No End in Sight: A Critical Discourse Analysis of U.S. National Newspaper Coverage of the Iraq War

On May 1, 2003, standing in front of a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished” aboard the warship U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, President Bush announced an end to major combat in Iraq, referring to the war as “one victory in the war on terror.” Over seven years later, on August 31, 2010, President Obama in a televised speech also announced an end to the combat mission in Iraq. On October 21, 2011, President Obama once again reaffirmed that U.S. military personnel would be leaving Iraq, saluting the troops on their “success” and remarking on the Iraqi government’s readiness for governing. And finally, on December 14, 2011, four days before the last U.S. troops left Iraq, President Obama, once again declared the end of the war and said: “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” The informational battlefront is a salient feature of any war, and understanding the role the mass media play in the production and packaging of information in the form of news offers fertile ground for Library and Information Science scholars. This study examines U.S. national newspapers’ representations of and discursive construction of two of these ‘endings,’ 2003 and 2011. Using the method of critical discourse analysis, news coverage is analyzed in order to understand and explain the discursive constructions of meaning in news reports about the end of the war, with a focus on outcomes, consequences, and responsibility for these. The three-part analysis that follows consists of a contextual analysis, a textual analysis, and a historical-diachronic analysis identifying the dominant discourses, and comparing and contrasting these in the two ‘endings.’ By shedding light on these discursive structures, this study seeks to elevate and make clear the ideological basis to hegemonic news discourses. The findings showed the media offer a narrow range of discursive possibilities that delimit the parameters of discourse on the Iraq War; however, there is also some variation within these parameters which give the impression of information plurality. A pro-American bias permeates the news discourse that has implications for the democratic and educational function of news as an informational product

Multistatic hybrid SAR/ISAR data generation using a stationary target

There is great interest in multistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems as they are capable of providing high resolution images. These systems could prove promising candidates for provision of surveillance for both military and civilian interest. Both multistatic SAR and its counterpart, multistatic inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), are limited by their assumptions of observing a stationary target from a moving platform and vice-versa. Hence, without adequate target motion compensation, their resultant radar images appear defocused. Arranging experiments capable of providing repeatable multistatic hybrid SAR/ISAR data of real moving targets can be difficult and costly. One viable approach is the novel method presented in this study, whereby multistatic hybrid SAR/ISAR data can be collected of a target moving with a theoretical motion, without the requirement of an actual moving target – the theoretical motion is brought about through the appropriate motion of antennas. The study demonstrates, both through simulation and experimentation, how radar trajectories of a given SAR system can be altered to arrive at the equivalent setup of observing a moving target. Results from simulation and from an experiment conducted at the Cranfield University Ground-Based SAR (GBSAR) laboratory are presented, showing the utility of this approach

Ayurvedic Aristology: Dining Etiquette in Ayurveda

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Dental public health in India: An insight

Oral diseases are a major public health problem, and their burden is on increase in many low- and middle-income countries. Dental public health (DPH) aims to improve the oral health of the population through preventive and curative services. However, its achievements in India are being questioned probably because of lack of proficiency and skill among DPH personnel. The literature search for the present study was conducted utilizing various search engines and electronic databases such as PubMed and MEDLINE. Documents related to the Central and State Governments of India were also considered. Finally, 26 articles were selected for the present study from which relevant information can be extracted. The present study focuses on some of the important aspects relating to DPH in India such as priority for oral health, DPH workforce and curriculum, utilization of DPH personnel in providing primary oral health care, role of mobile dental vans, and research in DPH. It was concluded that more attention should be given toward preventive oral health care by employing more number of public health dentists in public sector, strengthening DPH education and research, and combining oral health programs with general health-care programs