College Students, Networked Knowledge Activities, and Digital Competence

Amid the landscape of digital literacies and frameworks is a common assumption that contemporary youth, frequently dubbed “digital natives,” intuitively understand and use online technologies. While their use of these technologies may be frequent and highly skilled in some respects (e.g., communicating with friends), their use and abilities in other areas, such as those valued in school settings and the workforce, may differ. This survey of 350 college students examines how they use an array of online platforms for everyday life information-seeking purposes, including the frequency with which they engage in different networked knowledge activities. Findings show that while students often use platforms associated with personal networking, such as Instagram, professional platforms like LinkedIn are less commonly used. Students are much more likely to engage in passive online activities than active ones. In particular, skills related to tagging, writing, and creation are infrequently used. Additionally, about half of these college students do not believe social media, which fosters these networked knowledge activities, is relevant to their careers. These findings show opportunities for better developing college students’ digital skill sets, with guidance for skills that might be targeted, taught together, and supported through learning activities in online spaces to prepare college students for digital information tasks in the workplace

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio