Electoral news sharing:A study of changes in news coverage and Facebook sharing behaviour during the 2018 Mexican elections

Patterns of news consumption are changing drastically. Citizens increasingly rely on social media such as Facebook to read and share political news. With the power of these platforms to expose citizens to political information, the implications for democracy are profound, making understanding what is shared during elections a priority on the research agenda. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly explored how elections transform news sharing behaviour on Facebook. This study begins to remedy this by (a) investigating changes in news coverage and news sharing behaviour on Facebook by comparing election and routine periods, and by (b) addressing the ‘news gap’ between preferences of journalists and news consumers on social media. Employing a novel data set of news articles (N = 83,054) in Mexico, findings show that during periods of heightened political activity, both the publication and dissemination of political news increases, the gap between the news choices of journalists and consumers narrows, and that news sharing resembles a zero-sum game, with increased political news sharing leading to a decrease in the sharing of other news

URLs can facilitate machine learning classification of news stories across languages and contexts

Comparative scholars studying political news content at scale face the challenge of addressing multiple languages. While many train individual supervised machine learning classifiers for each language, this is a costly and time-consuming process. We propose that instead of rely-ing on thematic labels generated by manual coding, researchers can use ‘distant’ labels created by cues in article URLs. Sections reflected in URLs (e.g., nytimes.com/politics/) can therefore help create training material for supervised machine learning classifiers. Using cues provided by news media organizations, such an approach allows for efficient political news identification at scale while facilitating imple-mentation across languages. Using a dataset of approximately 870,000 URLs of news-related content from four countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, and Poland), we test this method by providing a comparison to ‘classical’ supervised machine learning and a multilingual BERT model, across four news topics. Our results suggest that the use of URL section cues to distantly annotate texts provides a cheap and easy-to-implement way of classifying large volumes of news texts that can save researchers many valuable resources without having to sacrifice quality

Towards a framework to evaluate the ‘total’ performance of buildings

Internationally, buildings are a major contributor to carbon emissions. Despite significant advances in the technology and construction of energy-efficient buildings, in many cases a performance gap between designed and actual performance exists. While much research has investigated the drivers of the building energy performance gap – both static and transient– there has been considerably less research into the total performance gap, defined here as performance gaps in building energy use, occupant satisfaction and Indoor Environmental Quality parameters such as thermal comfort and air quality which may impact on occupant health and wellbeing. This paper presents a meta-analysis of building performance data from buildings in the UK and China – selected due to their contrasting development environments – which illustrate the presence of and complexities of evaluating total performance gaps in both countries. The data demonstrate the need for (1) high end-use, spatial granularity and temporal resolution data for both energy and Indoor Environmental Quality, and (2) developing methodologies that allow meaningful comparisons between buildings internationally to facilitate learning from successful building design, construction methodologies and policy environments internationally. Using performance data from a UK building, a potential forward path is illustrated with the objective of developing a framework to evaluate total building performance. Practical application: While much research has examined building energy performance gaps, Indoor Environmental Quality and occupant satisfaction gaps are rarely included despite their relationship to energy. We use a meta-analysis of energy, indoor environmental quality, and occupant satisfaction data from buildings in the UK and China to illustrating the presence of and complexities of evaluating total performance gaps for buildings in the two countries, and the need for high resolution dynamic buildings data and novel methodologies for comparison between buildings across different contexts. Illustrative case studies are used to demonstrate potential future directions for evaluating ‘total’ building performance

Testosterone and fathers' parenting unraveled : links with the quantity and quality of father-child interactions

Objective Individual differences in quality of father involvement in caregiving might in part be explained by fathers' testosterone (T) levels. We examined the links between fathers' (n = 32) salivary T levels, amount of time spent with their child (12-30 months of age), type of father-child interaction, and fathers' sensitivity. Methods During two home visits, video observations of father-child interactions were conducted to measure fathers' sensitivity during a challenging and harmonious interaction. Fathers' saliva was collected several times throughout the day on a working day and on the home visit days, including right before and after each father-child interaction. Results Fathers' T secretion throughout the day was lower on home visit days (i.e., days with a higher amount of time spent with their child) than on a working day. For both challenging and harmonious father-child interactions, mean T levels did not differ before and after father-child interactions. However, individual changes in fathers' T levels during the father-child interactions did predict fathers' sensitivity. Specifically, the more T increased during the challenging interaction, or decreased during the harmonious interaction, the more sensitive the father was during that interaction as well as during a subsequent interaction. Conclusions Parenting quality is most optimal when fathers' T system reacts in the expected direction given the context of the father-child interaction, i.e., a T decrease during a harmonious interaction and a T increase during a challenging interaction. Our study underscores the importance of examining the interplay between biology, behavior, and caregiving context in fathers' parenting

Whole-genome analysis uncovers recurrent IKZF1 inactivation and aberrant cell adhesion in blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm

Blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN) is a rare and highly aggressive hematological malignancy with a poorly understood pathobiology and no effective therapeutic options. Despite a few recurrent genetic defects (eg, single nucleotide changes, indels, large chromosomal aberrations) have been identified in BPDCN, none are disease-specific, and more importantly, none explain its genesis or clinical behavior. In this study, we performed the first high resolution whole-genome analysis of BPDCN with a special focus on structural genomic alterations by using whole-genome sequencing and RNA sequencing. Our study, the first to characterize the landscape of genomic rearrangements and copy number alterations of BPDCN at nucleotide-level resolution, revealed that IKZF1, a gene encoding a transcription factor required for the differentiation of plasmacytoid dendritic cell precursors, is focally inactivated through recurrent structural alterations in this neoplasm. In concordance with the genomic data, transcriptome analysis revealed that conserved IKZF1 target genes display a loss-of-IKZF1 expression pattern. Furthermore, up-regulation of cellular processes responsible for cell-cell and cell-ECM interactions, which is a hallmark of IKZF1 deficiency, was prominent in BPDCN. Our findings suggest that IKZF1 inactivation plays a central role in the pathobiology of the disease, and consequently, therapeutic approaches directed at reestablishing the function of this gene might be beneficial for patients

Gla Rich Protein (GRP) is associated to osteoarthritis being highly accumulated in the joint tissues and synovial fluid

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio