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1. Towards Building Community Collective Efficacy for Managing Digital Privacy and Security within Older Adult Communities

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3432954  

   Kropczynski, Jess; Aljallad, Zaina; Elrod, Nathan Jeffrey; Lipford, Heather; Wisniewski, Pamela J. (January 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   Older adults are increasingly becoming adopters of digital technologies, such as smartphones; however, this population remains particularly vulnerable to digital privacy and security threats. To date, most research on technology used among older adults focuses on helping individuals overcome their discomfort or lack of expertise with technology to protect them from such threats. Instead, we are interested in how communities of older adults work together to collectively manage their digital privacy and security. To do this, we surveyed 67 individuals across two older adult communities (59 older adults and eight employees or volunteers) and found that the community's collective efficacy for privacy and security was significantly correlated with the individuals' self-efficacy, power usage of technology, and their sense of community belonging. Community collective efficacy is a group's mutual belief in its ability to achieve a shared goal. Using social network analysis, we further unpacked these relationships to show that many older adults interact with others who have similar technological expertise, and closer-knit older adult communities that have low technology expertise (i.e., low power usage and self-efficacy) may increase their community collective efficacy for privacy and security by embedding facilitators (e.g., employees or volunteers) who have more technical expertise within their communities. Our work demonstrates how both peer influence and outside expertise can be leveraged to support older adults in managing their digital privacy and security. 

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2. Men in feminism: A self-determination perspective and goals for the future.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/men0000480  

   Moser, Charlotte E; Siegel, Jaclyn A; Wiley, Shaun (October 2024, Psychology of Men & Masculinities)

   Men can make important contributions to gender equality, but a variety of obstacles impede their engagement with feminism. In this article, we propose a self-determination (Ryan & Deci, 2000) approach to supporting men’s feminist engagement. We argue that men are more likely to engage with feminism more consistently and effectively if they internalize feminist goals and incorporate them into their sense of self, that is, if they develop autonomous motivation. We argue further that men are more likely to develop autonomous motivation if their engagement with feminism satisfies basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. We suggest a variety of strategies to meet these needs, among them: framing feminism as a men’s issue, considering men’s viewpoints and values, portraying feminism as consistent with gender and masculine norms, encouraging positive interactions with feminist women, and presenting other feminist men as role models and mentors. According to bell hooks (1984), “sexism and sexist oppression, they can only be successfully eradicated if men are compelled to assume responsibility for transforming their consciousness and the consciousness of society as a whole” (p. 81). Our article applies the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) to encourage men to do so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved) 

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3. Discovering Differences in the Representation of People using Contextualized Semantic Axes

   Lucy, Li; Tadimeti, Divya; Bamman, David (January 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   A common paradigm for identifying semantic differences across social and temporal contexts is the use of static word embeddings and their distances. In particular, past work has compared embeddings against “semantic axes” that represent two opposing concepts. We extend this paradigm to BERT embeddings, and construct contextualized axes that mitigate the pitfall where antonyms have neighboring representations. We validate and demonstrate these axes on two people-centric datasets: occupations from Wikipedia, and multi-platform discussions in extremist, men’s communities over fourteen years. In both studies, contextualized semantic axes can characterize differences among instances of the same word type. In the latter study, we show that references to women and the contexts around them have become more detestable over time. 

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4. Governance of Autonomous Agents on the Web: Challenges and Opportunities

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3507910  

   Kampik, Timotheus; Mansour, Adnane; Boissier, Olivier; Kirrane, Sabrina; Padget, Julian; Payne, Terry R.; Singh, Munindar P.; Tamma, Valentina; Zimmermann, Antoine (November 2022, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology)

   The study of autonomous agents has a long history in the Multiagent System and the Semantic Web communities, with applications ranging from automating business processes to personal assistants. More recently, the Web of Things (WoT), which is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) with metadata expressed in Web standards, and its community provide further motivation for pushing the autonomous agents research agenda forward. Although representing and reasoning about norms, policies, and preferences is crucial to ensuring that autonomous agents act in a manner that satisfies stakeholder requirements, normative concepts, policies, and preferences have yet to be considered as first-class abstractions in Web-based multiagent systems. Towards this end, this article motivates the need for alignment and joint research across the Multiagent Systems, Semantic Web, and WoT communities, introduces a conceptual framework for governance of autonomous agents on the Web, and identifies several research challenges and opportunities. 

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5. Aging in Flood-Prone Coastal Areas: Discerning the Health and Well-Being Risk for Older Residents

   https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15122900  

   Bukvic, Anamaria; Gohlke, Julia; Borate, Aishwarya; Suggs, Jessica (December 2018, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health)

   Coastal communities are increasingly exposed to more intense and frequent hurricanes, accelerated sea-level rise, and prolonged tidal inundation, yet they are often a preferred retirement destination for older adults vulnerable to flooding and extreme weather events. The unique physical and psychosocial challenges of older population age 65 and over may affect their level of preparedness, capacity to cope with, and ability to respond and recover from a hazard event. Despite the clear vulnerabilities of older residents living in high-risk areas when compared to younger coastal populations, there is a lack of empirical research on the integrated flood risks to this population group in the coastal context. This paper provides a holistic assessment of this emerging problem along the U.S. East Coast by measuring the exposure of older population to sea level rise and storm surge in coastal counties. It further evaluates how age-related vulnerabilities differ between rural and urban settings using the case study approach and geospatial and statistical analysis the paper also conducts a review of scientific literature to identify gaps in the current understanding of health and well-being risks to aging populations in coastal communities. The results show that older populations are unevenly distributed along the U.S. East Coast with some states and counties having significantly higher percent of residents age 65 and older living along the shoreline. Many places with larger older populations have other attributes that further shape the vulnerability of this age group such as older housing stock, disabilities, and lower income and that often differ between rural and urban settings. Lastly, our study found that vast majority of research on aging in high-risk coastal locations has been conducted in relation to major disasters and almost none on the recurrent nuisance flooding that is already affecting many coastal communities. 

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