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Can Big Media do "Big Society"?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News
The UK Government is committed to helping ânurture a new generation of local media companiesâ. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This paper provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Mediaâs network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the âcommunity publishersâ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of âbig mediaâ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally-elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Governmentâs preferred convergent, commercial model
Discovery and Selection of Certified Web Services Through Registry-Based Testing and Verification
Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection
Monte Carlo approach of the islanding of polycrystalline thin films
We computed by a Monte Carlo method derived from the Solid on Solid model,
the evolution of a polycrystalline thin film deposited on a substrate during
thermal treatment. Two types of substrates have been studied: a single
crystalline substrate with no defects and a single crystalline substrate with
defects. We obtain islands which are either flat (i.e. with a height which does
not overcome a given value) or grow in height like narrow towers. A good
agreement was found regarding the morphology of numerical nanoislands at
equilibrium, deduced from our model, and experimental nanoislands resulting
from the fragmentation of YSZ thin films after thermal treatment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
High-precision Photometric Redshifts from Spitzer/IRAC: Extreme [3.6]-[4.5] Colors Identify Galaxies in the Redshift Range z~6.6-6.9
One of the most challenging aspects of studying galaxies in the z>~7 universe
is the infrequent confirmation of their redshifts through spectroscopy, a
phenomenon thought to occur from the increasing opacity of the intergalactic
medium to Lya photons at z>6.5. The resulting redshift uncertainties inhibit
the efficient search for [C II] in z~7 galaxies with sub-mm instruments such as
ALMA, given their limited scan speed for faint lines. One means by which to
improve the precision of the inferred redshifts is to exploit the potential
impact of strong nebular emission lines on the colors of z~4-8 galaxies as
observed by Spitzer/IRAC. At z~6.8, galaxies exhibit IRAC colors as blue as
[3.6]-[4.5] ~-1, likely due to the contribution of [O III]+Hb to the 3.6 mum
flux combined with the absence of line contamination in the 4.5 mum band. In
this paper we explore the use of extremely blue [3.6]-[4.5] colors to identify
galaxies in the narrow redshift window z~6.6-6.9. When combined with an
I-dropout criterion, we demonstrate that we can plausibly select a relatively
clean sample of z~6.8 galaxies. Through a systematic application of this
selection technique to our catalogs from all five CANDELS fields, we identify
20 probable z~6.6-6.9 galaxies. We estimate that our criteria select the ~50%
strongest line emitters at z~6.8 and from the IRAC colors we estimate a typical
[O III]+Hb rest-frame equivalent width of 1085A for this sample. The small
redshift uncertainties on our sample make it particularly well suited for
follow-up studies with facilities such as ALMA.Comment: In submission to the Astrophysical Journal, updated in response to
the referee report, 13 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl
Nature of the metal-nonmetal transition in metal-ammonia solutions. I. Solvated electrons at low metal concentrations
Using a theory of polarizable fluids, we extend a variational treatment of an
excess electron to the many-electron case corresponding to finite metal
concentrations in metal-ammonia solutions (MAS). We evaluate dielectric,
optical, and thermodynamical properties of MAS at low metal concentrations. Our
semi-analytical calculations based on a mean-spherical approximation correlate
well with the experimental data on the concentration and the temperature
dependencies of the dielectric constant and the optical absorption spectrum.
The properties are found to be mainly determined by the induced dipolar
interactions between localized solvated electrons, which result in the two main
effects: the dispersion attractions between the electrons and a sharp increase
in the static dielectric constant of the solution. The first effect provides a
classical phase separation for the light alkali metal solutes (Li, Na, K) below
a critical temperature. The second effect leads to a dielectric instability,
i.e., polarization catastrophe, which is the onset of metallization. The locus
of the calculated critical concentrations is in a good agreement with the
experimental phase diagram of Na-NH3 solutions. The proposed mechanism of the
metal-nonmetal transition is quite general and may occur in systems involving
self-trapped quantum quasiparticles.Comment: 13 figures, 42 page
Charge order at the frontier between the molecular and solid states in Ba3NaRu2O9
We show that the valence electrons of Ba3NaRu2O9, which has a quasi-molecular
structure, completely crystallize below 210 K. Using an extended Hubbard model,
we show that the charge ordering instability results from long-range Coulomb
interactions. However, orbital ordering, metal-metal bonding and formation of a
partial spin gap enforce the magnitude of the charge separation. The striped
charge order and frustrated hcp lattice of Ru2O9 dimers lead to competition
with a quasi-degenerate charge-melted phase under photo-excitation at low
temperature. Our results establish a broad class of simple metal oxides as
models for emergent phenomena at the border between the molecular and solid
states.Comment: Minor changes, with supporting information. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Let
Algebras generated by two bounded holomorphic functions
We study the closure in the Hardy space or the disk algebra of algebras
generated by two bounded functions, of which one is a finite Blaschke product.
We give necessary and sufficient conditions for density or finite codimension
of such algebras. The conditions are expressed in terms of the inner part of a
function which is explicitly derived from each pair of generators. Our results
are based on identifying z-invariant subspaces included in the closure of the
algebra. Versions of these results for the case of the disk algebra are given.Comment: 22 pages ; a number of minor mistakes have been corrected, and some
points clarified. Conditionally accepted by Journal d'Analyse Mathematiqu
Convergence and multiplicities for the Lempert function
Given a domain , the Lempert function is a
functional on the space Hol (\D,\Omega) of analytic disks with values in
, depending on a set of poles in . We generalize its definition
to the case where poles have multiplicities given by local indicators (in the
sense of Rashkovskii's work) to obtain a function which still dominates the
corresponding Green function, behaves relatively well under limits, and is
monotonic with respect to the indicators. In particular, this is an improvement
over the previous generalization used by the same authors to find an example of
a set of poles in the bidisk so that the (usual) Green and Lempert functions
differ.Comment: 24 pages; many typos corrected thanks to the referee of Arkiv for
Matemati
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