Live Blogging- Digital Journalism's Pivotal Platform? A case study of the production, consumption, and form of Live Blogs at Guardian.co.uk

This article describes and analyses the production, consumption, and form of Live Blogs at a popular UK newspaper website and contributes to related debates in journalism studies. Qualitative research interviews with journalists and editors, a reader survey, content analysis, and web metrics were used to obtain data about production practices, product outcomes, and the consumption stage of the product lifecycle. The study finds that Live Blogs are a popular daily component of the news site, used increasingly to cover serious breaking news. Although rarely authored exclusively on location, they may utilise more original sources than traditional online hard news formats. Their frequent updates mean factual verification is cursory, but compensatory factors, including their attribution practices, contribute to a positive evaluation of their objectivity by readers. Live Blogs—with their timeliness, navigational simplicity, and bite-sized content units—suit readers’ consumption of news in the workplace. Live Blogs may increase online news readers’ interest in public-affairs content, and their inclination to participate. This study contradicts some existing scholarship on sourcing practices, content preferences, and immediacy in online news, while supporting the observation that news is increasingly consumed at work. It makes the novel suggestions that Live Blogging is uniquely suited to readers’ at-work news consumption patterns and that the format provides journalists with a means to manage the competing demands of their elite and mass publics

A BCS Condensate in NJL_3+1 ?

We present results from a lattice Monte Carlo study of the Nambu - Jona-Lasinio model in 3+1 dimensions with a baryon chemical potential mu=/=0. As mu is increased there is a transition from a chirally-broken phase to relativistic quark matter, in which baryon number symmetry appears spontaneously broken by a diquark condensate at the Fermi surface, implying a superfluid ground state. Finite volume corrections to this relativistic BCS scenario, however, are anomalously large.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, contribution to Strong and Electroweak Matter '02 (Heidelberg

Treatment dilemmas in a young man presenting with narcolepsy and psychotic symptoms.

Psychotic features can be present in both narcolepsy and psychosis, which can result in challenges in diagnosis and management. The prevalence of both conditions is low and the reports in young people are scarce. Our report illustrates the relevance of a thorough differential diagnosis as well as the need to explore treatment avenues based on the evidence available for both narcolepsy and psychosis symptoms to try and maximise the therapeutic impact

Racks and blocked braids

In the paper Blocked-braid Groups, submitted to Applied Categorical Structures, the present authors together with Davide Maglia introduced the blocked-braid groups BB_n on n strands, and proved that a blocked torsion has order either 2 or 4. We conjectured that the order was actually 4 but our methods in that paper, which involved introducing for any group G a braided monoidal category of tangled relations, were inadequate to demonstrate this fact. Subsequently Davide Maglia in unpublished work investigated exactly what part of the structure and properties of a group G are needed to permit the construction of a braided monoidal category with a tangle algebra and was able to distinguish blocked two-torsions from the identity. In this paper we present a simplification of his answer, which turns out to be related to the notion of rack. We show that if G is a rack then there is a braided monoidal category TRel_G generalizing that of the above paper. Further we introduce a variation of the notion of rack which we call irack which yields a tangle algebra in TRel_G. Iracks are in particular racks but have in addition to the operations abstracting group conjugation also a unary operation abstracting group inverse. Using iracks we obtain new invariants for tangles and blocked braids permitting us to present a proof of Maglia's result that a blocked double torsion is not the identity. This work was presented at the Conference in Memory of Aurelio Carboni, Milan, 24-26 June 2013

A BCS Gap on the Lattice

Monte Carlo simulations of the 3+1 dimensional NJL model are performed with baryon chemical potential mu>0. For mu>Sigma_0, the constituent quark mass in vacuum, chiral symmetry is restored and a diquark condensate forms. We analyse the fermion propagator and find evidence for particle-hole mixing in the vicinity of the Fermi surface and an energy gap Delta>0, both of which provide evidence for superfluidity at high baryon density induced by a BCS mechanism. At (mu a)=0.8 the ratio between the BCS gap and the vacuum quark mass is Delta/Sigma_0=0.15(2).Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, Lattice2003(nonzero