Interactive infographics and news values

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Journalism [PUBLICATION DETAILS], copyright @ Taylor & Francis, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21670811.2013.841368.This study is concerned with the news values and working practices that inform the creation of interactive infographics in UK online news. The author draws upon organisational theory in journalism studies, and considers how conventional journalistic news values compare with best practice as espoused in different literatures within this field. A series of open-ended, depth interviews with visual news journalists from the UK national media were undertaken, along with a short-term observation case study at a national online news publisher. Journalistic and organisational norms are found to shape the selection, production, and treatment of interactive graphics, and a degree of variation is found to exist amongst practitioners as to definitions of quality in this field. Some news stories are considered to be better suited to rendering in interactive form than others. The availability of “big data” does not drive decision-making in itself, but some numbers are considered more newsworthy than others. Budgetary constraint drives practice and limits potential in this field. Risk aversion, embodied in various forms; from the use of templates, to a perceived need to avoid audience complaint, is found to dampen experimentation. Detailed audience research was found to inform the choice of methods used in data visualisation at one national news producer. This warrants further investigation as to how audiences engage with news interactives, and what the framing of news in certain (preferred) data visualisation formats means in terms of how news is understood

Engineering fundamentals of energy efficiency

Using energy more efficiently is essential if carbon emissions are to be reduced. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy efficiency improvements represent the largest and least costly savings in carbon emissions, even when compared with renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage. Yet, how should future priorities be directed? Should efforts be focused on light bulbs or diesel engines, insulating houses or improving coal-fired power stations? Previous attempts to assess energy efficiency options provide a useful snapshot for directing short-term responses, but are limited to only known technologies developed under current economic conditions. Tomorrow's economic drivers are not easy to forecast, and new technical solutions often present in a disruptive manner. Fortunately, the theoretical and practical efficiency limits do not vary with time, allowing the uncertainty of economic forecasts to be avoided and the potential of yet to be discovered efficient designs to be captured. This research aims to provide a rational basis for assessing all future developments in energy efficiency. The global fow of energy through technical devices is traced from fuels to final services, and presented as an energy map to convey visually the scale of energy use. An important distinction is made between conversion devices, which upgrade energy into more useable forms, and passive systems, from which energy is lost as low temperature heat, in exchange for final services. Theoretical efficiency limits are calculated for conversion devices using exergy analysis, and show a 89% potential reduction in energy use. Efforts should be focused on improving the efficiency of, in relative order: biomass burners, refrigeration systems, gas burners and petrol engines. For passive systems, practical utilisation limits are calculated based on engineering models, and demonstrate energy savings of 73% are achievable. Significant gains are found in technical solutions that increase the thermal insulation of building fabrics and reduce the mass of vehicles. The result of this work is a consistent basis for comparing efficiency options, that can enable future technical research and energy policy to be directed towards the actions that will make the most difference.The work was supported by the Overseas Research Scheme, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the C.T. Taylor Fund and the Clare Hall bursary scheme

Chern forms of singular metrics on vector bundles

We study singular hermitian metrics on holomorphic vector bundles, following Berndtsson-P{\u{a}}un. Previous work by Raufi has shown that for such metrics, it is in general not possible to define the curvature as a current with measure coefficients. In this paper we show that despite this, under appropriate codimension restrictions on the singular set of the metric, it is still possible to define Chern forms as closed currents of order 0 with locally finite mass, which represent the Chern classes of the vector bundle.Comment: 18

Adiabatic limits of eta and zeta functions of elliptic operators

We extend the calculus of adiabatic pseudo-differential operators to study the adiabatic limit behavior of the eta and zeta functions of a differential operator $\delta$, constructed from an elliptic family of operators indexed by $S^1$. We show that the regularized values ${\eta}(\delta_t,0)$ and $t{\zeta}(\delta_t,0)$ are smooth functions of $t$ at $t=0$, and we identify their values at $t=0$ with the holonomy of the determinant bundle, respectively with a residue trace. For invertible families of operators, the functions ${\eta}(\delta_t,s)$ and $t{\zeta}(\delta_t,s)$ are shown to extend smoothly to $t=0$ for all values of $s$. After normalizing with a Gamma factor, the zeta function satisfies in the adiabatic limit an identity reminiscent of the Riemann zeta function, while the eta function converges to the volume of the Bismut-Freed meromorphic family of connection 1-forms.Comment: 32 pages, final versio

Catastrophe Models for Cognitive Workload and Fatigue

We reconceptualised several problems concerning the measurement of cognitive workload – fixed versus variable limits on channel capacity, work volume versus time pressure, adaptive strategies, resources demanded by tasks when performed simultaneously, and unclear distinctions between workload and fatigue effects – as two cusp catastrophe models: buckling stress resulting from acute workload, and fatigue resulting from extended engagement. Experimental participants completed a task that was intensive on non-verbal episodic memory and had an automatically speeded component. For buckling stress, the epoch of maximum (speeded) performance was the asymmetry parameter; however, anxiety did not contribute to bifurcation as expected. For fatigue, the bifurcation factor was the total work accomplished, and arithmetic, a compensatory ability, was the asymmetry parameter; R2 for the cusp models outperformed the linear comparison models in both cases. A research programme is outlined that revolves around the two models with different types of task and resource configurations

Asymptotic expansions, LL-values and a new Quantum Modular Form

In 2010 Zagier introduced the notion of a quantum modular form. One of his first examples was the "strange" function $F(q)$ of Kontsevich. Here we produce a new example of a quantum modular form by making use of some of Ramanujan's mock theta functions. Using these functions and their transformation behaviour, we also compute asymptotic expansions similar to expansions of $F(q)$.Comment: 7 page