Charting New Ground: The Ethical Terrain of Nonprofit Journalism

A different kind of revenue, one that has nothing to do with advertising or subscriptions, is playing a larger role in journalism today. Nonprofit funding, once largely the province of public broadcasting, is becoming an important source of support for a new cohort of non-commercial news organizations -- many of them digital natives -- and a growing number of commercial news publishers, which are partnering with nonprofit media and in some cases accepting direct grants themselves. But the ethics of taking grants from foundations and gifts from donors to produce news is still evolving and not without controversy. In New York, a major public TV station returned a large journalism grant for a documentary series because of the donor's connection to the topic being covered. In New Orleans, a nonprofit media organization's reporting about a university president may have cost the organization's its office space at the school. In Texas, a nonprofit established new transparency rules after criticism that it was not revealing enough about donors and event backers. The role of nonprofit media outlets also seems likely to grow. In Philadelphia, the new owner of city's major newspapers is transferring ownership of the publications to a new nonprofit organization, a case being closely watched to see if it might become a model. This report, by the American Press Institute, explores the ethical terrain of nonprofit journalism by examining the kinds of grants made, the nature of communication between funders and grantees, the existence of journalistic firewalls, and the prevalence of written guidelines. The report is based on two main elements: surveys of funders, nonprofit news organizations and commercial partners about a range of funding and ethical issues; and five essays commissioned by people from various media and foundation stakeholder groups that explore different areas of ethical complexity. In a second phase, the study will be followed by recommendations for ethical guidelines

Power Amplifiers for Next Generation Wireless Platforms

Class-E amplifier has the potential to deliver high efficiency required for the next generation wireless systems. In this journal, we discuss a novel load pull analysis technique to characterize the efficiency performance of Class-E amplifier in an outphasing power combining scheme. Class-E amplifier is not an ideal current or voltage source as is required for the traditional analysis of outphasing structures. It requires a phase modulated input signal and has a non-linear transfer characteristic which is a function of load impedance. Here we define an operating load locus based on the load pull analysis which can be used to predict the non-linear transfer function, efficiency, output power, input drive phase and many other factors associated with the outphasing class-E amplifier. This scheme could also be used to characterize any amplifier class in an outphasing structure. Finally modulation performance of Class-E amplifier using PWM technique is also presented

Scaling up a learning technology strategy: Supporting student/faculty teams in learner‐centred design

Many post‐secondary institutions are experiencing the challenge of scaling up their learning technology initiatives without a matching increase in staff resources. This mismatch is particularly acute at the design stage of projects, where both domain knowledge and instructional design expertise are needed. To address this, we are developing structures and tools for a small cadre of instructional design experts to support a growing number of learning technology projects developed by student/faculty teams. One of these tools, the Learner‐Centred Design Idea Kit, is an interactive WWW‐based resource now in a fourth iteration of use in an undergraduate course, Designing Learning Activities with Interactive Multimedia. The course and the LCD Idea Kit which supports it are part of a larger institutional strategy to introduce technology‐enabled change in the learning process, working ‘bottom‐up’ with individual faculty and using the LCD Idea Kit to scale up the course across multiple university departments. In this paper, we describe the course and the Kit in detail and provide and overview of our current status and lessons learned

XMPP and iDTV or how to make television a social medium

Instant Messaging (IM) has the potential to become one of the killer applications for interactive Digital Television (iDTV) [12]. However, several factors make it difficult to provide a good implementation of IM services, among which the limited resources of a set-top box and the different user experience compared to computer environments. This paper proposes the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) standard as a solution for implementing IM. When we compare XMPP with other technologies, it reveals itself to be very well adapted to the specific needs of iDTV middleware platforms like the Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) [5]. Moreover, the use of XMPP doesn't limit itself to IM The flexible architecture of XMPP opens a window of opportunities like the ease of adding new interactive services. To demonstrate the possibilities of XMPP on MHP, an IM client -IM4MHP- is presented in this paper

Multicritical Symmetry Breaking and Naturalness of Slow Nambu-Goldstone Bosons

We investigate spontaneous global symmetry breaking in the absence of Lorentz invariance, and study technical Naturalness of Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes whose dispersion relation exhibits a hierarchy of multicritical phenomena with Lifshitz scaling and dynamical exponents $z>1$. For example, we find NG modes with a technically natural quadratic dispersion relation which do not break time reversal symmetry and are associated with a single broken symmetry generator, not a pair. The mechanism is protected by an enhanced `polynomial shift' symmetry in the free-field limit.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor typos corrected, references adde

Current Research: Recent Documentation of Ceramic Vessels and Other Funerary Objects in the Titus Phase Cemetery at the Tuck Carpenter Site, Camp County, Texas

Recently, we had the opportunity to complete the documentation of Late Caddo period Titus phase ceramic vessels and other funerary offerings from the Tuck Carpenter site (41CP5) in the Big Cypress Creek basin in Camp County, Texas. This portion of the funerary assemblage from the site has been in the hands of R. W. Walsh since the 1960s. Unable to properly care for the assemblage, he recently donated his collection to an anonymous individual, who graciously allowed us to fully document these funerary offerings. The Tuck Carpenter site (41CP5), on Dry Creek several miles from its confluence with Big Cypress Creek, is perhaps the best known Titus phase cemetery in the Big Cypress Creek basin in East Texas. This is due to the careful analysis and reporting of the recovered funerary offerings and remains from 45 burials excavated by Robert L.Turner and R. W. Walsh between 1963-1967. More than 95 percent of the graves had the bodies of single individuals laid in an extended supine position on the floor of the pit, but two burial features had two individuals placed side by side in the burial pit