As scholars of fan fiction and young adult literature, we started noticing how some fan fiction authors were incorporating autism into their stories – sometimes through new characters and other times by rewriting existing ones. Since then we’ve been collecting and analyzing fan fictions in which young writers have created characters with autism.
Read the full story at The Conversation.
Gloria Mark, who researches digital distraction at the University of California-Irvine, discovered in her research that it takes over 23 minutes to fully regain focus on your original task after an interruption.
Read the full story at Forbes.
Kat Brewster, UCI informatics graduate student writes, “Thursday night’s Game Awards offered much in the way of glitz, glam, and game teasers — including an exclusive look at the fourth installment of BioWare’s blockbuster Dragon Age series. BioWare has been known to offer painstaking amounts of detail in their promo art which, if deciphered correctly, has the potential to unlock oodles of secrets about Thedas, character backstory, lore and more.”
Read the full story at IGN.
Have you ever used a health app to track your personal data, such as diet, exercise, or menstrual cycle? Did seeing the data make you feel excited and empowered? Or stressed and frustrated?
Read the full story at The Conversation.
Tumblr has served as an essential outlet for LGBTQ youth in relation to other popular platforms. Alexander Cho, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine, has written about Tumblr’s “queer ecosystem” where “users circulate porn, flirt, provide support to deal with homophobia as well as advice on coming out…” Cho has found that queer youth of colour experience Facebook as a space of “default publicness” and prefer Tumblr for sharing intimate and personal content.
Read the full story at The Conversation.
We are thrilled to have Constance Steinkuehler (Professor of Informatics) and Mark Deppe (Director of Esports) from the University of California, Irvine … join the 2019 Featured Speaker lineup at SXSW Gaming. … With esports teams forming at the high school level, Deppe and Steinkuehler will analyze the results of a study conducted at the University of California, Irvine on how connecting teens’ vast esports interest with education will yield emotional and skill development to prepare them for a larger, increasingly connected world.
Read the full announcement at SXSW.com.
Some researchers have said that parents and teachers shouldn’t worry the violence in Fortnite will lead to violent behavior by players. Kurt Squire, a professor of social informatics at the University of California Irvine, wrote in an Education Week Commentary that research shows there is no causal link. He said Fortnite isn’t all that different from “traditional types of kids’ play,” like tag or capture the flag.
Read the full story at Education Week.
Having an app that rates these domestic workers only makes the problem worse, explained Noopur Raval, a PhD candidate in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine …. “People tend to rate and give feedback only in extreme experiences—bad or good. There is also a rating bias because users have previously trained on rating systems for Amazon. Yelp etc. So a 5-star or equivalent does not mean the same thing in each platform and this affects workers too.”
Read the full story at The Huffington Post.
Mark Baldwin’s hands-on research is helping visually impaired rowers enjoy their sport in new and exciting ways
Read the full story at UCI News.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine, told me that people check their email an average of 74 times a day. Our email demands our attention. It makes our phone buzz, it makes a little (1) icon pop up that is impossible to ignore, it more or less stomps its feet and throws a fit until we pay attention to it. That’s fertile ground for stress. “We’ve done a study that looks at the start and stop time of when people are on email, and then looks at stress measurements created by heart rate monitors,” Mark said. “We find that the longer time people spend on email, the higher their stress.”
Read the full story at Buzzfeed.