Data journalism, data literacy and data visualizations : a quantitative study

Professional project report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Journalism from the School of Journalism, University of Missouri--Columbia.As data becomes increasingly important in contemporary society, data journalism and data literacy also become more important. This project explores these concepts and examines the role each can play in writing about and understanding data intensive information. To test the effects of data visualizations and data literacy on comprehension, this project uses a quantitative experimental design where subjects read different versions of an article followed by a comprehension test. The article treatments include a text-only version, a version with a bar graph and a version with a data table. In addition, subjects were classified as data literate and non-data literate based on a survey. As hypothesized, the results showed a significant comprehension benefit for both groups of subjects with access to a data visualization, with the text-only group scoring lowest in comprehension. The results also showed significant comprehension differences based on data literacy in the bar graph test condition. These results can be used to inform future study, as well as to inform best practices in data journalism and in data science education.Includes bibliographical references

The Relationship Between Extraversion and Listening Comprehension Under High and Low-Salience Visual Distraction Conditions

The proposed study contributes to the pool of research examining the link between level of extraversion and sensory stimulation. Numerous studies have shown that introverts are more susceptible to forms of auditory distraction than extraverts when completing cognitive tasks requiring visual attention, but no study has examined the opposite relationship: the differing effects of visual distraction on auditory comprehension amongst introverts and extraverts. Using undergraduate college students as participants, this study tested three hypotheses: 1) there will be a negative correlation between level of extraversion and self-reported distraction while under high-salience visual distraction, 2) there will be a positive correlation between participants’ Extraversion score and performance on a listening comprehension task while under high-salience visual distraction and 3) the aforementioned correlation will be higher than the correlation between level of extraversion and performance on a listening comprehension task while under low-salience visual distraction. Though results did not lend support to the idea of these differences in sensory stimulation applying to different forms of visual distraction, we highlight the importance of these findings and provide important suggestions for future research into a critical phenomenon with implications in educational, workplace, and social settings

Factors Associated with Academic Stimulant Misuse in a College Setting

The purpose of this study was to further understand and explore the motivations behind college students’ misuse of stimulants in an academic setting, in order to develop means to combat its growing popularity. We hypothesized that students would be more likely to misuse stimulants if 1) they perceive SM to be safe, 2) they perceive SM to be ethical, 3) they are more extrinsically motivated in an academic setting, 4) they perceive their academic environments to be competitive, and 5) they perceive SM to be normative. Participants (n = 172) were undergraduate students at a small, Christian, liberal arts university in Southern California. Participants were recruited from an online research participation management system that included students enrolled in a foundational psychology course. The online survey was anonymous and took approximately 15 minutes to complete. The survey questionnaires were administered online in the following order: The Demographic Form, the Academic Motivation Scale, the Perceived Campus Competitiveness scale, the Stimulant Use Questionnaire, the Modified Perception of Prescription Misuse Among Peers scale, the Perception of Safety of Stimulants scale, the Perceptions of Adderall Ethicality scale, and the Validity Question. Descriptive statistics evaluated attitudes and perceptions of SM safety, commonality, and ethicality. Only 43.6% of participants viewed alcohol to be safer than SM. While only 10.5% of participants reported lifetime SM, 61.6% of students perceived less than half, about half, or more than half of students to misuse stimulants during finals week. Finally, only 35.4% of students actually viewed SM as academic dishonesty

Origin of Crack Tip Instabilities

This paper demonstrates that rapid fracture of ideal brittle lattices naturally involves phenomena long seen in experiment, but which have been hard to understand from a continuum point of view. These idealized models do not mimic realistic microstructure, but can be solved exactly and understood completely. First it is shown that constant velocity crack solutions do not exist at all for a range of velocities starting at zero and ranging up to about one quarter of the shear wave speed. Next it is shown that above this speed cracks are by and large linearly stable, but that at sufficiently high velocity they become unstable with respect to a nonlinear micro-cracking instability. The way this instability works itself out is related to the scenario known as intermittency, and the basic time scale which governs it is the inverse of the amount of dissipation in the model. Finally, we compare the theoretical framework with some new experiments in Plexiglas, and show that all qualitative features of the theory are mirrored in our experimental results.Comment: About fifty pages with lots of PostScript figure

Rhea—a manually curated resource of biochemical reactions

Rhea (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/rhea) is a comprehensive resource of expert-curated biochemical reactions. Rhea provides a non-redundant set of chemical transformations for use in a broad spectrum of applications, including metabolic network reconstruction and pathway inference. Rhea includes enzyme-catalyzed reactions (covering the IUBMB Enzyme Nomenclature list), transport reactions and spontaneously occurring reactions. Rhea reactions are described using chemical species from the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology (ChEBI) and are stoichiometrically balanced for mass and charge. They are extensively manually curated with links to source literature and other public resources on metabolism including enzyme and pathway databases. This cross-referencing facilitates the mapping and reconciliation of common reactions and compounds between distinct resources, which is a common first step in the reconstruction of genome scale metabolic networks and models

Le traçage anonyme, dangereux oxymore: Analyse de risques à destination des non-spécialistes

Dans le but affiché de ralentir la progression de l'épidémie COVID-19, la France envisage de mettre en place un système de traçage des contacts des maladesà l'aide d'une application mobile. Les concepteurs de ce type d'applications assurent qu'elles sont respectueuses de la vie privée. Cependant cette notion reste vague. Nous souhaitons donc contribuer au débat public en apportant unéclairage sur ce que pourrait et ne pourrait pas garantir une application de traçage, afin que chacun puisse se forger une opinion sur l'opportunité de son déploiement

Emotion and ethics: an inter-(en)active approach

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comIn this paper we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective interconnectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself

Os saberes a ensinar e para ensinar matemática e suas relações com o ensino industrial brasileiro

Disponível em: http://revistas.upel.edu.ve/index.php/paradigma/article/view/6907/0Este trabalho é parte de uma pesquisa de doutorado que se preocupa em investigar o ensino de matemática no Liceu e na Escola Industrial de Florianópolis no período de 1937 a 1961. O objetivo é identificar os saberes a ensinar e para ensinar nos cursos do Liceu Industrial e da Escola Industrial de Florianópolis e quais as principais mudanças no ensino de Mat emática destas instituições de ensino industrial. Foram utilizados como referenciais teóricos Chervel (1990) sobre história das disciplinas escolares, Julia (2001) sobre cultura escolar , Hofstetter & Valente (2017) a respeito dos saberes a ensinar , Hofstet ter et al . (2017) na definição dos experts e Cellard (2008) para a análise documental . Percebeu - se que o ensino de Matemática era voltado para cálculos básicos, pois o enfoque era formar o aluno para a indústria, apesar de se intensificar o ensino de Álgeb ra e Trigonometria no início dos anos de 1940. Palavras - chave: Ensino Industrial. História da Educação Matemática. Experts . Saberes a ensinar. Saberes para ensinar

Plasma glial fibrillary acidic protein in autosomal dominant Alzheimer\u27s disease: Associations with Aβ-PET, neurodegeneration, and cognition

Background: Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is a promising candidate blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) diagnosis and prognostication. The timing of its disease-associated changes, its clinical correlates, and biofluid-type dependency will influence its clinical utility. Methods: We evaluated plasma, serum, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) GFAP in families with autosomal dominant AD (ADAD), leveraging the predictable age at symptom onset to determine changes by stage of disease. Results: Plasma GFAP elevations appear a decade before expected symptom onset, after amyloid beta (A ) accumulation and prior to neurodegeneration and cognitive decline. Plasma GFAP distinguished A -positive from A -negative ADAD participants and showed a stronger relationship with A load in asymptomatic than symptomatic ADAD. Higher plasma GFAP was associated with the degree and rate of neurodegeneration and cognitive impairment. Serum GFAP showed similar relationships, but these were less pronounced for CSF GFAP. Conclusion: Our findings support a role for plasma GFAP as a clinical biomarker of A -related astrocyte reactivity that is associated with cognitive decline and neurodegeneration. Highlights: Plasma glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) elevations appear a decade before expected symptom onset in autosomal dominant Alzheimer\u27s disease (ADAD). Plasma GFAP was associated to amyloid positivity in asymptomatic ADAD. Plasma GFAP increased with clinical severity and predicted disease progression. Plasma and serum GFAP carried similar information in ADAD, while cerebrospinal fluid GFAP did not