Internet media and the public sphere: The 2007 Australian e-electioneering experience

Internet media have come under increasing examination since the early 1990s within a number of theoretical frameworks, including their use and potential influence in the public sphere of political discourse. Increasing use of internet media was identified in the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, with the latter being described as 'a critical turning point'. However, the development of what some call 'new media' or 'social media' based on Web 2.0 internet technology has overtaken many findings of previous research. Some of the most popular Web 2.0-based media currently in use were developed after 2004. These technological changes, coinciding with declining television viewing and newspaper readership, suggest that new forms of internet media need ongoing critical review. This paper analyses findings from a study of internet media use in the 2007 Australian federal election and explores their implications in relation to the public sphere

Effect of Financial Risk on the Earnings Response of Bank in Indonesisa, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand

The East Asian Financial crisis started at the beginning of July 1997. The crisis had a major impact on the banking industries in East Asian resulting in significant structural changes taking place in the banking sectors of the crisis-affected countries. This paper expands on the ideas of an earlier paper titled “Abnormal Returns of Bank stocks and their Factor-Analyzed Determinants” written by Cheng and Ariff (2007). This paper also attempts to analyze the Earnings Response Coefficients (ERC) for four (4) selected East Asian countries’ commercial banks and the effect of financial risks on the earnings response after the crisis and bank restructuring. This study uses the earnings response methodology and applies Sharpe’s Market Model, naive expectation model and factored principal components analyses. The countries selected are Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and Philippine and data resources are mainly accessed from the monthly closing prices in Bankscope financial data, Company Annual Reports, and the annual earnings announcements obtained from various Stock Exchange Central web-sites from 2000 to 2008. The findings show that Korea and Indonesian’s credit risk factors are significantly affecting their ERC and this is consistent with the results obtained for Malaysia by Cheng and Ariff (2007). Whereas additional interest risk factor and solvency factor are also significantly affecting Thailand’s ERC, surprisingly results from the Philippine’s show that their risk factors are not significantly affected because they are closely linked with the US and they are least affected by the financial crises. The findings provide new evidences on the effect of financial risk on ERC in banks’ stocks of East Asian countries with unique historical backgrounds and financial authorities’ policy decisions

Vaenunimedest eesti internetis

Ethnic, religious or other group-based dysphemisms are the most obvious manifestations of prejudice, ethnocentrism, sometimes even indicating actual feelings of xenophobia.But they also mirror the present and past on interethnic relationships, as slurs and dysphemisms are part of a nation’s or a group’s reactions to culture contacts, for example to the ethnic diversification of society. Nicknames are affected by quite objective factors like the amount and density of population, migration, etc., becoming more aggressive in the context of insecurity, fast and unanticipated changes, or perceived/ actual threat on the welfare of the group. The present study focuses on the use of aggressive nicknames in the Estonian web from the sociological and folkloristic perspective.The material covers the years 2000–2007 and features news comments posted on the Estonian online news portal www.delfi.ee from a selection of one-week periods from each year. The study describes the main objects of online flaming and the social background of target choice.The results show that online commenters play with the concepts of normal and abnormal, right and wrong, good and bad, while naming the “other”. They display their(sometimes radical) nationalism through juxtaposing themselves to “abnormal groups”.Temporal dynamics of ethnic and other hate speech in news comments show that the highest relative amount of slurs were used in 2003, regardless of the rise in national consciousness following the public disturbances in Estonia in April 2007. This trend is supported by the rise in other categories and by a sharp and direct confrontation to the “other” in Internet comments (but also the news themselves) during 2003. In the last years, commenters appear to use much less aggressive and straightforwardly offensive language to characterise groups other than their own. The trends show higher sensitivity and sense of responsibility, and the use of argument for the need of political correctness, possible censorship or even fear of punishment. The biggest number of instances of offensive slang are directed against Russians, while homosexualism and religion are also targets of dysphemisms. At the same time, ethnic slurs against Russians are proportionally much lower than those used against Gypsies, the Black or gays. Thus, as the number of comments in the case of a news story about Gypsys, for example, is much smaller than in the case of (very often provocative and emotional) news featuring Russians, the relative amount is somewhat distracting. The use and intensity of flaming also depends on many contextual cues: the news story and its construction, its main subjects, the identity or attitudes of the commenting persons, the social context of the news, etc

A view from above : changing seas, seabirds and food sources

In this review we summarize what is known about mechanisms by which climate change may be affecting the populations of seabirds around the UK. Breeding success and adult survival are the key factors affecting changes in seabird populations, and food intake is implicated as a major determinant of both. The diet of most UK seabird species is almost exclusively sandeels, small clupeoid fish or zooplankton and it is clear that the marine pelagic food web is the key ecological system determining food supply. Hence, we develop the review by first considering how climate changes may affect primary production, and then examine how this propagates through the food web to zooplankton and fish culminating in fluctuations in seabird numbers. A trend of increasing numbers of many seabird species since 1970, particularly puffins, guillemots and razorbills, appears to have been reversed since 2000. The proximate cause of the recent declines seems to be a succession of 5 years of low breeding success for a range of species due to a shortage of food, especially sandeels. However, the connection with climate change remains uncertain, though there are indications that declines in the productivity of sandeel populations may be linked in some complex way to warming sea temperatures. The main conclusion is that no part of the marine food web, including fisheries, can be considered in isolation when trying to understand and predict the consequences of climate change for seabirds. Impacts can be expected in all parts of the system, and all parts of the system are interconnected

Heteronormativity, intimate citizenship and the regulation of same-sex sexualities in Bulgaria

De-Centring Western Sexualities critically assesses the current state of knowledge about sexualities outside the framings of 'The West', by focusing on gender and sexuality within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. Providing rich case studies drawn from a range of "post-communist" countries, this interdisciplinary volume brings together the latest research on the formation of sexualities in Central and Eastern Europe, alongside analyses of the sexual and national identity politics of the region. Engaged with current debates within queer studies surrounding temporality and knowledge production, and inspired by post-colonial critique, the book problematises the Western hegemony that often characterises sexuality studies, and presents local theoretical insights better attuned to their geo-temporal realities. As such, it offers a cultural and social re-evaluation of everyday life experiences, and will be of interest to sociologists, queer studies scholars, geographers and anthropologists

Updating collection representations for federated search

To facilitate the search for relevant information across a set of online distributed collections, a federated information retrieval system typically represents each collection, centrally, by a set of vocabularies or sampled documents. Accurate retrieval is therefore related to how precise each representation reflects the underlying content stored in that collection. As collections evolve over time, collection representations should also be updated to reflect any change, however, a current solution has not yet been proposed. In this study we examine both the implications of out-of-date representation sets on retrieval accuracy, as well as proposing three different policies for managing necessary updates. Each policy is evaluated on a testbed of forty-four dynamic collections over an eight-week period. Our findings show that out-of-date representations significantly degrade performance overtime, however, adopting a suitable update policy can minimise this problem

Linking food web functioning and habitat diversity for an ecosystem based management: A Mediterranean lagoon case-study

We propose a modelling approach relating the functioning of a transitional ecosystem with the spatial extension of its habitats. A test case is presented for the lagoon of Venice, discussing the results in the context of the application of current EU directives. The effects on food web functioning due to changes related to manageable and unmanageable drivers were investigated. The modelling procedure involved the use of steady-state food web models and network analysis, respectively applied to estimate the fluxes of energy associated with trophic interactions, and to compute indices of food web functioning. On the long term (hundred years) temporal scale, the model indicated that the expected loss of salt marshes will produce further changes at the system level, with a lagoon showing a decrease in the energy processing efficiency. On the short term scale, simulation results indicated that fishery management accompanied by seagrass restoration measures would produce a slight transition towards a more healthy system, with higher energy cycling, and maintaining a good balance between processing efficiency and resilience. Scenarios presented suggest that the effectiveness of short term management strategies can be better evaluated when contextualized in the long term trends of evolution of a system. We also remark the need for further studying the relationship between habitat diversity and indicators of food web functioning