141,016 research outputs found
Cities and climate change: Strategic options for philanthropic support
Now, more than ever, cities are at the front lines of U.S. climate action. As national action stalls,
there is still a daunting amount to be done in reducing human-generated climate emissions.
Fortunately, this report comes in the wake of a groundswell of initiatives to engage on climate
change by cities, countries, and states across the U.S. Several important and thorough reports
on the types of mitigation actions cities can take have recently been released. We already have
examples of cities taking significant leadership roles in reducing their own climate emissions,
from New York and Boston to Austin, Boulder, and Los Angeles - yet U.S. climate emissions
continue to rise, and cities have an outsized role to play.
The purpose of this project is to review current U.S. city climate activities in order to identify
areas where additional investment by foundations could help accelerate city action to reduce
urban greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of the inquiry is on aggressive actions cities can take
that significantly increase their âlevel of ambitionâ to achieve emissions reductions on an
accelerated timetable. City strategies on climate adaptation are not encompassed in this
project. [TRUNCATED
Why ownership pluralism still matters in a multi-platform world
This chapter examines the effects of changing technology on landscapes of media provision and consumption and considers whether the greater choice made possible by digital technology and changing patterns of consumption obviate the need for special interventions to restrict media ownership for the sake of pluralism. News Corporation's bid for BSkyB in 2011 clearly exemplified how, not least in times of technological change, patterns of ownership are shaped by economic and strategic factors. Digitisation has encouraged greater cross-sectoral convergence providing an extra spur towards strategies of diversification and multi-platform expansion in the media industry. Even so, and despite the transition to a more web-connected era, as this chapter argues there remain good grounds for concerns about the power wielded by dominant media organisations in relation to production and circulation of news, ideas and cultural and political values within contemporary societies
Traveling Trends: Social Butterflies or Frequent Fliers?
Trending topics are the online conversations that grab collective attention
on social media. They are continually changing and often reflect exogenous
events that happen in the real world. Trends are localized in space and time as
they are driven by activity in specific geographic areas that act as sources of
traffic and information flow. Taken independently, trends and geography have
been discussed in recent literature on online social media; although, so far,
little has been done to characterize the relation between trends and geography.
Here we investigate more than eleven thousand topics that trended on Twitter in
63 main US locations during a period of 50 days in 2013. This data allows us to
study the origins and pathways of trends, how they compete for popularity at
the local level to emerge as winners at the country level, and what dynamics
underlie their production and consumption in different geographic areas. We
identify two main classes of trending topics: those that surface locally,
coinciding with three different geographic clusters (East coast, Midwest and
Southwest); and those that emerge globally from several metropolitan areas,
coinciding with the major air traffic hubs of the country. These hubs act as
trendsetters, generating topics that eventually trend at the country level, and
driving the conversation across the country. This poses an intriguing
conjecture, drawing a parallel between the spread of information and diseases:
Do trends travel faster by airplane than over the Internet?Comment: Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks,
pp. 213-222, 201
Analyzing the Digital Traces of Political Manipulation: The 2016 Russian Interference Twitter Campaign
Until recently, social media was seen to promote democratic discourse on
social and political issues. However, this powerful communication platform has
come under scrutiny for allowing hostile actors to exploit online discussions
in an attempt to manipulate public opinion. A case in point is the ongoing U.S.
Congress' investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election
campaign, with Russia accused of using trolls (malicious accounts created to
manipulate) and bots to spread misinformation and politically biased
information. In this study, we explore the effects of this manipulation
campaign, taking a closer look at users who re-shared the posts produced on
Twitter by the Russian troll accounts publicly disclosed by U.S. Congress
investigation. We collected a dataset with over 43 million election-related
posts shared on Twitter between September 16 and October 21, 2016, by about 5.7
million distinct users. This dataset included accounts associated with the
identified Russian trolls. We use label propagation to infer the ideology of
all users based on the news sources they shared. This method enables us to
classify a large number of users as liberal or conservative with precision and
recall above 90%. Conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times more
often than liberals and produced 36x more tweets. Additionally, most retweets
of troll content originated from two Southern states: Tennessee and Texas.
Using state-of-the-art bot detection techniques, we estimated that about 4.9%
and 6.2% of liberal and conservative users respectively were bots. Text
analysis on the content shared by trolls reveals that they had a mostly
conservative, pro-Trump agenda. Although an ideologically broad swath of
Twitter users was exposed to Russian Trolls in the period leading up to the
2016 U.S. Presidential election, it was mainly conservatives who helped amplify
their message
Achieving Very High PV Penetration
This article argues that optimally deployed intermittency solutions could affordably transform solar power generation into the firm power delivery system modern economies require, thereby enabling very high solar penetration and the displacement conventional power generation. The optimal deployment of these highâpenetration enabling solutions imply the existence of a healthy power grid, and therefore imply a central role for utilities and grid operators. This article also argues that a valueâbased electricity compensation mechanism, recognizing the multifaceted, penetrationâdependent value and cost of solar energy, and capable of shaping consumption patterns to optimally match resource and demand, would be an effective vehicle to enable high solar penetration and deliver affordable firm power generation
News media use, talk networks, and anti-elitism across geographic location: evidence from Wisconsin
A certain social-political geography recurs across European and North American societies: As post-industrialization and mechanization of agriculture have disrupted economies, rural and nonmetropolitan areas are aging and declining in population, leading to widening political and cultural gaps between metropolitan and rural communities. Yet political communication research tends to focus on national or cross-national levels, often emphasizing networked digital media and an implicitly global information order. We contend that geographic place still provides a powerful grounding for individualsâ lifeworld experiences, identities, and orientations to political communications and politics. Focusing on the U.S. state of Wisconsin, and presenting data gathered in 2018, this study demonstrates significant, though often small, differences between geographic locations in terms of their patterns of media consumption, political talk, and anti-elite attitudes. Importantly, television news continues to play a major role in citizensâ repertoires across locations, suggesting we must continue to pay attention to this broadcast medium. Residents of more metropolitan communities consume significantly more national and international news from prestige sources such as the New York Times, and their talk networks are more cleanly sorted by partisanship. Running against common stereotypes of news media use, residents of small towns and rural areas consume no more conservative media than other citizens, even without controlling for partisanship. Our theoretical model and empirical results call for further attention to the intersections of place and politics in understanding news consumption behaviors and the meanings citizens draw from media content
- âŚ