Events

Compared with their urban and suburban peers, rural students in the United States are less likely to complete higher education. Thus, they forego one of the main paths to the development of human capital and its associated benefits. Some have pointed to divides in Internet access, due to concentrated socioeconomic inequalities and gaps in the infrastructure for fixed home broadband, as a contributor to rural students’ reduced ability to acquire human capital. Overcoming the “homework gap” between students who can and cannot use the Internet from home, possibly through wireless Internet access, has been suggested as one solution to bridging […]

DIGITAL FUTURES WORKSHOP: Philip M. Napoli, Duke University Via Zoom | Register here | or email quello@msu.edu Debates about political bias in the content curation and moderation practices of social media platforms have spilled over into the policy realm, rekindling conversations about the Fairness Doctrine and its potential utility in possible regulatory approaches to social media.  This presentation revisits the history of the Fairness Doctrine, including its frequent recurrence as a point of reference in subsequent media policy debates, and uses this history as a lens for critically examining current proposals for integrating Fairness Doctrine-like principles into a regulatory framework for […]

Johannes M. Bauer will participate in a webinar on the "Digital Security in Enterprises in a Context of Increasing Digitalization" webinar, hosted by Cetic.br|NIC.br. With Tatiana Jereissati, Demi Getschko, and Alexandre F. Barbosa (Cetic.br|NIC.br); Laurent Bernat (OECD); Éireann Leverett (Concinnity Risks); Cristine Hoepers (CERT.br|NIC.br); Leonardo Melo Lins (Cetic.br|NIC.br); and Georgina Núñez (UN ECLAC). He will talk about the chapter co-authored with William H. Dutton on "The New Cybersecurity Agenda", just published by NIC.br in Portuguese. Recorded Live stream at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIzQbLLNpZQ.

Johannes M. Bauer will give a public lecture at the University of Indonesia - Innovation, Creativity and The Digital Economy

Johannes M. Bauer, Broadband and educational achievements: disentangling a multifaceted relationship, 2021 GCTC Agriculture and Rural SuperCluster Workshop, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, July 21, 2021.   The program website is at https://ag.purdue.edu/digital-ag-resources/event/2021-gctc-agriculture-and-rural-supercluster-workshop/.   This is a hybrid event in which Purdue University is hosting the SuperCluster workshop for in-person participation onsite at Convergence Center, Purdue University and on Zoom.

Join us in person or via Zoom (sign up here).  A Rural Computing Research Consortium/Quello Center joint event. Drawn from the pages of Dr. Ali's new book, Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, September 2021), this talk will focus on the politics, policies, and political economies that have prevented broadband from being systematically and democratically deployed in rural areas of the United States. Dr. Ali will describe and contrast the failure of federal rural broadband policy with the resilience and tenacity of local communities and counties who have connected themselves despite a regulatory system that ignores […]

Tiago S. Prado will present Effects of Big Tech Acquisitions on Start-up Funding and Innovation at the online 49th Research Conference on Communication, Information, and Internet Policy (TPRC49) on Friday, September 24, 10:30 AM. The paper is part of the Quello Center research project on Modeling and Measuring the Economic Impacts of Digital Platform Innovation. Quello Center Working Paper No. 04-21, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3787127.

DIGITAL FUTURES WORKSHOP: Pablo J. Boczkowski at the Quello Center. Join us in person or via Zoom(sign up here).  Information overload is something that humans have dealt with for millennia. During different historical eras, massive increases in what was available to know has motivated the creation of systems for sorting, indexing, and compiling information as well as concerns that the abundance of information might cause cultural anxiety or even drive people to madness. The digital age has renewed concerns about information overload and the detrimental effects it has on our ability to sort through the stream of online data, decide […]

Please RSVP here or email quello@msu.edu Submit any questions to quello@msu.edu The Quello Center Information Seeking Project examines how information seeking from online and offline sources is associated with knowledge of dynamically evolving events. We use the COVID-19 pandemic as a case in point for a class of phenomena for which incomplete (scientific) information about the phenomenon interacts with misinformation and disinformation. How is reliance on different information sources associated with beliefs about the pandemic, knowledge about it, and behavioral intentions to engage in precautionary measures? We applied multiple theoretical and empirical models to data from nationally representative surveys in the United States (N=2,280) […]

Via Zoom  RSVP Here | or email quello@msu.edu A Rural Computing Research Consortium/Quello Center joint event. Precision agriculture (PA) has aided farmers, researchers, and agricultural technology providers (ATPs) with feeding a growing population with finite resources. By using remote sensing and other data collecting techniques, farmers can more precisely apply their inputs to maximize their yield. ATPs collect input and output data from farmers and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to build prescription maps which farmers can program farm equipment to follow. The use of PA has allowed farmers to use less resources, which saves money and reduces environmental impact. However, technology […]

  Prof. Dr. Natascha Just, Alena Birrer, MA, Danya He, MSc, Media & Internet Governance Division, Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich Via Zoom | RSVP Here | or email quello@msu.edu Internationally dominant Internet platforms have established themselves as crucial intermediaries for opinion-forming content and have disrupted national media and communications markets. This raises new questions about the control of opinion power and media concentration in times of platformization. This talk presents findings from a cross-national study on the control of market and opinion power in five countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK, USA). It scrutinizes the current state of media-concentration control […]

  Sandra Braman, Abbott Professor of Liberal Arts, Department of Communication, Texas A&M University Via Zoom | RSVP Here | or email quello@msu.edu The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to examine how a medical emergency -- so different in kind from the national security emergencies we are accustomed to thinking about in this policy issue area -- affected information policy as broadly defined. The talk will provide an overview of information policy as legal epidemiology, examines the legal imaginaries of the pandemic as they appeared in the first five months, and positions those imaginaries relative to the longer trajectories of the evolution of information […]

Via Zoom | RSVP Here | or email quello@msu.edu People living with HIV in rural areas need to get to healthcare facilities and places where they can find nutritious food that are often located in other towns or cities. Thus, access to affordable and reliable forms of transportation to healthcare and food resources is critical for this population. Yet, the transportation needs of this vulnerable population are often underserved as public and private transportation services are limited in rural areas. Ridesharing platforms have made it easier for people living in urban areas to get to work, grocery stores and healthcare providers. However, such technologies […]

Dr. Johannes Bauer will be speaking with Maria Alessandra Rossi, Maria Massaro, and Pier Luigi Parcu at a webinar organized by the International Telecommunications Society 5G development, implementation and disruptiveness continues to gather attention and debate among policymakers and researchers. 5G will provide the basis for digitization in many areas of our lives and will influence a broad spectrum of sectors. Full realisation of the Internet of Things (IoT), often called the next Industrial Revolution, relies on 5G development. At present, one estimate is that there will be up to 26 billion connected devices by 2026 (Ericsson, 2021). The global […]