DMA: background, objectives, and its relationship to competition law. - In: New digital markets act, (2023), S. 5-22
UniteXR: joint exploration of a real-world museum and its digital twin. - In: VRST 2023, (2023), 25, insges. 10 S.
The combination of smartphone Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) makes it possible for on-site and remote users to simultaneously explore a physical space and its digital twin through an asymmetric Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). In this paper, we investigate two spatial awareness visualizations to enable joint exploration of a space for dyads consisting of a smartphone AR user and a head-mounted display VR user. Our study revealed that both, a mini-map-based method and an egocentric compass method with a path visualization, enabled the on-site visitors to locate and follow a virtual companion reliably and quickly. Furthermore, the embodiment of the AR user by an inverse kinematics avatar allowed the use of natural gestures such as pointing and waving which was preferred over text messages by the participants of our study. In an expert review in a museum and its digital twin we observed an overall high social presence for on-site AR and remote VR visitors and found that the visualizations and the avatar embodiment successfully facilitated their communication and collaboration.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3611659.3615708
Forerunners vs. latecomers : institutional competition in the German federalism during the COVID crisis. - Ilmenau : Ilmenau University of Technology, Institute of Economics, 2023. - 1 Online-Ressource (32 Seiten). - (Ilmenau economics discussion papers ; vol. 28, no. 182)
The COVID pandemic caused the political competition between the prime ministers of the German states to reach its peak. Whoever is the best at announcing, launching, or implementing policies to combat the pandemic can hope to capitalize most politically. In this paper, we attempt to document which state leaders are forerunners or latecomers in this political competition, when going more into depth of a region’s contextual factors. Based on several databases, we perform a survival analysis to compare state leaders’ relative determination to implement COVID policies. As our results show, the forerunners in the political discourse are not necessarily forerunners in the implementation, nor in the enforcement of COVID policies.
https://www.db-thueringen.de/receive/dbt_mods_00059000
Cross-timescale experience evaluation framework for productive teaming. - In: Engineering for a changing world, (2023), 5.4.129, S. 1-6
This paper presents the initial concept for an evaluation framework to systematically evaluate productive teaming (PT). We consider PT as adaptive human-machine interactions between human users and augmented technical production systems. Also, human-to-human communication as part of a hybrid team with multiple human actors is considered, as well as human-human and human-machine communication for remote and mixed remote- and co-located teams. The evaluation comprises objective, performance-related success indicators, behavioral metadata, and measures of human experience. In particular, it considers affective, attentional and intentional states of human team members, their influence on interaction dynamics in the team, and researches appropriate strategies to satisfyingly adjust dysfunctional dynamics, using concepts of companion technology. The timescales under consideration span from seconds to several minutes, with selected studies targeting hour-long interactions and longer-term effects such as effort and fatigue. Two example PT scenarios will be discussed in more detail. To enable generalization and a systematic evaluation, the scenarios’ use cases will be decomposed into more general modules of interaction.
https://doi.org/10.22032/dbt.58930
Stories of astrobiology, SETI, and UAPs: science and the search for extraterrestrial life in German news media from 2009 to 2022. - In: Science communication, ISSN 1552-8545, Bd. 45 (2023), 6, S. 788-823
The search for extraterrestrial intelligent (SETI) and non-intelligent extraterrestrial life has recently received considerable attention in academia and international news media. Since media frames of scientific space exploration potentially influence public support and perceptions of science, the German news media’s coverage of extraterrestrial life was analyzed. The three dominant frames from 2009 to 2022 were beneficial space exploration, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)/extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), and SETI risk. Two frames relied primarily on scientific sources, mainly universities/research centers, NASA, the SETI Institute, and Stephen Hawking. The European Space Agency (ESA), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and astrobiology as a discipline were rarely cited. Implications for science and risk communication are discussed.
https://doi.org/10.1177/10755470231206797
Meilenstein und Forschungs-Katalysator. - In: , (2023), S. 231-241
Die von David H. Weaver und G. Cleveland Wilhoit 1986 publizierte Analyse „The American Journalist“ markiert einen Meilenstein in der Entwicklung der empirischen Journalismusforschung. Aufbauend auf der zu Beginn der 1970er-Jahre durchgeführten Pionierstudie der Soziologen John Johnstone, Edward Slawski und William Bowman, rückte The American Journalist die repräsentative Erforschung der Merkmale und Einstellungen von Journalistinnen und Journalisten in den Fokus wissenschaftlicher Aufmerksamkeit. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung und die sich daran anschließenden Replikationsstudien vermitteln einen umfassenden Einblick in den Wandel des US-Journalismus über einen Zeitraum von fast fünf Jahrzehnten. Darüber hinaus regte The American Journalist eine große Zahl ähnlich aufgebauter empirischer Analysen in anderen Ländern an und beeinflusste nicht zuletzt auch die Konzeption der Worlds of Journalism-Studie, der bis heute umfangreichsten empirischen Analyse des globalen Journalismus.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25867-2_20
Moving from offline to online: how COVID-19 affected research in the social and behavioral sciences. - In: American behavioral scientist, ISSN 1552-3381, Bd. 0 (2023), 0
During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have faced a lot of challenges related to their daily work. This article introduces a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, which particularly focuses on methodological challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a brief review of the literature as well as the studies in this issue, we argue that the pandemic has sparked significant methodological innovations with respect to design, data collection, study documentation, and scholarly collaboration. We distinguish two types of innovations, both conceptualized as the outcome of an unprecedented external shock. First, "methodological compromises" that enabled data collection during the pandemic, but are inferior to established approaches. These methodological compromises, therefore, may be abandoned in post-pandemic times. Second, there are also "methodological game changers" that are superior to classic approaches and thus may prevail in the long run. Regardless of the type, we call scholars in the social and behavioral sciences to systematically test, compare, and evaluate the methodological innovations brought to us as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642231205761
Competitive positioning of German universities : deliberate decision, fate, or fiction?. - Jena, Germany : Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 2023. - 1 Online-Ressource (21 Seiten). - (Jena economic research papers ; # 2023, 012)
With the increasing autonomy, the competitive pressure on German universities is rising. More freedom comes along with a higher obligation to position oneself in the (German) tertiary education and research market. We investigate to what extent a (competitive) positioning of German universities can be detected and how their positioning changes over time. Using non-parametric productivity estimation, we analyze 79 Germany universities based on information about the German University Statistics (Hochschulstatistik) provided by the German statistical office (Statistisches Bundesamt). Our (preliminary) results show that a clear positioning according to productivity statistics remains vague. The resulting competitive dynamics remains low, whereas the Excellence Initiative only induced an anticipation effect in the competitive dynamics. Overall, the scope of (most) universities for a competitive repositioning seems to be low.
https://zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/receive/jportal_jparticle_01337589
§ 20 Plattformspezifische Vorgaben des Data Acts. - In: Europäische Plattformregulierung, (2023), S. 544-563
The global study of COVID news: scope, findings, and implications of quantitative content analyses of the COVID-19 news coverage in the first two years of the pandemic. - In: Health communication, ISSN 1532-7027, Bd. 0 (2023), 0, S. 1-14
Researchers and practitioners have unanimously acknowledged the impact of legacy media coverage of past pandemics as well as COVID-19 and its importance for health-related risk communication. Therefore, this study provides scholars and health communication practitioners with a deeper understanding of the patterns, main themes, and limitations of media reporting and peer-reviewed research in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in different national media environments. Because the objective is to evaluate patterns, this paper focuses on early quantitative and automated content analyses for theoretical contribution, geographic diversity, methodological rigor, and inclusion of risk and crisis communication theory. It also assesses whether authors deduced implications, for both theory and practice of health-related risk and crisis communication. We conducted a content analysis of 66 studies in peer-reviewed journals from the beginning of the pandemic until April 2022. The findings demonstrate that early quantitative analyses of the news coverage of COVID-19 are often not theory-driven, apply heterogeneous forms of framing analysis, and lack references to risk and crisis communication theory. Consequently, only few implications for health communication practice during pandemics were drawn. However, there is evidence of improvement in geographic scope compared to previous research. The discussion addresses the importance of developing a consistent approach to framing analyses of risk and crisis media coverage and the importance of well-designed cross-cultural research in a global pandemic.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2226932