No trade-offs between news and entertainment: Evidence from online engagement data

In today’s high-choice media environment, some scholars are concerned that people selectively consume media content based on personal interests and avoid others, which might lead to audience fragmentation across different content genres. Individually, there might be trade-offs between those genres, especially entertainment versus news. This study analyzed a large user engagement dataset (~40,000 users’ comments) collected from the Chinese information application Toutiao, one of the most popular information distribution platforms in China. The results showed that (1) the commenters were not fragmented between content genres, and (2) the users’ news engagement was positively associated with their entertainment engagement. The findings indicate that the availability of high media choices will not reduce the news engagement of those who have strong interest in entertainment. Instead, news engagement might increase alongside the augmentation of the sum of information engagement. Finally, we discussed the differences between relative news engagement and absolute news engagement.

From speech to language

This study proposes a novel exploration of perceived prosodic highlights in continuous speech, focusing on the alternative function of indexing and projecting information content deployment in the speech context. Given the assumption that prosodic highlight allocation directly reflects the interlocutors’ information content deployment, this study foregrounds perception-based prominences for indexing both the key information (KEY) and the projector (PJR) that projects the deployment of key/focal information. Two information content planning units (PJR plus its respective projection PJN, and KEY) prompted by prosodic highlights were established, based on quantitative analyses and discriminative acoustic features. Additional analyses confirm a general heavy-to-light information distribution across both units, showcasing that the relative projection trajectory size in the PJR-PJN unit is positively correlated to its position within discourse-prosodic units. Current results, therefore, directly substantiate the cognitive explanation of prosodic projection in speech, as evidence beyond syntactic relationships are drawn and prosodic projection is shown to involve perceived prosodic highlight allocation and information deployment in a fixed pattern. Explorations of prosody-prompted projection shed light on a more comprehensive account of the mechanism behind information planning, hence facilitating a deeper understanding of the composition of context prosody and the derivation of linguistic invariants from speech.

Motivation, Satisfaction, and Risks of Operational Forces and Helpers Regarding the 2021 and 2013 Flood Operations in Germany

Pluvial floods claimed more than 180 lives in Germany in July 2021, when a large and slow-moving storm system affected Germany and many neighbouring countries. The death tolls and damages were the highest since 1962 in Germany, and soon after, the crisis management was under public critique. This study has undertaken an online survey to understand crisis management better and identify lessons to learn. It has received a positive interest among operational relief forces and other helpers (n = 2264). The findings reveal an overall satisfaction with the operation in general as well as personal lessons learned. It also reveals shortcomings in many areas, ranging from information distribution, coordination, parallel ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, infrastructure resilience, and other factors. Just as well, areas for improvement of the crisis management system are suggested by the respondents. Cooperation and support by the affected population are perceived as positive. This helps to inform other areas of research that are necessary, such as studies on the perception by the affected people. The gaps in assessments of operational forces and some methodological constraints are discussed to advance future follow-up studies.

A variational-autoencoder approach to solve the hidden profile task in hybrid human-machine teams

Online, social media bots have been accused to spread misinformation and support extreme or minority-held opinions. However, bots in hybrid human-machine teams can also be designed to improve team performance. In this paper, we study the effect of a single minority-supporting bot in hybrid teams in a carefully controlled experiment. People working in teams of 10 were asked to solve a hidden-profile prediction task, where task-relevant information was scattered unequally across team members. To do well in this task, pieces of information shared by the minority and the majority of players should be integrated. Simple majority-based decisions are not enough to perform well as information held by minority players is also valuable. We used a variational auto-encoder to train a bot to learn people's information distribution by observing how people's judgements correlated over time. After training, a bot was designed to increase team performance by selectively supporting opinions proportionally to their under-representation in the team. We show that the presence of a single bot (representing 10\% of team members) can significantly increase the polarization between minority and majority opinions by making minority opinions less prone to social influence. Although the effects on hybrid team performance were negligible, the bot presence significantly influenced team opinion dynamics. These findings show that unsupervised learning can be used to program bots that can improve team performance.

CONTRIBUTION OF STRATEGIC INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION TO THE DECISION MAKING PROCESSES - AN EMPIRICAL

As an organizational asset, data is one of the great sources of competitive advantage of organizations, so that its publication and storageg, aligned with the organizations' strategic and operational metrics, has become a matter of great discussion and concern among decision makers. This study aims to carry out a study about the contributions of the strategic distribution of information to decision-making processes in organizations. The methodology used, of an exploratory qualitative nature, applied the study of multiple cases, through the collection and analysis of data from semi-structured interviews with several employees of organizations that use tools for collecting, processing and disseminating information. The research shows how the information and technologies applied to its treatment collaborate with decision-making processe.

OLD ENGLISH SWA SIMILES: STRUCTURE OVERVIEW

This paper describes a way of expressing figurative similarity through Old English constructions employing the element swa ‘as’ (or its variants) as a comparison marker, which in early Middle English developed into two distinct lexemes: the adverb also and the conjunction as, the latter often found in clauses of comparison. The uniqueness of this type of Anglo-Saxon simile is its capability to create similes whose tenors and vehicles either nominate the referents standing behind them or provide a certain amount of information concerning their actions or states, being expressed either by lexemes or clauses, correspondingly. The constructions in question are scrutinised regarding their structure, which sheds some light on its interdependency and interconnectedness with part of speech semantics as well as emphasis. The data is quantified in terms of grammatical as well as information distribution-related issues. This analysis results in a detailed description of two major categories of the Old English swa simile depending on the number of verbalised components, their positioning, and grammatical expression; it also briefly touches upon the chronological peculiarities of the concerned constructions as well as the comparison with other means of figurative similarity expression in Old English. The analysis is carried out on material that has never been studied before.

New record of Allamanda blanchetti Kunth (Apocynaceae) for the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

This study report the first record of Allamanda blanchetii Kunth in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil. This species was collected from an upland forest in Semi-deciduous Seasonal Forest. This occurrence adds new information about the distribution of this species and expands its range to Brazil, which is important for its conservation. We provide taxonomic information, distribution maps, conservation status assessment, photograps, and an identification key for the Allamanda L. species in the Atlantic Forest.