MCTs and universities: new risks, new visibilities and new vulnerabilities

Universities have long used new technologies to enhance teaching but mobile communication technologies (MCTs) are posing new ethical and policy challenges. The capture functions on MCTs bring considerable benefits in terms of a student being able to play back and review what was said in the teaching rooms. However, the convergence and connectivity of web 2.0 and its successors add new, as yet largely uncharted dimensions. It not only extends the classroom but also renders previously bounded teaching and residential spaces porous as anybody who has access to these rooms and a MCT can capture and open to outside scrutiny what previously would have been relatively private spaces. This has contradictory ethical implications. Abuses of power and indiscretions can be held to account before wider public opinion. However, the capture and dissemination of sensitive personal information in the form of the opinions, beliefs and ideas of students and staff can expose individuals to risk. Furthermore, the technologies also enable acceptable content to be edited and/or reformed into mashups that may not be intended to be malicious but have the potential for reputational damage. This paper explores these issues first in terms of a range of events and incidents that highlight new vulnerabilities and visibilities. It then outlines some of the policy responses in the United States in terms of cyberbullying; in the UK under data protection; and the implications of a proposed new EU directive. However, it argues, that the fundamental limitation with all of these is that ultimately the institution does not own the device and therefore its control of how it is used is limited. The paper concludes with some preliminary findings on how a handful of British universities are adopting a proactive response here

Making sense of British newspaper campaigns

In the first quarter of 2013 Ghana reported 7 cases of measles; Britain reported over 900 – the second highest in the EU. Ghana had a 100% vaccination rate; in Britain most reported cases were among 10- 16 year olds in areas where vaccination had fallen to 50%. Last month the British government said it would lobby the European Commission to relax the restrictions on GM food and crops. In 2012, 270 million ha of GM crops were grown in 28 countries; in the EU only 2 such crops have been licensed for commercial cultivation and the only country where they are grown in any sizable quantity is Spain. None are grown or sold in Britain

Exploring a curatorial turn in journalism

Curation has moved from the ‘rarefied’ atmosphere of museums and exhibitions into journalism where new discourses and practices are proliferating. The changes have attracted academic attention such that journalism is now facing its own curatorial turn akin to what Paul O’Neill identified in museum studies. This article draws on a meta-analysis of journal articles in the field to argue that the prevalent instrumentalist definitions of curation are necessary but not sufficient to capture what the shifts in discourse and practices mean for journalism. In order to derive a more nuanced conceptualization of curation that includes the instrumental and metaphorical, the article draws on literature beyond the field of journalism studies to trace the changing meanings of the term from curation from antiquity to the digital age. The conditions are propitious for the movement of new practices into newsrooms but where it fits in relation to existing professions is intellectually unclear because of a lack of conceptual clarity as to how curation overlaps and differs from other roles. The article offers a preliminary attempt to address this

Sounds of the jungle: Re-humanizing the migrant

This article examines the cross-border tensions over migrant settlements dubbed ‘The Jungle’ in Calais. The Jungle, strongly associated with the unauthorized movement of migrants, became a physical entity enmeshed in discourses of illegality and violation of white suburbia. British mainstream media have either rendered the migrant voiceless or faceless, appropriating them into discourses of immigration policy and the violent transgression of borders. Through the case study, Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS), we highlight how new media spaces can re-humanize the migrant, enabling them to tell their stories through narratives, images and vantage points not shown in the mainstream media. This reconstruction of the migrant is an important device in enabling proximity and reconstituting the migrant as real and human. This sharply contrasts with the distance framing techniques of mainstream media, which dehumanize and silence the migrant, locating the phenomenon of migration as a disruptive contaminant in civilized and ordered societies

Space construction in media reporting: A study of the migrant space in the 'Jungles' of Calais

Media are intrinsically implicated in constructing and framing space as well as in the imagination of communities. This paper examines how media through the spatial construct of the ‘jungle’ premises the discourses of migration between the borders of UK and France. We argue that newspapers impose a cartography by invoking a social imaginary of a bounded community sustained through imagined boundaries. Metaphors such as the ‘jungle’ function as spatialisation techniques to not only renew the sacrosanct boundaries of a nation-state, but they also become instrumental tools in invoking fear, anxiety and the visceral in migrant discourses. Conceptually, the paper argues that media sustains ‘an imagined community’ by techniques of spatialisation which encode politics of space in migrant discourses. These discourses are central in sustaining and enacting a social imaginary, where space framing and construction become tools to imagine and locate communities and to exclude the ‘other’

The non-human interest story: De-personalising the migrant

We argue that newspapers deliberately employ techniques to dehumanise and depersonalise news stories in order to cultivate distance between the reader and human subject in newspaper accounts. We posit this as a dominant technique in discourses of immigration in newspaper discourses. In the process the migrant is narrated as the sub-human entrapped through socio-legal terminologies and deviance discourses that both silence and trivialise human suffering. We highlight the case study of the refugee settlement in Calais dubbed the ‘jungle’ to illuminate this phenomenon. We argue that the depersonalisation of immigration stories is a sustained technique in media to submerge the ethical and humanitarian paradigms presented by immigration

Industrial application of fuzzy systems; adaptive fuzzy control of solder paste stencil printing

This paper presents an adaptive fuzzy control algorithm for the control of the solder paste stencil printing stage of surface mount printed circuit board assembly. The proposed method of automatic solder paste stencil printing consist of four blocks; fuzzy feature extraction, defect classifcation of paste deposits, adaptive fuzzy rule-based model identifcation and subsequently an optimal control action for the stencil printing process. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the capability of the algorithm

Flame resistant elastic elastomeric fibers

Development of materials to improve flame resistance of elastic elastomeric fibers is discussed. Two approaches, synthesis of polyether based urethanes and modification of synthesized urethanes with flame ratardant additives, are described. Specific applications of both techniques are presented

Does the far-infrared/radio correlation in spiral galaxies extend to the spatial domain

A comparison is made between the spatial distribution of the thermal far-infrared and non-thermal radio emission of nearby spiral galaxies. This is done in an attempt to improve our understanding of the well known correlation between the integrated Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) far-infrared and radio emission of spiral galaxies, e.g., de Jong et al., 1985, Helou et al., 1986. A physical explanation for this correlation is not straight forward due to the ambiguous nature of the origin of the far-infrared and radio, and the dependence of the non-thermal radio on each galaxies' magnetic field. It is now widely believed that the infrared emission detected in the longer wavelength IRAS wavebands (less than 50 microns) arises from at least two distinct sources, e.g., Cox et al., 1986, Persson and Helou, 1987: (1) a warm (T approx. 40 K) component associated with dense dust clouds heated by embedded O and B type stars; and (2) a cooler (T approx. 20 K) component associated with diffuse dust distributed throughout the interstellar matter (ISM) heated by the interstellar radiation field. A link between the warm component and the radio via electrons originating in Type II supernovae (the ultimate fate of many of the O and B type stars responsible for the warm component) has been suggested by numerous authors. The supporting evidence is scarce and inconclusive. Researchers have attempted to provide some insight into the problem by looking at the spatial distribution of the different components in some nearby spiral galaxies, starting with the face-on spiral M51. The source of the far-infrared data is the IRAS chopped photometric channel (CPC) instrument. Warm and cold far-infrared fluxes integrated over all wavelengths and the radio intensity at two frequencies are plotted against radius. All plots are to a common resolution of 100 arcsec, the radio data originating from the Cambridge Low Frequency Synthesis Telescope (151 MHz) and the VLA (1490 MHz, from Condon, 1987). The warm and cold regions are assumed to be representedby a single galactic wide temperatures of 50 K and 20 K respectively. A dust emissivity of 1 has been assumed. The form of the plots is little effected by varying these assumptions. The radio and cold component curves appear to follow each other most closely, in contradiction to the simple OB star/type II supernovae hypothesis