Are you talking to me? An analysis of journalism conversation on social media

Social media has become a key medium for discussion and dissemination of news stories, fuelled by the low barrier to entry and the ease of interaction. News stories may be propagated through these networks either by official news organisation accounts, by individual journalists or by members of the public, through link sharing, endorsing or commenting. This preliminary research aims to show how computational analysis of large-scale data-sets allows us to investigate the means by which news stories are spread through social media, and how the conversation around them is shaped by journalists and news organisations. Through the capture of more than 11 million tweets relating to 2303 Twitter accounts connected to journalism and news organisations, we are able to analyse the conversation within and around journalism, examining who spreads information about news articles and who interacts in the discussion around them. Capturing the tweets of news organisations and journalists and the replies and retweets of these micro-blogs allows us to build a rich picture of interaction around news media

Hybrid solid state qubits: the powerful role of electron spins

We review progress on the use of electron spins to store and process quantum information, with particular focus on the ability of the electron spin to interact with multiple quantum degrees of freedom. We examine the benefits of hybrid quantum bits (qubits) in the solid state that are based on coupling electron spins to nuclear spin, electron charge, optical photons, and superconducting qubits. These benefits include the coherent storage of qubits for times exceeding seconds, fast qubit manipulation, single qubit measurement, and scalable methods for entangling spatially separated matter-based qubits. In this way, the key strengths of different physical qubit implementations are brought together, laying the foundation for practical solid-state quantum technologies.Comment: 54 pages, 7 figure

Experiences of cervical screening and barriers to participation in the context of an organised programme: a systematic review and thematic synthesis

OBJECTIVE: As uptake of cervical screening continues to decline, this systematic review synthesises the qualitative literature on women's perceptions and experiences of cervical screening in the context of an organised call-recall programme, in order to understand the barriers to informed uptake. METHODS: We searched nine databases for English language peer-reviewed publications reporting on qualitative data from screening-eligible women, exploring barriers to cervical screening in countries that offer a nationally organised call-recall programme. Evidence was integrated using thematic synthesis. RESULTS: Thirty-nine papers from the UK, Australia, Sweden and Korea were included. The majority of participants had attended screening at least once. Two broad themes were identified: (a) should I go for screening? and (b) screening is a big deal. In considering whether to attend, women discussed the personal relevance and value of screening. Women who had previously attended described how it was a big deal, physically and emotionally, and the varied threats that screening presents. Practical barriers affected whether women translated screening intentions into action. CONCLUSIONS: The variation in women's understanding and perceptions of cervical screening suggests that interventions tailored to decisional stage may be of value in increasing engagement with the invitation and uptake of screening in those who wish to take part. There is also a need for further research with women who have never attended screening, especially those who remain unaware or unengaged, as their perspectives are lacking in the existing literature. © 2016 The Authors. Psycho-Oncology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Birds of a feather locate together? Foursquare checkins and personality homophily

In this paper we consider whether people with similar personality traits have a preference for common locations. Due to the difficulty in tracking and categorising the places that individuals choose to visit, this is largely unexplored. However, the recent popularity of location-based social networks (LBSNs) provides a means to gain new insight into this question through checkins - records that are made by LBSN users of their presence at specific street level locations. A web-based participatory survey was used to collect the personality traits and checkin behaviour of 174 anonymous users, who, through their common check-ins, formed a network with 5373 edges and an approximate edge density of 35%. We assess the degree of overlap in personality traits for users visiting common locations, as detected by user checkins. We find that people with similar high levels of conscientiousness, openness or agreeableness tended to have checked-in locations in common. The findings for extraverts were unexpected in that they did not provide evidence of individuals assorting at the same locations, contrary to predictions. Individuals high in neuroticism were in line with expectations, they did not tend to have locations in common. Unanticipated results concerning disagreeableness are of particular interest and suggest that different venue types and distinctive characteristics may act as attractors for people with particularly selective tendencies. These findings have important implications for decision-making and location

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

Transport spectroscopy of an impurity spin in a carbon nanotube double quantum dot.

We make use of spin selection rules to investigate the electron spin system of a carbon nanotube double quantum dot. Measurements of the electron transport as a function of the magnetic field and energy detuning between the quantum dots reveal an intricate pattern of the spin state evolution. We demonstrate that the complete set of measurements can be understood by taking into account the interplay between spin-orbit interaction and a single impurity spin coupled to the double dot. The detection and tunability of this coupling are important for quantum manipulation in carbon nanotubes

Personality and location-based social networks

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) are a recent phenomenon for sharing a presence at everyday locations with others and have the potential to give new insights into human behaviour. To date, due to barriers in data collection, there has been little research into how our personality relates to the categories of place that we visit. Using the Foursquare LBSN, we have released a web-based participatory application that examines the personality characteristics and checkin behaviour of volunteer Foursquare users. Over a four-month period, we examine the behaviour and the “Big Five” personality traits of 174 anonymous users who had collectively checked in 487,396 times at 119,746 venues. Significant correlations are found for Conscientiousness, Openness and Neuroticism. In contrast to some previous findings about online social networks, Conscientiousness is positively correlated with LBSN usage. Openness correlates mainly with location-based variables (average distance between venues visited, venue popularity, number of checkins at sociable venues). For Neuroticism, further negative correlations are found (number of venues visited, number of sociable venues visited). No correlations are found for the other personality traits, which is surprising for Extroversion. The study concludes that personality traits help to explain individual differences in LBSN usage and the type of places visited

Desynchronization and Wave Pattern Formation in MPI-Parallel and Hybrid Memory-Bound Programs

Analytic, first-principles performance modeling of distributed-memory parallel codes is notoriously imprecise. Even for applications with extremely regular and homogeneous compute-communicate phases, simply adding communication time to computation time does often not yield a satisfactory prediction of parallel runtime due to deviations from the expected simple lockstep pattern caused by system noise, variations in communication time, and inherent load imbalance. In this paper, we highlight the specific cases of provoked and spontaneous desynchronization of memory-bound, bulk-synchronous pure MPI and hybrid MPI+OpenMP programs. Using simple microbenchmarks we observe that although desynchronization can introduce increased waiting time per process, it does not necessarily cause lower resource utilization but can lead to an increase in available bandwidth per core. In case of significant communication overhead, even natural noise can shove the system into a state of automatic overlap of communication and computation, improving the overall time to solution. The saturation point, i.e., the number of processes per memory domain required to achieve full memory bandwidth, is pivotal in the dynamics of this process and the emerging stable wave pattern. We also demonstrate how hybrid MPI-OpenMP programming can prevent desirable desynchronization by eliminating the bandwidth bottleneck among processes. A Chebyshev filter diagonalization application is used to demonstrate some of the observed effects in a realistic setting.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure