The rise and fall of the public sphere? Public Service Broadcasting in Ireland, a wasted opportunity?

The following thesis has set itself the task of answering the following questions. Does RTEs news and current affairs constitute a public sphere? Does it provide the viewer or listener with a detailed, substantive analysis of the issues it covers, providing the viewer with an arsenal of political facts in the process? Do we emerge at the end of any given broadcast a better-informed electorate? Or is the station guilty of the charge levelled against it by many of its critics, namely, that in the search for ratings, it has jettisoned its public service remit to deal with the issues it covers in a detailed way, and instead embarked on a “dumbing down” or tabloidisation of this aspect of its output

The rise and fall of the public sphere? Public Service Broadcasting in Ireland, a wasted opportunity?

The following thesis has set itself the task of answering the following questions. Does RTEs news and current affairs constitute a public sphere? Does it provide the viewer or listener with a detailed, substantive analysis of the issues it covers, providing the viewer with an arsenal of political facts in the process? Do we emerge at the end of any given broadcast a better-informed electorate? Or is the station guilty of the charge levelled against it by many of its critics, namely, that in the search for ratings, it has jettisoned its public service remit to deal with the issues it covers in a detailed way, and instead embarked on a “dumbing down” or tabloidisation of this aspect of its output

Longitudinal and transverse meson correlators in the deconfined phase from the lattice

It has long been known that QCD undergoes a deconfining phase transition at high temperature. One of the consequent features of this new, quark-gluon phase is that hadrons become unbounded. In this talk meson correlation functions at non-zero momentum are studied in the deconfined phase using the Maximum Entropy Method.Comment: 6 pages. Prepared for Achievements and New Directions in Subatomic Physics: Workshop in Honour of Tony Thomas' 60th Birthday, Adelaide, Australia, 15-19 Feb 201

Believing the Integrity of a System (Invited Talk)

AbstractAn integrity policy defines the situations when modification of information is authorised and is enforced by the protection mechanisms of a system. Traditional models of protection tend to define integrity in terms of ad-hoc authorisation techniques whose effectiveness are justified more on the basis of experience and "best practice" rather than on any theoretical foundation. In a complex application system it is possible that an integrity policy may have been incorrectly configured, or that the protection mechanisms are inadequate, resulting in an unexpected system compromise. This paper examines the meaning of integrity and and describes a simple belief logic approach for analysing the integrity of a system configuration

Spectral functions at small energies and the electrical conductivity in hot, quenched lattice QCD

In lattice QCD, the Maximum Entropy Method can be used to reconstruct spectral functions from euclidean correlators obtained in numerical simulations. We show that at finite temperature the most commonly used algorithm, employing Bryan's method, is inherently unstable at small energies and give a modification that avoids this. We demonstrate this approach using the vector current-current correlator obtained in quenched QCD at finite temperature. Our first results indicate a small electrical conductivity above the deconfinement transition.Comment: 4 pages, v2: minor changes, footnote corrected, to appear in PR