New Media Ethics 2009 course

"By separating people into "news seekers" (those who said they'd prefer to watch the news programs) and "entertainment seekers," an interesting pattern is revealed. Entertainment seekers who were assigned to watch one of the partisan programs (much to their disappointment) were actually much more influenced by them than news seekers watching the same shows. News seekers are presumably more aware of current political debates and may have already formed their own opinions, making new information less likely to change their thinking."

"In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders. It has become an invaluable research tool that permits students, teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books. It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations. It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all society benefits."

IBM has built a computational creativity machine that creates entirely new and useful stuff from its knowledge of existing stuff. And the secret sauce in all this? Big data, say the computer scientists behind it.

"what exactly is information? We tend to think of it as human made, but since we're all a result of our DNA sequence, perhaps we should think of humans as being made of information."

"We must answer profound questions about the way we live. Should everyone be permanently connected to everything? Who owns which data, and how should information be made public? Can and should data use be regulated, and, if so, how? And what role should government, business, and ordinary Internet users play in addressing these issues?"

"In a feature story published Tuesday, the English-language version of the state-run Global Times reports that 250,000 Chinese journalists are being made to attend weekly training sessions ahead of a certification exam scheduled for next year. All journalists are technically required to be certified in order to be able to legally conduct interviews or otherwise gather information. Such certification must be renewed every five years, the newspaper said, though such intensive and mandatory training sessions are new. The aim of such training is to reinforce the "Marxist view of journalism," the report said."

" Piles upon piles of digital trails. Tweet streams and Facebook feeds. Blog posts, Instagram photos, forum conversations and/or arguments. Tracks left behind me, tracing every step.  With every tweet or comment, we write what we are going to leave behind us. Because we most assuredly will leave it behind. All this technology has created a wealth of stories, stories we never would have found 20 years ago. Stories that make us laugh or cry or catch our breath. Words that teach us and surprise us and make us better people. We leave traces behind every moment. We get to write our own legacies, even though with every day and every tweet and every throwaway glib comment, that's not what we think we're doing.  But in the end, it is. In some ways, it's all we're doing. What we've left is what we've chosen to put out there.  What have you chosen? Think about it. Really think about it. If you are gone tomorrow, or even in 20 years, what are you writing or doing or publishing today? Someday, someone will read it. What will they learn about you?"

"But this latest story once again sparked headlines around the world, even if articles often made the point that the research was not peer-reviewed. What was different, however, was Facebook's reaction. Previously, its PR team has gone into overdrive behind the scenes to rubbish this kind of research but said nothing in public. This time they used a new tactic, humour, to undermine the story. Mike Develin, a data scientist for the social network, published a note on Facebook mocking the Princeton team's "innovative use of Google search trends". He went on to use the same techniques to analyse the university's own prospects, concluding that a decline in searches over recent years "suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all". Now, who knows, Facebook may well face an uncertain future. But academics looking to predict its demise have been put on notice - the company employs some pretty smart scientists who may take your research apart and fire back. The gloves are off."

"Fact-checking has gained prominence as a reformist movement to revitalize truth-seeking ideals in journalism. While fact-checkers are often assumed to code facts accurately, no studies have formally assessed fact-checkers' performance. I evaluate the performance of two major online fact-checkers, Politfact at Tampa Bay Times and Fact Checker at Washington Post, comparing their interrater reliability using a method that is regularly utilized across the social sciences. I show that fact-checkers rarely fact-check the same statement, and when they do, there is little agreement in their ratings. Approximately, 1 in 10 statements is fact-checked by both fact-checking outlets, and among claims that both outlets check, their factual ratings have a Cohen's κ of 0.52, an agreement rate much lower than what is acceptable for social scientific coding. The results suggest that difficulties in fact-checking elites' statements may limit the ability of journalistic fact-checking to hold politicians accountable."

"First, false news is tricking people. During the presidential election last year, Facebook users saw articles falsely claiming that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton was at the centre of a paedophile ring. Many readers were inclined to believe these false stories because they didn't come from the traditional news sources-trust in which is pretty low. This is due in part to the second thing: America's president and those around him are denouncing news stories that portray them negatively, eroding trust in news and the organisations that report it. The same is true of Russia's president and others. So we have to deal with both actually false news and powerful individuals and institutions denouncing genuine news as false."

"Radar aims to automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement - basically roboticizing the work of reporters. Stories from the data will be penned using Natural Language Generation, which converts information gleaned from the data into words. The robotic reporters won't be working alone. The grant includes funds allocated to hire five journalists to identify datasets, as well as curate and edit the news articles generated from Radar. The project also aims to create automated ways to add images and video to robot-made stories."

When sufferers read these extreme stories they inevitably compare themselves, leading to denial. It gives them something quantitative to measure themselves against, instead of something more dimensional. I used to convince myself I didn't have a problem because I wasn't four stone, eating laxative and lettuce sandwiches and living off a drip. How can we solely blame the media for causing eating disorders when there are cases of anorexia in blind people and in places like rural Africa.