Suchergebnisse

With recent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and its increased usage in healthcare, medical chatbots have emerged as valuable tools in healthcare promotion. These chatbots, acting as conversational agents, can play a crucial role in addressing disparities in healthcare access, particularly in countries like India. This issue becomes even more complex when addressing stigmatised health concerns, such as those related to gynaecology and sexual health. While existing scholarship has explored factors like awareness, trust, and comfort influencing the uptake of chatbots, limited research has focused on using chatbots for healthcare marketing among socioeconomically marginalised groups. Against this backdrop, this study employs a quantitative approach with a structured survey to assess the general understanding and perceptions of reproductive health-related chatbots among vulnerable women, as well as the factors influencing both adoption and aversion. Additionally, this paper examines whether factors such as confidentiality, accuracy, physical and technological convenience, and anonymity impact the adoption of medical chatbots for sexual health information by economically vulnerable women. The findings reveal notable relationships between prior sexual health education and the willingness to use a chatbot for reproductive health information. Furthermore, the survey indicates that chatbots, due to their anonymity, confidentiality, neutral tone, and ease of access, are often preferred over gynaecologists and even search engines like Google.

PurposeThe effectiveness of independent directors in making autonomous decisions for better corporate governance in organizations has often been questioned. This paper aims to investigate their role in company's decision making in India and the reasons behind their ineffectiveness.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines the regulatory environment and ongoing reforms in which independent directors operate. It identifies crucial factors such as ownership patterns, the appointment and selection process that affect their autonomy. The analysis draws from newspaper articles, blogs, India's regulatory requirements, The Companies Act and relevant related literature.FindingsThe findings reveal that the independence of directors remains largely in form but not in function. This paper recommends a fair and more robust selection through an independent authority, and disclosure of the resignations of independent directors. Independent directors should be given more powers and their risk-reward scheme should be analyzed.Originality/valueThe paper emphasizes the need for independent directors to be truly independent from the senior management, promoters, and other existing directors. It calls for tighter and more transparent appointment procedures to ensure that independent directors are not influenced by senior management and can bring objectivity to the company board.

Despite a few gaps, Budget 2024 has incorporated various climate-focused interventions, offering hope for navigating the challenges of climate change with effective fiscal measures ...

The West is suffering from 'pessimism paralysis' – a despair towards the digital. This stands against the contagion of hope towards new technologies among young people, most of whom live in the Global South and have fast come online due to increasingly cheap mobile phones and data plans. The digital, despite the risks of surveillance and control, offers these young people with the possibility of a little more freedom to find pleasure, leisure, and spaces for self-actualization. While fears and concerns around new technology are legitimate, they become critically meaningful when they fairly account for the full spectrum of human sentiment driven by diverse lived experiences. Pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to live with despair. It is our moral imperative to hope as this collective belief can be harnessed to align the digital with global social flourishing.

AbstractThe world is witnessing a rise in speech-enabled devices serving as epistemic informants to their users. Some philosophers take the view that because the utterances produced by such machines can be phenomenologically similar to an equivalent human speech, and they may deliver the same function in terms of delivering content to their audience, such machine utterances should be conceptualized as "assertions". This paper argues against this view and highlights the theoretical and pragmatic challenges faced by such a conceptualization which seems to be based on a "functionalist" account of assertion. Instead, the paper argues that the view that some such machine utterances can be "proxy assertions", made on behalf of the designers and/or deployers of such machines is more tenable. Existing accounts of such a view, however, need further refinement, which is provided here. The paper then discusses implications of this view for design of such machines, particularly those enabled and equipped with machine learning capabilities.