The broadcast has become an origin story of fake news and technological anxiety in the United States, and its tentacled aliens watch when we talk of fake news today. Then, as now, the worry over whether the news can be believed was a proxy for something else entirely – fear of the new technologies that brought it. Scholars have convincingly questioned the scale of the 1938 panic. Everybody loves a good story – especially the newspapers threatened by radio news, the social scientists seeking a claim to relevance, and Welles, great ham that he was. Firsthand accounts attest that some listeners did panic, but many more did not. Why, then, did millions more find the panic so easy to believe these past 80 years?
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China's Great Boom as a Historical Process | IZA - Institute of Labor Economics - 0 views
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Beginning in the late 1970s, China's economy delivered the largest growth spurt in recorded history. Striking discontinuity between recent outcomes and the economic experience of the prior 200 years invites portrayal of recent events as a "China miracle" that requires neither economic nor historical analysis. This overlooks deep institutional constraints arising from authoritarian rule and its supporting elite networks and fails to recognize the link between central government weakness and the origins of the recent boom. In both the pre-1949 treaty ports and in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the retreat of central control enabled episodes of economic openness and dynamism built upon 'bottom up' initiative and decentralized innovation. Historic legacies that shape political structures and individual behavior will continue to influence China's economic trajectory.
The New Humanitarian | Will COVID-19 force the aid sector to change? - 0 views
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Today's pandemic offers the sector an opportunity to break that trajectory. "Crises are moments of change," Alice Obrecht, the head of policy for ALNAP, says. "They make it impossible to act in the way you were acting before." To understand where we might go from here, a look back at how the aid sector has changed - grown up, really - over the past 25 years is helpful: from the Rwanda genocide in 1994 to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami; from September 11th 2001 to 2013's Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and then the 2015 surge of refugees across the Mediterranean, humanitarianism has helped pick up the pieces and allowed people to restart their lives.
Gaps in early surveillance of coronavirus led to record-breaking US trajectory: study - 0 views
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Research from the University of Notre Dame estimates that more than 100,000 people were already infected with COVID-19 by early March-when only 1,514 cases and 39 deaths had been officially reported and before a national emergency was declared. The study provides insight into how limited testing and gaps in surveillance during the initial phase of the epidemic resulted in so many cases going undetected. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
COVID-19 Testing Dashboard for IU Bloomington - 0 views
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It is important to note that no single number or metric is robust enough to adequately describe the trajectory of the pandemic.
A radio play about radio that became the first fake-news story | Aeon Essays - 0 views
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In that decade, radio became more trusted than newspapers. The reasons had to do partially with the unique characteristics of the medium – its intimacy and ability to put you on the spot to hear as an event unfolded without a reporting gap in which craven newspapermen could insert their own slant. It also had to do with the trueness of the sounds that radio reproduced.
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In November, three days after the War of the Worlds broadcast, Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist and radio reporter, published an oft-cited piece in response, entitled ‘Mr Welles and Mass Delusion’, in which she argued that the broadcast suggested American susceptibility to foreign propaganda:All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic … If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.
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