Interactive infographics and news values

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Journalism [PUBLICATION DETAILS], copyright @ Taylor & Francis, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21670811.2013.841368.This study is concerned with the news values and working practices that inform the creation of interactive infographics in UK online news. The author draws upon organisational theory in journalism studies, and considers how conventional journalistic news values compare with best practice as espoused in different literatures within this field. A series of open-ended, depth interviews with visual news journalists from the UK national media were undertaken, along with a short-term observation case study at a national online news publisher. Journalistic and organisational norms are found to shape the selection, production, and treatment of interactive graphics, and a degree of variation is found to exist amongst practitioners as to definitions of quality in this field. Some news stories are considered to be better suited to rendering in interactive form than others. The availability of “big data” does not drive decision-making in itself, but some numbers are considered more newsworthy than others. Budgetary constraint drives practice and limits potential in this field. Risk aversion, embodied in various forms; from the use of templates, to a perceived need to avoid audience complaint, is found to dampen experimentation. Detailed audience research was found to inform the choice of methods used in data visualisation at one national news producer. This warrants further investigation as to how audiences engage with news interactives, and what the framing of news in certain (preferred) data visualisation formats means in terms of how news is understood

Persistence in Mathematics by Underrepresented Students: Experiences of a Math Excel Program

Success in mathematics by underrepresented and nontraditional college students is measured not only by academic performance (grades), but also by the continued participation and persistence of these students in mathematics coursework. The Math Excel program at Oregon State University attempts to build learning communities with a sharp academic focus in support of students concurrently taking introductory level mathematics courses. The Math Excel program is based heavily on Uri Treisman\u27s Emerging Scholars Workshop model of collaborative problem solving. In this article, we examine the experience of minority students in the Educational Opportunities Program participating in the Math Excel program. While the program had appeared successful in terms of improving academic performance in the concurrent mathematics course, the continued participation and persistence of these students in mathematics was disappointing. On a trial basis, structural changes were made to build a much stronger identification of the Math Excel learning community with a section of College Algebra. In the next term, there was a much higher incidence of participation in the subsequent Precalculus using the same Math Excel structure. While the collaborative problem solving activity provided in Math Excel was crucial to students\u27 successful academic performance, these results suggest that subtle issues related to students\u27 recognition of and identification with a learning community may be critically important to underrepresented and nontraditional students\u27 continued persistence in mathematics

Analysis of CDC social control measures using an agent-based simulation of an influenza epidemic in a city

Background: the transmission of infectious disease amongst the human population is a complex process which requires advanced, often individual-based, models to capture the space-time details observed in reality.Methods: an Individual Space-Time Activity-based Model (ISTAM) was applied to simulate the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical control measures including: (1) refraining from social activities, (2) school closure and (3) household quarantine, for a hypothetical influenza outbreak in an urban area.Results: amongst the set of control measures tested, refraining from social activities with various compliance levels was relatively ineffective. Household quarantine was very effective, especially for the peak number of cases and total number of cases, with large differences between compliance levels. Household quarantine resulted in a decrease in the peak number of cases from more than 300 to around 158 for a 100% compliance level, a decrease of about 48.7%. The delay in the outbreak peak was about 3 to 17 days. The total number of cases decreased to a range of 3635-5403, that is, 63.7%-94.7% of the baseline value.When coupling control measures, household quarantine together with school closure was the most effective strategy. The resulting space-time distribution of infection in different classes of activity bundles (AB) suggests that the epidemic outbreak is strengthened amongst children and then spread to adults. By sensitivity analysis, this study demonstrated that earlier implementation of control measures leads to greater efficacy. Also, for infectious diseases with larger basic reproduction number, the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical measures was shown to be limited.Conclusions: simulated results showed that household quarantine was the most effective control measure, while school closure and household quarantine implemented together achieved the greatest benefit. Agent-based models should be applied in the future to evaluate the efficacy of control measures for a range of disease outbreaks in a range of settings given sufficient information about the given case and knowledge about the transmission processes at a fine scal

Does attending a charter school Reduce the likelihood of being placed into special education? Evidence from Denver, Colorado

We use administrative data to measure whether attending a charter school in Denver, Colorado, reduces the likelihood that students are newly classified as having a disability in primary grades. We employ an observational approach that takes advantage of Denver’s Common Enrollment System, which allows us to observe each school that the student listed a preference to attend. We find evidence that attending a Denver charter school reduces the likelihood that a student is classified as having a specific learning disability, which is the largest and most subjectively diagnosed disability category. We find no evidence that charter attendance reduces the probability of being classified as having a speech or language disability or autism, which are two more objectively diagnosed classifications.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research came from The Searle Freedom Trust. (The Searle Freedom Trust)http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Does-Charter-Attendence-Reduce-Likelihood-of-SPED-Placement.pdfhttp://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Does-Charter-Attendence-Reduce-Likelihood-of-SPED-Placement.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Are low-performing students more likely to exit charter schools? Evidence from New York City and Denver, Colorado

A common criticism of charter schools is that they systematically remove or “counsel out” their lowest performing students. However, relatively little is currently known about whether low-performing students are in fact more likely to exit charter schools than surrounding traditional public schools. We use longitudinal student-level data from two large urban school systems that prior research has found to have effective charter school sectors–New York City and Denver, Colorado–to evaluate whether there is a differential relationship between low-performance on standardized test scores and the probability that students exit their schools by sector attended. We find no evidence of a differential relationship between prior performance and the likelihood of exiting a school by sector. Low-performing students in both cities are either equally likely or less likely to exit their schools than are student in traditional public schools.We would like to thank the Denver Public School System for providing the data necessary for this paper, and we especially appreciated the assistance of Josh Drake, Yu-lu Hsiung, and Alisha Anuscencion. Funding for this project comes from the Searle Charitable Trust. We thank the Foundation for its support, but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented are our own and do not necessarily represent those of the Foundation. All remaining errors are our own. (Searle Charitable Trust)http://sites.bu.edu/marcuswinters/files/2017/09/Exiting-Charter-Schools.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Absorption and emission spectroscopies of homogeneous and inhomogeneously broadened multilevel systems in strong light fields

A method is introduced to calc., for a model set of mol. levels, the spectral line shapes expected for a variety of conventional laser expts. including absorption, hole burning, fluorescence line narrowing, and Raman scattering. The method allows the incident laser field to have arbitrary intensity. Furthermore, the effects of model gaussian or lorenzian inhomogeneous distributions are readily incorporated. Earlier results for a 2-level system are easily obtained and new results are presented for inhomogeneously broadened 2- and 3-level systems, and for the effects of pure dephasing on the strong field spectra. The differences between fluorescence and Raman in strong fields, and the effect of strong fields on the spontaneous emission of inhomogeneously broadened transitions were described. Some predictions are made regarding line narrowing expts. in the strong-field limit

Consistency in Multi-Viewpoint Architectural Design of Enterprise Information Systems

Different stakeholders in the design of an enterprise information system have their own view on that design. To help produce a coherent design this paper presents a framework that aids in specifying relations between such views. To help produce a consistent design the framework also aids in specifying consistency rules that apply to the view relations and in checking the consistency according to those rules. The framework focuses on the higher levels of abstraction in a design, we refer to design at those levels of abstraction as architectural design. The highest level of abstraction that we consider is that of business process design and the lowest level is that of software component design. The contribution of our framework is that it provides a collection of basic concepts that is common to viewpoints in the area of enterprise information systems. These basic concepts aid in relating viewpoints by providing: (i) a common terminology that helps stakeholders to understand each others concepts; and (ii) a basis for defining re-usable consistency rules. In particular we define re-usable rules to check consistency between behavioural views that overlap or are a refinement of each other. We also present an architecture for a tool suite that supports our framework. We show that our framework can be applied, by performing a case study in which we specify the relations and consistency rules between the RM-ODP enterprise, computational and information viewpoints

The contribution of corporate ventures to radical innovation

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group, i.e. the independent ventures. In particular, corporate ventures are more successful at developing radical innovations. This effect, however, decreases with the ventures' degree of ownership concentration. We conclude that corporate ventures with a high ownership concentration are more likely to be controlled and monitored by their corporate sponsors, resulting in less favorable conditions for radical innovation. --corporate entrepreneurship,start-ups,radical innovation