Ecology and Environment: They\u27ve Been Integrated into J-Education Thinking

The article focuses on the impact of ecology and the environment on journalism education. Environmental concerns have measurably affected curricula, internships, public service programs and professional liaisons in journalism education. Environmentally-related breadth courses are required or primarily, optional in 28 percent of the programs, with about 68 percent of those programs requiring or recommending traditional, natural science-oriented environmental courses, and 45 percent including those with social science orientation, perhaps reflecting the social overtones of environmental problems made salient by the environmental era

The effect of radioactive substances on sludge digestion

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Constructing a Social Problem: The Press and the Environment

The U. S. daily press might seem to be in a strategic position to function as a claims-maker in the early construction of a social problem. But in the case of the manufacture of environmentalism as a social reality in the 1960\u27s and 70\u27s, the press was fairly slow to adopt a holistic environmental lexicon. Its reporting of environmental news even now only partially reflects concepts promoted by positive environmental claims-makers, such as planet-wide interdependence, and the threats to it by destructive technologies. The movement of environmental claims seems to have started with interest-group entrepreneurship using interpersonal communication and independent publication, gone on to attention in government, then finally--and incompletely--been put on the agenda of the daily press. Once on the press agenda, coverage of environmental issues may have improved. But there are some constraints, possibly inherent in the press as an institution, that limit its role in the incipient construction of some social problems

The Economic Foundations of Authoritarian Rule

Personal ambition and the distribution of economic goods often determine the character of politics. This dynamic plays out dramatically in authoritarian states where there are few independent arbiters outside of political violence. All dictatorships face two paramount problems in maintaining their tenure. First, to maintain power and distribute goods dictators must devise ways in which to manage a ruling coalition in the absence of explicit power-sharing institutions. Second, authoritarian regimes must devise ways to manage the desires of a population ruled with only implicit consent. This dissertation empirically treats the management style of authoritarian leaders as exogenous to the institutional composition of his regime, thus breaking from traditional authoritarian typologies. It utilizes original data and finds evidence that dictatorships can strengthen and survive longer, and in a nonviolent manner, with creative elite and popular economic management tools such as special economic zones (SEZs) and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). More specifically, it finds that violent and corrupt leaders that develop these economic tools can possibly be removed from power or eventually become constrained by the policies because the policies attach the leader and the regime to independent arbiters. At the regime level, SEZs and SWFs extend the survival of all types of regimes, despite institutional setting, through the mechanisms of labor fragmentation and sunk investments. Seemingly democratic institutions in dictatorships – parties, elections, legislatures – may be the foundation of democratic rule, but they are not the foundation of authoritarian rule – economic policy is

It's worse than you thought : the feedback negativity and violations of reward prediction in gambling tasks

The reinforcement learning theory suggests that the feedback negativity should be larger when feedback is unexpected. Two recent studies found, however, that the feedback negativity was unaffected by outcome probability. To further examine this issue, participants in the present studies made reward predictions on each trial of a gambling task where objective reward probability was indicated by a cue. In Study 1, participants made reward predictions following the cue, but prior to their gambling choice; in Study 2, predictions were made following their gambling choice. Predicted and unpredicted outcomes were associated with equivalent feedback negativities in Study 1. In Study 2, however, the feedback negativity was larger for unpredicted outcomes. These data suggest that the magnitude of the feedback negativity is sensitive to violations of reward prediction, but that this effect may depend on the close coupling of prediction and outcome

The feedback-related negativity reflects the binary evaluation of good versus bad outcomes

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Articulating Problems and Markets: A Translation Analysis of Entrepreneurs’ Emergent Value Propositions

In this qualitative study, the authors apply Callon’s sociology of translation to examine how new technology entrepreneurs enact material arguments that involve the first two moments of translation—problematization (defining a market problem) and interessement (defining a market and the firm’s relationship to it) - which in turn are represented in a claim, the value proposition. That emergent claim can then be represented and further changed during pitches. If accepted, it can then lead to the second two moments of translation: enrollment and mobilization. Drawing on written materials, observations, and interviews, we trace how these value propositions were iterated along three paths to better problematize and interesse, articulating a problem and market on which a business could plausibly be built. We conclude by discussing implications for understanding value propositions in entrepreneurship and, more broadly, using the sociology of translation to analyze emergent, material, consequential arguments. The study is based on data collected at the Austin Technology Incubator’s Student Entrepreneur Acceleration and Launch program (ATI SEAL) at The University of Texas at Austin.IC2 Institut

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Surrendering Privacy for Security’s Sake in an Identity Ecosystem

Despite individuals’ and organizations’ best efforts, many significant information security threats exist. To alleviate these threats, researchers and policy makers have proposed new digital environments called identity ecosystems. These ecosystems would provide protection against attackers in that a third party intermediary would need to authenticate users of the ecosystem. While the additional security may help alleviate security threats, significant concern exists regarding ecosystem users’ privacy. For example, the possibility of targeted attacks against the centralized identity repository, potential mismanagement of the verified credentials of millions of users, and the threat of activity monitoring and surveillance become serious privacy considerations. Thus, individuals must be willing to surrender personal privacy to a known intermediary to obtain the additional levels of protection that the proposed ecosystems suggest. We investigate the reasons why individuals would use a future identity ecosystem that exhibits such a privacy-security tradeoff. Specifically, we adopted a mixed-methods approach to elicit and assess the major factors associated with such decisions. We show that 1) intrapersonal characteristics, 2) perceptions of the controlling agent, and 3) perceptions of the system are key categories for driving intentions to use ecosystems. We found that trustworthiness of the controlling agent, perceived inconvenience, system efficacy, behavioral-based inertia, censorship attitude, and previous similar experience significantly explained variance in intentions. Interestingly, general privacy concerns failed to exhibit significant relationships with intentions in any of our use contexts. We discuss what these findings mean for research and practice and provide guidance for future research that investigates identity ecosystems and the AIS Bright ICT Initiative