TikTok as a Digital Activism Space: Social Justice Under Algorithmic Control

TikTok, a video sharing application, has become the center of viral internet culture. The app has risen in popularity so quickly that scholarly literature investigating its vast societal impact is still nascent. TikTok is not only used to discuss popular culture topics and create trends, but also being utilized as a tool for social justice activism in the United States in the wake of a tumultuous year with major events such as the coronavirus pandemic, a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the 2020 presidential election. TikTok activism is not without critiques, ranging from concerns of foreign government surveillance and data mining to questions of TikTok’s impact on creator mental health and the effectiveness of digital activism. I argue that despite these critiques, TikTok holds cultural value as an impactful and meaningful tool for social justice activism and entry-level democracy in the United States in the summer of 2020. Using two case studies and data compiled from interviews with content creators themselves, I provide a snapshot of how this app was used by content creators to facilitate grassroots digital social justice campaigns during this historically significant period, and aim to support the legitimacy of this form of digital activism. My intent is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of activism in novel digital spaces and encourage further discussions about TikTok, civic engagement, and digital activism

Design that keeps designing: designing for participation

What role does participation take when engaging the public in communication design projects? What considerations and capacities in the communication design process and practice are required to enable participation? These questions are considered in this paper through critically reflecting on a project entitled Fashion City, which explored engaging the public as co-author of the communication content. The unexpected and confronting outcomes of the project provided valuable insights into designing for participation. The paper summarises three of the key lessons learned during the project that revolved around issues of releasing control and de-centralising the designer and the outcome of design. Following the understandings arising from the project, a 'scaffold' model is proposed. This scaffold can act as a framework that respects the individual's agency and their participation as well as their rights to choose to ignore or interact, engage or disengage in a 'conversation' initiated through design. These scaffolds may be risky and unconventional to normative commercial processes, however, it is argued that they can lead to generative situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy to occur, enabling the discovery of new concepts, knowledge and practices in communication design

Birds in agricultural mosaics : the influence of landscape pattern and countryside heterogeneity

Agricultural environments are critical to the conservation of biota throughout the world. Efforts to identify key influences on the conservation status of fauna in such environments have taken complementary approaches. Many studies have focused on the role of remnant or seminatural vegetation and emphasized the influence on biota of spatial patterns in the landscape. Others have recognized that many species use diverse &lsquo;&lsquo;countryside&rsquo;&rsquo; elements within farmland, and emphasize the benefits of landscape heterogeneity for conservation. Here, we investigated the effect of independent measures of both the spatial pattern (extent and configuration) and heterogeneity of elements (i.e., land uses/vegetation types) on bird occurrence in farm-scale agricultural mosaics in southeastern Australia. Birds were sampled in all types of elements in 27 mosaics (each 1 3 1 km) selected to incorporate variation in cover of native vegetation and the number of different element types in the mosaic. We used an information-theoretic approach to identify the mosaic properties that most strongly influenced bird species richness. Subgroups of birds based on habitat requirements responded most strongly to the extent of preferred elements in mosaics. Woodland birds were richer in mosaics with higher cover of native vegetation while open-tolerant species responded to the extent of scattered trees. In contrast, for total species richness, mosaic heterogeneity (richness of element types) and landscape context (cover of native vegetation in surrounding area) had the greatest influence. These results showed that up to 76% of landscape-level variation in richness of bird groups is attributable to mosaic properties directly amenable to management by landowners. Key implications include (1) conservation goals for farm landscapes must be carefully defined because the richness of different faunal components is influenced by different mosaic properties; (2) the extent of native vegetation is a critical influence in agricultural environments because it drives the farmscale richness of woodland birds and has a broader context effect on total bird richness in mosaics; (3) land-use practices that enhance the heterogeneity of farmland mosaics are beneficial for native birds; and (4) the cumulative effect of even small elements in farm mosaics contribute to the structural properties of entire landscapes.<br /

Developments from the PSLRA: Beyond the Lead Plaintiff Provision in Financial Research

Since the passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995, a robust literature has analyzed the impact of the lead plaintiff provision, which made it more likely for institutional investors to take on the role of lead plaintiff. Recently, less investigated provisions in the PSLRA have had an increasingly relevant role in shareholder litigation, corporate governance, and how firms choose to go public. In this article, we review the law, finance, accounting, and economics literature to show how these other provisions have evolved over time, affecting the incentives for corporate disclosure, how firms go public, and corporate governance.

Do Shareholders Prefer Institutional Lead Plaintiffs?

Previous research has documented that institutional lead plaintiffs are associated with higher settlements and marginal improvements to governance following securities class action lawsuits. In this study, we examine the market reaction to an institution being named as lead plaintiff to examine whether the market views the improvements in governance to be worth the higher costs. We find that the abnormal returns surrounding the announcement of an institutional lead plaintiff are significantly positive, and significantly larger than the negative market reaction to the appointment of a non-institutional lead plaintiff. However, we find only weak evidence showing that the reaction is more positive for firms in greater need of governance improvement, nor is the quality of governance a consideration in seeking to be lead plaintiff. Instead, our results suggest that the market reaction is more positive when institutions retain ownership in the defendant firm, suggesting that their long-term interests are seen as more aligned with other existing shareholders

Simulation Programs in Financial Institutions

Christine Stewart is Manager of Educational Services for Olson Research Associates. Inc., Greenbelt, Maryland. John A. Haslem is Professor and Chairman of Finance at the University of Maryland

Travel Concentration: The effects of attractor-bound movement on workplace activity

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of office attractors on workplace activity. First, it aims to describe how movement towards different attractors such as canteens and entrances can be approximated in a 2D spatial model, and second, to show how those simulated effects relate to actual observations of movement and interaction. THEORY: Human activity in physical workspace is typically examined from the perspective of the purely geometric properties of the space (i.e. in the field of space syntax), or by other properties of workspaces, such as barriers and distance between workers. Movement in offices however is an activity that is driven by both geometric and non-geometric properties. The non-geometric properties relate to the functional configuration of space (where seats/canteens/meeting rooms are) but the activity itself happens in the real space and it is thus bound by spatial configuration.Furthermore, while the driver for movement is the need to travel to specific attractors, it is the actual space that allows for secondary effects such as serendipitous interactions to emerge. Thus, it can be expected that a successful approximation of workplace movement will also contribute to understanding interaction, especially that which happens away from spaces programmed for it such as meeting rooms. This paper examines the two activities of movement and interaction under the hypothesis that a spatial model that properly simulates attractor-bound movement can successfully identify the locations where movement happens, but also provide relevant hints for serendipitous interaction. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: To study this hypothesis, we constructed paths from each seat to a set of three types of attractors, specifically the building entrance, the closest canteen or kitchen and the closest WC. These paths were then transformed to zones of visibility to take into account the surrounding space as well as to allow for interaction to be examined as that activity is unlikely to happen directly on the path. The final result is a metric of travel concentration that measures how likely is it that a space will be seen from those generated paths. The metric is validated against actual observations of movement and interaction in a linear model, tested initially against a large sample of different workplaces (216 floors), but also against two sets of floors, one with high and one with low seat density. FINDINGS: The new metric fares well against both movement and interaction on the whole sample, but on the two sets of floors the effects are less robust. In high-density floors the main driver of attractor movement is the one generated from outside the floor and to a lesser extent the one that comes from within the floor. In low density floors only interaction is somewhat predictable albeit with a weak effect and only in relation to travel from within the floor. Travel concentration was found to be less effective than the existing Visual Mean Depth metric, however combinations of the two were found, in some cases to yield the best results. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The new metric presented here is a useful simulation of movement in office spaces which can be applied to the analysis of existing spaces, but also provide a way for designers to test against floor plans of new buildings

The practice and the community: a proposition for the possible contribution of communication design to public space

The practice of communication design has developed from a visual-communication service industry into a multi-facetted profession, directly involved with the maintenance and creation of social and cultural capital. The ancestry of communication design has led to its continued perception as a neutral tool for the achievement of communication. This research project aims to investigate the possible contributions of communication design as a practice, if it were to re-align its goals towards supporting and facilitating the community within which it is practiced. This research project is about the communication designer and the communities within which they practice: clients; target markets; companies; managers; neighbourhood groups; groups in a particular place and time; communities of practitioners; and emergent or yet to emerge communities. The project investigates designer agency and the ways for a communication designer to work holistically within communities: being or becoming part of them; working through and with them toward the achievement of communication goals. As much as it is about communicating, it is also about community. It is about designers working as conduits, facilitating and enabling the communities of their practice to find expression. It is about a democratisation of communication design authorship and power. It is about the design process as an educational process - all parts and participants within a design projects&#039; community learning and teaching simultaneously. The research project encompasses a series of component projects, across a range of different media, using a practice-led-research framework and a reflective practitioner methodology as the key investigative tool

Communication design and the other: investigating the intersubjective in practice

This research investigates the intersubjective aspects of communication design practice through a focus on the other, and the roles that the other takes in practice. It does so in order to better understand the practice of communication design as practiced on a day-to-day basis. Communication design, as a practice, and a field, extends out of graphic design. This extension is due to a change in priorities; from privileging the graphic and artefactual aspects of practice, to prioritising the consideration of the broader agency of design within a specific context. This research has been accomplished through a practice-led methodology. Communication design projects form the methods of, and the foundation for, the investigation. Seven individual research projects have been designed and carried out. These projects have each incorporated members of the different participants of communication design practice; new and existing clients, student designers and established practicing designers. This has allowed the research to investigate its concerns from a range of roles and viewpoints, incorporating different perspectives into its observations and understandings. This research extends the work of Donald Sch&amp;ouml;n and his investigation into The Reflective Practitioner (1983). It achieves this through a consideration for the roles of the other in professional practice. In order to articulate this move extensive reference is made to the thinking of the twentieth century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. This research has found that the other plays critical roles in the practice of communication design. These roles are ones of providing provocative disjunction. Provocative disjunction, as understood by this research, contributes directly to the generative action communication design offers artefacts, clients and designers. The observations and understandings of this practice-led research have enabled extensive insights into the practice of communication design. These insights contribute significantly to the broader communication design discourse in professional practice, education and research

A case of eosinophilic esophagitis discovered with positron emission tomography imaging: a case report

INTRODUCTION: Eosinophilic esophagitis was first reported in 1978, and since then it has been increasingly recognized as one of the major etiologies for dysphagia, food impaction, and food regurgitation. To the best of our knowledge, no case of eosinophilic esophagitis (excluding esophageal eosinophilia not responsive to proton pump inhibitor treatment) has previously been demonstrated on the basis of positron emission tomography imaging. CASE PRESENTATION: A 68-year-old Caucasian man presented with dysphagia to solids with recurrent regurgitation and weight loss of 7lb within the preceding 2 months. The patient attributed these symptoms to radiation therapy he had received 1 year earlier for squamous cell cancer of the lung. The patient underwent routine follow-up positron emission tomography imaging, which showed a hypermetabolic lesion in the posterior mediastinum and was increased at the level of the midesophagus. CONCLUSION: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported case of eosinophilic esophagitis demonstrated by positron emission tomography imaging and confirmed with endoscopic evaluation and biopsies both after positron emission tomography imaging and a trial of proton pump inhibitor therapy. This could have an impact on the diagnostic evaluation of esophageal eosinophilic inflammation as well as eosinophilic infiltration of other gastrointestinal organs