Consolidation in the UK commercial radio sector: the impact on newsroom practice of recent changes in regulation, ownership and the local content requirement

This article aims to explore the implications for local radio news in the UK commercial radio industry of a series of changes to the regulation of the sector since it was first established in the 1970s. A recent regulatory focus on product rather than process has enabled groups of stations to move not only programming production but also much news journalism out of the editorial areas it is intended to serve and into news ‘hubs’ intended to rationalize the process of news gathering and bulletin presentation and enable the groups to become increasingly profitable. The article considers a number of issues around the management of commercial radio groups in the United Kingdom, the development and, most recently, exploitation of the group ownership system of what mainly began as locally owned and locally operated radio stations, and the appropriateness of the current regulatory regime in the much altered media landscape of today. It uses original data derived from the ownership groups themselves to show the extent to which ‘hubs’ are routinely being used to increase profitability by making economies of scale, while also taking news journalism out of the editorial areas it is intended to cover

Journaling to Support Student Learning: The Case of an Elementary Number Theory Course

The use of journals in supporting student learning in elementary number theory is explored. Implications are made for the use of reflective writing for the teaching and learning of proofs and for undergraduate mathematics education

A legislator`s guide to municipal solid waste management

The purpose of this guide is to allow individual state legislators to gain a better understanding of municipal solid waste (MSW) management issues in general, and examine the applicability of these concerns to their state. This guide incorporates a discussion of MSW management issues and a comprehensive overview of the components of an integrated solid waste management system. Major MSW topics discussed include current management issues affecting states, federal activities, and state laws and local activities. Solid waste characteristics and management approaches are also detailed

Accretion disc time lag distributions: applying CREAM to simulated AGN light curves

DAS acknowledges the support of the Science and Technologies Funding Council studentship. KH acknowledges support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) consolidated grant to St Andrews (ST/M001296/1).Active galactic nuclei (AGN) vary in their brightness across all wavelengths. Moreover, longer wavelength ultraviolet-optical continuum light curves appear to be delayed with respect to shorter wavelength light curves. A simple way to model these delays is by assuming thermal reprocessing of a variable point source (a lamp post) by a blackbody accretion disc. We introduce a new method, CREAM (Continuum REprocessed AGN Markov Chain Monte Carlo), that models continuum variations using this lamp post model. The disc light curves lag the lamp post emission with a time delay distribution sensitive to the disc temperature-radius profile and inclination.We test CREAM's ability to recover both inclination and product of black hole mass and accretion rate MM˙ , and show that the code is also able to infer the shape of the driving light curve. CREAM is applied to synthetic light curves expected from 1000 s exposures of a 17th magnitude AGN with a 2-m telescope in Sloan g and i bands with Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 500-900 depending on the filter and lunar phase.We also test CREAM on poorer quality g and i light curves with SNR = 100. We find in the high-SNR case that CREAM can recover the accretion disc inclination to within an uncertainty of 5° and an MM˙to within 0.04 dex.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe