Extracting attributed verification and debunking reports from social media: MediaEval-2015 trust and credibility analysis of image and video

Journalists are increasingly turning to technology for pre-filtering and automation of the simpler parts of the verification process. We present results from our semi-automated approach to trust and credibility analysis of tweets referencing suspicious images and videos. We use natural language processing to extract evidence from tweets in the form of fake & genuine claims attributed to trusted and untrusted sources. Results for team UoS-ITI in theMediaEval 2015 Verifying Multimedia Use task are reported. Our 'fake' tweet classifier precision scores range from 0.94 to 1.0 (recall 0.43 to 0.72), and our 'real' tweet classifier precision scores range from 0.74 to 0.78 (recall 0.51 to 0.74). Image classification precision scores range from 0.62 to 1.0 (recall 0.04 to 0.23). Our approach can automatically alert journalists in real-time to trustworthy claims verifying or debunking viral images or video

Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" and the problem of democratic values in Britain, 1938-1961

This article traces a history of the literary critic and theorist Raymond Williams’s idea of the “structure of feeling”, the formation of which is situated within debates about the place of artistic and moral values in democratic politics during the 1940s and 1950s. It demonstrates that the “structure of feeling” was intended to circumvent an equation of collective normative legislation with totalitarianism in the early cultural Cold War, by conceiving the definition of values as a process upon which all individuals in a society were always, necessarily, engaged. In articulating this quasi-democratic account of the production of artistic and moral standards, Williams also sought to escape the various theories of “minority culture” that dominated literary and cultural criticism in mid-century Britain. However, his concept of the “structure of feeling” required him to maintain a privileged role for artistic and intellectual arbiters, which constrained his vision of a properly democratic culture. In conclusion, the article argues that the problem of “democratic values” that Williams addressed in his work of the 1950s was a major factor in the marginalization or exclusion of moral criticism from political argument in Britain after 1945, and suggests that this passage of intellectual history may therefore be of considerable importance to contemporary debates about the lineages and reform of, in a broad sense, neoliberal political economy

The concept of 'The Establishment' and the transformation of political argument in Britain since 1945

This article examines the formation and development of the concept of the Establishment in British political argument after its recoining in a celebrated article by the journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955. The author argues that the term “the Establishment” did not have a stable referent but rather acquired a range of possible meanings and uses as part of a new political vocabulary within which the course and significance of recent political and social change was contested, and that ultimately transformed social-democratic and conservative politics in Britain. The article situates the formation of the concept of the Establishment within a prolonged contestation of social and political authority in Britain during the middle of the twentieth century and traces the recoining of the term in conservative political commentary prior to Henry Fairlie's frequently cited 1955 Spectator article. From the late 1950s, it is argued, the concept acquired more distinctively contemporary meanings that enabled its adoption by Harold Wilson during the mid-1960s and its subsequent reappropriation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1970s. These usages registered and helped to accomplish fundamental political realignments, the understanding of which depends upon a close analysis of political and social concepts

Ambient Multi-Camera Personal Documentary

Polymnia is an automated solution for the creation of ambient multi-camera personal documentary films. This short paper introduces the system, emphasising the rule-based documentary generation engine that we have created to assemble an edited narrative from source footage. We describe how such automatically generated media can be integrated with and augment personally-authored images and videos as a contribution to an individual’s personal digital memory

Veracity and velocity of social media content during breaking news: analysis of November 2015 Paris shootings

Social media sources are becoming increasingly important in journalism. Under breaking news deadlines semi-automated support for identification and verification of content is critical. We describe a large scale content-level analysis of over 6 million Twitter, You Tube and Instagram records covering the first 6 hours of the November 2015 Paris shootings. We ground our analysis by tracing how 5 ground truth images used in actual news reports went viral. We look at velocity of newsworthy content and its veracity with regards trusted source attribution. We also examine temporal segmentation combined with statistical frequency counters to identify likely eyewitness content for input to real-time breaking content feeds. Our results suggest attribution to trusted sources might be a good indicator of content veracity, and that temporal segmentation coupled with frequency statistical metrics could be used to highlight in real-time eyewitness content if applied with some additional text filters

The Gardens of Singapore

Singapore has several public gardens of which two, Singapore Botanic Gardens and Gardens by the Bay, are of particular national and international renown. These two gardens have contrasting but complementary ways of enthusing and educating the public about plants and of gaining their support for horticultural excellence, botanical research and conservation. Founded in 1859, Singapore Botanic Gardens is an old and established garden with a long history of horticultural and botanical research, plant exploration and conservation. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2015, the world’s first tropical botanic garden to receive this accolade. Gardens by the Bay opened in 2012 and its focus is on large-scale displays in spectacular settings, thereby attracting huge numbers of visitors since its opening. In their contrasting ways, both gardens enthuse and educate the public about plants and the natural world. This work lays the foundations for public advocacy of conservation efforts in Singapore, resulting in a very high level of public support for greening efforts and the protection of natural areas in land-scarce Singapore