Within the process of progressive digitization of materials and tools for teaching and distance learning of a subject of introduction to Microeconomics (quarterly, in year three of the Degree in Social Work), taught by the authors at the National University of Distance Education (UNED), a virtual assistant in the form of chatbot, or conversational robot, called EconBot, has been designed and made available to students from 2017. This paper presents the reasons that led to its adoption, the process of its development, differentiating two phases, its characteristics and functions, the assessment of its usefulness and the role of teachers in the implementation of this type of technological innovation.

the United States" (129) and Canada. A large number are nurses, many of whom are admitted into the United States for a two-year period under the H-1 program. Chang points out that the $20,000 a year nurses earn on the average does not draw U.S. citizens into the profession in adequate numbers. Jamaican and Filipina women have taken up the slack.Not only immigrant women but also poor women citizens have been turned into a low-waged labor force through the 1996 PRWORA. Welfare-to-work programs exploit the low-cost labor of women who were previously entitled to welfare payments. Working for the city and increasingly for private industry, workfare women receive wages lower than those of regular employees in the same jobs and often replace full-time city employees in jobs such as street sweeping and cleaning staff in public schools. The jobs are viewed as "training" rather than employment; Marriott Hotels thus has welfare-to-work women being "trained" in housekeeping and kitchen work, among other things.Chang, without using Marxist concepts concerning the drive of capital for a cheap labor force, points out the similar economic position of immigrant and workfare women:While immigrants are forced to do "3D-dirty, dangerous and degrading" work for sub-minimum wages in large part because they are excluded from public assistance and services that they need and deserve, workfare workers are forced to do this work for free or what amounts to poverty wages because they are threatened with losing their benefits otherwise. (180) Public officials, meanwhile, applaud the deportation of the undocumented because this frees up jobs for workfare workers.Disposable Domestics is an excellent contribution to literature on immigration and on the marginalized labor force in the United States and elsewhere. The title is somewhat inadequate as a guide to the subjects Chang covers, but the analysis is innovative and much needed.The present book is a collection of testimonies and evidence that results in a multidisciplinary report on how the current globalization structures and rules, which are mainly based on market criteria, have made the gap between the rich and the poor grow, thereby constituting a risk for poor people's lives. From different perspectives and through case studies, the authors have identified the relationship between poverty, lack of the basic necessities, and disease. The editors argue that these studies should encourage further research on a question that does not have a high priority on current academic agendas: the impact of economic policies on the health on the poor. Academics, doctors, and activists show the existing links between changes in the global economy and the health care crisis that the poor- Book Reviews 377at University of Birmingham on June 1, 2015 rrp.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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