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Topic
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In ever-more digitalized world, we all need a ‘Handbook of Social Computing’
This new handbook, co-edited by Francesca Grippa in Northeastern’s College of Professional Studies, responds “to the increasingly blurred boundaries between humans and technology,” according to the publisher’s webpage. Geared toward practitioners across disciplines, from computer scientists and social network analysts to sociologists, this volume “illustrates the diverse ways in which digital technologies can be used to analyze social behavior, recognize individual and group interaction patterns and improve daily life.”
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Excelling in law school exams may be exercise in ‘Getting to Maybe’
Originally published in 1999, professor of law Jeremy R. Paul’s “Getting to Maybe: How To Excel on Law School Exams” — co-written with Richard Michael Fischl — has been released in a second edition. “What sets it apart from its competitors is its frank recognition that law exams test legal reasoning,” according to the publisher’s copy, “and that legal reasoning cannot be reduced to any simple ‘check the boxes’ template.” Rather than relying on binary right-or-wrong answers, “Getting to Maybe” prepares students to argue their points, “mobilizing persuasive arguments on multiple sides of legal problems.”
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‘Analyzing High-Throughput Assay Data To Advance the Rapid Screening of Environmental Chemicals for Human Reproductive Toxicity’
“While high-throughput (HTP) assays have been proposed as platforms to rapidly assess reproductive toxicity, there is currently a lack of established assays that specifically address germline development/function and fertility. We assessed the applicability domains of yeast (S. cerevisiae) and nematode (C. elegans) HTP assays in toxicity screening of 124 environmental chemicals, determining their agreement in identifying toxicants and their concordance with reproductive toxicity in vivo.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Reproductive Toxicology.
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‘Through the Theory of Mind’s Eye: Reading Minds with Multimodal Video Large Language Models’
“Can large multimodal models have a human-like ability for emotional and social reasoning, and if so, how does it work? Recent research has discovered emergent theory-of-mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). LLMs can reason about people’s mental states by solving various text-based ToM tasks that ask questions about the actors’ ToM (e.g., human belief, desire, intention). … Thus, we consider videos a new medium for examining spatio-temporal ToM reasoning ability. Specifically, we ask explicit probing questions about videos with abundant social and emotional reasoning content.”Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘On-Demand Auxeticity and Co-Existing Pre-Tension Induced Compression Stage … with Kinematically Constrained 3D Suture Tiles’
“By incorporating concepts from auxeticity, kinematic constraints, pre-tension induced compression (PIC), and suture tessellations, tiled sandwich composites are designed, demonstrating behaviors attributed to the synergy between auxeticity and pre-tension induced contact and compression, simultaneously triggered by a threshold strain. The designs can theoretically achieve on-demand Poisson’s ratio in the widest range (−∞, +∞), and once triggered, the Poisson’s ratio is stable under large deformation.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Digital Avatars: Framework Development and Their Evaluation’
“We present a novel prompting strategy for artificial intelligence driven digital avatars. To better quantify how our prompting strategy affects anthropomorphic features like humor, authenticity, and favorability we present Crowd Vote – an adaptation of Crowd Score that allows for judges to elect a large language model (LLM) candidate over competitors answering the same or similar prompts. To visualize the responses of our LLM, and the effectiveness of our prompting strategy we propose an end-to-end framework for creating high-fidelity artificial intelligence (AI) driven digital avatars.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘When Being Managed by Technology: Does Algorithmic Management Affect Perceptions of Workers’ Creative Capacities?’
“Artificial intelligence is rapidly being integrated into human roles in the workplace. One example is algorithmic management, where employees are supervised in the execution of their tasks by algorithms. Unfortunately, we know little about how algorithmic management affects the perceptions of employees managed by these algorithms. In three experiments, we explore people’s beliefs about the creative capacities of employees who are managed by algorithms.”
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‘Navigating the Paradox: Challenges and Strategies of University Students Managing Mental Health Medication in Real-World Practices’
“Mental health has become a growing concern among university students. While medication is a common treatment, understanding how university students manage their medication for mental health symptoms in real-world practice has not been fully explored. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with university students to understand the unique challenges in the mental health medication management process and their coping strategies, particularly examining the role of various technologies in this process. We discovered that … the medication management process for students was a highly dynamic journey involving frequent dosage changes.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Revisiting the Musical Reminiscence Bump: Insights From Neurocognitive and Social Brain Development in Adolescence’
“Music listening is enjoyed across the lifespan and around the world. This has spurred many theories on the evolutionary purpose of music. The Music for Social Bonding hypothesis posits that the human capacity to make music evolved for the purpose of creating and preserving relationships between one another. … we propose that neurocognitive changes in the reward system make adolescence an ideal developmental time window for investigating interactions between prosocial behavior and reward processing, as adolescence constitutes a time of relative increase in music reward valuation.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Frontiers in Psychology.
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The hardest part of your job may be the people you work with (including you)
Odds are that your job is most challenging when working with others — Loredana Padurean, associate teaching professor at Northeastern University, has written “The Job Is Easy, the People Are Not: 10 Smart Skills To Become Better People,” which collects 10 interviews “with professional managers and academic leaders” and 10 skills that Padurean believes could replace “soft” skills. This book provides “practical suggestions about how to develop your own smart skills,” according to the book’s webpage, and might help some readers “realize that you are also one of the people that makes the job harder than it should be!”
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Increasing participation with ‘Conversational Design’
Michael Arnold Mages, assistant professor of art and design in the College of Arts, Media and Design, has published “Conversational Design: Improving Participation and Decision-Making in Public Organizations.” This new book helps public-facing organizations retain participation rates among their stakeholders and promises to “improve co-design and informed decision-making practices” by offering “practical tools and case studies to stimulate participation and foster better conversations.” Aimed at “both practitioners and scholars of design,” “Conversational Design” seeks to bridge the gap between policymakers, designers and “citizen voices.”
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‘Effects of AI Feedback on Learning, the Skill Gap and Intellectual Diversity’
“Can human decision-makers learn from AI feedback? Using data on 52,000 decision-makers from a large online chess platform, we investigate how their AI use affects three interrelated long-term outcomes: Learning, skill gap, and diversity of decision strategies. … Access to AI feedback increases, rather than decreases, the skill gap between high- and low-skilled individuals.”
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‘Where Is All the Deviance? Liminal Prescribing and the Social Networks Underlying the Prescription Drug Crisis’
“The misuse of prescription drugs is a pressing public health crisis in the United States that is fueled by high-risk prescribing. We show that high-risk prescribing comprises two distinct practices: (1) routinely overprescribing to patients whose prescription-fill patterns are consistent with misuse or abuse, which conforms to the definition of deviance in sociology, and (2) routinely overprescribing to patients whose prescription-fill patterns are within possible bounds of medical use, which does not.”
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Zhang receives Responsible Research in Management award
Assistant professor of management and organizational development Victoria Zhang has received the Responsible Research in Management Award from the Academy of Management for her paper “Where Is All the Deviance? Liminal Prescribing and the Social Networks Underlying the Prescription Drug Crisis.” “This annual award recognizes and celebrates recent research that benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge,” the Academy of Management noted in their announcement.
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‘Developing a Culture of Cybersecurity’
“In a prelude to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian hackers probed and attacked Ukrainian computer networks to find vulnerabilities and exfiltrate information that might be useful in future conflicts. … As we broadened our investigation beyond NotPetya to include other cyberattacks and hacking incidents, we were able to find a consistent pattern of cultural failures linked to misaligned incentives, a disconnect between top management and technical personnel, and a general lack of awareness and engagement of the existential threat posed by cyberattacks.”
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‘Tracking COVID-19 Infections Using Survey Data on Rapid At-Home Tests’
“In this survey study conducted among 306,799 residents aged 18 years or older across 50 US states and the District of Columbia, the proportion of individuals reporting a positive COVID-19 infection in a longitudinal nonprobability survey closely tracked the institutionally reported proportions in the US. … This study suggests that nonprobability online surveys can serve as an effective complementary method to monitor infections during an emerging pandemic and provide an alternative for estimating infections in the absence of institutional testing when at-home tests are widely available.” Find the paper and full list of authors in JAMA Network Open.
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Lu receives distinguished communication scholarship
Associate professor of communication studies in the College of Arts, Media and Design Amy Lu has received the Gerald M. Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship from the National Communication Association. “Dr. Lu’s scholarship explores the power of narratives in interactive communication technologies informed by an interdisciplinary and community-engaged approach,” the association states in its announcement. “This program of research has been supported by an impressive record of securing external grant funding and demonstrates great promise in shaping the future of health communication.”
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‘Measuring Enlarged Mentality: Development and Validation of the Enlarged Mentality Scale’
“Hannah Arendt’s concept of enlarged mentality (also referred to as representative thinking) has received much attention from theorists and philosophers, but it has not been a central concept in the empirical political communication literature. This article explicates the concept of enlarged mentality and argues for its relevance to political communication theory and research. … We offer suggestions on how the measure of enlarged mentality could be useful for different areas of political communication research.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
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Vidrin meditates on partnering, power and care in dance
In an essay for The Blackwood Gallery, assistant professor of theatre Ilya Vidrin meditates on “the invisible boundaries that separate” him and his dance partner. Vidrin considers that “the power dynamics of the dance floor can be fraught, and any miscommunication or misunderstanding can complicate those dynamics and cause harm,” while also leaving space for “possibility and hope,” he writes.
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Patent granted for engineered bacteria ‘secreting therapeutic proteins’
“Engineered bacteria that secrete therapeutic polypeptides, pharmaceutical compositions comprising the bacteria, methods for producing recombinant polypeptides, and methods for using the bacteria for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes are provided,” the abstract reads.
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Taylor receives Harold Osher Award for research in sleep problems for children with autism
“Taylor, an emerging researcher in the field of mental and behavioral health, was presented with the Harold Osher Award for Excellence in Clinical and Population Health at the annual Lambrew Research Retreat sponsored by the MaineHealth Research Institute on May 1st, 2024. One hundred and thirty abstracts were submitted for the award, and after a blind panel review, Taylor’s abstract, ‘Sleep Problems in Children with Autism at the Time of Psychiatric Hospitalization in Relation to Parental Stress and Self-Efficacy,’ was awarded first place in the category of clinical and population health research.”
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Wesley wins 2023 Fox International Case Writing Competition
In a post on LinkedIn, David Wesley wrote that he was “honored to be the winner of the 2023 Fox International Case Writing Competition with the case study, ‘Anheuser-Busch and the Anti-Transgender Boycott of Bud Light.'” Wesley performed this research “to show how Bud Light, as the leading beer brand in America, had to deal with a crisis situation that resulted from its campaign with a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney.” Wesley continued, “The case highlights the duty of care that businesses have to their stakeholders, especially in times of crisis.”
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‘Evolve or Dissolve: Shaping Your Corporate Culture for a Remote Reality’
As remote work has become more prevalent, distinguished professor Paula Caligiuri identifies a significant challenge now facing corporate cultures, and she provides five strategies to shape this culture: emphasize regular communication and visibility; foster connection and collaboration; reinforce and adapt company values; use myGiide to socialize employees; and recognize and reward cultural contributions.