Media discourse in China and Japan on the COVID-19 pandemic: comparative analysis of the first three months

Purpose This study aims to analyze how English-language versions of e-newspapers in the first two countries affected, China and Japan, which are non-English-speaking countries and have different socio-economic and political settings, have highlighted Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic news and informed the global community. Design/methodology/approach A text-mining approach was used to explore experts’ thoughts as published by the two leading English-language newspapers in China and Japan from January to March 2020. This study analyzes the Opinion section, which mainly comprises editorial and the op-ed section. The current study groups all editorial discussions and highlights into ten major aspects, which cover health, economy, politics, culture and others. Findings Within the first three months, the media in both China and Japan shifted their focus from health and preparedness to the economy, politics and social welfare. Governance and social welfare were key concerns in China’s news media, while, in contrast, global politics received the highest level of attention from experts in Japan’s news media. Environment and technologies aspects did not receive much attention by the expert’s columns. Originality/value At the initial stage of a world crisis, how leading nations and initially affected nations deal with the problem, how media play their role and guide mass population with experts’ thoughts are highlighted here. The understanding developed in this study can provide guidance to news media in other countries in playing effective roles in the management of this health crisis and catastrophes.

Cholera Epidemics in Valencia in the 19th Century

The world crisis created by COVID-19 invites us to find some precedents to it by examining past periods and situations in which our society has suffered similar circumstances. In this regard, one of the periods that show more similarities from a social and sanitary perspective is the Valencia of the 19th century, where between 1834 and 1890 there were a total of nine cholera epidemics that resulted in dozens of deaths and determined the future development of one of the main regions of the old Crown of Aragon. The author analyzes the social and cultural impact of cholera in Valencia during the 19th century and especially in the intellectual and literary world.

The Frankfurt School and the School of Post-Soviet Critical Marxism: An Experience of Comprehending the World Crisis

Монография посвящена анализу причин всемирного кризиса и обоснованию путей его преодоления. Данная цель может быть достигнута на основе кооперации российской и немецкой философских культур, миграции философских идей и их синтеза. Исследуются две научные школы — Франкфуртская школа и школа постсоветского критического марксизма. Авторы осуществляют попытку не механически соединить результаты их деятельности, а синтезировать их на основе интеграции ключевых понятий данных школ: интерсубъективности и коммуникативного разума, с одной стороны, и креатосферы и ноономики, с другой стороны. Монография может быть интересной специалистам по философии, экономической теории, политологии, социологии, а также широкой общественности.

A Global Perspective on Psychologists' and Their Organizations' Response to a World Crisis

Around the world, individual psychologists have stepped up to deliver essential services to address the social and emotional sequelae of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many psychological organizations have also responded to this public health crisis, though their efforts may be less widely recognized. Psychological organizations engaged in preventive and mitigation efforts targeted, among others, the general public, local communities, and high-risk groups such as health care providers. They disseminated mental health information to the general public, trained laypersons to provide psychological first aid, and used research to design and evaluate public health responses to the pandemic. In some countries, psychological organizations contributed to the design and implementation of public health policies and practices. The nature of these involvements changed throughout the pandemic and evolved from reactive to proactive, from local to international. Several qualities appear key to the value, impact, and success of these efforts. These include organizational agility and adaptability, the ability to overcome their political inertia and manage conflict, recognizing the need to address cultural differences, and allocating limited resources to high-risk and resource-depleted constituencies where it was needed most.

A NEW DAWN? THOMAS ADÈS AND THE CASE OF MUSICAL SIMPLICITY

Demonstrating an ability to both subscribe to and question aesthetic and formal conventions, the music of Thomas Adès has become synonymous with a particular brand of complexity; various multiplicities – stylistic, temporal, semantic – characterise the discourses that both pervade and surround his works. This might help explain the fractured critical response to Dawn, a ‘chacony for orchestra at any distance’, premièred at the 2020 BBC Proms: a seven-minute unfurling passacaglia of stark simplicity. Mixed reviews have presupposed rationales ranging from bold aesthetic choice to deadline-induced haste. This article considers Dawn within Adès's continuing exploration of the different formal, aesthetic and semantic roles that musical simplicity can play. Here, his previous utilisation of simplicity at points of formal crux allows a reframing of the work as a compositional response to real-world crisis that, beneath its surface, presents an intriguing affinity with – and recontextualisation of – fundamental aspects of his compositional character.

Altruism in a Time of Crisis: Dissociable Social Valuation and Perception during COVID-19 in the United States

Human prosocial behaviors are constantly shaped by the push-and-pull between societal need for cooperation and one’s natural tendency to self-prioritize. Nevertheless, it remains elusive how our valuation and perceptual systems might contribute to altruistic acts under the influence of a real-world crisis. Here, using computational modeling and a game-theoretic approach, we investigated how the coronavirus pandemic perturbed altruistic choices in the United States, April-May, 2020. Overall, people made more altruistic choices as the pandemic worsened, an effect primarily driven by increased preference for social welfare. Paradoxically, participants also processed self-relevant information (i.e., “self-prioritization”) more efficiently at the perceptual level, as the pandemic became worse. These effects were not observed one year later (May-June, 2021) when the variability of the pandemic diminished. Furthermore, individuals’ prosocial choices and preferences did not correlate with their self-prioritization efficiency. Collectively, these results revealed a more nuanced view of human altruism — that as a dynamic and context-dependent construct, altruism can co-exist with increased attention to the self.

The EduINAF revolution: how to transform a pandemic crisis in an outreach opportunity

<p>In the last year, the world experimented a world crisis that changed the approach to science communication and the needs of the worldwide audiences. EduINAF, the online monthly magazine of the National Institute for Astrophysics, dedicated in Italy to science education and public outreach, reacted to this pandemic undergoing a process of deep restructuring that led to new, effective forms and approaches to science communication, education and outreach.<br /><br />In this talk we will analyze EduINAF's last year of activity, showing the increase in online readers and analyzing them in detail, focusing on the substantial changes in their requests, expectations and reactions due to lockdown and to a changed school and society.<br />We will also present and analyze some of the innovative and interactive educational initiatives and tools and new editorial contents that have been proposed as an opportunity for this changing world and that we will continue to use in the future. </p> <p>In this presentation we will present the online archive of thematic online educational resources that was born with pandemic and that now hosts more than 200 resources. We will describe in detail the competitions and collaborative online calls to readers that, in the last year, have seen the participation of thousands of wanna-be astronomers, poets and artists from our audience. We will focus on innovation in education, both talking about innovative approaches to education and about innovative technical solutions and tools, such as Virtual Reality and how it can be used in astronomy education. Finally, we will also introduce INAF Online Labs, the outreach hands-on laboratories that were born in EduINAF as an answer to online Science Festivals.<br />Many of the tools and initiatives introduced in this talk will be presented more in deep in related talks at EPSC 2021.</p>