The structural developments of regional television in Britain and Germany

This paper compares the structural developments of regional television in Britain and Germany from the early days of broadcasting to the present from an institutional and organisational perspective. Drawing on a series of interviews with policy-makers and other key personalities, it is argued that the combination of political administrative borders and regional television boundaries, as exists in the German Länder, provides a fruitful basis for a strong regional television service. During the post-war period divergences between Länder borders and Consortium of Public-Law Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany (ARD) broadcasting boundaries, palpably manifest in south-west Germany, have been harmonised, leading to thorough conformity. However, in centralised England questions of regionalism have strangely played such an important role in the evolution of television, and there are evident disjunctures between regional boundaries and television regions. This applies to the regional structure of Independent Television (ITV) as well as to the regional initiatives of the BBC, which, since the mid-1980s, increasingly takes over ITV's regional duties, fulfilling primarily political demands

One-dimensional transient finite difference model of an operational salinity gradient solar pond

This paper describes the modeling approach used to simulate the transient behavior of a salinity gradient solar pond. A system of finite difference equations are used to generate the time dependent temperature and salinity profiles within the pond. The stability of the pond, as determined by the capacity of the resulting salinity profile to suppress thermal convection within the primary gradient region of the pond, is continually monitored and when necessary adjustments are made to the thickness of the gradient zone. Results of the model are then compared to measurements taken during two representative seasonal periods at the University of Texas at El Paso's (UTEP's) research solar pond

Media Studies in the UK

This article outlines the growth and character of media and communication studies in the UK. It sets out the history and development of the field, and explains its twin origins in both humanities and social sciences contexts. The article also presents some descriptive data about the scale and nature of teaching and research in the field in UK higher education, and explains the evolution of relevant subject associations. The public, political and professional reception of and response to the field are described, and the continuing debates about its value and salience examined

Detailed and simplified non-equilibrium helium ionization in the solar atmosphere

Helium ionization plays an important role in the energy balance of the upper chromosphere and transition region. Helium spectral lines are also often used as diagnostics of these regions. We carry out 1D radiation-hydrodynamics simulations of the solar atmosphere and find that the helium ionization is mostly set by photoionization and direct collisional ionization, counteracted by radiative recombination cascades. By introducing an additional recombination rate mimicking the recombination cascades, we construct a simplified 3 level helium model atom consisting of only the ground states. This model atom is suitable for modeling non-equilibrium helium ionization in 3D numerical models. We perform a brief investigation of the formation of the He I 10830 and He II 304 spectral lines. Both lines show non-equilibrium features that are not recovered with statistical equilibrium models, and caution should therefore be exercised when such models are used as a basis in the interpretation of observations.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Political economy and media production: a reply to Dwyer

© The Author(s) 2016.This is a response to an article by Paul Dwyer in this Journal which makes several claims about the nature and impact of the political economy approach to the analysis of media and communications. We argue that Dwyer’s article misunderstands or is unaware of the history of this approach, and quite fundamentally misconstrues its central tenets. Our response explains how, in capitalist societies, media organisations are integrated into general processes of accumulation, how they exercise power, and how their strategies shape the communications landscape. We explain how the critical political economy approach actually works and illustrate how it has been deployed for concrete analysis in ways that Dwyer seems unaware of. Analysis of shifts in the organisation of capitalism and of their consequences for the structure of cultural production is essential alongside detailed research into how shifting webs of pressure and opportunity impinge on the everyday business of crafting cultural goods in specific cultural industries. We argue that, contra Dwyer, contemporary analysis has a rich legacy of work in both areas on which to build

Electrodynamics of Amorphous Media at Low Temperatures

Amorphous solids exhibit intrinsic, local structural transitions, that give rise to the well known quantum-mechanical two-level systems at low temperatures. We explain the microscopic origin of the electric dipole moment of these two-level systems: The dipole emerges as a result of polarization fluctuations between near degenerate local configurations, which have nearly frozen in at the glass transition. An estimate of the dipole's magnitude, based on the random first order transition theory, is obtained and is found to be consistent with experiment. The interaction between the dipoles is estimated and is shown to contribute significantly to the Gr\"{u}neisen parameter anomaly in low $T$ glasses. In completely amorphous media, the dipole moments are expected to be modest in size despite their collective origin. In partially crystalline materials, however, very large dipoles may arise, possibly explaining the findings of Bauer and Kador, J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 118}, 9069 (2003).Comment: Submitted for publication; April 27, 2005 versio

The take a break campaign? National print media reporting of the election

The take a break campaign? National print media reporting of the electio

The North East Regional Assembly Campaign : a media content analysis

The Electoral Commission commissioned an analysis of media coverage during the referendum campaign on the proposal for a Regional Assembly in the North East of England in November 2004. The Communication Research Centre of Loughborough University (LUCRC) was awarded the tender to the design, conduct and analyse this research

Same campaign, differing agendas : analysing news media coverage of the 2005 General Election

This analysis of the 2005 general election focuses on the way the formal campaign was reported, in their different ways, by national and local broadcasters and newspapers. Having assessed how much attention the various news media devoted to the election, Norris et al’s (1999) tri-partite distinction between the so-called ‘stop watch’, ‘agenda’ and ‘directional’ balances is applied to explore the relative prominence and positive/negative attention given to competing actors and issues. The analysis also compares how the major respective broadcasters and newspapers covered the campaign from their national (UK wide, Scottish and Welsh) and local (East Midlands) perspectives. There is further discussion of how the rival sectors (i.e. ‘popular’, ‘mid-market’ and ‘quality’ press, radio and television) reported the election in quite distinctive ways for their particular audiences. Various other themes, notably the ‘presidential’, ‘soundbite’, partisan and gendered nature of the coverage are considered. It is demonstrated how certain news media promoted the issues of ‘Iraq’, ‘Immigration and Asylum’ and ‘Impropriety’ onto the agenda at different stages during the campaign. By comparison other important policy areas were largely neglected. The conclusion discusses whether it is still possible to conceive of a singular ‘media agenda’ during a general election campaign

Combination of mesoscale and synoptic mechanisms for triggering an isolated thunderstorm: Observational case study of CSIP IOP 1

Copyright @ 2007 AMSAn isolated thunderstorm formed in the southern United Kingdom on 15 June 2005 and moved through the area where a large number of observational instruments were deployed as part of the Convective Storm Initiation Project. Earlier, a convergence line had formed downstream of Devon in the southwest of the United Kingdom in a southwesterly airflow, along which a series of light showers had formed. The depth of these showers was limited by a capping inversion, or lid, at around 2.5 km. The deep thunderstorm convection developed from one of these showers when the convection broke through the lid and ascended up to the next inversion, associated with a tropopause fold at around 6 km. A series of clear-air reflectivity RHIs are used to map the height of the capping inversion and its lifting resulting from the ascent along the convergence line. The origins of the lid are tracked back to some descent from the midtroposphere along dry adiabats. The strength of the lid was weaker along a northwest-to-southeast-oriented region located behind an overrunning upper cold front. The transition from shallow to deep convection occurred where this region with a weaker lid intersected the region with a raised lid, oriented southwest to northeast, downstream of Devon. A very high resolution forecast model that is being developed by the Met Office predicted the isolated thunderstorm successfully. This success depended on the accurate representation of the following two scales: the synoptic-scale and the surface-forced mesoscale convergence line. The interaction between these scales localized the convection sufficiently in space and time for the initiation and subsequent development to be highly predictable despite the relatively poor representation in the model of processes at the cloud scale.This work was funded from the Natural Environment Research Council and the Met Office National Meteorology Programme