Book review: can the newspaper survive amidst Youtube, lone bloggers and Wikileaks?

Page One explores journalism’s big shake-up and takes on the cause of reuniting journalism with its true civic purpose. After reading this collection of essays, Cheryl Brumley reflects that there remains not enough consensus, nor enough collaboration between all constituents of the media world to save itself from slipping further into untenable business practices. Page One: Inside the New York Times. Edited by David Folkenflik. Public Affairs. June 2011

Diffusing opinions in bounded confidence processes

We study the effects of diffusing opinions on the Deffuant et al. model for continuous opinion dynamics. Individuals are given the opportunity to change their opinion, with a given probability, to a randomly selected opinion inside an interval centered around the present opinion. We show that diffusion induces an order-disorder transition. In the disordered state the opinion distribution tends to be uniform, while for the ordered state a set of well defined opinion clusters are formed, although with some opinion spread inside them. If the diffusion jumps are not large, clusters coalesce, so that weak diffusion favors opinion consensus. A master equation for the process described above is presented. We find that the master equation and the Monte-Carlo simulations do not always agree due to finite-size induced fluctuations. Using a linear stability analysis we can derive approximate conditions for the transition between opinion clusters and the disordered state. The linear stability analysis is compared with Monte Carlo simulations. Novel interesting phenomena are analyzed

Paedophiles in the community: inter-agency conflict, news leaks and the local press

This article explores the leaking of confidential information about secret Home Office plans to house convicted paedophiles within a local community (albeit inside a prison). It argues that a politics of paedophilia has emerged in which inter-agency consensus on the issue of ‘what to do’ with high-profile sex offenders has broken down. Accordingly, the article situates newspaper ‘outing’ of paedophiles in the community in relation to vigilante journalism and leaked information from official agencies. The article then presents research findings from a case study of news events set in train following a whistle-blowing reaction by Prison Officers’ Association officials to Home Office plans. Drawing from a corpus of 10 interviews with journalists and key protagonists in the story, the article discusses both the dynamics of whistle blowing about paedophiles and also what happens after the whistle has blown

Committee Structure and the Success of Connected Lending in Nineteenth Century New England Banks

Early nineteenth century New England banking exhibited high levels of lending to directors and their associates (i.e., connected lending). Today many think this arrangement can lead to inefficiency and financial fragility. This paper explores the decision making processes inside these banks and argues that connected lending was viable when many people were involved in loan decisions. The committees used to vote on the approval of loans are the focus. Banks that required more votes for a given committee size prevented the approval of loans with private gains and social costs. The historical data are consistent with the idea that higher levels of consensus in the loan committees raised the return on assets.

Practical Issues Regarding the Use of Dielectric Measurements to Diagnose the Service Health of MV Cables

Presented at Jicable '07.During the last decade, Very Low Frequency (VLF) testing for extruded distribution cables has gained interest among the North American utilities. The increasing interest is evidenced by recent research publications and discussions inside the expert community in which standards are being proposed and continuously discussed. While there is a general consensus as to the meaning of insulation dielectric properties, many open issues still remain for discussion in order to produce a more accurate evaluation. Consequently, this paper will discuss a number of the practical issues that arise when making these measurements at VLF on field aged and non-aged cables, particularly Tan δ measurements. The discussion is based on data from laboratory experiments and field testing.The work reported here was supported by a large number of utilities in North America and the U.S. Department of Energy under award number DE-FC02-04CH11237