When hyping technology is a crime

The rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes, former chief executive officer (CEO) of the high-flying, privately held, American medical diagnostics company Theranos, has riveted the public for years. A bestseller, a documentary, and a seemingly endless stream of news stories have chronicled the drama, which came to a climax last week when a jury decided that Holmes committed fraud. Although a verdict has been rendered, it’s worth examining how the culture of science innovation contributed to the problem. For too long, fledging companies promoting technological and scientific advances have relied too much on style and not enough on substance.

Communicating Photograph Content Through Tactile Images to People With Visual Impairments

Millions of people with a visual impairment across the world are denied access to visual images. They are unable to enjoy the simple pleasures of viewing family photographs, those in textbooks or tourist brochures and the pictorial embellishment of news stories etc. We propose a simple, inexpensive but effective approach, to make content accessible via touch. We use state-of-the-art algorithms to automatically process an input photograph into a collage of icons, that depict the most important semantic aspects of a scene. This collage is then printed onto swell paper. Our experiments show that people can recognise content with an accuracy exceeding 70% and create plausible narratives to explain it. This means that people can understand image content via touch. Communicating scene foreground is a step forward, but there are many other steps needed to provide the visually impaired with the fullest possible access to visual content.

Analysis of COVID-19 news coverage by Televisión Española (TVE1)

This article analyzes the news coverage of the COVID-19 health crisis by Televisión Española (TVE1), to determine if this media reported the news with rigor and in accordance with journalism professional codes and best practice guidelines. For this purpose, content analysis was conducted on the universe of news stories (n=1,449) in the TVE1 daily newscast, starting with the first outbreak of the pandemic on the Iberian Peninsula on February 26, 2020, until the end of the first state of emergency on June 21, 2020. Our categories of analysis were: information sources, news frames, predominant topics, resources used for dramatic effects, and breaches of journalism ethics in reporting news. In general, TVE1 did not engage in sensationalized or dramatized news coverage, but instead attempted to transmit a message that was educational and instructional. Its policy was to provide information on measures adopted by authorities to help prevent the spread of the pandemic. Nevertheless, TVE’s benevolent attitude towards the government and its policies can be observed in its news reporting, revealing a lack of impartiality and editorial independence by this media. Despite the importance of specialized and expert information in times of a pandemic, eyewitness sources were those most used in reporting news, even in economic news framing. Furthermore, these latter sources were employed instead of expert ones, which were in fact the least used, and whose presence progressively declined during the analyzed period.

A Semantic Preprocessing Framework for Breaking News Detection to Support Future Drone Journalism Services

Nowadays, news coverage implies the existence of video footage and sound, from which arises the need for fast reflexes by media organizations. Social media and mobile journalists assist in fulfilling this requirement, but quick on-site presence is not always feasible. In the past few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and specifically drones, have evolved to accessible recreational and business tools. Drones could help journalists and news organizations capture and share breaking news stories. Media corporations and individual professionals are waiting for the appropriate flight regulation and data handling framework to enable their usage to become widespread. Drone journalism services upgrade the usage of drones in day-to-day news reporting operations, offering multiple benefits. This paper proposes a system for operating an individual drone or a set of drones, aiming to mediate real-time breaking news coverage. Apart from the definition of the system requirements and the architecture design of the whole system, the current work focuses on data retrieval and the semantics preprocessing framework that will be the basis of the final implementation. The ultimate goal of this project is to implement a whole system that will utilize data retrieved from news media organizations, social media, and mobile journalists to provide alerts, geolocation inference, and flight planning.

Health-related fake news during the COVID-19 pandemic: perceived trust and information search

PurposeHealth-related online fake news (HOFN) has become a major social problem. HOFN can lead to the spread of ineffective and even harmful remedies. The study aims to understand Internet users' responses to HOFN during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic using the protective action decision model (PADM).Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected pandemic severity data (regional number of confirmed cases) from government websites of the USA and China (Studies 1 and 2), search behavior from Google and Baidu search engines (Studies 1 and 2) and data regarding trust in two online fake news stories from two national surveys (Studies 2 and 3). All data were analyzed using a multi-level linear model.FindingsThe research detected negative time-lagged relationships between pandemic severity and regional HOFN search behavior by three actual fake news stories from the USA and China (Study 1). Importantly, trust in HOFN served as a mediator in the time-lagged relationship between pandemic severity and search behavior (Study 2). Additionally, the relationship between pandemic severity and trust in HOFN varied according to individuals' perceived control (Study 3).Originality/valueThe authors' results underscore the important role of PADM in understanding Internet users' trust in and search for HOFN. When people trust HOFN, they may seek more information to implement further protective actions. Importantly, it appears that trust in HOFN varies with environmental cues (regional pandemic severity) and with individuals' perceived control, providing insight into developing coping strategies during a pandemic.

NEWS in brief

A roundup of the latest news stories and developments affecting practice managers in the UK