Networked Press Freedom and Social Media: Tracing Historical and Contemporary Forces in Press‐Public Relations

This paper analyzes how mainstream, online news organizations understand press autonomy in their relationships to audiences. I situate the press in terms of neo‐institutional sociology, seeing its autonomy as a distributed, field‐level phenomenon involving “boundary work” among distributed actors. I then trace press‐audience relations through two historical examples (letters to the editor and ombudsmen), showing how the press has historically both separated itself from and relied upon audiences. Examining eight news organizations' social media policies, I analyze the “inside‐out” and “outside‐in” forces through which the press distinguishes itself from audiences, concluding with a discussion of how such guidelines structure the types of control that news organizations have, or might have, as they use social network sites in their news work.     

Attention to news and its dissemination on Twitter: A survey

In recent years, news media have been hugely disrupted by news promotion, commentary and sharing in online, social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit). This disruption has been the subject of a significant literature that has largely used AI techniques – machine learning, text analytics and network models – to both (i) understand the factors underlying audience attention and news dissemination on social media (e.g., effects of popularity, type of day) and (ii) provide new tools/guidelines for journalists to better disseminate their news via these social media. This paper provides an integrative review of the literature on the professional reporting of news on Twitter; focusing on how journalists and news outlets use Twitter as a platform to disseminate news, and on the factors that impact readers’ attention and engagement with that news on Twitter. Using the precise definition of a news-tweet (i.e., divided into user, content and context features), the survey structures the literature to reveal the main findings on features affecting audience attention to news and its dissemination on Twitter. From this analysis, it then considers the most effective guidelines for digital journalists to better disseminate news in the future.     

Effects of the News‐Finds‐Me Perception in Communication: Social Media Use Implications for News Seeking and Learning About Politics

With social media at the forefront of today's media context, citizens may perceive they don't need to actively seek news because they will be exposed to news and remain well‐informed through their peers and social networks. We label this the “news‐finds‐me perception,” and test its implications for news seeking and political knowledge: “news‐finds‐me effects.” U.S. panel‐survey data show that individuals who perceive news will find them are less likely to use traditional news sources and are less knowledgeable about politics over time. Although the news‐finds‐me perception is positively associated with news exposure on social media, this behavior doesn't facilitate political learning. These results suggest news continues to enhance political knowledge best when actively sought.     

Copyrighting computer software: The “look and feel” controversy and beyond

In today's society, the development of new technologies generally outpaces the laws and regulations created to protect them. This is precisely what has happened in copyright cases involving the copyrightability of the “look and feel” of a program (the visual displays and specific command keystrokes that make a computer program unique). Currently, regulatory agencies and judicial interpretation of copyright law is not precise, leading to uncertainty and a lack of uniformity. Until the courts and/or agencies reach some consistency in their rulings, software developers and individual programmers are left in a quandary as to when charges of copyright infringement might be served. Although it may be difficult to achieve consistent interpretation, US case law does provide some guidance that can aid US developers in not only protecting their work, but also avoiding charges of copyright infringement. This paper examines the current US copyright laws and limitations with special attention to “look and feel.” International copyright aspects, as outlined in the Berne Convention, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are also addressed. It also reviews several cases that deal with (or have somehow impacted) questions surrounding “look and feel,” along with commentaries on their individual impacts, evaluates where copyright laws stand today, and discusses some possible alternatives for software developers based on the results of recent cases.     

The Double‐Edged Sword: The Effects of Journalists' Social Media Activities on Audience Perceptions of Journalists and Their News Products

As social media become popular news platforms, journalists and news organizations have been keen to capitalize on their potential to build and maintain audiences. However, little is known about the extent to which these efforts may have adverse implications. Based on normative theories, the present study investigates the influence of journalists' social media activities (specifically, self‐disclosure and interaction with other users) on audience perceptions of journalists. An experiment (N = 267) revealed that: Although both journalists' self‐disclosure and interaction positively influenced audience perceptions of the journalists in the personal dimension, interaction negatively influenced audience perceptions in the professional dimension; and the perceptions transferred to perceptions of news products, thereby mediating the relationship between journalists' social media activities and audience news perceptions.     

Commenting in the Online Arab Public Sphere: Debating the Swiss Minaret Ban and the “Ground Zero Mosque” Online

This article focuses on the emerging online Arab public sphere that the web has enabled. It explores how the “local” interacts with the “global,” critically examining their implications on global politics. Specifically looking at online readers' comments about the Swiss minaret ban the so‐called “Ground Zero Mosque,” how does the Arab online public sphere respond to and frame these issues? What implications do these reader frames portend locally and globally? The study analyzes online comments and responses that readers of Al Arabiya.net and Al Jazeera.net posted on related news articles. The article concludes that the new online public sphere does make it possible for Arab citizens to circumvent and challenge traditional authoritarian controls.     

Copyright infringement and users of P2P networks in multimedia applications: The case of the U.S. Copyright regime

This paper discusses certain copyright infringement issues regarding the liabilities of P2P network users. These issues are applicable to most P2P multimedia transmissions, as multimedia works are increasingly generating copyright disputes. The discussions will focus on the liabilities of both the distributors and end-users of P2P software via copyright law. The reason why the operations of P2P networks conflict with the regulations of copyright law is not complicated; the current copyright law evaluates infringement responsibilities via a simple copyrighted works distribution and usage dichotomy classification, and the application of P2P networks exceeds this classification. However, the copyright law was written during an analog era, and the interpretations of infringement were designed to target those who were making copies of cassettes and compact disks. A new regulation concerning digital file transactions is required; without it, due to the vagueness of the copyright law, more and more “innocent infringers” will be trapped by this pitfall called copyright protection and industries applying P2P network operations are directly threatened by trends of copyright impetus.     

The New About News: How Print,Online, Free,and Mobile Coconstruct New Audiences in Italy,France, Spain,the UK,and Germany

This paper presents cross‐national research on news readership diversification. We compare written news (print and free newspapers, online and mobile news services) audiences in the 5 most populous and industrialized European countries (Italy, France, Spain, the UK and Germany). Outlining a sociodemographic portrait of these different news users is important in order to understand the changes undergone inside the world of written news. We draw on a telephone survey carried out in 2009, using a representative population sample (N=7,255). The survey considers sociodemographic variables, including a range of social activities and attitudinal variables, television, computer, and mobile phone ownership, and Internet access and use. Findings show a rich, but volatile relationship between written news, audience behaviors, and community participation.     

An interactional view of social presence: Making the virtual other “real”

In IS research, social presence is generally defined as the perceived capacity of a communication medium to convey contextual cues normally available in face‐to‐face settings. However, theorizing social presence as a property of the technology has been challenged for decades. The objective of this paper is to develop a more contemporary, interactional view of social presence. To this end, this paper develops a new conceptualization of how participants form the sense that each other is present. We characterize the development of this sense as a skilful accomplishment that entails interactants' joint construction of each other as “real.” Viewing social presence as contingent on social practice, we seek to answer the following research question: “How is social presence accomplished in virtual environments?” To explicate how virtual others are perceived as becoming socially present, that is, emotionally and psychologically “real” to someone interacting with them, we draw from Goffman's work, particularly his concepts of involvement and involvement obligation. Detailing two examples of social interaction in the virtual world Second Life, our analysis highlights the key role that this moral obligation, intrinsic to everyday social interaction, plays in virtual others becoming perceived as psychoemotionally “there.” By outlining a model of how the sense of a virtual other as “real” is produced in and through social interaction, our work contributes a sociological perspective to the construct of social presence and underscores some of the material and social conditions necessary for users to perceive virtual others as present.     

Internet,News, and Political Trust: The Difference Between Social Media and Online Media Outlets

What is the relationship between Internet usage and political trust? To answer this question, we performed a cross‐sectional analysis of Eurobarometer survey data related to 27 countries and a supervised sentiment analysis of online political information broadcast during the Italian debate on the reform of public funding of parties. The results disclose the differences between Web 1.0 websites and Web 2.0 social media, showing that consumption of news from information/news websites is positively associated with higher trust, while access to information available on social media is linked with lower trust. This has implications for the debate on social media as a public sphere and for the tension between professional and citizen journalism.     

How do development actors do “ICT for development”? A strategy‐as‐practice perspective on emerging practices in Ghanaian agriculture

This paper examines how development actors within the Ghanaian agricultural sector enact information and communication technology (ICT) in their day‐to‐day outreach practices with smallholder farmers. We draw on an in‐depth qualitative case study, informed by the theoretical perspective of “strategy‐as‐practice” to answer the research question: “what ICT‐mediated strategic practices are used by development actors in the Ghanaian agriculture sector?” The research findings reveal that (1) the activities of development actors are meshed within a network of interdependencies; (2) the enacted strategic practices reflect the trade‐off between novelty of content and novelty of the technologies used to deliver it; and lastly, (3) the praxis of development actors for doing ICT for development consists of hybrid strategies, combining bottom‐up approaches consistent with farmers' indigenous smallholder logic, with top‐down imperatives framing agriculture “as a business” and nurturing value‐chain integration. Consequently, our research points to the impact of ICT initiatives as step‐wise and attained over the long term, rather than disruptive and attained in the immediate term.     

Machine learning for science and society

The special issue on “Machine Learning for Science and Society” showcases machine learning work with influence on our current and future society. These papers address several key problems such as how we perform repairs on critical infrastructure, how we predict severe weather and aviation turbulence, how we conduct tax audits, whether we can detect privacy breaches in access to healthcare data, and how we link individuals across census data sets for new insights into population changes. In this introduction, we discuss the need for such a special issue within the context of our field and its relationship to the broader world. In the era of “big data,” there is a need for machine learning to address important large-scale applied problems, yet it is difficult to find top venues in machine learning where such work is encouraged. We discuss the ramifications of this contradictory situation and encourage further discussion on the best strategy that we as a field may adopt. We also summarize key lessons learned from individual papers in the special issue so that the community as a whole can benefit.     

Accessing Egypt: making myths and producing web sites in cyber-Cairo

From an anthropological viewpoint, “accessibility” is not so much a technological and design project as it is a cultural construction, a cognitive schema through which graphic designers and technologists imagine audiences and create appropriate graphic designs that will be “accessible” to that audience. The ethnographer's task is the specification of key actors, institutions and discourses active in the making and remaking of accessibility in a given context. In this article, we examine how Egyptian Web producers at the turn of millennium (1999–2001) sought to design Web portals that would allow the “typical” Egyptian to easily access the World Wide Web. We argue, first, that Egyptian Web producers are deeply influenced by national and international discourses that frame IT as a national mission for socioeconomic development. Second, we found that in the absence of clear definitions of the Web audience, Web producers imagined a “typical” Egyptian that contradicted their own experiences of users of the Web. Finally, we found that Egyptian Web producers largely borrowed pre-existing models, using design elements to “inflect” their sites with an Egyptian motif. However, the conceptual models of access and related design strategies created by Egyptian Web producers were out of touch with Egyptian social realities, contributing to a collapse of most Web portal projects.     

Sega Enterprises Ltd v Accolade Inc. (1993, 9th us circuit): Reverse engineering a defense to copyright infringement?

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is regarded by many as one of the more progressive courts in the country. Because it encompasses California and its ‘Silicon Valley’, the Ninth Circuit has been especially active in the law governing computers and related technology.[1] The Court's recent decision in Sega Enterprises Ltd v. Accolade Inc.[2] has already added considerably to its reputation as a progressive court, and has evoked considerable response from the bar. Yet, a closer analysis reveals that the Sega decision does not fundamentally change United States copyright law. Instead, the decision represents a reasoned approach to a complex problem of copyright law, a problem that the court itself analogized to trying “to fit the proverbial square peg into a round hole”.[3]     

A decision support model for tax revenue collection in Greece

In the midst of the financial crisis currently unfolding in Greece, tax revenue collection is considered a top priority. This work describes a dynamic, Markov-based decision support model, aimed at predicting the behavior of a risk-neutral enterprise in Greece, and at evaluating tax policies before they are implemented. We use our model to i) analyze the effectiveness of an alternative taxation option periodically offered by the Greek government, ii) show that in the current environment, a rational enterprise has no incentive to disclose its profits, and iii) identify “virtuous” combinations of parameters which lead to full disclosure of profits.     

Control of a one-sector economy on finite time interval with account of tax deductions

The problem of optimal control of a one-sector economy on a finite time interval in the presence of tax deductions is studied on the class of linear homogeneous production functions using the criterion of maximization of consumption of employers in the case of exponential growth of labor resources. The solution is obtained in the form of the “Turnpike Theorem”. The “Golden Rule of Saving” is studied. The results are specified for the case of the Cobb-Douglas production function.     

High‐resolution and high‐brightness full‐colour “Silicon Display” for augmented and mixed reality

High‐brightness micro‐LED display bonded onto silicon backplane has been successfully demonstrated. The 0.38‐inch full‐colour active matrix LED microdisplay system consists of 352 × 198 pixels. Each pixel is 24 μm square composed of red, green, and blue (RGB) subpixels corresponding to a pixel resolution of 1053 ppi. Quantum‐dot materials are formed on III‐nitride blue micro‐LED array to convert blue light into red and green for full‐colour operation. We have confirmed that this microdisplay, which we call “Silicon Display” has wide colour gamut exceeding 120% of sRGB. We describe the advantage of this colour‐converting approach for the full‐colour micro‐LEDs. Progress toward higher resolution is also described. Brightness of more than 30 000 cd/m² has been confirmed at a driving current density of 4 A/cm² for 3000 ppi blue monochrome micro‐LED prepared for full‐colour Silicon Display. We believe our “Silicon Display” is ideally suited for near‐to‐eye displays for augmented and mixed reality.     

A critical analysis of the “improved Clarke and Wright savings algorithm”

In their paper “An improved Clarke and Wright savings algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem,” published in ScienceAsia (38, 3, 307–318, 2012), Pichpibul and Kawtummachai developed a simple stochastic extension of the well‐known Clarke and Wright savings heuristic for the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Notwithstanding the simplicity of the heuristic, which they call the “improved Clarke and Wright savings algorithm” (ICW), the reported results are among the best heuristics ever developed for this problem. Through a careful reimplementation, we demonstrate that the results published in the paper could not have been produced by the ICW heuristic. Studying the reasons how this paper could have passed the peer review process to be published in an ISI‐ranked journal, we have to conclude that the necessary conditions for a thorough examination of a typical paper in the field of optimization are generally lacking. We investigate how this can be improved and come to the conclusion that disclosing source code to reviewers should become a prerequisite for publication.     

A broadband inverted umbrella shaped cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna for “WLAN” and “C” band applications

The main objective of the present article is to improve the bandwidth of a low profile Cylindrical Dielectric Resonator Antenna (CDRA) and operate it for WLAN and “C” band applications. An inverted umbrella shaped CDRA excited by a microstrip feedline with single stub is proposed here. Efficient coupling has been achieved by means of a single stub microstrip feed between DRA and the feed. The new shape of DRA and a single stub microstrip feed improves the bandwidth significantly as high as 28% from 5 to 6.67 GHz which is quite useful for both WLAN and “C” band applications. The proposed antenna is simple in construction, easy to fabricate, low profile and thickness of CDRA is only 5 mm. A parametric study is performed using Ansoft HFSS simulation software to optimize the antenna performance. The proposed CDRA is fabricated and the characteristics of the antenna are measured.