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This paper seeks to explore the impact of gender and age diversity within the board of directors, as well as the appointment of a female CEO, on the return of assets (ROA) and Tobin Q of banks on a global scale. The study is motivated by the growing interest in how the quality of human capital within boardrooms affects the performance of banks, as well as the conflicting results of previous research on this topic. To conduct the study, panel regressions with fixed effects were employed as the research method. The sample consisted of 470 banks, including 146 banks from emerging markets, and data was collected from 2013 to 2023. The findings revealed that gender diversity within the board had a significant and negative impact on banks' Tobin's Q. Additionally, there was no significant relationship found between gender diversity and banks' ROA, as well as between age diversity and both banks' ROA and Tobin's Q. The appointment of a female CEO harmed banks' Tobin Q in emerging markets, but no significant influence was found on ROA and Tobin Q in banks in the developed world. As a result, it appears that banks' investors do not view gender diversity as separate from other human capital issues within the boardrooms and may not derive significant financial benefits from gender and age diversity. These findings can be valuable for strategic controlling in evaluating the impact of human capital on the boards and executive branches of financial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human age and gender prediction from facial images has garnered significant attention due to its importance in various applications. Traditional models struggle with large-scale variations in unfiltered images. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as effective tools for facial analysis due to their robust performance. This paper presents a novel CNN approach for robust age and gender classification using unconstrained real-world images. The CNN architecture includes convolution, pooling, and fully connected layers for feature extraction, dimension reduction, and mapping to output classes. Adience and UTKFace datasets were utilized, with the best training and testing accuracies achieved using an 80% training and 20% testing data split. Robust image pre-processing and data augmentation techniques were applied to handle dataset variations. The proposed approach outperformed existing methods, achieving age prediction accuracies of 86.42% and 81.96%, and gender prediction accuracies of 97.65% and 96.32% on the Adience and UTKFace datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, the landscape of financial literacy has been evolving to accommodate new trends driven by the growing prominence of digital finance. This shift has underscored the vital need for developing digital financial literacy (DFL). Scientists and researchers have increasingly recognized the crucial importance of acquiring the knowledge and skills required to navigate the complexities of digital transactions, crypto currencies, online banking, and digital investment platforms. In our study conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we utilized the 2022 OECD survey questionnaire for this purpose. Employing various data collection methods, including Paper and Pencil Interviewing, Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing, and Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing, we gathered a substantial dataset comprising 1,096 fully completed questionnaires. Our primary contribution lies in the assessment of DFL scores among adults in Bosnia and Herzegovina, marking the first study of its kind in this transitional and developing nation. Furthermore, our research identifies notable personal background and socio-demographic disparities in DFL levels, rooted in factors such as age, gender, urban or rural residence, education, income and internet access, but also self-awareness of financial knowledge, owning a current account and a credit card. The survey results underscore the prevailing low levels of DFL in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with an overall score of 3.83 out of 10, highlighting the urgency for government intervention in addressing this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thailand is a worldwide hub for the value addition of gemstones. Women in Thailand enjoy a high level of education, their employment level is on par with other member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and they play a significant role in the gem and jewellery industry. Thai institutions support the industry, but their gender-neutral stance does not celebrate, or capitalise on, the contribution of female actors. Patriarchy and 'invisible masculinity' underlie entrepreneurship across the country. A few privileged women have experienced a degree of empowerment and fair conditions at work. But some parts of the industry, for example, home-based work, are informal and women in the home-based gemstone-cutting industry in the border regions, hit particularly hard by COVID-19, have experienced little progress. The literature has not paid much attention to the Thai gem resource sector or to the contribution of women. This paper considers the gem and jewellery industry's contribution to the lives of women in Thailand referencing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—gender equality and empowerment (SDG 5), decent work and economic work (SDG 8), and reduced inequalities (SDG 10). The paper is based on seven years of research into the opportunities and challenges for women in the gemstone value chain spanning Madagascar and Thailand. The paper questions the extent to which the industry has enabled and empowered women in Thailand, and whether it perpetuates some of the patterns of economic inequality reflected in, and caused by, the urban–rural divide. • Critical analysis of gem and jewellery industry in Thailand contributes to achievement of SDGs for women. • Insights into Thailand's successful gemstone beneficiation hub. • Understanding of gender and inequality in the Thai context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Embodiment studies should expect potential changes in participants behaviour while doing a task after a threat was introduced. • Threat introduction and repetition do not seem to impact the subjective measure of the Sense of Embodiment (user responses to questionnaires). • Threat introduction and repetition do not seem to impact the objective measure of the Sense of Embodiment (behavioural responses to threat towards the virtual body). • Individual differences between users, such as users' neuroticism trait, gender or game experience can influence their threat responses and also their Sense of Embodiment. [Display omitted] This paper is an extended version of a previous paper [1] published at ICAT-EGVE 2020. We explored the potential impact of threat occurrence and repeatability on users' Sense of Embodiment (SoE) and threat response. To that aim, we conducted an experiment in which participants were embodied in a virtual avatar, and performed a task in which a threat towards the virtual body was introduced a first time, then repeated several times through the experiment (in total 5 times). The SoE of participants as well as their subjective response to the threat were assessed through subjective questionnaires before the introduction of the threat, after a first introduction of the threat and at the end of the experiment. A control group did the same experiment with no threat introduced during the task. The main findings of our experiment are that the introduction of a threat does not alter users' SoE but might change their behaviour while performing a task after the threat occurrence. In addition, threat repetitions did not show any effect on users' subjective SoE, or subjective and objective responses to threat. Taken together, our results suggest that embodiment studies should expect potential change in participants behaviour while doing a task after a threat was introduced, but that threat introduction and repetition do not seem to impact the subjective measure of the SoE (subective ratings) nor the objective measure of the SoE (physical reaction to threat). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shaping fictional characters is an important part of story-telling and the forces which shape identity are worth examining as they add to pragmatic theorizing on identity construction. The paper suggests that translation practice offers multiple contexts where the various workings of identity formation through discourse may be explored. The study uses Bucholtz and Halls's (2005) identity formation principles in two Greek versions (1947, 2017) of the same playtext to heighten awareness of alternative identity representation patterns, which employ various identity formation principles. Results show a significant shift in the translators' shaping the identity of the father figure, through target discursive options assuming a shifting gender position in the target societal environment and a different perception of societal values. Questionnaire respondents favoured certain target options probably for the intensity they created. The paper concludes that an integral part of a character's identity is conveyed through the non-/offensive value of items which regulate the translators' renegotiation of the character's identity. The paper advances understanding of pragmatic aspects in fictional identity formation and im/politeness through translation. It shifts attention to cross-cultural pragmatics, highlights the relational dynamic in the characters' communication, and the translator evaluation intention manifesting how intra-cultural variation affects the translator's task. • Identity formation principles are potentially anchored in interaction. • Translated versions of a playtext may favour different identity formation processes. • Translation practice may reveal further aspects of identity formation processes. • Translation practice may anchor identity in the relational dynamics of discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in an intelligent way, which aims at creating scalable and flexible solutions. Big tech firms and businesses believe in the success of HCI as it allows them to profit from on-demand technology and infrastructure for information-centric applications without having to use public clouds. Because of its capacity to imitate human coding abilities, facial expression recognition and software-based facial expression identification systems are crucial. This paper proposes a system of recognizing the emotional condition of humans, given a facial expression, and conveys two methods of predicting the age and gender factors from human faces. This research also aims in understanding the influences posed by gender and age of humans on their facial expressions. The model can currently detect 7 emotions based on the facial data of a person - (Anger, Disgust, Happy, Fear, Sad, Surprise, and Neutral state). The proposed system is divided into three segments: a.) Gender Detection b.) Age Detection c.) Emotion Recognition. The initial model is created using 2 algorithms - KNN, and SVM. We have also utilized the architectures of some of the deep learning models such as CNN and VGG - 16 pre-trained models (Transfer Learning). The evaluation metrics show the model performance regarding the accuracy of the Recognition system. Future enhancements of this work can include the deployment of the DL and ML model onto an android or a wearable device such as a smartphone or a watch for a real-time use case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper proposes female CEOs' overconfidence and risky behavior stem from gender stereotype threats. • We empirically show that female CEOs in the North, where there is less gender stereotyping, tend to overinvest relative to male CEOs. • Female CEOs from the North tend to take more risks even when dealing with market volatility and uncertainty. • Such risky behaviors do not deteriorate firm value but, instead, possibly improve firm performance. This paper proposes female CEOs' overconfidence and risky behavior stem from gender stereotype threats. Using two subsamples from Vietnam—firms in the Northern and Southern regions—we empirically show that female CEOs in the North, where there is less gender stereotyping, tend to overinvest relative to male CEOs. However, in the South, they are indifferent. Additional analysis reinforces the main finding that female CEOs in the North tend to take more risks even when dealing with market volatility and uncertainty (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Such risky behaviors do not deteriorate firm value but, instead, possibly improve firm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate-induced migration is an increasingly pressing issue in many African regions, as rising temperatures and extreme weather events have caused the displacement of vulnerable populations. This is especially so in Eastern Africa and the Horn of Africa, particularly Kenya and Ethiopia, where extreme weather events have led to rangeland degradation, crop failures, water shortages, and food insecurity. Hence, there is a perceived need to understand these processes better. Against this background, this paper reports on a study investigating the processes associated with climate-induced migration in Kenya and Ethiopia. The research method used consisted of an expert-driven assessment approach, which assesses the causes of climate-induced migration in Kenya and Ethiopia and its human and social implications on local communities. Data were collected from 110 experts residing and working on climate and migration-related issues in Ethiopia and Kenya via e-mail, whose knowledge of the current situation has enabled the identification of some important trends. The results show that climate change is a primary trigger of migration both internally and externally. The high number of migrants, many of whom living within levels of poverty in their home areas is straining resources and services in the receiving regions. Their presence is also leading to increased competition for jobs and resources. Additionally, it has increased urban poverty, as many migrants have little access to living space and health care. This paper provides a welcome addition to the literature in that it lists the causes and implications of climate-induced migration and, by doing so, fosters a better understanding of the current crisis and its implications. The implications of this paper to the overall knowledge of climate change and migration are twofold. First, it highlights the need for governments, international organisations, and other stakeholders better to understand the complex linkages between climate change and migration. Secondly, it shows the usefulness of better recognising how climate change can drive migration and the other factors shaping the decision to migrate. The paper concludes by stating the urgent need for policies and programmes that support climate change-induced migrants. Also, it draws attention to the usefulness of promoting sustainable development in their origin countries and destinations, so that migration is not necessarily perceived as the only response to climate change. A further conclusion is that there is a perceived need for providing access to resources such as education, health care, and livelihood opportunities and establishing mechanisms to ensure a safe and dignified return for those who choose to do so. • Climate change is a significant driver for migration in Kenya and Ethiopia. • Droughts, conflicts, and crop failures are among the key drivers of migration. • Male migration is more prominent than a female one. • Limited access to productive resources leads to outmigration from rural areas. • Lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic did not cause any major migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper critically reviews the extant research on young worker safety. • We reconcile the inconsistent definitions used in young worker safety research. • Safety campaigns and safety training should consider interactions among young workers' age, gender, minority status, and job characteristics. Introduction: Research on young worker safety often relies on inconsistent definitions of young workers and poorly delineated indicators of occupational safety. This review aims to reconcile these fundamental issues by critically integrating research across disciplines and providing clear directions for future research on young worker safety. Method: We critically review the extant research on young worker safety. Results: We first reconcile the inconsistent definitions of young workers and specify the indicators of occupational safety used in young worker safety research. We next describe the prevalence of workplace injuries and population-level predictors of these injuries among young workers and then outline other factors that increase young workers' susceptibility to workplace injuries. Finally, we discuss the convergence of many of these issues on family farms—a context commonly studied in young worker safety research. Conclusions: Clearer definitions of young workers and indicators of occupational safety can improve the interpretation and comparability of extant research findings. Furthermore, the prevalence of workplace injuries and population-level predictors of injury among young workers are subject to the interactions among age, gender, minority status, and job characteristics. Other factors that increase young workers' susceptibility to injury include young workers' responses to hazardous work, individual differences stemming from young workers' biological and psychological development, managerial attitudes about young workers, and the limited safety training young workers are thus provided, the types of work that young workers typically perform, and the range of social influences on young workers. Practical Applications: Safety campaigns and safety training should consider interactions among young workers' age, gender, minority status, and job characteristics, rather than considering these features independently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the international commitments to cut CO 2 emissions by 50–70% by 2030 and 100% by 2050–2070, the search for cost-efficient tools is continuously ongoing. In theory, CO 2 taxes are one of the most efficient and simple tools. However, despite their excellent economic properties, CO 2 taxes are not always preferred by the public and can impact social inequality. Another issue is that other CO 2 reduction interventions, such as increased renewable energy like wind power, can substitute the CO 2 tax. Nevertheless, wind power is also controversial, and the local acceptance of new, mainly onshore, wind power projects can be very low. In this paper, we test how these two issues are related. Using data from a national survey with 2386 respondents, we test how the existing and potential future wind power landscape (number of turbines) relates to the CO 2 consumer tax support. The average results show no relations. However, conditional on gender, age, and income, female respondents, older respondents, and respondents from low-income households who can see many turbines from the residence are more positive towards consumer CO 2 taxes than male respondents, younger respondents, and respondents from higher-income households who see two or more turbines. We also find that low-income households with knowledge about local wind turbine projects support a consumer CO2 tax more than higher-income houses with the same knowledge. Finally, the density of turbines on the postal area level correlates differently and significantly with the support of a consumer CO 2 tax between male and female respondents. First, our results illustrate the dynamic properties of wind turbine exposure and the correlation with the support for CO 2 consumer taxes. Secondly, our results also denote the complexity of substitution between acceptance of CO 2 consumer taxes and wind power development across generations and household income levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores sellers' addressing behaviours in Chinese e-commerce live streaming discourse by focusing on the impact of gender. Data were drawn from a self-built corpus comprising 120 h of transcribed texts from live streaming on Taobao. By conducting a corpus-based analysis, we compared males' and females' keywords for addressing customers and their performative functions of suggestive selling. The findings show that: (1) both males and females use a small percentage of kinship terms; (2) males' ratio of address pronouns to nouns greatly surpasses females', but their frequency of ' nín ' (deferential you) is much lower than females'; (3) females are more likely to consistently use nouns with the meaning of baby, whereas males prefer utilising diverse friendship terms; and (4) females frequently use a pattern of 'thank/greet + baby' to conduct ritual interactions more often than males. We argue that both males' and females' addressing behaviours function to promote successful selling; however, gender distinctions do exist in terms of their lexical choices and pragmatic uses of addressing words. The current study contributes to both pragmatics and the sociolinguistic study of gender and language. • Provides research data on Chinese addressing behaviors in e-commerce live streaming context. • Explores how sellers manage rapport via address pronouns and nouns for suggestive selling. • Focuses on gender's impact on addressing forms by conducting a corpus-based analysis. • Finds both similarities and differences in males' and females' use of addressing forms. • Contributes to both pragmatics and the sociolinguistic study of gender and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face biometrics are playing a key role in making modern smart city applications more secure and usable. Commonly, the recognition threshold of a face recognition system is adjusted based on the degree of security for the considered use case. The likelihood of a match can be for instance decreased by setting a high threshold in case of a payment transaction verification. Prior work in face recognition has unfortunately showed that error rates are usually higher for certain demographic groups. These disparities have hence brought into question the fairness of systems empowered with face biometrics. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which disparities among demographic groups change under different security levels. Our analysis includes ten face recognition models, three security thresholds, and six demographic groups based on gender and ethnicity. Experiments show that the higher the security of the system is, the higher the disparities in usability among demographic groups are. Compelling unfairness issues hence exist and urge countermeasures in real-world high-stakes environments requiring severe security levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present situation, renewable energy has become a vital source to mitigate energy crises and environmental threats. In order to ensure that women's contributions, knowledge and opinions represent a significant portion of the expanding energy sector, it is crucial to approach the development of renewable energy from a gender perspective. Bibliometric analysis was performed to identify prior research on two primary terms, "Gender" and "Renewable Energy", from 1995 to 2022. Identifying the most influential countries, authors, publications, journals, and co-occurrence of keywords helps to understand the evaluation and trends of the research through network visualisations by bibliometric approach. This paper presents a comprehensive bibliometric review of the influence of gender on renewable energy. The result of this paper gives details picture of the gender impact on renewable energy during the period from 1995 to 2022. The paper centred on bibliometric and cluster analysis based on the two most important databases, Web of Science and Scopus. The study involved utilising various bibliometric tools, including R Studio, VOSviewer, and Biblioshiny. The study revealed an increase in publications and citations during the third period since 2017, after the United Nations set the target of the Sustainable Development Goal. Most influential countries and productive authors belong to China, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. Energy Research and Social Science are predominated in publications on the research topic. In addition, the co-occurrence of keywords found major keywords related to this topic, such as renewable energy, gender, women, knowledge, sustainability, climate change and sustainable development. Finally, the study observed a huge research gap because developing nations are more affected by the lack of gender-influencing policies on the growth of renewable energy. Thus, the study provides a comprehensive overview of research in this field that can help researchers and stakeholders identify potential ways for future research in gender considerations on renewable energy access by formulating effective policies to change society and reach the Sustainable Development Goals. • Gender has become a focal point of interest within the renewable energy sector. • Using network visualisation, bibliometric analysis examines research trends by keyword occurrence and country collaborations. • Publication, citation, journal, and authorship contribution trends are to be analysed. • The research growth across different periods was discussed for potential future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of gender-fair language remains rather controversial in France. Although some recent changes have taken place at institutional level, forms associated with inclusive writing are still discouraged in numerous legal settings. Inspired by the broader research framework of the Eurolect Observatory Project, 1 which focuses on the cross-language contact that derives from the multilingual drafting and translation of EU legislation, this paper investigates the possible dialogue between supranational and national legal varieties and the way(s) in which the topical issue of gender is addressed in French legal provisions. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of a corpus consisting of (i) EU directives, (ii) their implementing measures in the French national legal system, and (iii) French national laws, the study investigates different linguistic strategies for expressing gender, which can be categorised under the tripartite division of masculine, binary, or neutral forms. This contribution joins an existing body of recent literature on the discursive articulation of gender in legislative languages (Cavagnoli and Mori, 2019) and narrows down the focus to gender-related provisions in the French language. The analysis is guided by the following research questions: Can a potential intralinguistic dialogue be observed between supranational and national varieties in French legal discourse? And if so, can such a potential dialogue be said to be moving towards (more) gender-fair representation in the law? • Masculine forms in the law are a case of pragmatic indeterminacy. • The strategies used to represent gender in French legal discourse still lack convergence. • The inconsistent use of gender-fair strategies may result in male-biased inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effect of word representations on gender classification using deep learning. There are two main objectives: how well do popular deep learning architectures, namely LSTM and CNNs, perform on gender classification task and investigate how the choice of word representation effects the performance. Three networks, LSTM, CNN and LeNet-5, were trained on a dataset containing about 18000 names from India, Western countries, Sri Lanka and Japan. These names, encoded using the popular One-Hot representation and Word Embeddings in addition to Integer representation and an Enhanced Integer representation (proposed in this paper), were given as Input and the performance is evaluated on accuracy, training times and size of input layer. Experimental results show that LSTM in combination with word embedding derived from the proposed Enhanced Integer representation gives the best performance of about 85%. One-Hot representation is superior to Integer and Enhanced Integer representation but appears to perform lower than word embeddings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the behaviour of pedestrians when they cross at signalized intersection under mixed traffic situations. Based on a field study at a typical signalized intersection in the commercial hub in the city of Kolkata, the paper describes various characteristics of pedestrian movements. Several attributes like width of the road, age and gender of the pedestrian and if they are carrying any baggage were considered at the time of performing such analysis. The age and gender of pedestrians were found to have an impact on their speeds; however, children were observed to walk faster since they are accompanied by their parents in most occasions. The speed of panic-stricken pedestrians who prefer to run on the zebra marking while crossing the road at intersection was observed to be quite high. Interestingly, the effect of carrying baggage on walking speeds was found to be insignificant at the study site. Accordingly, the current study made an attempt to further investigate the fact by conducting an informal opinion poll. The poll of about 50 road users revealed that since most of them walk towards their office or business centre, they usually carry lighter baggage and quite often they are compelled to walk fast. Further, at crosswalk, speed does not vary to a considerable extent with the increase of flow; this attributes to the absence of confined flow. The observed flow parameters were plotted and the scattered diagrams indicate widespread data points that largely follow the Greenberg’s logarithmic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factors affecting academic achievement were widely analyzed and compared. This paper studies the effect of some context variables, including Gender, Age and School Resources (namely, General School Resources index ?GSR? and Resources for Mathematics Instruction ?RMI?) on the performance in Mathematics of the Moroccan?s fourth-grade students that participated on the TIMSS 2019 survey. The data collection method uses secondary data from this survey. Two statistical software packages are used (R Core Team, 2017 and SPSS 20) to treat data and apply multilevel modeling. The results of this modeling show that the variance explained at the school level is 39.41 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has as its main goal investigating the errors and non-errors made by three machine translation (MT) systems in translating gender-bound constructs from English to Arabic in four selected technical texts. The three MT systems used in this study were Systran’s Pure Neural Machine Translation (PNMT), Google Translate (GT) and Microsoft Bing (MB). The target gender-bound constructs were subject-verb agreement, adjectival-noun agreement and pronoun-antecedent agreement, which occurred naturally in four purposefully selected technical texts. The idea behind the choice of technical texts was to reduce the linguistic load found in other genres, such as literary texts, which involve utilising creative linguistic tools that are out of the scope of the present paper. Upon the qualitative examination of the target language texts, the findings revealed that the three MT systems had errors and non-errors in rendering gender-bound constructs from English to Arabic, and that errors transpired in certain co-textual environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current global pandemic, actions are taken to prevent Covid-19 spread, residents are embracing small-scale gardening activities in their homes; especially in low to middle income communities, 3rd world countries as in Africa, depending on individual activities. Despite that, there is a lack provided by literature review about home gardening, the paper then shifts to the exploration of the gender influence on home gardening, poses questions; how do gender roles influence home gardening habits, and how would such activities potentially benefit the gardeners, and are the benefits equally distributed or are they potentially skewed to one gender over the other? Using an imperical quantitative approach through a survey, the results imply hypotheses and test them using WarpPLS, to verify their validity. This paper highlight effects on the connection between gender, gardening activities, and their potential benefits. The findings can help urban authorities to create a fair and inclusive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the prevalence of REs in a clinic from Aguascalientes, Mexico by analysing clinical records from the local public health system. Refractive errors (REs) are quite common globally, but no data have been published regarding their frequency in clinics from Mexico. A priori, the frequency of ametropias should be high as admixture ancestry from this region is mainly European and Amerindian, the regions with high prevalence worldwide. This cross-sectional study was conducted on 2195 subjects from records of public optometry services during the year 2018. Information obtained included age, gender, sphere, cylinder and axis. The prevalence of myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism was determined by gender and age groups in paediatric and adult patients. Chi-square testing was applied to determine significant differences in prevalence across age groups and gender. A p-value <0.05 was considered significant. In subjects under 18 years of age, the prevalence of emmetropia, astigmatism, myopia and hyperopia was 20.1%, 51.1%, 7.0% and 11.8%, respectively. In adults, emmetropia was present at a frequency of 20.1%, while 57.1% presented astigmatism, 12.4% hyperopia and 8.6% presented myopia. A significant association was observed between the presence of REs and age and gender. In this first report of prevalence of REs from western Mexico, astigmatism was the most prevalent RE in children, adolescents and adults while the least common was myopia. Important differences were found in prevalence in comparison to national and international reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-speaker spoken datasets enable the creation of text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) systems which can output several voice identities. The multi-speaker (MSPK) scenario also enables the use of fewer training samples per speaker. However, in the resulting acoustic model, not all speakers exhibit the same synthetic quality, and some of the voice identities cannot be used at all. In this paper we evaluate the influence of the recording conditions, speaker gender, and speaker particularities over the quality of the synthesised output of a deep neural TTS architecture, namely Tacotron2. The evaluation is possible due to the use of a large Romanian parallel spoken corpus containing over 81 hours of data. Within this setup, we also evaluate the influence of different types of text representations: orthographic, phonetic, and phonetic extended with syllable boundaries and lexical stress markings. We evaluate the results of the MSPK system using the objective measures of equal error rate (EER) and word error rate (WER), and also look into the distances between natural and synthesised t-SNE projections of the embeddings computed by an accurate speaker verification network. The results show that there is indeed a large correlation between the recording conditions and the speaker's synthetic voice quality. The speaker gender does not influence the output, and that extending the input text representation with syllable boundaries and lexical stress information does not equally enhance the generated audio across all speaker identities. The visualisation of the t-SNE projections of the natural and synthesised speaker embeddings show that the acoustic model shifts some of the speakers' neural representation, but not all of them. As a result, these speakers have lower performances of the output speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People search based on semantic attributes presents an important task for several surveillance applications. The aim is to locate a suspect or to find a missing person in public areas based on an appearance description provided by a witness. In this paper, we propose a novel people search method based on an appearance description provided in terms of semantic attributes under uncontrolled acquisition conditions (e.g. gender, worn bags, carried objects, and clothes pattern). To this end, we propose to learn a set of deep semantic attribute classifiers based on the convolutional neural network. Experimental evaluations, based on the confusion matrix and the statistical tests, prove the efficiency of our method compared to state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Further, a comparison with state-of-the-art attribute classification methods is also conducted and confirms the efficiency of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on mental health by providing novel evidence of its interaction with labor market conditions and the long-term persistence of these effects. We run four waves of a large-scale representative survey in Spain between April 2020 and April 2022, and benchmark our data against a decade of pre-pandemic information. We document an increase in the share of individuals reporting depressive feelings from 16% prior to the pandemic to 46% in April 2020. We show that this effect is more pronounced for women, younger individuals and those with unstable incomes. We apply machine learning techniques, mediation analysis and event studies to document the role of the labor market as an important driver of these effects. Our results are crucial for the design of targeted policies that proof useful in overcoming the long lasting consequences of the pandemic. • We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on mental Health. • We run four waves of a representative survey in Spain to look at persistence effects. • We find a strong and persistent increase in depressive feelings, stronger for women. • Our results are crucial for designing policies to fight the pandemic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the literature on Gender and Company Executives with the purpose of identifying lines on which future research could be directed in order to eradicate gender differences in the decision-making bodies of companies. A bibliometric study has been carried out on the Web of Science collection, which, after a series of filters, has given rise to a sample of 144 articles from 1992 to 2018. Keywords and bibliographic references were the units of analysis used. With this information, bibliometric maps have been created applying the methodology of co-word and co-cite, clustering, and visualization techniques. The results suggest that this is an emerging scientific area not yet sufficiently developed, hinting at new research related to topics, such as career, gender diversity and performance, gender and leadership, organizational behavior and mobility, and gender and ethics. The emergence of the concept of "glass cliff" has been detected in the literature analyzed as a sign of the risk posed to women by the access to leadership positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the discourse-pragmatic use of the adverbs there/here , e.g., " So, our grandson there is a real mixture ", in four small northern Ontario towns. 1200 examples contrasted by type of reference, ambiguous locative or non-locative, were coded for social and linguistic factors and analysed using statistical modelling. The results reveal that the strongest predictor of discourse-pragmatic use is date of birth: middle-aged speakers use it most in each town, but no other social factors (e.g. perceived gender, education, job type) are significant. Importantly, the higher the proportion of Francophone populations in the community, the greater the use of there but not here. We argue that alignment between Francophones and Anglophones is a likely explanation. More generally this study highlights the value of discourse-pragmatic features for understanding styles of interaction and underscores the research potential for comparing these phenomena across communities. • Discourse-pragmatic there/here is a vernacular feature of northern Ontario. • Strongest predictor of use is date of birth: middle-aged speakers use it most. • More French heritage individuals in a community correlates with greater usage. • Heightened use is emblematic of alignment between Francophones and Anglophones as defined and reported in the discourse-pragmatic and sociolinguistic literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relative importance of climate change in the context of multiple stressors in semi-arid Ghana. It draws upon ethnographic research in two agrarian villages, and integrates theories from resilience, vulnerability and feminist political ecology. The findings empirically demonstrate that many farmers do not worry about climate change, even in situations where local perceptions and the climate data show a clear pattern of variability. Additionally, the paper provides evidence of a ‘gendered double exposure,’ whereby patriarchy and local culture shape how different social groups are impacted by climate change. Overall, the emerging findings suggest that an overemphasis on scenario-based climate change impacts may detract attention from equally important non-climatic factors that loom large in people's lives. The article's central argument is not meant to downplay the ongoing impacts of climate change in Africa. It rather suggests that climate change should be addressed as one problem among many socio-ecological challenges facing smallholder farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the number of Arabic language writers in social media is increasing, the research work targeting Author Profiling (AP) is at the initial development phase. This paper investigates Gender Identification (GI) (male or female) of authors posting Egyptian dialect tweets using Neural Networks (NN) models. Various architectures of NN are explored with extensive parameters' selection such as simple Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long–Short Term Memory (LSTM), Convolutional Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (C-Bi-LSTM) and Convolutional Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (C-Bi-GRU) NN which is tuned for the GI problem at hand. The best acquired GI accuracy using C-Bi-GRU multichannel model is 91.37%. It is worth noting that the presence of the bidirectional layer as well as the convolutional layer in the NN models has significantly enhanced the GI accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Forensic Gender Speaker Recognition (FGSR) deals with finding out the gender of a person from his or her voice. This task has been implemented in several Automatic Speaker Recognition systems and has proved to be of great significance. The use of gender recognition eases for user authentication and identification in high security systems. In this paper, we have used the gender recognition for speakers using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), a Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) and Likelihood Report (LR) were used for modelization of features extracted from the speech signal of speakers under clean and noisy conditions. The performance of FGSR system is evaluated in terms of Equal Proportion Probability (EPP). Three sets of experiments were performed - the first experiment; corpus contains males' voices. The second; contains females' voices and third; contains both voices of both sexes. In clean conditions, the average accuracy of the first experiment was slightly higher for EPP=3.1579% than the second and the third experiments. Therefore, Performance evaluation results are encouraging in clean conditions compared to in noisy condition for EPP=27%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive use of the social media and the huge number of messages that are shared on the internet, create a countless need to automatically detect the age and gender of the people who write these messages. Several sites and platforms attempt to mislead and cheat the people who are visiting them by providing deceptive information about the age and the gender of their customer. The traditional way to detect deceivers was by human judgment, but this way is no longer suitable since lots of interviews are not conducted face to face. This paper presents an automate tool with a unique set of features that used to analyze a given text. The features include the unigram, part of speech, and production rules. The accuracy results of the proposed method outperform the existing techniques. The best results achieved by using the production rules features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for detecting an author's profile using the following two elements: gender and age. This is based on a set of dialogues, written in two languages: English and Spanish, provided for Author Profiling competence within the evaluation forum "Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse" (PAN2018). Counts of lexical, semantic, and syntactic characteristics are used to generate a two-phase classification system, which first classifies gender and then age. The results obtained show that, with the amount of data available, it is possible to characterize both the age and gender of an author with an accuracy greater than 50%. However, these values could be improved by having more evidence of information in the training data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image Processing for Human recognition involves using bio-metric traits such as Face, Iris, Voice and other physical traits to uniquely identify human faces. With the increase in Image Data on the Internet, there is a huge demand for Artificial Intelli-gence(AI) algorithms that can perform classification tasks like Race and Gender Classification. The advent of Deep Learning Techniques like Convolutional Networks has led to a rapid ascent in accuracy in various image classification tasks. Through this paper, a novel method to predict Gender of a person by applying various Machine Learning Classification Techniques on Facial Em-beddings has been proposed. The facial embeddings are found by passing through a Pretrained Inception Network. The maximum accuracy obtained by the proposed work to classify gender is 97%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We concern gender prediction of anonymous users by analyzing their indoor paths. • It is a real-world problem for LBSs to provide better marketing messages. • The main contribution of the paper is the proposed Levenshtein-based Fuzzy kNN. • The L-FkNN method outperforms the kNN, Nave Bayes, Decision tree and random forest. Companies have an advantage over the competitors if they can present customized offers to customers. Demographic information of customers is critical for the companies to develop individualized systems. While current technologies make it easy to collect customer data, the main problem is that demographic data are usually incomplete. Hence, several methods are developed to predict unknown genders of customers. In this study, customer genders are predicted from their paths in a shopping mall using fuzzy sets. A fuzzy classification method based on Levenshtein distance is developed for string data that refer to the indoor customer paths. Although there are several ways to predict the gender, no study has focused on path-based gender classification. The originality of the research is to classify customer data into the gender classes using indoor paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this review was to systematically assess literature on differences between males and females in the physiological and biomechanical responses to load carriage during walking. PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science and the Cochrane library were searched. A total of 4637 records were identified and screened. Thirty-three papers were included in the review. Participant characteristics, load carriage conditions, study protocol, outcome measures and main findings were extracted and qualitatively synthesised. Absolute oxygen uptake and minute ventilation were consistently greater in males but there were limited sex-specific differences when these were expressed relative to physical characteristics. There is limited evidence of sex-specific differences in spatio-temporal variables, ground reaction forces (normalised to body mass) or sagittal plane joint angles with load. However, differences have been found in hip and pelvic motions in the frontal and horizontal planes, which might partly explain an economical advantage for females proposed by some authors. • Limited evidence for differences when VO 2 standardised to physical characteristics. • Earlier exercise end point for females with absolute load. • No evidence for sex differences in sagittal plane biomechanics during load carriage. • Some evidence of frontal and horizontal plane sex differences in loaded gait. • Pelvis width and rotation might offer females an economical advantage in some cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consortium managed project in the Upper Indus Basin of Gilgit-Baltistan , Pakistan, supported the creation of women's collective farming. The component of the project related to water resource management for agriculture was implemented in Hunza district, where in three sites, the communities encouraged women farmers to engage in the pilot interventions related to innovative water resource management technologies and improved farming practices to overcome climate-induced issues for farmers. This paper analyzes the situation of women as collective farmers and its contributions to women's agency. The study used a gender analysis framework, and data was collected through quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in the project site areas. The study's findings show that climate change has created issues more for women farmers being at the forefront in handling and tackling the impacts through various measures. It shows that collective farming and networking is an appropriate tool for women to challenge norms and stereotypes that hinder them from being part of the decision-making at various levels. Furthermore, it helps women to minimize drudgery by sharing burdens, using appropriate technology, and sharing their successes and issues while working together. Based on the findings, this study suggests that policy decisions to implement such initiatives at a more macro level will help involve women at various levels of decision-making, minimize their drudgery, expand the choices of women farmers, and overall contribute to the agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Following the untimely death of philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford in 1879, his wife, the novelist, Lucy Lane Clifford, survived him for fifty years, during which she refashioned Clifford's posthumous reputation to temper his philosophical radicalism. • Lucy Clifford's collaboration with her publisher and editor reveal her concern that William Clifford be remembered in alignment with gendered Victorian expectations of masculinity, as opposed to someone ruled by passion in his mathematical work. • Rather than hold William and Lucy Clifford apart as individuals, this article tracks their interrelationship and demonstrates how important their shared life as a married couple was to their embodied lived experience and to the work they did, drawing out connections between William as a creator of mathematics and Lucy as a creator of literature. The avowed atheist, evolutionary naturalist and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford is often remembered for his essay, "The Ethics of Belief," in which he opposed organized religion in any form. As a mathematician, Clifford was an early advocate of non-Euclidean geometry in England. Combining William Rowan Hamilton's work on quaternions with Hermann Grassmann's theory of linear extension, he invented an original system of geometric algebra. Breaking with conservative traditionalism in his philosophical and mathematical work, Clifford's marriage to the children's writer, novelist, and dramatist Lucy Lane was a relatively conventional, if brief, Victorian marriage. After his untimely death from consumption in 1879, Lucy outlived her husband by fifty years. Raising their two daughters and supporting herself after his passing, Lucy refashioned Clifford's posthumous reputation to temper his philosophical radicalism. Her collaboration with Clifford's publisher and editor reveal Lucy's concern that Clifford not be remembered as someone ruled by passion in his mathematical work. Her efforts to expunge writings suggestive of William's weakness, excitability, or inconstancy from the public record demonstrates her desire to craft an image of her husband in alignment with gendered expectations of masculinity. This paper argues that Lucy fashioning of William's memory conformed, rather than departed from, normative parameters of gender as defined by Victorian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper focuses on community engagement, and particularly the inclusion of women, in water management as a response to climate change. Addressing water-related problems is central to climate change adaptation, and civil society, marginalized populations and women, in particular, must be involved. This is for both moral and pragmatic reasons: not only are the marginalized the first and worst affected by extreme weather events, but they also possess local ecological, social and political knowledge which can inform and contribute significantly to climate change adaptation strategies. Because of their social roles and position worldwide, women are greatly affected by water scarcity and flooding, and tend to be gravely impacted by poor water management, yet they face great difficulties in participating effectively in governance bodies. Sustainable long-term management of water resources in the face of climate change requires the participation of women, who possess knowledge of effective social technologies for coping with and adapting to climate change. Community-based environmental education is therefore required in order to expand the equitable involvement of women in water-related climate change adaptation activities and policy development. Environmental non-governmental organizations worldwide, working on shoestring budgets at the local level, are developing a range of methods to organize, raise consciousness and confidence, and help local activists create successful climate defense programs. This paper discusses South–North initiatives and models for community-based environmental and climate change education which are using the democratic opening provided by watershed-based governance structures to broaden grassroots participation, especially of women, in political processes. We outline the activities and results of two international projects: the Sister Watersheds project, with Brazilian and Canadian partners (2002–2008); and a Climate Change Adaptation in Africa project with partners in Canada, Kenya, Mozambique, and South Africa (2010–2012). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study aims to propose a novel approach for gender recognition using best feature subset based on recursive feature elimination (RFE) in normal walking. This study has focused on the analysis of gait characteristics by distinguishing the gait phases as initial contact (IC), Mid-stance (MS), Pre-swing, and swing (SW), and collected the large number of gait to improve the reliability of quantitative assessment of natural variability associated with muscle activity during free walking. The gait system was designed using pressure and a tri-axis accelerometer sensor, and a 9-channel electromyography sensor for measuring the data. Gender recognition method was proposed using support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) based on RFE to determine best feature subset. Statistical results show that effects of gender-based differences on gait characteristic including temporal, kinematics, and muscle activity were investigated. The temporal parameters of stride time and gait cycle (%) in the gait phases of IC, MS, and SW were significantly different between females and males (p < 0.01). The females exhibited both a lower angle and a root mean square acceleration of the knee joint as compared to the males, and there was a clear gender-based difference with respect to knee angle movement. In addition, most muscle activation measurements in the females were larger than those of the males with respect to the gait phases. Gender classification result shows that SVM-RFE was 99.11% (SVM classifier) and RF-RFE was 98.89% (SVM and RF classifier), having powerful performance. • The paper investigates the statistical effect of gender-based differences on gait. • The paper has focused to analysis gait characteristics in gait sub-phases. • A novel approach for gender classification is proposed using RFE. • The paper has the powerful performance for gender classification using SVMRFE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The role of women''s participation in community forestry has recently been investigated in a number of theoretical and empirical papers. This paper takes an existing theoretical framework developed by Agarwal (2001) and applies it to examine two questions: (1) What determines women''s participation in forestry institutions? and (2) What effect does women''s participation have on institutional outcomes (such as levels of conflict and rule fairness)? To answer these questions data is used from two sources: (1) a detailed household survey conducted with 1.433 households in Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico, and Uganda and (2) a more aggregated dataset from forest associations investigated by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) program in 10 countries. The analyses suggest that women''s participation is likely when institutions exist that are less exclusionary, when households have more education, and when there is small economic inequality in general and across genders in particular. A history of women''s participation, especially when women are seated on forest councils or attain leadership positions, is highly correlated with less disruptive conflict. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• This paper examines why women are less likely to study STEM in college. • We use administrative data for all secondary school students who apply for college in Ireland. • Find a 22 percentage points raw gender gap that is concentrated in the areas of engineering, technology, and mathematics. • Subject choice in secondary school is the most important predictor of the portion of the gap that can be explained, with a small role for grades achieved in mathematics versus English. • A gender gap of 9% remains even among students who studied the same subjects and achieved the same grades at secondary school. • Find a much smaller gap when we include nursing degrees in STEM. While education levels of women have increased dramatically relative to men, women are still greatly underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) college programmes. We use unique data on preference rankings for all secondary school students who apply for college in Ireland and detailed information on school subjects and grades to decompose the sources of the gender gap in STEM. We find that, of the 22 percentage points raw gap, about 13 percentage points is explained by differential subject choices and grades in secondary school. Subject choices are more important than grades – we estimate male comparative advantage in STEM (as measured by subject grades) explains about 3 percentage points of the gender gap. Additionally, differences in overall achievement between girls and boys have a negligible effect. Strikingly, there remains a gender gap of 9 percentage points even for persons who have identical preparation at the end of secondary schooling (in terms of both subjects studied and grades achieved); however, this gap is only 4 percentage points for STEM-ready students. We find that gender gaps are smaller among high-achieving students and for students who go to school in more affluent areas. There is no gender gap in science (the large gaps are in engineering and technology), and we also find a smaller gender gap when we include nursing degrees in STEM, showing that the definition of STEM used is an important determinant of the conclusions reached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solidarity economy organizations (SEOs), community-based firms that usually operate in the third sector (nonprofit ventures) and are created by the members of the communities they serve, are believed to have the potential to contribute to a more sustainable world. However, little evidence has been produced so far about the factors that make these organizations more sustainable. In this paper, we analyze the impact of five key factors (source of capital, organization size, gender of leaders, incubation and networking) on the sustainability of more than 6000 Brazilian informal SEOs. We validated the constructs through a set of techniques belonging to the calculations of structural equations. Our study provides four key findings: social incubation and networking have a strong impact on the sustainability of SEOs, organizational size is (surprisingly) not important for the sustainability of these organizations, external sources of capital positively affect the sustainability of SEOs and finally, SEOs with more women leaders are more sustainability-oriented. Taken together, our findings indicate a path towards sustainability within the solidarity economy sector. Image 1 • Networking and incubation tend to be highly important for SEOs which want to increase their sustainability. • SEOs have the capacity to be socially, environmentally and economically sustainable, irrespective of their size. • The use of external sources of capital positively affect the sustainability of SEOs. • Female membership proved to be positive for the sustainability of SEOs. • The participation of SEOs in networks is an important condition to foster their sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to critically examine the evaluative implications of the conversation analytic (hereafter CA) methodology for studying interruptions, and second, to offer an outline of an intertextual approach to interruption that situates a US presidential debate by taking seriously its interrelatedness to 'ongoing debates in the media' (i.e., its intertextual constitution). First, the analysis identifies the 'interruptions' that occur in the debate using four CA notions of 'clashes'. These four notions presume that interruptions involve uncooperative or incoherent actions, and interruptions are identified on the basis of the participants' mutual orientations. Next, the 'interruptions' thus identified are subjected to intertextual analysis. Here, interruption is conceived of in terms of a very different notion of 'clash', namely as participants drawing on different, conflicting 'prior discourses'. This part of the analysis draws on Jacobsen's (2016) notion of the position–contradiction pair type and Tannen's (2007/1989) Bakhtin-inspired approach to verbal interaction. The analysis not only reveals several things about interruption in the First 2016 US presidential debate, but likewise demonstrates that the picture of 'clash' that one is left with using the present intertextual approach is very different from the one left by a CA-oriented approach. • The study critically examines the evaluative implications of the CA methodology for studying interruptions. • The study offers an outline of an intertextual approach to interruption. • The First 2016 debate is situated/contextualized by way of the participants' references to 'ongoing debates in the media'. • Two basic notions of 'clash' are examined: one relating to 'simultaneous' talk and one to 'conflicting prior discourses'. • Interruptions are found to serve two primary functions: an attacking one and a defensive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread of social media among all age groups in Arabic countries, the research directed towards Author Profiling (AP) is still in its early stages. This paper provides an Egyptian Dialect Gender Annotated Dataset (EDGAD) obtained from Twitter as well as a proposed text classification solution for the Gender Identification (GI) problem. The dataset consists of 70,000 tweets per gender. In text classification, a Mixed Feature Vector (MFV) with different stylometric and Egyptian Arabic Dialect (EAD) language-specific features is proposed, in addition to N-Gram Feature Vector (NFV). Ensemble weighted average is applied to the Random Forest (RF) with MFV and Logistic Regression (LR) with NFV. The achieved gender identification accuracy is 87.6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The age and gender information extracted from Electroencephalogram (EEG) has been used in various applications which are allocating a person to age and gender groups, identifying or authenticating a person and improving brain-computer interface systems. Besides this, the EEG-based automatic recognition of alcoholics greatly supports to the psychiatrists. However, one of the major challenges when using EEG is about storing and transmitting a huge amount of EEG data, leading to the need of using compression. Although lossy compression techniques give much higher compression ratio (CR) than lossless ones, they introduce the loss of information including the age, gender and alcoholic information in the reconstructed signals, which may reduce the performance of EEG-based age, gender and alcoholic recognition systems significantly. In this paper, the impact of lossy compression on the age, gender and alcoholic information extracted from EEG signals is examined in detail with different feature extraction and machine learning techniques. Our experimental results indicate that with an appropriate feature extraction technique, we could minimize the information loss in EEG compression and maintain the high performance of EEG-based age, gender and alcoholics recognition systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The physiological factors like the age, gender and body mass index (BMI) of individuals have seen to affect the thermal comfort of occupants in indoor environment. However, very few studies aimed at determining the effect of these physiological factors on the factors of thermal comfort were conducted, especially in India. In this paper, the results of the field survey based thermal comfort with the objectives of studying the effect of these physiological factors on the thermal comfort factors of clothing insulation, thermal sensation votes, comfort temperature and preferred temperature of the subjects are presented. The mean clothing insulation for female subjects was lower (0.83 clo), than that for male subjects (0.87 clo), while the mean clo for senior subjects (0.94) was higher than mid aged (0.86) and young aged (0.85), respectively. A lower comfort temperature for the male subjects (11.1–35.7°C) than for the female subjects (11.5–36.1°C) was noted. Similarly the mean comfort temperature was seen to be higher in younger subjects (20.4°C), than mid-aged subjects (17.5°C) and senior aged subjects (16.7°C), respectively. Likewise, the underweight subjects had a higher comfort temperature (mean 22.8°C) than normal (mean 20.9°C), overweight (20.3°C) and obese subjects (mean 19.7°C), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We study the relationship between work and the BMI of adults in urban India. • We find that those in sedentary occupations have a relatively high BMI. • Increase in BMI originates from those at the upper tail of the BMI distribution. • Rise in BMI is driven by decline in energy expenditure for men and women. Increase in energy intake is also pivotal for men. • Relative to not working, employment in a blue-collar occupation is associated with a BMI penalty. Galvanized by rapid income growth, labor market transitions in the nature of jobs, and lifestyle factors, there has been an increase in rates of obesity in many developing countries. This paper examines the relationship between BMI and sector and physical intensity of work among urban adults in India. We document that BMI is positively and significantly associated with labor market inactivity. Women in white-collar work have about 1.01 kg/m2 higher BMI than women in blue-collar work. For working men, the comparable estimate is approximately 1.18 kg/m2. We find that the increase in overall BMI originates from those who are already at high levels of BMI. Further, relative to the non-working sample, employment in a blue-collar occupation is associated with a BMI penalty for men and women. We find suggestive evidence that the increase in BMI for women is driven by a decline in energy expenditure, while both a decrease in energy expenditure and an increase in energy intake are important in explaining BMI dynamics for men. These results are robust to a variety of specification and methodological checks, and suggest that the increasing trend in BMI may be attributed to the transition towards a more sedentary occupational structure. Overall our research underlines the important role played by occupational engagement in determining the general health of populations in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Forensic Gender Speaker Recognition (FGSR) deals with finding out the gender of a person from his or her voice. This task has been implemented in several Automatic Speaker Recognition systems and has proved to be of great significance. The use of gender recognition eases for user authentication and identification in high security systems. In this paper, we have used the gender recognition for speakers using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), a Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) and Likelihood Report (LR) were used for modelization of features extracted from the speech signal of speakers under clean and noisy conditions. The performance of FGSR system is evaluated in terms of Equal Proportion Probability (EPP). Three sets of experiments were performed - the first experiment; corpus contains males' voices. The second; contains females' voices and third; contains both voices of both sexes. In clean conditions, the average accuracy of the first experiment was slightly higher for EPP=3.1579% than the second and the third experiments. Therefore, Performance evaluation results are encouraging in clean conditions compared to in noisy condition for EPP=27%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper extends current auditor negotiation research by considering the effects of two dimensions of auditors' identity that are posited to be relevant to auditors' negotiation: gender and audit firm identification. Women earn over half of college degrees in accounting, and hold more than half of accounting and auditing positions in the US, yet the balance of the gender of partners at audit firms is currently not equal (AICPA, 2017). However, as more women advance into partnership positions in firms, it is increasingly important to have an understanding of how gender affects the behaviors, processes and outcomes of negotiation, and thus the quality of financial statements. The auditor-client negotiation context has features, such as ambiguity and representation of others that can "trigger" the salience of auditors' gender and firm identity. Once salient, these two dimensions of auditors' identity shape auditors' motivational orientation towards negotiations, which, in turn, affects the auditors' negotiation behavior and negotiation outcomes. The study finds that male and female auditors approach the negotiation over audit adjustments differently. Although many negotiation studies find that males negotiate more aggressively than do females, auditor-client negotiation offers a unique setting that has been found to reverse this common trend. We hypothesize and find that female auditors recommend higher audit adjustments than males. However, the level of firm identification moderates female's recommended audit adjustments such that at higher levels of firm identification, the larger audit adjustments recommended by females decrease. This finding is consistent with the growing research on gender differences in auditing and the research on gender and risk tolerance, which find females to be more risk averse, but contrary to much of the negotiation research which shows males as more aggressive and achieving higher negotiated outcomes. In supplemental analysis, we find that our results hold in the senior manager subsample but not in the partner subsample. This result is consistent with theory on gender differences which suggests that the differences will disappear with increased occupational socialization (Smith & Rogers, 2000). Practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to theoretically explore the origins and possible psychotherapeutic applications of some neo-pagan, neo-shamanic, or psycho-spiritual women's movements that are currently spreading in Western countries. In spite of their great diversity, they are all encompassed within the term "ecofeminist spirituality." This article analyzes their ideological, historical, and cultural origins, placing special emphasis on their psychotherapeutic role and describing the main tools and fields of application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]