news 2022

Artificial intelligence chatbots that show positive feelings - such as adding an -I am excited to do so!- or a few exclamation marks - do not necessarily translate into positive reactions or contribute to higher customer satisfaction, according to a recent study by researchers from the University of South Florida, the Georgia Institute of Technology and McGill University.

A new research project from Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam (UvA) launches a 4-year project entitled 'A Safe Bet: design and evaluation of a player-tailored online responsible gambling promotion framework'. The researchers will develop and evaluate new tools for online Responsible Gambling (RG).

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives. It has given rise to smart assistants that take on tasks that would otherwise take humans a great deal of time and effort - in medicine, business and industry, for example. To do this, smart assistants require vast amounts of data.

Good leadership is like sex and chocolate ice cream: what goes on in the minds of motivated employees Who wouldn't want a boss like Barack Obama? A leader who carries the team along, communicates visions and inspires enthusiasm. But why are employees more motivated by such behavior? Scientists at the University of Graz know the answer: because good leadership activates the same areas of the brain as chocolate ice cream or sex, and can therefore have just as motivating an effect.

One in ten people in Switzerland already uses a smartphone bank. Although such neo-banks have so far only been used as secondary and third-party banks, they could also challenge the established banks' status as principal bankers in the future. This is the result of a study by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts on the Swiss retail banking market.

If nothing is done to improve the health of Australia's male truck drivers, 6067 lives and AU$2.6 billion in productivity could be lost over the next 10 years, Monash University-led research has found. Researchers have also found that inaction could cost an estimated $485 million in healthcare costs and 21,173 lost years of life due to work-related diseases or injury in the truck driving industry.

An artificial intelligence tool developed by researchers at UCL and Queen Mary University of London could help governments decide whether or not to bail out a bank in crisis by predicting if the intervention will save money for taxpayers in the long term. The AI tool, described in a new paper in Nature Communications , assesses not only if a bailout is the best strategy for taxpayers, but also suggests how much should be invested in the bank, and which bank or banks should be bailed out at any given time.

The test centre for drone and sensor applications Unmanned Valley will get access to a drone-corridor to sea, right over the dunes near Katwijk. This new flight path goes from former air force base Valkenburg (South-Holland) to the North Sea and has just opened. Bart Remes, project manager and researcher at The Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory (MAVlab), which is part of the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the TU Delft, is very pleased with the new test facility.

A major study has shown that healthcare and social assistance workers are twice as likely to file a workplace compensation claim for psychological injuries, compared to a similar data-set of workers in all non-healthcare industries, including construction, retail and law-enforcement services.

However, the Monash Centre for Financial Studies' (MCFS) Modern Slavery Research Program , which investigates the quality of company disclosures, is calling on the Federal Government and regulators to actively assist companies in tackling the reporting challenges and monitor the quality of disclosures, rather than forcing them to go it alone.

13:27 Publication The paper 'Mismatch Cycles' by Assistant Professor Ana Figueiredo and co-authors Isaac Baley and Robert Ulbricht, has been published in the November issue of the Journal of Political Economy, one of the oldest and most prestigious journals in economics. A novel narrative for the scarring effect of unemployment In their paper, Ana Figueiredo (Erasmus School of Economics) and co-authors Isaac Baley (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Robert Ulbricht (Boston College) study the cyclical dynamics of skill mismatch and quantify its impact on labour productivity.

Workplace cafeteria study finds no evidence that physical activity calorie-equivalent labelling changes food purchasing An experiment carried out across ten workplace cafeterias found no significant change in the overall number of calories purchased when food and drink labels showed the amount of physical activity required to burn off their calories.

The Young people's financial strategies report released today, reveals job losses during the Covid-19 pandemic, lack of affordable housing and the rapid rise of platforms like cryptocurrency and 'buy now, pay later' (BNPL) schemes, have changed the financial landscape for young Australians, and not necessarily in a good way.

Researchers analyze association between Covid vaccination status and social cohesion People who strongly identify with their Covid vaccine status discriminate more strongly against the respective other group. This is shown by a study conducted by the team around Luca Henkel, member of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute at the University of Bonn, with the participation of the Universities of Erfurt and Vienna and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine Hamburg.

Threat or salvation? The way in which people judge globalization depends on whether it benefits them or not. Our own experiences are crucial here, and carry more weight than forecasts of potential gains. This has been shown in an experiment by researchers at the University of Basel. November 2022 For decades, global political and economic relations have been seen as the secret to greater prosperity, and have therefore been consistently nurtured and intensified.

However, Australians rate the online shopping experience better, and return more items purchased in-store than online. The annual Retail Monitor survey of 1,000 Australian shoppers from the Australian Consumer and Retail Studies (ACRS) unit in the Monash Business School, shows bricks and mortar is back with physical shopping returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Gender-equal ownership can help women overcome the systemic barriers their new businesses face A new study reveals that inexperienced entrepreneurial women in Canada still see more success when partnering with experienced men than when partnering with experienced women or going it alone. That is the key finding from research coming out of the University of Waterloo and Statistics Canada based on an analysis of 183,358 unique Canadian business ventures from 2006 to 2017 and the impact of co-ownership by women and men.

WGEA Gender Equity Insights series released today by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC) and the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) has found Australia's gender pay gap could narrow by a third if a more balanced gender concentration was achieved across all industries and occupations.

A quarter of a million working-age people aged 50 or older, could have stayed in paid employment for longer, had the levelling up health targets been achieved a decade ago, finds a new UCL-led study. Researchers believe this is important as staying in work can provide both positive health and financial outcomes for individuals.

Over a third of office staff are working away from home for more days than they would like, according to new research from the University. Some 39% of office workers are so-called hybrid "misfits" and don't have the right balance of home and office working, the survey funded by the Economic and Social Research Council found.