news

CMU, Facebook Study Finds Personalized Communication Can Boost Your Well-Being Personal interactions on Facebook can have a major impact on a person's feelings of well-being and satisfaction with life just as much as getting married or having a baby, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook researchers shows.

The researchers suggest that developers of e-commerce sites should carefully consider how they design their pages to make sure that important content is not ignored because it is separated from interactive tools. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Cool interactive web tools and neat features can boost a user's memory but they may also cause other content on the site to be less memorable, according to researchers.

Atherosclerosis - commonly known as "hardening of the arteries" - occurs when deposits on the inner walls of vessels lead to chronic inflammation and narrowing of the vessels. That can restrict blood flow or block it entirely, ultimately triggering a cardiac infarction or a stroke. Treatment strategies up to now focus primarily on inhibiting the inflammation reaction.

ANN ARBOR'Turn off the lights when not in use. Drive less by walking, biking or taking public transportation. Or write a letter to an elected official to support action on climate change. We're more likely to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors if we read media stories about climate change that include images of renewable energy, a new University of Michigan study found.

ANN ARBOR'When Americans rely primarily on television shows, movies and the news media for information about Muslims, their attitude toward Muslims may be negatively influenced, a new University of Michigan study finds. But relying on direct with Muslims for information produces the opposite effect. "These findings reflect the importance of media and direct in influencing attitudes towards marginalized groups," said Muniba Saleem, U-M assistant professor of communication studies and the study's lead author.

British citizens are worrying about their online presence in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks amid concerns over state surveillance, new research by Cardiff University has found. The first comprehensive study of its kind to examine the consequences of the Snowden revelations - led by the University's School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies - revealed that citizens have different strategies for coping with it.

You might think from anecdotal evidence that hate speech on social media by individuals and groups appears quite a lot, but one of first academic studies to examine the empirical data concludes that these extreme forms of speech on Facebook are marginal as compared with total content. Researchers from the University of Oxford and Addis Ababa University examined thousands of comments made by Ethiopians on Facebook during four months around the time of  Ethiopia's general election in 2015.

Researchers have shown that data mining techniques can be used to understand when Twitter users start displaying supportive behaviour to radical terror groups such as ISIS. Analysis of 154,000 Europe-based Twitter accounts and more than 104 million tweets (in English and Arabic) relating to Syria show that users of the social media platform are more likely to adopt pro-ISIS language - and therefore display potential signs of radicalisation - when connected to other Twitter users who are linked to many of the same accounts and share and retweet similar information.

ANN ARBOR-It happens in many households. Kids are tapping on their cell phones or are preoccupied by their favorite TV show as their parents ask them a question or want them to do a chore. It's not just teens caught up in electronic media, but also preschoolers. In fact, there is little mother-child dialogue or conversation while children ages 3 to 5 are using media, such as TV, video games and mobile devices, according to a new University of Michigan study.

A new study has found that seemingly positive media coverage of feminist campaigner Malala Yousafzai is actually full of patronising assumptions about women in Muslim countries. The study analysed more than 140,000 words of coverage of activist Yousafzai in the nine months after she was attacked by the Pakistani Taleban.

Stanford political scientist Andrew Hall found that contentious primaries that receive heavy media coverage and voter attention tend to produce nominees who do less well in the general election. A divisive political primary that receives heavy media scrutiny reduces the party nominee's chances in the general election, Stanford research shows.

'Journalists in the UK' is a wide-ranging report of more than 60 pages, which captures journalists' views on matters relating to their profession. There are now around 64,000 professional journalists working in the UK. A new report reveals what they think of working in the media and how they operate post-Leveson.

A student listens to media through earbuds while working on a laptop. New research shows heavy media multitaskers benefited from a short meditation exercise in which they sat quietly counting their breaths. Photo: Jeff Miller People who often mix their media consumption - texting while watching TV, or listening to music while reading - are not known for being able to hold their attention on one task.

Wikipedia exists in nearly 300 languages but many versions are small and incomplete. In one experiment, computer scientists tripled article creation by recommending missing entries to editors. Every day, people around the globe visit one of the roughly 300 language editions of Wikipedia, searching through millions of articles written by tens of thousands of volunteer editors who build and maintain this free encyclopedia.

Social media and electronic gaming strategies can have an extremely positive influence on the lives of impoverished families, a study of The University of Queensland's Triple P Online program has found. A version of Triple P Online, the web-based version of UQ's Triple P - Positive Parenting Program , was ramped up with social media and gaming smarts and made available to disadvantaged families in Los Angeles.

Two new free projects being launched today by Cardiff University aim to provide the public with a better understanding of devolution in Wales ahead of the National Assembly elections in May. The two projects, an online booklet Guide to covering the National Assembly for Wales Election for Community Journalists and a new online course Scotland and Wales Vote 2016: Understanding the Devolved Elections, will provide people in Wales with the knowledge to better understand the forthcoming Welsh General Election in May.

An experimental study carried out by LMU media researchers has found that readers rate texts generated by algorithms more credible than texts written by real journalists. Readers like to read texts generated by computers, especially when they are unaware that what they are reading was assembled on the basis of an algorithm.

"Previous research has shown that people tend to be more altruistic after they watch a movie or television program that they consider more meaningful, but this study suggests that not only are they more altruistic, but they are more willing to offer help to people from different groups outside of their own," Bailey said.

New research using Artificial Intelligence finds men's views and voices more prominent than women's It has long been argued that women are under-represented and marginalised in relation to men in the world's news media. New research, by Bristol and Cardiff universities, using artificial intelligence (AI), has analysed over two million articles to find out how gender is represented in online news.

Dr Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh from QMUL's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science looks at what it takes to teach an AI how to read natural human languages. Wikipedia is to put artificial intelligence to the enormous task of keeping the free, editable online encyclopedia up-to-date, spam-free and legal.