Condensational symbols in British press coverage of Boko Haram

This study of British press coverage of Boko Haram, a militant group in Nigeria, concentrates on condensational symbols in news reports of one of its major acts of terrorism, the bombing of the United Nations House in Abuja, the country’s capital city, in August 2011. The study examines the visibility of Boko Haram in British newspapers before and after the attack. It identifies the condensational symbols that dominated the coverage and how these provided a particular trajectory that could have shaped newspaper readers’ understanding of the event. The study argues that the symbolic terms that journalists used in their reports were not only easily identifiable but were specifically chosen to simplify a complex story for audiences that were perhaps uninformed about the group and its activities. The terms also reflect the repertoire of news frames that journalists mine to reconstruct reality for their audiences

A Strategic Orientation Model for the Turkish Local e-Governments

Increased environmental uncertainty and complexity along with budget constraints requires public organizations to manage strategically as never before. The environments of public organizations have become increasingly turbulent and more firmly interconnected. During the past two decades, governments have innovated new management tools such as strategic planning, outsourcing, and performance measurement to deal with complex governance and networks to provide their public services. Meanwhile, the drive to implement e-government has resulted in the formulation of many e-government visions and strategies, driven by their own sets of political, economic, and social factors and requirements. With this regard, recent developments in e-service provision of Turkish Local e-Governments deserve empirical and well-structured research. Building on the recent literature, this study draws a strategic orientation framework and tests it by analyzing the contents of strategic documents of 114 Turkish Local e-Governments

Global climate analysis of growth rings in woods, and its implications for deep time paleoclimate studies

We outline a plausible evolutionary sequence that led from prokaryotes to the origin of the first nucleated cell. The nucleus is postulated to evolve after the archaebacterium and eubacterium merged to form the symbiotic ancestor of amitochondriate protists. Descendants of these amitochondriate cells (archaeprotists) today thrive in organic-rich anoxic habitats where they are amenable to study. Eukaryosis, the origin of nucleated cells, occurred by the middle Proterozoic Eon prior to the deposition in sediments of well-preserved microfossils such as Vandalosphaeridium and the spiny spheres in the Doushantou cherts of China