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n order to protect their food from competitors, ball-rolling dung beetles detach a piece of dung from a pile, shape it into a ball, and roll it away along a straight path [1]. They appear to rely exclusively on celestial compass cues to maintain their bearing [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8], but the mechanism that enables them to use these cues for orientation remains unknown. Here, we describe the orien

The research in this article examines audience responses to a range of factual and reality genres. It takes as a starting point that television audiences do not experience news or documentary or reality TV in isolation but as part of a range of factual and reality programmes. Factual and reality programming includes a broad understanding of non-fictional programming on broadcast television, satell

In this article, the author focuses on Big Brother in relation to audience attraction. I outline the context of factual entertainment and its audience, and the specific experience of watching Big Brother. Seen in relation to factual entertainment as a whole, Big Brother is one of the least popular examples of “documentary as diversion.” Seen in relation to gamedocs, Big Brother is one of the most

This article examines the conceptual framework of the social amplification of risk in relation to the social sciences framework of moral panic and the media violence debate in Britain. The paper will explore the symbolic use of 'risk' in relation to the alleged negative effects of media violence, and analyse the key stages in the social amplification of the physical and moral risks of media violen

Wikipedia has become one of the most popular resources in natural language processing and it is used in quantities of applications. However, Wikipedia requires a substantial pre-processing step before it can be used. For instance, its set of nonstandardized annotations, referred to as the wiki markup, is language-dependent and needs specific parsers from language to language, for English, French,

This essay suggests that the conceptualization of strategic communication as a field uniting several disciplines was an important step forward, but progress in absolute terms has been disappointing so far. Individual researchers open up new avenues of exploration and regularly arrive at answers to questions internally consistent with their respective perspectives. But the body of reasonably verifi

This article discusses actor-network theory (ANT) as an approach in empirical public relations research. It is foremost a methodological reflection, but uses a case study to illustrate key points. The case, published as a full study elsewhere, revolved around the plagiarisms in the PhD-dissertation of former German Defence Minister zu Guttenberg and places special emphasis on the work of anonymous

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child state that in all actions concerning children the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration. Children are capable of forming their own views and have the right to express those views freely. The school plays an important role in empowering children in this socialization process and Swedish schools have in its educational assignment a