Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mean measurable corticosterone in House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) primary feathers varies little across life-history stages

ABSTRACT The relatively new technique of measuring corticosterone (cort) levels extracted from feathers provides a less invasive, more integrated method of assessing a bird's stress physiology. Current understanding is that cort is deposited into the feather via blood when the feather is replaced during molt. The blood supply in the feather is cut off when the new feather completes growth, thereby ending the influx of cort. Previous studies assumed that cort deposited during feather growth remained constant throughout the feather's attachment to the bird, allowing an accurate retrospective index of circulating cort at the time of feather growth. We tested this assumption by measuring cort levels in feathers collected from different wild House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) across 6 important life history stages spanning a single year, thus representing feathers of different ages but grown during similar environmental conditions. If the common assumption is correct, we predicted that feather cort would not vary across the year. We further simulated substantial feather wear by removing the top 20% length of duplicate samples from the same birds across the same time span. We found significant differences in cort levels across life history stages, but no effect of sex or 20% feather removal. After excluding feather wear and sex and re-running the analysis, the effect of life history stage was no longer significant. Furthermore, despite uncontrolled individual and environmental variation, there was not a sustained decrease in feather cort over time. These data support the assumption that feather cort levels are stable while feathers are on the bird, regardless of feather age or typical wear.
Ubiquitous News Experienced Alone: Interviews with Americans and their Devices

Scholars, journalists, and other commentators argue that many parts of the world, including the US, are suffering a social-epistemological crisis, sometimes called "post-truth," and that this crisis is related to the fragmentation of newsmedia. The conventional media effects research explanation for this relationship between news and "post-truth" is framed in terms of messages and information-especially misinformation-as the mechanism by which communication effects change. Analysing the results of a large (n = 164) interview study on mobile and other digital news audiencehood, this article presents an alternative, complementary explanation focused on ritual functions of communication. The primary method of affinity analysis of interview data identified a number of recurring themes: people's preferences, methods, and patterns of news consumption exhibit wild diversity beyond easy summary, but they share the experience of news as nearly ubiquitous, and often as excessive and therefore in need of management. Strategies for managing news broadly fell into categories of news avoidance and active research. Perhaps the most consistent observation across participants' accounts, however, is a conspicuous absence of other people, with news managed and confronted alone. Those findings are interpreted through James Carey's ritual theory of communication, which argues that meaning emerges not only through transmission of messages and information, but also through people's shared experiences of participating in the ritual processes of communication. This work makes a parallel argument that media fragmentation has been implicated in social-epistemological breakdown not only through the mechanism of messages and (mis)information, but also through the transformation and, in certain cases, loss of shared news rituals. The combination of large-scale interview research with media ritual analysis led to these insights about the cultural relevance and collective implications of people's experiences of ubiquitous news and the avoidance thereof.
Cognitive Blame Is Socially Shaped

Blame is not only a cognitive process but also a social act of moral criticism. Such acts of criticism often serve to correct a transgressor’s behavior but can be costly—to the moral critic, the transgressor, and the community. To limit these costs, blame is socially regulated: Communities set standards of evidence for blame and expect individuals to provide warrant, or justification, for their expressed judgments by pointing to appropriate evidence. We describe the path model of blame, which captures the cognitive processes that underlie blame judgments and that specify the kind of evidence that counts as warrant for blame. We then show how the varying costs of blaming put social pressure on the moral critic to be accurate and fair. We also identify conditions under which these pressures are weakened and standards of evidence decline: for example, when the transgressor has low status or is an out-group member, when the critic has high status or is anonymous, or when interactions are online. We close with numerous open questions that we hope will inspire further research into the hypothesis that cognitive blame is socially shaped.
True or False: Studying the Work Practices of Professional Fact-Checkers

Misinformation has developed into a critical societal threat that can lead to disastrous societal consequences. Although fact-checking plays a key role in combating misinformation, relatively little research has empirically investigated work practices of professional fact-checkers. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 fact-checkers from 19 countries. The participants reported being inundated with information that needs filtering and prioritizing prior to fact-checking. The interviews surfaced a pipeline of practices fragmented across disparate tools that lack integration. Importantly, fact-checkers lack effective mechanisms for disseminating the outcomes of their efforts which prevents their work from fully achieving its potential impact. We found that the largely manual and labor intensive nature of current fact-checking practices is a barrier to scale. We apply these findings to propose a number of suggestions that can improve the effectiveness, efficiency, scale, and reach of fact-checking work and its outcomes.
"I Just Can't Help But Smile Sometimes": Collaborative Self-Management of Depression

Depression is a challenging condition that requires individuals to manage their moods and emotions over time. Within CSCW, there has been an interest in understanding how individuals seek and share support on social media and in online communities. However, less attention has been paid to how collaboration as an aspect of self-management of depression unfolds in people's daily lives. In this paper, we explore the collaborative self-management work of 28 individuals managing depression who live in the United States. Data collection included remote semi-structured interviews with an associated cognitive mapping exercise. Our findings describe who participants turn to for day-to-day collaborative support, how collaborative activities are enacted (across both mood-focused and preventative support practices), and where these often technology-mediated interactions occur across text, phone, video, and picture-based channels. We discuss collaborative self-management in the depression support context, including key characteristics: agency, reciprocity, time, and interaction. We also present a four-step model of how the process occurs over time (awareness, planning, interaction, and reflection). We conclude by discussing how technology ecosystems support individuals' collaborative self-management.
More than just Software Surprises: Purposes, Processes, and Directions for Software Application Easter Eggs

"Easter eggs" are features hidden inside software, and the practice of developers including them is a long-standing global phenomenon. They have seen some investigation in the context of games, but despite their prevalence in non-game software applications, their nature within this context is less clear. We perform a qualitative, investigative analysis of Easter eggs in non-game software application contexts, using primarily archival research including discussion forums, social media posts, and user-created online databases, along with select developer interviews. Our work uncovers the stories behind, motivations for creating, and intended perceptions of Easter eggs, which we present as categories of purposes with illustrative examples. This analysis also informs a categorization and discussion of processes that Easter eggs undergo concerning the social and emotional circumstances of their developers and users. Finally, we use our results to motivate future directions for applying Easter eggs in user interfaces.
Situating Public Speaking: The Politics and Poetics of the Digital Islamic Sermons in Bangladesh

Research on public speaking has recently made fair progress within the CSCW scholarship that mostly focuses on training speakers to gain popularity. Core to this research is the idea of a universal set of skills that makes a public speech successful in terms of popularity. However, a strand of research has also shown skepticism to this simplistic conceptualization of the speaking context. We join this discussion by presenting a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses of Islamic preaching videos on YouTube. These videos are created from Islamic sermons -- a form of Islamic religious public speaking in Bangladesh. By exploring the topics of discussion by the preachers and by analyzing the performances of the preachers during the sermons, we demonstrate how those are situated in their social, political, and religious context. Based on our findings, we discuss how the public speaking scholarship of CSCW and related fields could benefit from studying such public speeches in non-secular contexts of the Global South. Further, we discuss how the role of such religious sermons could contribute to the development discourse within CSCW.
Home-Life and Work Rhythm Diversity in Distributed Teamwork: A Study with Information Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of previously co-located information workers had to work from home, a trend expected to become much more commonplace in the future. We interviewed 53 information workers from 17 U.S. teams to understand how this unique extended work-from-home setting influenced teamwork and how they adapted to it. Using a grounded theory approach, we discovered that extended remote work highlighted diversity in team members' home-lives and daily work rhythms. Whereas these types of diversity played only marginal roles for teams in the co-located office, they had a more tangible impact in the work-from-home setting, from coordination delays and interruptions to conflicts related to workload fairness, miscommunication, and trust. Importantly, workers reported that their teams adapted to these challenges by setting explicit norms and standards for online communication and asynchronous collaboration and by promoting general social and situational awareness. We discuss computer-supported designs to help teams manage these latent diversities in an extended remote teamwork setting.
From Parental Control to Joint Family Oversight

Our research aims to highlight and alleviate the complex tensions around online safety, privacy, and smartphone usage in families so that parents and teens can work together to better manage mobile privacy and security-related risks. We developed a mobile application ("app") for Community Oversight of Privacy and Security ("CO-oPS") and had parents and teens assess whether it would be applicable for use with their families. CO-oPS is an Android app that allows a group of users to co-monitor the apps installed on one another's devices and the privacy permissions granted to those apps. We conducted a study with 19 parent-teen (ages 13-17) pairs to understand how they currently managed mobile safety and app privacy within their family and then had them install, use, and evaluate the CO-oPS app. We found that both parents and teens gave little consideration to online safety and privacy before installing new apps or granting privacy permissions. When using CO-oPS, participants liked how the app increased transparency into one another's devices in a way that facilitated communication, but were less inclined to use features for in-app messaging or to hide apps from one another. Key themes related to power imbalances between parents and teens surfaced that made co-management challenging. Parents were more open to collaborative oversight than teens, who felt that it was not their place to monitor their parents, even though both often believed parents lacked the technological expertise to monitor themselves. Our study sheds light on why collaborative practices for managing online safety and privacy within families may be beneficial but also quite difficult to implement in practice. We provide recommendations for overcoming these challenges based on the insights gained from our study.
"Finsta gets all my bad pictures": Instagram Users' Self-Presentation Across Finsta and Rinsta Accounts

Significant research has examined social media users' self-presentation strategies, both within a single account and across multiple platforms. Few studies, however, have considered how users' self-presentation varies across multiple accounts on a single platform. In this survey study, we examine how Instagram users manage content sharing decisions and the audience for their content across two types of Instagram accounts: Rinsta ("real" Instagram) and Finsta ("fake" Instagram). Data analyzed includes 499 Finsta and Rinsta posts rated across different dimensions of self-presentation (e.g., self-presentation intention, picture editing effort) and 453 open-ended responses about participants' rationales for using the two accounts. Through this mixed-method approach, we find that Rinsta accounts are more likely to be public, focus on positive and uplifting content, and involve more careful editing and selection, while Finsta accounts are used for more off-the-cuff, emotional, and inappropriate content, as well as those photos that do not make the Rinsta cut. Participants also rated how they perceived responses to their Finsta and Rinsta posts. Mediation analysis suggests that participants perceived responses to Finsta posts as less satisfying, useful, and supportive - partly because Finsta posts contained more negative emotions and received fewer comments than Rinsta posts. We discuss these findings in relation to prior work on social media, self-presentation, and platform affordances, and consider the benefits of this more time-intensive approach to managing two distinct personas on one platform.
A control strategy to enhance the life time of the battery in a stand-alone PV system with DC loads

This study proposes a unique control strategy to enhance the life time of the battery in a stand-alone photovoltaic (PV) system employing energy storage devices such as battery and super capacitor. The intermittent fluctuations in PV power and load power affect the DC bus voltage leading to a random and frequent charging/discharging profile of the battery since the controlling converters are operated as constant voltage sources. To overcome this drawback, the supercapacitor converter is commanded as a constant voltage source so as to adapt to varying load conditions and the battery converter is commanded as a constant current source. This strategy helps to decouple the power imbalances from the charge–discharge profile of battery, thereby contributing to the improved battery life. The detailed experimental results are presented. Further, the proposed control strategy is tested and validated under various scenarios.
GeniAuti: Toward Data-Driven Interventions to Challenging Behaviors of Autistic Children through Caregivers' Tracking

Challenging behaviors significantly impact learning and socialization of autistic children and can stress and burden their caregivers. Documentation of challenging behaviors is fundamental for identifying what environmental factors influence them, such as how others respond to a child's such behaviors. Caregiver-tracked data on their child's challenging behaviors can help clinical experts make informed recommendations about how to manage such behaviors. To support caregivers in recording their children's challenging behaviors, we developed GeniAuti, a mobile-based data-collection tool built upon a clinical data collection form to document challenging behaviors and other clinically relevant contextual information such as place, duration, intensity, and what triggers such behaviors. Through an open-ended deployment with 19 parent-child pairs and three expert collaborators, caregivers found GeniAuti valuable for (1) becoming more attentive and reflective to behavioral contexts, including their own response strategies, (2) discovering positive aspects of their children's behaviors, and (3) promoting collaboration with clinical experts around the caregiver-tracked data to develop tailored intervention strategies for their children. However, participant experiences surface challenges of logging behaviors in social circumstances, conflicting views between caregivers and clinical experts around the structured recording process, and emotional struggles resulting from recording and reflecting on intensely negative experiences. Considering the complex nature of caregiver-based health tracking and caregiver--clinician collaboration, we suggest design opportunities for facilitating negotiations between caregivers and clinicians and accounting for caregivers' emotional needs.
To Use or Abuse: Opportunities and Difficulties in the Use of Multi-channel Support to Reduce Technology Abuse by Adolescents

Technology abuse among adolescents refers to the problematic use of technology devices, and the negative impact it can have on lifestyle and one's physical and mental health. This paper reports on in-depth interviews with 15 dyads of adolescent patients, their parents, and four experts with the objective of unraveling the issue of technology abuse. We conducted qualitative analysis aimed at unpacking the contextual factors affecting technology abuse, and differences between adolescents and their parents pertaining to this issue. Our discussions led us to formulate solutions to technology abuse: (1) motivating adolescents by sending timely reminders and providing interactive micro-incentives; (2) promoting communication between adolescents and their parents by sharing usage data related to device usage; and (3) incorporating social supports to complement parental support, while fulfilling the adolescent's social needs. This paper provides valuable insights into the design of technological solutions aimed at mediating technology abuse.
Eliciting Confidence for Improving Crowdsourced Audio Annotations

In this work we explore confidence elicitation methods for crowdsourcing "soft" labels, e.g., probability estimates, to reduce the annotation costs for domains with ambiguous data. Machine learning research has shown that such "soft" labels are more informative and can reduce the data requirements when training supervised machine learning models. By reducing the number of required labels, we can reduce the costs of slow annotation processes such as audio annotation. In our experiments we evaluated three confidence elicitation methods: 1) "No Confidence" elicitation, 2) "Simple Confidence" elicitation, and 3) "Betting" mechanism for confidence elicitation, at both individual (i.e., per participant) and aggregate (i.e., crowd) levels. In addition, we evaluated the interaction between confidence elicitation methods, annotation types (binary, probability, and z-score derived probability), and "soft" versus "hard" (i.e., binarized) aggregate labels. Our results show that both confidence elicitation mechanisms result in higher annotation quality than the "No Confidence" mechanism for binary annotations at both participant and recording levels. In addition, when aggregating labels at the recording level, results indicate that we can achieve comparable results to those with 10-participant aggregate annotations using fewer annotators if we aggregate "soft" labels instead of "hard" labels. These results suggest that for binary audio annotation using a confidence elicitation mechanism and aggregating continuous labels we can obtain higher annotation quality, more informative labels, with quality differences more pronounced with fewer participants. Finally, we propose a way of integrating these confidence elicitation methods into a two-stage, multi-label annotation pipeline.
The Reintegration Journey Following a Psychiatric Hospitalization: Examining the Role of Social Technologies

For people diagnosed with mental health conditions, psychiatric hospitalization is a major life transition, involving clinical treatment, crisis stabilization and loss of access of social networks and technology. The period after hospitalization involves not only management of the condition and clinical recovery but also re-establishing social connections and getting back to social and vocational roles for successful reintegration ? a significant portion of which is mediated by social technology. However, little is known about how people get back to social lives after psychiatric hospitalization and the role social technology plays during the reintegration process. We address this gap through an interview study with 19 individuals who experienced psychiatric hospitalization in the recent past. Our findings shed light on how people's offline and online social lives are deeply intertwined with management of the mental health condition after hospitalization. We find that social technology supports reintegration journeys after hospitalization as well as presents certain obstacles. We discuss the role of social technology in significant life transitions such as reintegration and conclude with implications for social computing research, platform design and clinical care.
A new equivalent sand grain roughness relation for two-dimensional rough wall turbulent boundary layers

Abstract The effects of different geometries of two-dimensional (2-D) roughness elements in a zero pressure gradient (ZPG) turbulent boundary layer (TBL) on turbulence statistics and drag coefficient are assessed using single hot-wire anemometry. Three kinds of 2-D roughness are used: (i) circular rods with two different heights, $k= 1.6$ and 2.4 mm, and five different streamwise spacing of $s_{x}= 6k$ to $24k$, (ii) three-dimensional (3-D) printed triangular ribs with heights of $k= 1.6$ mm and spacing of $s_{x}= 8k$ and (iii) computerized numerical control (CNC) machined sinewave surfaces with two different heights, $k= 1.6$ and 2.4 mm, and spacing of $s_{x}= 8k$. These roughnesses cover a wide range of ratios of the boundary layer thickness to the roughness height ($23 < \delta /k < 41$), where $\delta$ is the boundary layer thickness. All roughnesses cause a downward shift on the wall-unit normalised streamwise mean velocity profile when compared with the smooth wall profiles agreeing with the literature, with a maximum downward shift observed for $s_{x}= 8k$. In the fully rough regime, the drag coefficient becomes independent of the Reynolds number. Changing the roughness height while maintaining the same spacing ratio $s_{x}/k$ exhibits little influence on the drag coefficient in the fully rough regime. On the other hand, the effective slope $(ES)$ and the height skewness $(k_{sk})$ appear to be major surface roughness parameters that affect the drag coefficient. These parameters are used in a new expression for $k_{s}$, the equivalent sand grain roughness, developed for 2-D uniformly distributed roughness in the fully rough regime.