INTRODUCTION We wanted to understand how cancer risks are communicated in mainstream and ethnic newspapers, to determine whether the 2 kinds of newspapers differ and to examine features of news stories and sources that might predict optimal risk communication. METHODS Optimal risk communication was defined as presenting the combination of absolute risk, relative risk, and prevention response ...

BACKGROUND Media coverage of medical research influences the views and behaviours of clinicians, scientists and members of the public. We examined how frequently commenters in news stories about medical research have relevant expertise and have academic and financial conflicts, how often such conflicts are reported and whether there are associations between the conflicts and the disposition of ...

We investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing a novel, story-based computerassisted language learning (CALL) system for students learning Japanese kanji characters. In contrast to traditional kanji instruction methods, which rely most heavily on rote learning, our story-based CALL system focuses on mnemonic stories (following Heisig, 1986) and allows the user to create and m...

In this paper we describe Digg, a successful social news aggregator web site. Digg allows users to submit links to news stories, as well as vote and comment on other submitted stories. It also enables users to designate other users as friends and makes it easy to track their activities, thereby creating a social network within Digg. We perform a statistical analysis of a sample of 1000 popular ...

Narrative features of the life stories of child abuse survivors and nonvictimized respondents were compared. Particular emphasis was placed on relatively "objective" features, given that the content of the narrative typically precluded blind coding. The research focused on both the relative emphasis on the past versus present and future and on the self versus others in respondents' stories. The...

The natural way to model a news corpus is as a directed graph where stories are linked to one another through a variety of relationships. We formalize this notion by viewing each news story as a set of actors, and by viewing links between stories as transformations these actors go through. We propose and model a simple and comprehensive set of transformations: create, merge, split, continue, an...

Writers of stories for both print and screen have a deeply ingrained tendency to construct stories for an audience to experience the finished work in a fixed linear fashion. Although there are starting to be some examples of fixed non-linear multimedia works, viewing a cinematic story must always be linear, as a linear sequence of pictures and sounds conveying some meaning. However, it should b...

Collaborative fantasy play and storytelling serve an important role in preschool children’s development. Making up characters and telling stories are activities through which children make sense of and test out their hypotheses about the world. While computers are increasingly present to support young children’s collaboration in school tasks, there is a lack of computational systems to support ...

The telling of birth stories (i.e. stories that describe women's experiences of giving birth) is a common and important social practice. Whereas most research on birth narratives reflects the stories of middle-class, 'adult' women, we examine how the birth stories told by early-age mothers interconnect with broader narratives regarding social stigma and childbearing at 'too early' an age. Drawi...