Global Education Greenhouse: Constructing and Organizing Online Global Knowledge

Education, and the knowledge it generates, is seen as a means to effective participation in societies and economies that are affected by globalization (UNESCO). The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2015) was declared by a Resolution of the General Assembly, in December 2002, with a goal to re-focus on education and learning as central to the common pursuit and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The United Nations General Assembly has stated that education for all is essential for achieving the goals of eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, curbing population growth, achieving gender equality, and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy. Education is viewed as key to participation in the global economy as well as critical to local prosperity. What marks this debate as unique to the 21st century is its deep relationship to information technology. Intrinsically combining education and information technology is viewed as endemic in preparing the global youth to face the challenges of the knowledge economy (Monahan, 2005). The Internet promises a novel an

Being a Young Citizen in Estonia: An Exploration of Young People’s Civic and Media Experiences

The book gives an intriguing insight into how young people in Estonia, twenty years after the establishment of democracy, perceive their own role as citizens. It does so in a theoretical framework that stresses the embeddedness of the civic experiences in a media-dominated environment, thus closely linking civic and media experiences. Based on the analysis of both qualitative interview data and a relatively new method of using the internet as a complementary tool for engaging with open-ended diaries, the study explores the extent to which young citizens experience the media as being interwoven with their everyday lives and, in fact, constitutive of their social reality as citizens. With its particular focus on young Estonians, i.e. on a generation that has been brought up in a context of rapid political, economic and social change and that is well-known for its fascination with new communication technologies, the book is a valuable contribution to the growing international research on media and civic experiences

Representation of coronavirus in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times

Since January of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has received a lot of global media attention. The aim of this thesis is to explore the representation of the pandemic in two highly respected newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The corpus consists of a total of 291 articles from both newspapers. Sketch Engine software is used for the corpus analysis. The introduction discusses the nature of news and points out various factors that influence the process of deciding which news is worth covering. Chapter 1 provides an overview of previous studies on media representation of the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics. Chapter 2 describes the created corpora in greater detail and introduces the method of analysis. The process of conducting the corpus analysis is introduced and the key findings discussed. The conclusion compares the results to previous research and makes recommendations for further research.https://www.ester.ee/record=b5460820*es

Commentaries on the Recent Amendment of the Insurance Law of the People\u27s Republic of China Regarding Insurance Contracts from the Perspective of Comparative Law

The Article presents information on the amendment to the insurance law with reference to the history of the insurance law and the insurance industries in the People\u27s Republic of China. The amendments focus on the insurable interests, disclosure of the duties of the insured, insurance fraud and the concept of double insurance, the contractual clauses and their legal interpretation. Information on the role of the amendments for the improvement in the legislation of the country is also presented

E-residency – the beginning of a new era or the end of citizenship as we know it?

Estonia, one of the smallest EU member states in the North-Eastern part of the Union might not attract new residents and investors with its outstanding nature, weather conditions or natural resources. Who would like to live in a country where summer means “three months of bad weather for skiing”? As one of the former Soviet satellite states it had to find another strategy to launch itself as an attractive and unique country on a global scale. Early on technology was identified as a solution to all kinds of challenges ranging from democratization to marketization and attracting global businesses

E-Democracy Postponed: Public Policy Design the Key to UK E-Voting

This chapter presents a survey study on attitudes towards political campaigning in social media. During the national election in Sweden in 2010, a considerable amount of resources was invested in online communication with the constituency, not least in social media. Whereas several studies have focused on e-democracy at a macro level, there is a lack of studies examining the phenomenon of campaigning 2.0 as it is perceived by the actual voters. This chapter, therefore, asks the question whether the voters noticed the political campaigning in social media at all, and if so, how they perceived it. The main findings are that respondents who were already interested and politically engaged considered campaigning 2.0, in line with the politicians' rhetoric, as a way to enhance democracy. Respondents who were neither interested nor engaged in politics, on the other hand, showed little interest in this kind of communication. Consequently, the study confirms assumptions about digital divide and continued fragmentation of the citizenry.

Algorithmic Resistance : Media practices and the Politics of Repair

The article constitutes a critical intervention in the current, dramatic debate on the consequences of algorithms and automation for society. While most research has focused on negative outcomes, including ethical problems of machine bias and accountability, little has been said about the possibilities of users to resist algorithmic power. The article draws on Raymond Williams’ work on media as practice to advance a framework for studying algorithms with a focus on user agency. We illustrate this framework with the example of the media activist campaign World White Web by the Swedish artist and visual designer Johanna Burai. We suggest that user agency in relation to algorithms can emerge from alternative uses of platforms, in the aftermath of algorithmic logics, and give birth to complicit forms of resistance that work through ‘repair’ politics oriented towards correcting the work of algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the proposed framework helps us rethink debates on algorithmic power.Peer reviewe

Too Fat to Fly? New Brain Circuits Regulate Obesity in Drosophila

In mammals, fat store levels are regulated by brain centers that control food intake and metabolism. A new study by Al-Anzi and colleagues in this issue of Neuron identifies neurons with similar functions in Drosophila, further establishing the fly as a legitimate model to study obesity

Political Agency at the Digital Crossroads?

This thematic issue presents the outcome of the 2015 ECREA Communication and Democracy Section Conference “Political Agency in the Digital Age” that was held at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. It problematizes changes in the configurations of political agency in the context of digital media. The articles represent a shift from an exclusive focus on political elites to the interrelation between institutionalised politics and political processes in other societal spheres in the field of media and politics research. Political agency as the main notion of the thematic issue draws attention at the (media) practices through which social actors reproduce, reorganise and challenge politics. At the same time, the issue poses questions about the structures—economic, political and social—that allow for, define and also limit these practices. The contributions gathered here suggest an understanding of agency as constituted through the use of knowledge and resources, themselves embedded within structural contexts; at the same time, agency is transformative of the structures within which it is embedded by making use of knowledge and resources in creative and often radical ways. In that context the development of digital media marks a rupture or critical juncture that allows and requires a rethinking of conditions of political agency. Accordingly the contributions critically scrutinize the role of digital media moving beyond celebratory accounts of democratizing potential of digital media. The rethinking of the grammar of political agency is at the heart of this thematic issue