Faulty Metrics and the Future of Digital Journalism

This report explores the industry of Internet measurement and its impact on news organizations working online. It investigates this landscape through a combination of documentary research and interviews with measurement companies, trade groups, advertising agencies, media scholars, and journalists from national newspapers, regional papers, and online-only news ventures

Visual Representations of Gender and Computing in Consumer and Professional Magazines

Studies in the nineteen-eighties showed that advertising images of computers were gendered, with women relatively less represented, and shown with less empowered roles, problems or presented as sexual objects. This paper uses a mix of content and interpretative analysis to analyse current imagery in consumerist and professional society publications. It reveals the present variation and complexity of the iconography of computers and people across different domains of representation, with the continuation of gender bias in subtle forms

Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition

Reports findings from multiple neuroscientific studies on the impact of arts training on the enhancement of other cognitive capacities, such as reading acquisition, sequence learning, geometrical reasoning, and memory

Diverse perceptions of smart spaces

This is the era of smart technology and of ‘smart’ as a meme, so we have run three workshops to examine the ‘smart’ meme and the exploitation of smart environments. The literature relating to smart spaces focuses primarily on technologies and their capabilities. Our three workshops demonstrated that we require a stronger user focus if we are advantageously to exploit spaces ascribed as smart: we examined the concept of smartness from a variety of perspectives, in collaboration with a broad range of contributors. We have prepared this monograph mainly to report on the third workshop, held at Bournemouth University in April 2012, but do also consider the lessons learned from all three. We conclude with a roadmap for a fourth (and final) workshop, which is intended to emphasise the overarching importance of the humans using the spac

Marriage and divorce: changes and their driving forces

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives. Cohabitation has also become increasingly important, emerging as a widely used step on the path to marriage. Out-of-wedlock fertility has also risen, consistent with declining "shotgun marriages." Compared with other countries, marriage maintains a central role in American life. We present evidence on some of the driving forces causing these changes in the marriage market: the rise of the birth control pill and women's control over their own fertility; sharp changes in wage structure, including a rise in inequality and partial closing of the gender wage gap; dramatic changes in home production technologies; and the emergence of the internet as a new matching technology. We note that recent changes in family forms demand a reassessment of theories of the family and argue that consumption complementarities may be an increasingly important component of marriage. Finally, we discuss how these facts should inform family policy debates.Public policy

Marriage and Divorce: Changes and their Driving Forces

We document key facts about marriage and divorce, comparing trends through the past 150 years and outcomes across demographic groups and countries. While divorce rates have risen over the past 150 years, they have been falling for the past quarter century. Marriage rates have also been falling, but more strikingly, the importance of marriage at different points in the life cycle has changed, reflecting rising age at first marriage, rising divorce followed by high remarriage rates, and a combination of increased longevity with a declining age gap between husbands and wives. Cohabitation has also become increasingly important, emerging as a widely used step on the path to marriage. Out-of-wedlock fertility has also risen, consistent with declining "shotgun marriages". Compared with other countries, marriage maintains a central role in American life. We present evidence on some of the driving forces causing these changes in the marriage market: the rise of the birth control pill and women's control over their own fertility; sharp changes in wage structure, including a rise in inequality and partial closing of the gender wage gap; dramatic changes in home production technologies; and the emergence of the internet as a new matching technology. We note that recent changes in family forms demand a reassessment of theories of the family and argue that consumption complementarities may be an increasingly important component of marriage. Finally, we discuss the welfare implications of these changes.

The Emergent Logic of Health Law

The American health care system is on a glide path toward ruin. Health spending has become the fiscal equivalent of global warming, and the number of uninsured Americans is approaching fifty million. Can law help to divert our country from this path? There are reasons for deep skepticism. Law governs the provision and financing of medical care in fragmented and incoherent fashion. Commentators from diverse perspectives bemoan this chaos, casting it as an obstacle to change. I contend in this Article that pessimism about health law’s prospects is unjustified, but that a new understanding of health law’s disarray is urgently needed to guide reform. My core proposition is that the law of health care provision is best understood as an emergent system. Its contradictions and dysfunctions cannot be repaired by some master design. No one actor has a grand overview—or the power to impose a unifying vision. Countless market players, public planners, and legal and regulatory decisionmakers interact in oft-chaotic ways, clashing with, reinforcing, and adjusting to each other. Out of these interactions, a larger scheme emerges—one that incorporates the health sphere’s competing interests and values. Change in this system, for worse and for better, arises from the interplay between its myriad actors. By quitting the quest for a single, master design, we can better focus our efforts on possibilities for legal and policy change. We can and should continuously survey the landscape of stakeholders and expectations with an eye toward potential launching points for evolutionary processes—processes that leverage current institutions and incentives. What we cannot do is plan or predict these evolutionary pathways in precise detail; the complexity of interactions among market and government actors precludes fine-grained foresight of this sort. But we can determine the general direction of needed change, identify seemingly intractable obstacles, and envision ways to diminish or finesse them over time. Dysfunctional legal doctrines, interest group expectations, consumers’ anxieties, and embedded institutional and cultural barriers can all be dealt with in this way, in iterative fashion. This Article sets out a strategy for doing so. To illustrate this strategy, I suggest emergent approaches to the most urgent challenges in health care policy and law—the crises of access, value, and cost

Effects of a Single Diaphragmatic Breath on Anxiety, Gaze, and Performance

Anxiety is an emotion frequently experienced by athletes in competitive situations (Lazarus, 2000). Attentional control theory (Eysenck et al., 2007) explains that anxiety affects performance by occupying limited attentional resources, which reduces the efficiency and effectiveness of athletes. Efficient gaze patterns are linked to high levels of performance (e.g., Vickers, 1992). As athletes become more anxious, their gaze patterns become less efficient; specifically, they have more fixations of shorter duration and shorter quiet eye fixation duration (e.g., Wilson, Vine & Wood, 2009). The purpose of the current study was to test if a common anxiety reduction intervention, the diaphragmatic breath, affects the anxiety, gaze efficiency, and performance of novice golfers completing a golf putting task. Currently, there is no research to support that a single diaphragmatic breath can aid performance, affect gaze patterns, and reduce anxiety of novices during competition, though sport psychology practitioners commonly apply this intervention. Undergraduate university students (n=30) with little to no golf putting experience and normal vision were block randomized into diaphragmatic breath (DB) and control groups. The protocol consisted of completing a pretest block of 20 putts, an intervention, 60 practice putts, then a posttest block of 20 putts where their anxiety was manipulated. The DB group was taught to take a diaphragmatic breath before each putt. Diaphragmatic breathing instructions were adapted from Lehrer, Vaschillo, and Vaschillo’s (2000) abdominal breathing manual. Anxiety was measured using the somatic and cognitive subscales of the Mental Readiness Form-3 (MRF-3: Krane), which were administered after each putt. Gaze efficiency was measured using Tobii Pro Glasses 2. No statistically significant multivariate effects of the grouped independent variables on the grouped dependent variables were found. Results also showed no statistically significant interaction effect for group and time on anxiety or performance, suggesting that the diaphragmatic breath intervention did not manage participant anxiety levels or affect the performance of the DB group compared to the control group. While not statistically significant, a large effect size was found for the interaction of group and time on average fixation length, and a moderate effect size was found for the interaction of group and time on quiet eye duration. Trends in the data showed that the control groups’ average fixation duration and quiet eye duration increased, while the DB groups’ average fixation duration and average quiet eye duration increased. These findings suggest that implementing a diaphragmatic breath intervention does not seem to manage anxiety or enhance gaze efficiency. While more research is needed on the effects of DB on anxiety, performance, and gaze efficiency, trends in the data from the current study suggest that a single DB may not be an effective strategy for novices faced with pressure situations in sport