Emily Hund. The influencer industry: The quest for authenticity on social media

The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, written by American media researcher Emily Hund, takes the reader on a scouting expedition into the U. S. influencer industry. Hund is a well-established author in social media influencer research, where her works on gender dynamics in the influencer industry have been particularly notable (e. g., Duffy & Hund, 2015, 2019). These works look at social media influence from a creative industry’s angle, and The Influencer Industry also stands in this lineage. Although the title does not make it clear, the book offers, first and foremost, a chronological history of the influencer industry in the United States. Beginning with the advent of political bloggers in the late 1990s, each chapter focuses on a specific period and the overarching developmental milestones Hund identifies as constituting the period. This way, Hund provides a much-needed historical perspective on the influencer industry. However, the book wants to be more than that – and it definitely is – in that it also reflects on how the influencer industry impacts contemporary forms of sociation

Joseph Turow. The voice catchers: How marketers listen in to exploit your feelings, your privacy, and your wallet

“Voice profiling is a gateway drug to a new era of hyper-personalized targeting,” (p. 227) Joseph Turow concludes in his book The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen in to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet. This crucial function of what Turow calls the “voice intelligence industry” explains the urgency of Turow’s most recent endeavor: a thorough examination of this industry which consists of different players, most centrally call center firms and the developers of voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, the Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and Samsung’s Bixby. The industry is united by its interest in using voice as another source for collecting biometrical data. Such voiceprints, as Turow figuratively puts it, are the “gold in people’s speech” (p. 192). In contrast to the face as another source for biometrical data, voice has received comparatively little public attention

Die Ideologie der Sharing Economy

Der Beitrag untersucht die ideologische Grundlage des digitalen Kapitalismus, die als Solutionismus verstanden wird. Am Beispiel der Sharing Economy als einer im Zuge der fortschreitenden Digitalisierung entstandenen Ökonomie vollziehen wir diese ideologische Grundlage exemplarisch nach. Hierzu arbeiten wir mittels einer narrativen Diskursanalyse die Ideologiearchitektur aus den Manifesten sowie Anti-Manifesten der Sharing Economy heraus

Trust in the Sharing Economy: An Experimental Framework

Peer-to-peer platforms in the realm of the sharing economy, such as Airbnb or BlaBlaCar, have heavily rattled the electronic commerce landscape and are expected to further impact consumer behavior in the future. While trust between the parties involved is of utmost importance in such platform economies, experimental research on this aspect is scarce. In this conceptual paper, we first present an experimental framework for targeting trust in the sharing economy based on experimental economics and the trust game in particular. In doing so, we sketch out a path to complement existing Information Systems research on the sharing economy by experimental methods. Second, we apply the framework to a specific use case, by developing a research model and experimental design to explore the role of user representation for trust on sharing economy platforms. We therefore set the stage for controlled (laboratory) experiments to enrich research on trust in the sharing economy

Lenalidomide in combination with dexamethasone at first relapse in comparison with its use as later salvage therapy in relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma

This subset analysis of data from two phase III studies in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma (MM) evaluated the benefit of initiating lenalidomide plus dexamethasone at first relapse. Multivariate analysis showed that fewer prior therapies, along with β2-microglobulin (≤2.5 mg/L), predicted a better time to progression (TTP; study end-point) with lenalidomide plus dexamethasone treatment. Patients with one prior therapy showed a significant improvement in benefit after first relapse compared with those who received two or more therapies. Patients with one prior therapy had significantly prolonged median TTP (17.1 vs. 10.6 months; P=0.026) and progression-free survival (14.1 vs. 9.5 months, P=0.047) compared with patients treated in later lines. Overall response rates were higher (66.9% vs. 56.8%, P=0.06), and the complete response plus very good partial response rate was significantly higher in first relapse (39.8% vs. 27.7%, P=0.025). Importantly, overall survival was significantly prolonged for patients treated with lenalidomide plus dexamethasone with one prior therapy, compared with patients treated later in salvage (median of 42.0 vs. 35.8 months, P=0.041), with no differences in toxicity, dose reductions, or discontinuations despite longer treatment. Therefore, lenalidomide plus dexamethasone is both effective and tolerable for second-line MM therapy and the data suggest that the greatest benefit occurs with earlier use

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM