Thursday, February 07, 2019

How Students Engage with MEdia Dragon News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians



tax apple france from amp.theguardian.com
Apple has agreed to pay 10 years of back taxes to France, marking the latest victory for European governments ...

Apple's French division said it had reached a deal with France to pay an undeclared amount of back-dated tax, which French media estimated at around 500 million euros (A$797 million). ... "As a multinational company, Apple is regularly audited by fiscal authorities around the world," Apple France said in a statement.


Millions are on the move in China, and Big Data is watching

China's high-speed rail network appears to be at the centre of the state's experiment in harnessing technology to not only watch its citizens, but shape their behaviour.


What is it like to live without MEdia Dragon and Google?



Birmingham was brought to a standstill on Saturday, with motorists abandoning cars and the city gridlocked for hours after thousands of teenagers flooded the city centre to see a 19-year-old YouTuber make a 30-second public appearance at a cosmetics store.
Many shoppers were forced to cancel their trips, while parts of the bus network ground to a halt and road traffic was at a standstill, as fans hoped to catch a glimpse of James Charles, who is known for his online makeup guides.

You still underestimate YouTube and MEdiaDragon




One Lawyer, One Day, 194 Felony Cases - New York Times – “High-level felonies carry sentences of 10 years or more and should each get 70 hours of legal attention, according to a workload study. For Mr. Talaska, that’s more than two years of full-time work. Mid-level felonies require 41 hours each.A few of Mr. Talaska’s clients faced life without parole. Such cases, on average, require 201 hours apiece. In total, Mr. Talaska needed to do the work of five full-time lawyers to serve all of his clients. Mr. Talaska was not outside the norm. Of the public defenders in Louisiana handling felony caseloads at that time, there were two dozen with even more clients. One had 413. The numbers alone might seem to violate the Constitution. Poor defendants in the United States have the right to a competent lawyer, and hundreds of thousands of defendants rest their hopes on someone like Mr. Talaska. But there has never been any guarantee that those lawyers would have enough time to handle their cases. That’s why the study cited above, which looked at the workloads of public defenders, is significant…”



How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians,” Project Information Literacy Research Institute. (October 16, 2018). Alison J. Head, John Wihbey, P. Takis Metaxas, Margy MacMillan, and Dan Cohen,
“The News Study research report presents findings about how a sample of U.S. college students gather information and engage with news in the digital age. Results are included from an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 U.S. colleges and universities selected for their regional, demographic, and red/blue state diversity. A computational analysis was conducted using Twitter data associated with the survey respondents and a Twitter panel of 135,891 ​college-age people. Six recommendations are included for educators, journalists, and librarians working to make students ​effective news consumers. To explore the implications of this study’s findings, concise commentaries from leading thinkers in education, libraries, media research, and journalism are included.”


‘Being a truth-teller is the greatest service to society’

 
Walking in Media Dragon Shoes -  Rhia Catapano, Zakary L. Tormala, and Derek D. Rucker:

Does Facebook Really Know How Many Fake Accounts It Has? NYT. Lol no. Seems a bit gentle; the conclusions from Plainsite (cited in the Times article, and linked to at NC on January 25 under “The Bezzle”) seem more in line with what we know about Facebook, the enterprise: “Fcebook has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50% of its network. Its official metrics—many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly—are self-contradictory and even farcical. The company has lost control of its own product.”

Counterattitudinal-argument generation is a powerful tool for opening people up to alternative views. On the basis of decades of research, it should be especially effective when people adopt the perspective of individuals who hold alternative views. In the current research, however, we found the opposite: In three preregistered experiments (total N = 2,734), we found that taking the perspective of someone who endorses a counterattitudinal view lowers receptiveness to that view and reduces attitude change following a counterattitudinal-argument-generation task. This ironic effect can be understood through value congruence: Individuals who take the opposition’s perspective generate arguments that are incongruent with their own values, which diminishes receptiveness and attitude change. Thus, trying to “put yourself in their shoes” can ultimately undermine self-persuasion. Consistent with a value-congruence account, this backfire effect is attenuated when people take the perspective of someone who holds the counterattitudinal view yet has similar overall values.


 The welfare effects of social media, a new paper by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow.  (On the road, have not had a chance to read it yet.)  And the NYT summary.  My guess is this is the best paper on social media/Facebook so far.