Mandatory Disclosure about Environmental and Employee Matters in the Reports of Italian-Listed Corporate Groups

This paper analyses the impact of Italian Legislative Decree 32/2007 – following the 2003/51 European Directive – and the disclosure of environmental and employee matters in terms of overall volume, completeness of information, presence of bad/good news and target-oriented information. Content analysis has been applied to all Italian corporate groups that made public both the consolidated annual report and the stand-alone social and environmental report in 2005 and in 2010, for a total of 96 reports. The results show that despite the overall increase in sentences devoted to environmental and employee matters, the completeness of the information has not substantially improved, indicating that the 2007 regulation has been ineffective. The Italian experience could provide useful insights for European regulators. Such insights may inform policy recommendations to design a mandated social and environmental accountability process with the potential of providing information to societal stakeholders while facilitating accountability

Qualitative and Mixed Methods Social Media Research: A Review of the Literature

Social media technologies have attracted substantial attention among many types of users including researchers who have published studies for several years. This article presents an overview of trends in qualitative and mixed methods social media research literature published from 2007 through 2013. A collection of 229 qualitative studies were identified through a systematic literature review process. A subset of 55 of these articles report studies involving a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Articles were reviewed, analyzed, and coded through a qualitative content analysis approach. Overall trends are presented with respect to the entire collection of articles followed by an analysis of mixed methods research approaches identified in the subset of 55 studies. The most commonly used research approaches involved collecting data from people through interview, focus group, and survey methodologies. Content analysis was the second most commonly used approach whereby researchers use Facebook posts, Tweets (Twitter posts), YouTube videos, or other social media content as a data source. Many of the studies involving combinations of quantitative and qualitative data followed a design resembling Creswell and Plano Clark’s basic mixed methods typology (e.g., convergent parallel, explanatory sequential, and exploratory sequential)

Revealing the news: How online news changes without you noticing

This paper describes an ongoing design project relating to online news and how alterations to news stories are hidden from the reader. As the delivery and consumption of news content online continues to overtake other channels in reader numbers and market penetration, so methods of transparency and reliability developed over centuries continue also to be tested by digital media. We have conducted content analysis on existing stories and examined how news organisations and channels handle rapidly evolving news stories. We have proceeded to develop low-fidelity prototypes and an interaction model to test our design approach. The outcomes are in production and will result in a digital artifact that reveals editorial changes to news items (the News Inspector). These changes will be made visible within the browser. The implications of the project relate to the wider question of news truth-telling, trust and online news credibility

On the Effective Description of Large Volume Compactifications

We study the reliability of the Two-Step moduli stabilization in the type-IIB Large Volume Scenarios with matter and gauge interactions. The general analysis is based on a family of N=1 Supergravity models with a factorizable Kaehler invariant function, where the decoupling between two sets of fields without a mass hierarchy is easily understood. For the Large Volume Scenario particular analyses are performed for explicit models, one of such developed for the first time here, finding that the simplified version, where the Dilaton and Complex structure moduli are regarded as frozen by a previous stabilization, is a reliable supersymmetric description whenever the neglected fields stand at their leading F-flatness conditions and be neutral. The terms missed by the simplified approach are either suppressed by powers of the Calabi-Yau volume, or are higher order operators in the matter fields, and then irrelevant for the moduli stabilization rocedure. Although the power of the volume suppressing such corrections depends on the particular model, up to the mass level it is independent of the modular weight for the matter fields. This at least for the models studied here but we give arguments to expect the same in general. These claims are checked through numerical examples. We discuss how the factorizable models present a context where despite the lack of a hierarchy with the supersymmetry breaking scale, the effective theory still has a supersymmetric description. This can be understood from the fact that it is possible to find vanishing solution for the auxiliary components of the fields being integrated out, independently of the remaining dynamics. Our results settle down the question on the reliability of the way the Dilaton and Complex structure are treated in type-IIB compactifications with large compact manifold volumina.Comment: 23 pages + 2 appendices (38 pages total). v2: minor improvements, typos fixed. Version published in JHE

Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: An analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Contemporary Social Science on 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21582041.2017.1367833.[EN] The infotainment format offers candidates an informal setting to show a more personal side of themselves to the electorate, opening themselves up to potential voters. An example of media hybridisation, social networks users can immediately comment on infotainment television programmes, a process known as second screening. These second screeners tend to be especially active in politics. This paper analyses the immediate emotional reaction of these users as they watch infotainment programmes that air during the campaign or pre-campaign seasons and feature political candidates as guests. We have confirmed that second screeners react more emotionally towards the candidate when his or her party is mentioned, and less emotionally when the host displays an aggressive attitude through his or her non-verbal communication. When issues related to the candidate¿s personal lives are discussed, users¿ emotional reactions improve slightly. The relevance of this research stems from the fact that we are witnessing the consolidation of a politics that increasingly strays from ideological questions, and instead focuses on more emotional and personal issues.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad under Grants CSO2013-43960-R and CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R.Baviera, T.; Peris, À.; Cano-Orón, L. (2019). Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: An analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season. Contemporary Social Science. 14(1):144-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2017.1367833S144156141Baum, M. A., & Jamison, A. S. (2006). TheOprahEffect: How Soft News Helps Inattentive Citizens Vote Consistently. The Journal of Politics, 68(4), 946-959. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00482.xBravo-Marquez, F., Mendoza, M., & Poblete, B. (2014). Meta-level sentiment models for big social data analysis. Knowledge-Based Systems, 69, 86-99. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2014.05.016Casero-Ripollés, A., Feenstra, R. A., & Tormey, S. (2016). Old and New Media Logics in an Electoral Campaign. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 21(3), 378-397. doi:10.1177/1940161216645340Ceron, A., & Splendore, S. (2016). From contents to comments: Social TV and perceived pluralism in political talk shows. New Media & Society, 20(2), 659-675. doi:10.1177/1461444816668187Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759477.001.0001Dang-Xuan, L., Stieglitz, S., Wladarsch, J., & Neuberger, C. (2013). AN INVESTIGATION OF INFLUENTIALS AND THE ROLE OF SENTIMENT IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON TWITTER DURING ELECTION PERIODS. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 795-825. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.783608Giglietto, F., & Selva, D. (2014). Second Screen and Participation: A Content Analysis on a Full Season Dataset of Tweets. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 260-277. doi:10.1111/jcom.12085Grabe, M. E., & Bucy, E. P. (2009). Image Bite Politics. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195372076.001.0001Guo, L., & Vargo, C. (2015). The Power of Message Networks: A Big-Data Analysis of the Network Agenda Setting Model and Issue Ownership. Mass Communication and Society, 18(5), 557-576. doi:10.1080/15205436.2015.1045300Harrington, S. (2008). Popular news in the 21st century Time for a new critical approach? Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, 9(3), 266-284. doi:10.1177/1464884907089008López-Rico, C.-M., & Peris-Blanes, À. (2017). Agenda e imagen de los candidatos de las elecciones generales de 2015 en España en programas televisivos de infoentretenimiento. El Profesional de la Información, 26(4), 611. doi:10.3145/epi.2017.jul.05Maruyama, M., Robertson, S. P., Douglas, S., Raine, R., & Semaan, B. (2017). Social Watching a Civic Broadcast. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998340Medhat, W., Hassan, A., & Korashy, H. (2014). Sentiment analysis algorithms and applications: A survey. Ain Shams Engineering Journal, 5(4), 1093-1113. doi:10.1016/j.asej.2014.04.011Saif, H., He, Y., & Alani, H. (2012). Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 508-524. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35176-1_32Shah, D. V., Hanna, A., Bucy, E. P., Lassen, D. S., Van Thomme, J., Bialik, K., … Pevehouse, J. C. W. (2016). Dual Screening During Presidential Debates. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(14), 1816-1843. doi:10.1177/0002764216676245Sullivan, D. G., & Masters, R. D. (1988). «Happy Warriors»: Leaders’ Facial Displays, Viewers’ Emotions, and Political Support. American Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 345. doi:10.2307/2111127Thelwall, M., Buckley, K., Paltoglou, G., Cai, D., & Kappas, A. (2010). Sentiment strength detection in short informal text. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(12), 2544-2558. doi:10.1002/asi.21416Vergeer, M., & Franses, P. H. (2015). Live audience responses to live televised election debates: time series analysis of issue salience and party salience on audience behavior. Information, Communication & Society, 19(10), 1390-1410. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1093526Vilares, D., Thelwall, M., & Alonso, M. A. (2015). The megaphone of the people? Spanish SentiStrength for real-time analysis of political tweets. Journal of Information Science, 41(6), 799-813. doi:10.1177/0165551515598926Wohn, D. Y., & Na, E.-K. (2011). Tweeting about TV: Sharing television viewing experiences via social media message streams. First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v16i3.336

Dark Radiation and Dark Matter in Large Volume Compactifications

We argue that dark radiation is naturally generated from the decay of the overall volume modulus in the LARGE volume scenario. We consider both sequestered and non-sequestered cases, and find that the axionic superpartner of the modulus is produced by the modulus decay and it can account for the dark radiation suggested by observations, while the modulus decay through the Giudice-Masiero term gives the dominant contribution to the total decay rate. In the sequestered case, the lightest supersymmetric particles produced by the modulus decay can naturally account for the observed dark matter density. In the non-sequestered case, on the other hand, the supersymmetric particles are not produced by the modulus decay, since the soft masses are of order the heavy gravitino mass. The QCD axion will then be a plausible dark matter candidate.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures; version 3: version published in JHE

Mixed Mediation of Supersymmetry Breaking with Anomalous U(1) Gauge Symmetry

Models with anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry contain various superfields which can have nonzero supersymmetry breaking auxiliary components providing the origin of soft terms in the visible sector, e.g. the U(1) vector superfield, the modulus or dilaton superfield implementing the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism, U(1)-charged but standard model singlet matter superfield required to cancel the Fayet-Iliopoulos term, and finally the supergravity multiplet. We examine the relative strength between these supersymmetry breaking components in a simple class of models, and find that various different mixed mediations of supersymmetry breaking, involving the modulus, gauge, anomaly and D-term mediations, can be realized depending upon the characteristics of D-flat directions and how those D-flat directions are stabilized with a vanishing cosmological constant. We identify two parameters which represent such properties and thus characterize how the various mediations are mixed. We also discuss the moduli stabilization and soft terms in a variant of KKLT scenario, in which the visible sector K\"ahler modulus is stabilized by the D-term potential of anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

Inheriting library cards to Babel and Alexandria: Contemporary metaphors for the digital library

Librarians have been consciously adopting metaphors to describe library concepts since the nineteenth century, helping us to structure our understanding of new technologies. We have drawn extensively on these figurative frameworks to explore issues surrounding the digital library, yet very little has been written to date which interrogates how these metaphors have developed over the years. Previous studies have explored library metaphors, using either textual analysis or ethnographic methods to investigate their usage. However, this is to our knowledge the first study to use bibliographic data, corpus analysis, qualitative sentiment weighting and close reading to study particular metaphors in detail. It draws on a corpus of over 450 articles to study the use of the metaphors of the Library of Alexandria and Babel, concluding that both have been extremely useful as framing metaphors for the digital library. However, their longstanding use has seen them become stretched as metaphors, meaning that the field’s figurative framework now fails to represent the changing technologies which underpin contemporary digital libraries

Erasmus Language students in a British University – a case study

Students’ assessment of their academic experience is actively sought by Higher Education institutions, as evidenced in the National Student Survey introduced in 2005. Erasmus students, despite their growing numbers, tend to be excluded from these satisfaction surveys, even though they, too, are primary customers of a University. This study aims to present results from bespoke questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with a sample of Erasmus students studying languages in a British University. These methods allow us insight into the experience of these students and their assessment as a primary customer, with a focus on language learning and teaching, university facilities and student support. It investigates to what extent these factors influence their levels of satisfaction and what costs of adaptation if any, they encounter. Although excellent levels of satisfaction were found, some costs affect their experience. They relate to difficulties in adapting to a learning methodology based on a low number of hours and independent learning and to a guidance and support system seen as too stifling. The results portray this cohort’s British University as a well-equipped and well-meaning but ultimately overbearing institution, which may indicate that minimising costs can eliminate some sources of dissatisfaction

Dynamic knowledge integration in socio-technical networks: an interpretive study of intranet use for knowledge integration

A major challenge facing firms competing in electronic business markets is the dynamic integration of knowledge within and beyond the firm, enabled by internet-based infrastructure and emergent fluid socio-technical networks. This paper explores how social actors dynamically employ intranets to integrate formal and informal knowledge within evolving socio-technical networks that emerge, permeate and extend beyond the organisational boundary. The paper presents two case studies that illustrate how static intranets can be useful for dynamically integrating knowledge when they are interwoven with other knowledge channels such as e-mail through which flows the informal knowledge needed to make sense of and situate formal organisational knowledge. The findings suggest that businesses should carefully examine how employees integrate intranets with other channels in their work, and the shaping of knowledge outcomes that flows from such use. There are practical implications for the proper skilling of thepeople who share and integrate knowledge in this way. The paper also provides a framework for dynamic knowledge integration in socio-technical networks, which can help underpin future research in this area.<br /