2,652 research outputs found

    Fake News: Finding Truth in Strategic Communication

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    Fake news is an old phenomenon that has become a new obsession and a menace to society due to technological advancement and the proliferation of social media, which has changed traditional journalism norms. As the spread of false information has increased these past few years, it has become increasingly difficult for information consumers to distinguish between facts and fakes. A comprehensive systematic literature review to extract themes revealed the major factors responsible for spreading fake news. This qualitative interpretative meta-synthesis (QIMS) aims to better understand and offer solutions to combat fake news. This Ph.D. dissertation will serve as a guide for ethical communication practice and a reference for future research studies

    UNPUBLISHING THE NEWS: AN ASSESSMENT OF U.S. PUBLIC OPINION, NEWSROOM ACCOUNTABILITY, AND JOURNALISTS’ AUTHORITY AS “THE FIRST DRAFT OF HISTORY”

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    Unpublishing, or the manipulation, deindexing, or removal of published content on a news organization’s website, is a hotly debated issue in the news industry that disrupts fundamental beliefs about the nature of news and the roles of journalists. This dissertation’s premise is that unpublishing as a phenomenon challenges the authority of journalism as “the first draft of history,” questions the assumed relevance of traditional norms, and creates an opportunity to reconsider how news organizations demonstrate their accountability to the public. The study identifies public opinions related to unpublishing practices and approval of related journalistic norms through a public opinion survey of 1,350 U.S. adults. In tandem, a qualitative analysis of 62 editorial policies related to unpublishing offers the first inventory and assessment of emerging journalistic practices and the normative values journalists demonstrate through them. These contributions are valuable to both the academy and the news industry, as they identify a path forward for future research and provide desired guidance to U.S. news organizations. Findings suggest that in response to the unpublishing phenomenon, American journalists defend their professionalism primarily through the traditional professional paradigm of accuracy, invoking it to legitimize new guidelines whether those policies permitted or denounced unpublishing as a newsroom practice. Findings also show newsrooms are pledging increased levels of accountability to their communities and society at large, but how they might demonstrate that accountability more tactically was absent from policy discourse. In addition, both American adults and news organizations place a high value on the accuracy of previously published news content, yet the groups’ temporal conceptions of accuracy must be reconciled. Ultimately, the unpublishing phenomenon presents an opportunity for journalists to redefine their notions of accountability to their communities. Based on these findings, the study concludes with a call for American news organizations to abandon claims as the “first draft of history” in the digital era and assume the role of information custodians, proactively establishing and managing the lifecycle of content.Doctor of Philosoph

    Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum of Canadian Digital Literacy Programs

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    This research project examines the hidden curriculum of current digital media literacy resources in Canadian secondary classrooms and focuses on a recent federally funded program for secondary students CTRL-F (pronounced control-f). Measuring the interventions against criteria for critical intermedia pedagogy, this project addresses three research questions: (1) What digital media literacy interventions are available to secondary classroom teachers in Canada, and which organisations provide them? The term intervention is used here in a broad sense, covering any pedagogical activity that is designed specifically for digital literacy. (2) What strategies are modelled or prescribed in the examples? (3) Examining the content for its hidden curriculum, what ideological messages are presented? Do the interventions reinforce binary notions of credibility and fact that constitute what Michel Foucault calls a “regime of truth”? My results show that current resources lack the necessary critical dimensions to support analytical thinking, while also amplifying the objectivity rhetorics of mainstream journalism

    Writing Facts: Interdisciplinary Discussions of a Key Concept in Modernity

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    "Fact" is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering "writing facts" and "writing facts", the volume shows why and how "facts" are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity

    OLLI Fall 2023 Catalog

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    Re-envisioning access for the digital preservation community: challenges, opportunities and recommendations

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    Digital material is not new and has been preserved for a couple of decades now. With a growing digital preservation community, and a growing number of practitioners identifying as doing something digital, there is an understanding that this material is here to stay. More and more institutions are publishing digital strategies or creating networks focusing on digital material. However, when looking at this in practice there seems to be a disconnect between what is being stated within these networks and strategies and what is being made accessible to the public. This thesis will explore this disconnect by first understanding how the digital preservation community has been providing access to this material and how they are envisioning it in the future. This exploration surfaces both a) how digital material can no longer be seen as separate from the infrastructure that ensures its materiality and b) how the provision of access is not just a technological question, but also a social, legal and ethical one. This thesis will also seek to explore the ways in which those who identify as digital preservation practitioners articulate their role and responsibilities. It will do so by drawing on relevant literature and gaining perspectives from practitioners and other relevant participants through in-depth interviews. Building from this exploration, this thesis will offer recommendations for how this practice can move forward in negotiating the provision of access to digital material in the online public space of the internet. This research is part of a collaborative project with The National Archives, UK where a number of the ideas encountered during this work were explored in practice. Some of these results have helped shape the recommendations given in the final chapters of this thesis

    Erasure in dependently typed programming

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    It is important to reduce the cost of correctness in programming. Dependent types and related techniques, such as type-driven programming, offer ways to do so. Some parts of dependently typed programs constitute evidence of their typecorrectness and, once checked, are unnecessary for execution. These parts can easily become asymptotically larger than the remaining runtime-useful computation, which can cause linear-time algorithms run in exponential time, or worse. It would be unnacceptable, and contradict our goal of reducing the cost of correctness, to make programs run slower by only describing them more precisely. Current systems cannot erase such computation satisfactorily. By modelling erasure indirectly through type universes or irrelevance, they impose the limitations of these means to erasure. Some useless computation then cannot be erased and idiomatic programs remain asymptotically sub-optimal. This dissertation explains why we need erasure, that it is different from other concepts like irrelevance, and proposes two ways of erasing non-computational data. One is an untyped flow-based useless variable elimination, adapted for dependently typed languages, currently implemented in the Idris 1 compiler. The other is the main contribution of the dissertation: a dependently typed core calculus with erasure annotations, full dependent pattern matching, and an algorithm that infers erasure annotations from unannotated (or partially annotated) programs. I show that erasure in well-typed programs is sound in that it commutes with single-step reduction. Assuming the Church-Rosser property of reduction, I show that properties such as Subject Reduction hold, which extends the soundness result to multi-step reduction. I also show that the presented erasure inference is sound and complete with respect to the typing rules; that this approach can be extended with various forms of erasure polymorphism; that it works well with monadic I/O and foreign functions; and that it is effective in that it not only removes the runtime overhead caused by dependent typing in the presented examples, but can also shorten compilation times."This work was supported by the University of St Andrews (School of Computer Science)." -- Acknowledgement

    New perspectives on A.I. in sentencing. Human decision-making between risk assessment tools and protection of humans rights.

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    The aim of this thesis is to investigate a field that until a few years ago was foreign to and distant from the penal system. The purpose of this undertaking is to account for the role that technology could plays in the Italian Criminal Law system. More specifically, this thesis attempts to scrutinize a very intricate phase of adjudication. After deciding on the type of an individual's liability, a judge must decide on the severity of the penalty. This type of decision implies a prognostic assessment that looks to the future. It is precisely in this field and in prognostic assessments that, as has already been anticipated in the United, instruments and processes are inserted in the pre-trial but also in the decision-making phase. In this contribution, we attempt to describe the current state of this field, trying, as a matter of method, to select the most relevant or most used tools. Using comparative and qualitative methods, the uses of some of these instruments in the supranational legal system are analyzed. Focusing attention on the Italian system, an attempt was made to investigate the nature of the element of an individual's ‘social dangerousness’ (pericolosità sociale) and capacity to commit offences, types of assessments that are fundamental in our system because they are part of various types of decisions, including the choice of the best sanctioning treatment. It was decided to turn our attention to this latter field because it is believed that the judge does not always have the time, the means and the ability to assess all the elements of a subject and identify the best 'individualizing' treatment in order to fully realize the function of Article 27, paragraph 3 of the Constitution

    Caribbean cultural heritage and the nation:Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao in a regional context

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    Centuries of intense migrations have deeply impacted expressions of cultural heritage on the ABC islands: Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. This volume queries how cultural heritage on these Dutch Caribbean islands relates to the work of nation building and nation-branding. How does the imagining of a shared political “we” relates to images deliberately produced to market these islands to a world of capital? The contributing authors in this volume address this leading question in their essays that describe and analyze the expressions of the ABC islands. In doing so they compare and contrast nation building and branding on the ABC islands to those taking place in the wider Caribbean. The expressions of cultural heritage discussed range from the importance of sports, music, literature and visual arts to those related to the political economy of tourism, the work of museums, the activism surrounding the question of reparations, and the politics and policies affecting the Caribbean Diasporas in the North Atlantic. This volume adds to the understanding of the dynamics of nation, culture and economy in the Caribbean

    Radio frequency communication and fault detection for railway signalling

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    The continuous and swift progression of both wireless and wired communication technologies in today's world owes its success to the foundational systems established earlier. These systems serve as the building blocks that enable the enhancement of services to cater to evolving requirements. Studying the vulnerabilities of previously designed systems and their current usage leads to the development of new communication technologies replacing the old ones such as GSM-R in the railway field. The current industrial research has a specific focus on finding an appropriate telecommunication solution for railway communications that will replace the GSM-R standard which will be switched off in the next years. Various standardization organizations are currently exploring and designing a radiofrequency technology based standard solution to serve railway communications in the form of FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile Communication System) to substitute the current GSM-R. Bearing on this topic, the primary strategic objective of the research is to assess the feasibility to leverage on the current public network technologies such as LTE to cater to mission and safety critical communication for low density lines. The research aims to identify the constraints, define a service level agreement with telecom operators, and establish the necessary implementations to make the system as reliable as possible over an open and public network, while considering safety and cybersecurity aspects. The LTE infrastructure would be utilized to transmit the vital data for the communication of a railway system and to gather and transmit all the field measurements to the control room for maintenance purposes. Given the significance of maintenance activities in the railway sector, the ongoing research includes the implementation of a machine learning algorithm to detect railway equipment faults, reducing time and human analysis errors due to the large volume of measurements from the field
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