Flooded with Information from Social Media: Effects of Disaster Information Source and Visuals on Viewers' Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Responses

While a variety of crisis types loom as real risks for organizations and communities, and the media landscape continues to evolve, research is needed to help explain and predict how people respond to various kinds of crisis and disaster information. For example, despite the rising prevalence of digital and mobile media centered on still and moving visuals, and stark increases in Americans’ use of visual-based platforms for seeking and sharing disaster information, relatively little is known about how the presence or absence of disaster visuals online might prompt or deter resilience-related feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviors. Yet, with such insights, governmental and other organizational entities as well as communities themselves may best help individuals and communities prepare for, cope with, and recover from adverse events. Thus, this work uses the theoretical lens of the social-mediated crisis communication model (SMCC) coupled with the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP) to explore effects of disaster information source and visuals on viewers’ resilience-related responses to an extreme flooding scenario. Results from two experiments are reported. First a preliminary 2 (disaster information source: organization/US National Weather Service vs. news media/USA Today) x 2 (disaster visuals: no visual podcast vs. moving visual video) factorial between-subjects online experiment with a convenience sample of university students probes effects of crisis source and visuals on a variety of cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. A second between-subjects online experiment manipulating still and moving visual pace in online videos (no visual vs. still, slow-pace visual vs. still, medium-pace visual vs. still, fast-pace visual vs. moving, slow-pace visual vs. moving, medium-pace visual vs. moving, fast-pace visual) with a convenience sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk) similarly probes a variety of potentially resilience-related cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. The role of biological sex as a quasi-experimental variable is also investigated in both studies. Various implications for community resilience and recommendations for risk and disaster communicators are explored. Implications for theory building and future research are also examined. Resulting modifications of the SMCC model (i.e., removing “message strategy” and adding the new category of “message content elements” under organizational considerations) are proposed.

Role of financial and other information in trade credit decisions in SMEs: An international study

Trade credit is an important source of finance for SMEs and this study investigates the use of the financial statements and other information in making trade credit decisions in smaller entities in Finland, the UK, USA and South Africa. The study adds to the literature by examining the information needs of unincorporated entities as a basis for making comparisons with small, unlisted companies. In-depth, semi-structured interviews in each country were used to collect data from the owner-managers of SMEs and from credit rating agencies and credit insurers. The findings provide insights into similarities and differences between countries and between developed and developing economies. The evidence suggests that there are three main influences on the trade credit decision: formal and report-based information, soft information relating to social capital and contingency factors. The latter dictate the extent to which hard/formal information versus soft/informal information is used.

Pedagogical Appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by West African Educators = Appropriation pédagogique des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) par les éducateurs ouest-africains

Œuvre dédiée à Alioune Camara; merci au Prof. Denis Dougnon de l’Université de Bamako pour le parrainage

Pedagogical Appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) by West African Educators = Appropriation pédagogique des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) par les éducateurs ouest-africains

Œuvre dédiée à Alioune Camara; merci au Prof. Denis Dougnon de l’Université de Bamako pour le parrainage

Summary of Commercial Fishing Laws for Other Equipment/Trotlines and General Commercial Fishing Information 2016-2017

Each year the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Marine Resources Division publishes a summary of the laws and regulations of commercial fishing in the state. This publication provides the license requirements, definitions, restrictions, and laws and regulations for the use of fishing equipment.

A new educational technology for media and communication studies : mapping media in Australia and Sweden

This chapter reports on Australian and Swedish experiences in the iterative design, development, and ongoing use of interactive educational systems we call ‘Media Maps.’ Like maps in general, Media Maps are usefully understood as complex cultural technologies; that is, they are not only physical objects, tools and artefacts, but also information creation and distribution technologies, the use and development of which are embedded in systems of knowledge and social meaning. Drawing upon Australian and Swedish experiences with one Media Map technology, this paper illustrates this three-layered approach to the development of media mapping. It shows how media mapping is being used to create authentic learning experiences for students preparing for work in the rapidly evolving media and communication industries. We also contextualise media mapping as a response to various challenges for curriculum and learning design in Media and Communication Studies that arise from shifts in tertiary education policy in a global knowledge economy.

Libr@ries : changing information space and practice

This volume examines the social, cultural, and political implications of the shift from traditional forms of print-based libraries to the delivery of online information in educational contexts. Despite the central role of libraries in literacy and learning, research of them has, in the main, remained isolated within the disciplinary boundaries of information and library science. By contrast, this book problematizes and thereby mainstreams the field. It brings together scholars from a wide range of academic fields to explore the dislodging of library discourse from its longstanding apolitical, modernist paradigm. Collectively, the authors interrogate the presuppositions of current library practice and examine how library as place and library as space blend together in ways that may be both complementary and contradictory. Seeking a suitable term to designate this rapidly evolving and much contested development, the editors devised the word “libr@ary,” and use the term arobase to signify the conditions of formation of new libraries within contexts of space, knowledge, and capital.

Semantic oscillations : encoding context and structure in complex valued holographic vectors

In computational linguistics, information retrieval and applied cognition, words and concepts are often represented as vectors in high dimensional spaces computed from a corpus of text. These high dimensional spaces are often referred to as Semantic Spaces. We describe a novel and efficient approach to computing these semantic spaces via the use of complex valued vector representations. We report on the practical implementation of the proposed method and some associated experiments. We also briefly discuss how the proposed system relates to previous theoretical work in Information Retrieval and Quantum Mechanics and how the notions of probability, logic and geometry are integrated within a single Hilbert space representation. In this sense the proposed system has more general application and gives rise to a variety of opportunities for future research.

Down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass: A conception of information seeking and searching through a diary study.

Information behaviour (IB) is an area within Library and Information Science that studies the totality of human behaviour in relation to information, both active and passive, along with the explicit and the tacit mental states related to information. This study reports on a recently completed dissertation research that integrates the different models of information behaviours using a diary study where 34 participants maintained a daily journal for two weeks through a web log or paper diary. This resulted in thick descriptions of IB, which were manually analysed using the Grounded Theory method of inquiry, and then cross-referenced through both text-analysis and statistical analysis programs. Among the many key findings of this study, one is the focus this paper: how participants express their feelings of the information seeking process and their mental and affective states related specifically to the sense-making component which co-occurs with almost every other aspect of information behaviour. The paper title – Down the Rabbit Hole and Through the Looking Glass – refers to an observation that some of the participants made in their journals when they searched for, or avoided information, and wrote that they felt like they have fallen into a rabbit hole where nothing made sense, and reported both positive feelings of surprise and amazement, and negative feelings of confusion, puzzlement, apprehensiveness, frustration, stress, ambiguity, and fatigue. The study situates this sense-making aspects of IB within an overarching model of information behaviour that includes IB concepts like monitoring information, encountering information, information seeking and searching, flow, multitasking, information grounds, information horizons, and more, and proposes an integrated model of information behaviour illuminating how these different concepts are interleaved and inter-connected with each other, along with it's implications for information services.

An observational study of how objects support engineering design thinking and communication : implications for the design of tangible media

There has been an increasing interest in objects within the HCI field particularly with a view to designing tangible interfaces. However, little is known about how people make sense of objects and how objects support thinking. This paper presents a study of groups of engineers using physical objects to prototype designs, and articulates the roles that physical objects play in supporting their design thinking and communications. The study finds that design thinking is heavily dependent upon physical objects, that designers are active and opportunistic in seeking out physical props and that the interpretation and use of an object depends heavily on the activity. The paper discusses the trade-offs that designers make between speed and accuracy of models, and specificity and generality in choice of representations. Implications for design of tangible interfaces are discussed.

Intelligent computing and sensing for active safety on construction sites

On obstacle-cluttered construction sites where heavy equipment is in use, safety issues are of major concern. The main objective of this paper is to develop a framework with algorithms for obstacle avoidance and path planning based on real-time three-dimensional job site models to improve safety during equipment operation. These algorithms have the potential to prevent collisions between heavy equipment vehicles and other on-site objects. In this study, algorithms were developed for image data acquisition, real-time 3D spatial modeling, obstacle avoidance, and shortest path finding and were all integrated to construct a comprehensive collision-free path. Preliminary research results show that the proposed approach is feasible and has the potential to be used as an active safety feature for heavy equipment.

The internetalisation of information, knowledge and interaction components of the firm’s internationalisation process

Transcending traditional national borders, the Internet is an evolving technology that has opened up many new international market opportunities. However, ambiguity remains, with limited research and understanding of how the Internet influences the firm’s internationalisation process components. As a consequence, there has been a call for further investigation of the phenomenon. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the Internet’s impact on the internationalisation process components, specifically, information availability, information usage, interactive communication and international market growth. Analysis was undertaken using structural equation modelling. Findings highlight the mediating impact of the Internet on information and knowledge transference in the internationalisation process. Contributions of the study test conceptualisations and give statistical validation of interrelationships, while illuminating the Internet’s impact on firm internationalisation.

Scalability of encryption techniques for electronic health record (EHR) retrieval

Electronic Health Record (EHR) retrieval processes are complex demanding Information Technology (IT) resources exponentially in particular memory usage. Database-as-a-service (DAS) model approach is proposed to meet the scalability factor of EHR retrieval processes. A simulation study using ranged of EHR records with DAS model was presented. The bucket-indexing model incorporated partitioning fields and bloom filters in a Singleton design pattern were used to implement custom database encryption system. It effectively provided faster responses in the range query compared to different types of queries used such as aggregation queries among the DAS, built-in encryption and the plain-text DBMS. The study also presented with constraints around the approach should consider for other practical applications.

Democracy, Crime and Justice. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences

As a growing number of nations embark on a path to democracy, criminologists have become increasingly interested and engaged in the challenges, concerns, and questions connecting democracy with both crime and criminal justice. Rising levels of violence and street crime, white collar crime and corruption both in countries where democracy is securely in place and where it is struggling, have fuelled a deepening skepticism as to the capacity of democracy to deliver on its promise of security and justice for all citizens. What role does crime and criminal justice play in the future of democracy and for democratic political development on a global level? The editors of this special volume of The Annals realized the importance of collecting research from a broad spectrum of countries and covering a range of problems that affect citizens, politicians, and criminal justice officials. The articles here represent a solid balance between mature democracies like the U.S. and U.K. as well as emerging democracies around the globe – specifically in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. They are based on large and small cross-national samples, regional comparisons, and case studies. Each contribution addresses a seminal question for the future of democratic political development across the globe. What is the role of criminal justice in the process of building democracy and instilling confidence in its institutions? Is there a role for unions in democratizing police forces? What is the impact of widespread disenfranchisement of felons on democratic citizenship and the life of democratic institutions? Under what circumstances do mature democracies adopt punitive sentencing regimes? Addressing sensitive topics such as relations between police and the Muslim communities of Western Europe in the wake of terrorist attacks, this volume also sheds light on the effects of terrorism on mature democracies under increasing pressure to provide security for their citizens. By taking a broad vantage point, this collection of research delves into complex topics such as the relationship between the process of democratization and violent crime waves; the impact of rising crime rates on newly established as well as secure democracies; how crime may endanger the transition to democracy; and how existing practices of criminal justice in mature democracies affect their core values and institutions. The collection of these insightful articles not only begins to fill a gap in criminological research but also addresses issues of critical interest to political scientists as well as other social and behavioral scientists and scholars. Taking a fresh approach to the intersection of crime, criminal justice, and democracy, this volume of The Annals is a must-read for criminologists and political scientists and provides a solid foundation for further interdisciplinary research.