Internet Memes as Instruments of Subversion in the Context of Islam and Muslims

This research investigates the nature of internet memes as instruments of subversion in the context of Islam and Muslims. For the purpose of this research, internet memes including Twitter hashtags have been conceived as idea units. The study employed network analysis to examine roughly 208,000 Twitter hashtags related to Islam and Muslims. Based on this data, actor and hashtag networks were created in order to understand the relationship between leading actors, co- occurring hashtags, dominant discursive practices, and their subversion. Thematic analysis of internet memes was also undertaken in order to study the visual and textual elements in the larger context in which the memes were set. Two major themes emerged: ‘Everyday life and Lived Religion’, and ‘Terrorism, Security and Surveillance’. The study provides evidence of agency of individuals to create fissures in the institutional narratives by reappropriating and subverting the popular symbols originally created by social structures as well as creating their own set of language which is unique to the format of internet memes. The findings derived from the network analysis as well as the thematic analysis also demonstrated the relevance of Richard Dawkins’s (1976) gene-meme analogy

An Analytic Model for left invertible Weighted Translation Semigroups

M. Embry and A. Lambert initiated the study of a semigroup of operators $\{S_t\}$ indexed by a non-negative real number $t$ and termed it as weighted translation semigroup. The operators $S_t$ are defined on $L^2(\mathbb R_+)$ by using a weight function. The operator $S_t$ can be thought of as a continuous analogue of a weighted shift operator. In this paper, we show that every left invertible operator $S_t$ can be modeled as a multiplication by $z$ on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space $\cal H$ of vector-valued analytic functions on a certain disc centered at the origin and the reproducing kernel associated with $\cal H$ is a diagonal operator. As it turns out that every hyperexpansive weighted translation semigroup is left invertile, the model applies to these semigroups. We also describe the spectral picture for the left invertible weighted translation semigroup. In the process, we point out the similarities and differences between a weighted shift operator and an operator $S_t.$Comment: 14 page

Measuring consensus as the midpoint of the central tendency

Federal Open Market Committee ; Forecasting

FOMC consensus forecasts

In November 2007, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announced a change in the way it communicates its view of the economic outlook: It increased the frequency of its forecasts from two to four times per year, and it increased the length of the forecasting horizon from two to three years. The FOMC does not release the individual members' forecasts or standard measures of consensus such as the mean or median. Rather, it continues to release the forecast information as a range of forecasts, both the full range between the high and the low and a central tendency that omits the extreme values. This paper uses individual forecaster data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) to mimic the FOMC's method for creating their central tendency. The authors show that the midpoint of the central tendency of the SPF is a reliable measure of the consensus, suggesting that the FOMC reporting method is also a reliable measure of consensus. For the dates when both are available, the authors also compare the relative forecast accuracy of the FOMC and SPF consensus forecasts for output growth and inflation. Overall, the differences in forecast accuracy are too small to be statistically significant.Federal Open Market Committee ; Monetary policy