Posts tagged research

This is a Brain This describes the brain and what’s happening. 

This is a Brain

This describes the brain and what’s happening. 

The State of the News Media 2013

onaissues:

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released their annual report on American journalism this week.  The report paints a bleak picture of the  news landscape, citing “a continued erosion of news reporting resources” and detailing “a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands.” You can view the full report online. 

On Slate, Matthew Yglesias counters the findings of the report. He argues, “American news media has never been in better shape. That’s just common sense. Almost anything you’d want to know about any subject is available at your fingertips.” He criticizes The State of the News Media Report for focusing  on the challenges related to monetizing digital content and selling ads and ignoring the variety and depth of news available today online. 

FJP: On our ever expanding reading list.

latimes: Twitter is not the world: Or America, for that matter. In a new study from Pew Research, reactions to events on Twitter often are detached from society’s reactions as a whole. While Pew found that Twitter consensus moves back and forth from liberal to conservative, what really sticks out is just how much more negative Twitter discussions can be. For both [presidential] candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin throughout the fall campaign season. But from September through November, Romney was consistently the target of more negative reactions than was Obama. And as always, it’s important to understand the limitations of Twitter’s reach. The overall reach of Twitter is modest. In the Pew Research Center’s 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter. Read Pew’s full study here (or follow them on Tumblr, which will hopefully be proven to be more positive than Twitter). Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP

latimes:

Twitter is not the world: Or America, for that matter. In a new study from Pew Research, reactions to events on Twitter often are detached from society’s reactions as a whole. While Pew found that Twitter consensus moves back and forth from liberal to conservative, what really sticks out is just how much more negative Twitter discussions can be.

For both [presidential] candidates, negative comments exceeded positive comments by a wide margin throughout the fall campaign season. But from September through November, Romney was consistently the target of more negative reactions than was Obama.

And as always, it’s important to understand the limitations of Twitter’s reach.

The overall reach of Twitter is modest. In the Pew Research Center’s 2012 biennial news consumption survey, just 13% of adults said they ever use Twitter or read Twitter messages; only 3% said they regularly or sometimes tweet or retweet news or news headlines on Twitter.

Read Pew’s full study here (or follow them on Tumblr, which will hopefully be proven to be more positive than Twitter).

Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP

Help an Iranian Researcher Out A few days ago, Iman Miri, a researcher from Tehran, reached out to us and asked that we help him promote a research project he’s conducting about technology and the media. He’s trying to research media habits and if you’d like to participate in the survey for his research, fill out the English questionnaire here or the Farsi questionnaire here. It doesn’t take more than 5-10 minutes of your time to fill out

Help an Iranian Researcher Out

A few days ago, Iman Miri, a researcher from Tehran, reached out to us and asked that we help him promote a research project he’s conducting about technology and the media.

He’s trying to research media habits and if you’d like to participate in the survey for his research, fill out the English questionnaire here or the Farsi questionnaire here.

It doesn’t take more than 5-10 minutes of your time to fill out

Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.
The Origins of ‘Big Data’: An Etymological Detective Story - NYTimes.com (via greglinch)

The New York Times

Predicting the Future via New York Times Archives

Well, not just the Times, scientists are also digging through Wikipedia among many other sites.

Via GigaOm:

Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them.

The new research is the latest in a number of similar initiatives that seek to mine web data to predict all kinds of events. Recorded Future, for instance, analyzes news, blogs and social media to “help identify predictive signals” for a variety of industries, including financial services and defense. Researchers are also using Twitter and Google to track flu outbreaks.

Technology Review outlines how it can work.

The system provides striking results when tested on historical data. For example, reports of droughts in Angola in 2006 triggered a warning about possible cholera outbreaks in the country, because previous events had taught the system that cholera outbreaks were more likely in years following droughts. A second warning about cholera in Angola was triggered by news reports of large storms in Africa in early 2007; less than a week later, reports appeared that cholera had become established. In similar tests involving forecasts of disease, violence, and a significant numbers of deaths, the system’s warnings were correct between 70 to 90 percent of the time.

See Kira Radinsky and Eric Horvitz, Mining the Web to Predict Future Events (PDF).

Researching Journalism, Ethics and Technology

We received a question some time ago from theinsightfulmouse which went like this:

I am planning an undergraduate thesis on the effects of technology on journalism ethics and looking to narrow my topic. Do you all have any ideas or suggestions of interesting, complex issues to research relating to journalism, ethics and technology?

Well, insightful mouse, there is a universe of interesting questions in the realm of journalism ethics, especially regarding online journalism. We’ll offer you some starting points for research rather than fleshed out ideas, because those will very much depend on your personal interests and investments.

You might like to search our Tumblr archive for ethics posts. We’ve written, for example, about the ethics of  news vs. reviews, privacy on social media, linking, curation, and Instagram, all of which are debates that have since developed and could use more digging. Also see our transparency tag, which is something that you can deep dive into for a number of questions. Other great places to explore for ideas are the Public Editor’s Journal over at the NY Times, and Poynter’s Everyday Ethics.

Very useful (and fun, if you geek out over this stuff like me) is reading the ethics guidelines of various news organizations (here is a great list), many of which address online journalism. NPR has a great ethics handbook in which the visual journalism section deals with issues of digital attribution and manipulation (not necessarily the most compelling research topic, but useful to bookmark if you’re a journalist). Finally, and arguably the mecca of these questions, can be found in this discussion that Poynter hosted on journalism ethics in the digital age, on which a book is also in the works—I wrote a reaction here. The people involved are also key people you might want to reach out to help focus your ideas.

You did ask this question some time ago, so if you’ve already narrowed down a topic, do share it with us! —Jihii

Have a question for us? Ask.

I Love Messing with Data The Journalist’s Resource, a project that curates media scholarship, created a great reading list on the social, cultural and political issues and possibilities surrounding big data. Like much in today’s digital world, the promise and hope of using huge data sets to solve significant issues are all too tempered by the threats that same data can have depending on whose hands it is in and what they plan to do with it. What follows are abstracts from just some of the articles the Journalist’s Resource has pulled together. Read through for more and to access links back to the originals. danah boyd and Kate Crawford Will large-scale analysis of DNA help cure diseases? Or will it usher in a new wave of medical inequality? Will data analytics help make people’s access to information more efficient and effective? Or will it be used to track protesters in the streets of major cities? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Some or all of the above?… Given the rise of Big Data as both a phenomenon and a methodological persuasion, we believe that it is time to start critically interrogating this phenomenon, its assumptions and its biases. Vivek Kundra If … data isn’t sliced, diced and cubed to separate signal from noise, it can be useless. But, when made available to the public and combined with the network effect — defined by Reed’s Law, which asserts that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network — society has the potential to drive massive social, political and economic change. David M. Berry In cutting up the world [into data chunks], information about the world necessarily has to be discarded in order to store a representation within the computer. In other words, a computer requires that everything is transformed from the continuous flow of our everyday reality into a grid of numbers that can be stored as a representation of reality which can then be manipulated using algorithms. These subtractive methods of understanding reality (episteme) produce new knowledges and methods for the control of reality (techne). They do so through a digital mediation, which the digital humanities are starting to take seriously as they’re problematic.” Bert-Japp Koops Big Data involves not only individuals’ digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) but, perhaps more importantly, also individuals’ data shadows (information about them generated by others). And contrary to physical footprints and shadows, their digital counterparts are not ephemeral but persistent. This presents particular challenges for the right to be forgotten, which are discussed in the form of three key questions. Against whom can the right be invoked? When and why can the right be invoked? And how can the right be effected?” Janna Anderson and Lee RainieWhile enthusiasts see great potential for using Big Data, privacy advocates are worried as more and more data is collected about people — both as they knowingly disclose such things as their postings through social media and as they unknowingly share digital details about themselves as they march through life. Not only do the advocates worry about profiling, they also worry that those who crunch Big Data with algorithms might draw the wrong conclusions about who someone is, how she might behave in the future, and how to apply the correlations that will emerge in the data analysis. Image: Calvin and Hobbes.

I Love Messing with Data

The Journalist’s Resource, a project that curates media scholarship, created a great reading list on the social, cultural and political issues and possibilities surrounding big data.

Like much in today’s digital world, the promise and hope of using huge data sets to solve significant issues are all too tempered by the threats that same data can have depending on whose hands it is in and what they plan to do with it.

What follows are abstracts from just some of the articles the Journalist’s Resource has pulled together. Read through for more and to access links back to the originals.

danah boyd and Kate Crawford
Will large-scale analysis of DNA help cure diseases? Or will it usher in a new wave of medical inequality? Will data analytics help make people’s access to information more efficient and effective? Or will it be used to track protesters in the streets of major cities? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Some or all of the above?… Given the rise of Big Data as both a phenomenon and a methodological persuasion, we believe that it is time to start critically interrogating this phenomenon, its assumptions and its biases.

Vivek Kundra
If … data isn’t sliced, diced and cubed to separate signal from noise, it can be useless. But, when made available to the public and combined with the network effect — defined by Reed’s Law, which asserts that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network — society has the potential to drive massive social, political and economic change.

David M. Berry
In cutting up the world [into data chunks], information about the world necessarily has to be discarded in order to store a representation within the computer. In other words, a computer requires that everything is transformed from the continuous flow of our everyday reality into a grid of numbers that can be stored as a representation of reality which can then be manipulated using algorithms. These subtractive methods of understanding reality (episteme) produce new knowledges and methods for the control of reality (techne). They do so through a digital mediation, which the digital humanities are starting to take seriously as they’re problematic.”

Bert-Japp Koops
Big Data involves not only individuals’ digital footprints (data they themselves leave behind) but, perhaps more importantly, also individuals’ data shadows (information about them generated by others). And contrary to physical footprints and shadows, their digital counterparts are not ephemeral but persistent. This presents particular challenges for the right to be forgotten, which are discussed in the form of three key questions. Against whom can the right be invoked? When and why can the right be invoked? And how can the right be effected?”

Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie
While enthusiasts see great potential for using Big Data, privacy advocates are worried as more and more data is collected about people — both as they knowingly disclose such things as their postings through social media and as they unknowingly share digital details about themselves as they march through life. Not only do the advocates worry about profiling, they also worry that those who crunch Big Data with algorithms might draw the wrong conclusions about who someone is, how she might behave in the future, and how to apply the correlations that will emerge in the data analysis.

Image: Calvin and Hobbes.

Small Town News The Pew Research Center released a report today in partnership with the Knight Foundation that explores how US adults get local news by community type. Fun facts from the report: Urban residents: People who live in large cities rely on a wider combination of platforms for information than others and are more likely to get local news and information via a range of digital activities, including internet searches, Twitter, blogs and the websites of local TV stations and newspapers. Urbanites were also those least tied to their communities in terms of how long they lived in the community and how many people they know… …Suburban residents: Those who live in suburban communities are more likely than others to rely on local radio as a platform (perhaps because of relatively longer commuting times); they are more interested than others in news and information about arts and cultural events; and they are particularly interested in local restaurants, traffic, and taxes. Like urbanites, they are heavy digital participators who comment and share the news… …Small town residents: Along with rural residents, people who live in smaller towns are more likely to rely on traditional news platforms such as television and newspapers to get local news; newspapers are especially important to them for civic information. Small town Americans prefer the local newspaper for a long list of information—including local weather, crime, community events, schools, arts and culture, taxes, housing, zoning, local government and social services. Residents of smaller towns are also the most likely to worry about what would happen if the local newspaper no longer existed. Rural residents: Those who live in rural communities generally are less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also more reliant on traditional platforms such as newspapers and TV for most of the topics we queried. And they are less likely than others to say it is easier now to keep up with local information. Pew Research Center, How people get local news and information in different communities (PDF).

Small Town News

The Pew Research Center released a report today in partnership with the Knight Foundation that explores how US adults get local news by community type.

Fun facts from the report:

Urban residents: People who live in large cities rely on a wider combination of platforms for information than others and are more likely to get local news and information via a range of digital activities, including internet searches, Twitter, blogs and the websites of local TV stations and newspapers. Urbanites were also those least tied to their communities in terms of how long they lived in the community and how many people they know…

…Suburban residents: Those who live in suburban communities are more likely than others to rely on local radio as a platform (perhaps because of relatively longer commuting times); they are more interested than others in news and information about arts and cultural events; and they are particularly interested in local restaurants, traffic, and taxes. Like urbanites, they are heavy digital participators who comment and share the news…

…Small town residents: Along with rural residents, people who live in smaller towns are more likely to rely on traditional news platforms such as television and newspapers to get local news; newspapers are especially important to them for civic information. Small town Americans prefer the local newspaper for a long list of information—including local weather, crime, community events, schools, arts and culture, taxes, housing, zoning, local government and social services. Residents of smaller towns are also the most likely to worry about what would happen if the local newspaper no longer existed.

Rural residents: Those who live in rural communities generally are less interested in almost all local topics than those in other communities. The one exception is taxes. They are also more reliant on traditional platforms such as newspapers and TV for most of the topics we queried. And they are less likely than others to say it is easier now to keep up with local information.

Pew Research Center, How people get local news and information in different communities (PDF).

Forget the Paywall, Consider the Surveywall

About 150 US news sites have some sort of paywall (give or take 150 or so). Some are hard, some are soft and some are in between.

All have been written about extensively.

But what if we looked at walls from an entirely different direction? Google’s done this with their Consumer Surveys. Instead of asking readers to pull out their wallets to access content, they’re asked to answer a single question. Think of it as a Surveywall.

Frédéric Filloux describes it like so:

Eighteen months ago — under non disclosure — Google showed publishers a new transaction system for inexpensive products such as newspaper articles. It worked like this: to gain access to a web site, the user is asked to participate to a short consumer research session. A single question, a set of images leading to a quick choice.

The solution is one that’s beautiful in its simplicity. Market research is an almost $30 billion industry. And while a lot of it is much more than having people answer surveys, a lot of it is people answering surveys.

So what if you target surveys to, say, readers of certain sections of The Miami Herald, or Wired, or Car and Driver. The researcher wins because it’s a lower cost solution than traditional outreach. The publisher wins because they’ve gained a revenue stream by running the surveys. The reader wins because her wallet stays in her pocket.

There are caveats, of course, which Frédéric outlines:

In theory, the mechanism finally solves the old quest for tiny, friction-free transactions: replace the paid-for zone with a survey-zone through which access is granted after answering a quick question. Needless to say, it can’t be recommended for all sites. We can’t reasonably expect a general news site, not to mention a business news one, to adopt such a scheme. It would immediately irritate the users and somehow taint the content.

I’m not so sure it’s unreasonable. Different, yes, but the entire digital enterprise and the economics behind it is different.

The solution though reminds me of reCAPTCHA, an initiative started at Carnegie Mellon and now run by Google to crowdsource book digitization by harnessing a few seconds of millions of users’ time by having them enter the text they see in a traditional CAPTCHA box (the first word is machine readable, the second isn’t and that’s the one that Google hopes you can decipher).

As Google explains:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

In theory, the micro-surveys of a Surveywall would work similarly. With enough scale to conduct a full survey one question at a time, market researchers gain the insights they’re looking for. The publisher earns more for running the survey than it would get with traditional display advertising.

The question, as it always does, comes back to the reader.

Will she take a few seconds to answer a question, or think it intrusive, close the page and move on?

And that, most likely, comes back to the king of it all: just how valuable is the content that the publisher is providing? — Michael

The Politics of Social Media The Pew Research Center released a study yesterday exploring how people, politics and social media interrelate. Some key findings:  36% of social networking site (SNS) users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in keeping up with political news. 26% of SNS users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in recruiting people to get involved in political issues that matter to them. 25% of SNS users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them for debating or discussing political issues with others. 25% of SNS users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in finding other people who share their views about important political issues. Those numbers aside, it’s been 100% fun keeping up with Twitter while listening to convention speeches. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter how well the two go hand in hand. — Michael Image: Detail from Who Uses Social Networking Sites (PDF), via Pew Internet and American Life Project. 

The Politics of Social Media

The Pew Research Center released a study yesterday exploring how people, politics and social media interrelate. Some key findings: 

  • 36% of social networking site (SNS) users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in keeping up with political news.
  • 26% of SNS users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in recruiting people to get involved in political issues that matter to them.
  • 25% of SNS users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them for debating or discussing political issues with others.
  • 25% of SNS users say the sites are “very important” or “somewhat important” to them in finding other people who share their views about important political issues.

Those numbers aside, it’s been 100% fun keeping up with Twitter while listening to convention speeches. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter how well the two go hand in hand. — Michael

Image: Detail from Who Uses Social Networking Sites (PDF), via Pew Internet and American Life Project. 

It is as if someone sat at a desk and wrote a novel about a research idea.

The Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists in a report on Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii who fabricated 172 papers over the past 19 years. Science Insider, A New Record for Retractions?

Via Science Insider:

Among other problems, the panel, set up by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, could find no records of patients and no evidence medication was ever administered…

…The panel focused on 212 of 249 known Fujii papers. It tried to review the raw data, laboratory notebooks, and records on the patients or animal subjects involved. Committee members also interviewed relevant people.

Among the 172 papers judged bogus, the report claims that 126 studies of randomized, double-blind, controlled trials “were totally fabricated.” The committee identified only three valid papers. For another 37 papers, the panel could not conclusively determine if there had been fabrication.

FJP: Wow.

Where Wireless Speeds of 2.56 Terabytes Per Second Just Happened

Researchers have harnessed streams of light to transfer massive amounts of data. In a recent test, they hit 2.56 terabytes per second. Simplify the language and that’s about the equivalent of transferring over 67,000 songs per second.

Before getting too giddy, this was an experiment over one meter. Still though, add this to a very interesting, data heavy future.

Via TechSpot:

Researchers at USC, JPL and Tel Aviv University have managed to transfer 2.56 terabits of information by multiplexing 8 x 300Gbps “twisted” streams of visible light into a single beam. The feat exploits a phenomenon which, up until recently, scientists thought may have been impossible to achieve with light: orbital angular momentum (OAM).

OAM, the way a wave can be made to twist around itself, is what makes the team’s discovery particularly exciting. It also makes their findings incredibly useful for wireless data transmission. Making light beams spiral to create an optical vortex is not necessarily a new idea, but putting that phenomenon to work for the transmitting information is something researchers have been striving for.

TechSpot, Scientists hit wireless speeds of 2.56Tbps using light vortex beams.

News Coverage of Trayvon Martin Case Drops But Still Public’s Top Story Via the Pew Research Center: For the third straight week, the controversy over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin was the public’s top story, though coverage dropped considerably. A third of the public (33%) say they followed news about the death of the African American teenager in Florida more closely than any other news, about twice the percentage citing the economy (16%) or the 2012 elections (15%). News about the controversy made up 7% of coverage, down from 18% one week earlier, according to a separate analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ). African Americans continue to follow news about the controversy more closely than whites. About seven-in-ten blacks (72%) say they followed Trayvon Martin developments more closely than any other story, compared with 26% of whites. Looking at partisans, 45% of Democrats say this was their top story last week, three times the 15% of Republicans that say this. Among independents more than a third (36%) say this was their top story.

News Coverage of Trayvon Martin Case Drops But Still Public’s Top Story

Via the Pew Research Center:

For the third straight week, the controversy over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin was the public’s top story, though coverage dropped considerably. A third of the public (33%) say they followed news about the death of the African American teenager in Florida more closely than any other news, about twice the percentage citing the economy (16%) or the 2012 elections (15%). News about the controversy made up 7% of coverage, down from 18% one week earlier, according to a separate analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

African Americans continue to follow news about the controversy more closely than whites. About seven-in-ten blacks (72%) say they followed Trayvon Martin developments more closely than any other story, compared with 26% of whites. Looking at partisans, 45% of Democrats say this was their top story last week, three times the 15% of Republicans that say this. Among independents more than a third (36%) say this was their top story.