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This paper aims to explore a national anti-hate messaging project, #USvsHate, and its call to students to create public messages refusing “hate, bias, and injustice.” Participants indicated that #USvsHate’s invitation to publicly express students’ ideas about equal human value functioned as a next step in furthering youth voice and critical consciousness toward societal inclusion and justice.

Using grounded theory, analysis drew from teacher interviews (n = 45), student focus groups (n = 30), anonymous participant questionnaires and student-created messages and backstories (n = 250) gathered between 2017 and 2020.

Participants indicated #USvsHate’s call to amplify student voice offered a next step to act upon awareness of social issues by denouncing hate while promoting inclusivity. Four invitations related to the project’s “anti-hate message” call emerged as important to participants: the invitation to comment personally on improving society; the creative invitation to share perspectives in any media form; the invitation to speak to a promised public audience; and the invitation to join a collective “us” improving society.

Youth voice and critical consciousness scholarship show the importance of supporting K12 youth to develop abilities to speak about injustice while pursuing an inclusive democracy. Still, less research highlights youth who might enter a classroom with some level of such awareness. This research extends existing scholarship by examining a potential next step to inviting critical consciousness and youth voice in any classroom. It also explores the potential pitfalls of this open-ended approach.

In this chapter I employ a hybrid critical framework that draws on feminist media studies, feminist critiques of post-feminism, theories of intersectionality, and genre theory to consider a range of domestic violence stories on screen. The chapter begins with a summary of prototypical patterns of narrative and character in contemporary Hollywood films about abuse and subsequently explores two recent media representations that, while conforming to certain of these patterns, also introduce alternative perspectives: the 2017/2019 Home Box Office miniseries Big Little Lies and French director Xavier Legrand's 2018 film Custody (Jusqu’à la garde). I argue that both of these media texts draw on familiar genres that engage audiences not simply to generate sympathy for the abused woman-turned-heroine, but to challenge persistent myths about domestic violence such as that abusers are monsters who never show love towards their partners; that abused women are weak, passive, and the victims of their own bad judgment; that the effects and repercussions of abuse end with the departure of the abuser; that, ultimately, the problem of abuse must be “solved” by the individual; that the “solution” is as simple as leaving; and that there is little as a community or a society that we can do. I conclude that, in different ways and to different degrees, each of these media texts succeeds in making small but significant interventions into the predictable formulas of mainstream Hollywood domestic violence films through narratives that foreground the complexities, contradictions, and dilemmas of abuse.

An amateur boxer; A professional soldier turned indestructible zombie; A fast-driving heister; A combat pilot on another world; A taco truck driver with a heart of gold; A Smurf; Michelle Rodriguez, American actress, has played them all. As Leticia ‘Letty’ Ortiz, Rodriguez' most famous role offers both a sensitive portrayal of a tenacious woman living out a tough existence who exhibits as much courage, strength, moral standing and fibre as her male counterparts, whilst also revealing a softer, emotional side and one that focuses on family and ideals of accepting Motherhood. This is what makes Rodriguez such a fascinating contradiction. Whilst much praise is heaped on other actresses for their roles in action films, this chapter will offer, through both an overview of her action-hero career and in-depth look at Rodriguez's work in the Fast and Furious films, an insight into the importance of this actress to the growing canon of action hero(ine) characters and film stars.

This study aims to focus on the evaluation of systems for the automatic translation of questions destined to translingual question‐answer (QA) systems. The efficacy of online translators when performing as tools in QA systems is analysed using a collection of documents in the Spanish language.

Automatic translation is evaluated in terms of the functionality of actual translations produced by three online translators (Google Translator, Promt Translator, and Worldlingo) by means of objective and subjective evaluation measures, and the typology of errors produced was identified. For this purpose, a comparative study of the quality of the translation of factual questions of the CLEF collection of queries was carried out, from German and French to Spanish.

It was observed that the rates of error for the three systems evaluated here are greater in the translations pertaining to the language pair German‐Spanish. Promt was identified as the most reliable translator of the three (on average) for the two linguistic combinations evaluated. However, for the Spanish‐German pair, a good assessment of the Google online translator was obtained as well. Most errors (46.38 percent) tended to be of a lexical nature, followed by those due to a poor translation of the interrogative particle of the query (31.16 percent).

The evaluation methodology applied focuses above all on the finality of the translation. That is, does the resulting question serve as effective input into a translingual QA system? Thus, instead of searching for “perfection”, the functionality of the question and its capacity to lead one to an adequate response are appraised. The results obtained contribute to the development of improved translingual QA systems.

Literature about transparency in public-sector organizations has been attracting the attention of scholars for the last two decades. This study reviews the existing literature with the intention of creating a description of the state of the art, categorized by geographical areas, levels of government, topics, and methodologies.

The authors have developed a structured literature review following a rigorous protocol. The initial search was launched on 25 April 2022 on Scopus and Web of Science, resulting in 3,217 articles. After removing duplicates and studies that did not meet all the inclusion criteria specified in the review protocol, the final sample includes 956 articles from 1991 to 2021.

The analyses show a considerable increase in studies since 2005, especially in the last two years, when 30% of the publications have been produced. Most of the studies analyze the national/central level of government. Many authors compare different countries, while other scholars focus on specific countries, overall, the USA and the UK. The local level of government has also been widely studied, especially in the Spanish and Chinese contexts. The most frequently used methodologies are quantitative and empirical techniques, and the most common topics are those associated with accountability.

This study uses a huge sample (956 articles over the period 1991–2021), which has never been used before, to examine the literature on transparency. The structured literature review facilitates the identification of gaps that can be filled by future studies. These include analyzing transparency in specific geographical areas like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, studying transparency at different levels of government, especially at the regional and federal levels, and providing comparative studies and case study collections.

“Dora! Dora!” squealed my 18-month-old son from his stroller on the crowded subway platform. I scanned the crowd but could not locate the source of his excitement. Then a young girl turned her back to us and I saw on her purple backpack the face of “Dora the Explorer,” whose name had made its way into my son's small vocabulary. This scene could have easily taken place in any city or town in the US; young children of all ethnicities are familiar with Dora's animated television program. Worldwide, parents have spent over $3 billion on Dora the Explorer merchandise since 2001, and most products feature English and Spanish phrases (Jiménez, 2005). And Dora is not alone: her show was just the first in a recent wave of animated educational children's programs featuring Latino main characters and dialogue in Spanish.

In advanced societies, lifestyles are increasingly sedentary, and it is important to identify strategies to help people acquire healthy habits, such as exercise. The present study proposes the use of gamification as a strategy for encouraging users to exercise regularly, based on the possibilities offered by “smart” devices such as smartbands.

The work analyzes how individuals experience their participation in a gamification program, on the premise that it should provide an experience that is intrinsically motivating and fun. Also the moderator effect of the gender and age on the relationship between their experience of participating in a gamification program and perceived self-efficacy.

The results show that individuals' experience of participating in a gamification program exerts a positive influence on their perceived self-efficacy in the practice of sport or exercise. The study also finds that the variables “gender” and “age” moderate the relationship between their experience of participating in a gamification program and perceived self-efficacy, such that it exerts a greater influence on women and older people.

The practical implications for the professionals and institutions involved in promoting the adoption of regular sport and exercise in society are about taking advantage of the potential of wearable technology such as smartbands. The present study finds that the use of gamification for encouraging people to adopt regular physical activity is more effective for women than for men, and for older people than for younger users.

The findings of this study provide a better understanding of whether gamification is an appropriate strategy for helping participants to perceive themselves as having greater self-efficacy in their chosen sport or exercise, taking into account the moderating effect of participant gender and age.

Online review bias research has predominantly focused on self-selection biases on the user’s side. By collecting online reviews from multiple platforms and examining their biases in the unique digital environment of “Chinanet,” this paper aims to shed new light on the multiple sources of biases embedded in online reviews and potential interactions among users, technical platforms and the broader social–cultural norms.

In the first study, online restaurant reviews were collected from Dianping.com, one of China's largest review platforms. Their distribution and underlying biases were examined via comparisons with offline reviews collected from on-site surveys. In the second study, user and platform ratings were collected from three additional major online review platforms – Koubei, Meituan and Ele.me – and compared for possible indications of biases in platform's review aggregation.

The results revealed a distinct exponential-curved distribution of Chinese users’ online reviews, suggesting a deviation from previous findings based on Western user data. The lack of online “moaning” on Chinese review platforms points to the social–cultural complexity of Chinese consumer behavior and online environment that goes beyond self-selection at the individual user level. The results also documented a prevalent usage of customized aggregation methods by review service providers in China, implicating an additional layer of biases introduced by technical platforms.

Using an online–offline design and multi-platform data sets, this paper elucidates online review biases among Chinese users, the world's largest and understudied (in terms of review biases) online user group. The results provide insights into the unique social–cultural cyber norm in China's digital environment and bring to light the multilayered nature of online review biases at the intersection of users, platforms and culture.