From regional to national clouds: TV coverage in the Czech Republic

Media, and particularly TV media, have a great impact on the general public. In recent years, spatial patterns of information and the relevance of intangible geographies have become increasingly important. Gatekeeping plays a critical role in the selection of information that is transformed into media. Therefore, gatekeeping, through national media, also co-forms the generation of mental maps. In this paper, correspondence analysis (a statistical method) combined with cloud lines (a new visual analytics technique) is used to analyze how individual major regional events in one of the post-communist countries, the Czech Republic, penetrate into the media on a national scale. Although national news should minimize distortions about regions, this assumption has not been verified by our research. Impressions presented by the media of selected regions that were markedly influenced by one or several events in those regions demonstrate that gatekeepers, especially news reporters, functioned as a filter by selecting only a few specific, and in many cases, unusual events for dissemination.Web of Science1111art. no. e016552

The ALADIN system and its canonical model configurations AROME CY41T1 and ALARO CY40T1

The ALADIN System is a numerical weather prediction (NWP) system developed by the international ALADIN consortium for operational weather forecasting and research purposes. It is based on a code that is shared with the global model IFS of the ECMWF and the ARPEGE model of Meteo-France. Today, this system can be used to provide a multitude of high-resolution limited-area model (LAM) configurations. A few configurations are thoroughly validated and prepared to be used for the operational weather forecasting in the 16 partner institutes of this consortium. These configurations are called the ALADIN canonical model configurations (CMCs). There are currently three CMCs: the ALADIN baseline CMC, the AROME CMC and the ALARO CMC. Other configurations are possible for research, such as process studies and climate simulations. The purpose of this paper is (i) to define the ALADIN System in relation to the global counterparts IFS and ARPEGE, (ii) to explain the notion of the CMCs, (iii) to document their most recent versions, and (iv) to illustrate the process of the validation and the porting of these configurations to the operational forecast suites of the partner institutes of the ALADIN consortium. This paper is restricted to the forecast model only; data assimilation techniques and postprocessing techniques are part of the ALADIN System but they are not discussed here

Parameter estimation of nonlinear econometric models using particle swarm optimization

Global optimization is an essential component of econometric modeling. Optimization in econometrics is often difficult due to irregular cost functions characterized by multiple local optima. The goal of this paper is to apply a relatively new stochastic global technique, particle swarm optimization, to the well-known but difficult disequilibrium problem. Because of its co-operative nature and balance of local and global search, particle swarm is successful in optimizing the disequilibrium maximum likelihood function, providing better values than those reported in the literature obtained using other stochastic techniques. These encouraging results suggest that particle swarm optimization may be successfully applied to difficult econometrics problems, possibly in conjunction with existing methods

The Image of the Czech Agriculture Based on the National Television News in the Period of Adaptation of Czechia Into the European Union: Regional Perspectives

Agriculture represents one of the most important economic activities that co-creates the qualities of landscapes. While topics such as food production, land utilization, or the development of rural regions are typically taken into account when analysing agriculture, regionally differentiated media portrayals of agriculture constitute a largely innovative approach. The main objective of this paper is to analyse and interpret agriculture-oriented news about individual self-governing regions in Czechia that were broadcasted in the framework of the national TV reporting. The paper is conceived as a historical study of the creation of the image of agriculture in the period from 2004 to 2011, which we define as the period of adaptation of Czech agriculture to the EU. The article includes both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. In summary, the media portrayals of agriculture largely differ from real conditions in Czech self-governing regions. Important themes, such as common agricultural policy or organic farming, have been mostly ignored within regionally focused national TV coverage. On the contrary, TV news is typically focused on one or a few phenomena of unusual or negative character, which is consistent with the gatekeeping conception

multimodal

metrics based on nonadditive entropies for 2D-3

Cloud line visualization of two regions and two categories, grouped by region.

<p>The default bandwidth (<i>h</i> = 7 days) and scaling factor (<i>α</i> = 1) are used. Each category is colored uniquely. Data for the entire time duration are displayed.</p

Chi-Squared test corresponding to hypothesis <i>H</i>₁.

<p>Chi-Squared test corresponding to hypothesis <i>H</i>₁.</p