Linking Local Weather To Climate Change: One Year Of Twitter In The US

There is a high level of scientific consensus on climate change. Nevertheless for climate change research to have any practical value, to develop public support for climate policies, the climate research results must find the way to general public. That is why it is important to understand how the public perception of climate change forms. During the last decades there have been a number of studies on the factors affecting the level of public concern on climate change. Two major groups of factors are hypothesized to have the biggest influence on the level of public concern on climate change: extreme weather events and the mass media topic coverage. Local studies confirm that the weather events experienced by people in certain locations might be related to climate change. In 1998 James Hansen hypothesized that two weather parameters\u27 variations, namely, temperature and precipitation, exceeding one standard deviation should be noticeable by people and result in increase of the level of public concern on the phenomena. Nevertheless no previous studies were able to test this hypothesis and demonstrate that people truly use the information about local weather to make assumptions about climate change. The other studies on public perception of climate change are generally based on the agenda-setting theory, stating that the level of public concern on the issue is a reflection of the extent and prominence of media coverage of the topic. The previous studies on how public perception of climate change forms are mainly based surveys, which is an active approach to collect social data. With the development of social media, however, a passive surveying of public perceptions on climate change has become possible. In this thesis the change in climate change microblogging intensity in Twitter was used as a proxy of change in the level of concern on the issue. The objectives of the study were to utilize the Twitter, a currently the most popular microblogging platform, as a source of public salience data to test if the changes in weather parameters and in media coverage result in changes of the level of public concern on climate change. For this purpose the multiple linear regression and multi-model inference statistical techniques were used on three geographical levels of data aggregation. The results clearly show that changes in weather parameters have significant effect on the level of public concern on climate change on the national, regional and local scales. The mass media topic coverage was also positively associated with the level of public concern on the national level. The study demonstrated that the social media data provides unprecedented opportunities for public opinion research

Physicists, stamp collectors, human mobility forecasters

One of the two reviewers studied in high school to be a physicist. In the end, he became something else, but he never lost his awe of physics. The other reviewer never intended to become a physicist, but he sometimes asks himself why he didn’t become one. Today, they are both sociologists who practice their science on an action theory basis and believe that regularities exist in the world of social actions which can be perceived, understood, explained – and even used for making predictions

How to reach out to more customers through Facebook: a case study for Captain's Shop

In the last 10 years internet usage has grown rapidly and people spend a considerable amount of time using search engines, reading newspapers, and connecting with friends and family online. The use of social media has increased considerably as well. Facebook, as the biggest social media network, has grown in the past six years to become a significant advertising channel for companies with over 750 million daily users. The purpose of this thesis is to help Captain’s Shop use the social network webpage Facebook to access more customers, both new and old. The study was executed during the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013. A qualitative re-search method was used including two interviews with employees of the company, in which the same questionnaire was used for both interviewees. In addition to interviews, literature related to the subject was used. This literature was written by experts in this field. The thesis was conducted as a case study of Captain’s Shop. As an employee of the company the author had access to all necessary internal information and benefited from informal discussions with other employees as well as personal experiences. The results of the case study affirmed the need to advertise more through Facebook and it is recommended that the company implements the advertisement campaign

American and Egyptian media coverage of the Camp David Peace Accords

This thesis is concerned with the way multi-national issues are dealt with by media. I illustrate this by the example of the media treatment of Mideast relations, concentrating on three newspapers: The Washington Post and The New York Times from the US, and Al Ahram from Egypt. The events central to the study lay within the Camp David Period of September 1977 to March 1979, with the signing of the Camp David Accords in September, 1978, and the Treaty in March, 1979 ("Camp David"). Because of the media coverage this is an ideal series of events to study methods of filtering information within newspapers. Since Camp David created as much interest in the Mideast as in the West, a comparison of different reports is fruitful. Within Chapter 5I utilise a content analytical method to discover what biases may have been present in the reporting of Camp David, widening this to deal with issues of journalism and the North/ South divide, and show that media is less an investigative tool and more an anchor for established views. A tentative conclusion is an identification of the lack of what are considered journalists' most valued qualities: objectivity and professionalism. I identify a misunderstanding in the lay-person's view of the media profession: as The Washington Post and The New York Times show, although articles may have attempted a balanced format, these media may not have been investigative internationally (though they were domestically). We have to be wary when extrapolating from only three newspapers to the wider world (though I studied other newspapers and media) but since these titles were chosen for their standing and influence, some wider conclusions may be drawn. The thesis indicates no single viewpoint of developed media; no "conspiracy" somehow politically to defraud or act directly for domestic interests. I seek a perspective on developed media in a simultaneous analysis of the Egyptian media and its milieu. What I contend is of interest is that forces acted on Al Ahram, The Washington Post and The New York Times which, though different in kind, were more similar in effect than heretofore argued. Western journalism I assess as operating within a narrower set of models than is frequently believed

A semantic memory bank assisted by an embodied conversational agents for mobile devices

Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that causes memory loss and interferes with intellectual abilities seriously. It has no current cure and therapeutic efficiency of current medication is limited. However, there is evidence that non-pharmacological treatments could be useful to stimulate cognitive abilities. In the last few year, several studies have focused on describing and under- standing how Virtual Coaches (VC) could be key drivers for health promotion in home care settings. The use of VC gains an augmented attention in the considerations of medical innovations. In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits semantic technologies and Embodied Conversational Agents to help patients training cognitive abilities using mobile devices. In this work, semantic technologies are used to provide knowledge about the memory of a specific person, who exploits the structured data stored in a linked data repository and take advantage of the flexibility provided by ontologies to define search domains and expand the agent’s capabilities. Our Memory Bank Embodied Conversational Agent (MBECA) is used to interact with the patient and ease the interaction with new devices. The framework is oriented to Alzheimer’s patients, caregivers, and therapists

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal