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The aim of this paper was to photograph this precise moment in history, focusing on the situation of older adults during the COVID-19 health emergency in Northern Italy. In particular, we analysed the relationship between social networks and social support, sport and recreational activity, and the use of communications technologies in December 2020. We investigated and discussed such use of technologies, wondering if and how it helped to compensate for the diminishment in social health, usually gained trough social interactions and the practice of sport and physical activity. We examined how reduction of mobility, social distancing and isolation measures imposed by the government to reduce the spread of COVID-19, affected the living conditions of the older adults, in particular their social health, and the level of sport and physical activity they were engaged in. We collected data through interviews with the subjects, assessing their social networks, the perceived social support provided by their family members, friends and caregivers, and the level of sport and physical activity they were engaged in. Moreover, we analysed the impact of technological communications devices, which were employed to help older adults to maintain their relationships with the outside world and to preserve their active life. The interview questions were formulated based on the Lubben Social Network Scale-Revised (LSNS-R), the short version of the Social Support List (SSL12-I) for the elderly and the Physical Activity Scale for the Elderly (PASE). A relationship was found between the social health related to physical activity of the older adults subjects during the COVID-19 emergency and the use of communications technologies, which played a role in mitigating the impact of the crisis on their social health by helping them to keep physically and socially active. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hey Siri, Alexa, Google, can you help me learn to read? Speech recognition apps can take dictation. Elementary, middle, high school students, and adults, who struggle to read can dictate to speech recognition apps and see their oral vernacular become written words. However, at the time of this study, speech recognition apps remained notoriously inaccurate. The purpose of this study was to examine whether first-graders who struggled to read would develop sight vocabulary for the words they dictated to speech recognition apps. If so, how did their speech recognition-generated words compare with words they might encounter in other texts? Conversely, did they use vocabulary represented on high-frequency word lists? Derived from a broader ethnographic study, for 4 months, students attended a classroom writing centre and used speech recognition apps to compose. Findings indicated that speech recognition inaccuracies were inconsequential to participants' development of corresponding sight vocabulary. Within the timeframe and writing process used in the study, the students spontaneously generated a relatively low percentage of words they might encounter in other texts. However, speech recognition appeared to support students' abilities to embrace personally meaningful oral language and transfer their linguistic and culturally diverse oral vernacular to sight vocabulary. Findings raise issues of ecological validity and the origins of sight vocabulary curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication during patient transitions is difficult in a fragmented health care system. eHealth technologies are often seen as a panacea, but a large proportion of eHealth projects fail, primarily because of human, not technological, elements. To combat this tendency, concepts derived from institutional ethnography were applied to create an electronic communications solution, which enabled careful mapping of communications gaps; their consequences; and the diverse needs of multiple health care providers. Institutional ethnography allowed researchers to trace social relations across locations in the health system and determine how action could be coordinated to ensure that family physicians were informed of patients' acute care encounters, while simultaneously strengthening relations between clinicians and information technology workers. As a result, an automated electronic notification system was piloted, evaluated, and spread to more than 92 percent of community physicians in one region of British Columbia, Canada, improving communication between providers and enhancing patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT; e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the Internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. However, CT also facilitates monitoring and arresting terrorists. This article formulates the hypothesis that a society's level of CT is systematically related to terrorism. We introduce a simple theoretical framework, suggesting that terrorism first becomes more attractive with a rise in CT, but then decreases, following an inverted U shape. Accessing data for 199 countries from 1970 to 2014, we find evidence consistent with these predictions: terrorism peaks at intermediate ranges of CT and corresponding magnitudes are sizable. Our estimations control for a range of potentially confounding factors, as well as country fixed effects and year fixed effects. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications and placebo regressions. We find no evidence of a potential reporting bias explaining our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contains research about the phenomenon of digital inequality among different social groups in Russia. The short literature review, conducted in it, concerns the factors, which have an impact on the rise and spread of digital inequality. The types of digital inequality have been analyzed, and each of them has the relative digital divide indicators calculated. It has been revealed, that the digital divide in terms of the Internet and information and communications technology access between the rural and urban population has been decreased, however the divide in terms of digital skills has been increased. There is almost no digital divide in ICT among the middle-aged groups, and it is constantly decreasing. Although the digital divide among the older-aged groups is also growing down, it is still high, and the divide in digital skills remains unchanged. It is noted, that the country's territory in length objectively increases the IT infrastructure costs, hampers providing for the high-quality internet-connection for the rural people and is the reason for digital divide in terms of Internet-access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Younger adults are more likely to smoke and less likely to seek treatment than older smokers. They are also frequent users of communication technology. In the current study, we conducted focus groups to obtain feedback about preferences for a text message–based smoking cessation program from potential users. Participants (N = 21, M age = 25.6 years, age range = 20-33 years) were current or recently quit smokers (M cigarettes/day = 12.8) who used text messaging. Participants completed questionnaires and participated in a 2-hour focus group. Focus groups were conducted using an a priori semistructured interview guide to promote discussion of the content and functionality of the intervention. Major themes from analysis of the focus groups included support for the acceptability of a text-based cessation program, suggestions for a more technologically broad-based program, and adjustments to the program structure. Participants recommended including social networking functions, user control of program output through an online profile, and text message features to promote interaction with the system. Interestingly, many participants suggested the program should begin on individuals’ identified quit day, challenging the procedures used in most cessation programs, which begin by preparing participants for a future quit date. Overall, younger adult smokers appear to be interested in participating in a smoking cessation program that uses text messages and web-based elements. Qualitative feedback regarding the perceived optimal features and structure of a technology-based intervention challenged traditional methods of implementing smoking cessation interventions and will inform the development of future programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an exploratory conceptual analysis on the factors that affect the inability of leadership to express emotional intelligence when relying on web-based communication technologies. It states that the use of newer technologies can affect the emotional intelligence (EI) characteristics of leaders during dialogue with stakeholders. It also explores the possibility of leaders' ineffectiveness in performing corporate tasks as well as handling and developing subordinates.

Cultural and social studies of technology have regarded infrastructure as less significant than the interfaces, devices, materials, and practices where processes of consumption, representation, attachment, embodiment, identification, and sociality are most visible. Infrastructural elements of new technologies usually remain in the background of analysis. What would it mean to invert the figure-ground relation between technology and "infrastructure"? Via a case study of an increasingly popular, everyday contemporary wireless networking technology, Wi-Fi, the author suggests that infrastructures have begun to figure as sites of cultural contestation. Infrastructures work as highly potentialized fields, triggering a multiplicity of interpretations. Using textual and ethnographic materials, the author suggests that rather than being the immobile grounds of technological cultures, different imaginings and practices of connectivity run through the many Wi-Fi projects, enterprises, and visions of the past 2 years. In seeking to understand these different imaginings of connectivity, the author suggests that contemporary infrastructures embody cultural logics at odds with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]