The public impact of impacts: How the media play in the mass extinction debates

“Mass media” presentations of the dinosaurs and their co-inhabitants have been around for some 200 years. The question of what exterminated the dinosaurs and allowed mammals to take their leading place on Earth has a similarly lengthy history in the scientific arena and in public. However, there are amazingly few communication studies of the debates around mass extinctions and impacts. Those that do exist have picked up on the fact that these debates involve scientists from several disciplines, scientists who are often unused to reading each other’s research. Under these circumstances, more public or leading journals play a key role, not only in getting ideas out into the public arena, but in informing scientists across disciplinary boundaries. “Normal” communication processes, in which articles in peer-reviewed journals inform the scientific community and “simplified” versions may trickle out to the public via the mass media, become more complex. The dramatic impact answer to the question of the death of the dinosaurs seems to have attracted limited media attention at the time, confined to the “elite” newspapers. This paper analyzes the newspaper coverage of the death of the dinosaurs during the period from 1980 to 2008. I find that the period from 1991 to 1995 was critical in terms of changing public perceptions, insofar as they are determined/reflected in articles in general newspapers. I argue that the “Great Crash of 1994,” when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the giant planet Jupiter, played an important role in propelling the impact scenario for the death of the dinosaurs into the (mass) public eye, and that the news value co-option was important in this process

Cumulative Prospect Theory Based Dynamic Pricing for Shared Mobility on Demand Services

Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) is a modeling tool widely used in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology that captures subjective decision making of individuals under risk or uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a dynamic pricing strategy for Shared Mobility on Demand Services (SMoDSs) using a passenger behavioral model based on CPT. This dynamic pricing strategy together with dynamic routing via a constrained optimization algorithm that we have developed earlier, provide a complete solution customized for SMoDS of multi-passenger transportation. The basic principles of CPT and the derivation of the passenger behavioral model in the SMoDS context are described in detail. The implications of CPT on dynamic pricing of the SMoDS are delineated using computational experiments involving passenger preferences. These implications include interpretation of the classic fourfold pattern of risk attitudes, strong risk aversion over mixed prospects, and behavioral preferences of self reference. Overall, it is argued that the use of the CPT framework corresponds to a crucial building block in designing socio-technical systems by allowing quantification of subjective decision making under risk or uncertainty that is perceived to be otherwise qualitative.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, and has been accepted for publication at the 58th Annual Conference on Decision and Control, 201

The Crescent Student Newspaper, March 30, 1937

Student newspaper of Pacific College, precursor to George Fox University.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/the_crescent/2427/thumbnail.jp