Water Balloon Rupture in Low‐G

A qualitative study of the bursting of water balloons in a simulated low-gravity environment was conducted aboard NASA Lewis’s DC-9 aircraft. The tests were performed to develop techniques to rapidly deploy large liquid drops in a microgravity environment

The Return of the Honeymoon: Television News Coverage of New Presidents, 1981-2009

Content analysis of network evening news coverage during the first year of the Barack Obama presidency revealed coverage that was far more positive in tone than comparable news reports from the first years of the Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush presidencies. Both domestic and international policy evaluations of the Obama presidency were more positive in tone than those of the last three presidents to take office during partisan transfers of power. The findings reveal a revival of the media honeymoon that scholars thought had disappeared during the modern era of a more combative press. An investigation of the “beat sweetening” hypothesis reveals mixed results, suggesting the need for further investigation

News Coverage of New Presidents in \u3ci\u3eThe New York Times\u3c/i\u3e, 1981-2009

Content analysis of front-page The New York Times stories during the first year of the Barack Obama presidency revealed news coverage that was far more positive in tone than that received during the first year of the Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush presidencies. Overall, the Obama findings reveal a media honeymoon in that influential newspaper, a sharp contrast from first-year coverage of other presidents during the modern era of a more combative press. The positive policy coverage Obama received in the Times was also significantly more positive than on evening newscasts of network television and on Fox News’ Special Report

Network Television’s Coverage of the 2008 Presidential Election

Content analysis of network evening news coverage of the 2008 presidential election revealed a slight increase in the amount of coverage and a decline in the coverage of policy matters compared to 4 years earlier. Barack Obama received the most positive coverage recorded for any major party nominee on network television since the Center for Media and Public Affairs started analyzing election news content in 1988. The tonal gap between the Democratic and Republican nominees was also the largest recorded over the past six presidential elections. The one-sided coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC was in sharp contrast to the more uniformly negative coverage of the two candidates during the evening newscasts on Fox News

Partisan Targets of Media Fact-checking: Examining President Obama and the 113th Congress

An analysis of statements by President Obama and by Democratic and Republican members of Congress selected for analysis by PolitiFact.com and Washington Post Fact Checker reveals that PolitiFact was more likely to find greater deceit in Republican rhetoric and that the Fact Checker was more negative overall in its assessments. Legislators who had more than one statement analyzed during the study period were disproportionally likely to be influential members of the House or Senate leadership or likely 2016 presidential candidates. The lawmakers selected for greater scrutiny were also more likely to be more ideologically extreme than the median members of their party caucuses

Tree Recruitment Limitation by Introduced Snowshoe Hares, Lepus americanus, on Kent Island, New Brunswick

Species introductions often have negative consequences for native plant and animal communities of islands. Herbivores introduced to islands lacking predators can attain high population densities and alter native plant communities by selective consumption of palatable plants. We examined the legacy of the 1959 introduction of Snowshoe Hares (Lepus americanus) to Kent Island, New Brunswick, by reconstructing a history of tree recruitment on Kent Island and on nearby Outer Wood Island, which lacks Snowshoe Hares. Tree-ring records show pronounced recruitment peaks associated with farm abandonment in the 1930s for Kent Island and in the 1950s for Outer Wood Island. Following the introduction of Snowshoe Hares to Kent Island, tree recruitment plummeted and has remained low ever since. In contrast, trees continued to establish throughout the latter 20th century on Outer Wood Island. The high rates of seedling mortality on Kent Island associated with Snowshoe Hare browsing coupled with high rates of canopy tree mortality threaten to degrade severely the forest of this important seabird nesting sanctuary

International News Coverage of Barack Obama as a New President

Content-analyzed television newscasts in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Middle East during 2009 gave the new president more positive coverage than did US media. International news turned negative during the first half of 2010 but remained less negative than US news for most outlets. Positive international news coverage focused on Obama’s personality and his capacity to govern, while Middle East policies received largely negative comments. These findings demonstrate a president’s limited ability to “spin” international news and underscore key differences among domestic and international news outlets regarding coverage of a new US president

A meta-model for automatic modeling dynamic web applications

This paper proposes an approach to automatically transform source code of a web application into an abstraction model. A Web Application Program Dependency (WAPD) meta-model is being proposed to store dependency information based on a multi-tiered architecture, corresponding to web application’s behavior. A WebParseTree is used as an intermediate model for the transformation from the source code to the WAPD model. The WebParseTree is a DOM-like tree that consists of statements and dependencies stored information and behavior in the tree. To ensure that the resulting model is valid, it must conform to the defined web application rules. This validation step can be done automatically by a constraint validator using Object Constraint Language (OCL). The WAPD model will be represented as a generic model for web applications which can be used for many purposes such as automatic test case generation and automatic code transformation