Commercialisation and Programming Strategies of European Public Television. A Comparative Study of Purpose, Genres and Diversity.

The increase of competition in the European television market has raised concern about commercialisation of public broadcasting. European public television struggles to survive, adapting to a competitive environment and maintaining the principle of public service. Some public broadcasters -it is argued-, have been forced to follow a strategy of convergence of their programming with that of their commercial competitors. In other cases, public televisions have maintained a highly distinctive programming, with more “serious” content, including political issues. This paper presents the main results of a study on prime-time programming of European public and commercial broadcasters, which has been carried out in 14 countries of the European Union, in 2003 and 2004. The main results indicate that European public television has reached a significant level of commercialisation, although there are still some differences with private programming, since public broadcasting is more oriented to information and maintains a higher level of diversity

Science related information in European television: a study of prime-time news

According to the few studies carried out on this subject, in spite of its importance and interest for the audience, science has been a marginal topic in television news, and has presented several problems of quality. This article presents the main results of a comparative research on science in European television, focusing on the main prime-time news programs of the leading public and the leading commercial channel, in the five largest countries. A sample of two weeks (2676 stories) was analyzed, with an outcome of 218 science related stories, which were coded (topic, length, explicit news values, contextual information and scientific explanation). Results indicate that the number and airtime of science related stories have increased, compared to a decade ago, but still do not seem to match the interest that citizens declare to have in science. The quality of the information broadcast seems relatively acceptable, although it still needs to be improved in some aspects, for which new formats of news programs would be helpful

Quantitative chemical tagging, stellar ages and the chemo-dynamical evolution of the Galactic disc

The early science results from the new generation of high-resolution stellar spectroscopic surveys, such as GALAH and the Gaia-ESO survey, will represent major milestones in the quest to chemically tag the Galaxy. Yet this technique to reconstruct dispersed coeval stellar groups has remained largely untested until recently. We build on previous work that developed an empirical chemical tagging probability function, which describes the likelihood that two field stars are conatal, that is, they were formed in the same cluster environment. In this work we perform the first ever blind chemical tagging experiment, i.e., tagging stars with no known or otherwise discernable associations, on a sample of 714 disc field stars with a number of high quality high resolution homogeneous metal abundance measurements. We present evidence that chemical tagging of field stars does identify coeval groups of stars, yet these groups may not represent distinct formation sites, e.g. as in dissolved open clusters, as previously thought. Our results point to several important conclusions, among them that group finding will be limited strictly to chemical abundance space, e.g. stellar ages, kinematics, colors, temperature and surface gravity do not enhance the detectability of groups. We also demonstrate that in addition to its role in probing the chemical enrichment and kinematic history of the Galactic disc, chemical tagging represents a powerful new stellar age determination technique.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS

The Parent Populations of 6 groups identified from Chemical Tagging in the Solar neighborhood

We estimate the size and distribution of the parent populations for the 6 largest (at least 20 stars in the Solar neighborhood) chemical groups identified in the Chemical Tagging experiment by Mitschang et al.~2014. Stars in the abundance groups tend to lie near a boundary in angular momentum versus eccentricity space where the probability is highest for a star to be found in the Solar neighborhood and where orbits have apocenter approximately equal to the Sun's galactocentric radius. Assuming that the parent populations are uniformly distributed at all azimuthal angles in the Galaxy, we estimate that the parent populations of these abundance groups contain at least 200,000 members. The spread in angular momentum of the groups implies that the assumption of a uniform azimuthal distribution only fails for the two youngest groups and only for the highest angular momentum stars in them. The parent populations of three thin disk groups have narrow angular momentum distributions, but tails in the eccentricity and angular momentum distributions suggest that only a small fraction of stars have migrated and increased in eccentricity. In contrast, the parent populations of the thick disk groups exhibit both wide angular momentum and eccentricity distributions implying that both heating and radial migration has taken place.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRA

La visión de los productores sobre la televisión interactiva: el final de la utopía

La televisión interactiva (TVI) ha experimentado un amplio desarrollo aunque sin llegar a alcanzar la implantación masiva. Este artículo analiza los criterios que los productores de TVI están adoptando para conseguir que los nuevos programas satisfagan las expectativas de la audiencia y aprovechen al máximo las posibilidades del medio. En primer lugar, se identifican los temas esenciales que afectan a la producción de TVI y se formulan las hipótesis de la investigación, relacionadas con la selección de los contenidos, los estudios de mercado, el uso de la interactividad y los modelos de negocio. Se realizó una encuesta entre productores de empresas de TVI europeas y norteamericanas, con objeto de recabar sus opiniones al respecto. La mayoría de los productores considera que el modelo de TVI actual necesita un sólido modelo de negocio, incorporar los avances tecnológicos y potenciar las aplicaciones interactivas más demandadas por los usuarios. Los resultados indican que la industria de la TVI está dispuesta a abandonar la utopía del pasado y evolucionar hacia posiciones más pragmáticas y realistas

Commercialisation and programming strategies of european public television. A comparative study of purpose, genres and diversity

The increase of competition in the European television market has raised concern about commercialisation of public broadcasting. European public television struggles to survive, adapting to a competitive environment and maintaining the principle of public service. Some public broadcasters -it is argued-, have been forced to follow a strategy of convergence of their programming with that of their commercial competitors. In other cases, public televisions have maintained a highly distinctive programming, with more “serious” content, including political issues. This paper presents the main results of a study on prime-time programming of European public and commercial broadcasters, which has been carried out in 14 countries of the European Union, in 2003 and 2004. The main results indicate that European public television has reached a significant level of commercialisation, although there are still some differences with private programming, since public broadcasting is more oriented to information and maintains a higher level of diversit

La ciencia en imágenes. Construcción visual y documental científico

En un contexto de creciente importancia del entretenimiento, el documental televisivo de contenido científico ha ido adoptando nuevas formas narrativas y visuales. A lo largo de la historia del cine, la captación de imagen real ha ido haciéndose cada vez más sofisticada, gracias al desarrollo de las tecnologías que han ido mejorando las posibilidades de contar la ciencia con recursos visuales interesantes. Más recientemente, los medios digitales han situado al documental científico en una nueva dimensión, gracias a las imágenes generadas por ordenador. Sin embargo, tanto la imagen real como la de síntesis, plantean dificultades como medios de representación de la ciencia, ya que su utilización puede terminar mermando el rigor científico del enunciado y deslegitimándolo como referente de la realidad

Pro-science, anti-science and neutral science in online videos on climate change, vaccines and nanotechnology

Online video has become a relevant tool to disseminate scientific information to the public. However, in this arena, science coexists with non-scientific or pseudoscientific beliefs that can influence people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Our research sets out to find empirical evidence of the representation of pro-science, anti-science and neutral stances in online videos. From a search on Google videos, we conducted content analysis of a sample of videos about climate change, vaccines and nanotechnology (n = 826). Results indicate that a search through Google videos provides a relatively small representation of videos with an anti-science stance, which can be regarded as positive, given the high potential influence of this search engine in spreading scientific information among the public. Our research also provides empirical evidence of the fact that an anti-science stance is more frequent in user-generated content than in videos disseminated by other types of producers

The age-metallicity relation from a sample of white dwarf-main sequence binarie

The age-metallicity relation (AMR) is a fundamental observational constraint for un-derstanding how the Galactic disc formed and evolved chemically in time. However, there is not yet an agreement on the observational properties of the AMR, primarily due to the difficulty inobtaining accurate ages for individual field stars. We have started an observational campaign for providing new observational input by using wide white dwarf-main sequence (WDMS) binaries.WDs are natural clocks and can be used to derive accurate ages. Metallicities can be obtained from the MS companions. Since the progenitors of WDs and the MS stars were born at the sametime, WDMS provide a unique opportunity to constrain in a robust way the properties of the AMR. We present the AMR derived from analysing a pilot sample of 23 WDMS and provide clear evidence for the lack of correlation between age and metallicity at young and intermediate ages.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version