Social Media, Surveillance and Social Control in the Bahrain Uprising

ArticleMarc Owen Jones began his PhD at the University of Durham in 2011 after securing a studentship from the North East Doctoral Training Centre. He worked briefly as a graduate research assistant at Leicester University following the completion of an MSc in Arab World Studies from Durham University in 2010. This two-year MSc was funded by the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World and involved a year of intense Arabic tuition at both the Universities of Edinburgh and Damascus. He received his BA in Journalism, Film and Broadcasting from Cardiff University in 2006 before spending a year in Sudan teaching English. He tweets and blogs regularly on Bahrain and his research interests include critical security surveillance, cultural geography, public space, social justice, systemic control, policing and social media. This is a study of how the Bahraini regime and its supporters utilized Facebook, Twitter and other social media as a tool of surveillance and social control during the Bahrain uprising. Using a virtual ethnography conducted between February 2011 and December 2011, it establishes a typology of methods that describe how hegemonic forces and institutions employed social media to suppress both online and offline dissent. These methods are trolling, naming and shaming, offline factors, intelligence gathering and passive observation. It also discusses how these methods of control limit the ability of activists to use online places as spaces of representation and anti-hegemonic identity formation. While there is considerable research on the positive role social media plays in activism, this article addresses the relative paucity of literature on how hegemonic forces use social media to resist political change

Sink particle radiative feedback in smoothed particle hydrodynamics models of star formation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this record.We present a new method for including radiative feedback from sink particles in smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations of low-mass star formation, and investigate its effects on the formation of small stellar groups. We find that including radiative feedback from sink particles suppresses fragmentation even further than calculations that only include radiative transfer within the gas. This reduces the star-formation rate following the formation of the initial protostars, leading to fewer objects being produced and a lower total stellar mass. The luminosities of sink particles vary due to changes in the accretion rate driven by the dynamics of the cluster gas, leading to different luminosities for protostars of similar mass. Including feedback from sinks also raises the median stellar mass. The median masses of the groups are higher than typically observed values. This may be due to the lack of dynamical interactions and ejections in small groups of protostars compared to those that occur in richer groups. We also find that the temperature distributions in our calculations are in qualitative agreement with recent observations of protostellar heating in Galactic star-forming regions.This work was supported by the European Research Coun- cil under the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 Grant Agreement No. 339248). The calculations discussed in this paper were performed on the University of Exeter Supercomputer, Isca. The rendered plots shown were produced using SPLASH (Price 2007)

Model independent properties of two-photon exchange in elastic electron proton scattering

We derive from first principles, as the C-invariance of the electromagnetic interaction and the crossing symmetry, the general properties of two-photon exchange in electron-proton elastic scattering. We show that the presence of this mechanism destroys the linearity of the Rosenbluth separation.Comment: 12 pages, no figures- Corrected misprints, changes in P. 7. No changes in conclusion

A Station-Based Southern Annular Mode Index from 1884 to 2005

Atmospheric pressure observations from the Southern Hemisphere are used to estimate monthly and annually averaged indexes of the southern annular mode (SAM) back to 1884. This analysis groups all relevant observations in the following four regions: one for Antarctica and three in the subtropical zone. Continuous surface pressure observations are available at a number of locations in the subtropical regions since the end of the nineteenth century. However, year-round observations in the subpolar region near the Antarctic continent began only during the 1940-60 period. The shorter Antarctic records seriously compromise the length of a traditionally estimated SAM index. To improve the situation "proxy'' estimates of Antarctic sea level pressure anomalies are provided based on the concept of atmospheric mass conservation poleward of 208S. This allows deriving a longer SAM index back to 1884. Several aspects of the new record, its statistical properties, seasonal trends, and the regional pressure anomaly correlations, are presented

Real-time extraction of the Madden-Julian oscillation using empirical mode decomposition and statistical forecasting with a VARMA model

A simple guide to the new technique of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in a meteorological-climate forecasting context is presented. A single application of EMD to a time series essentially acts as a local high-pass filter. Hence, successive applications can be used to produce a bandpass filter that is highly efficient at extracting a broadband signal such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO). The basic EMD method is adapted to minimize end effects, such that it is suitable for use in real time. The EMD process is then used to efficiently extract the MJO signal from gridded time series of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) data. A range of statistical models from the general class of vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) models was then tested for their suitability in forecasting the MJO signal, as isolated by the EMD. A VARMA (5, 1) model was selected and its parameters determined by a maximum likelihood method using 17 yr of OLR data from 1980 to 1996. Forecasts were then made on the remaining independent data from 1998 to 2004. These were made in real time, as only data up to the date the forecast was made were used. The median skill of forecasts was accurate (defined as an anomaly correlation above 0.6) at lead times up to 25 days

Is there model-independent evidence of the two-photon-exchange effect in the electron-proton elastic scattering cross section?

We re-analyze the data of the elastic electron proton scattering to look for model-independent evidence of the two-photon-exchange (TPE) effect. In contrast to previous analyses, TPE effect is parametrized in forms which are free of kinematical-singularity, in addition to being consistent with the constraint derived from crossing symmetry and the charge conjugation. Moreover, we fix the value of $R=G_E/G_M$ as determined from the data of the polarization transfer experiment. We find that, at high $Q^2 \geq 2 GeV^2$ values, the contribution of the TPE effect to the slope of $\sigma_R$ vs. $\epsilon$ is large and comparable with that arising from $G_{E}$. It also behaves quasi-linearly in the region of current data, namely, in the range of $0.2 < \epsilon < 0.95$. Hence the fact that the current elastic $ep$ cross section data shows little nonlinearity with respect to $\epsilon$ can not be used to exclude the presence of the TPE effect. More precise data at extreme angles will be crucial for a model-independent extraction of the TPE effect.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Public goods and decay in networks

We propose a simple behavioral model to analyze situations where (1) a group of agents repeatedly plays a public goods game within a network structure and (2) each agent only observes the past behavior of her neighbors, but is affected by the decisions of the whole group. The model assumes that agents are imperfect conditional cooperators, that they infer unobserved contributions assuming imperfect conditional cooperation by others, and that they have some degree of bounded rationality. We show that our model approximates quite accurately regularities derived from public goods game experiments

The evolution of galaxy formation

Our history of understanding galaxy formation could be traced through the development of individual ideas. A cynic might be tempted to suggest that new catchphrases are developed at a faster rate than genuine progress is made.Comment: 10 pages, Plain TeX, no figures. A slightly abbreviated version of this article appears in the December issue of Astronomy & Geophysic

Berry phase and quantum criticality in Yang--Baxter systems

Spin interaction Hamiltonians are obtained from the unitary Yang--Baxter $\breve{R}$-matrix. Based on which, we study Berry phase and quantum criticality in the Yang--Baxter systems.Comment: 7 pages, no figures. Accepted for publication in Annals of Physic