The Opinion Editorial: teaching physiology outside the box

Improving the public understanding of science is an important challenge for the future professional scientists who are our current undergraduates. In this paper, we present a conceptual model that explores the role of mass media as community gatekeepers of new scientific findings. This model frames the benefits for undergraduate science students to learn about media genres so that they can learn to communicate science more effectively to nonprofessional audiences. Informed by this Media Role model, we then detail a novel writing task for undergraduate physiology students, the Opinion Editorial (Op-Ed), and an accompanying Peer Review. The Op-Ed genre was directly taught to the students by a professional journalist. As an assessment task, students presented a recent, highly technical paper as an Op-Ed. This was assessed by both faculty members and peers using a detailed assessment rubric. Most students were able to replicate the features of Op-Eds and attained high grades on their writing tasks. Survey data from final-year physiology students (n = 230) were collected before and after the implementation of the Op-Ed/Peer Review. These indicated that most students were aware of the importance of scientists to effectively communicate their knowledge to nonprofessional audiences, that the Op-Ed writing task was challenging, and that they believed that their ability to write to nonprofessional audiences was improved after explicit teaching and feedback.

Perspectivas e metodologias de pesquisa da Comunica����o Social no contexto da internet com o Big Data e da especializa����o Data Scientist

O trabalho desenvolvido analisa a Comunica����o Social no contexto da internet e delineia novas metodologias de estudo para a ��rea na filtragem de significados no ��mbito cient��fico dos fluxos de informa����o das redes sociais, m��dias de not��cias ou qualquer outro dispositivo que permita armazenamento e acesso a informa����o estruturada e n��o estruturada. No intento de uma reflex��o sobre os caminhos, que estes fluxos de informa����o se desenvolvem e principalmente no volume produzido, o projeto dimensiona os campos de significados que tal rela����o se configura nas teorias e pr��ticas de pesquisa. O objetivo geral deste trabalho �� contextualizar a ��rea da Comunica����o Social dentro de uma realidade mut��vel e din��mica que �� o ambiente da internet e fazer paralelos perante as aplica����es j�� sucedidas por outras ��reas. Com o m��todo de estudo de caso foram analisados tr��s casos sob duas chaves conceituais a Web Sphere Analysis e a Web Science refletindo os sistemas de informa����o contrapostos no quesito discursivo e estrutural. Assim se busca observar qual ganho a Comunica����o Social tem no modo de visualizar seus objetos de estudo no ambiente das internet por essas perspectivas. O resultado da pesquisa mostra que �� um desafio para o pesquisador da Comunica����o Social buscar novas aprendizagens, mas a retroalimenta����o de informa����o no ambiente colaborativo que a internet apresenta �� um caminho f��rtil para pesquisa, pois a modelagem de dados ganha corpus anal��tico quando o conjunto de ferramentas promovido e impulsionado pela tecnologia permite isolar conte��dos e possibilita aprofundamento dos significados e suas rela����es.

The discourse of climate change: a corpus-based approach

Based on Goffman���s definition that frames are general ���schemata of interpretation��� that people use to ���locate, perceive, identify, and label���, other scholars have used the concept in a more specific way to analyze media coverage. Frames are used in the sense of organizing devices that allow journalists to select and emphasise topics, to decide ���what matters��� (Gitlin 1980). Gamson and Modigliani (1989) consider frames as being embedded within ���media packages��� that can be seen as ���giving meaning��� to an issue. According to Entman (1993), framing comprises a combination of different activities such as: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. Previous research has analysed climate change with the purpose of testing Downs���s model of the issue attention cycle (Trumbo 1996), to uncover media biases in the US press (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004), to highlight differences between nations (Brossard et al. 2004; Grundmann 2007) or to analyze cultural reconstructions of scientific knowledge (Carvalho and Burgess 2005). In this paper we shall present data from a corpus linguistics-based approach. We will be drawing on results of a pilot study conducted in Spring 2008 based on the Nexis news media archive. Based on comparative data from the US, the UK, France and Germany, we aim to show how the climate change issue has been framed differently in these countries and how this framing indicates differences in national climate change policies.

Re-imagining Yerevan in the post-Soviet era: Urban symbolism and narratives of the nation in the landscape of Armenia's capital

The urban landscape of Yerevan has experienced tremendous changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Armenia���s independence in 1991. Domestic and foreign investments have poured into Yerevan���s building sector, converting many downtown neighborhoods into sleek modern districts that now cater to foreign investors, tourists, and the newly rich Armenian nationals. Large portions of the city���s green parks and other public spaces have been commercialized for private and exclusive use, creating zones that are accessible only to the affluent. In this dissertation I explore the rapidly transforming landscape of Yerevan and its connections to the development of contemporary Armenian national identity. This research was guided by principles of ethnographic inquiry, and I employed diverse methods, including document and archival research, structured and semi-structured interviews and content analysis of news media. I also used geographic information systems (GIS) and satellite images to represent and visualize the stark transformations of spaces in Yerevan. Informed by and contributing to three literatures���on the relationship between landscape and identity formation, on the construction of national identity, and on Soviet and post-Soviet cities���this dissertation investigates how messages about contemporary Armenian national identity are being expressed via the transforming landscape of Armenia���s national capital. In it I describe the ways in which abrupt transformations have resulted in the physical and symbolic eviction of residents, introducing fierce public debates about belonging and exclusion within the changing urban context. I demonstrate that the new additions to Yerevan���s landscape and the symbolic messages that they carry are hotly contested by many long-time residents, who struggle for inclusion of their opinions and interests in the process of re-imagining their national capital. This dissertation illustrates many of the trends that are apparent in post-Soviet and post-Socialist space, while at the same time exposing some unique characteristics of the Armenian case.

Filtering the international gender paradigm: Perspectives of gender in Barbados

My work presents a place-specific analysis of how gender paradigms interact across and within spatial scales: the global, the regional, the national and the personal. It briefly outlines the concepts and measures defining the international gender paradigm, and explores the filtration of this paradigm into assessments and understandings of gender and gender dynamics by and within Barbados. It does this by analyzing the contents of reports of the Barbados government to international bodies assessing the country���s performance in the area of gender equality, and by analyzing gender-comparative content of local print news media over the decade of the 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s. It contextualizes the discussion within the realm of social and economic development. The work shows how the almost singular focus on ���women��� in the international gender paradigm may depreciate valid gender concerns of men and thus hinder the overall goal of achieving gender equality, that is, achieving just, inclusive societies.

Voting with their feet: Migration, partisanship, and party-safe elections in Florida

Political scientists have long noted that Congressional elections are often uncompetitive, often extremely so. Many scholars argue that the cause lies in the partisan redistricting of Congressional districts, or ���gerrymandering���. Other scholars emphasize polarization created by a fragmented news media, or the candidate choices made by a more ideological primary electorate. All these explanations identify the cause of party-safe elections in institutions of various kinds. This dissertation, by contrast, presents a structural explanation of uncompetitive elections. My theory is that population composition and patterns of migration are significant causes and predictors of election results in Florida. I test this theory empirically by comparing the predictions from four hypotheses against aggregate data, using the county as the unit of analysis. The first hypothesis is that Florida can be divided into clearly distinguishable, persistent partisan sections. This hypothesis is confirmed. The second hypothesis is that Florida voters have become increasingly partisan over time. This hypothesis is confirmed. The third hypothesis is that the degree of migration into a county predicts how that county will vote. This hypothesis is partially confirmed, for the migration effect appears to have waned over time. The last hypothesis is that the degree of religiosity of a county population is a predictor of how that county will vote. This hypothesis is also supported by the results of statistical analysis. By identifying the structural causes of party-safe elections, this dissertation not only broadens our understanding of elections in Florida, but also sheds light on the current polarization in American politics.

The discursive construction of Japanese identity and its haunting others

This dissertation examined the formation of Japanese identity politics after World War II. Since World War II, Japan has had to deal with a contradictory image of its national self. On the one hand, as a nation responsible for colonizing fellow Asian countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Japan has struggled with an image/identity as a regional aggressor. On the other hand, having faced the harsh realities of defeat after the war, Japan has seen itself depicted as a victim. By employing the technique of discourse analysis as a way to study identity formation through official foreign policy documents and news media narratives, this study reconceptualized Japanese foreign policy as a set of discursive practices that attempt to produce renewed images of Japan's national self. The dissertation employed case studies to analyze two key sites of Japanese postwar identity formation: (1) the case of Okinawa, an island/territory integral to postwar relations between Japan and the United States and marked by a series of US military rapes of native Okinawan girls; and (2) the case of comfort women in Japan and East Asia, which has led to Japan being blamed for its wartime sexual enslavement of Asian women. These case studies found that it was through coping with the haunting ghost of its wartime past that Japan sought to produce "postwar Japan" as an identity distinct from "wartime imperial Japan" or from "defeated, emasculated Japan" and, thus, hoped to emerge as a "reborn" moral and pacifist nation. The research showed that Japan struggled to invent a new self in a way that mobilized gendered dichotomies and, furthermore, created "others" who were not just spatially located (the United States, Asian neighboring nations) but also temporally marked ("old Japan"). The dissertation concluded that Japanese foreign policy is an ongoing struggle to define the Japanese national self vis-��-vis both spatial and historical "others," and that, consequently, postwar Japan has always been haunted by its past self, no matter how much Japan's foreign policy discourses were trying to make this past self into a distant or forgotten other.

Resistance Performances: (Re)constructing Spaces of Resistance and Contention in the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico Student Movement

On the night of April 20, 2010, a group of students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), R��o Piedras campus, met to organize an indefinite strike that quickly broadened into a defense of accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Although the history of student activism in the UPR can be traced back to the early 1900s, the 2010-2011 strike will be remembered for the student activists��� use of new media technologies as resources that rapidly prompted and aided the numerous protests. This activist research entailed a critical ethnography and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of traditional and alternative media coverage and treatment during the 2010 -2011 UPR student strike. I examined the use of the 2010-2011 UPR student activists��� resistance performances in constructing local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their movement. In particular, I analyzed the different tactics and strategies of resistance or repertoire of collective actions that student activists used (e.g. new media technologies) to frame their collective identities via alternative news media���s (re)presentation of the strike, while juxtaposing the university administration���s counter-resistance performances in counter-framing the student activists��� collective identity via traditional news media representations of the strike. I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism developed, maintained, and/or modified students activists��� collective identities. As such, the UPR student activism���s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change. These networks add to the debate surrounding Internet activism and its impact on student activism. Ultimately, the results of this study highlight the important role student movements have had in challenging different types of government policies and raising awareness of the importance of an accessible public higher education of excellence.

O envelhecimento no espa��o midi��tico: a produ����o de sentidos pelos meios jornal��sticos

Aging as a social phenomenon is guided in the ways of production and reproduction, that is linked to the peculiarities and compliances of the social structure influence the values and erected senses. The search for the understanding of the reality will be given by the appropriation of knowledge/information that in contemporary times are increasingly tied to the media means, so that they go beyond the mere condition media, reaching the condition of instruments of direct, attitudes and opinions production. Among the media instruments, there are news medias, that are important means of information dissemination and consequently production of senses, including over aging. Thus, the objective is to: apprehend the social representations and meanings associated with aging in the media space about aging; browse the social representations about aging in media space and their influence on the relations that are established in the cultural socio-economic context. To do it The Theory of Social Representation will be used. To collect the data, 57 online news from the three main state newspapers were studied: Tribuna do Norte, Gazeta do Povo and Jornal de Hoje, which were captured through a search tol of these newspaper sites, using the words: ���aging������elderly���. These materials were analyzed making use of Bardin���s Qualitative Analysis, which allowed the establishment of five categories, namely: Aging and violence; Aging in contemporary times; Aging and health; Aging and citizenship; and Aging, work and action. In the first category news reporting violent situations are framed the regardless of the victim���s condition or the one charged by the violence, the fragility of elderly persists. In Aging in contemporary times the attempts of the news media to explain the demographic changes of the quantitative increases in the elderly, the burden it may lead to the full development of the country are noticed. In Aging and health is noticed the imminent end of the condition brought on age, as a synonym for diseases and conditions. In the fourth category, Aging and citizenship situations are shown where peculiarities and needs or the elderly need to turn into obligation to be fulfilled, denouncing the condition of low expression and social power of the class. Finally, in Aging, work and action situations that indicate the non-expectation of elderly interaction with new technologies and participation in decision-making directions of society are brought. In a general and specific form this analysis allowed learning the ways of production of meanings about aging in the papers, as these ones tend to represent aging through intentioned situations as hegemonic needs, building the social representation of the elderly as fragile person, submissive, inactive, subject to violence and susceptible to becoming ill.

Managing Vietnamese newsrooms: the role of internal communication

There have been many studies on news production but little has been found about newsroom efficiency despite the fact that this is journalists��� main concern. The very few (mostly foreign) researchers who study Vietnamese media usually look at them from policy making and political-social perspectives, and with an outsider���s eye. They have little physical access, if any, to the media houses, which surely limits their view. Their approach implicitly over-emphasizes the influence of political forces and neglects the media���s own dynamics. This research takes a different approach: from insiders��� point of view. Using two daily newspapers as case studies, this multi-disciplinary ethnographic research seeks to understand the strategies Vietnamese news media employ to cope with the subsidy cuts and increasing competition while still under close political control. A particular focus is on the newsroom operational strategies to improve efficiency. It is found that organizational structure and culture, work climate, motivation and employee satisfaction, leadership and management styles, personnel policies (task requirements vs personal abilities and skills), systems/policies and procedures, and most importantly, communication are the factors that affect the newsroom efficiency, as well as newsroom strategy implementation and results.

Looking for Determinants of Ontological Security in the Spain of the Crisis

The concept of ontological security has a remarkable echo in the current sociology to describe emotional status of men of late modernity. However, the concept created by Giddens in the eighties has been little used in empirical research covering various sources of risk or uncertainty. In this paper, a scale for ontological security is proposed. To do this, we start from the results of a research focused on the relationship between risk, uncertainty and vulnerability in the context of the economic crisis in Spain. These results were produced through nine focus groups and a telephone survey with standardized questionnaire applied to a national sample of 2,408 individuals over 18 years. This work is divided into three main sections. In the fi rst, a scale has been built from the results of the application of different items present in the questionnaire used. The second part explores the relationships of the scale obtained with the variables further approximate the emotional dimensions of individuals. The third part observes the variables that contribute to changes in the scale: These variables show the structural feature of the ontological security.

Prensa escrita mendocina y construcci��n identitaria sobre los pueblos originarios de Argentina

En el siguiente trabajo presentamos un estudio multidimensional sobre la conceptualizaci��n de los pueblos originarios que han constituido los medios de prensa escrita en Mendoza durante la primera d��cada del siglo XX. Para llevarlo a cabo acudimos al Archivo de Hemeroteca de la Biblioteca General San Mart��n de la Ciudad de Mendoza, teniendo como referencia al Diario Los Andes, principal peri��dico de la provincia, creado en 1882 y vigente en la actualidad. El objetivo del estudio es la identificaci��n de las distintas formas de construcci��n conceptual sobre los pueblos etnogr��ficos del actual territorio argentino que difundi�� dicho diario, y del modo en que dichos art��culos period��sticos jugaron un rol activo en relaci��n con el proceso de construcci��n de alteridad sociocultural y la legitimaci��n de las pol��ticas etnocidas implementadas por las clases dominantes.

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