Challenges to Political Campaigns in the Media: Commercialization, Framing, and Personalization

Due to an increasing interdependence between mass communication and political processes, the role of media in political campaigns generated much debate.In this paper, we identify commercialization, framing and personalization as three key challenges to the way the media face political campaigns. We theoretically derive three hypotheses, one for each of those challenges. Based on data from expert interviews as well as from a content analysis, the validity of each hypothesis is surveyed. The results do not confi rm an assumed lack of providing campaign relevant news in the media coverage as proposed by considering the media as purely commercially driven organizations. Further they demonstrate the use of different frames for the presentation of competing positions in a political debate. Finally, personalization appears as an important strategy of news selection, focusing on a small number of prominent actors

I/O-efficient dynamic point location in monotone planar subdivisions

We present an efficient external-memory dynamic data structure for point location in monotone planar subdivisions. Our data structure uses O(N/B) disk blocks to store a monotone subdivision of size N, where B is the size of a disk block. It supports queries in O(logi N) I/OS (worst-case) and updates in O(lo& N) I/OS (amortized). We also propose a new variant of B-trees, called leuelbalanced B-trees, which allow insert, delete, merge, and split operations in O((l+ $logM,B f) log, N) I/OS (amortized), 2 5 b 2 B/2, even if each node stores a pointer to its parent. Here M is the size of main memory. Besides being essential to our point-location data structure, we believe that level-balanced B-trees are of significant independent interest. They can, for example, be used to dynamically maintain a planar St-graph using O((1 +$10g~,~ $$) log, N) = O(logi N) I/OS (amortized) per update, so that reachability queries can be answered in O(log, N) I/OS (worst case)

Discordant Supramolecular Fibres Reversibly Depolymerised by Temperature and Light

Synthetic stimuli responsive supramolecular polymers attract increasing interest for their ability to mimic the unique properties of natural assemblies. Here we focus on the well-studied benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxamide (BTA) motif, and substitute it with two (S)-3,7-dimethyloctyl groups and an azobenzene photoswitch. We demonstrate the UV (λ=365 nm) induced depolymerisation of the helical hydrogen-bonded polymers in methylcyclohexane (MCH) through circular dichroism and UV-vis spectroscopy in dilute solution (15 μm), and NMR and iPAINT super-resolution microscopy in concentrated solution (300 μm). The superstructure can be regenerated after thermal depolymerization, whilst repeated depolymerisation can be reversed without degradation by irradiating at λ=455 nm. Molecular dynamics simulations show that the most energetically favourable configuration for these polymers in MCH is a left-handed helical network of hydrogen-bonds between the BTA cores surrounded by two right-handed helices of azobenzenes. The responsiveness to two orthogonal triggers across a broad concentration range holds promise for use in, for example, photo-responsive gelation

A three-year longitudinal study of retinal function and structure in patients with multiple sclerosis

BACKGROUND Researchers have in recent years begun to investigate ophthalmological manifestations of multiple sclerosis (MS) other than optic neuritis (ON), and it is now clear that changes to retinal function (measured using the electroretinogram, ERG) and structure (measured using optical coherence tomography, OCT) are found in MS patients irrespective of prior ON episodes. ERG results are consistent with dysfunctional bipolar cells, as in other autoimmune diseases. To date, studies have presented only cross-sectional data regarding ERG and OCT. We, therefore, studied the longitudinal course of ERG and OCT in patients with MS, as well as the effect of disability changes and non-ON clinical relapses on these functional and structural measures. METHODS MS patients (n = 23) participating in an ongoing longitudinal observational study were invited to take part in a 3-year ophthalmological substudy. ERG and OCT were performed, and measures of MS-related disability and relapse history were obtained. Study visits were repeated annually. ERG peak times, rod b-wave amplitude, mixed rod/cone and cone b-/a-wave amplitude ratios, thickness of the peripapillary retinal nerve fibre layer, and volumes of the segmented retinal layers/complexes were analysed. Using generalised estimating equation models adjusted for age, ON, and MS treatment status, we assessed changes to ERG and OCT over the study duration, the effect of changes in disability and recent non-ON MS relapses on ERG and OCT, and the effect of selected OCT parameters on corresponding ERG parameters. RESULTS At the group level, small fluctuations of several ERG peak times were recorded, with OCT values remaining stable. Increased disability between visits was associated with significant prolongation of mixed rod-cone ERG b-wave peak times. No evidence of associations between OCT and ERG parameters was observed. CONCLUSIONS Retinal bipolar cell function may be affected by changes in disability in patients with MS; however, recent non-ON MS clinical relapses appear not to affect ERG or OCT results. As ERG changes in MS patients over 3 years are likely to be small and of uncertain clinical relevance, longitudinal studies of retinal function in MS should be planned over an extended period

Geometric representations for minimalist grammars

We reformulate minimalist grammars as partial functions on term algebras for strings and trees. Using filler/role bindings and tensor product representations, we construct homomorphisms for these data structures into geometric vector spaces. We prove that the structure-building functions as well as simple processors for minimalist languages can be realized by piecewise linear operators in representation space. We also propose harmony, i.e. the distance of an intermediate processing step from the final well-formed state in representation space, as a measure of processing complexity. Finally, we illustrate our findings by means of two particular arithmetic and fractal representations.Comment: 43 pages, 4 figure

SAT-based Explicit LTL Reasoning

We present here a new explicit reasoning framework for linear temporal logic (LTL), which is built on top of propositional satisfiability (SAT) solving. As a proof-of-concept of this framework, we describe a new LTL satisfiability tool, Aalta\_v2.0, which is built on top of the MiniSAT SAT solver. We test the effectiveness of this approach by demonnstrating that Aalta\_v2.0 significantly outperforms all existing LTL satisfiability solvers. Furthermore, we show that the framework can be extended from propositional LTL to assertional LTL (where we allow theory atoms), by replacing MiniSAT with the Z3 SMT solver, and demonstrating that this can yield an exponential improvement in performance

Automated Security Analysis of IoT Software Updates

IoT devices often operate unsupervised in ever-changing environments for several years. Therefore, they need to be updated on a regular basis. Current approaches for software updates on IoT, like the recent SUIT proposal, focus on granting integrity and confidentiality but do not analyze the content of the software update, especially the IoT application which is deployed to IoT devices. To this aim, in this paper, we present IoTAV, an automated software analysis framework for systematically verifying the security of the applications contained in software updates w.r.t. a given security policy. Our proposal can be adopted transparently by current IoT software updates workflows. We prove the viability of IoTAV by testing our methodology on a set of actual RIOT OS applications. Experimental results indicate that the approach is viable in terms of both reliability and performance, leading to the identification of 26 security policy violations in 31 real-world RIOT applications