A new study analyzing transnational corporations demonstrates the power a core group of 1,318 companies has over the global economy. The most powerful, not surprisingly, are banks.

The study, conducted by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, explores the network of transnational corporations — including who owns who among other economic relationships — and further discover that a super-connected 147 companies control 40% of the wealth in the total network.

(These “super-connected” companies are represented by the red dots in the image above. The “merely” very connected are in yellow.)

Via New Scientist:

[The study] combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations…

…John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”…

…Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.

Image: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the global economy. Dot size represents revenue. New Scientist via PLoS One.

Study (PDF).

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project

Your future audience has arrived. 

A study on children by Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center  concludes that TV still rules the roost but the Internet is gaining ground, with 80% of those under five going online at least once a week. 

Original Report. H/T: Mashable. Photo via Padawan Neophyte on Flickr.

Random aside: whatever happened to playing with blocks?

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

“There are consequences to journalism that just reports what each side says with no fact checking,” Pingree told Ohio State’s research staff. “It makes readers feel like they can’t figure out what the truth is.”

The result: news consumers get depressed when they reach the end of a story with no clear idea about what they’re to believe; become ambivalent and dismissive to politics generally; and become more prone to believing factually incorrect statements by politicians and other authorities.

As Pingree writes in his study:

[T]the crucial test of journalism is when sources make contradictory factual claims; in these moments, passive journalists stop at reporting the opposing claims when they should, as Jamieson and Waldman (2003) put it, “adjudicate factual disputes.” This adjudication is not a radical or novel proposal foreign to reporters’ habits; it comes down to the extent to which they “do their homework” by checking facts, looking for additional sources, and doing their own analysis. There is no limit to the amount of such homework that can be done on any given story, and there is no guarantee that it will resolve important factual disputes between sources. Ideally, journalists would decide how much adjudication a dispute merits based on a careful and open-minded assessment of its importance and resolvability. However, there are of course limits to journalists’ time to work on any given story. Particularly in forms of journalism in which time is very limited such as 24-hour cable news and also in general as a consequence of modern journalism’s understaffed newsrooms and fast news cycles…

Media critics have taken news organizations to task for falling into “balanced” truthiness whereby demonstrably false propositions are reported as just another side of the story. So here’s another bit of civic, and psychological, ammunition to their arguments.

The study, published in the Journal of Communication, can be read here.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

The United States Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and is meant to give citizens access to previously unreleased federal government information and documents.

Over the years, different presidents have both restricted and expanded the law. For example, the Clinton administration issued executive directives that allowed for the release of previously classified national security documents that were more than 25 years old, while the Bush administration limited access to the records of former presidents.

The Knight Foundation released a study yesterday on FOIA’s progress under the Obama administration. Here’s some of what they have to say:

On his first day in office in January 2009, President Barack Obama issued a presidential memorandum instructing federal agencies to “usher in a new era of open government.” In March 2010, however, the 2010 Knight Open Government Survey found that only 13 out of 90 agencies had actually made concrete changes in their FOIA procedures. The resulting national headlines sparked a new White House call to all agencies to show concrete change.

This year, the 2011 Knight Open Government Survey found that a few more than half of the federal agencies have complied – up from 13 to 49.

“At this rate, the president’s first term in office may be over by the time federal agencies do what he asked them to do on his first day in office,” commented Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the study.

Resources:

• FOIA explainer via OMB Watch
• FOIA definitions and terms via the Government Printing Office
• FOIA Handbook via the US Office of Special Counsel

The good news: A new study reports that people are no more likely to believe false political information just because they read about it online.

Email, on the other hand…

The bad news: The same study says that false information is more likely to be believed — and is spread more rapidly — when received via email from trusted sources such as friends and family.

Via Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune:

[The researcher] found both exposure to, and belief in, the false rumors was generally low. Those who used the Internet for political information were more likely to have heard or read them. But they were also more likely to have come across a rebuttal, making the net effect of this exposure on belief very small…

…However, politically minded e-mail contact between individuals did promote beliefs in false rumors, in part because the recipients were unlikely to also receive contradictory communications.

Takeaway? Information silos aren’t completely upon us but lets repeat the study in a few years after customized news via our social networks and social graphs takes hold.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.