Children’s Film as Design Fiction: Ethics, Data, and Technology in Big Hero 6 and Zootopia

This poster explores how technologies and information are represented in recent children’s cinema, seeing these works as diegetic prototypes. We assert that contemporary “kidult” film can serve as a kind of design fiction to explore the ethical and technical tensions of information systems. This approach is supported through close readings of two Disney films, Big Hero 6 and Zootopia, both of which offer uncritical assessments of data aggregation and use in the effort to resolve a crime-adventure story. We sound a note of caution regarding how these films reinforce contemporary cultural concerns about data, privacy, and role of information in society

On the tear resistance of skin.

Tear resistance is of vital importance in the various functions of skin, especially protection from predatorial attack. Here, we mechanistically quantify the extreme tear resistance of skin and identify the underlying structural features, which lead to its sophisticated failure mechanisms. We explain why it is virtually impossible to propagate a tear in rabbit skin, chosen as a model material for the dermis of vertebrates. We express the deformation in terms of four mechanisms of collagen fibril activity in skin under tensile loading that virtually eliminate the possibility of tearing in pre-notched samples: fibril straightening, fibril reorientation towards the tensile direction, elastic stretching and interfibrillar sliding, all of which contribute to the redistribution of the stresses at the notch tip

Introduction to the Sage Handbook of E-learning Research, 2nd ed.

The publication of the second edition of the SAGE Handbook of E-learningResearch attests to the continued need for study and understanding of learningpractices in contemporary technology-supported and technology-enabled educational, work and social settings. In preparing the first edition (Andrews &Haythornthwaite, 2007a), we found that while there had been considerabledevelopment in teaching and learning online, and in learning design, there wasno coherent view of what constituted research in the field. Writing for this 2016edition, we find there has been much progress in research, but it has taken many new directions, each wrestling with how to analyze and represent learning in an era of continuing change in technologies, learning practices, and knowledge distribution. This volume, like the last, takes stock of progress in e-learning research, highlighting advances as well as new directions in studies and methods for approaching and keeping up with changes in learning in an e-society

A MULTI-GROUP CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS OF THE REACTIVE- PROACTIVE AGGRESSION QUESTIONNAIRE IN A SAMPLE OF YOUNG ADULTS

Aggression has long-term negative effects on humanity as a whole. Because of this, aggression has become an important topic of study across many disciplines. Originally conceptualized as being either non-impulsive or impulsive, aggression has become dichotomized as being reactive or proactive. Each form of aggression has been linked to a variety of genetic, psychological, physiological, and neurobiological correlates. Because research continues to grow in these fields surrounding proactive and reactive aggression, it is important to make sure that measurement tools are assessing aggression appropriately across a variety of groups. One such tool that has emerged recently is the Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questionnaire (RPQ; Raine et al., 2006). Though a number of studies exist testing the validity of the RPQ in adolescent and child populations. No such studies exist examining the factor structure and measurement invariance of proactive and reactive aggression in young adult male and females from different ethnicities. The current study assesses factor structure and measurement invariance in multiple groups of young North American adults. Results show that a two- factor, proactive-reactive, structure fits the current data overall. However, measurement invariance is not achieved across the majority of these groups. Meaning that interpretation of reactive and proactive scores is not the same across gender and ethnicity. Limitations and future directions are discussed

Understanding Information and Knowledge Sharing in Online Communities: Emerging Research Approaches

Social media have become an important component of contemporary information ecosystems. People use social media systems, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Tumblr to communicate ideas and information needs, seek advice and solve problems, show appreciation and disagreement with a person or issue. These tools facilitate the emergence of communities, often resembling the communities of practice that arise in workplaces and educational institutions, where a common interest, identity and set of norms and structures for communicating develop through interaction. But while it seems easy to suck in data streams from social media to understand online communities, making sense of the vast data sets has been challenging. The issues include not just the tools and methods for extracting and synthesizing large data sets like the Twitter Firehose, they also extend to the ethical and responsible use and reporting of this data for academic and commercial purposes. This panel will focus on methodological approaches and research strategies for the study of social media communities, in particular web 2.0 tools that play an important role in the North American cultural landscape