The Speech Act of Apology by Filipino Call Center Agents

The Philippines is a global leader in business process outsourcing (BPO). Many foreign investors view the Philippines as a viable location for their call center operations due to the Filipinos' strength in English proficiency. This study focuses on inbound call center accounts that deal with a variety of call situations, ranging from information requests to difficult calls that require more time to handle, such as complaint calls. Since the goal of any business is customer satisfaction, this research aims to investigate how Filipino call center agents mitigate and reduce the liability and guilt towards customers. Results show that the 90 call center representatives have successfully produced 'perfect apologies' by providing all five strategies posited by Cohen et al. (1986) in most of their complaint calls. However, the sequence is distorted by emphasizing more on offering a repair. This leads to a recommendation that calls center training on apology be emphasized on building personal connections rather than a mechanical response to situations.

Integrated reporting as a determinant of changing the targets of economic analysis of sustainable development in the face of challenges

Subject. The article deals with the revision of targets in the economic analysis, enabling timely identification of factors of value creation, and considering the influence of the interests of stakeholders. Objectives. The purpose is to identify targets of economic analysis in connection with changes in information requests of stakeholders and requirements for corporate reporting, concerning the disclosure of opportunities for sustainable development in the context of challenges. Methods. We performed a content analysis of changes in information requests of stakeholders and requirements for the composition and content of types of corporate reporting. The study employs methods of systems, comparative, structural, and logical analysis. Results. The demonstration of excellence by management and investors in understanding the values and the best ways to achieve goals creates threats, and, by definition, is a challenge that should be reflected in integrated reporting. The system of indicators and methods of analysis should be aimed at identifying conflicts and take into account the interests of stakeholders, which will ensure the balance of resources used in creating value. Conclusions. The determinant of the development of corporate reporting is integration, in which a significant amount of information should contain estimated parameters of economic, social and environmental problems and threats specific to major challenges. It will ensure the most effective interaction of stakeholders in managing corporate risks associated with all types of capital. Such disclosure will lead to a synergistic effect in making strategic decisions on sustainable development.

The Prison Media Complex: Labour, Technology and Communication Infrastructures in the Prison System

Prisons are a recurring topic and backdrop in the popular culture of the Global North. They often serve as spectacular environments that seem far removed from most people’s everyday lives. This article develops the notion of the prison media complex and discusses material entanglements between prisons and private media industries via the production of media technologies, consumption of communication, and technology development in the prison sector. The article seeks to answer the question of how we can conceptualise the prison media complex (PMC) from a materialist perspective. Taking the Swedish context as a starting point, we analyse the economic and material connections that characterise the PMC in this national context. Drawing on archival data, participant observations at prison technology tradeshows and a prison sector conference, as well as freedom of information requests, we bring nuance to the picture of media and communication technologies, as technologies of freedom are also based on unfreedom and captivity.

A FEW REPRESENTATIVES OF ASTEROIDAE (ASTERACEAE) SUBFAMILY AND GERANIUM (GERANIACEAE) GENUS IN THE BAIKAL REGION (REVIEW

The aim of the article was to analyze the state of knowledge of the following plants: Heteropappus altaicus (Willd.) Novopokr., Solidago dahurica L., Leucanthemum vulgare Lam., Tripleurospermum inodorum (L.), Antennaria dioica (L.) Gaertn., Leontopodium conglobatum (Turcz.) Hand.-Mazz. and Geranium eriostemon Fischer., G. pratense L., G. wlassowianum Fisch. ex Link. (Geraniaceae).Materials and methods. To compile the review, the information from the following scientific open and available literature sources placed in scientific libraries of institutions, in electronic databases and search systems, was used: floristic summaries “Flora of Siberia”; “Flora of Central Siberia”; Electronic library of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Elibrary; PubMed; Scopus; CyberLeninka, Google Academy; The Plant List, Global Compositae Checklist. The search carried out, was based on the publications for the period of 2009-2020, on the information requests for names of families and subfamilies, names of plant species, biologically active compounds in English, Latin and Russian.Results. A comparative analysis of morphological characters, common species names and the synonyms for the listed species, has been carried out. The studied objects are characterized by the presence of polyphenolic compounds and substances of a triterpene structure, in particular, flavonoids, hydroxycinnamic acids, tannides. In addition, the representatives of the Asteroideae subfamily (Asteraceae) show the accumulation of essential oils, and the representatives of the Geranium genus (geranium) show the accumulation of anthocyanins. The spectrum of the pharmacological activity includes anti-inflammatory, choleretic, antimicrobial, antispasmodic and other types of effects.Conclusion. The presented review makes it possible to arrive at the conclusion about a certain knowledge level of the regional representatives of the Asteroideae subfamily and the Geranium genus. This determines the prospects of these plant objects for further pharmacognostic and pharmacological research and the creation of drugs on their basis – the sources of polyphenolic compounds.

How do we interpret questions? Simplified representations of knowledge guide humans’ interpretation of information requests

This paper investigates the cognitive mechanisms supporting humans’ interpretation of requests for information. Learners can only search for a piece of information if they know that they are ignorant about it. Thus, in principle, the interpretation of requests for information could be guided by representations of Socratic ignorance (tracking what people know that they do not know). Alternatively, the interpretation of requests for information could be simplified by relying primarily on simple knowledge tracking (i.e., merely tracking what people know). We judged these hypotheses by testing two-and-a-half-year-old toddlers (N = 18), five- to seven-year-old children (N = 72), and adults (N = 384). In our experiments, a speaker asked a question that could be disambiguated by tracking her state of knowledge. We manipulated the speakers’ visuals to modulate the complexity of the ignorance representation required to disambiguate their questions. Toddlers showed no tendency to appeal to representations of Socratic ignorance when disambiguating questions (Pilot S1). Five- to seven-year-olds exhibited a similar pattern of results, and they performed better when information requests could be disambiguated using simple knowledge tracking (Studies 1a-1b). Adults used representations of Socratic ignorance to interpret questions, but were more confident when simple knowledge tracking was sufficient to disambiguate information requests (Studies 2-3). Moreover, adults disambiguated questions as if speakers could request information about things that they were ignorant of, even when speakers had no reason to know about their ignorance (Studies 3-4). Thus, the interpretation of requests for information rests primarily on simple knowledge tracking—and not on representations of Socratic ignorance—a heuristic that reduces processing costs.

How has Covid-19 affected health visiting teams?

Based on data collected through Freedom of Information requests, researchers at University College London generated a detailed picture of the effects of the pandemic on health visiting services in England. Dave Hancock reveals some highlights

Interoperability in NHS Acute Trusts within England: a Situation and Capability Analysis using Freedom of Information requests

Background Many central initiatives to improve digital maturity and interoperability in the NHS started after 2015. There are few prior assessments of digital maturity and interoperability. Methods Freedom of Information Act requests were sent to all English Acute NHS Trusts and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to obtain information regarding digital maturity according to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Electronic Medical Record Adoption Mode (EMRAM) scale, and interoperability. Results One third of Acute NHS Trusts have an EMR that meets requirements for EMRAM stage 6 or above. 17.4% of responding Trusts considered this. 59.1% of responding Trusts stated that their EMR allows for functional interoperability with other (interoperable) EMRs. The majority of responding Trusts had not conferred with other Trusts when making EMR purchasing decisions. Discussion In order to realise the benefits of digitisation and interoperability, we discuss policy recommendations including actions for local health economies.

A Census of Federally Regulated Big Cat Populations within the United States as of December 2020

No comprehensive assessment of the populations of big cats in federally regulated facilities in the United States is currently available. Concerns about big cat use are increasingly of strong public interest and the lack of data about their number and distribution has ramifications impacting zoological industry function, conservation programs, rescue work, and legislation. In this work a dataset has been compiled using publicly available USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) records and direct information requests. The resulting census was derived from the animal inventories listed on inspection records for all 2272 facilities with animal exhibition licenses. The total number of big cats in federally regulated facilities is on the order of 4100 animals and appears to be declining.

Measuring Human Rights Abuse from Access to Information Requests

Existing measures of human rights abuses are often only available at the country-year level. Several more fine-grained measures exhibit spatio-temporal inaccuracies or reporting biases due to the primary sources upon which they rely. To address these challenges, and to increase the diversity of available human rights measures more generally, this study provides the first quantitative effort to measure human rights abuses from textual records of citizen-government interactions. Using a dataset encompassing over 1.5 million access-to-information (ATI) requests made to the Mexican federal government from June 2003 onward, supervised classification is used to identify the subset of these requests that pertain to human rights abuses of various types. The results from this supervised machine learning exercise are validated against (i) gold standard ATI requests pertaining to past human rights abuses in Mexico and (ii) several accepted external measures of sub-national and sub-annual human rights abuses. In doing so, we demonstrate that the measurement of human rights abuses from citizen-submitted ATI request texts can provide measures of human rights abuse that exhibit both high validity and notable spatio-temporal specificity, relative to existent human rights datasets and variables.