In its latest edition, the Associated Press Stylebook — a widely used reference for journalists — is embracing the use of “they” as a singular pronoun.
Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.
There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com.
It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.
The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.
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The News Literacy Project
A Stanford studyfound that the majority of middle school students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news. In fact, 82 percent couldn’t distinguish between a real news story on a website and a “sponsored content” post.
The WSJ: Of the 8,704 students studied (ranging in age from middle school to college level), four in ten high-school students believed that the region near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was toxic after seeing an unsourced photo of deformed daisies coupled with a headline about the Japanese area. The photo, keep in mind, had no source or location attribution. Meanwhile, two out of every three middle-schoolers were fooled by an article on financial preparedness penned by a bank executive.
The survey data is based on a survey of more than 500 scholars drawn from more than 50 major research universities in the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. Data is broken out by various criteria, such as type of university, scholar’s country, gender, political views, academic subject specialty, academic title and other criteria.
50.69% of respondents are currently collaborating or coordinating research with scholars or other researchers from other universities or colleges outside of their country.
Web based meetings were most common in the Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry and other Science and Technology fields, 33.70, and least common in the Literature and Languages fields, 2.92.
7.72% of respondents routinely use Adobe Connect to communicate with scholars at other locations.
87.52% of respondents have co-authored a journal article with one or more other authors. Co-authorship was most common in Australia/New Zealand, 96.77%, followed by Canada, 93.10%, and the UK/Ireland, 89.83%. It was least common in the USA, 85.07%.
a study, the “Why We Post” project, has just been published by nine anthropologists, led by Daniel Miller of University College, London. worked independently for 15 months at locations in Brazil, Britain, Chile, China (one rural and one industrial site), India, Italy, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkey.
In rural China and Turkey social media were viewed as a distraction from education. But in industrial China and Brazil they were seen to be an educational resource. Such a divide was evident in India, too. There, high-income families regarded them with suspicion but low-income families advocated them as a supplementary source of schooling. In Britain, meanwhile, they were valued not directly as a means of education, but as a way for pupils, parents and teachers to communicate.
How would you answer if addressed by this study? How do you see social media? Do you see it differently then before?
On a recent visit in 2015, I found the social media landscape dramatically changed, again. Facebook began actively steering reading practices through changes in 2013 to the News Feed algorithm, which determines content in the site’s central feature. That year, Facebook announced an effort to prioritize “high quality content,” defined as timely, relevant, and trustworthy—and not clickbait, memes, or other viral links. This policy, along with changing practices in sharing news content generally, meant that current events can unfold on and through social media.
how much of your news do you acquire through social media? do you trust the information you acquire through social media? #FakeNews – have explored this hashtag? What is your take on fake news?
meaning management :
Anthropologists and the culturally sensitive analysts take complex bits of data and develop a higher-order sense of them. Information and meaning work at cross purposes. In managing meaning, context is everything while in managing information context is error and noise. When we give our social listening projects to information specialists, we lose an appreciation of context and with it the ability to extract the meanings that provide insight for our companies and brands.
Meaning management also involves a deeper appreciation of social listening as a component of a broader meaning-making system, rather than as, simply, a data source to be exploited.
How do you perceive meaning management? Do you see yourself being a professional with the ability to collect, analyze and interpret such data for your company?
Students will be introduced to exercises, experiences, and assignments, which focus on developing student’s classroom engagement, empowerment, critical awareness of media, civic engagement, and adoption of a social justice agenda. The guide enables students to work with faculty to produce GCMLP Webpage content, which can be consumed by the public to help expand citizen’s understanding of key events and processes in the global society. Furthermore, participating students will be granted academic and employment opportunities through the GCMLP, so they can be equitable participants in the 21st century economy.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
The Charles G. Koch Foundation offered to give the university $1.5 million to hire two assistant professors and fund fellowships and undergraduate curriculum on free-enterprise topics.
“In exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”
How the Koch Brothers Are Influencing U.S. Colleges
The most notable difference: While some of Soros’ higher education grants go to programs aligning with his domestic policy priorities, the majority are focused overseas, tax records show.
Spreading the Free-Market Gospel
What’s new and interesting about the Koch brothers’ approach to funding academics
It is well-known that the Kochs’ network has invested hundreds of millions of hard-to-track dollars in conservative political nonprofits that influence elections. The brothers, who earned theirbillions leading private oil, chemical, and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries Inc., were dominant forces in recent election cycles
The Kochs educational giving, while rarefied, isn’t the most abundant in the United States. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, with his wife Betty, this year pledged $100 million to the California Institute of Technology—and offered to let the school to spend it as it sees fit.
At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, for example, documents show the foundation wanted more than just academic excellence for its money. It wanted information about students it could potentially use for its own benefit
Among the proposed conditions: Teachings must align with the libertarian economic philosophy of Charles Koch, the Charles Koch Foundation would maintain partial control over faculty hiring and the chairman of the school’s economics department—a prominent economic theorist—must stay in place for another three years despite his plans to step down.
Florida State University ultimately didn’t agree to the initial requests when, in 2008, it reached a funding agreement with the foundation. It’s also tightened and clarified policies that affect private donors’ contributions to the university.
To Charles Koch, Universities Are Propaganda Machines
From
Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
(https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/)
Fact-Checking Organizations
There are many fact-checking sites outside the U.S. Here is a small sample.