Soft Skills of Latin American Engineering Professors: Gender Gap

The importance of soft skills in the professional work of an engineer is becoming increasingly important, even more so since the emergence of Covid-19 boosted the digitization of all professional sectors. In order for future engineers to acquire this type of skills, it is necessary for engineering professors to have an optimal level of technical and transversal skills. This article analyzes the assessment made by a group of engineering professors about their degree of development of soft skills and describes gender gaps in these assessments. Based on a self-created survey to evaluate different families of soft skills relevant to engineering education, a sample of 284 Latin American engineering professors reported: 1) high evaluations of their soft skills and 2) the existence of gender gaps in the families of work behavior and social skills in favor of females. This gap is especially wide among participants younger than 45 and older than 65 in the social skills family. In addition, females also rate their work motivation skills higher, except in the 55–64 age range.

Contract Violations in the Construction Projects: How Contractual Obligations are Reached Affects Contractual and Reputational Enforcement

Contract violations are frequent due to the high uncertainty and complexity of construction projects. However, enforcement after a violation has received limited attention. This study distinguishes between three types of violations, i.e., letter violations, mutually agreed spirit violations, and unilaterally assumed spirit violations, based on the documentation and mutuality dimensions. By using the data collected from Chinese general contractors, this study concludes that compared with unilaterally assumed spirit violations, violations of high mutuality of obligations (the first two violations) will lead to more severe contractual and reputational enforcement while with high mutuality, whether the violated obligations are written in the contract or not (corresponding to the first two violations, respectively) does not significantly affect the severity of enforcement. The mediating effects of relational risk perception on the aforementioned effects are empirically supported. This study contributes to the enforcement literature by exploring the effects of the characteristics of violations, especially violations of undocumented elements of contracts, on enforcement and fills the gaps in the scarce literature on reputational enforcement and its antecedents. Project managers can benefit from this study by recognizing the application of reputational enforcement and making better alignment between different types of violations and enforcement. IEEE

Understanding Residents' Behavior for Smart City Management by Sequential and Periodic Pattern Mining

Understanding the residents’routine and repetitive behavior patterns is important for city planners and strategic partners to enact appropriate city management policies. However, the existing approaches reported in smart city management areas often rely on clustering or machine learning, which are ineffective in capturing such behavioral patterns. Aiming to address this research gap, this article proposes an analytical framework, adopting sequential and periodic pattern mining techniques, to effectively discover residents’routine behavior patterns. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated in a case study of American public behavior based on a large-scale venue check-in dataset. The dataset was collected in 2020 (during the global pandemic due to COVID-19) and contains 257 561 check-in data of 3995 residents. The findings uncovered interesting behavioral patterns and venue visit information of residents in the United States during the pandemic, which could help the public and crisis management in cities. IEEE

Concluding remarks

Although our world's population is separated by water and borders, differences in faith and culture, the pandemic proved to all of us that as humans, unification and collaboration are essential to growing towards a more robust and healthier future as the competition among each other will only create further damage. As the United Nations strives for global improvements through an alliance to attain the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (United Nations, n.d.), individuals and societies across the globe must be informed on what cannot be seen by some by brutally experienced by others. This book series offers a continuous awareness of many global issues for which many are working towards creating solutions that will eventually contribute to the success of the SDGs. This particular series presented readers with global issues that have always been a part of our world, except for the Gomez and Texidor chapter on Coping with Pandemics: The Case of Coronavirus. Health issues discussed in this book affect populations that are still misunderstood, stigmatized, and left feeling vulnerable to those that do not understand the complexities. As coronavirus isolated people from each other, people with dementia were left feeling more lost than ever, leading experts like Dr. Mahakian to discover ways that robots could keep elderly patients who have dementia feeling less confused. Substance abuse, including alcohol, increased, leading to health problems. Good health and well-being are both attained differently, but how they are achieved should not matter. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Plastics and the coronavirus pandemic: A behavioral science perspective

With the coronavirus outbreak, new and strengthened norms of plastic dependency emerged in the Middle East and North Africa region through the desperate demand for products like face masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE), highlighting the tradeoffs between health and the environment. While the rise in demand has been considered as temporary, behavioral barriers and misperceptions might make these norms particularly sticky and hinder society's ability to transition to a circular economy. Fortunately, behavioral science offers valuable insights about why the current pandemic can actually be a catalyst to create new eco-conscious behaviors. As some behaviors are often strenuous to change and require enforcement through traditional policy solutions (e.g. regulations), behavioral science offers complementary tools that will make policies more effective. We have an opportunity to start thinking about ways to leverage behavioral insights to create new norms that promote a circular economy while ultimately ensuring proper adherence to hygiene practices to curb the spread of the virus. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Micropublishing During and After the COVID-19 Era

In the COVID-19 situation, social and behavioral science evidence is accumulating rapidly through online data collection, but the options to share and publish this information are scarce. As a remedy, I recommend the adoption of micropublishing in the fields of social and behavioral sciences. While micropublishing has been gaining popularity, it is not yet widely accepted or utilized by existing academic journals. Greater implementation would improve the availability of data in the immediate COVID-19 era and establish a post-COVID-19 publishing methodology that could increase researcher and practitioner engagement in real time. I recommend micropublishing in a specific manner that bifurcates an experiment's methodology or survey method from the subsequently published data based on that experiment protocol. Published findings could be presented in a series and edited as new data emerges. This publishing system promotes cumulative science. To provide a visual example that supports my argument, I created a demo journal with sample papers organized according to the structure I recommend. The demo journal has features-except a Digital Object Finder (DOI)-that make it possible to publish social and behavioral sciences research. It could be replicated for a newly established journal. Alternatively, existing journals could add a section dedicated to micropublication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Pandemic-driven changes in the nearshore non-commercial fishery in Hawai'i: catch photos posted to social media capture changes in fisher behavior.

Using social media, we collect evidence for how nearshore fisheries are impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic in Hawai'i. We later confirm our social media findings and obtain a more complete understanding of the changes in nearshore non-commercial fisheries in Hawai'i through a more conventional approach-speaking directly with fishers. Resource users posted photographs to social media nearly three times as often during the pandemic with nearly double the number of fishes pictured per post. Individuals who fished for subsistence were more likely to increase the amount of time spent fishing and relied more on their catch for food security. Furthermore, individuals fishing exclusively for subsistence were more likely to fish for different species during the pandemic than individuals fishing recreationally. Traditional data collection methods are resource-intensive and this study shows that during times of rapid changes, be it ecological or societal, social media can more quickly identify how near shore marine resource use adapts. As climate change threatens additional economic and societal disturbances, it will be necessary for resource managers to collect reliable data efficiently to better target monitoring and management efforts.

Vaccination Against COVID-19: Human Behavior and Public Policy Analyzed from Behavioral Economics.

Society is facing a global pandemic, causing millions of deaths and hundreds of millions of infections. The importance of vaccination to face COVID-19 is decisive in the fight against the virus. However, many people have decided not to get vaccinated, ruining public health policy. The objective of this article is to apply knowledge about behavioral economics in the explanation of the behavior of those who decide not to be vaccinated, as well as the use of decision architecture and nudges for the design of behavioral interventions. The methodology used was qualitative, supported by bibliographic search and content analysis, with theoretical methods such as historical-logical analysis and deductive and hypothetical analysis. Behavioral economics has been used to modify behaviors associated with chronic non communicable diseases, so it can provide a solution to increase the number of people who are inoculated against the virus. The perception of risk and uncertainty, the amount of information and social pressure are identified as factors that influence the decision, as well as various heuristics and cognitive biases. The design of behavioral interventions should employ nudges in the decision architecture, starting from the "simple, attractive, social and timely" methodology as an opportunity to increase the number of people who are vaccinated. Copyright © 2022, Editorial Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.

Psychology and the pandemic: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue of Translational Issues in Psychological Science presents a series of articles highlighting the many roles played by psychological factors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several themes are explored in this special issue, including discrimination, risk perception, cognitive biases, stress and coping mechanisms, pandemic-related mental health problems, and treatment issues for underserved and other special populations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Vaccination Against COVID-19: Human Behavior and Public Policy Analyzed from Behavioral Economics

Society is facing a global pandemic, causing millions of deaths and hundreds of millions of infections. The importance of vaccination to face COVID-19 is decisive in the fight against the virus. However, many people have decided not to get vaccinated, ruining public health policy. The objective of this article is to apply knowledge about behavioral economics in the explanation of the behavior of those who decide not to be vaccinated, as well as the use of decision architecture and nudges for the design of behavioral interventions. The methodology used was qualitative, supported by bibliographic search and content analysis, with theoretical methods such as historical-logical analysis and deductive and hypothetical analysis. Behavioral economics has been used to modify behaviors associated with chronic non communicable diseases, so it can provide a solution to increase the number of people who are inoculated against the virus. The perception of risk and uncertainty, the amount of information and social pressure are identified as factors that influence the decision, as well as various heuristics and cognitive biases. The design of behavioral interventions should employ nudges in the decision architecture, starting from the "simple, attractive, social and timely" methodology as an opportunity to increase the number of people who are vaccinated. Copyright © 2022, Editorial Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.

Designing Predictive Models for Customer Recommendations During COVID-19 in the Airline Industry

Although travel restrictions imposed by countries are gradually lifted, the airline industry rebounds only when customers’confidence in air travel is restored. Airlines that generate positive customer recommendations during the pandemic can have a competitive advantage in the post-pandemic environment. This article focuses on the prediction of customer recommendations of airlines during the pandemic. The results show that airline ratings established before the pandemic have weak performance, implying that customer recommendations could be based on other factors that are unique to the pandemic. In addition, COVID-19 travel safety of airlines and sentiments hidden in customer reviews are valuable for predicting customer recommendations. The results also confirm that flight duration affects the predictive powers of airline rating established before the pandemic and COVID-19 travel safety rating of airlines. There are important implications for the airline industry. First, airline ratings established before pandemic is not valuable to predict customer recommendations during COVID-19, underpinning the importance of including COVID-19 travel safety measures as part of the airline evaluation criteria in the future. Besides, COVID-19 travel safety is more relevant to customer recommendations in the long-haul markets. When selecting airlines for evaluation, airline rating organizations can give priorities to airlines that offer long-haul flights. IEEE

Soft Skills of Latin American Engineering Professors: Gender Gap

The importance of soft skills in the professional work of an engineer is becoming increasingly important, even more so since the emergence of Covid-19 boosted the digitization of all professional sectors. In order for future engineers to acquire this type of skills, it is necessary for engineering professors to have an optimal level of technical and transversal skills. This article analyzes the assessment made by a group of engineering professors about their degree of development of soft skills and describes gender gaps in these assessments. Based on a self-created survey to evaluate different families of soft skills relevant to engineering education, a sample of 284 Latin American engineering professors reported: 1) high evaluations of their soft skills and 2) the existence of gender gaps in the families of work behavior and social skills in favor of females. This gap is especially wide among participants younger than 45 and older than 65 in the social skills family. In addition, females also rate their work motivation skills higher, except in the 55–64 age range. IEEE

Risk Propagation Decision-Making for Product and Supply Chain Change Systems Under COVID-19: An Assessment-to-Control Support Scheme

Dynamics in supply chains (SCs) can trigger risks due to the changing and propagating nature. In the context of COVID-19, this article presents an assessment-to-control decision-making support scheme to tackle propagation effect uncertainties of SCs considering product changes. First, a new decision model is proposed for risk warnings, with the potential advantages that: 1) propagation effects can be assessed generally and objectively and 2) permitting control theory to integrate and identify the interrelations between propagation effects. More specifically, the bullwhip effect (BE) with operational and behavioral causes is quantified as cascading amplified inventory fluctuations. The ripple effect (RE) from large-scale supplier disruptions driven by COVID-19 is quantified as increased entropy rates (ERs). Then, the system studied is integrated as a closed-loop control system under provided change control. Moreover, some criteria are derived for the existence of controller gains/decision coefficients to stabilize the closed-loop system with the BE mitigation under the RE. Finally, a mask SC case study under COVID-19 is performed for examining the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. IEEE

Reflections on the use of persuasion tools in emergency management and vaccination policy

Behavioral sciences offer important tools to manage the violent Covid 19 pandemic and also represent an interesting point of view for jurists to understand whether the measures adopted by the Government can be framed in the so-called “nudge”. The paper aims to reconstruct prospect theory to evaluate its possible application to pandemic management both on the side of prevention tools and on the side of vaccines. © 2022, Societa Editoriale Federalismi s.r.l.. All rights reserved.

Can Subsidy Policies Reduce Vaccine Hesitancy Under Social Learning?

Vaccine hesitancy refers to a delay in getting or refusing vaccinations for efficacy reviews from early vaccinated individuals (e.g., social learning). However, no reviews occur if everyone delays. To overcome vaccine hesitancy, we first introduce social learning to characterize this undesirable behavior in two-period vaccine market (composed of a government, a manufacturer, and individuals). Then, designing subsidy policies are in three aspects: subsidy recipients (who should be subsidized, individuals or manufacturer), subsidy times (when subsidy policies should be set, preannounced or responsive), and subsidy paths (how the subsidy level should be adjusted over two periods, increasing or decreasing). Some results are yielded. First, if subsidy recipients are individuals, sales subsidies occur, and their equilibrium subsidy paths hinge on subsidy times. When sales subsidies are preannounced in the first period, a decreasing path is always optimal. In contrast, when these subsidies are responsive in two periods, an increasing path may be optimal. Second, these optimal sales subsidies can counter vaccine hesitancy and, further, utilize social learning to enhance vaccine coverage with different levels. Their differences are affected by two factors (government budgets and uncertain vaccine efficacy levels) that have asymmetric roles. Finally, if subsidy recipients are shifted from individuals to the manufacturer, cost subsidy occurs but it fails to overcome vaccine hesitancy.

Government Subsidies and Policies for Mask Production Under COVID-19: Is It Wise to Control Less?

Under the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide have subsidized manufacturers or consumers on the production or purchase of masks. However, the impacts of these subsidies on the mask supply chain (MSC) operations are unclear. Motivated by our interview with a mask manufacturer as well as the observed real-world practices, we establish consumer utility-based stylized models to analytically examine government subsidies and policies in the MSC. We utilize the infection transmission model to capture the social health risk during the COVID-19 outbreak. The government aims to maximize social welfare, which includes the manufacturer's profit, consumer surplus, social health risk, and government subsidy expenditure. Results indicate that when the price is not controlled (i.e., the manufacturer decides it), the manufacturer and consumer subsidy programs are equally efficient in enhancing consumer surplus as well as reducing harm to social health risk under COVID-19. Thus, the government can conduct a subsidy scheme that is easier to implement in practice. However, we surprisingly find that the government's excessive intervention will cause disequilibrium in the MSC. When the price or the manufacturer's dishonest behavior is fully controlled by the government, subsidizing the MSC is not always advisable. Besides, our findings are consistent with the public interest theory;that is, the proper implementation of dishonesty prevention and pricing control policies can improve social welfare but sacrifice consumer surplus. Our results contribute to healthcare operations management and generate managerial insights for MSC management during COVID-19 with industrial validation.

Big Data-Driven Approach to Analyzing Spatio-Temporal Mobility Pattern

It is imperative to understand human movement and behavior, from epidemic monitoring to complex communications. So far, most research and studies on investigating and interpreting human movements have traditionally depended on private and accumulated data such as mobile records. In this work, social network data is suggested as a proxy for human mobility, as it relies on a large amount of publicly accessible data. A mechanism for urban mobility mining and extraction scheme is proposed in this research to shed light on the importance and benefits of the publicly available social network data. Given the potential value of the Big Data obtained from social network platforms, we sought to demonstrate the process of analyzing and understanding human mobility patterns and activity behavior in urban areas through the social network data. Human mobility is far from spontaneous, follows well-defined statistical patterns. This research provides evidence of spatial and temporal regularity in human mobility patterns by examining daily individual trajectories of users covering an average time span of three years (2018 to 2020). Despite the diversity of individual movements history, we concluded that humans follow simple, reproducible patterns. Additionally, we studied and evaluated the effect of COVID-19 on human mobility and activity behavior in urban areas and established a strong association between human mobility and COVID-19 spread. Numerous years of mobility data analysis can reveal well-established trends, such as social or cultural activities, which serve as a baseline for detecting anomalies and changes in human mobility and activity behavior.

Building hope: Psychology day at the United Nations in 2022 focused on climate action

In 2022, the Psychology Coalition at the United Nations (PCUN) marked its tenth year, with a mission to apply psychological science to global issues at the UN. Since March of 2020, PCUN activities have not declined, but have increased despite disruptive global COVID lockdowns. This two-part report offers a concise overview of: (a) the dramatic growth of PCUN activities since 2020, and (b) PCUN's 15th annual Psychology Day at the UN on April 21, 2022, which focused on "Building Hope: Psychological Contributions to a Roadmap for Climate Action." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Russian) B 2022 . Koa cxoooB B OpaH3a ObedHeHHblx Ha (Psychology Coalition at the United Nations, PCUN) oTMeTa cBoe decTeTe, ocTaBB eped cobo 3aday pMeHTb cxooeckyyu Hayky k peeHyu obab-Hblx pobeM. HecMoTp Ha obabHble opaHeH B cB3 c aHdeMe COVID-19, c MapTa 2020 . deTebHocTb PCUN B ToM HapaBeH He pekpaTacb, a, ckopee, akT- B3poBaacb. DEaHHbl peopTa cocToT 3 dByx acTe, B koTopblx pedcTaBeHbl kpaT- ke ob3opbl: 1) pe3koo pocTa akTBHocT PCUN c 2020 .;2) 15-o IEeodHoo DEH c- xoo B OOH 21 ape 2022 ., ocBeHHoo TeMe <<Bo3podeHe Hadedbl: Bkad cxoo B bopbby c 3MeHeHeM kMaTa. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Interacting with COVID-19: How population behavior, feedback and memory shaped recurrent waves of the epidemic

Until the approval of vaccines at the end of 2020, societies relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in order to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Spontaneous changes in individual behavior might have contributed to or counteracted epidemic control due to NPIs. For example, the population compliance to NPIs may have varied over time as people developed “epidemic fatigue" or altered their perception of the risk and severity of COVID-19. Whereas official measures are well documented, the behavioral response of the citizens is harder to capture. We propose a mathematical model of the societal response, taking into account three main effects: the citizen response dynamics, the authorities’NPIs, and the occurrence of unpreventable events that significantly alter the virus transmission rate. A key assumption is that a society has a waning memory of the epidemic effects, which reflects on both the severity of the authorities’NPIs and on the citizens’compliance to the prescribed rules. This, in turn, feeds back onto the transmission rate of the disease, such that a higher number of hospitalizations decreases the probability of transmission. We show that the model is able to reproduce the COVID-19 dynamics in terms of hospital admissions for several European countries during 2020 over surprisingly long time scales. Also, it is capable of capturing the effects of disturbances (for example the emergence of new virus variants) and can be exploited for implementing control actions to limit such effects. A possible application, illustrated in the paper, consists of exploiting the estimations based on the data of one country, to predict and control the evolution in another country, where the virus spreading is still in an earlier phase. IEEE

The Green Frontier of Mobile Applications in Improving Recycling Consumers' Behavior

In this article, we provide a new insight into overcoming resistance to emerging green technologies through mobile app users' environmental engagement. The use of a mobile recycling application is evaluated with regard to its media richness with a sample of 12 539 users in Italy. The research is developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when users have become more environmentally conscious and aware of plastic pollution. This time period has also seen an increase in the use of mobile applications, which provide social engagement and other benefits. Although it has encouraged new research on recycling behavior and how environmental messages are spread, as far as we know, no research has included a specific technology, such as mobile applications. Through the lens of consumer social media engagement behavior, it has emerged that media richness has a positive correlation with user engagement and recycling behavior. Theoretically, the research offers a novel technological tool worthy of further exploration in the fields of management and engineering. New practical insights are offered in terms of best practices for strengthening the relationships between companies and their clients. As users become more accustomed to social technologies, those technologies may help to establish responsible consumption patterns.