Clustering Users to Determine the Most Suitable Gamification Elements

The use of gamification elements has extended from being a complement for a product to being integrated into multiple public services to motivate the user. The first drawback for service designers is choosing which gamification elements are appropriate for the intended audience, in addition to the possible incompatibilities between gamification elements. This work proposes a clustering technique that enables mapping different user profiles in relation to their preferred gamification elements. Additionally, by mapping the best cluster for each gamification element, it is possible to determine the preferred game genre. The article answered the following research questions: What is the relationship between the genre of the game and the element of gamification? Different user groups (profiles) for each gamification element? Results indicate that there are cases where the users are divided between those who agree or disagree. However, other elements present a great heterogeneity in the number of groups and the levels of agreement.

Imperial and Local: Audience and Identity in the Idrimi Inscription

This article studies the Idrimi inscription from ancient Alalah, modern Tell Atchana, in order to explore how and to what effect manifestations of empire may have been socially consequential to local populations ruled by Mittani. Specifically, the article argues that Idrimi is presented as a Mittani hero, but the story of his life is told in a Northwest Semitic-Akkadian code; an imperial vision receives a local expression. From this conclusion, the article ends by trying to infer something about the inscription’s intended audience.

Visualising policy responses during health emergencies. Learning from the COVID-19 policy trackers

Data visualisations are intimately connected to the emergence of public health as a discipline and policy area. Besides the mapping of cases and deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of attempts to track policy responses. They have come from actors sometimes initially unfamiliar with public and global health. In this paper, we analyse seven of the most successful tracker initiatives that have sought to map governments’ reactions to COVID-19 and reflect on our own. When not led by international organisations, the trackers primarily rely on networks of volunteer country expert contributors (who need to be incentivised in the medium term). The vertical crowdsourcing approach means that, despite good intentions, contributors have a relatively limited agency in shaping the trackers. Maps and timelines comparing countries are the most popular visualisations; they suggest that (some) policy solutions can be found abroad and rely on policy taxonomies established by the trackers’ core teams. We contend that such taxonomies, which compete with each other, constitute attempts to frame the complex issue of which policies matter in responding to COVID-19. All the projects are large and complex and often without a well-defined intended audience. We hypothesise that the popularity (in terms of backlinks) of the most successful tracker arises from the fact that it sums up COVID-19 policies in one easily visualisable indicator. We suggest that the trackers are a more helpful emergency policy tool when they provide contextual information, keep policy details or refer to them (rather than only reduce them to categories), and suggest ways to link different elements—including the relationship between health or societal outcomes and policies.

Developing Organizational Workforce by Successfully Facing and Overcoming Current Challenges

During the year 2018, an operator evaluated the career paths and professional development of its technical personnel, extending its evaluation to how the contracting department acquired such training, which wasn't consistent with regard to a training provider, training topics, course agendas or training delivery. Some of the main challenges in providing training are the engineers’ availability to attend classes and the scheduling constraints throughout the operator's five field locations. As an example, planning a class in the current organization might not reach the entire intended audience within the desired time frame because that class may only be scheduled in one of the five locations, and the engineers from the other four locations would need to travel to attend it. The impact of this may be that without the advantage of travelling to attend a specific training, the engineer may not be able to achieve all the promotional requirements for the next step in his/her career path.

Fields, features, and filters: how dating applications construct sexual fields and romantic and erotic capital

Young adults have gone from consulting matchmakers to app-makers, as they seek ways to meet sexual and romantic partners. Each dating application is constructed in a distinctive manner, creating unique “sexual fields” on each platform. In this study, I consider the affordances of four dating applications—the structure of profiles, available search filters, and application features—in order to understand how dating applications construct sexual fields and emphasize different forms of erotic and romantic capital. I find that which qualities constitute capital differs depending on the platform politics of the application, and the sexual fields vary according to the intended audience and outcome of the rules for interactions on the app. Such an analysis reveals how forces of heterosexism, racism, and classism operate in modern partner-seeking, both romantic and sexual.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Gerontological Research Mentoring and Methodologies

With a rapid increase in our nation's diversity and in particular the diversity of the aging population, research focused on the well-being and quality of life for all older adults is imperative. Within GSA, The Minority Issue in Gerontology Advisory Panel is charged with providing support to the membership that ultimately will yield an increase in the quantity and quality of research related to minority aging issues. Therefore, understanding best practices for minority-focused gerontological research and gerontological education curriculum is warranted. The advancement of the field is predicated on the ability to have trained professionals with skills and competencies that effectively meet the needs of a diverse aging population. This symposium will include a presentation highlighting practical strategies for strengthening gerontology research by intentionally incorporating anti-racist methodological approaches. The second presentation will consist of recommendations on how to support, promote, and advance gerontology education in a manner that increases the diversity of those pursuing a research or an applied career in this area of study. Presenters will share an overview of the literature, findings from program implementation focus groups, and recommendations for tailoring strategies to fit your intended audience. This session will prove beneficial as we make strides to ensure that diversity, equity, and inclusion remain a core value and an inherent practice of all gerontology professionals.

Critical Discourse Analysis and Rhetorical Tropes in Donald Trump’s First Speech to the UN

Language and politics go hand in hand and learning and comprehending political genre is to learn a language created for codifying, extending and transmitting political discourse in any text/talk. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Fairclough’s CDA and Rhetoric, the current study aims at investigating Donald Trump’s First Speech, from the point of frequency and functions of some rhetorical strategies (Parallelism, Anaphora and the Power of Three, Antithesis and Expletive, etc.), Nominalization, Passivization, We-groups and Modality as well as Lexical and Textual Analysis, presented to the UN delivered on Sep. 19, 2017. Specifically, the study seeks to determine: (1) how President Trump succeeded in conveying his notions and assumptions to his intended audience, and in convincing and negotiating, (2) how he attempted to explicitly and implicitly pass his attitudes on his targets, and (3) how those orientations, intended notions and assumptions were seamlessly presented to his addressees in discoursal and lexico-grammatical levels; (4) and finally in this underlying trend how he achieved his own ends. The results of the study hope to enhance reading comprehension and writing in academic registers for EFL/ESL students.

Good with Words: Speaking and Presenting

Suppose you were good with words. Suppose when you decided to speak, the message you delivered—and the way you delivered it—successfully connected with your intended audience. What would that mean for your career prospects? What would that mean for your comfort level in social situations? And perhaps most importantly, what would that mean for your satisfaction with the personal relationships you value the most? This book is designed to help you find out. Based on an award-winning course and workshop series at the University of Michigan taken by students training to enter a wide range of fields—law, business, medicine, social work, public policy, design, engineering, and many more—it removes the guesswork from figuring out how to communicate clearly and compellingly. All of us have ideas that are worth sharing. Why not learn how to convey yours in a way that people will appreciate, enjoy, and remember?

The image of the Roman Empire in American newspapers at the end of 19th century

Конец XIX века стал для США эпохой многочисленных перемен. Это отразилось на переосмыслении образа Римской империи в американской культуре. В данной статье на материале американских газет конца XIX в. показано, какие сюжеты из истории Римской империи использовались в периодической печати, и как они актуализировались для читателей. Основное внимание сосредоточено на полемике по поводу главных общественных проблем: морального облика американцев, социального расслоения, империализма. Анализируется влияние географии издания, предполагаемой аудитории и политических пристрастий редакторов на использование римского опыта при оценке событий настоящего. Благодаря этому можно увидеть, какой образ Римской империи транслировали своим читателям разные американские газеты. The end of the 19thcentury had been the era of multiple changes for the United States. This was reflected in the rethinking of the Roman Empire’s image in American culture. However, there have been no attempts to analyze widely available sources in historiography. This article considers the materials of various American newspapers of the late XIX century. On their basis, the research shows what examples from the Roman Empire’s history were used by journalists, and how they were updated this information for readers. The main focus is on the debates over the main social issues: the moral character of Americans, social inequality, imperialism. The survey analyzes the influence of the publication’s geography, intended audience and political views of editors on the use of the Roman experience in evaluating the current events. This could help to see the different forms Roman Empire’s image which presented to readers of the various American newspapers.

When Human Factors Fails: Intentional and Unintentional Bad Designs

The primary goal of human factors is to create systems that can be easily used by their intended audience, while minimizing the number of mistakes that a user might make. However, sometimes human factors principles are applied in ways that makes a user’s task harder. Sometimes this is intentional, and the designer uses human factors as justification for creating an exclusionary design. In other cases, it is unintentional, and the application of human factors was done in a haphazard or incomplete way, with the resulting design at cross-purposes with the original intent. In either case, that’s bad human factors.