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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 paper aims to contribute to an understanding of the process of the construction of the professional businessman in Britain in the early twentieth century.

Two books authored by the prominent British industrialist Sir Samuel Turner III are analysed as a form of contemporaneous discourse. This allows for examination of the texts as a particular genre of social media within their social, economic and political contexts.

Sir Samuel Turner III derived the elite status from his family’s standing as a prominent Lancashire, church-going, industrial dynasty. The role of business and the businessman as a professional are recast as the means to restore Britain to its former pre-World War I glory – a position that continues to resonate in a variety of contexts today.

The paper contributes to our understanding of the construction of the social world through discourse. While Turner’s ideology of the relationship between labour, capital, business and society may appear quaint to our twenty-first-century experiences, it is nevertheless an important reminder that the elite voice influences political and social action.

Let us return to Nancy Cruzan's story. Hopeful that Nancy would eventually recover, her parents, Lester and Joyce Cruzan, agreed to have doctors insert a feeding tube to deliver artificial hydration and nutrition – a decision they would one day regret. Although the Cruzans visited frequently, Nancy was unable to respond to their attention. After four years had elapsed, the Cruzans concluded that Nancy would never regain consciousness and should be allowed to die.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

10. In selecting the places which we visited our aim was to see the manufacture of condensed milk and other dairy products under different conditions and to obtain as representative an idea as possible of the circumstances under which the whole process, from the milking of the cow to the final stage of manufacture, was conducted. Accordingly we visited the following places:—

For many years, science fiction has been perceived as “rayguns and rocket ships” boys' literature. Any number of impressionistic and statistical studies have identified the typical SF reader as male, between the ages of twelve and twenty and, in the case of adults, employed in some technical field. Yet I continually find myself having conversations with women, only to find that they, like myself, began reading science fiction between the ages of six and ten, have been reading it voraciously ever since, and were often frustrated at the absence of satisfying female characters and the presence of misogynistic elements in what they read. The stereotype of the male reader and the generally male SF environment mask both the increasing presence of women writers in the field of science fiction and the existence of a feminist dialog within some SF novels. This dialog had its beginnings in the mid‐sixties and is still going strong. It is the hope of the feminist SF community that this effacement can be counteracted.

The paper aims to explore the determinants of perceived job performance in a sample of shop‐floor employees in a manufacturing plant in northern Mexico.

It is hypothesised that job satisfaction, age and education levels are significant predictors of job performance. A thorough literature review reveals that studies of the variables that influence job performance within a manufacturing setting are basically lacking. A questionnaire distributed amongst shop‐floor employees and their immediate supervisors was used in order to measure the variables included in the study. Statistical analyses were performed with the data in order to test for the reliability and validity of the measures, and also to test the three main research hypotheses.

It was found that two variables that measure job satisfaction are positively and significantly associated with job performance. This result is consistent with previous studies. Nevertheless, age and education levels do not show a significant association with job performance. Interestingly, it was also found that education levels are negatively related to job satisfaction.

The sample size is small, and it includes only one manufacturing plant. Consequently, the statistical analyses are limited. These limitations prevent the generalisation of the results. More objective measures of job performance would be preferable. Also, other variables such as leadership style and motivation could be included in future studies.

Although exploratory in nature, the results from this study can be used to gain a better understanding of the different factors and relationships that are conducive to higher job satisfaction, and how job satisfaction is related to job performance.

Job satisfaction and its influence on performance have been researched across a number of industries and sectors. Nonetheless, to the best of one's knowledge, this is the first study that uses a sample of shop‐floor employees in a manufacturing plant to test this relationship. A similar situation is observed in terms of age and education levels: the effect of those variables on performance within a manufacturing setting has been clearly under‐researched.

Whereas analogical relations characterized preliterate rationality, logical connections mark literate reasoning. As we enter post‐literate cultures via instant electric media, cybernetic concepts that we have increasingly used to describe human individual and social behavior can no longer keep pace with today's reality; they are now superseded by the process patterns of an ecological rationality that perceives existence directly in its own terms.

The paper aims to explore the relationship between accounting and racial violence through an investigation of sharecropping in the postbellum American South.

A range of primary sources including peonage case files of the US Department of Justice and the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are utilised. Data are analysed by reference to Randall Collins' theory of violence. Consistent with this theory, a micro-sociological approach to examining violent encounters is employed.

It is demonstrated that the production of alternative or competing accounts, accounting manipulation and failure to account generated interactions where confrontational tension culminated in bluster, physical attacks and lynching. Such violence took place in the context of potent racial ideologies and institutions.

The paper is distinctive in its focus on the interface between accounting and “actual” (as opposed to symbolic) violence. It reveals how accounting processes and traces featured in the highly charged emotional fields from which physical violence could erupt. The study advances knowledge of the role of accounting in race relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, a largely unexplored period in the accounting history literature. It also seeks to extend the research agenda on accounting and slavery (which has hitherto emphasised chattel slavery) to encompass the practice of debt peonage.