Operational assessment of Paralympics transit system: low-floor buses, lift-equipped buses, and signage.

Federal Transit Administration, Washington, D.C.

The Agendas of The Stream

The new tech has introduced the traits of the hypermedia, interactivity and convergence in the journalism field. Moreover, it has involved the emergence of new media and changes in the informative contents. In 2006 Al Jazeera in English was created for covering the underreported regions, inasmuch as new media arise, new contents do so, thus, the research examines the agendas of The Stream, the TV show from Al Jazeera that relies heavily on social networks.

Clare Balding: the televisual face of London 2012

This piece discusses the performance of television presenter Claire Balding during her coverage of the Olympics and Paralympics of London 2012. It suggests that her success with viewers was connected with her persona as a television personality, which combined professional skill with intimacy and immediacy. It argues that Balding represented the face of contemporary public service broadcasting – one that bridges both the BBC and Channel 4’s brand identities – through her research and authority, combined with interaction with her audience with social media.

Disability [sport] and discourse: stories within the Paralympic legacy

This paper aims to encourage critical reflection on what are key and pressing social and political issues surrounding the Paralympics Games. The focus of the paper is personal narratives of six current elite Paralympic athletes who have participated in at least one Paralympic Games. In response to critical stimuli presented in the form of five ‘unfinished stories’, the self-reflexive, personal, compelling narrative reflections of these individuals were (re)presented for each of the stories as a composite narrative. The stories expose questions over fear, despair, freedom, hope, love, oppression, hatred, hurt, terror, (in)equality, peace, performance and impairment. To really learn from London and reflect for Rio, we need academic work that can understand sport, sporting bodies and physical activity as important ‘sites’ through which social forces, discourses, institutions and processes congregate, congeal and are contested in a manner that contributes to the shaping of human relations, subjectivities, and experiences in particular, contextually contingent ways.

Inclusão e deficiência: em busca das representações sociais na mídia impressa em Natal/RN

This thesis is the result of an extensive research on print media discourse on the inclusion of disabled people in society. Articles published in the newspapers Diário de Natal/O Poti and Tribuna do Norte from 1992 to 2002 have been analyzed. Beginning with the very same questions that moved Moscovici (1978) in his classic study La Psychalyse son image et son public , according to which the media play a predominant role in the formation and propagation of social representations as well as in the construction of human behaviors, we have chosen this mass media as our investigation field. Understanding the importance of the communication theory, we intend to associate it to the social representation theory, since communication, as an aspiration, relates to the fundamentals of all humanity (WOLTON, 2004, p. 56). Moreover, means of communication represent an important space for symbolic production and representational process, allowing the analysis of the circulating discourses on social inclusion and disability. Based on these questions, we have determined social representations present in print media on the subject to be our study object. This objective was elected due to the fact that the thematic of disability and inclusion is scarcely and sporadically found in journalistic speech. The research questions have been: which is the representation of disabled people s condition in print media? What changes have occurred during the analyzed period and which was the role played by print media in this process? The research corpus was composed of newspaper articles about various aspects concerning disability and of free word association by reporters. We have analysed: 1) graphical language promoted by the picture of the substances propagated in the period from 1992 a 2002; 2) free word association experiments carried out with reporters of both newspapers; and 3) texts published from 1996 to 1997 using the high-tech program ALCESTE (Contextual Lexical Analysis of a Set of Segments of Texts). The results revealed that the print media in Natal/RN refer to the topic in a discontinuous way, and depend on specific events to highlight disabled people s fight for their rights. Social inclusion is still a great challenge for these people in all levels. We believe that this incapacity to overcome all kinds of obstacles is established in a dialectic relation between society and the media: society remains silent (the manifestation of interest for the cause only attracts some people s or groups attention) and the media, which selects which information is to be broadcasted, gives no evidence to the issue. This representation may be noticed in the infrequency in which articles about the subject are published, as well as in the emphasis to sports, a more important issue for the media. An implication of this study is that a new perspective is opened for analysis and reflection: the Paralympics games as both an inclusive and a segregating social phenomenon. It would be beautiful to have all of us together!

Free-running circadian rhythms of muscle strength, reaction time, and body temperature in totally blind people

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

A DEFICIÊNCIA FÍSICA NAS REVISTAS VEJA, ÉPOCA E ISTOÉ: um estudo de recepção

A maioria das pesquisas sobre mídia e deficiência estuda de que forma as pessoas com deficiência são representadas pelo jornalismo. As representações encontradas pelos pesquisadores são de assistencialismo, normalização, superação e cidadania. Este estudo procura compreender a percepção das pessoas com deficiência física em relação às revistas de atualidades e descobrir como essas pessoas sentem-se representadas por tais veículos de comunicação. Analisaram-se três revistas de atualidades: Veja, Época e Istoé. Para compor o corpus da pesquisa optou-se por textos referentes à deficiência nas edições de julho a dezembro de 2012, período em que aconteceram os jogos paraolímpicos, e nas datas relacionadas à luta das pessoas com deficiência. Quanto aos procedimentos metodológicos destaca-se, em um primeiro momento, a análise de conteúdo e, em seguida, a análise retórica do discurso de três textos jornalísticos, um de cada revista, de acordo com a representação predominante. Por último analisa-se a recepção, com 16 entrevistados, sendo oito estudantes da Universidade Metodista de São Paulo e oito pacientes da Associação de Paraplégicos de Taubaté (Aparte). A análise revelou que a representação que mais apareceu no período foi a da superação, e que as pessoas que têm deficiência física querem ser representadas de uma forma mais humana e inclusiva. .