“Freedom Edition”: Considering Sony Pictures and The Interview

Culture Digitally is a community of scholars, originally convened by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With generous support from the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through a wide range of projects and collaborations, including a scholarly blog and periodic workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culturedigitally.org or follow @CultureDig on Twitter.

This is the latest in the series of Culture Digitally’s “dialogues.” On occasion, we invite two or more participants to engage in an intellectual back-and-forth, on a point of interest that emerges from discussions at our meetings, around blog posts, or based on evident, shared interests. In these dialogues, scholars are encouraged to grapple with contemporary issues in media, but to do so quite a bit faster than the glacial pace of publishing typically allows. We imagine them as the digital equivalent of the scholarly exchange of letters between pre-eminent scientists. The thinking is meant to be raw and provocative, a chance for the dialogue participants to prod each other beyond their own certainties.

The scholars in this dialogue were convened by Joshua Braun in response to the recent public and media discourse surrounding the security breach at Sony Pictures Entertainment and its film, The Interview.     

The persistence of entrepreneurship and innovative immigrants

Ethnicity and immigration status may play a role in entrepreneurship and innovation, yet the impact of university entrepreneurship education on this relationship is under-explored. This paper examines the persistence and differences in entrepreneurship by ethnicity and nationality. We find that among Stanford alumni, Asian Americans have a higher rate of entrepreneurship than white Americans. However, non-American Asians have a substantially lower, about 12% points lower, start-up rate than Asian Americans. Such discrepancy not only holds for entrepreneurial choice but also for investing as an angel investor or venture capitalist, or utilizing Stanford networks to find funding sources or partners. Participation in Stanford University’s entrepreneurship program as a student does little to reduce this gap. The low level of parental entrepreneurship and the high degree of intergenerational correlation in entrepreneurship likely result in the lower level of entrepreneurship and participation in university entrepreneurship programs among Asians relative to their Asian American counterparts. Our findings highlight the value of immigration in terms of breaking the persistence in entrepreneurship among certain ethnic groups and promoting potential high-growth entrepreneurship in the United States. In addition, our findings may have important implications for programs to incorporate immigrant entrepreneurs within their home countries to promote entrepreneurship and help break the persistence of entrepreneurship across generations.     

A Cohort-Driven Assessment Task for Scientific Report Writing

A formative assessment task was developed to improve the scientific report writing skills of university students. Students undertaking this task typically possessed varying levels of scientific literacy and were drawn from a cohort of mixed abilities. The assessment task involved the construction of a scientific report that included feedback from instructor to students before final submission of the assessment piece. After initial submission of a scientific report, the instructor developed a cohort-specific marking scheme based on the deficiencies that were evident within the class group. Using a mixture of peer and self-review against specific criteria, the students were required to resubmit an amended report. This resulted in elevated marks compared with those that would have been obtained after first submission, thus rewarding the student for the application of feedback. This technique proved to be efficient for both parties and also resulted in improvement of skills of the entire student population, regardless of the ability of the student prior to the assessment task. Using this methodology, students of varying aptitudes were able to measure their own skill improvement against tangible criteria, and enjoy a degree of learning success independent of the ranking within their group.     

Getting at the Mathematics: Sara’s Journal

In this paper, we discuss issues in planning and conducting research into mathematics learning. We emphasize two central themes: (a) the learners mathematics (especially the issues and ideas, in given problem situations, that learners choose to think about and to present) and (b) the kinds of knowledge that learners may be building (including their ideas about what mathematics is, and how people do, learn, use, communicate and understand it). While the first theme is at least partly mathematical, the second interweaves cognition and epistemology. Anchored in student data from an extended classroom teaching experiment in the mathematics of change, we focus on key choices needed to build narratives to help researchers capture, in detail, how students engage with mathematics in extended problem explorations.     

The healthcare advertising landscape

A survey of the various categories of advertising spend in the United States in the healthcare market is reported upon and the position of the publishing industry within that is described.