Real-life Contact Research Articles

Discriminatory Residential Preferences in Germany—A Vignette Study

The article focusses on the generating mechanisms of residential segregation for the demand side of housing markets, i.e., discriminatory residential preferences of inhabitants regarding the composition of their neighborhood. The data stem from an online survey among a random sample of the population of a mid-sized German city. In a vignette experiment, respondents were asked to rate example residential settings with respect to their attractiveness. The settings varied regarding the ethnic and religious composition of the neighborhood and other neighborhood characteristics that are positively or negatively related to residential attractiveness.We find that respondents have discriminatory residential preferences toward migrants and the presence of a Muslim community in the neighborhood. One-half of the migrant effect is mitigated if other positively connoted residential characteristics exist. We take this as an indication for statistical discrimination. This does not hold for the “Muslim community” effect. Discrimination gets stronger with higher levels of perceived economic group-threat from migrants. We further find evidence for a cultural group-threat and for the contact hypothesis: religious people are more discriminatory than nonreligious people, and real-life contact with migrants entails less discrimination.

Initial development of perpetrator confrontation using deepfake technology in victims with sexual violence-related PTSD and moral injury.

Interventions aimed at easing negative moral (social) emotions and restoring social bonds - such as amend-making and forgiving-have a prominent role in the treatment of moral injury. As real-life contact between persons involved in prior morally injurious situations is not always possible or desirable, virtual reality may offer opportunities for such interventions in a safe and focused way. To explore the effects of the use of deepfake technology in the treatment of patients suffering from PTSD and moral injury as a result of being forced by persons in authority to undergo and commit sexual violence (so-called betrayal trauma). Two women who had experienced sexual violence underwent one session of confrontation with the perpetrator using deepfake technology. The women could talk via ZOOM with the perpetrator, whose picture was converted in moving images using deepfake technology. A therapist answered the questions of the women in the role of the perpetrator. Outcome measures were positive and negative emotions, dominance in relation to perpetrator, self-blame, self-forgiveness, and PTSD-symptom severity. Both participants were positive about the intervention. Although they knew it was fake, the deepfaked perpetrator seemed very real to them. They both reported more positive and less negative emotions, dominance in relation to the perpetrator and self-forgiveness, and less self-blame and PTSD-symptoms after the intervention. Victim-perpetrator confrontation using deepfake technology is a promising intervention to influence moral injury-related symptoms in victims of sexual violence. Deepfake technology may also show promise in simulating other interactions between persons involved in morally injurious events.

Assessment of the Current Collection Quality of Pantograph–Catenary With Contact Line Height Variability in Electric Railways

The numerical tools are widely used to facilitate the design of the railway catenary. Only radical results are obtained as the current assessment is generally performed without any practical errors. In this article, the most common error, the contact line height variability, is appropriately included in evaluating the current collection quality. Based on the real-life contact line height data collected from a high-speed network, the heights of the key points in the contact line are extracted, of which the pointwise stochastics is represented by the power spectrum density (PSD) function. Random samples are generated by the inverse Fourier transform based on the Monte Carlo method. An advanced initialization procedure is presented to properly include the contact line height variability in the initial configuration. A stochastic analysis with a high cutoff frequency is performed to evaluate a double pantograph–catenary system’s current collection quality. Unlike the deterministic result obtained by the perfect design data, the contact line height variability causes uncertainty. The present analysis method indicates some risks of safety accident and contact loss that the traditional simulation cannot capture with ideal design data or low cutoff frequency.

USING ICT TO FORM FOREIGN LANGUAGE COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE OF FUTURE ARMED FORCES OFFICERS

The article provides an analysis, theoretical justification and results of empirical approbation of using information and communication technologies as a tool to help future officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces acquire foreign language communicative competence. A broad overview of the ICT employed in language teaching has been provided, as well as the rationale behind integrating ICT into cadets’ language learning process. In order to validate the effectiveness of ICT in military learning environment, a pedagogical experiment has been conducted; its findings have been described. It has proved the efficiency of using ICT in the process of language learning in a military higher education institution, resulting in the increase in cadets’ language proficiency, professional preparedness, and overall academic skills. Implementation of ICT was also instrumental in providing powerful motivation, having an effect on cadets’ attitude towards language learning and promoting their autonomy, creativeness and cognitive skills. Future officers found the ability to interact and maintain real-life contact with native speakers, counterparts or military experts and engagement in international projects through video chats and video calls to be a particularly inspiring and enjoyable experience. Another benefit of integrating ICT is the opportunity to present subject matter in different ways depending on the cadets’ individual learning style. Using visual aids such as pictures, videos, multimedia presentations, infographics, etc. motivated cadets to be engaged in reading, making texts easier for comprehension when illustrated with pictures, graphics, illustrations, audio and video. The technology gave the cadets a greater control over their learning progress and more freedom to collaborate in the classroom.

Assessing the Effects of a Real-Life Contact Intervention on Prejudice Toward LGBT People

Prejudice against sexual and gender minorities (e.g., LGBT people) is quite prevalent and is harmful. We examined an existing—and often-used—contact intervention in pre-existing groups in an educational setting and assessed its effectiveness in reducing different forms of LGBT negativity. We focused particularly on modern LGBT negativity: a relatively subtle form of prejudice, involving ambivalence, denial, and/or the belief that there is too much attention for LGBT prejudice. We used a mixed design in which condition (experimental vs. control group) was the between-participants factor, which was randomized at the group level, and time (pretest vs. posttest vs. follow-up) was the within-participants factor (N = 117). Interventions were video recorded and the behavior of LGBT educators and participants was coded. Participants responded positively to the intervention, especially to the LGBT educator’s “coming-out story.” Exploratory analysis of the video data indicated that the perceived effectiveness of the intervention was higher in groups where participants were more engaged, although caution is necessary in interpreting this finding. The most important measure indicated that modern LGBT negativity decreased in the intervention groups directly after the intervention, but returned to baseline levels one week later. However, in the control condition, modern LGBT negativity had increased over time. Taken together, this suggests that an actual reduction in modern LGBT negativity was short-lived (i.e., the intervention effect disappeared within 7 days).

Mitigating COVID-19 outbreaks in workplaces and schools by hybrid telecommuting.

The COVID-19 epidemic has forced most countries to impose contact-limiting restrictions at workplaces, universities, schools, and more broadly in our societies. Yet, the effectiveness of these unprecedented interventions in containing the virus spread remain largely unquantified. Here, we develop a simulation study to analyze COVID-19 outbreaks on three real-life contact networks stemming from a workplace, a primary school and a high school in France. Our study provides a fine-grained analysis of the impact of contact-limiting strategies at workplaces, schools and high schools, including: (1) Rotating strategies, in which workers are evenly split into two shifts that alternate on a daily or weekly basis; and (2) On-Off strategies, where the whole group alternates periods of normal work interactions with complete telecommuting. We model epidemics spread in these different setups using a stochastic discrete-time agent-based transmission model that includes the coronavirus most salient features: super-spreaders, infectious asymptomatic individuals, and pre-symptomatic infectious periods. Our study yields clear results: the ranking of the strategies, based on their ability to mitigate epidemic propagation in the network from a first index case, is the same for all network topologies (workplace, primary school and high school). Namely, from best to worst: Rotating week-by-week, Rotating day-by-day, On-Off week-by-week, and On-Off day-by-day. Moreover, our results show that below a certain threshold for the original local reproduction number [Formula: see text] within the network (< 1.52 for primary schools, < 1.30 for the workplace, < 1.38 for the high school, and < 1.55 for the random graph), all four strategies efficiently control outbreak by decreasing effective local reproduction number to [Formula: see text] < 1. These results can provide guidance for public health decisions related to telecommuting.

Practicing Religion during a Pandemic: On Religious Routines, Embodiment, and Performativity

This article aims to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the religious lifestyles of practicing female Roman Catholics in Belgium. I explore how these Catholic believers manage to stay in touch with their faith and faith community in times of crisis when physical and real-life contact is very limited. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews conducted via Zoom, carried out in the framework of my current ethnographic research project. The empirical results show how Catholic women grappled with the multiple lockdowns during the last year and a half, and how the lockdowns led to severe changes in their religious practices and routines. Many believers had to find alternative possibilities and modalities in order to preserve continuity with their religious pre-COVID-19 lives. Throughout the article, I intend to map their practices and strategies. I will argue that inquiring how religion and religious practices are performed during a pandemic can contribute to the flourishing and timely scholarship on digital and online religion and it also provides us with further insights in the performativity, materiality, and embodiment of religion.

Deleterious Effects of an Air Pollutant (NO2) on a Selection of Commensal Skin Bacterial Strains, Potential Contributor to Dysbiosis?

The skin constitutes with its microbiota the first line of body defense against exogenous stress including air pollution. Especially in urban or sub-urban areas, it is continuously exposed to many environmental pollutants including gaseous nitrogen dioxide (gNO2). Nowadays, it is well established that air pollution has major effects on the human skin, inducing various diseases often associated with microbial dysbiosis. However, very few is known about the impact of pollutants on skin microbiota. In this study, a new approach was adopted, by considering the alteration of the cutaneous microbiota by air pollutants as an indirect action of the harmful molecules on the skin. The effects of gNO2 on this bacterial skin microbiota was investigated using a device developed to mimic the real-life contact of the gNO2 with bacteria on the surface of the skin. Five strains of human skin commensal bacteria were considered, namely Staphylococcus aureus MFP03, Staphylococcus epidermidis MFP04, Staphylococcus capitis MFP08, Pseudomonas fluorescens MFP05, and Corynebacterium tuberculostearicum CIP102622. Bacteria were exposed to high concentration of gNO2 (10 or 80 ppm) over a short period of 2 h inside the gas exposure device. The physiological, morphological, and molecular responses of the bacteria after the gas exposure were assessed and compared between the different strains and the two gNO2 concentrations. A highly significant deleterious effect of gNO2 was highlighted, particularly for S. capitis MFP08 and C. tuberculostearicum CIP102622, while S. aureus MFP03 seems to be the less sensitive strain. It appeared that the impact of this nitrosative stress differs according to the bacterial species and the gNO2 concentration. Thus the exposition to gNO2 as an air pollutant could contribute to dysbiosis, which would affect skin homeostasis. The response of the microbiota to the nitrosative stress could be involved in some pathologies such as atopic dermatitis.

Beyond simulation — Extracurricular volunteering in nursing education: A focus group

BackgroundA reduction in clinical placement hours has seen alternative teaching methods being explored in nursing education in Australia. The use of simulated patients in academic laboratories is highly utilised, however, may still be limiting learning opportunities. ObjectiveThe objective of this research was to describe the learning experiences of nursing students who participated in supervised extracurricular, volunteering opportunities during their nursing studies. DesignA descriptive qualitative design was used to discover and understand learning experiences of a volunteering encounter, described from the nursing student perspective. SettingThe Pit Stop men’s health check program is a collaboration of local health organisations, volunteering their time to provide free health checks at a farming Field Day event in regional Victoria, Australia. ParticipantsTwelve second year undergraduate nursing students volunteered at the 2019 Pit Stop event, over a four day period and outside their normal study requirements. Seven volunteers then participated in post event research, sharing experiences and providing feedback. MethodsOne semi-structured focus group interview was conducted at University campus, using reflective and open ended questioning. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Thematic analysis identified common themes. ResultsStudents unanimously recommended the real life learning experiences and reported an increased confidence and competence in basic communication and clinical skills, not always provided in the simulated environment of the academic laboratory. Their motivation to attend was driven by wanting more real life contact with patients, having time to practice skills and experience diversity within their practice. Students also recommended future volunteering ideas that would potentially provide additional learning opportunities. ConclusionsExperiential learning such as simulation is highly valued in current nursing education, however, students still crave the real life learning experiences from working with human patients. With limited clinical exposure currently offered to students within nursing education programs, additional opportunities such as supervised volunteering may be worth considering when preparing confident and competent nurse graduates.

Steady-State Analysis of Buffer Occupancy for Different Forwarding Strategies in Mobile Opportunistic Network

We perform a study on the buffer occupancy 1 1 The term buffer occupancy refers to the amount (or number) of data (or packets) present in the buffer. We shall be using the terms buffer occupancy and system size interchangeably as deemed fit. and its steady-state properties in a mobile opportunistic network (MON) for different forwarding strategies. Nodes in MON adhere to replication based strategy in order to ensure reliable delivery. Such replications occur in bulks during intermittent and very short contact events, which often lead to buffer congestion in the relay nodes, thereby affecting the network performance. The state-of-the-art on buffer management in MON relies on local information exchange to measure buffer occupancy, which leads to overhead. Therefore, to find the average buffer occupancy, we first study the aggregated bulk transfer size using real-life contact traces and find that it follows a log-normal distribution. Since the contact rate has been observed to follow a Poisson distribution, we model the packet arrival process in each node as a compound Poisson process. Furthermore, the departure process is modeled as packets dropped due to time-to-live expiry, which is shown to have an exponential distribution. Using the above model, we derive the steady-state probability distribution of buffer occupancy of an arbitrary node for three different classes of replication scheme, viz., epidemic routing, probabilistic routing, and time-varying probabilistic routing. The results of this paper help in assessing how fast a node buffer gets depleted under different routing algorithms, which will help in designing better buffer management techniques and routing algorithms.

Getting connected: Intergroup contact on Facebook

ABSTRACTOne correlational study examined whether virtual contact via Facebook is positively related to intergroup relations. The followers of two online campaigns from Iran and Israel—whose countries have been in a politically hostile relationship since the 1980s—indicated the amount of direct and indirect virtual (Facebook) and real-life outgroup contact they have had, a number of quality and affective judgments about that contact, and completed an affective prejudice measure about the respective outgroup. Overall, contact was negatively associated with affective prejudice, providing support for the contact hypothesis in a specific and exclusively virtual setting with citizens of hostile nations. Previously experienced real-life contact did not moderate the results, suggesting that virtual contact has an independent link to positive outgroup attitudes.

ETandem Language Learning and Foreign Language Anxiety among Colombian learners of German

Although eTandems, offering the opportunity of real life contact to speakers of one's target language, are suggested as an anxiety-reducing, confidence-increasing approach to language learning, these effects have not been investigated empirically. The aim of this article is to explore the experiences and perceptions of 11 Colombian learners of German as a foreign language who participated in a German-Spanish eTandem project. Data were collected by means of interviews and focus groups, and evaluated using qualitative content analysis. Results support the anxiety-reducing and confidence-raising nature of eTandem Language Learning. These effects, however, are not in every case transferable into the language classroom.

Exploring auditors’ stereotypes: the perspective of undergraduate students

We report the results of a study that examines university students’ perceptions about the public image of auditors through their stereotypes and their changes in attitudes after an extra-curricular activity with professionals, sponsored by a well-known and prestigious professional organisation of auditors in Spain. In our experimental study, we examine whether real life contact for students is a way to change their stereotypes on the auditing profession.Participants completed a preliminary and also a post-survey, both pen-and-paper, in order to analyse the students’ final impressions and the evolution of their perception of auditors’ stereotypes. Both surveys were divided in three different sections: demographic data, general perceptions towards the activity, and 30 questions with regard to the perceptions of an average auditor compared to an average individual. Results indicate that, indeed, the activity changed the students’ view to consider auditors as more warm, more available to work in teams, more modest, more tender-minded, and less impulsive.

QA&lt;sup&gt;RT&lt;/sup&gt;: A System for Real-Time Holistic Quality Assurance for Contact Center Dialogues

Quality assurance (QA) and customer satisfaction (C-Sat) analysis are two commonly used practices to measure goodness of dialogues between agents and customers in contact centers. The practices however have a few shortcomings. QA puts sole emphasis on agents’ organizational compliance aspect whereas C-Sat attempts to measure customers’ satisfaction only based on post dialogue surveys. As a result, outcome of independent QA and C-Sat analysis may not always be in correspondence. Secondly, both processes are retrospective in nature and hence, evidences of bad past dialogues (and consequently bad customer experiences) can only be found after hours or days or weeks depending on their periodicity. Finally, human intensive nature of these practices lead to time and cost overhead while being able to analyze only a small fraction of dialogues. In this paper, we introduce an automatic real-time quality assurance system for contact centers — QART (pronounced cart). QART performs multi-faceted analysis on dialogue utterances, as they happen, using sophisticated statistical and rule-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques. It covers various aspects inspired by today’s QA and C-Sat practices as well as introduces novel incremental dialogue summarization capability. QART front-end is an interactive dashboard providing views of ongoing dialogues at different granularity enabling agents’ supervisors to monitor and take corrective actions as needed. We demonstrate effectiveness of different back-end modules as well as the overall system by experimental results on a real-life contact center chat dataset.

The moderating effect of valenced contact: Slovak language media use, acculturation and L2 confidence among young Hungarian speakers

ABSTRACTIntegrating the tenets of the social context model of L2 acquisition with insights from the parasocial contact hypothesis, the present paper addresses the role of mass media in L2 acquisition and acculturation among young Hungarian speakers in Slovakia. Questionnaire data were collected among Hungarian-speaking secondary school students (N = 310). The results indicated that integrative orientation guided individuals to seek media content in L2, and that L2 media use was associated with a higher L2 confidence and acculturation. Additionally, and in contrast to our expectations, L2 media use had a greater effect on acculturation and L2 confidence among those who had higher levels of positively valenced contact and lower levels of negatively valenced real-life contact with L2 speakers.

기업의 융합요인이 재무적 성과에 미치는 영향

Modern is the era of convergence. In the complex position of the company to survive in the rapid environmental changes it can not be a mandatory fusion rather than choice. Wind convergence also in the art can be said to castration. This phenomenon can be found in many real life. Most real-life contact with the service sector is no exception. Due to a number of banks and insurance combined Banca named fusion of French banking and insurance business are integrated. Even recently, the situation has been provided by Investment consulting, equity trading services within bank branches. In this study, based on the need for convergence of corporate businesses convergence factors examined through regression analysis on whether any impact on the financial aptitude. External environmental factors that make up the fusion research factors internal environmental factors, both core competencies were factors to affect financial performance.

Evaluating Temporal Factors in Combined Interventions of Workforce Shift and School Closure for Mitigating the Spread of Influenza

BackgroundIt is believed that combined interventions may be more effective than individual interventions in mitigating epidemic. However there is a lack of quantitative studies on performance of the combination of individual interventions under different temporal settings.Methodology/Principal FindingsTo better understand the problem, we develop an individual-based simulation model running on top of contact networks based on real-life contact data in Singapore. We model and evaluate the spread of influenza epidemic with intervention strategies of workforce shift and its combination with school closure, and examine the impacts of temporal factors, namely the trigger threshold and the duration of an intervention. By comparing simulation results for intervention scenarios with different temporal factors, we find that combined interventions do not always outperform individual interventions and are more effective only when the duration is longer than 6 weeks or school closure is triggered at the 5% threshold; combined interventions may be more effective if school closure starts first when the duration is less than 4 weeks or workforce shift starts first when the duration is longer than 4 weeks.Conclusions/SignificanceWe therefore conclude that identifying the appropriate timing configuration is crucial for achieving optimal or near optimal performance in mitigating the spread of influenza epidemic. The results of this study are useful to policy makers in deliberating and planning individual and combined interventions.

Temporal factors in school closure policy for mitigating the spread of influenza

Is school closure effective in mitigating influenza outbreaks? For Singapore, we developed an individual-based simulation model using real-life contact data. We evaluated the impacts of temporal factors - trigger threshold and duration - on the effectiveness of school closure as a mitigation policy. We found an upper bound of the duration of school closure, where further extension beyond which will not bring additional benefits to suppressing the attack rate and peak incidence. For school closure with a relatively short duration (< 6 weeks), it is more effective to start closure after a relatively longer delay from the first day of infection; if the duration of school closure is long (>6 weeks), however, it is better to start it as early as reasonable. Our studies reveal the critical importance of timing in school closure, especially in cost-cautious situations. Our studies also demonstrate the great potential of a properly developed individual-based simulation model in evaluating various disease control policies.

Performance of Opportunistic Epidemic Routing on Edge-Markovian Dynamic Graphs

Connectivity patterns in intermittently-connected mobile networks (ICMN) can be modeled as edge-Markovian dynamic graphs. We propose a new model for epidemic propagation on such graphs and calculate a closed-form expression that links the best achievable delivery ratio to common ICMN parameters such as message size, maximum tolerated delay, and link lifetime. These theoretical results are compared to those obtained by replaying a real-life contact trace.

From encounters to plausible mobility

Inferring plausible node mobility based only on information from wireless contact traces is a difficult problem. Working with mobility information allows richer protocol simulations, particularly in dense networks, but requires complex set-ups to measure. On the other hand, contact information is easier to measure but only allows for simplistic simulation models. In a contact trace a lot of node movement information is irretrievably lost so the original positions and velocities are in general out of reach. In this paper, we propose a fast heuristic algorithm, inspired by dynamic force-based graph drawing, capable of inferring a plausible movement from any contact trace, and evaluate it on both synthetic and real-life contact traces. Our results reveal that (i) the quality of the inferred mobility is directly linked to the precision of the measured contact trace, and (ii) the simple addition of appropriate anticipation forces between nodes leads to an accurate inferred mobility.