Liberty and the News

Liberty and the News was published a century ago, the young Walter Lippmann’s fifth book. The slim volume merits a fresh read in our post-truth moment. “In an exact, sense,” Lippmann writes, “the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism.” For Lippmann, liberty constitutes a method, not a series of prohibitions and permissions. The book’s aim is to identify and examine potential reforms to boost the reliability of news—a project as relevant today as it is unfinished. Liberty and the News is republished in this mediastudies.press edition with a new introduction by Sue Curry Jansen

From AAA to Junk: Credit rating agencies as news sources in the Irish print-media during the economic crisis, 2008–2013

From AAA to Junk: Credit rating agencies as news sources in the Irish print-media during the economic crisis, 2008–201

It’s not all cat videos: moving beyond legacy media and tackling the challenges of mapping news values on digital native websites

The question “what is news?” has been a topic of scholarly examination for more than 60 years as researchers have sought to develop and revise the taxonomy of news values to inform journalism education and wider public debates on the subjectivity of journalists. However, these studies have focused on legacy print and broadcast media even when attempting to bring their findings into the digital era by examining online content. To date, there has been limited research, in the UK and internationally, on news values on digitally born news websites–platforms that only exist online such as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed News and LADbible, which are consumed by a third of the UK population at least once a week. A significant impediment is the complexity of mapping offline latent coding methods to fluid online content. Digital native websites are particularly problematic due to their varied appearance across platforms–desktop, tablet and mobile–and their multiple access points–via web browser, social media and App. Yet, content analysis has a rich history dating back to the clergy's examination of newspapers in the late 1600s and the method has proved to be an adaptable tool for measuring news output as each new media technology has emerged. This paper argues that it is imperative that researchers look beyond legacy media when studying digital news values due to the growing significance of digital native news websites in the marketplace. The secondary purpose of this methodological paper is to highlight the challenges of capturing and analysing news values on digital native news platforms and suggest how researchers can begin to tackle the complexities of liquid content analysis in this field

Re-Forming vision. On the governmentality of Griersonian documentary film

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. This essay traces and discusses John Grierson\u27s programme for documentary film and its projected function and operation within liberal democracy. It is argued that documentary film as envisioned and propagated by Grierson neither set out to advance \u27open\u27 and/or controversial public discourse \u27from an Enlightenment standpoint\u27 (Rosen, Philip. 2001. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 249) nor to educate its popular audiences through the dissemination of facts. As such Griersonian documentary film should be less located within the pedagogical tradition of the Enlightenment and was not to mainly function as a \u27discourse of sobriety\u27 (Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Rather, it was to insensibly shape subjectivities and agents by strategically arranging \u27visions of the real\u27. Documentary set out to model what Grierson termed \u27the subconscious\u27, the implicit framework that shaped citizen\u27s thoughts, desires, emotions and agency by which they governed their selves, others and by extension society at large into the future. Grierson\u27s documentary programme decisively governmentalised so-called non-fiction film as a specific technique of democratic government. It sought to render the formative and \u27creative\u27 aspects of its production transparent in favour of effect through affect by shaping appropriate visions for a reality yet to become. Thereby Grierson\u27s programme set out to strategically subjectify popular audiences/\u27ordinary citizens\u27 towards a desirable and \u27better\u27 national and global future

Strong interface-induced spin-orbit coupling in graphene on WS2

Interfacial interactions allow the electronic properties of graphene to be modified, as recently demonstrated by the appearance of satellite Dirac cones in the band structure of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) substrates. Ongoing research strives to explore interfacial interactions in a broader class of materials in order to engineer targeted electronic properties. Here we show that at an interface with a tungsten disulfide (WS2) substrate, the strength of the spin-orbit interaction (SOI) in graphene is very strongly enhanced. The induced SOI leads to a pronounced low-temperature weak anti-localization (WAL) effect, from which we determine the spin-relaxation time. We find that spin-relaxation time in graphene is two-to-three orders of magnitude smaller on WS2 than on SiO2 or hBN, and that it is comparable to the intervalley scattering time. To interpret our findings we have performed first-principle electronic structure calculations, which both confirm that carriers in graphene-on-WS2 experience a strong SOI and allow us to extract a spin-dependent low-energy effective Hamiltonian. Our analysis further shows that the use of WS2 substrates opens a possible new route to access topological states of matter in graphene-based systems.Comment: Originally submitted version in compliance with editorial guidelines. Final version with expanded discussion of the relation between theory and experiments to be published in Nature Communication

Encefalitis autoinmune mediada por anticuerpos contra el receptor N-metil-D-aspartato: reporte de cuatro casos en Perú

La encefalitis autoinmune por anticuerpos contra el receptor N-metil-D-aspartato (anti-NMDAR) es un desorden mediado por anticuerpos contra antígenos de superficie neuronal, cuyo diagnóstico temprano y tratamiento oportuno mejoran el pronóstico de la enfermedad. Se presentan cuatro casos con el diagnóstico definitivo de encefalitis autoinmune por anti-NMDAR, tratados en el Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Neurológicas en Lima-Perú. Todos los pacientes presentaron crisis epilépticas y tres casos desarrollaron un estado epiléptico refractario. Asimismo, tres pacientes presentaron alteraciones neuropsiquiátricas, discinesias y disautonomías. Dos casos requirieron soporte ventilatorio. Todos presentaron un electroencefalograma anormal, dos casos tuvieron pleocitosis en líquido cefalorraquídeo, y sólo uno mostró anormalidades cerebrales en la resonancia magnética. Respecto al tratamiento, todos los pacientes recibieron inmunoterapia con metilprednisolona y sólo dos de ellos requirieron plasmaféresis por respuesta ineficaz al tratamiento con corticoides. A los 12 meses del alta hospitalaria, tres pacientes quedaron libre de crisis epilépticas y sólo un caso no logró la independencia funcional. Estos casos muestran que la encefalitis anti-NMDAR es una condición tratable y su reconocimiento temprano junto con un tratamiento adecuado (inmunoterapia/plasmaféresis) son esenciales para una evolución favorable