Final day of two-day session for law enforcement personnel focusing on communications challenges.

Opening day of two-day session for law enforcement personnel focusing on communications challenges.

An informative, how-to workshop focusing on simple security precautions everyone can take. From shoppers' club cards and your privacy settings on Facebook, to the cars we drive and phones we use -- the data we are creating is being used by governments, advertisers, and business strategists to build your personal profile! But what do we do when the data being gathered crosses the ethical line -- how do we help protect ourselves from harm, unintentional and purposeful? Technology guru, professor and digital freedom fighter, Sascha Meinrath, talks data mining at this pop-up community event! Questions will be taken in advance. Register online -- space is limited. Refreshments provided!

Annual regional meeting of Associated Press Sports Editors, hosted by the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State.

Rob Potter, and professor at Indiana University and director of the Institute for Communicaiton Research, presents “Peering Backward and Peeking Forward: What I’ve Learned After a Quarter Century of Using Psychophysiology."

This is a free event. but seating is limited.

For more information and to reserve seats. visit: http://thestatetheatre.org/food-evolution/

To learn more about the film and its creation, visit: http://news.psu.edu/story/510981/2018/03/19/public-events/documentary-takes-global-look-food-technology-issues

Following the screening, there will be a question and answer session with a group of experts. The Q&A panelists will be Sarah Evanega, director of the Alliance for Science at Cornell University; Siela Maximova, research professor of plant biotechnology; Lee Ahern, director of Penn State’s Science Communication Program; and Shelby Fleisher, professor of entomology.

Sponsored by:

Council on Agricultural Innovation: Scientific, Ethical, Legal, Social Issues
College of Agricultural Sciences
Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications' Science Communication Program

The lecture can be streamed via the Penn State Library website.

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Hoaxes, lies and other misinformation have been around for centuries. Their recent ability to spread at lightning speed has media researchers studying how inaccurate information circulates and how to combat its harmful effects.

Brian Southwell is an expert in science communication whose work combines research from a number of areas, including public health, psychology, political science and environmental science. He specifically targets the public’s understanding of science, and he will discuss that and other topics at noon April 18 in Foster Auditorium in Penn State’s Paterno Library. His talk is titled “The Peril and Persistence of Misinformation.”

Despite its long history, misinformation has fostered additional issues in the digital age. Research shows that people tend to believe information — whether true or false — when they first encounter it. Unfortunately, it’s more difficult to change the minds of readers and viewers once they’ve taken in the information.

Most media don’t have a system to prevent misinformation from spreading and it takes a lot of time and resources to debunk misinformation once it has received wide exposure.

“The biggest example is climate change denial, but you have athletes and celebrities saying untrue things to a large audience and influencing health behavior, too. That’s pretty big,” said Jessica Myrick, associate professor in the Department of Film-Video and Media Studies. “We are beginning to develop strategies for combating this and that’s what Brian is going to talk about.”

Southwell, who is the director of science in the public sphere at RTI International, conducts research to better understand why and how misinformation spreads, which also can help researchers understand how to stop it from spreading. He says while programs that label “fake news” or “bad ads” are commendable, they can’t prevent false stories from appearing on the air or in a news feed — and once information is out, it’s difficult to reel it back in.

This is why Southwell is a proponent of building media literacy, which is a better understanding of the features that go into any media message. He says it’s up to science communicators to create messages for wide audiences that are understandable. It’s important for the accurate messages to receive the same level of exposure as the misinformation — a goal much easier said than done.

The lecture will feature research from the book “Misinformation and Mass Audiences.” The book builds on a special issue of the Journal of Communication that targets misinformation, and it was recently featured in American Scientist magazine. Southwell edited the book, which was published in January.

Southwell is an adjunct professor with Duke University’s Social Science Research Institute. He also is a research professor in media and journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in more than 100 journal articles and he hosts a weekly social science radio show/podcast called “The Measure of Everyday Life.”

Southwell’s talk is a part of the SciComm Lecture series, an initiative of Penn State’s Science Communication Program. The program is housed in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and builds productive research collaborations between scientists in a variety of disciplines with science communications researchers.

Justin Keene, an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, presents "Dueling Motivations: Coactivation as a Pre-Cursor for Meta-Emotions, Attitude Formation, and Behavior Change."

Join a group of digital publishing and media marketing experts for a presentation and panel discussion about how leading publishers are responding to the pressures and challenges of the digital age. The session is free and open to the public.

Inaugural event, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Sports in Society at Penn State. Keynote session April 12 features John Urschel. To view the agenda, click here.