A Study of a Sample of Facebook Users Finds They Do Not Seek Political News through Facebook But Are Exposed to Political News through This Medium

Abstract A Review of: Schaferm, S., Sulflow, M., & Muller, P. (2017). The special taste of snack news: an application of niche theory to understand the appeal of Facebook as a source for political news. First Monday, 22(4-3). http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i4.7431 Abstract Objective – To investigate Facebook as a source of exposure to political news stories and to compare the reasons for using Facebook as a news source and the gratifications obtained, compared with other news sources. Design – Survey questionnaire. Setting – Facebook. Subjects – 422 German Facebook users. Methods – An online survey was developed to investigate the use of Facebook as a news source compared with other sources. Specific research questions were informed by the ‘theory of niche’ (Dimmick, 2003) which examines the coexistence and competition between different media outlets by examining the breadth, overlap and superiority of one platform over another. The survey was distributed using a ‘snowball’ technique between July and August 2015. The survey was shared by 52 student research assistants on their Facebook profiles. They asked their friends to complete the survey and share it with their own networks. Main results – The mean (M) age of the 422 respondents was 23.5 years (SD=8.25). The majority were female (61%) with a high school degree (89%). TV news and news websites were the most frequently used sources of political news. Facebook ranked third, ahead of newspapers, search engines, magazines, email provider websites, and Twitter. The mean score for the importance of Facebook as a news sources was 2.46 (SD=1.13) on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is low and 5 is high. This fell in the middle of the range when compared with the top ranked source assessed by importance (TV news, M 4.40, SD=0.88) and the lowest (email providers, M 1.92, SD=0.97). Users rarely visited Facebook with the purpose of finding news (M 1.59, SD=0.73). However, they estimated around 24% of the posts they see were concerned with political news, and when encountered, these stories are frequently read (M 3.53, SD=1.18). However, the level of interaction as measured by liking, commenting, sharing or status updates was low (M 1.94 SD=1.09; M 1.37, SD=0.79; M 1.51, SD=0.85 and M 1.4, SD=0.78 respectively). The ‘gratification’ categories where Facebook as a news source scored the highest were for killing time (M 2.97, SD=1.29), entertainment (M 2.92, SD=1.05), and surveillance (M 2.77, SD=1.01). When compared to newspapers and TV news, it was found that Facebook has a lower score for niche breadth, meaning that it serves a specific rather than general news function. Facebook also had a lower overlap score when compared with the other media, thereby performing a complementary function, while TV news and newspapers perform similarly. TV news scored better for providing balanced information, surveillance and social utility while Facebook scored highest for killing time. There was no difference in the category of entertainment. There was a similar picture when comparing Facebook with newspapers. Conclusion – The authors conclude that while users do not actively seek political news through Facebook, they are exposed to political news through this medium. Respondents did not consider the news to be well balanced, and that currently Facebooks’ niche is restricted to entertainment and killing time. The authors note that this may be disappointing for news organisations, but there is potential to expose large audiences to political news when they are not actively seeking it. The findings represent a specific time point in a changing landscape and future research will need to take these changes into account. Comparisons with other online news sources and the use of objective measures to validate self-reported data would be valuable areas for future research

Exploring women’s perspectives of living with mental illness, stigma, and receiving community services

According to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) (2015), one in five individuals will experience mental illness personally, which means that all Canadians will be indirectly (or directly) influenced by mental illness at some point in their life. Unfortunately, due to historical trends and negative stereotypes mental illness has become heavily stigmatized (Camp, Finlay, and Lyons, 2002; Chernomas, Clarke, and Chisholm, 2000; Link, Struening, Neese-Todd, Asmussen, and Phelan, 2001; Sands, 2009; Szeto, Luong & Dobson, 2013). Although many studies have assessed the relationship between mental illness and stigma, little research has included a gender lens when exploring these topics. Therefore, the primary research objective of the current study is to explore women’s perspectives of living with mental illness, stigma, and receiving community services. In total, five women from the Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge area participated in the study. Similar to the literature, results found that the women experienced feelings of loneliness and sadness due to their mental illness diagnosis and the stigma they experienced from friends, family, and service staff. Some women talked about being relieved to have a label or diagnosis for their illness, however, the majority of their narratives suggested that living with a mental illness is difficult due to the internal and external stigma they experience. Findings from this study have implications for contributing to the field of social work, improving service delivery within various healthcare facilities, and future research

Twitter Users with Access to Academic Library Services Request Health Sciences Literature through Social Media

A Review of: Swab, M., & Romme, K. (2016). Scholarly sharing via Twitter: #icanhazpdf requests for health sciences literature. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, 37(1), 6-11. http://dx.doi.org/10.5596/c16-009 Objective – To analyze article sharing requests for health sciences literature on Twitter, received through the #icanhazpdf protocol. Design – Social media content analysis. Setting – Twitter. Subjects – 302 tweets requesting health sciences articles with the #icanhazpdf tag. Methods – The authors used a subscription service called RowFeeder to collect public tweets posted with the hashtag #icanhazpdf between February and April 2015. Rowfeeder recorded the Twitter user name, location, date and time, URL, and content of the tweet. The authors excluded all retweets and then each reviewed one of two sets. They recorded the geographic region and affiliation of the requestor, whether the tweet was a request or comment, type of material requested, how the item was identified, and if the subject of the request was health or non-health. Health requests were further classified using the Scopus subject category of the journal. A journal could be classified with more than one category. Any uncertainties during the coding process were resolved by both authors reviewing the tweet and reaching a consensus. Main results – After excluding all the retweets and comments, 1079 tweets were coded as heath or non-health related. A final set of 302 health related requests were further analyzed. Almost all the requests were for journal articles (99%, n=300). The highest-ranking subject was medicine (64.9%, n=196), and the lowest was dentistry (0.3%, n=1). The most common article identifier was a link to the publisher’s website (50%, n=152), followed by a link to the PubMed record (22%, n=67). Articles were also identified by citation information (11%, n=32), DOI (5%, n=14), a direct request to an individual (3%, n=9), another method (2%, n=6), or multiple identifiers (7%, n=22). The majority of requests originated from the UK and Ireland (29.1%, n=88), the United States (26.5%, n=80), and the rest of Europe (19.2%, n=58. Many requests came from people with affiliations to an academic institution (45%, n=136). These included librarians (3.3%, n=10), students (13.6%, n=41), and academics (28.1%, n=85). When tweets of unknown affiliation were excluded (n=117), over 70% of the requests were from people with academic links. Other requesters included journalists, clinicians, non-profit organisations, patients, and industry employees. The authors examined comments in the tweets to gain some understanding of the reasons for seeking articles through #icanhazpdf, although this was not the primary focus of their study. A preliminary examination of the comments suggested that users value the ease, convenience, and the ability to connect with other researchers that social media offers. Conclusion – The authors concluded that the number of requests for health sciences literature through this channel is modest, but health librarians should be aware of #icanhazpdf as another method through which their users might seek to obtain articles. The authors recommend further research into the reasons why users sometimes choose social media over the library to obtain articles

Web-Scale Discovery Services Retrieve Relevant Results in Health Sciences Topics Including MEDLINE Content

A Review of: Hanneke, R., & O’Brien, K. K. (2016). Comparison of three web-scale discovery services for health sciences research. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 104(2), 109-117. http://dx.doi.org/10.3163/1536-5050.104.2.004 Abstract Objective – To compare the results of health sciences search queries in three web-scale discovery (WSD) services for relevance, duplicate detection, and retrieval of MEDLINE content. Design – Comparative evaluation and bibliometric study. Setting – Six university libraries in the United States of America. Subjects – Three commercial WSD services: Primo, Summon, and EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). Methods – The authors collected data at six universities, including their own. They tested each of the three WSDs at two data collection sites. However, since one of the sites was using a legacy version of Summon that was due to be upgraded, data collected for Summon at this site were considered obsolete and excluded from the analysis. The authors generated three questions for each of six major health disciplines, then designed simple keyword searches to mimic typical student search behaviours. They captured the first 20 results from each query run at each test site, to represent the first “page” of results, giving a total of 2,086 total search results. These were independently assessed for relevance to the topic. Authors resolved disagreements by discussion, and calculated a kappa inter-observer score. They retained duplicate records within the results so that the duplicate detection by the WSDs could be compared. They assessed MEDLINE coverage by the WSDs in several ways. Using precise strategies to generate a relevant set of articles, they conducted one search from each of the six disciplines in PubMed so that they could compare retrieval of MEDLINE content. These results were cross-checked against the first 20 results from the corresponding query in the WSDs. To aid investigation of overall coverage of MEDLINE, they recorded the first 50 results from each of the 6 PubMed searches in a spreadsheet. During data collection at the WSD sites, they searched for these references to discover if the WSD tool at each site indexed these known items. Authors adopted measures to control for any customisation of the product setup at each data collection site. In particular, they excluded local holdings from the results by limiting the searches to scholarly, peer-reviewed articles. Main results – Authors reported results for 5 of the 6 sites. All of the WSD tools retrieved between 50-60% relevant results. EDS retrieved the highest number of relevant records (195/360 and 216/360), while Primo retrieved the lowest (167/328 and 169/325). There was good observer agreement (k=0.725) for the relevance assessment. The duplicate detection rate was similar in EDS and Summon (between 96-97% unique articles), while the Primo searches returned 82.9-84.9% unique articles. All three tools retrieved relevant results that were not indexed in MEDLINE, and retrieved relevant material indexed in MEDLINE that was not retrieved in the PubMed searches. EDS and Summon retrieved more non-MEDLINE material than Primo. EDS performed best in the known-item searches, with 300/300 and 299/300 items retrieved, while Primo performed worst with 230/300 and 267/300 items retrieved. The Summon platform features an “automated query expansion” search function, where user-entered keywords are matched to related search terms and these are automatically searched along with the original keyword. The authors observed that this function resulted in a wholly relevant first page of results for one of the search questions tested in Summon. Conclusion – While EDS performed slightly better overall, the difference was not great enough in this small sample of test sites to recommend EDS over the other tools being tested. The automated query expansion found in Summon is a useful function that is worthy of further investigation by the WSD vendors. The ability of the WSDs to retrieve MEDLINE content through simple keyword searches demonstrates the potential value of using a WSD tool in health sciences research, particularly for inexpert searchers

Study flow diagrams in Cochrane systematic review updates: an adapted PRISMA flow diagram.

Cochrane systematic reviews are conducted and reported according to rigorous standards. A study flow diagram must be included in a new review, and there is clear guidance from the PRISMA statement on how to do this. However, for a review update, there is currently no guidance on how study flow diagrams should be presented. To address this, a working group was formed to find a solution and produce guidance on how to use these diagrams in review updates.A number of different options were devised for how these flow diagrams could be used in review updates, and also in cases where multiple searches for a review or review update have been conducted. These options were circulated to the Cochrane information specialist community for consultation and feedback. Following the consultation period, the working group refined the guidance and made the recommendation that for review updates an adapted PRISMA flow diagram should be used, which includes an additional box with the number of previously included studies feeding into the total. Where multiple searches have been conducted, the results should be added together and treated as one set of results.There is no existing guidance for using study flow diagrams in review updates. Our adapted diagram is a simple and pragmatic solution for showing the flow of studies in review updates

Neural Cellular Automata Can Respond to Signals

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are a model of morphogenesis, capable of growing two-dimensional artificial organisms from a single seed cell. In this paper, we show that NCAs can be trained to respond to signals. Two types of signal are used: internal (genomically-coded) signals, and external (environmental) signals. Signals are presented to a single pixel for a single timestep. Results show NCAs are able to grow into multiple distinct forms based on internal signals, and are able to change colour based on external signals. Overall these contribute to the development of NCAs as a model of artificial morphogenesis, and pave the way for future developments embedding dynamic behaviour into the NCA model. Code and target images are available through GitHub: https://github.com/jstovold/ALIFE2023Comment: Accepted to main track at ALIFE 202

Reaction–diffusion chemistry implementation of associative memory neural network

Unconventional computing paradigms are typically very difficult to program. By implementing efficient parallel control architectures such as artificial neural networks, we show that it is possible to program unconventional paradigms with relative ease. The work presented implements correlation matrix memories (a form of artificial neural network based on associative memory) in reaction–diffusion chemistry, and shows that implementations of such artificial neural networks can be trained and act in a similar way to conventional implementations

Youth\u27s Comprehension of Environmental Justice Across Multiple Countries

Global climate change is an issue of environmental justice, because neither contributions toward the causes nor its consequences are equally distributed across and within countries (Roberts, 2001). Given the importance of framing climate change as an environmental justice issue, the present study sought to understand how youth conceptualize and engage with environmental justice across multiple countries. Youth are an important target population for engagement, because they often are active agents of social change by challenging the status-quo, and becoming civically engaged (Blythe & Harré, 2012; De Vreede, Warner & Pitter, 2014; United Nations, 2004). The current research is a secondary analysis of qualitative interview data collected from participants as part of the multinational longitudinal study Youth Leading Environmental Change (YLEC study). In total, 33 interviews were analyzed and participants ranged from 18 to 25 years of age. The following research questions were investigated: (1) How do youth describe the state of the environment? (2) How do youth conceptualize environmental justice? Are there differences from one country to another? (2a) What cultural aspects do youth reference when describing their understanding of environmental justice? (3)What aspects of the YLEC workshop do youth reference as contributors to learning about environmental justice? Analysis was conducted by coding all interviews by country to identify emerging themes based on geographic location. Results revealed that youth had a moderate to thorough understanding of current environmental issues and environmental justice. Additionally, a guest speaker providing a personal account of environmental injustice, and a video exchange between students from developing and developed countries were the most impactful, and influential components in regard to youths learning about environmental justice. Implications for environmental justice education and future research will be discussed