Media Domain Research Articles

Parametric Nonlinear Model Reduction Using K-Means Clustering for Miscible Flow Simulation

This work considers the model order reduction approach for parametrized viscous fingering in a horizontal flow through a 2D porous media domain. A technique for constructing an optimal low-dimensional basis for a multidimensional parameter domain is introduced by combining K-means clustering with proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). In particular, we first randomly generate parameter vectors in multidimensional parameter domain of interest. Next, we perform the K-means clustering algorithm on these parameter vectors to find the centroids. POD basis is then generated from the solutions of the parametrized systems corresponding to these parameter centroids. The resulting POD basis is then used with Galerkin projection to construct reduced-order systems for various parameter vectors in the given domain together with applying the discrete empirical interpolation method (DEIM) to further reduce the computational complexity in nonlinear terms of the miscible flow model. The numerical results with varying different parameters are demonstrated to be efficient in decreasing simulation time while maintaining accuracy compared to the full-order model for various parameter values.

An Investigation of Coping Strategies Used by College Students With Intellectual Disability

Abstract Attending college can lead to many benefits including better outcomes in adult life for college graduates. This concept is applicable to all students, including students with intellectual disability who are attending institutions of higher education programs to refine social, academic, employment, and independent living skills. Similar to their typical peers, students with intellectual disability enrolled in postsecondary education programs endure levels of stress that result in the application of coping strategies necessary to navigate various social domains of college life, including romantic relationships, friendships, roommate relationships, and social media interactions. The present study utilizes survey and interview data to examine which coping strategies are used by college students with mild intellectual disability. When faced with stressful situations, almost one-third of study participants chose Planful Problem Solving as their first choice coping strategy in the Romantic domain, and almost half of respondents used it to deal with stressful situations related to Friendships. More than a third of college students with intellectual disability chose Confrontive Coping as their preferred strategy in the Roommate and Social Media domains. Findings are consistent with previous research, which suggests that young adults with intellectual disability use Problem-Focused strategies most frequently when dealing with stressful situations. Implications for research and practice are also presented and discussed.

Social Media Text Mining Framework for Drug Abuse: Development and Validation Study With an Opioid Crisis Case Analysis.

BackgroundSocial media are considered promising and viable sources of data for gaining insights into various disease conditions and patients’ attitudes, behaviors, and medications. They can be used to recognize communication and behavioral themes of problematic use of prescription drugs. However, mining and analyzing social media data have challenges and limitations related to topic deduction and data quality. As a result, we need a structured approach to analyze social media content related to drug abuse in a manner that can mitigate the challenges and limitations surrounding the use of such data.ObjectiveThis study aimed to develop and evaluate a framework for mining and analyzing social media content related to drug abuse. The framework is designed to mitigate challenges and limitations related to topic deduction and data quality in social media data analytics for drug abuse.MethodsThe proposed framework started with defining different terms related to the keywords, categories, and characteristics of the topic of interest. We then used the Crimson Hexagon platform to collect data based on a search query informed by a drug abuse ontology developed using the identified terms. We subsequently preprocessed the data and examined the quality using an evaluation matrix. Finally, a suitable data analysis approach could be used to analyze the collected data.ResultsThe framework was evaluated using the opioid epidemic as a drug abuse case analysis. We demonstrated the applicability of the proposed framework to identify public concerns toward the opioid epidemic and the most discussed topics on social media related to opioids. The results from the case analysis showed that the framework could improve the discovery and identification of topics in social media domains characterized by a plethora of highly diverse terms and lack of a commonly available dictionary or language by the community, such as in the case of opioid and drug abuse.ConclusionsThe proposed framework addressed the challenges related to topic detection and data quality. We demonstrated the applicability of the proposed framework to identify the common concerns toward the opioid epidemic and the most discussed topics on social media related to opioids.

Applying Brenda Dervin's sense-making methodology to fan studies

Communication scholar Brenda Dervin created sense-making methodology (SMM), an approach for conducting interviews that draws on metatheoretical concepts such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the humanistic approach to psychology. Since its formulation, SMM has been utilized across different disciplines through the development of interview protocols for both one-on-one interviews and focus groups. Among these studies are those that focus on people's engagement with media products or with each other in relation to media products. These SMM audience and reception studies demonstrate that the methodology can be useful for studying fans by bringing a more systematic, and thus quantifiable, approach to a phenomenological, interpretive study of fan behavior, be it mental, emotional, physical, or social. SMM would allow for studies that analyze how fans make sense of a situation involving their fandom and fan identity. After explaining what SMM is and how it has been used to study fans, a case study demonstrates how SMM may suggest a way to define being a fan and applying the concept of fandom beyond the traditional domains of sports, media, and popular culture.

Social Media Mining Toolkit (SMMT).

There has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of utilizing social media data for research purposes within the biomedical community. In PubMed alone, there have been nearly 2,500 publication entries since 2014 that deal with analyzing social media data from Twitter and Reddit. However, the vast majority of those works do not share their code or data for replicating their studies. With minimal exceptions, the few that do, place the burden on the researcher to figure out how to fetch the data, how to best format their data, and how to create automatic and manual annotations on the acquired data. In order to address this pressing issue, we introduce the Social Media Mining Toolkit (SMMT), a suite of tools aimed to encapsulate the cumbersome details of acquiring, preprocessing, annotating and standardizing social media data. The purpose of our toolkit is for researchers to focus on answering research questions, and not the technical aspects of using social media data. By using a standard toolkit, researchers will be able to acquire, use, and release data in a consistent way that is transparent for everybody using the toolkit, hence, simplifying research reproducibility and accessibility in the social media domain.

Discontinuous finite volume element method for Darcy flows in fractured porous media

This paper presents a numerical simulation of the single phase Darcy flow model in two-dimensional fractured porous media. Under some physically consistent coupling conditions, the model can be described as a reduced problem by coupling the bulk problem in porous matrix and the fracture problem in fractures. Flows are governed by the primal form of the Darcy’s equations for both the bulk and fractures. The coupled discontinuous finite volume element methods and conforming finite element method are adopted to solve the bulk problem and fracture problem, respectively. We theoretically analyze the well-posedness of the discrete problem, and derive optimal error estimates in standard L2 error and broken H1 error. Numerical experiments include not only the fractures with high permeability as the prior flow conduit, but also the fractures with low permeability as the flow barrier, which demonstrate the accuracy, flexibility and robustness of our discrete formulation for complicated networks of fractures in porous media domain.

Exploring Contemporary Security Issues Near Sarawak-Kalimantan Border

Stringent border control is one of the methods to secure national security across the world. Securing the border is essential for both economic and political reasons. In Sarawak, border security is one of the most discussed topics on the social media domain when it comes to state security concerns. Due to the porous Sarawak-Kalimantan border, a worrisome number of illegal activities had been recorded. Throughout the years, cases such as illegal crossings, drug syndicates, kidnapping, auto theft, smuggling, infiltration of illegal immigrants were reported to local authorities. These are among many other cases that highlight the gravity of the security issue near the Sarawak-Kalimantan border. Despite the continuous effort to increase security by Sarawak government through establishments of five new guard posts in Sarawak in 2018, security issues near the borderline is still a great concern. Sarawak is vulnerable not only along its border with Indonesia but also its shore and airspace. This research aims to explore the contemporary security issues near Sarawak-Kalimantan borders and efforts taken by the authorities to minimize security threats along the borderline. Through content analysis of Facebook discourse on security issues in Sarawak and in-depth interviews with eight informants - the findings of this research are hoped to be able to provide more updated data on Sarawak security issues with particular focus on border safety. Keywords: Sarawak, Kalimantan, security issues, border, national security.

Social Media Fake Profile Detection Technique Based on Attribute Estimation and Content Analysis Method

Social media is a virtual place where every age group members are available. Members are using this platform to share knowledge and information. But some of them are misuse and abuse the services of social media. In order to perform malicious activities the users and BOTs are creating fake profile, these profiles are used for spreading the unsolicited and malicious contents. Therefore the proposed work is motivated to study about the social media platform and it’s security and privacy challenges. In this context, the recent year’s progress in the domain of social media is explored, and the literature is collected and categorized according to the area of work. Among them concepts of profile attribute evaluation and the content analysis based techniques are most promising. Therefore by using the concept of both the kinds of technique a new model is tried to design and their functional aspects are discussed. In near future the proposed working model is implemented and their performance is demonstrated.

Social Media Fake Profile Detection Technique Based on Attribute Estimation and Content Analysis Method

Social media is a virtual place where every age group members are available. Members are using this platform to share knowledge and information. But some of them are misuse and abuse the services of social media. In order to perform malicious activities the users and BOTs are creating fake profile, these profiles are used for spreading the unsolicited and malicious contents. Therefore the proposed work is motivated to study about the social media platform and it’s security and privacy challenges. In this context, the recent year’s progress in the domain of social media is explored, and the literature is collected and categorized according to the area of work. Among them concepts of profile attribute evaluation and the content analysis based techniques are most promising. Therefore by using the concept of both the kinds of technique a new model is tried to design and their functional aspects are discussed. In near future the proposed working model is implemented and their performance is demonstrated.

Privacy in Social Media

This paper is about the state of privacy in social media. Most people’s immediate concern about privacy in social media, and internet platforms more generally, relate to data protection. People fear that information they post on various platforms is potentially abused by corporate entities, governments, or even criminals, in all sorts of nefarious ways. The main premise of this paper is that that concerns about data protection, legitimate and serious as they may be, are not, mostly, about the right to privacy. Privacy is about control over the presentation of the self, not about protection of property rights. From the perspective of privacy as self-presentation, I argue that social media is, generally, very conducive to privacy—in fact, often too much so. The main tension in the domain of social media is between privacy and authenticity: social media enables a great deal of privacy at the expense of truth and authenticity. But the medium also comes with dangers of exposure that carry serious risks to privacy, potentially undermining peoples’ ability to control what aspects of themselves they present to others. Privacy in social media is a mixed bag, pulling in opposite directions, none of them free of serious concerns.

Wishing to be like the character on screen: Media exposure and perception of hacking behavior

This research addressed whether exposure to media, which increasingly portrays hacker characters across diverse media domains, may predict perceptions of others’ willingness to hack. Specifically, this study assessed how wishful identification with hacker characters may contribute to individuals’ perception of hacking behaviors. One-hundred forty-nine North American participants were recruited using MTurk.com. Participants reported (1) their exposure to general media and perceived identification with a fictional hacker character, and (2) their perceived risks, payoffs, and estimated willingness of others to engage in hacker behaviors regarding a specific call to hack. Additionally, this research examined differences in the effects of media exposure on hacking likelihood between two types of hacks: financial hacking attacks and hacktivism attacks. Results show (1) that perceived payoffs of hacking, but not perceived risks, predict individuals’ estimation of hacker behaviors, (2) a significant and positive indirect effect between media exposure and estimation of others’ willingness to hack passes through wishful identification and perceived payoffs of hacking attacks, and (3) no significant differences in the above relationships between the two types of hacks. Together, these findings highlight that media exposure may increase positive perceptions of hackers and in turn increase the perception of pervasiveness and legitimacy of engaging in hacking behaviors.

Interpersonal Functioning in Borderline Personality Disorder Traits: A Social Media Perspective

This is the first study to demonstrate interpersonal difficulties associated with borderline personality disorder (BPD) features in the domain of social media. Using crowdsourcing, we presented participants with a battery of questions about their recent social media use, and then assessed their BPD features using the short form of the Five-Factor Borderline Inventory. The results revealed that individuals with higher BPD trait scores reported posting more often on social media, as well as a higher incidence of experiencing regret after posting on social media, and of deleting or editing their posts. They also report a higher degree of importance of social media in their social behavior and daily routines. These results highlight the pervasiveness of interpersonal difficulties associated with BPD features even in the non-clinical population, and demonstrate that these difficulties are also observable in social media behavior. Our findings may provide a starting point for research using data from social media to illuminate the cognitive and emotional processes underpinning the interpersonal difficulties associated with BPD features, and to inform and assess therapeutic interventions.

Who is more entrepreneurial? A comparative study of vocational and academic students

Purpose Research in the context of an individual’s choice of an entrepreneurial career has looked at effect of perceived self-efficacy (PSE), personality characteristics (PC) and subjective norms on entrepreneurial intentions (EIs). In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to compare these constructs across a vocational student (VC) group and an academic group (AC), in a supportive entrepreneurial ecosystem. It also includes PC of the individuals as a variable. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on a quantitative method followed by a qualitative approach to gain more insights in the study domain. It includes administration of a survey questionnaire and a round of unstructured interviews with select students. Findings Theorizing that there would be significant differences in PSE, PC and EIs between the two groups, the study demonstrates that for all the three variables, individuals opting for a vocational course exhibit significant difference as compared to an academic group. The results are significant when controlled for family business background and gender. Originality/value This paper has contributed to the academic literature in the entrepreneurship domain by differentiating the choice of an academic course prior to taking up a career in entrepreneurship and how it impacts entrepreneurial orientations. These interrelationships can further be extended into the domain of social media and networks, to draw interesting insights pertaining to how students get influenced by the social media in their choice of entrepreneurial career.

Rethinking Civic Education in Tunisia: a Focus on School Curricula and Teacher Training

The paper explores the status of civic education in Tunisian public schools. It calls for seizing the opportunities offered by Tunisia’s transition to democracy to improve the teaching and learning of civic education. Before 2011, the Tunisian educational system was not very concerned with raising young generations on the principles and values of civic engagement, participatory citizenship, democratic participation, and social justice. Decision makers did not seem to be aware of the opportunities that young generations may enjoy inside and outside the classroom to learn about these values, and to be more actively committed to other issues, such as human rights, economic development, and the rule of law. However, the Tunisian youth have always used modern technology to keep updated about National and world affairs, and the recent huge developments in the domains of social media and citizen journalism have deepened their awareness about the lack of social justice and human rights in the country. The paper focuses on the importance of civic education in the Tunisian educational system to critically reconsider its potential role in educating the young generations on the values and principles of democracy. This is achieved through a review of two major components of the teaching/learning of civic education, namely how the subject is being taught and how the teachers are being prepared.

Impact of pore structure and morphology on flow and transport characteristics in randomly repacked grains with different angularities

The flow and transport behaviors in porous media are closely linked to the structure and morphology of the pore space. A fundamental objective of most studies of porous media is to link the pore structure to the hydraulic functions, such as the permeability, capillary pressure and diffusivity, which are necessary for engineering applications. In this paper, an attempt is made to build a direct link between the hydraulic functions and the morphological measures of diverse porous media. Porous columns with different structures and morphologies are generated by randomly packing grains with different shapes and sizes. The pore structure of the repacked porous media is visualized through X-ray computed tomography and quantified by a series of parameters, including the set of Minkowski functionals, diverse characteristic pore sizes, geometric tortuosity and fractal dimension. The intrinsic permeability, molecular diffusivity and apparent thermal conductivity of the repacked porous media are simulated numerically. The Minkowski functionals have the capacity to characterize the microscale complex pore domain of the porous media in a macroscale way. A good linear relationship is shown among the effective pore size, nominal opening dimension and critical pore neck size obtained from the morphological analysis regardless of the shapes and sizes of the grains. The three different pores may serve as the characteristic pore correlation to the intrinsic permeability. The Kozeny-Carman equation can be used to mimic the intrinsic permeability and to serve as a quality-control tool for porous media with different grain angularities. A topologically based model can generally provide a single relationship for porous media randomly repacked with grains of different angularities. The molecular diffusivity of angular grains is found to be larger than that of round ones. The molecular diffusivity is linearly related to the porosity and fractal dimension. Porous media repacked with round grains tend to attain denser packing, a higher number of contacts per unit volume and higher thermal conductivity than media packed with angular particles. The apparent thermal conductivity has a negative linear correlation to the porosity and fractal dimension of porous media with different grain morphologies.

A cross-media heterogeneous transfer learning for preventing over-adaption

Cross-media heterogeneous transfer learning aims to transfer knowledge from the source media domain to the target media domain, which promotes the performance of the learned model for the target media domain. Existing cross-media heterogeneous transfer learning methods usually attempt to learn the latent feature space with a large amount of co-occurrence data. However, there is a significant challenge: domain over-adaption. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Media Heterogeneous Transfer Learning for Preventing Over-adaption (CMHTL-PO) to address this challenge. The divergence between the different media feature spaces is very large. Each media space has some weak correlation features which have no semantic corresponding features in other media. When the co-occurrence data are not enough, if the weak correlation features are compulsively mapped into the common features in the latent space, it will lead to over-adaption. CMHTL-PO divides the features into the strong correlation features and the weak correlation features, which are respectively mapped into the common features and the peculiar features in the latent space. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets widely adopted in transfer learning to verify the superiority of our proposed CMHTL-PO over existing state-of-the-art Heterogeneous Transfer Learning methods.

Online journalism education in Rwanda: students find value in the Experiential Learning Approach

The digital age is reshaping media industries locally and globally, forcing media firms and media producers to master new media tools in order to remain competitive and employable. This technological revolution has had a marked impact on the structures and economic viability of media, necessitating media training institutions to rethink how they prepare future media professionals for work in the twenty-first century. In order to keep pace with these rapid technological changes, educational institutions have had to adjust journalism curricula to integrate online or multimedia journalism courses that build online competencies and the technological skills needed for graduates to flourish in digital media domains. Despite these efforts, industry players still decry the apparent unpreparedness of graduates, largely attributing this to the learning approach taken by universities.Quality skills training has been argued to ensure that learners can relate with real work life. However, in countries like Rwanda, little is known about whether these new strategies are fostering the knowledge, skills and professional dispositions needed to work in a country that is undergoing rapid technological and economic change. Drawing from experiential learning theory, this study uses five focus-group discussions from five Rwandan journalism schools to glean the views of final-year students on how trainers employ practical pedagogy to cultivate students’ online skills in readiness for employment. Findings reveal that students consider the experiential learning approaches to be essential to their perceived online readiness. These enhanced skills were achieved using digital scenarios relating to students’ future work environment. However, the perceived quality of this experience varied from trainer to trainer, based on a range of factors including their how students perceived the trainers’ attitudes towards new media, their perceived ability to teach the digital skills and the learners’ own digital experience and competence.
 
 How to cite this article: 
 NJUGUNA, Joseph; JJUUKO, Margaret. Online journalism education in Rwanda: students find value in the Experiential Learning Approach. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South. v. 3, n. 2, p. 84-101, Sept. 2019. Available at:
 https://sotl-south-journal.net/?journal=sotls&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=91&path%5B%5D=48
 
 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
 To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Unified Modeling Framework for Thin-Film Evaporation from Micropillar Arrays Capturing Local Interfacial Effects.

Thin-film evaporation from micropillar array porous media has gained attention in a number of fields including energy conversion and thermal management of electronics. Performance in these applications is enhanced by leveraging the geometries of the micropillar arrays to both optimize flow through these arrays via capillary pumping and increase the curved liquid-vapor interface (meniscus) area for active phase-change heat transfer. In this work, we present a unified semianalytical modeling framework to predict the dry-out heat flux accurately for thin-film evaporation from micropillar arrays with the precise prediction of (i) the pressure profile along the wick achieved by discretizing the porous media domain and (ii) the local permeability that depends on the local meniscus shape. We validate the permeability model with 3D numerical simulations and verify the accuracy of the thin-film evaporation modeling framework with available experimental data from the literature. We emphasize the importance of predicting an accurate liquid-vapor interface shape for the prediction accuracy of both the permeability and the associated governing equations for liquid propagation and phase-change heat transfer through porous materials. This modeling framework is an accurate non-CFD-based methodology for predicting the dry-out heat flux during thin-film evaporation from micropillar arrays and will serve as a general framework for modeling steady liquid-vapor phase-change processes (evaporation and condensation) in porous media.

THE ‘SOCIAL’ IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: SOCIAL MEDIA ENABLED POLITICAL DISCOURSE, ENGAGEMENT AND MOBILIZATION IN INDIA

Purpose of the study: The advent of digital media along with the recent boom of smartphones has changed the atlas of communication. The ubiquity of Social media has led to its increased use in all aspects of communication as against conventional media. Politics is not an exception. The role of social media in political discourses, engagement, and mobilization is widely realized and practiced and has become an important mode of political communication in India. In this paper, we explore the current academic corpus on political communication in the context of social media. Methodology: The narrative literature review method proposed by Green, Johnson, and Adams (2006) was employed as the method for this article. Relevant peer-reviewed papers published during the period 2011-18 were considered for the narrative review. Appropriate papers were selected by a Google Scholar search using the keywords ‘Social media’, ‘India’ and ‘political communication. Main Findings: The broad aim of the present paper was to explore the current academic literature in the field of social media and political communication. The narrative literature review undertaken indicates scant work with limited focus on the broader issues. Social media influence on voting behavior and political engagement was the well-explored domain, but the determinants and uniqueness of such communication have not been explored. Applications of this study: The indications from the review showcase that the magnitude and essence of political communication have changed through the years. The spectrum of political communication through social media has a great role in political and civic engagement. This study will be useful to the researchers in the field of mass communication, journalism, and political science. Novelty/Originality of this study: The conventional mainstream media and social media are increasingly showing a pattern of convergence and mutual exclusiveness. One of the critical findings from the review is that the gender domains of social media and political communication in India have not been given much attention and empirical evidence is scanty. Future research in the field of social media in India should focus on the gendered spheres of political communication.

Prinsip Komunikasi Al-Qur’an Dalam Menghadapi Era Media Baru

This research seeks to reconstruct the communication terms in the Qur'an with a more holistic approach. The existing terms all reinforce each other and form a configuration of meanings for the major themes of Islamic communication. At least four domains of Islamic mass media; da'wah, tabligh, amar ma'ruf nahi mungkar and morality (communication, information, change and development, and wisdom). The analysis of key concept communication gave birth to the principle of communication in the face of new media extracted from the values ​​of the Qur'an. The principle is then elaborated in the form of: 1) Communicating in a good way and message 2) Honesty of information and reasonableness 3) Verification of information and responsibility, 4) Inviting to the path of God (Islam) and or contrasting with the best way 5) Anticipating communication disorders and violations.