Rise of the Machines: A Critical Review on the Behavioural Effects of Automating Traditional Gambling Games

Automated gambling products are now a common feature on many casino floors. Despite their increasing prevalence, little research has considered the impact of converting games traditionally free from technological enhancements to automated versions. This review seeks to illustrate how automation is likely to change the way people engage and experience traditional games based around five prominent modifications: visual and auditory enhancements; illusions of control; cognitive complexity; expedited play; and social customisation. Otherwise known as the “VICES” framework. The inclusion of rich graphics, event-dependent sound and game-play information such as statistics, history, betting options and strategic betting are likely to prolong and entice gambling while encouraging more intense betting. Changes to the social environment due to the asocial nature of automated products is also likely to significantly change the gambling experience. Given the increasing prevalence of these products in the marketplace, it is important to consider the implications of converting traditional products to automated form as technological enhancements have the potential to allow for faster, more intense betting. More research is needed to determine the full impact of automation on player behaviours in order to understand the potential risks associated with technological enhancements to traditional games.     

Chinese Beliefs in Luck are Linked to Gambling Problems via Strengthened Cognitive Biases: A Mediation Test

Problematic patterns of gambling and their harms are known to have culturally specific expressions. For ethnic Chinese people, patterns of superstitious belief in this community appear to be linked to the elevated rates of gambling-related harms; however, little is known about the mediating psychological mechanisms. To address this issue, we surveyed 333 Chinese gamblers residing internationally and used a mediation analysis to explore how gambling-related cognitive biases, gambling frequency and variety of gambling forms (‘scope’) mediate the association between beliefs in luck and gambling problems. We found that cognitive biases and scope were significant mediators of this link but that the former is a stronger mediator than the latter. The mediating erroneous beliefs were not specific to any particular type of cognitive bias. These results suggest that Chinese beliefs in luck are expressed as gambling cognitive biases that increase the likelihood of gambling problems, and that biases that promote gambling (and its harms) are best understood within their socio-cultural context.     

Addressing the Needs of Adults and Children with Disabilities through Emergency Preparedness and Organizational Improvisation

The purpose of this qualitative study is to describe the experiences of fifteen organizational leaders and staff members who were responsible for caring for adults and children with disabilities during a 2014 winter storm. This study integrates the literature bases of emergency management and organizational improvisation. In response to this severe unexpected winter weather event, organizational leaders and staff members demonstrated creativity and flexibility in addressing the needs of clients, students, and patients, including adults and children with disabilities. The study concludes with reflections about emergency planning and organizational improvisation, practical implications, and a call to action to learn from these events and provide additional training and resources to individuals who may be in similar situations in the future.     

Serving our (in)visible elders: The impact of a LGBTQ+ aging presentation on a rural college campus

ABSTRACT

As the number of individuals 65 and older continues to grow, so too does the richness and complexity of their identity. Specifically, the culture of aging within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community has received little attention in the literature. In order to best serve this population, human service professionals must understand the reality of aging within diverse communities. This article explores the impact of an invited campus speaker focused on LGBTQ+ aging on a rural college campus. Results indicate a general increase in overall knowledge and appreciation for issues directly impacting the aging LGBTQ+ community. Recommendations for practice, grounded in a social justice framework, are shared.     

Rainfall events drive foraging choices by an urban coloniser

Using a seven-year data set of visitation of an inner city park by the Australian white ibis, we investigated whether rain events were correlated with ibis abundance in the park. The park is associated with high levels of anthropogenic food, but relatively low levels of natural food sources. For all magnitudes of rainfall tested, ibis abundance significantly decreased after a rainfall event, although stronger responses were associated with higher rainfall, with a 46% decline in ibis abundance following rainfall events of ≥60 mm. Average ibis abundance was higher during the dry, non-breeding period than during the breeding period, and variation associated with rainfall was particularly pronounced in the non-breeding period. However, the rainfall response was still evident in both periods. Results suggest that rainfall influences the ibis distribution in urban centres either by decreasing anthropogenic food supplied to the birds, forcing the birds to relocate to forage, or increasing the amount of natural food available elsewhere, or a combination of the two. Increased rainfall intensified the response by ibis, and our results demonstrate the importance of climatic processes on the behaviour of urban birds.     

Revisiting the sociology of identities and selves with discursive resources

In recent years, a growing body of multidisciplinary research has used the concept of the discursive resource. Discursive psychologists, communications scholars, and sociologists have all used this concept. Discursive resources are clusters of categories supplied by culture that present explanations for past and future activities, provide individual and collective identities for self‐construction, and enable and constrain texts. In this essay, I describe how this research contributes to sociological theorizing of identity, and make some recommendations for researchers who wish to use these concepts or improve these concepts. Studies using the concept of the discursive resource contribute to sociological theorizing of identity by showing how discursive resources are related to important features of social life such as future talk; collective identities; space and time; and complex and political divisions of labor, culture, and postmodernity. I then conclude by suggesting that future research analyze the social distribution of discursive resources across different kinds of social environments.     

Monitoring foreclosure rates with a spatially risk-adjusted Bernoulli CUSUM chart for concurrent observations

Frequently in process monitoring, situations arise in which the order that events occur cannot be distinguished, motivating the need to accommodate multiple observations occurring at the same time, or concurrent observations. The risk-adjusted Bernoulli cumulative sum (CUSUM) control chart can be used to monitor the rate of an adverse event by fitting a risk-adjustment model, followed by a likelihood ratio-based scoring method that produces a statistic that can be monitored. In our paper, we develop a risk-adjusted Bernoulli CUSUM control chart for concurrent observations. Furthermore, we adopt a novel approach that uses a combined mixture model and kernel density estimation approach in order to perform risk-adjustment with regard to spatial location. Our proposed method allows for monitoring binary outcomes through time with multiple observations at each time point, where the chart is spatially adjusted for each Bernoulli observation's estimated probability of the adverse event. A simulation study is presented to assess the performance of the proposed monitoring scheme. We apply our method using data from Wayne County, Michigan between 2005 and 2014 to monitor the rate of foreclosure as a percentage of all housing transactions.     

Quantitative Comparison of Approximate Solution Sets for Bi‐criteria Optimization Problems*

We present the Integrated Preference Functional (IPF) for comparing the quality of proposed sets of near‐pareto‐optimal solutions to bi‐criteria optimization problems. Evaluating the quality of such solution sets is one of the key issues in developing and comparing heuristics for multiple objective combinatorial optimization problems. The IPF is a set functional that, given a weight density function provided by a decision maker and a discrete set of solutions for a particular problem, assigns a numerical value to that solution set. This value can be used to compare the quality of different sets of solutions, and therefore provides a robust, quantitative approach for comparing different heuristic, a posteriori solution procedures for difficult multiple objective optimization problems. We provide specific examples of decision maker preference functions and illustrate the calculation of the resulting IPF for specific solution sets and a simple family of combined objectives.     

Environmental education evaluation: Time to reflect,time for change

Evaluation in environmental education is fairly nascent despite decades-long attention to its importance. In setting the context for future chapters appearing in this special issue of the Journal of Evaluation and Program Planning, attention is devoted to the political circumstances associated with retrenchment in the public sector and increased involvement of citizens in environmental issues in their regions. It further is nested in the context of potential political reforms in a stable market democracy where education is but one strategy that can be bundled with regulations and taxes/subsidies. Additional attention is directed to explaining many of the key evaluation theories – utilization-focused evaluation, evaluative capacity building, and program-theory driven evaluation. The final section of this chapter situates the subsequent chapters of this volume based on the demographic target (youth or adult) as well as connection to a particular evaluation theory.     

Political Position and Social Knowledge1

The nature of social cognition—how we “know about” the social world—is one of the most deceptively obvious problems for sociology. Because we know what we know, we often think that we know how or why we know it. Here, we investigate one particular aspect of social cognition, namely, what we will call “political ideology”—that is, people’s self‐placement on a dimension on which persons can be arrayed from left to right. We focus on that understanding that is in some ways the “ur‐form” of social cognition—our sense of how we stand by others in an implicit social formation whose meaning is totally relational. At the same time, these self‐conceptions seem to be of the greatest importance for the development of the polity and of civil society itself. Our question is, when citizens develop such a “political ideology,” what does this mean, and what do they do with it? We examine what citizens gain from their subjective placement on the dimension from liberalism to conservatism by using the results of a survey experiment that alters aspects of a hypothetical policy.