The citizen interest – still a thorny problem for Ofcom

LSE’s Sonia Livingstone and University of Leicester’s Peter Lunt, authors of Media Regulation: Governance and the interests of citizens and consumers, look at Ofcom’s new report: Citizens and communications services and outline four ways Ofcom can meet its obligations under the 2003 Communications Act to better grasp citizens’ interests

Ofcom’s plans to promote ‘participation’, but whose and in what?

The consultation on Ofcom’s Draft Annual Plan 2013/14 ended on Friday 22 February. LSE’s Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt of the University of Leicester point out that despite a stated focus on “participation” and the “citizen interest” the plan needs much more clarity and specifics on these two priorities

Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication studies

Mediatization research draws on the history of media and the history of mediation within diverse fields of society to develop a scholarly and empirically grounded account of the mediation of history. It is first argued that mediatization is characterized by two crucial features: it concerns the effects of the media on a field of society that is historically separate from the media; and it recognizes that these effects work in a complex manner over a considerable period of time. The chapter then contrasts three ideal typical accounts of mediatization, each with a different focus and timescale, namely: the many and varied roles of mediation throughout the longue durée of cultural evolution; the institutionalized forces of high modernity converging to produce a dominant corporate media sector in recent centuries; and the still uncertain yet potentially radical socio-technological transformations in digital networks over recent decades. It is concluded, first, that the second, institutional perspective makes the strongest case for a theory of mediatization, but that all perspectives could be mutually compatible with further theoretical and empirical work. This latter should include questions of critique, should be developed in partnership with experts in the various fields being mediatized, and could usefully be collected together under a single hashtag to permit further synthesis

Strain-induced structural instability in FeRh

We perform density functional calculations to investigate the structure of the inter-metallic alloy FeRh under epitaxial strain. Bulk FeRh exhibits a metamagnetic transition from a low-temperature antiferromagnetic (AFM) phase to a ferromagnetic (FM) phase at 350K, and its strain dependence is of interest for tuning the transition temperature to the room-temperature operating conditions of typical memory devices. We find an unusually strong dependence of the structural energetics on the choice of exchange-correlation functional, with the usual local density approximation (LDA) yielding the wrong ground-state structure, and generalized gradient (GGA) extensions being in better agreement with the bulk experimental structure. Using the GGA we show the existence of a metastable face-centered-cubic (fcc)-like AFM structure that is reached from the ground state body-centered-cubic (bcc) AFM structure by following the epitaxial Bain path. We predict that this metastable fcc-like structure has a significantly higher conductivity than the bcc AFM phase. We show that the behavior is well described using non-linear elasticity theory, which captures the softening and eventual sign change of the orthorhombic shear modulus under compressive strain, consistent with this structural instability. Finally, we predict the existence of an additional unit-cell-doubling lattice instability, which should be observable at low temperature.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Occurrence cubes : a new paradigm for aggregating species occurrence data

In this paper we describe a method of aggregating species occurrence data into what we coined “occurrence cubes”. The aggregated data can be perceived as a cube with three dimensions - taxonomic, temporal and geographic - and takes into account the spatial uncertainty of each occurrence. The aggregation level of each of the three dimensions can be adapted to the scope. Built on Open Science principles, the method is easily automated and reproducible, and can be used for species trend indicators, maps and distribution models. We are using the method to aggregate species occurrence data for Europe per taxon, year and 1km2 European reference grid, to feed indicators and risk mapping/modelling for the Tracking Invasive Alien Species (TrIAS) project

weSPOT: a cloud-based approach for personal and social inquiry

Scientific inquiry is at the core of the curricula of schools and universities across Europe. weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a cloud-based approach for personal and social inquiry. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mashups out of cloud-based tools in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers

Expression in the human brain of retinoic acid induced 1, a protein associated with neurobehavioural disorders

Acknowledgements Funding was provided by the Wellcome Trust and Tenovus Scotland. Prof Fragoso is the recipient of a Post Doctoral Science without Borders grant from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq, 37450/2012- 7). We also thank Aberdeen Proteomics for assistance with the western blots as well as the Microscopy and Histology Core Facility at the University of Aberdeen for confocal microscopy.Peer reviewedPublisher PD