Media awareness among Hong Kong primary students

This study aimed to investigate the extent to which Hong Kong primary students have access to various media, how they evaluate the credibility of the media, what they know about the media, and how they choose among different media, as well as teachers’ expectations towards their students’ views and consumption of media. Since little is known about young children in the context of media education, this paper fills a research gap by studying the media awareness and use of upper primary students. A questionnaire on media awareness and media use patterns was given to the teachers, who were asked to answer the questions from the perspective of their students. The same questionnaire was administered to students during class time. The descriptive statistics of the data were analyzed and compared. Students believed that the most reliable media for providing news was the television, followed by the radio, the newspaper, and the Internet; about half of the students believed that they were capable of distinguishing true from false news; students were more proactive media users than the teachers thought. The findings of this study suggest that more contextual and in-depth approaches to research would be beneficial to assess the media use patterns of students, from which relevant media education models can be derived

Agent-Based Methods for Simulation of Epidemics with a Low Number of Infected Persons

Part 1: Information & Communication Technology-EurAsia Conference 2014, ICT-EurAsia 2014International audienceModeling of infectious diseases with a low number of infections is a task that often arises since most real epidemics affect only a small fraction of the population. Agent-based methods simulate individuals and their behavior. When the model is simulated, the epidemic automatically arises without being explicitly defined. Surprisingly, it is not easy to produce such epidemics with small infection numbers. Instead, it needs model improvements to accomplish that task. In this paper, we show different extensions, addressing the person’s behavior, the pathogen’s behavior and the environmental impacts. It turns out that the discussed improvements have different consequences. Hence, they need to be used deliberately to overcome modeling issues of a specific epidemic in an appropriate and valid way. Even more, these improvements address the underlying behavior of epidemics and hence have the ability to provide a deeper insight into the real spreading process of a disease