58,709 research outputs found
Routinisation of Audience Participation: BBC News Online, Citizenship and Democratic Debate
Leading up to the 2010 UK general election, Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, stressed the importance of the Corporationâs ability âto provide a strong and independent space where the big debates can take place, free from political or commercial influenceâ. âIn this public space,â he continued, âeveryone can have access to the lifeblood of healthy democratic debate â impartial news and informationâ. Affirming the importance of BBC Online, Thompson described it as âbeing a cornerstone of what the BBC should be aboutâ (Thompson, 2010). As with previous elections, one of the key strategic priorities for the BBCâs Election 2010 website was to help inform the citizenry about the campaign and empower voters to make an informed choice. In the most traditional sense, this was achieved through the BBCâs journalism and a series of rich background features â e.g. guidance on voting procedures, MPs and parliamentary politics, and comparisons of party manifestos. The BBC election websites have also featured experimentation with various forms of audience engagement, exemplified by different interactive features on the BBC micro websites for the 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010 UK general elections. This has traditionally been anchored in the Corporationâs public service commitment to facilitating âcivic engagementâ and providing âdemocratic valueâ to British citizens (see also Thorsen et al., 2009, Thorsen, 2010, 2011, Allan and Thorsen, 2010). The BBCâs news website was incredibly popular during the 2010 election according to visitor statistics. On results day, May 7, BBC News Online had 11.4 million individual users, breaking the previous record set on November 5, 2008, for the election of Barack Obama as US President (Herrmann, 2010). Comparing this to 2005, the number of unique visitors to the BBCâs election site on results day, May 6, was 3 million taking the overall BBC News Online total to 4.3 million (Ward, 2006:17). This demonstrates a near three-fold increase in individual users from one election to the next and indicates that whilst the internet might not be perceived as having had a significant impact on the election outcomes, the BBC has certainly had a considerable impact on citizensâ online activities. Based on a larger study into BBCâs election websites involving interviews, observations and textual analysis, this chapter will examine how audience participation had by 2010 become a routinised part of the Corporationâs newsroom. It will begin by providing an historical overview of how public access programming has developed within the BBC and its influence on how the Corporation has sought to facilitate participatory spaces online. Following a discussion of online participatory spaces on the BBCâs election websites, it will offer a critique of how these are operationalized internally. It will argue that despite converged newsroom practices, the scale of the BBCâs operations means facilitation of civic engagement is fragmented between competing stakeholders within the Corporation each with their own routinised practices and perception of its value. This tension has a dramatic effect not only on the dialectic relationship between BBC journalists and its audiences, but also on the type of âpublic spaceâ the Corporation is able to foster and by extension the empowerment of citizens to engage in âhealthy democratic debateâ
Algorithms and Complexity Results for Persuasive Argumentation
The study of arguments as abstract entities and their interaction as
introduced by Dung (Artificial Intelligence 177, 1995) has become one of the
most active research branches within Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning. A
main issue for abstract argumentation systems is the selection of acceptable
sets of arguments. Value-based argumentation, as introduced by Bench-Capon (J.
Logic Comput. 13, 2003), extends Dung's framework. It takes into account the
relative strength of arguments with respect to some ranking representing an
audience: an argument is subjectively accepted if it is accepted with respect
to some audience, it is objectively accepted if it is accepted with respect to
all audiences. Deciding whether an argument is subjectively or objectively
accepted, respectively, are computationally intractable problems. In fact, the
problems remain intractable under structural restrictions that render the main
computational problems for non-value-based argumentation systems tractable. In
this paper we identify nontrivial classes of value-based argumentation systems
for which the acceptance problems are polynomial-time tractable. The classes
are defined by means of structural restrictions in terms of the underlying
graphical structure of the value-based system. Furthermore we show that the
acceptance problems are intractable for two classes of value-based systems that
where conjectured to be tractable by Dunne (Artificial Intelligence 171, 2007)
Asymmetry of the Kolmogorov complexity of online predicting odd and even bits
Symmetry of information states that .
We show that a similar relation for online Kolmogorov complexity does not hold.
Let the even (online Kolmogorov) complexity of an n-bitstring
be the length of a shortest program that computes on input ,
computes on input , etc; and similar for odd complexity. We
show that for all n there exist an n-bit x such that both odd and even
complexity are almost as large as the Kolmogorov complexity of the whole
string. Moreover, flipping odd and even bits to obtain a sequence
, decreases the sum of odd and even complexity to .Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
A Theory of Formal Synthesis via Inductive Learning
Formal synthesis is the process of generating a program satisfying a
high-level formal specification. In recent times, effective formal synthesis
methods have been proposed based on the use of inductive learning. We refer to
this class of methods that learn programs from examples as formal inductive
synthesis. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for formal
inductive synthesis. We discuss how formal inductive synthesis differs from
traditional machine learning. We then describe oracle-guided inductive
synthesis (OGIS), a framework that captures a family of synthesizers that
operate by iteratively querying an oracle. An instance of OGIS that has had
much practical impact is counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS). We
present a theoretical characterization of CEGIS for learning any program that
computes a recursive language. In particular, we analyze the relative power of
CEGIS variants where the types of counterexamples generated by the oracle
varies. We also consider the impact of bounded versus unbounded memory
available to the learning algorithm. In the special case where the universe of
candidate programs is finite, we relate the speed of convergence to the notion
of teaching dimension studied in machine learning theory. Altogether, the
results of the paper take a first step towards a theoretical foundation for the
emerging field of formal inductive synthesis
- âŠ