Challenging selective exposure: do online news users choose sites that match their interests and preferences?

Today’s online news environment has made it easy to select outlets covering the topics one is interested in and the political viewpoints one shares. Previous research often examined either the diversity of news content or the audience’s choices. This study of online news use in Austria does both to assess audience selectivity systematically. It first investigates the topics and bias of news sites based on a content analysis (N = 2069), before survey data (N = 2829) are used to investigate how far online news users select outlets that match their preferences. Content differences exist to some extent, but people hardly match them with their personal preferences. We conclude that, across the population, there is a substantive interest in general-interest digital journalism. In contrast to what selective exposure research suggests, factors other than interests and orientation might guide the choice for a specific news site

Robotic Building as Integration of Design-to-Robotic-Production and -Operation

Robotic Building implies both physically built robotic environments and robotically supported building processes. Physically built robotic environments consist of reconfigurable, adaptive systems incorporating sensor-actuator mechanisms that enable buildings to interact with their users and surroundings in real-time. These robotic environments require Design-to-Production and -Operation (D2P&O) chains that may be (partially or completely) robotically driven. This chapter describes previous work aiming to integrate D2RP&O processes by linking performance-driven design with robotic production and user-driven building operation.Digital ArchitectureArchitectural Engineerin

The ATLAS project - VIII. Modelling the formation and evolution of fast and slow rotator early-type galaxies within ΛCDM

The definitive version can be found at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ Copyright Royal Astronomical SocietyWe propose a simple model for the origin of fast and slow rotator early-type galaxies (ETG) within the hierarchical Λcold dark matter (ΛCDM) scenario, that is based on the assumption that the mass fraction of stellar discs in ETGs is a proxy for the specific angular momentum expressed via λ. Within our model we reproduce the fraction of fast and slow rotators as a function of magnitude in the ATLAS survey, assuming that fast-rotating ETGs have at least 10 per cent of their total stellar mass in a disc component. In agreement with ATLAS observations we find that slow rotators are predominantly galaxies with M > 10M contributing ~20 per cent to the overall ETG population. We show in detail that the growth histories of fast and slow rotators are different, supporting the classification of ETGs into these two categories. Slow rotators accrete between ~50 and 90 per cent of their stellar mass from satellites and their most massive progenitors have on average up to three major mergers during their evolution. Fast rotators in contrast accrete less than 50 per cent and have on average less than one major merger in their past. We find that the underlying physical reason for the different growth histories is the slowing down and ultimately complete shut-down of gas cooling in massive galaxies. Once cooling and associated star formation in disc stop, galaxies grow via infall from satellites. Frequent minor mergers thereby destroy existing stellar discs via violent relaxation and also tend to lower the specific angular momentum of the main stellar body, lowering λ into the slow rotator regime. On average, the last gas-rich major merger interaction in slow rotators happens at z > 1.5, followed by a series of minor mergers. These results support the idea that kinematically decoupled cores (KDC) form during gas-rich major mergers at high z followed by minor mergers, which build-up the outer layers of the remnant, and make remnants that are initially too flat compared to observations become rounder. Fast rotators are less likely to form such KDCs due to the fact that they have on average less than one major merger in their past. Fast rotators in our model have different formation paths. The majority, 78 per cent, has bulge-to-total stellar mass ratios (B/T) > 0.5 and managed to grow stellar discs due to continued gas cooling or bulges due to frequent minor mergers. The remaining 22 per cent live in high-density environments and consist of low B/T galaxies with gas fractions below 15 per cent, that have exhausted their cold gas reservoir and have no hot halo from which gas can cool. These fast rotators most likely resemble the flattened disc-like fast rotators in the ATLAS survey. Our results predict that ETGs can change their state from fast to slow rotator and vice versa, while the former is taking place predominantly at low z (z 10M) fast rotators being more than one order of magnitude more frequent at z~ 2.Peer reviewe