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Digital voice assistants use wake word engines (WWEs) to monitor surrounding audio for detection of the voice assistant's name. There are two failed conditions for a WWE, false negative and false positive. Wake word false positives threaten a loss of personal privacy because, upon activation, the digital assistant records audio to the voice cloud service for processing.

This observational study attempted to identify which Amazon Alexa wake word and Amazon Echo smart speaker resulted in the fewest number of human voice false positives. During an eight-week period, false-positive data were collected from four different Amazon Echo smart speakers located in a small apartment with three female roommates.

Results from this study suggest the number of human voice false positives are related to wake word selection and Amazon Echo hardware. Results from this observational study determined that the wake word Alexa resulted in the fewest number of false positives.

This study suggests Amazon Alexa users can better protect their privacy by selecting Alexa as their wake word and selecting smart speakers with the highest number of microphones in the far-field array with 360-degree geometry.

This study aims to identify the relationship between different maintenance practices and productive efficiency in continuous process productive plants as well as the moderating effect of good training practices.

The empirical data were drawn from a database containing 609 observations of 29 productive units. Scales were validated using the Q-sort method. The panel data technique was used as the analysis methodology, with the inclusion of fixed effects for each productive plant.

Maintenance practices can effectively contribute to increasing the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of firms. Application of predictive maintenance practices should be considered as the primary training tool.

This study used a secondary database, limiting the research design and data manipulation.

The article provides practitioners with an analysis of maintenance practices by category (predictive, preventive and corrective), and the impact of each practice on the OEE of continuous process productive plants. Moreover, it explores the importance of training for extracting more results from maintenance practices.

Companies are investing in new technologies, but it is also essential to invest in training people. There is a demand for Industry 4.0 through the introduction of upskilling and reskilling programs.

This study used practice-based view (PBV) theory to explain how maintenance practices help firms achieve greater OEE. Furthermore, it introduced training practice as a moderating variable in the relationship between maintenance practices and OEE.

Volume 9 is a collection of advances in gender research from various parts of the world. The papers document the types of work in which women engage, and gender equity issues they face. They show the importance of considering the uniqueness of cultural contexts for understanding and resolving problems, but they also show how global interdependence affects local gender realities. The papers in this volume fall into two broad and overlapping categories: gender, work and development, and gender and discrimination.

Films focusing on girls and women with anorexia have not found major producers and distributors in Hollywood, yet movies on subjects such as suicidality and bipolar disorder have been showcased. Eating disorders affect approximately 30 million people in the United States alone, and it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, so this invisibility seems incongruous. The authors theorize that Hollywood avoids this subject because of ontological anxiety. Movie plots are schemas and young females are inextricably associated with fertility and futurity. An anorexic’s appearance contradicts and nullifies this symbolic role because anorexia often leads to infertility and death. Psychological studies and philosophical arguments claim that a belief in an afterlife and the regeneration of humankind create coherence and meaning for individuals. An anorexic’s appearance and behavior represent images of self-destruction – images that inflame the viewer’s unconscious and primordial fears about the annihilation of the species. By avoiding the topic of anorexia, Hollywood defends against its symbolic fears of mortality but diminishes the importance of the subject through its absence; it ignores its place in women’s social history and erases its place in American history. Because of Hollywood’s social reach and because greater visibility is correlated with a reduction in stigma, the authors conjecture that a film on this subject would inspire necessary attention to women’s roles, public mores, public policies, and the social good.

Using the concepts of resistance, identity construction, and communicative democracy, I explore the possibility that older women's life histories create and occupy a potentially transformative space within global research on gender. First, such narratives challenge existing hierarchies of age and gender that systematically disadvantage older women. Second, older women use them to assert their own more complex identities (in opposition to those limiting identities assigned to them by others). Third, through their life stories, older women can contribute to democratic dialogue in society at large. I use life history interviews conducted with older women in Cuernavaca, Mexico from 1995 to 1997 as a specific case that supports my overall argument. I contend that the first two processes are already taking place through the act of storytelling and life history narration itself. The more radical methodological claim of this paper is that the act of constructing and communicating life stories is a legitimate and valuable exercise of (political) power.

Issues of diversity and inclusion are at the forefront of public discourse and policy initiatives. Media and product lines have recently faced scrutiny for not being inclusive of difference. We conducted a content analysis of books intended for the tween (ages 8–12) girl. More specifically, these books were from the preeminent tween girl company, American Girl. A company perhaps best known for their line of dolls and historical fiction books, American Girl also publishes advice books with the intention of addressing a range of topics pertinent to the tween girl. Since the company strives to appeal to all girls, the authors analyzed these advice books for images and messages of racial, religious, ability, and sexuality difference in an effort to identify who American Girl’s American girl truly is. The findings of this chapter revealed an overall lack of diversity in the American Girl advice books in not only images but also messages. Images of White girls were more common than those of non-White girls, and any representation of religious, ability, or sexuality difference was minimal. Analysis of the content of the messages also revealed few mentions of difference, and categorization of the books suggested an emphasis on relationships with other people and bodies/appearance as important. It is apparent from this analysis that American Girl’s American girl is White, able-bodied, religiously ambiguous (though presumably Christian), and heterosexual. The need for American Girl to be fully inclusive of diversity across all their product lines is apparent.

This chapter explores how power obtained from societal hierarchies of gender, race, and economic status is covertly used by individuals within relationships, further maintaining systems of stratification. The case of marriage is used to examine how social stratification translates into and is reinforced within even the most intimate relationships in terms of control over decision making. Analysis of in-depth interviews with black and white wives in same-race and interracial marriages illustrates how economic inequality affects who makes what decisions within marriage and how race affects what decisions are made. In the midst of income and racial inequality, socialized gender roles dictate which spouse controls certain arenas versus others. Gender norms operate covertly to affect decision making dynamics through mechanisms of availability, areas of knowledge, and preference.

Research on gender attitudes has consistently found that younger generations have more gender egalitarian views than older generations. Less attention, however, has been directed toward examining whether the generation gap has grown or shrunk over time and whether it differs across dimensions of gender attitudes. Using data from the General Social Survey for years 1977–2018,the authors examine the generational gap in gender attitudes across three components: views toward women in leadership, working mothers, and the gendered division of family labor between public and private spheres. The results show that differences between generations vary significantly across these dimensions. Attitudes have converged over time in support for women’s leadership, yet Baby Boomers espouse slightly higher levels of support than other generations, including the younger Generation Xers and Millennials. In contrast, consistent generation gaps are observed in support for working mothers, where younger generations hold more supportive views than respective older generations. Attitudes toward the gendered division of public/private sphere labor have converged between Millennials, Generation Xers, and Baby Boomers, with only Pre-Baby Boomers holding significantly more traditional views. Collectively, these trends highlight how cultural change through cohort replacement does not uniformly advance gender egalitarian ideologies. Instead, these shifts vary across specific dimensions of gender attitudes.