Award Winning Communication Programs: Centrality or Confusion?

This article analyzes award winning communication programs. The winners of the Small College Interest Group\u27s Programs of Excellence Award provide directions for achieving centrality and the goals outlined by the National Communication Association Task Force on Advancing the Discipline. They have similar names, degrees and locations within their institutions and they favor a holistic department and curricula that are interdisciplinary with strong department anchors. Most have assessment programs in place to maintain this quality. In most cases, they have identified themselves with the mission of their institution through courses and goals. These programs can provide some guidelines for departments in schools of 5,000 or less undergraduates to use in conducting self evaluations to determine if their programs have centrality

Historical Roundtable: ‘Stories We Tell’ in Broadcast News

The study and teaching of the history of broadcast news is a relatively recent enterprise — particularly with respect to the attention given to television news — which often parallels the lives of the academics who study and teach the subject. As a result, some of the research focused on broadcast news has been based upon the observations of individuals and events observed firsthand on occasion by those doing the reporting and the research. This close proximity to history has offered unique opportunities to stimulate interest, offer additional clarity or alternatively debunk some of the historic narratives from the field, including the many “moments” one might most readily recall with genuine concerns about authenticity and accuracy. The members of this panel of four media historians have experiences totaling well over a century in the field and offer considerable perspective on the stories they regularly report to their students and their colleagues

An Encouragement of Television News History Research: A Roundtable Discussion.

The article focuses on the speech by four scholars including Mary E. Beadle, Madeleine Liseblad and Mike Conway, delivered at the 2016 American Journalism Historians Association annual conference held in Saint Petersburg, Florida, on television news history research. Beadle discusses the lack of material in local television history research. Liseblad discusses the challenges and opportunities of television history research in Europe while Conway discusses access to historic broadcasts

Moral and Cultural Awareness in Emerging Adulthood: Preparing for Multi-Faith Workplaces

The study evaluates a pilot course designed to respond to findings from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) and similar findings reporting changes in U.S. life course development and religious participation through an intervention based on sociological theories of morality. The purpose of the study is to investigate the impacts of a business course in a public university designed to prepare emerging adults for culturally and religiously diverse workplaces. The intended outcomes are for students to better identify their personal moral values, while also gaining cultural awareness of the moral values in six different value systems: five major world religions and secular humanism. The study response rate was 97 percent (n = 109). Pre- and post-test survey data analyze changes in the reports of students enrolled in the course (primary group) compared to students in similar courses but without an emphasis on morality (controls). Qualitative data include survey short answer questions, personal mission statements, and student essays describing course impacts. Quantitative and qualitative results indicate reported increases in identification of personal moral values and cultural awareness of other moral values, providing initial evidence that the course helps prepare emerging adults for multi-faith workplaces

Time series prediction via aggregation : an oracle bound including numerical cost

We address the problem of forecasting a time series meeting the Causal Bernoulli Shift model, using a parametric set of predictors. The aggregation technique provides a predictor with well established and quite satisfying theoretical properties expressed by an oracle inequality for the prediction risk. The numerical computation of the aggregated predictor usually relies on a Markov chain Monte Carlo method whose convergence should be evaluated. In particular, it is crucial to bound the number of simulations needed to achieve a numerical precision of the same order as the prediction risk. In this direction we present a fairly general result which can be seen as an oracle inequality including the numerical cost of the predictor computation. The numerical cost appears by letting the oracle inequality depend on the number of simulations required in the Monte Carlo approximation. Some numerical experiments are then carried out to support our findings