Posts Tagged: social media
4-H fun facts
Twice in the last week, someone has raised to me that I should be more active on social media. I...
Brentwood 4-H Receiving Proclamation in BOS Chambers (Photo courtesy of Rob Bennaton)
Couple introduces Berkeley falcons to the world, one post at a time
Reposted from the UC Berkeley News
UC Berkeley is globally famous for producing Nobel Prize-winning scientists, entrepreneurs, economists, artists and environmentalists. Now, a new group's got a spot — actually, a perch — on that list: peregrine falcons.
Falcons first hatched in a secluded nest atop the campus's 307-foot-tall Campanile in 2017, but not until Sean Peterson, a Berkeley Ph.D. student, and Lynn Schofield, a biologist in Marin County at the Institute for Bird Populations, began a social media project about them this year did Berkeley's raptor family achieve a following in more than 40 countries worldwide.
Two webcams installed on the bell tower in January made possible the pair's clever Cal Falcons Instagram, Facebook and Twitter posts, many of them about Carson and Cade — recent offspring of parents Annie and Grinnell. So far, viewers have watched the brothers appear, sport flight feathers, get banded, feast on fresh prey, practice flying and, recently, take wing.
The posts also have included falcon facts, short videos, close-up shots taken with long-focus lenses and fun Photoshopped images — from Carson and Cade in graduation regalia to Annie receiving a Mother's Day bouquet of pigeons — designed to prompt awe and appreciation for these once-endangered animals.
“Our number one mission always will be to prioritize conservation of peregrine falcons,” says Peterson. “But close behind that, we want to stoke people's interest in these amazing animals and a grow a community for them. And, we want to increase awareness of the wildlife in everyone's backyard.”
Peterson and Schofield, who are married, happily educate falcon fans who pose questions via social media with responses that are factual, friendly and, if necessary, reassuring. A popular one this spring was why a third egg laid by Annie, the mother falcon, didn't hatch.
The couple's efforts — and a live, May 6 Berkeleyside interview that included Vireo, their now 9-month-old son, who wears raptor booties — have resulted in the famlly occasionally being greeted by passersby as “the Peregrine Falcon People.”
“It tells me people are interested in the falcons,” says Peterson, of the family's nickname, “but I also think it's our baby they remember.”
Cal Falcons is a joint effort by seven bird experts who represent UC Berkeley, the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, East Bay Regional Park District, Institute for Bird Populations and Institute for Wildlife Studies.
Observatory director Allen Fish says Peterson and Schofield “are both serious and focused ornithologists. And yet, they've been able to reach hundreds, maybe thousands, of Cal Falcons fans with their informal and spot-on social media posts and answers.
“This is a great lesson for scientists everywhere; we have many roads to teaching.”
A visibility problem
In winter 2016, Schofield, a biologist at the nonprofit Institute for Bird Populations, was working in the courtyard of Berkeley's Valley Life Sciences Building when she heard peregrine falcon cries. “I asked around if there was a pair on campus,” she says, “but everyone said no.”
Still, Schofield knew what she'd heard. She'd been familiar with falcons since her childhood in Minnesota, where she spent lunch hours watching a pair nesting on her dad's office building. Before moving to California, she also worked at the University of Minnesota's Raptor Center.
So, in early 2017, she and Peterson, along with Berkeley alumnus Doug Bell, the East Bay Regional Park District's wildlife program manager, and Mary Malec, a volunteer raptor nest monitor for the park district and Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, climbed high in the Campanile to look for falcons. The group soon was peeking through grates at a female falcon on a crude nest, on the western balcony above the tower's observation deck, “and she stared right back at us,” says Schofield.
“It's good we went up there,” she adds, “as the conditions weren't right. The balcony isn't quite level, Annie had laid four eggs — two had rolled away — and the birds were incubating the other two on a torn-open sand bag.”
Emergency permission was obtained from state and federal authorities and UC Facilities Services to provide the falcon family with a temporary nest shelf — a large tray with gravel. Peterson and Schofield visited the tower almost every day, watching from below for evidence that the parents were feeding babies at the nest.
“At that point, our main worry was the nest itself, whether they'd have a successful nest, and if the chicks would fledge successfully,” says Peterson, whose dissertation in the Department of Environmental Policy, Science and Management is on wetland birds in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
In late May 2017, chicks Fiat and Lux emerged, and a volunteer falcon fledge watch crew assembled below the Campanile. It would monitor the young birds through spotting scopes as the siblings readied to fly and help them if they became stranded.
Young Lux died that July after hitting a window, prompting a bird-proofing of windows around the tower. Yet, his parents, “because they'd had a successful nesting year,” says Peterson, persevered: The following year, three chicks — Berkelium, Californium and Lawrencium — were born on the Campanile, this time in a permanent, wooden box, and fledged successfully.
Still, it again was a struggle for Peterson and Schofield to view the nest. “We had no visibility up there, in the tower, and we didn't even know when the female had laid eggs,” says Schofield.
And, adds Peterson, “it was hard for people to experience the falcons from the ground.”
A fan club takes flight
“I think we were all thinking webcam from the beginning,” says Schofield, of the solution she and Peterson had for real-time observation of the birds on the tower. “There are a lot of great webcams for birds,” including one for a pair of bald eagles in Decorah, Iowa, and another for albatrosses in Kauai, Hawaii, that's currently on hiatus.
In October 2018, Berkeley launched a successful crowdfunding campaign for two 24/7 webcams, and last February, they were installed — one facing the nest, anotheron the northern balcony — in time for Cal Falcons and the public to observe a new and complete season of hatching and fledging.
As the chicks emerged, the nest webcam activity also was livestreamed on the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive's huge outdoor video screen. More than 500 people stopped by on April 25 to watch, and falcon experts were there to answer questions.
Peterson and Schofield say it's important that their Cal Falcons social media posts not only feature, but explain, the raptors' webcam activity.
“We know stuff will happen — birds die, sometimes— and we want to make sure there is a format where people are in communication with us, so we can help them understand natural history and realize they aren't watching pets,” says Schofield.
For example, when Carson and Cade fledged off the tower, with no branches nearby to land on and rest, says Peterson, “we never downplayed how dangerous that time period was. They could end up on the ground, and their flight muscles at first are not good enough for them to take off from there, and they become vulnerable to predators.”
Of Peterson and Schofield's posts, says Malec, “Their skill in answering questions is unsurpassed.”
The same could be said of their talent for sharing lighter moments, like the time aspiring hunters Cade and Carson caught a moth.
Cal Falcons fans live as far away as Japan, the United Kingdom and the Middle East, says Peterson, adding that neither he nor Schofield “anticipated how much of a following there would be for our posts, or the number of questions and cool opportunities to teach there would be.”
He predicts that Carson and Cade will leave the Campanile in August, but says he and Schofield “will keep people up to date with any sightings we have … until breeding season picks up again.” Lawrencium, known as “Larry,” has been spotted on Alcatraz Island, and she is likely establishing a territory there, says Peterson, adding that a researcher doing seabird surveys there reported that Larry had killed a Canada goose mid-air for a meal.
Schofield says Cal Falcons' social media efforts so far have inspired one fan to take a bird behavior course, several teachers to involve their classrooms and children to submit names for the chicks — Fluffy and Peeppeep made it into this season's naming contest.
“We want the Cal Falcons audience to grow,” she says, “and it seems that caring about Berkeley's falcons is something everyone can agree on. If it's a sign of success, the president of the Berkeley College Republicans and the president of Cal Berkeley Democrats began following us on the same day.”
Social Media Use in 2018
A majority of Americans use Facebook and YouTube, but young adults are especially heavy users of Snapchat and Instagram.
A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that the social media landscape in early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives.
As has been the case since the Center began surveying about the use of different social media in 2012, Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook.
But the social media story extends well beyond Facebook. The video-sharing site YouTube – which contains many social elements, even if it is not a traditional social media platform – is now used by nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94% of 18- to 24-year-olds. And the typical (median) American reports that they use three of the eight major platforms that the Center measured in this survey.
These findings also highlight the public's sometimes conflicting attitudes toward social media. For example, the share of social media users who say these platforms would be hard to give up has increased by 12 percentage points compared with a survey conducted in early 2014. But by the same token, a majority of users (59%) say it would not be hard to stop using these sites, including 29% who say it would not be hard at all to give up social media.
Different social media platforms show varied growth
Facebook remains the most widely used social media platform by a relatively healthy margin: some 68% of U.S. adults are now Facebook users. Other than the video-sharing platform YouTube, none of the other sites or apps measured in this survey are used by more than 40% of Americans.
The Center has asked about the use of five of these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest) in several previous surveys of technology use. And for the most part, the share of Americans who use each of these services is similar to what the Center found in its previous survey of social media use conducted in April 2016. The most notable exception is Instagram: 35% of U.S. adults now say they use this platform, an increase of seven percentage points from the 28% who said they did in 2016.
The youngest adults stand out in their social media consumption
At the same time, there are pronounced differences in the use of various social media platforms within the young adult population as well. Americans ages 18 to 24 are substantially more likely to use platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter even when compared with those in their mid- to late-20s. These differences are especially notable when it comes to Snapchat: 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds are Snapchat users, but that share falls to 54% among those ages 25 to 29.
With the exception of those 65 and older, Facebook is used by a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups. But other platforms appeal more strongly to certain subsets of the population. In addition to the age-related differences in the use of sites such as Instagram and Snapchat noted above, these are some of the more prominent examples:
- Pinterest remains substantially more popular with women (41% of whom say they use the site) than with men (16%).
- LinkedIn remains especially popular among college graduates and those in high-income households. Some 50% of Americans with a college degree use LinkedIn, compared with just 9% of those with a high school diploma or less.
- The messaging service WhatsApp is popular in Latin America, and this popularity also extends to Latinos in the United States – 49% of Hispanics report that they are WhatsApp users, compared with 14% of whites and 21% of blacks.
For more details on social media platform use by different demographic groups, see Appendix A.
Roughly three-quarters of Facebook users – and around six-in-ten Snapchat and Instagram users – visit each site daily
While the overall share of Americans who use Snapchat is smaller than that of Facebook, a similar share of Snapchat users (49%) say they use the platform multiple times per day. All told, a majority of Snapchat (63%) and Instagram (60%) users indicate that they visit these platforms on a daily basis. The share of Instagram users who visit the platform daily has increased slightly since 2016 when 51% of Instagram users were daily visitors. (Note: this is the first year the Center has specifically asked about the frequency of Snapchat use in a telephone poll.)
In addition to adopting Snapchat and Instagram at high rates, the youngest adults also stand out in the frequency with which they use these two platforms. Some 82% of Snapchat users ages 18 to 24 say they use the platform daily, with 71% indicating that they use it multiple times per day. Similarly, 81% of Instagram users in this age group visit the platform on daily basis, with 55% reporting that they do so several times per day.
The median American uses three of these eight social platforms
As was true in previous surveys of social media use, there is a substantial amount of overlap between users of the various sites measured in this survey. Most notably, a significant majority of users of each of these social platforms also indicate that they use Facebook and YouTube. But this “reciprocity” extends to other sites as well. For instance, roughly three-quarters of both Twitter (73%) and Snapchat (77%) users also indicate that they use Instagram.
This overlap is broadly indicative of the fact that many Americans use multiple social platforms. Roughly three-quarters of the public (73%) uses more than one of the eight platforms measured in this survey, and the typical (median) American uses three of these sites. As might be expected, younger adults tend to use a greater variety of social media platforms. The median 18- to 29-year-old uses four of these platforms, but that figure drops to three among 30- to 49-year-olds, to two among 50- to 64-year-olds and to one among those 65 and older.
A majority of social media users say it would not be difficult to give up these sites
Some 59% of social media users think it would not be hard to give up social media, with 29% indicating it would not be hard at all. By contrast, 40% say they would indeed find it hard to give up social media – although just 14% think it would be “very hard” to do this. At the same time, the share of social media users who would find it hard to give up these services has grown somewhat in recent years. The Center asked an identical question in a survey conducted in January 2014, and at that time, 28% of social media users indicated they would have a hard time giving up social media, including 11% who said it would be “very hard.”
These findings vary by age. Roughly half of social media users ages 18 to 24 (51%) say it would be hard to give up social media, but just one-third of users ages 50 and older feel similarly. The data also fit broadly with other findings the Center has collected about Americans' attitudes toward social media. Despite using them for a wide range of reasons, just 3% of social media users indicate that they have a lot of trust in the information they find on these sites. And relatively few have confidence in these platforms to keep their personal information safe from bad actors.
Source: Published originally on pewresearch.org, Social Media Use in 2018, by Aaron Smith And Monica Anderson, March 1, 2018.
UC Rice is live on Social Media
UC Rice is now live on social media! We will be posting events that may be of interest to...
Strawberry and vegetable crops extension program and its impact in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties
Extension education plays a major role in agricultural development. Timely and efficient dissemination of information on new technologies, crop production or pest management practices, and emerging or potential problems helps growers to reduce their production costs and improve yields. A variety of communication tools and techniques are necessary to effectively carry out the mission of extension education. As communication is a major part of extension education, the kind of communication tools used will determine the success of the program. Modern communication tools such as emails, webinars, electronic journals, social media, web portals, videos, and smartphone applications add value to traditional outreach methods such as field visits, phone calls, extension meetings, and field days. While the number of subscribers, views to online articles, or attendees at meetings indicates the effectiveness of the extension program, periodic surveys are very important to measure the impact.
Here is an overview of my extension program and some of the methods used to reach out to my clientele groups since I joined UC Cooperative Extension in January, 2009.
Field visits or individual consultations: They provide an opportunity to understand individual needs and provide specific solutions. More than 6,300 people have been served through personal visits or communication related to various crop production and crop protection.
Field days and extension meetings: My annual extension events provide an excellent opportunity to bring together local communities where new information is exchanged and collaborations are developed. I have reached out to more than 5,800 people through various extension events organized by myself, my colleagues, or industry partners. Presentations and handouts from my meetings can be accessed online.
Trade journals and web portals: Several print magazines and web portals such as American Vegetable Grower, American Fruit Grower, CAPCA Adviser, Growing Produce, Vegetables West, and Western Farm Press are excellent resources to disseminate information to thousands of readers. I regularly contribute article to these sources.
Newsletters: Sending out periodical information through newsletters keeps the clients informed about new developments. Central Coast Agriculture Highlights is a quarterly newsletter that I sent out to about 500 subscribers. After finding out that other online articles are more effective in timely dissemination of information, I focused more on those options. However, I continue to contribute articles to county newsletters.
Electronic journals: I started the electronic journal Strawberries and Vegetables six years ago (15 December, 2010), to alert growers about an issue that some of the strawberry growers were experiencing. Most of these articles are reviewed by peers and their periodic publication allowed immediate availability of information to people within the region as well as those outside California or United States. I started another electronic journal Pest News in January, 2011, to provide information about pests, diseases, and other issues not related to strawberries and vegetables.
Out of the 80 articles in Strawberries and Vegetables, I authored or co-authored 74. These articles have a total of 173,120 direct views between 15 December, 2010 and 2016. While my 74 articles had 168,469 views, the remaining six had 4,651. On an average, each of my articles was read more than 2,200 times.
Readership of Strawberries and Vegetables eJournal related to specific crops or general issues from 15 December 2010-2016. Numbers on the bars are the number of articles.
Number of articles (on bars) on different topics and their readership from 15 December, 201-2016 (above). Top five articles with the highest number of views (below).
The average views for articles on strawberry or vegetable issues was about the same, but when the views or the readership of individual articles was considered, spider mite management in strawberries was the most popular topic followed by information on the invasive Bagrada bug.
In Pest News the 16 articles I authored or co-authored were viewed 52,743 times since 2 February, 2011 while the 15 article authored by others were viewed 15, 264 times. Articles about the spotted lanternfly the weeping fig thrips, both invasive species, had the highest views.
Top five popular articles in Pest News eJournal.
Other extension publications: The illustrated strawberry production manual published in collaboration with Cachuma Resource Conservation District in both English and Spanish is available for free download. This publication complements contributions made to pest management guidelines or manuals published by UCANR.
Smartphone application: Apps have become very popular because of the convenience and a variety of features or services they offer. I conceived the idea of developing IPMinfo app three years ago to provide information about pests and diseases and had an Android version developed first for initial testing. An iOS version was first released in May, 2015 and with some improvements, the Android version was released in September, 2016. IPMinfo currently has information about strawberry pests and diseases, but additional crops will be added. With a few hundred downloads and very positive feedback from several users, IPMinfo, the first such app from University of California is an efficient extension tool using modern technology.
IPMinfo can be downloaded through Apple App Store and Google Play Store for free.
Twitter:Tweets are a great way to announce publications, extension events, or important issues in 140 characters or less. I started @calstrawberries and @calveggies accounts in January, 2010, which now have 210, and 149 followers, respectively. In addition to the followers, tweets from these accounts reach out to hundreds of other Twitter users.
Stay tuned to the updates by following @calstrawberries and @calveggies.
Facebook: Not having the character limit as in Twitter, Facebook allows us to post pictures and large text to engage clients in conversation about research and extension activities. I created the @strawberriesvegetables page in June, 2012 and it reaches out to those who are not connected through other tools.
Like the @strawberriesvegetables Facebook page and stay connected.
YouTube videos: A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth much more. Short videos are very valuable in providing information or training on a variety of issues. I first posted a YouTube video on the biology, damage, and control of the Bagrada bug on 1 August, 2013 in response to numerous queries about this invasive pest. On 23 September, 2013, I posted my second video on virus decline (Pallidosis-related decline) of strawberry. Both videos helped in providing a good overview of important issues at that time. Additional videos are also available on my YouTube channel.
Informative short videos on pest and disease issues can be found on my YouTube channel.
While there are several communication tools for extending information, it is important to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each and use them as appropriate for the program and the specific clientele groups.
Needs assessment and impact measurement: Assessing the needs of the clients helps build a research and extension program that addresses existing and emerging issues. Conducting surveys immediately and a few months after the extension events helps understand their usefulness and impact in improving clients' knowledge, change behavior, or improving their agricultural practices. Surveys conducted after my extension events have been receiving positive feedback. For example, a recent survey showed that the information I provided through my research and extension program during last year positively impacted farming on more than 137,000 acres and improved savings or returns that amounted to $1.28 million.
Feedback received from more than 300 people since 1 September, 2015 indicated that 99.4% found the articles in my electronic journals useful and 93.4% would use that information in their farming operations.
Highly positive feedback indicates the usefulness of the information provided through the two eJournals.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to all the growers, PCAs, industry partners, and other clients who support my research and extension program and continue to provide feedback enabling me to improve and serve better.
http://ucanr.edu/articlefeedback