Mobile - First News: How People Use Smartphones to Access Information

This report is based on a research study conducted with Nielsen and commissioned by Knight Foundation to explore how people use mobile platforms for news

APIs and Your Privacy

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, have been the topic of much recent discussion. Newsworthy events, including those involving Facebook’s API and Cambridge Analytica obtaining information about millions of Facebook users, have highlighted the technical capabilities of APIs for prominent websites and mobile applications. At the same time, media coverage of ways that APIs have been misused has sparked concern for potential privacy invasions and other issues of public policy. This paper seeks to educate consumers on how APIs work and how they are used within popular websites and mobile apps to gather, share, and utilize data. APIs are used in mobile games, search engines, social media platforms, news and shopping websites, video and music streaming services, dating apps, and mobile payment systems. If a third-party company, like an app developer or advertiser, would like to gain access to your information through a website you visit or a mobile app or online service you use, what data might they obtain about you through APIs and how? This report analyzes 11 prominent online services to observe general trends and provide you an overview of the role APIs play in collecting and distributing information about consumers. For example, how might your data be gathered and shared when using your Facebook account login to sign up for Venmo or to access the Tinder dating app? How might advertisers use Pandora’s API when you are streaming music? After explaining what APIs are and how they work, this report categorizes and characterizes different kinds of APIs that companies offer to web and app developers. Services may offer content-focused APIs, feature APIs, unofficial APIs, and analytics APIs that developers of other apps and websites may access and use in different ways. Likewise, advertisers can use APIs to target a desired subset of a service’s users and possibly extract user data. This report explains how websites and apps can create user profiles based on your online behavior and generate revenue from advertiser-access to their APIs. The report concludes with observations on how various companies and platforms connecting through APIs may be able to learn information about you and aggregate it with your personal data from other sources when you are browsing the internet or using different apps on your smartphone or tablet. While the paper does not make policy recommendations, it demonstrates the importance of approaching consumer privacy from a broad perspective that includes first parties and third parties, and that considers the integral role of APIs in today’s online ecosystem

Get yourself connected: conceptualising the role of digital technologies in Norwegian career guidance

This report outlines the role of digital technologies in the provision of career guidance. It was commissioned by the c ommittee on career guidance which is advising the Norwegian Government following a review of the countries skills system by the OECD. In this report we argue that career guidance and online career guidance in particular can support the development of Norwa y’s skills system to help meet the economic challenges that it faces.The expert committee advising Norway’s Career Guidance Initiativ

The Craft of Incentive Prize Design: Lessons from the Public Sector

In the last five years, incentive prizes have transformed from an exotic open innovation tool to a proven innovation strategy for the public, private and philanthropic sectors. This report offers practical lessons for public sector leaders and their counterparts in the philanthropic and private sectors to help understand what types of outcomes incentive prizes help to achieve, what design elements prize designers use to create these challenges and how to make smart design choices to achieve a particular outcome. It synthesizes insights from expert interviews and analysis of more than 400 prize

The Evolution of Investing

A Literature Review on how investing has changed, the companies that have have pioneered this change, and the shift in investment personality to companies that spearhead Environmental Sustainability through Impact Investing

Distributed tuning of boundary resources: the case of Apple's iOS service system

The digital age has seen the rise of service systems involving highly distributed, heterogeneous, and resource-integrating actors whose relationships are governed by shared institutional logics, standards, and digital technology. The cocreation of service within these service systems takes place in the context of a paradoxical tension between the logic of generative and democratic innovations and the logic of infrastructural control. Boundary resources play a critical role in managing the tension as a firm that owns the infrastructure can secure its control over the service system while independent firms can participate in the service system. In this study, we explore the evolution of boundary resources. Drawing on Pickering’s (1993) and Barrett et al.’s (2012) conceptualizations of tuning, the paper seeks to forward our understanding of how heterogeneous actors engage in the tuning of boundary resources within Apple’s iOS service system. We conduct an embedded case study of Apple’s iOS service system with an in-depth analysis of 4,664 blog articles concerned with 30 boundary resources covering 6 distinct themes. Our analysis reveals that boundary resources of service systems enabled by digital technology are shaped and reshaped through distributed tuning, which involves cascading actions of accommodations and rejections of a network of heterogeneous actors and artifacts. Our study also shows the dualistic role of power in the distributed tuning process

Utilizing community media to facilitate cross-cultural communication between LSU AgCenter field and state agents and Louisiana agricultural producers

The primary purpose of this study was to determine how Louisiana agricultural producers get information related to their crops. Specifically, this study examined how Louisiana agricultural producers used the Louisiana State University AgCenter’s website and other media sources so that it could be determined which form of community media could be used to facilitate cross-cultural communication between LSU AgCenter field and state agents and Louisiana agricultural producers. Data for this study were obtained from 187 usable surveys completed by Louisiana agricultural produceragricultural producers. The data were analyzed to determine if producers utilized the LSU AgCenter website, the frequency they utilized it, detect the trust Louisiana producers had in information provided by the LSU AgCenter on its website, ascertain what additional information Louisiana producers would like to see provided on the LSU AgCenter’s website, determine if social media was an acceptable means of communicating with producers, and identify factors related to how and when information provided by the LSU AgCenter was used in Community media vehicles. The study’s findings indicated The Delta Farm Press was the source producers used to get agriculture-related information. Ag consultants were the second most used source that Louisiana agricultural producers used to receive information. LSU AgCenter agents/offices were the third highest source and the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation was listed as the fourth highest source for agriculture-related information. It was also found that the largest number of producers who accessed the LSU AgCenter’s website did so on a monthly basis and that they trusted material provided by the LSU AgCenter. In addition, the study found Louisiana producers wanted a mobile weather application, as well as more information about markets, more interactive material, and information available in Spanish. In addition, several of the producers indicated they were not aware of all of the services offered on the LSU AgCenter’s website. For instance, weather information is one of the services producers indicated they would like to see on the website. Weather information is available on the website, but it may not be structured so that it is easily found by visitors to the website

The Center for Teaching & Learning: July 1, 2014 - December 2015

Contents: From the Director New Center Supports Teaching and Learning CTL Supports Scholarly Publishing iCE Platform Fosters Interactive Learning Experience A Physical and Virtual Makeover for Scott Library Reaching Out to Our Users Exhibits & Special Events Staff Highlight