The tragedy and its aftermath captured national attention, and in the weeks following the Columbine High School shootings, politicians and pundits worked to assign blame. Their targets ranged from the makers of the first-person shooter video game Doom to the Hollywood studios responsible for The Matrix.Tom Brook, “Is Hollywood to Blame?” BBC News, April 23, 1999
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In modern society, the persuasive power of the mass media is well known. In the years after 9/11, there were multiple reports of the death of Osama bin Laden; people desperately wanted to believe he was killed. In reality, he was killed in 2011. Governments, corporations, nonprofit organizations, and political campaigns rely on both new and old media to create messages and to send them to the general public. During and since the 2008 Presidential election, there has been constant scrutiny over Barack Obama’s birthplace and citizenship; the reports are discredited, but the questions resurface. The comparatively unregulated nature of U.S. media has made, for better or worse, a society in which the tools of public persuasion are available to everyone.
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Both of the above scenarios involve the generation of data: information about observable or measurable phenomena in the world. In the scenario above where effects of carbon and nitrogen are associated with plants’ root structures, data would consist of measurements associated with the roots. Alternatively, the information collected in the first example—that people in a given group have different hair texture that can be described and grouped by category—is what we usually call qualitative data. Qualitative data is observable or measurable information that is not (typically) numerical in nature. Writing and Talking about Data: What can we do with it and what should we do with it?
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