Mei Chan

Telephone scammers achieve their purpose through live voice conversations to acquire sensitive information and defraud victims of their money as the eventual outcome. While much research has been conducted to deconstruct the nature of scams of various types, the telephone scam has not been given due attention, particularly through the lens of language in the exercise of control over victims. This study investigated how telephone scammers manipulate victims through linguistic means. Additionally, as control strategies are affected by the type of response from targets, patterns of scammer strategies associated with “convinced” and “unconvinced” targets were investigated. Discourse strategies executed by scammers in recorded telephone scam conversations in China were analysed to reveal how scammers achieve control over their targets. The strategies realizing larger actions of legitimation, cooperation, defensive and offensive tactics were found to vary according to the relative success of the scam interaction. The study contextualizes the telephone call from an unknown caller as a liminal space that lends itself to the occurrence of criminal activities, highlights the strategic use of language as a powerful tool to manipulate targets through the framing of discourse within an institutional structure, both of a legal-authoritative institution and that of polite society leveraging on the protection of “face”. The findings enhance understanding of linguistic manipulation in telephone scams that could inform the development of public awareness programs for crime prevention.

Many are calling for concrete mechanisms of oversight for health research involving artificial intelligence (AI). In response, institutional review boards (IRBs) are being turned to as a familiar model of governance. Here, we examine the IRB model as a form of ethics oversight for health research that uses AI. We consider the model's origins, analyze the challenges IRBs are facing in the contexts of both industry and academia, and offer concrete recommendations for how these committees might be adapted in order to provide an effective mechanism of oversight for health‐related AI research.

In highly routinised service encounter interactions, communication is often guided by service scripts that are the material embodiment of institutional expectations of how the service interaction is to be conducted. However, counter to common belief that scripted communication is well-controlled and homogeneous in its execution, observation of actual talk reveals interesting patterns and variations that reflect the ways in which participants make meaning of and perform their respective roles within the interaction towards achieving the overall goal of the service communication. Applying the analysis of speech functions and sequential order of talk in audio-recorded verbal exchanges between servers and customers at the service counter of a fast-food restaurant, acts in the fast-food service interaction are interpreted and explained in relation to management-prescribed service script, servers’ script-in-use and customers’ script within an institutional discourse framework. Findings from the study have important implications for service management and training as it addresses the tension between the practices on the ground and those sanctioned by the organisation.