Seven characteristics defining online news formats:Towards a typology of online news and live blogs

Whilst live blogs have become an established part of the news media ecology, corresponding research is still in its infancy, especially that which examines the crucial question of sourcing practices. In this article we address some of the gaps in previous research by conducting a large comparative sourcing analysis of three UK news organisations - BBC News, the Guardian, and the Telegraph - that all regularly publish live blogs. We analyse sourcing practices across three different genres of live blogging and corresponding online news articles, through a comparative analysis of events broadly categorised as crisis, politics, and sport. Our findings suggest that there are some aspects of sourcing practices that are distinct to live blogs, such as directly embedding social media. However, when it comes to polyvocality (the diversity of who gets to speak), genre-specific journalism norms seem to account for more than the affordances of the platform itself and only in sport live blogs are demotic voices habitually included. Based on these findings we develop a typology of live blogging and online news articles, that documents the nuances in sourcing patterns across different news formats and genres, and provide a theoretical basis for future research in this field

Effective theory of the Delta(1232) in Compton scattering off the nucleon

We formulate a new power-counting scheme for a chiral effective field theory of nucleons, pions, and Deltas. This extends chiral perturbation theory into the Delta-resonance region. We calculate nucleon Compton scattering up to next-to-leading order in this theory. The resultant description of existing $\gamma$p cross section data is very good for photon energies up to about 300 MeV. We also find reasonable numbers for the spin-independent polarizabilities $\alpha_p$ and $\beta_p$.Comment: 29 pp, 9 figs. Minor revisions. To be published in PR

The Discursive Legitimation of Political Regimes: A Network Perspective

In this working paper, we treat legitimacy and legitimation as interactive, discursive and relational concepts: Legitimacy is socially constructed in the public spheres of (democratic) political regimes, that is, in discursive exchanges of political elites and citizens about the acceptability of these regimes. Legitimacy claims and assessments establish a link between regimes and their institutions on the one hand, and normative benchmarks on the other. Hence they may be examined with the help of discourse network analysis - a novel application of network analysis whose rationale and potential are illustrated on the basis of a corpus of legitimation statements gleaned from German and US quality newspapers. Our method enables us to discover and visualize the structures of legitimation discourses - prominent speaker types, privileged legitimation criteria and discourse coalitions - and to offer some conjectures on the link between discourses and the institutional arrangements of the German and US polities.Dieses Arbeitspapier behandelt Legitimität und Legitimation als interaktive, diskursive und relationale Konzepte: Legitimität wird in den Öffentlichkeiten (demokratischer) politischer Regimes, also in einem diskursiven Austausch von politischen Eliten und Bürgern über die Akzeptabilität politischer Herrschaft, sozial konstruiert. In Legitimitätsbehauptungen und -bewertungen wird eine Verbindung zwischen Regimes und ihren Institutionen auf der einen und normativen Kriterien auf der anderen Seite hergestellt. Diese können mit Hilfe der Diskursnetzwerkanalyse untersucht werden; Logik und Potential dieser neuen Anwendung der Netzwerkanalyse werden auf der Basis eines Korpus von Legitimationsstatements aus deutschen und US-amerikanischen Qualitätszeitungen illustriert. Unsere Methode erlaubt es, die Strukturen von Legitimationsdiskursen - etwa prominente Sprechertypen, privilegierte Legitimationskriterien und Diskurskoalitionen - aufzudecken und zu visualisieren; daraus lassen sich schließlich auch Erkenntnisse über die Verbindung zwischen Diskursen und politischen Institutionenarrangements in Deutschland und den USA ableiten

Glycine Inhibitory Dysfunction Turns Touch into Pain through PKCgamma Interneurons

Dynamic mechanical allodynia is a widespread and intractable symptom of neuropathic pain for which there is a lack of effective therapy. During tactile allodynia, activation of the sensory fibers which normally detect touch elicits pain. Here we provide a new behavioral investigation into the dynamic component of tactile allodynia that developed in rats after segmental removal of glycine inhibition. Using in vivo electrophysiological recordings, we show that in this condition innocuous mechanical stimuli could activate superficial dorsal horn nociceptive specific neurons. These neurons do not normally respond to touch. We anatomically show that the activation was mediated through a local circuit involving neurons expressing the gamma isoform of protein kinase C (PKCγ). Selective inhibition of PKCγ as well as selective blockade of glutamate NMDA receptors in the superficial dorsal horn prevented both activation of the circuit and allodynia. Thus, our data demonstrates that a normally inactive circuit in the dorsal horn can be recruited to convert touch into pain. It also provides evidence that glycine inhibitory dysfunction gates tactile input to nociceptive specific neurons through PKCγ-dependent activation of a local, excitatory, NMDA receptor-dependent, circuit. As a consequence of these findings, we suggest that pharmacological inhibition of PKCγ might provide a new tool for alleviating allodynia in the clinical setting

Sensitivity projections for a dual-phase argon TPC optimized for light dark matter searches through the ionization channel

Dark matter lighter than 10  GeV/c2 encompasses a promising range of candidates. A conceptual design for a new detector, DarkSide-LowMass, is presented, based on the DarkSide-50 detector and progress toward DarkSide-20k, optimized for a low-threshold electron-counting measurement. Sensitivity to light dark matter is explored for various potential energy thresholds and background rates. These studies show that DarkSide-LowMass can achieve sensitivity to light dark matter down to the solar neutrino fog for GeV-scale masses and significant sensitivity down to 10  MeV/c2 considering the Migdal effect or interactions with electrons. Requirements for optimizing the detector’s sensitivity are explored, as are potential sensitivity gains from modeling and mitigating spurious electron backgrounds that may dominate the signal at the lowest energies

Sensitivity projections for a dual-phase argon TPC optimized for light dark matter searches through the ionization channel

Dark matter lighter than 10 GeV/c$^2$ encompasses a promising range of candidates. A conceptual design for a new detector, DarkSide-LowMass, is presented, based on the DarkSide-50 detector and progress toward DarkSide-20k, optimized for a low-threshold electron-counting measurement. Sensitivity to light dark matter is explored for various potential energy thresholds and background rates. These studies show that DarkSide-LowMass can achieve sensitivity to light dark matter down to the solar neutrino floor for GeV-scale masses and significant sensitivity down to 10 MeV/c$^2$ considering the Migdal effect or interactions with electrons. Requirements for optimizing the detector's sensitivity are explored, as are potential sensitivity gains from modeling and mitigating spurious electron backgrounds that may dominate the signal at the lowest energies

The societal context of professional practice: Examining the impact of politics and economics on journalistic role performance across 37 countries

The impact of socio-political variables on journalism is an ongoing concern of comparative research on media systems and professional cultures. However, they have rarely been studied systematically across diverse cases, particularly outside Western democracies, and existing studies that compare western and non-western contexts have mainly focused on journalistic role conceptions rather than actual journalistic practice. Using journalistic role performance as a theoretical and methodological framework, this paper overcomes these shortcomings through a content analysis of 148,474 news stories from 365 print, online, TV, and radio outlets in 37 countries. We consider two fundamental system-level variables—liberal democracy and market orientation—testing a series of hypotheses concerning their influence on the interventionist, watchdog, loyal-facilitator, service, infotainment, and civic roles in the news globally. Findings confirm the widely asserted hypothesis that liberal democracy is associated with the performance of public-service oriented roles. Claims that market orientation reinforces critical and civic-oriented journalism show more mixed results and give some support to the argument that there are forms of “market authoritarianism” associated with loyalist journalism. The findings also show that the interventionist and infotainment roles are not significantly associated with the standard measures of political and economic structure, suggesting the need for more research on their varying forms across societies and the kinds of system-level factors that might explain them