Don’t be stupid : The role of social media policies in journalistic boundary-setting

This document is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journalism Studies on 9 May 2018, available online via: https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1467782 Under embargo until 9 November 2019.Social media are now firmly embedded in professional newsrooms, and policies and guidance within these newsrooms have evolved to include social media activities. These policies articulate and expose the underlying assumptions of the role of these new media within the traditional boundaries of the newsroom. Through thematic analysis of the policies of 17 news organizations, this research identifies and explicates the ways in which professional news organizations have moved and reinforced the boundaries of newswork to both include social media, and to bring social media under its control—to the extent of requiring newsworkers to subsume their personal online identities under their professional ones. The research identifies a number of areas of further research, including analysis of compliance with these policies and resistance to them on the part of newsworkers.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Project accelerate: increasing STEM opportunities for underserved high school students

Project Accelerate is a NSF-funded project aimed at helping prepare underserved high school students for the AP Physics 1 exam. The students attend schools that do not offer AP Physics 1. All Project Accelerate students are enrolled in a scaffolded small private online course (SPOC) that takes them through the physics material in an interactive way. A significant fraction of the students, including all those in the Boston area, also attend weekly 2.5-hour sessions on campus to do hands-on lab activities and recitation exercises. These sessions are led by undergraduate students who have pedagogical training. Our data indicate that Project Accelerate participants do at least as well on the AP Physics exam as similar students who take an AP Physics 1 through a traditional classroom-based course. One of the main goals of Project Accelerate is to give underserved students access to a rigorous science course, helping these students to build a solid foundation for a possible undergraduate degree in STEM. We also present evidence that successfully completing Project Accelerate makes students more likely to pursue further opportunities in STEM.Published versio

Exploring Supermarket Loyalty Card Analysis to Identify Who Buys Fairtrade

The aim of this paper is to show how supermarket loyalty card data from a panel of over 1.7 million shoppers can be analysed to provide behavioural segmentation insights to profile the fairtrade shopper in order to enhance making targeted marketing decisions. The paper demonstrates the huge marketing potential that loyalty card based shopper segmentation can bring to objectively describe who buys fairtrade products, compared to profiling shoppers with claimed/reported behaviour dataset. A pairedsamples t-test is used to test the degree of appeal of fairtrade tea, coffee, chocolate, drinking chocolates, banana and sugar categories in Tesco to life-stage and lifestyle shopper segments in terms of their retail sales values over 104 weeks. The results show that analysing loyalty cards based on actual behaviour provides a more detailed picture of how specific fairtrade food product categories appeal to the various life-stage and lifestyle shopper segments

Friend, Foe or Frenemy? Traditional Journalism Actors' Changing Attitudes towards Peripheral Players and Their Innovations

This study synthesises two analytical frameworks - journalistic strangers and agents of media innovation - to examine how perceptions among newsworkers towards new entrants to their field shape the normalisation of innovations in a digital-first legacy news organisation over three years. Based on two rounds of interviews, it finds that peripheral players are gradually recognised for their contributions to journalism by traditional actors. Nonetheless, as barriers between the two groups lower, tensions involving dissonant professional perspectives, practices, and jurisdictions surface and are negotiated. The findings indicate a growing salience of hybrid roles in newsrooms that serve as linchpins to connect divergent professional fields, and more importantly, as bridges between tradition and innovation. Based on the increasing importance of collaboration and hybrid roles, this study makes a theoretical and practical contribution to research and media management by proposing that four forms of proximity - physical, temporal, professional, and control - are crucial in operationalising the impact that peripheral players have on innovation in news organisations

2014 Iowa Land Value Survey: Overview

This briefing paper includes background information on the Iowa land value survey, including historic information, an analysis of highest/lowest land values and changes from last year’s survey

Experimental Methodology for Determining Turbomachinery Blade Damping Using Magnetic Bearing Excitation and Non-Contacting Optical Measurements

Experiments to determine the effects of turbomachinery fan blade damping concepts such as passively shunted piezoelectric materials on blade response are ongoing at the NASA Glenn Research Center. A vertical rotor is suspended and excited with active magnetic bearings (AMBs) usually in a vacuum chamber to eliminate aerodynamic forces. Electromagnetic rotor excitation is superimposed onto rotor PD-controlled support and can be fixed to either a stationary or rotating frame of reference. The rotor speed is controlled with an air turbine system. Blade vibrations are measured using optical probes as part of a Non-Contacting Stress Measurement System (NSMS). Damping is calculated from these measurements. It can be difficult to get accurate damping measurements using this experimental setup and some of the details of how to obtain quality results are seemingly nontrivial. The intent of this paper is to present those details