Social Media Literacy Among Adolescents and Young Adults: Results From a Cross-Country Validation Study

When being online, young users are often confronted with insulting, hateful, or misleading messages. To handle these dark forms of participation, it is essential to equip them with resources that support their social literacy in today’s complex online environments. In the present article, we deployed a previously established scale on self-perceived participatory-moral literacy and conducted a broad online survey study with 1,489 adolescents and young adults aged 16–22 years (M = 19.74; SD = 1.65; 51% female) across eight different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom). The results provided a configural identical model of participatory-moral abilities, motivation, and behavior across the considered European countries. We could confirm weak invariance, satisfactory psychometric qualities, and convergent validity of the scale across the different countries. Implications for digital literacy research are discussed

Responsible Human-Robot Interaction with Anthropomorphic Service Robots: State of the Art of an Interdisciplinary Research Challenge

Anthropomorphic service robots are on the rise. The more capable they become and the more regular they are applied in real-world settings, the more critical becomes the responsible design of human-robot interaction (HRI) with special attention to human dignity, transparency, privacy, and robot compliance. In this paper we review the interdisciplinary state of the art relevant for the responsible design of HRI. Furthermore, directions for future research on the responsible design of HRI with anthropomorphic service robots are suggested

Editorial: Gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt

Ob es sich um soziale Netzwerke, Fernsehen, Radio oder Zeitungen handelt, Medien haben Einfluss auf unsere Wahrnehmung der Welt und unser Verständnis für die Gesellschaft. Eine Frage hierbei ist, welche Bedeutung Medien im Kontext gesellschaftlichem Zusammenhalt haben. Medien können einen wichtigen Beitrag zum sozialen Zusammenhalt leisten. Jedoch gibt es auch Entwicklungen, die diesen gefährden. Der vorliegende Band zeigt eine Auswahl an theoretischen, empirischen und praxisorientierten Perspektiven zur Frage auf, wie Strukturen interpersonaler und (teil-)öffentlicher Kommunikation sowie Medien insgesamt gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt stärken, aber auch herausfordern

Non-standard neutrino interactions in IceCube

Non-standard neutrino interactions (NSI) may arise in various types of new physics. Their existence would change the potential that atmospheric neutrinos encounter when traversing Earth matter and hence alter their oscillation behavior. This imprint on coherent neutrino forward scattering can be probed using high-statistics neutrino experiments such as IceCube and its low-energy extension, DeepCore. Both provide extensive data samples that include all neutrino flavors, with oscillation baselines between tens of kilometers and the diameter of the Earth. DeepCore event energies reach from a few GeV up to the order of 100 GeV - which marks the lower threshold for higher energy IceCube atmospheric samples, ranging up to 10 TeV. In DeepCore data, the large sample size and energy range allow us to consider not only flavor-violating and flavor-nonuniversal NSI in the μ−τ sector, but also those involving electron flavor. The effective parameterization used in our analyses is independent of the underlying model and the new physics mass scale. In this way, competitive limits on several NSI parameters have been set in the past. The 8 years of data available now result in significantly improved sensitivities. This improvement stems not only from the increase in statistics but also from substantial improvement in the treatment of systematic uncertainties, background rejection and event reconstruction

IceCube Search for Earth-traversing ultra-high energy Neutrinos

The search for ultra-high energy neutrinos is more than half a century old. While the hunt for these neutrinos has led to major leaps in neutrino physics, including the detection of astrophysical neutrinos, neutrinos at the EeV energy scale remain undetected. Proposed strategies for the future have mostly been focused on direct detection of the first neutrino interaction, or the decay shower of the resulting charged particle. Here we present an analysis that uses, for the first time, an indirect detection strategy for EeV neutrinos. We focus on tau neutrinos that have traversed Earth, and show that they reach the IceCube detector, unabsorbed, at energies greater than 100 TeV for most trajectories. This opens up the search for ultra-high energy neutrinos to the entire sky. We use ten years of IceCube data to perform an analysis that looks for secondary neutrinos in the northern sky, and highlight the promise such a strategy can have in the next generation of experiments when combined with direct detection techniques