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There is increased mobile telecommunications penetration across Nigeria. One of the realities connected to such penetration is the news-text services offered by the country’s 9Mobile mobile telecommunications company. This content analysis and covert non-participant observation research examined news entrepreneurial and citizen journalism potentials of the service. Findings show that news SMS service is encouraging, but issues such as delayed delivery and incomplete replications concurrently hamper entrepreneurial and citizen journalism benefits. The degree of diversity of 9Mobile news SMS contents is also poor. Nevertheless, there was significant use of prominent news stories – as derived from the hardcopies of the sourcing national newspapers. The research notes the need for news SMS copyright and plagiarism checks alongside other professional standards. Overall, it is pertinent to reiterate that irrespective of shortcomings, convergent news deliveries of 9Mobile SMS-MoreNews retain significant potentials for entrepreneurship and citizen journalism.

This article examines the phenomenon of fake news through a survey of university students in the United Kingdom. The survey, composed through a selection of factual and non-factual content/news and complemented through a validation tool, sought to assess the attitudes of these respondents to items of factual misinformation before and after these were verified with the tool. The findings from the survey present online misinformation as a very complex and unfolding phenomenon in terms of user behaviour, particularly when presented with an authentication tool. The majority of respondents failed in identifying factual from fake news posts. While respondents indicated mistrust in using third-party validation tools, the majority indicated a critical need for a verification tool that would support their quest and increase their trust in what they read online.

Journalists include ordinary people as exemplars – also known as case sources – in news stories to illustrate the general issue through their personal accounts. These accounts from exemplars tend to evoke emotions in the audience and carry greater weight than base rate information when people form perceptions or attitudes on the problem at hand. In this study, drawing on a news story in which an expert source and an exemplar provide conflicting information, we explore viewers’ emotional response to the exemplar and their perceptions of the expert source and the main message of the news story. We do this by presenting participants with two versions of a television news story – one with and one without an exemplar. We measure participants’ emotional response through a combination of open-ended and close-ended self-reports and directly through electrodermal activity, and we explore their perception of sources and the message of the story through open-ended questions. We find that viewers experience increased arousal when they watch the personal account of an exemplar, and that they tend to interpret the base rate information in the light of the exemplar’s account. Furthermore, some respondents tend to delegitimize the expert source that contradicts the account of the exemplar. We discuss the implications that these results have for journalists and provide tentative advice on which measures journalists can take to counter such effects.

This interdisciplinary research aims to examine the effects of photos used in Arabic news websites on both comprehension and recall among readers. The dual-coding theory was used as a theoretical framework. The research used an experimental design of two groups to test the effects of photos on comprehension and recall of the news content included in two news websites created specifically for the experiment. Two groups of 80 university students have participated voluntarily in the experiment. The results indicated that the use of photos in the news website has increased significantly the levels of both comprehension and recall among respondents.

This is a comparative study of official diplomatic speeches regarding COVID-19, released by spokespersons for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and documents from the United States Department of State China Archive. It explores how these speeches and documents reflect the US–China relations and the conduct of policies surrounding digital media in the two countries. We focus on the period from the start of the Wuhan lockdown, 20 January 2020, to the city’s reopening on 8 April, and use several forms of content analysis to analyse the documents: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling, sentiment network analysis and word clouds. We argue that the diplomatic relationship and political ideologies adopted by different political and media systems can have a major impact upon media policy implementation and guidance.

The role of the media in informing the public has long been a central topic in journalism studies. Given that social media platforms have become today’s major source of news, it is important to understand the impact of social media use on citizens’ knowledge of current affairs. While people get news from multiple platforms throughout the day, most research treats social media as a single entity or examines only one or two major platforms ignoring newer social media platforms. Drawing on news snacking framework, this study investigates how using some of today’s most popular social media platforms predicts users’ current affairs knowledge, with particular attention to Snapchat and its news section Discover. A survey conducted in the United States (N=417) demonstrated that each of the platforms is distinct: Twitter is a strongly positive predictor of knowledge, Facebook a marginally significant negative predictor, Reddit a significantly negative predictor and Instagram not a significant predictor. Overall Snapchat use has no significant association with users’ knowledge of current affairs, whereas Discover use has a negative relationship. Further analysis revealed that mere exposure to Snapchat is positively related to soft-news knowledge and attention to Discover is negatively related to hard-news knowledge.

Discordance between physicians and patients’ health beliefs can impede health communication efforts. However, little research considers physicians’ perceptions of patient beliefs, despite the impor...

Hypoparathyroidism (HP) is a rare metabolic disorder and causes hypocalcemia because parathyroid hormone secretion is inadequate to mobilize calcium from bone and reabsorb calcium from kidney and gut. Anterior neck surgery is the most common cause of acquired HP and autoimmune HP is the next most common form in adults. The duration, severity, and rate of development of hypocalcemia determine the clinical presentation. A variety of organs can be affected by calcification, more frequently kidneys, but also joints, eyes, skin, vasculature, and other organ systems and, although rarely seen, intracerebral calcifications. We report four cases of bilateral basal ganglia calcifications (BGC) also known as Fahr’s syndrome related to hypoparathyroidism. Fahr’s syndrome is characterized by bilateral symmetrical calcification of areas of the brain that control movements including basal ganglia, thalamus, and others; it is a rare inherited or sporadic neurological disorder with a prevalence of less than 1/1.000.000. Main symptoms related to bilateral BGC include extra-pyramidal and cerebellar disorders, cognitive impairment, epileptic seizures, and psychiatric changes. BGC has been established as a possible outcome of HP. Its prevalence, demonstrated in the HP cohorts, varied significantly from 12 up to 74%. Currently, computed tomography (CT) is the most valuable method for diagnosis. The treatment include symptomatic support and identification of causes, but there is no specific treatment limiting the progression of calcification in the basal ganglia. Especially in HP, an early treatment can prevent calcification and neurophysiological disorders. Resumo O hipoparatireoidismo (HP) é um distúrbio metabólico raro e causa hipocalcemia, pois a secreção do paratormônio é inadequada para mobilizar o cálcio dos ossos e reabsorver o cálcio dos rins e intestino. A cirurgia cervical anterior é a causa mais comum de HP adquirido. O HP autoimune é a segunda causa mais comum em adultos. A duração, gravidade e taxa de desenvolvimento da hipocalcemia determinam a apresentação clínica. Diversos órgãos podem ser afetados pela calcificação, mais frequentemente os rins, mas também articulações, olhos, pele, vasculatura e outros órgãos e, embora raramente vista, calcificações intracerebrais. Relatamos quatro casos de calcificações dos gânglios da base (CGB) bilaterais, também conhecidas como síndrome de Fahr relacionadas ao hipoparatireoidismo. A síndrome de Fahr é caracterizada pela calcificação bilateral simétrica de áreas do cérebro que controlam os movimentos incluindo os gânglios da base, tálamo e outros; é um distúrbio neurológico raro, hereditário ou esporádico, com uma prevalência 1/1.000.000. Os principais sintomas relacionados à CGB bilateral incluem distúrbios extrapiramidais e cerebelares, comprometimento cognitivo, convulsões e alterações psiquiátricas. A CGB foi estabelecida como uma possível consequência do HP. Sua prevalência, demonstrada nas coortes de HP, variou significativamente de 12 a 74%. Atualmente, a tomografia computadorizada (TC) é o método mais valioso para o diagnóstico. O tratamento inclui suporte sintomático e identificação de causas, mas não há tratamento específico limitando a progressão da calcificação nos gânglios da base. Especialmente no HP, um tratamento precoce pode prevenir calcificações e distúrbios neurofisiológicos.

With the integration of social media in journalism practice, media training institutions must focus on preparing future media professionals with the right mix of digital skills for the industry. Although efforts to improve students’ online skills readiness are evident in schools, no reliable tool exists to assess students’ confidence in doing online journalism tasks upon graduation. This study develops and validates an Online Journalism Self-Efficacy Scale (OJSES) that can be used to measure mass communication students’ perceptions of their self-efficacy for online journalism work. Items for the proposed scale were developed from a comprehensive literature review and refined by eight online journalism professionals (five online journalism lecturers and three online news editors). To explore the factor structure of the tool, exploratory factor analysis of data from a sample of finalist undergraduate mass communication students (n = 182) in five Rwandan universities was done. Results suggested that the OJSES is a five-dimensional tool that comprises 27 items. This scale measures online journalism self-efficacy in terms of students’ capabilities to conduct online journalism research, communicate with social media tools, create and share multimedia content online, observe ethical online publishing and use social media to solve organizational problems. The scale demonstrated reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.785 and the five self-efficacy dimensions explaining 51.1 per cent of the total variance. The scale’s psychometric soundness implied its suitability not only to empirically measure the students’ confidence in working in online environments but also guide capacity-building for the required online skills for the media industry.

This article examines the role of the fixer in international news production, particularly war reportage, and reorients an ongoing debate about the role of local media-workers in foreign bureaus. While the institutional conditions of fixing have received some scholarly attention, the epistemic dimension of fixers’ labour yet requires critical examination. Utilizing eighteen months of participant observation and qualitative interviews with fixers and foreign journalists in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, I demonstrate that the local, ‘situated’ knowledge of fixers is both structural to, and ultimately suppressed by, the global, ‘professional’ knowledge of international news. This tension is evident in the routines of war reportage – gathering information, navigating checkpoints – and in journalism’s generic conventions, as where the byline – mark of professional authorship – establishes a hierarchy regarding what counts as authoritative meanings for war. In resituating analysis of fixing from the institutional to the epistemic, this article aims to recover the displacements inherent to normative representations of foreign conflict.

Television news corporations changed their work roles from a tradition of team production to a ‘one-man-band’ method of production. Many veteran reporters are hesitant to accept the new methodology. This study intended to examine how television news reporters adjusted to more work demands and new technologies. A questionnaire was combined with participant observation for analysis. The participants included 289 television journalists, selected from local affiliates throughout the United States. The results indicate that there is preference for younger workers and burnout occurring to all age groups. This study explores the commodification of the profession in terms of labour value.

The journalistic profession has long since entered an age where technology and audience participation are two of its most defining factors. Changes that were brought about by the advent of WEB 2.0 transformed journalism – among other professions – fundamentally, and opened the gates to a more connected future, one in which the lines between content producer and content consumer are far less defined than they used to be. One of the more promising technologies of this new era is that of chatbots and conversational agents. These multifaceted programs have proven to be extremely useful in many aspects of modern journalism, with some of them getting used in scenarios that go as far as trying to replace the traditional role of the journalist as we know it. As such, the influence of these programs has also spread to the field of audience interaction and participatory journalism. This article aims to underline the integral role that chatbots play within the confines of the journalistic profession, while at the same time explore the significant effects they have in the field of audience participation and communication between the journalist and the public in general. To achieve this goal a model chatbot was created in order to demonstrate the benefits of automating the process of filing and transferring a report on account of the public to the news organization.

This article presents a case study of media literacy deployment in contemporary media regulation through interviews with New Zealand’s Chief Censor and other key staff members in the Office of Film and Literature Classification. The interviews offer an account of how media literacy came to be adopted as a prominent strategy within their policy remit. This article explores how the institutional narrative reconciles their media literacy approaches and core classification work, finding four key discursive and practical strategies: integrating, expanding, reconceptualizing and reasserting relevance. The analysis also reveals how the standpoint of media as a site of potential harm shapes the meaning of media literacy in this institutional context. This case study provides insight into the utility of media literacy for contemporary media regulation, examining how a classification agency navigates change and continuity in the face of a challenging and rapidly evolving media landscape.

This study seeks to uncover the effects of source and repetition on the illusory truth effect and the dissemination of fake news on social media with an online experiment. This study found that in a personalized source system where trustworthy traditional news sources and personal contacts converged on social media, repetition has a big influence on the trustworthiness of news source and balance of news story. Although most people intend to share real news stories with balance, the illusory truth effect causes mis-judgement, which makes fake news more likely to go viral than real news. The multi-group SEM analysis of the two groups – without source and with source – showed that readers in the no source group rated the effect of repetition on news evaluation as more significant than the with source group. The findings suggest that the effect of source has diminished in the evaluation of news quality. However, sharers on social media are becoming more influential.

Digitalization of news organizations and other traditional media presents an ongoing struggle. Although there is a general decline in news consumption in all ages, youth in particular seems to be ‘tuning out’ of news globally. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report published in 2016 by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, announced that news accessed via social media sites increased in Europe (average 46 per cent) where Greece and Turkey were high adoption countries with 74 and 73 per cent usage rates, respectively. These numbers dropped in the 2018 report to 66 per cent in Turkey and 71 per cent in Greece. This research explores the factors that influence college students’ news consumption behaviour in Greece and Turkey through an interpretative approach. Data collection was done in 2017 in Athens and Istanbul with voluntary participation of 40 college students who study in public and private universities.

Influenced by digital technologies, the cost of media production has considerably decreased, and the traditional media is faced with new agile, flexible and low-cost media entrepreneurs. This article examines the dynamics of the Iraqi media market transformation with an emphasis on factors that help to merge media entrepreneurs and digital media firms that target an audience on social media. A qualitative method was adopted in this study using open, in-depth interviews with nineteen media entrepreneurs and three managers of media firms. The study revealed that relative freedom and advanced communication technologies have encouraged media entrepreneurs to drive the new media on producing short videos and broadcast them on social media, which has become popular among media consumers. This new era in Iraqi media entrepreneurship has created an abstract space in which media entrepreneurs get involved in the media market, collaborate with international media and deliver values through the use of user-generated content and flexible journalism. This opportunity is shaped by three key interrelated factors: first, the relative freedom of journalism that resulted from the political environment, current regulations and advanced communication technologies that provide more space of freedom; second, the development of communication technologies that allow journalists and media entrepreneurs to employ the media market effectively; third, the emergence of media entrepreneurs themselves who are convinced to seize the opportunities presented by the two previous factors.

The research purpose of this article was to analyse the search engine marketing and social media marketing predictive trends that are occurring both regionally in Africa and on a global scale. The motivation for the study was to offer pragmatic advice to business practitioners in crafting digital marketing strategies by leveraging search engine marketing and social media marketing trends. In terms of research methodology, a systematic literature survey method and an inductive research approach were applied. Social media concepts were critically analysed and evaluated to determine their link to the current research focus area. The main literature findings showed that the main trends include the use of Accelerated Mobile Pages, micro-vlogging, voice search, blogging and social messaging. In the continuous dynamic digital landscape, marketers need to embrace the art of doing business by adopting new search engine marketing and social media marketing techniques. With this in mind, it is important for corporations to utilize social media for the development of marketing strategies. The viral power of social media makes it more attractive to businesses promoting their products to target markets. The article also provides an intuitive apprehension of the predictive trends in digital marketing, which are vital for developing an agile stance to outwit rivals in blue oceans.

In this paper, we present SoDa, an irradiance-based synthetic Solar Data generation tool to generate realistic sub-minute solar photovoltaic (PV) output power time series, that emulate the weather pattern for a certain geographical location. Our tool relies on the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) to obtain irradiance and weather data patterns for the site. Irradiance is mapped onto a PV model estimate of a solar plant’s 30-min power output, based on the configuration of the panel. The working hypothesis to generate high-resolution (e.g. 1 second) solar data is that the conditional distribution of the time series of solar power output given the cloud density is the same for different locations. We therefore propose a stochastic model with a switching behavior due to different weather regimes as provided by the cloud type label in the NSRDB, and train our stochastic model parameters for the cloudy states on the high-resolution solar power measurements from a Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU). In the paper we introduce the stochastic model, and the methodology used for the training of its parameters. The numerical results show that our tool creates synthetic solar time series at high resolutions that are statistically representative of the measured solar power and illustrate how to make use of the tool to create synthetic data for arbitrary sites in the footprint covered by the NSRDB.

This study explores metapragmatic comments in Nigerian quasi-judicial public hearings, involving interactions between complainants, defendants and a hearing panel, with a view to investigating their forms, features, distribution and functions. The data are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively from a discourse-pragmatic framework that incorporates Verschueren’s theory of metapragmatics, Mey’s pragmatic act theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversation analysis. Four types of metapragmatic comments are used: speech act descriptions, talk regulation comments, maxim adherence/violation related comments and metalinguistic comments. Their distribution and functioning are shown to be partly predictable from properties of the speech event, while they also co-determine the nature and development of the analysed hearings.

Data visualizations are often represented in public discourse as objective proof of facts. However, a visualization is only a single translation of reality, just like any other media, representation devices, or modes of representation. If we wish to encourage thoughtful, informed, and literate consumption of data visualizations, it is crucial that we consider why they are often presented and interpreted as objective. We reflect theoretically on data visualization as a system of representation historically anchored in science, rationalism, and notions of objectivity. It establishes itself within a lineage of conventions for visual representations which extends from the Renaissance to the present and includes perspective drawing, photography, cinema and television, as well as computer graphics. By examining our tendency to see credibility in data visualizations and grounding that predisposition in a historical context, we hope to encourage more critical and nuanced production and interpretation of data visualizations in the public discourse.

Working with data is an increasingly powerful way of making knowledge claims about the world. There is, however, a growing gap between those who can work effectively with data and those who cannot. Because it is state and corporate actors who possess the resources to collect, store and analyze data, individuals (e.g., citizens, community members, professionals) are more likely to be the subjects of data than to use data for civic purposes. There is a strong case to be made for cultivating data literacy for people in non-technical fields as one way of bridging this gap. Literacy, following the model of popular education proposed by Paulo Freire, requires not only the acquisition of technical skills but also the emancipation achieved through the literacy process. This article proposes the term creative data literacy to refer to the fact that non-technical learners may need pathways towards data which do not come from technical fields. Here I offer five tactics to cultivate creative data literacy for empowerment. They are grounded in my experience as a data literacy researcher, educator and software developer. Each tactic is explained and introduced with examples. I assert that working towards creative data literacy is not only the work of educators but also of data creators, data publishers, tool developers, tool and visualization designers, tutorial authors, government, community organizers and artists.

As the public use of virtual reality (VR) scales, understanding how users engage across various sources of VR content is critical. 360-video is popular due to its ease of both creation and access. There are, however, few studies of 360-videos, and they suffer from three limitations. First, most studies rely on small and homogeneous samples of participants. Second, they tend to examine only a single 360-video, or a handful of them in a few exceptional cases. Third, very few studies trace participants' VR use over multiple experiences. The current study examined a large sample of participants (511) and a large set of 360-videos (80). Each participant experienced 5 of the videos, and we tracked head movement in addition to self-report data on presence, arousal, simulator sickness, and future use intention for each video. This design allowed us to answer novel questions relating to individual differences of participants and changes in experience over time, and in general to present results of VR use at a scale not seen before in the literature. Moreover, the results suggest that looking at patterns across stimuli provide unique insights which are missed when looking only within a single piece of content.

In recent years, digitalization has detached television content from the television screen, and so the television is no longer the only choice for personal audio-visual consumption. The audio-visual market is facing increased fragmentation due to the multiplicity of delivering platforms. Furthermore, the digital touch has brought about far-reaching changes in people’s audio-visual consumption practices. The protagonists of this new digital landscape are the members of Generation Z (GenZ), who are early adopters of the digital innovation. In this article, contemporary consumption behaviours of audio-visual content, contrasting those at the times of traditional television viewing, are explored in the context of the GenZ community. In Greece, GenZ represent nearly 20 per cent of the entire population and makes an interesting target to be scrutinized under the prism of ongoing studies of media usage.

This study compares the balance of newspaper and television news coverage about migration in two countries that were differently affected by the so-called “refugee crisis” in 2015 in terms of the geopolitical involvement and numbers of migrants being admitted. Based on a broad consensus among political elites, Germany left its borders open and received about one million migrants mainly from Syria during 2015. In contrast, the conservative British government was heavily attacked by oppositional parties for closing Britain’s borders and, thus, restricting immigration. These different initial situations led to remarkable differences between the news coverage in both countries. In line with news value theory, German media outlets reported much more on migration than did their British counterparts. In line with indexing theory, German news coverage consonantly reflected the consensual view of German political elites, while British news media reported along their general editorial lines.

This study aims to open a discussion on the changing face of cultural imperialism within the context of contemporary capitalism’s conditions and the changing habits of Turkish television viewers. Although the past two decades have witnessed a growing interest in both the changing patterns of television viewing habits and viewers’ class status, this process has focused almost exclusively on the West and specifically Euro-American metropolitan viewers’ experiences. By contrast, very few studies have directly addressed other contexts, specifically, television viewers in non-western countries. Based on cultural proximity and cultural discount theories, this study analyses the reasons and outcomes behind Turkish television viewers’ ongoing tendency towards the video-on-demand platforms, such as Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video or their domestic counterparts, like Puhu or Blu TV, under Turkey’s ongoing modernization process. The results suggest that video-on-demand platforms provide particular interest for television viewers while offering relative freedom from state-controlled public media or strictly regulated private channels. Nevertheless, these platforms have appealed to both Turkish upper-middle-class viewers and younger viewers who have the cultural background to enjoy and appreciate the content on offer. This study also indicates how access to streaming platforms in Turkey mainly relies on the class status of television viewers, and that this kind of cultural flow, to some extent, creates a digital divide in Turkey.

Results of an online survey suggest that heavy binge-watching of serialized video content might be in part socially motivated. Among a sample of US college students, heavy binge-watchers were more likely to be opinion leaders and to experience fear of missing out (FOMO) than regular binge-watchers or non-binge-watchers. They also reported higher levels of parasocial engagement with the shows’ characters than other viewers. Contrary to common beliefs, heavy binge-watching did not come at the cost of decreased social engagement. Quite the opposite: heavy binge-watchers reported spending significantly more time in interactions with friends and family on a daily basis than non-binge-watchers. Heavy binge-watching was also modestly associated with a few negative outcomes (loss of sleep and decrease in productivity).

Based on a time-lag model, this study tested for changes in young children’s (1–6 years) home access and use of digital media in the 2012–2018 period as well as in their parents’ views on such media. What it found was that in only a few years the digital devices available to children have become more mobile (tablets and smartphones), more accessible, and more numerous in these children’s bedrooms, especially in single-parent households. Also, on average children have strongly increased their daily media use—up to 102 minutes. This is especially true for both younger children (3 years or less, plus 30 minutes) and children in middle to highly educated households (plus 25 minutes). Our findings support the complementary media adoption theory more than the displacement theory. Over the years parents have tended more and more to use digital media as ‘babysitters’, while they also found it increasingly difficult to stop their children from using such media, which may have major implications for parenting support activities.

As connected platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok rise in popular use, communication strategies are forced to grow more condensed and to be transmitted primarily across digital screens. Online short-form video has consequently become a primary format for environmental communication, though research on digital communication remains largely limited to frame analysis and discussions of print and still images. Filling a need in current scholarship on environmental media and aiming to further bridge humanities and communication research, this article offers a model for assessing environmentally themed short-form videos that complements communication studies’ focus on messaging rhetoric with humanities-based film and visual culture analytic tools for assessing the connotative aspect of aesthetic and narrative elements. Intending to offer an applicable framework for environmental messengers, we develop a genre system of short-form videos along cognitive and emotional axes that can be quantitatively identified according to formal practices, demonstrated through an examination of four environmental short-form videos.

To better understand the processing of e-cigarette prevention messages, we conducted a content analysis of 1,968 participants' open-ended responses to one of four messages, which focused on industry manipulation (Big tobacco), financial and psychological cost of vaping (Can't afford), harmful chemicals in e-cigarettes (Formaldehyde), or uncertainty about the ingredients of e-liquids (Top secret). Health Belief Model (HBM) and perceived message effectiveness (PME) constructs were coded and the frequency of each variable was compared across message conditions. Among the HBM constructs, perceived health threat had the most mentions overall (38.8%). Self-efficacy of staying away from vaping had the fewest mentions across all messages (0.56%). For PME, participants more frequently mentioned message perceptions (15.75% positive message perceptions, 8.38% negative) than effect perceptions (3.46% positive effect perceptions, 1.37% negative). Big tobacco received the highest number of mentions for positive message perceptions and Formaldehyde received the highest number of mentions for positive effect perceptions. Future anti-vaping messages are recommended to address the efficacy element and to combine different themes to communicate harms of e-cigarettes.

eSports is a rapidly growing phenomenon in competitive gaming. Expertise is an interesting topic to study in relation to eSports, as eSports athletes are considered among the most highly-skilled players of their particular games. Examining expertise not only advances the understanding of what skills compose professional play but enables a deeper study of learning in games; before learning processes are studied, it is important to detail what learning these processes should produce. This study examines expertise through the application of thematic analysis to a series of interviews with professional players of the eSports game, Overwatch. The goal of this study is to identify which skills are perceived to be important to professional-level play by professional players. Two overarching themes were identified, game sense and mechanics. A number of sub-themes were identified as important, including survival, anticipation / prediction, communication, thoughtfulness, aim, ability usage, movement and positioning, and team-based mechanical synergies.

This study examines the ethical conflict of interest that exists in this sphere between journalists and politicians in an age of media entrepreneurship in Iraq, which theoretically would enable journalists to express their own voices and hold a greater stake in the media market. A qualitative method was adopted for this study using open, in-depth interviews with 36 participants. The study found that relative freedom, smartphone applications and social media helped innovative Iraqi journalists to become media entrepreneurs and own media enterprises themselves. These media enterprises are characterized by activities such as publishing material that is critical in tone and satirical in content and accompanied by short videos that are broadcast on social media. This is then easily accessible for media consumers using their smartphones. Media enterprises appear to offer journalists an opportunity for professional and financial independence, but their operation in the Iraqi media space tends to reflect the propagandistic function of traditional media outlets instead of fulfilling this emancipatory role. The findings also showed that there is a dark side to Iraqi digital media enterprise, which involves politicians exploiting journalists to troll and attack activists through anonymous digital media. This in turn harms the freedom of expression and suppresses critical views voice against the political establishment.

The increasing use of social media has led to the growing reliance of social media as a news source. The viral nature of social platforms inevitably elevates the viral impact of fake news. As both academia and practitioners touted media literacy as a means of combating fake news or misinformation, little is known about the nature of relevant efficacies. Existent literature points to the plausible contribution of media consumption, self-efficacy of fake news and perceived impact of fake news in this process. Therefore, this study explored the relationship between consumers’ news consumption, such as fake news experiences/perceptions, news sources and news consumption motives; and fake news perceptions like self-efficacy and impacts. This study conducted an online survey to examine the proposed hypotheses and research questions. The findings suggest that consumers’ previous experiences and consumption motives are connected with their perceived effects and efficacy of fake news. In addition, different news sources (i.e. mainstream media and social media) exert diverse effects on fake news self-efficacy.

Social media rumors not only affect the health of online social networks, but also reduce the quality of information accessed by its users. In the case of emergencies, the rapid spread of rumors often triggers mass anxiety and panic. This study integrates the planned behavior (TPB) and deterrence (TD) theories to study the factors affecting the rumor recognition behavior of social media users. The structural equation model (SEM) method is used to test the proposed model. Further, the interaction between various factors is analyzed to evaluate their impact on the rumor recognition behavior exhibited by social media users in emergencies. The results demonstrate that certainty and severity have significant positive effects on subjective norms. In addition, subjective norms, attitude, and perceived behavioral control all affect the rumor recognition behavior of social media users, and involvement negatively moderates the relationship between the subjective norms and attitude. Finally, insights into the formulation of rumor control strategies during emergencies are presented based on the empirical analysis.

High resolution analog to digital converters (ADCs) are conventionally used at the receiver terminals to store an accurate digital representation of the received signal, thereby allowing for reliable decoding of transmitted messages. However, in a wide range of applications, such as communication over millimeter wave and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the use of high resolution ADCs is not feasible due to power budget limitations. In the conventional fully digital receiver design, where each receiver antenna is connected to a distinct ADC, reducing the ADC resolution leads to performance loss in terms of achievable rates. One proposed method to mitigate the rate-loss is to use analog linear combiners leading to design of hybrid receivers. Here, the hybrid framework is augmented by the addition of delay elements to allow for temporal analog processing. Two new classes of receivers consisting of delay elements, analog linear combiners, and one-bit ADCs are proposed. The fundamental limits of communication in single and multi-user (uplink and downlink) MIMO systems employing the proposed receivers are investigated. In the high signal to noise ratio regime, it is shown that the proposed receivers achieve the maximum achievable rates among all receivers with the same number of one-bit ADCs., Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Communications

Through an online experiment, this study examines the impact of live-blogging on audiences’ perception of readability, selective scanning, news credibility, news use and paying intent (N = 220). Contrary to industry expectation, this study found that the quest for speed at the expense of errors (and subsequent corrections) has no effect on the outcome variables, except news presented in the live-blogging format decreases readability. In contrast, news interest predicts all outcome measures. Findings from this study carry theoretical and practical implications for online news production and consumption.

Using ideas from Chu and Bode/Fano theories, we characterize the maximum achievable rate over the single-input single-output wireless communication channels under a restriction on the antenna size at the receiver. By employing circuit-theoretic multiport models for radio communication systems, we derive the information-theoretic limits of compact antennas. We first describe an equivalent Chu's antenna circuit under the physical realizability conditions of its reflection coefficient. Such a design allows us to subsequently compute the achievable rate for a given receive antenna size thereby providing a physical bound on the system performance that we compare to the standard size-unconstrained Shannon capacity. We also determine the effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which strongly depends on the antenna size and experiences an apparent finite-size performance degradation where only a fraction of Shannon capacity can be achieved. We further determine the optimal signaling bandwidth which shows that impedance matching is essential in both narrowband and broadband scenarios. We also examine the achievable rate in presence of interference showing that the size constraint is immaterial in interference-limited scenarios. Finally, our numerical results of the derived achievable rate as function of the antenna size and the SNR reveal new insights for the physically consistent design of radio systems., Comment: accepted to IEEE Transactions on Communications

In this article, I discuss the role of internships in the career of Brazilian journalists. Its aim is to understand the professional side of this experience and compare it with conditions imposed by the media labour market in Brazil, its fluctuations and reshapings. This study is based mainly on biographical in-depth interviews with 32 journalists working in Brasilia. More than just a learning and preparation experience, internships make up a career of socializing in journalism and managing the uncertainty concerning the labour market. Internships are also telling of the transformations in journalism. The stratification of internship experience from each generation shows us how it has gradually become legitimized, and then naturalized, as a pedagogical experience in journalism careers, as well as a plan for entering the profession. This process goes hand-in-hand with the increased skills required of interns and the professionalization of how they are selected.

Social media aided in expanding apparel design strategies for this study, which evaluated ageing women’s clothing preferences by examining their fashion blogs. Fashion blogs provided a rich qualitative dataset that offered insight into how older bloggers made sense of their world. This research analysed written texts and images presented by twenty women to better understand how they felt about their clothing options. Four major themes emerged from the blog data: personal style, self concept, health and ability, and apparel preferences and garment characteristics. The data showed that bloggers were interested in clothing styles and fashion trends that they could modify to accommodate an ageing body without calling attention to disabilities. Clothing was a form of personal expression for many of the bloggers. The women in this study preferred comfort in their clothing styles, and they were generally unwilling to exchange garment comfort for style even when style was a high priority. The study fills a gap by using blogs to inform apparel design. The data from the blogs ultimately helped the researcher, an apparel designer, to better understand and identify possible options for inclusive apparel design for boomer women with a range of needs.

Data collection in big data is an effective way to aggregate information that the collector is interested in. However, there is no assurance for the data that the users provide. Since collector does not have the ability to check the authenticity of every piece of information, the trustworthiness of users participated in the collection become important. In this paper, we design an efficient approach to calculate users' trustworthiness in data collection for big data context. We divide the trustworthiness into familiarity trustworthiness and similarity trustworthiness, and study the influences of user actions on trustworthiness. To prevent malicious users from raising their trustworthiness and providing false information that may mislead final results, we also design a security queue to record users' historical trust information, so that we can detect malicious users with high accuracy. Simulation results show that our model can sensitively resist the malicious actions of users.

In this paper, we study joint adaptive M-QAM modulation and power adaptation for a downlink two-user non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network. Without sacrificing bit error rate (BER), joint adaptive transmission can fully utilize the time-varying nature of wireless channels, by allowing both power and rate to adapt to channel fading. Two adaptive power allocation strategies, namely, Scheme 1 and Scheme 2, each of which guarantees the minimum target rate for one user while supporting the highest possible rate for the other, are first proposed. Then, based on the two power schemes, the performance of joint adaptive transmission in terms of average spectral efficiency (SE) is studied for continuous-rate and discrete-rate modulation, while guaranteeing the minimum required rate and BER requirements. With the focus on practical discrete-rate M-QAM modulation, it is proved that for the strong user in Scheme 1 and the weak user in Scheme 2, their average SEs converge to the minimum target rates. In order to further increase the total transmission rate, we then propose a dynamic rate and power adaptation (DRPA) algorithm, aiming to increase the rate of one user without sacrificing the rate of the other. It is shown that at high SNRs, the DRPA algorithm allows the strong user in Scheme 1 and the weak user in Scheme 2 to continue to increase their transmission rates until reaching the highest modulation order that the system can support. Hence, the total transmission rate can be greatly increased at high SNRs due to the adoption of DRPA, by allowing both users in each scheme to reach the highest transmission rate in the system.

This article examines two approaches to postdictatorship cinema: trauma theory, which has been especially popular in reading this corpus, and semiotics, which has regained popularity in film analysis in general but is not often employed when analyzing postdictatorship films. The article claims that, though highly productive in the 1990s, trauma theory has become less fruitful after decades of continuous scholarship and after the emergence of administrations that have made the representation of the dictatorship the center of their public policies, such as kirchnerismo in Argentina (2003–2015). While trauma theory yields ahistorical analyses, a semiotic approach that takes into account how indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs merge in the cinematic field allows for historical interpretations that are more adequate for reading postdictatorship films, especially after 2003. The article first outlines the main tenets of the two approaches (trauma theory and semiotics), then assesses their suitability for historical interpretation via a brief analysis of Andres no quiere dormir la siesta , a 2009 Argentine film on the country’s last dictatorship. Resumen Este articulo se propone examinar dos aproximaciones al cine postdictatorial: la teoria del trauma, que ha sido especialmente popular para leer este corpus, y la semiotica, un acercamiento que ha vuelto a ganar popularidad en el analisis filmico en general pero que no es frecuentemente utilizado en la interpretacion de este tipo de peliculas. El articulo argumenta que la teoria del trauma, aunque productiva en los anos noventa, se ha vuelto menos fructifera despues de varias decadas de produccion academica constante y de la emergencia de gobiernos que, como el kirchnerismo en Argentina (2003–2015), han puesto la representacion de la dictadura en el centro de sus politicas publicas. Mientras que la teoria del trauma resulta insuficiente para leer historicamente el cine postdictatorial, una lectura semiotica de como los componentes indiciales, iconicos y simbolicos se combinan en la imagen cinematografica resulta mas apropiada para llevar a cabo una interpretacion historica, especialmente despues del 2003. Luego de delinear estas dos aproximaciones, el articulo las reevalua mediante un breve analisis de una pelicula argentina reciente sobre la dictadura militar, Andres no quiere dormir la siesta.

Resumen Se presenta un analisis tematico de tres debates parlamentarios claves para el tema de la libertad de expresion en el ambito mediatico en Chile desde la vuelta a la democracia: la discusion en torno a la Ley de Prensa 1993–2001, el Informe de la Comision Especial sobre las Libertades de Pensamiento y Expresion 2007–2010 y el debate de la Ley de Television Digital 2008–2014. En todos ellos, la batalla principal se ha librado por el significado mismo de la libertad de expresion, por su contenido meramente negativo —como la libertad de “injerencia” estatal— o el positivo que supone un Estado activo. Los ganadores de los debates argumentaron en contra de la regulacion viendola como una intromision estatal limitante para el mercado, y reduciendo asi la nocion de la libertad de expresion a la libertad de empresa. Abstract This article presents a thematic analysis of three parliamentary debates that are key to the topic of freedom of expression in the Chilean media since the return of democracy: the debate on the Press Law, 1993–2001; the Report of the Special Commission on Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Expression, 2007–2010; and the debate on the Digital Television Law, 2008–2014. In all three cases, the debates turned fundamentally on the central issue of the very meaning of the concept of freedom of expression: whether it should be understood in a merely negative sense—as freedom from state “interference”—or as a positive right to expression (presupposing an active state). These debates were all won by those who argued against regulation, viewing it as state intrusion against the market and thus reducing the notion of free expression to that of free enterprise.

We consider a set of security and privacy problems under reliability and storage constraints that can be tackled by using codes and particularly focus on the secret-key agreement problem. Polar subcodes (PSCs) are polar codes (PCs) with dynamically-frozen symbols and have a larger code minimum distance than PCs with only statically-frozen symbols. A randomized nested PSC construction, where the low-rate code is a PSC and the high-rate code is a PC, is proposed for successive cancellation list (SCL) and sequential decoders. This code construction aims to perform lossy compression with side information, i.e., Wyner-Ziv (WZ) coding. Nested PSCs are used in the key agreement problem with physical identifiers and two terminals since WZ-coding constructions significantly improve on Slepian-Wolf coding constructions such as fuzzy extractors. Significant gains in terms of the secret-key vs. storage rate ratio as compared to nested PCs with the same list sizes are illustrated to show that nested PSCs significantly improve on all existing code constructions. The performance of the nested PSCs is shown to improve with larger list sizes, unlike the nested PCs considered. A design procedure to efficiently construct nested PSCs and possible improvements to the nested PSC designs are also provided.

La Educación Superior es uno de los motores del desarrollo social y económico de los países, teniendo como objetivo último el de facilitar una formación académica de calidad. En la actualidad, los modelos de enseñanza-aprendizaje en entornos virtuales implican retos importantes, específicamente en la actual situación por la COVID-19. Algunos de estos desafíos se abordarán en este estudio. Se trabajó con 225 estudiantes de tercero de grado en titulaciones de Ciencias de la Salud, a lo largo de dos cursos académicos impartidos durante la situación de pandemia. Los objetivos fueron: 1) comprobar si existían diferencias significativas en la satisfacción de los estudiantes con el proceso docente respecto del primer año de pandemia (se aplicó docencia e-Learning) vs. el segundo año (se aplicó docencia b-Learning); 2) comprobar si existían diferencias significativas en los resultados académicos entre ambos grupos. Se realizó una investigación cuantitativa (se utilizó un diseño factorial 2x2, ANOVA y ANCOVA) y otra cualitativa (se utilizó un diseño comparativo con análisis de categorización). Los resultados indican diferencias en algunos aspectos de la satisfacción y en los resultados de aprendizaje, a favor de la docencia en el segundo año. Los estudiantes valoraron positivamente el uso de metodologías activas y de recursos tecnológicos, si bien concluyeron que su uso exigía más tiempo de trabajo. Futuros estudios se dirigirán a contrastar la satisfacción de estudiantes en otras ramas de conocimiento., Higher education is one of the driving forces behind the social and economic development of countries, with the ultimate aim of providing quality academic training. At present, teaching-learning models in virtual environments face a number of important challenges, particularly in the current situation caused by COVID-19. Some of these challenges will be addressed in this study. We worked with 225 third-year undergraduate students in health science degrees over two academic years during the pandemic. The objectives were: (1) to ascertain whether there were significant differences in student satisfaction with the teaching process in the first year of the pandemic (e-learning teaching) vs. the second year (b-learning teaching); (2) to determine whether there were significant differences in academic performance between the two groups. Quantitative research (using a 2x2 factorial design, ANOVA and ANCOVA) and qualitative research (using a comparative design with categorisation analysis) were carried out. The results indicate differences in some aspects of satisfaction and learning outcomes in favour of teaching in the second of the two years. Students rated the use of active methodologies and technological resources positively, although they concluded that their use required more work time. Future studies will seek to compare student satisfaction in other areas of knowledge.

Abstract. Headlines that are incongruous with article content can negatively impact media learning outcomes. Clickbait headlines intentionally misrepresent news content, often in sensational ways to increase click-throughs and ad revenue. To evaluate the impact of clickbait headlines on media learning and article-related beliefs, we conducted two online experiments, each testing a 3 (headline-type: accurate, clickbait-question, clickbait-exaggerated) × 2 (exposure: headline-only, full article) factorial. In Study 1, an online sample of US adults ( N = 629) was randomly assigned to one of six news message conditions. Study 2 ( N = 1,674) was a replication study across three news contexts and testing a mediator to explain how exposure to a clickbait headline can influence learning. Key results suggest that reading the full article with an accurate headline resulted in the highest recognition and comprehension, and reading correcting information within an article is likely not enough to overcome the deleterious impact of a clickbait headline. Theoretical and practical recommendations are discussed.

In this study, we present a novel method for recognizing the properties of materials by using the returning echoes of self-emitted acoustic signals. This is achieved by mimicking the acoustic recognition mechanisms that are present in several animals like bats and dolphins. To implement this mechanism, we propose an end-to-end machine learning approach that uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which can translate spectral cues that are delivered by reflected echoes into meaningful information for the target object. To validate the proposed approach, we conducted two different experiments. In the first experiment, we attempted to learn a set of predefined everyday surfaces using that reflected acoustic signals that are emitted from a distance. As an extension of the first experiment, the second experiment investigated whether echo-acoustic signals can be used for the classification of an acoustically smooth surface (e.g., liquid solutions). The experimental results showed that our system can recognize texture and, density information. In comparison to the conventional machine learning approach that relies on feature-engineering processes, our approach that is based on CNNs demonstrated high accuracies (>90%) in the test datasets. We conclude this paper by discussing the limitations of the proposed approach and exploring the potential avenues to incorporate acoustic recognition functionality into computers.

Previous research indicates that user comments serve as exemplars and thus have an effect on perceived public opinion. Moreover, they also shape the attitudes of their readers. However, studies almost exclusively focus on controversial issues if they explore the consequences of user comments for attitudes and perceived public opinion. The current study wants to find out if hate speech attacking social groups due to characteristics such as religion or sexual orientation also has an effect on the way people think about these groups and how they think society perceives them. Moreover, we also investigated the effects of hate speech on prejudiced attitudes. To explore the hypotheses and research questions, we preregistered and conducted a 3 × 2 experimental study varying the amount of hate speech (none/few/many hateful comments) and the group that was attacked (Muslims/homosexuals). Results show no effects of the amount of hate speech on perceived public opinion for both groups. However, if homosexuals are attacked, hate speech negatively affects perceived social cohesion. Moreover, for both groups, we find interaction effects between preexisting attitudes and hate speech for discriminating demands. This indicates that hate speech can increase polarization in society.

Abstract. This study tests the effects of camera distance and camera angle on emotional response across four categories of pictures covering a large emotional range (positive and negative miscellanea, erotica, and threat), using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) –a large database of emotionally evocative photographs. We content analyzed 722 images for the content category and camera framing (distance and angle), employing these as independent factors in analyses, and used the IAPS’ pre-existing normative average ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and dominance as dependent variables. As hypothesized, affective responses were generally increased by closer framing and high and low angles (compared to straight angles), but the content of the picture played an important role in determining effect strength and direction. In particular, closeness increased arousal for all picture groups but had the opposite effect on positive miscellaneous pictures, straight angles decreased the emotional response for the two miscellanea groups, and low angles increased the emotional response for threatening pictures. This study is the first to show that previously found camera framing effects apply to pictures of high emotional intensity (e.g., erotica and threat). We suggest that future work should consider formal manipulations alongside message content.