737 research outputs found
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
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
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
HST and Spitzer Observations of the HD 207129 Debris Ring
A debris ring around the star HD 207129 (G0V; d = 16.0 pc) has been imaged in
scattered visible light with the ACS coronagraph on the Hubble Space Telescope
and in thermal emission using MIPS on the Spitzer Space Telescope at 70 microns
(resolved) and 160 microns (unresolved). Spitzer IRS (7-35 microns) and MIPS
(55-90 microns) spectrographs measured disk emission at >28 microns. In the HST
image the disk appears as a ~30 AU wide ring with a mean radius of ~163 AU and
is inclined by 60 degrees from pole-on. At 70 microns it appears partially
resolved and is elongated in the same direction and with nearly the same size
as seen with HST in scattered light. At 0.6 microns the ring shows no
significant brightness asymmetry, implying little or no forward scattering by
its constituent dust. With a mean surface brightness of V=23.7 mag per square
arcsec, it is the faintest disk imaged to date in scattered light.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure
Metallicity of solar-type stars with debris discs and planets
Around 16% of the solar-like stars in our neighbourhood show IR-excesses due
to debris discs and a fraction of them are known to host planets. We aim to
determine in a homogeneous way the metallicity of a sample of stars with known
debris discs and planets. Our analysis includes the calculation of the
fundamental stellar parameters by applying the iron ionisation equilibrium
conditions to several isolated Fe I and Fe II lines. The metallicity
distributions of the different stellar samples suggest that there is a
transition toward higher metallicities from stars with neither debris discs nor
planets to stars hosting giant planets. Stars with debris discs and stars with
neither debris nor planets follow a similar metallicity distribution, although
the distribution of the first ones might be shifted towards higher
metallicities. Stars with debris discs and planets have the same metallicity
behaviour as stars hosting planets, irrespective of whether the planets are
low-mass or gas giants. In the case of debris discs and giant planets, the
planets are usually cool, -semimajor axis larger than 0.1 AU. The data also
suggest that stars with debris discs and cool giant planets tend to have a low
dust luminosity, and are among the less luminous debris discs known. We also
find evidence of an anticorrelation between the luminosity of the dust and the
planet eccentricity. Our data show that the presence of planets, not the debris
disc, correlates with the stellar metallicity. The results confirm that
core-accretion models represent suitable scenarios for debris disc and planet
formation. Dynamical instabilities produced by eccentric giant planets could
explain the suggested dust luminosity trends observed for stars with debris
discs and planets.Comment: Accepted for publication by A&A, 17 pages, 10 figure
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