This study investigates whether English proficiency moderates core Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) pathways in the context of AI-enhanced English MOOCs for vocational students. Drawing on an extended TAM that links Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Behavioral Intention (BI), and Perceived Learning Outcomes (PLO), we surveyed 516 learners from a provincial AI-powered MOOC. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed strong measurement properties (all factor loadings > 0.74, AVE > 0.57, CR > 0.80). Structural analysis revealed robust direct effects: PEOU → PU (β = 0.756), PU → BI (β = 0.696), and BI → PLO (β = 0.814). Hierarchical regression showed no significant moderating by English proficiency on any TAM path, though a small positive direct effect on BI was observed (β = 0.064, p = 0.042). Results suggest that well-designed AI personalization can mitigate language-related barriers, allowing core TAM mechanisms to operate consistently across proficiency levels. The findings highlight the potential of adaptive AI tools to foster equitable engagement in vocational language learning. Future research should employ multi-item or objective proficiency measures and incorporate actual usage data to further validate these insights.
Ruth Ntombifuthi Luthuli, Idah Moyo, Azwihangwisi Helen Mavhandu-Mudzusi
This paper reports on human rights violation of trans women in Umlazi township in South Africa. Violation of trans women’s human rights happens in several countries regardless of their constitutional stance regarding LGBTQI policies. Although South Africa was the first country to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation with its democratic Constitution of 1996, it is not an exception to these violations of transgender people’s human rights. This paper presents human rights violations experienced by trans women’s in Umlazi township in South African. The study was qualitative in nature utilising an interpretative phenomenological analysis design. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews from eight criterion purposively selected trans women from Umlazi township. Data was analysed guided by an interpretative analytics framework. Two key themes emerged from the study: the types of human rights violations and their sources. The findings indicated that trans women experience several types of human rights violations, including violations of their right to safety, freedom of expression, access to employment, and the right to human dignity. The sources of these human rights violations for trans women include cis-normative infrastructure, transphobic communities, and transphobic public officials. Understanding these experiences is crucial in developing measures to conscientize communities, foster tolerance and promoting social inclusivity of transgender people in society. The findings provide insights that can facilitate positive changes in how communities perceive transgender persons.
Objective: For some individuals, problematic trading behaviors lead to relevant negative consequences. The need to identify the line between normal and pathological is plagued by epistemological issues that may overpatologize trading as well as blind clinicians to specificities of the clinical condition. This study aims to use a qualitative approach to partially overcome epistemological issues and to identify key features of problematic trading.
Method: We developed the Experiences of Trading Interview (ETI) that was administered to a sample of 29 individuals engaging in cryptocurrencies trading. The content of the questions as well as the structure of the ETI were created to investigate both gambling-like and trading-specific problems. The ETI was structured in sections exploring 1) the story of trading activity, 2) problems emerging after significant losses (e.g., tilt, chasing), 3) problems emerging after significant gains and 4) trading-related harms. The transcripts of the interviews were analyzed through thematic cluster analyses performed with the Tlab software.
Results: Problematic trading is characterized by lack of control consequent to disruption in emotion regulation processes following significant loses or profits. Other problematic features were related to excessive pervasiveness of the activity and cognitive salience. Some features are similar to those described by gambling or addiction literature whereas others are more specific to trading.
Conclusions: Models of gambling and behavioral addictions help identifying some aspects of problematic trading. However, this phenomenon has specific features that should be better investigated. Qualitative approach appears to be a powerful tool to reduce epistemological bias in the study of potential new behavioral addictions.
Global warming can be caused by various sectors, one of which is the transportation sector. The use of gasoline is one of the main contributors to energy consumption. Conventional cars typically use gasoline as fuel to support the mobility of their users. The use of this fuel can have negative impacts on the environment, such as greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Therefore, electric vehicles could be a potential solution to reduce these impacts. However, it cannot be denied that there are several barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles. Through the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) analysis, this study explores the influence of attitudes toward behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control on the intention to purchase electric vehicles among millennials. Additionally, it examines the motivations of millennials in their purchase intentions and the moderating role of gender in the intention to buy electric vehicles. The study sample consists of millennials living in the Jabodetabek area with an interest in electric vehicles. A quantitative method with a Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)-PLS approach is used to analyze the relationships among the variables studied. The results show that TPB and motivation influence the intention to purchase electric vehicles among millennials in Jabodetabek. Meanwhile, gender moderation only influences the relationship between perceived behavioral control and the intention to buy electric vehicles among millennials in Jabodetabek.
Autonomous personal mobility vehicle (APMV) is a new type of small smart vehicle designed for mixed-traffic environments, including interactions with pedestrians. To enhance the interaction experience between pedestrians and APMVs and to prevent potential risks, it is crucial to investigate pedestrians' walking behaviors when interacting with APMVs and to understand the psychological processes underlying these behaviors. This study aims to investigate the causal relationships between subjective evaluations of pedestrians and their walking behaviors during interactions with an APMV equipped with an external human-machine interface (eHMI). An experiment of pedestrian-APMV interaction was conducted with 42 pedestrian participants, in which various eHMIs on the APMV were designed to induce participants to experience different levels of subjective evaluations and generate the corresponding walking behaviors. Based on the hypothesized model of the pedestrian's cognition-decision-behavior process, the results of causal discovery align with the previously proposed model. Furthermore, this study further analyzes the direct and total causal effects of each factor and investigates the causal processes affecting several important factors in the field of human-vehicle interaction, such as situation awareness, trust in vehicle, risk perception, hesitation in decision making, and walking behaviors.
Psychological defenses are strategies, often automatic, that people use to manage distress. Rigid or overuse of defenses is negatively linked to mental health and shapes what speakers disclose and how they accept or resist help. However, defenses are complex and difficult to reliably measure, particularly in clinical dialogues. We introduce PsyDefConv, a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level, and DMRS Co-Pilot, a four-stage pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. The corpus contains 200 dialogues and 4709 utterances, including 2336 help seeker turns, with labeling and Cohen's kappa 0.639. In a counterbalanced study, the co-pilot reduced average annotation time by 22.4%. In expert review, it averaged 4.62 for evidence, 4.44 for clinical plausibility, and 4.40 for insight on a seven-point scale. Benchmarks with strong language models in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate clear headroom, with the best macro F1-score around 30% and a tendency to overpredict mature defenses. Corpus analyses confirm that mature defenses are most common and reveal emotion-specific deviations. We will release the corpus, annotations, code, and prompts to support research on defensive functioning in language.
Hilary Putnam's biography and philosophical development reflect the history of Anglo-Saxon philosophy over the last 40 years. Putnam has influenced this history significantly for almost as long. In this introduction, the main aim is to present the context in which Putnam stands and from which his philosophical contributions can be understood. In the context of a sketch of Putnam's philosophical development, a preliminary historical classification of his work will also be attempted, even if this is not the place for a comprehensive critique or presentation: The introduction must remain at a fairly elementary level and of course cannot replace a reading of the texts. Since Putnam's work is certainly part of a rapprochement between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy, the introduction to the texts translated here should finally make clear what Putnam has to offer non-analytically oriented readers. Hilary Putnams Biographie und philosophische Entwicklung spiegeln die Geschichte der angelsächsischen Philosophie in den letzten 40 Jahren. Beinahe ebenso lange hat Putnam diese Geschichte wesentlich beeinflußt. In der vorliegenden Einleitung soll vor allem der Kontext dargestellt werden, in dem Putnam steht und aus dem heraus verständlich wird, was er philosophisch zu sagen hat. Im Rahmen einer Skizze von Putnams philosophischer Entwicklung soll zudem eine vorläufige philosophiehistorische Einordnung versucht werden, auch wenn hier nicht der Ort für eine umfassende Kritik oder Darstellung sein kann: Die Einleitung muß auf recht elementarem Niveau bleiben und kann eine Lektüre der Texte natürlich nicht ersetzen. Da Putnams Werk sicherlich Teil einer Annäherung von 'analytischer' und 'kontinentaler' Philosophie ist, soll bei der Einführung in die hier übersetzten Texte schließlich deutlich werden, was Putnam nicht analytisch orientierten Lesern zu bieten hat.
Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked answer to this question is provided by T.S. Kuhn. In this paper, I show that discoveries awarded with a Nobel Prize in Physics in the past 53 years accord with a basic premise of Kuhn's account and his distinction between two types of natural kind discoveries. I also draw normative conclusions for credit attribution in science.
Rodzina chrześcijańska, oprócz wspólnoty parafialnej i seminarium duchownego, jest podstawowym środowiskiem rozpoznawania i kształtowania powołania kapłańskiego. Wychowuje i towarzyszy osobie powołanej na wszystkich etapach jej formacji. Postępująca w Polsce sekularyzacja, połączona z rosnącym indywidualizmem i relatywizmem, sprawia, że należy przypominać i propagować chrześcijański model rodziny. Zgodnie z zamysłem Bożym jest ona zbudowana na przymierzu małżeńskim,
całożyciowej wspólnocie mężczyzny i kobiety, która prowadzi do zrodzenia i wychowania potomstwa. Odkrywanie i formowanie powołania kapłańskiego dziecka dokonuje się na drodze realizacji podstawowych zadań rodziny chrześcijańskiej, którymi są: tworzenie wspólnoty osób, służba życiu, udział w rozwoju społeczeństwa, uczestnictwo w życiu i posłannictwie Kościoła. W rodzinie dziecko uczy się wartości ludzkich i chrześcijańskich oraz doświadcza, że powołanie kapłańskie rodzi się z inicjatywy Boga i jest dziełem Jego miłości.
This work explores a pataphysical approach to the concept of space and time, inspired by Aristotelian philosophy and the insights of John Wheeler. We propose the "Physics of Pears", a theory that conceives space as a graph and time as a measure of change, within a geometrodynamical context. The goal is to stimulate reflections on the nature of physical laws and the boundaries between physics and metaphysics.
Virtual counselors powered by large language models (LLMs) aim to create interactive support systems that effectively assist clients struggling with mental health challenges. To replicate counselor-client conversations, researchers have built an online mental health platform that allows professional counselors to provide clients with text-based counseling services for about an hour per session. Notwithstanding its effectiveness, challenges exist as human annotation is time-consuming, cost-intensive, privacy-protected, and not scalable. To address this issue and investigate the applicability of LLMs in psychological counseling conversation simulation, we propose a framework that employs two LLMs via role-playing for simulating counselor-client interactions. Our framework involves two LLMs, one acting as a client equipped with a specific and real-life user profile and the other playing the role of an experienced counselor, generating professional responses using integrative therapy techniques. We implement both the counselor and the client by zero-shot prompting the GPT-4 model. In order to assess the effectiveness of LLMs in simulating counselor-client interactions and understand the disparities between LLM- and human-generated conversations, we evaluate the synthetic data from various perspectives. We begin by assessing the client's performance through automatic evaluations. Next, we analyze and compare the disparities between dialogues generated by the LLM and those generated by professional counselors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to thoroughly examine the performance of our LLM-based counselor trained with synthetic interactive dialogues by benchmarking against state-of-the-art models for mental health.
James Edomwonyi Edokpolor, Dagogo William Legg-Jack, Patience Osebhakhomen Imeokparia
The study explored the relationship between work burnout (WB) dimensions (e.g. emotional exhaustion, cynicism and lack of professional accomplishment) and job performance (JP) components (e.g. task and contextual) of vocational education lecturers (VELs) in universities in Nigeria. The target population of the study were 284 VELs from public universities in Nigeria. The study employed a structured questionnaire for data collection. Pearson correlational Metrix and linear regression with a bootstrap bias-correction technique were applied for the analyses of data. The results shows that WB dimensions (e.g. emotional exhaustion, cynicism and lack of professional accomplishment) do not significantly correlate with JP components (e.g. task and contextual) of VELs. The results provided evidence concerning the relationship between WB dimensions and JP components of VELs. However, WB experienced by VELs has affected their JP. In all, caution must be exercised by university administrators in assigning job responsibilities to lecturers.
People segment complex, ever-changing and continuous experience into basic, stable and discrete spatio-temporal experience units, called events. Event segmentation literature investigates the mechanisms that allow people to extract events. Event segmentation theory points out that people predict ongoing activities and observe prediction error signals to find event boundaries that keep events apart. In this study, we investigated the mechanism giving rise to this ability by a computational model and accompanying psychological experiments. Inspired from event segmentation theory and predictive processing, we introduced a self-supervised model of event segmentation. This model consists of neural networks that predict the sensory signal in the next time-step to represent different events, and a cognitive model that regulates these networks on the basis of their prediction errors. In order to verify the ability of our model in segmenting events, learning them during passive observation, and representing them in its internal representational space, we prepared a video that depicts human behaviors represented by point-light displays. We compared event segmentation behaviors of participants and our model with this video in two hierarchical event segmentation levels. By using point-biserial correlation technique, we demonstrated that event segmentation decisions of our model correlated with the responses of participants. Moreover, by approximating representation space of participants by a similarity-based technique, we showed that our model formed a similar representation space with those of participants. The result suggests that our model that tracks the prediction error signals can produce human-like event boundaries and event representations. Finally, we discussed our contribution to the literature of event cognition and our understanding of how event segmentation is implemented in the brain.
In the 1958 paper "Shall we count the living or the dead", Canadian physician and biostatistician Mindel C. Sheps proposed a novel approach to choice of effect measure, which resolves key theoretical shortcomings of relative risk models. Sheps' insights have been independently rediscovered multiple times in different academic disciplines, and her approach is consistent with influential work on mechanism of action from toxicology, as well as work on causal generalizability from the psychology and philosophy literature
The culture of wine as a traditional drink in the countries of Southern Europe is determined by the geographical, ethnographic, and historical context, at the same time it is associated with national identification. In the case of Spain, wine plays the role of a friendly union, an element of active communication, is a sociocultural behavioral norm. Through the history of wine-making, the key stages of the country’s development can be traced: from ancient settlements to the European Union, variety of backgrounds, traditions and religions, etc. adding to the long history of wine on the territory of today’s Spain. The theme of wine is reflected in the works of famous Spanish philosophers, writers and artists as a stable tradition, a symbol of community, celebration, creativity, at the same time melancholy and sadness, as a typical Spanish dualism of attitude to life. It is noted that wine was not only viewed as a means of recreation, but also a powerful double-edged social factor, both pacifying and disorganizing. Taverns became people’s universities, and cafes with their tertulias became the center of intellectual life. Wine is an important economic component, the vineyard zones cover the whole country, with its main wine-making regions — from Rioja to Jerez — renowned around the world. Hundreds of varieties of wines are produced, which differ in denomination, aging, reputation, and popularity on the world market and with tourists. Spain has a leading position in this area. At present, bars, restaurants, and taverns, as public spaces suitable for big parties and family gatherings alike, have become not only a place of spending one’s pastime, but also a platform for political discussions, a place where certain political forces manipulate their influence, where polar views on the current and future agenda are in confrontation: the globalization of the society and cultural unification, or the preservation of unique customs and traditions. Wine culture is dynamic, it manifests itself in a new form in the younger generation, the latest gender andprogressivenorms appear, the simple, down-to-earth consumption characteristic of thebar culturedisplaces the spiritual component. The loss of traditions, including the wine culture, is dangerous for the society. It will have negative consequences for the country, will cause damage to its attractiveness for investors and tourists, and hurt the very image of their motherland the Spanish hold dear. Wine remains an important part of the national heritage, material, and spiritual culture of Spain.
Overproduction, consumerism and commodity fetishism — it seems like these tendencies are omnipotent and omnipresent in the modern world. The difference between the society criticized by Marx and the reality encompassing us is that in the postmodern societies, it is the information and images that serve as an object of consumption and consequently commodity fetishism. In other words, the service sector produces images that become the means of mediation. In the article, the author looks into the work of Stanislaw Lem Futurological Congress and contemporary French movie The Congress following the same plot. The analysis being founded on the theories of Guy Debord, Slavoj Žižek and Karl Marx, as well as the recent investigations of a journalist Naomi Klein, the author uncovers implicit consequences of the consumerist way of life, imposed on us by the capitalist system as well as media and transnational companies. Arguing, after Žižek, that the criticism of late-capitalism is directly linked to the understanding of the human psyche’s recesses, the article attempts to explain the consumer turning into a marionette of large businesses. This position is further strengthened by the natural necessity for an individual to embrace the system’s core impositions, in particular, to recognize the non-existing authenticity behind a brand. The tendency further leads to the alienation from real merit and overconfidence in the fairness inherent in the existing system. Overproduction and the ubiquitous loss of Walter Benjamin’s Aura result in actual poverty behind the mask of abundance, nature of the art and authenticity becoming extinct. This leads to the natural drive to substitute the lost identity for the (re-) invented one and manifest individualities, sometimes aggressively and vigorously. As Lem’s characters balance on the verge between reality and hallucinations, modern-day consumers lose the established coordinate system, distracted by the absolute and seemingly non-restricted liberty of choice, the virtual reality permitting to act out any repressed impulses and instincts fully and with impunity. Citing Debord, ‘the poverty unites everyone involved in the spectacle and its controversies’. The author is of the opinion that Lem’s Futurological Congress aims at forewarning the reader from the possibility of the imaginary system progressing irreversibly, the idea further reflected in the movie. There is no hope for a society abandoning the boundaries of reality and moral guidelines for good. The analysis could possibly describe the broadening sphere of influence of the multinational corporations and contribute to the lively discussions on the digital divide and the social networks’ actual/ impact on society.
Philipp Berghofer, Jordan François, Simon Friederich
et al.
Gauge symmetries play a central role, both in the mathematical foundations as well as the conceptual construction of modern (particle) physics theories. However, it is yet unclear whether they form a necessary component of theories, or whether they can be eliminated. It is also unclear whether they are merely an auxiliary tool to simplify (and possibly localize) calculations or whether they contain independent information. Therefore their status, both in physics and philosophy of physics, remains to be fully clarified. In this overview we review the current state of affairs on both the philosophy and the physics side. In particular, we focus on the circumstances in which the restriction of gauge theories to gauge invariant information on an observable level is warranted, using the Brout-Englert-Higgs theory as an example of particular current importance. Finally, we determine a set of yet to be answered questions to clarify the status of gauge symmetries.
Institutional trust is in decline in many western democracies. Since the 2008 global economic and financial crisis, this increasing distrust has been closely related to trust in political institutions. Trust in institutions is one of the pillars of democracy, and its decline is one of the most evident and shared symptoms of the recession, especially in those contexts where it has been particularly acute. This article has both substantive and methodological aims. From a substantive point of view, it deals with trust in political institutions in Europe, and its decline during the recession. Differences are found among European countries, depending on the severity of the economic crisis. From a methodological point of view, the article compares two methodologies for cross-cultural analyses: the more traditional Multiple-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and the newer Alignment method. Recommendations for the use of the newer method in certain circumstances are provided.