Balanced Norms Research Articles

Supercloseness in a balanced norm of finite element methods on Shishkin and Bakhvalov–Shishkin rectangular meshes for reaction–diffusion problems

We present a convergence analysis for finite element methods of any order, which are applied on Shishkin mesh and Bakhvalov–Shishkin mesh to a singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion problem. A new interpolant is introduced for analysis in the balanced norm. By means of this interpolant and some superconvergence estimations, we prove supercloseness results in the cases of Shishkin mesh and Bakhvalov–Shishkin mesh. Numerical experiments also support these theoretical results.

Singularly Perturbed Reaction\u2013Diffusion Problems as First order systems

We consider a singularly perturbed reaction diffusion problem as a first order two-by-two system. Using piecewise discontinuous polynomials for the first component and H_{{{,mathrm{{div}},}}}-conforming elements for the second component we provide a convergence analysis on layer adapted meshes and an optimal convergence order in a balanced norm that is comparable with a balanced H^2-norm for the second order formulation.

Error estimations in the balanced norm of finite element method on Bakhvalov–Shishkin triangular mesh for reaction–diffusion problems

A balanced norm, rather than the common energy norm, is introduced to reflect the behavior of layers more accurately in the finite element method for singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion problems. Convergence of optimal order in the balanced norm has been proved in the case of rectangular finite elements. However, for triangular finite elements Pk (k≥2), it is still open to prove this convergence result. With the help of the L2-stability of a weighted L2 projection, instead of the L∞-stability widely used in existing references, the geometric constraints on meshes are relaxed. As a result, the optimal order convergence in the balanced norm is proved in the case of Bakhvalov–Shishkin triangular meshes. Numerical experiments support theoretical results.

Towards New Standards? Interaction Patterns of German Political Journalists in the Twittersphere

Research has provided few findings on the patterns of communication and interaction between political and media actors in social media and how these interactions have evolved. The present study analyzes how journalists registered in the German Federal Press Conference interact with members of the German Bundestag (member of parliament) on Twitter and what type of content they exchange with each other. Based on two time periods (2016, 2020), the communicative practices and the patterns of interactions are examined. New insights into the conversational structure are generated through a combination of content and network analysis. The results indicate a trend in the use of Twitter among the actors as a political opinion medium. While the dissemination of opinions among politicians remains stable, journalists use Twitter interactions more to express a subjective and critical view and less for news coverage over time. Furthermore, the analysis notes that journalists generally comment in negative terms on the parties, except for the Greens. To some extent, the results indicate that the usual journalistic norms of objectivity and balance do not apply for interactions in the Twittersphere. To evaluate whether this pattern also applies to other countries, more comparative investigations in the domain of media–politics interactions on Twitter are needed.

Convergence and Supercloseness in a Balanced Norm of Finite Element Methods on Bakhvalov-Type Meshes for Reaction-Diffusion Problems

In convergence analysis of finite element methods for singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion problems, balanced norms have been successfully introduced to replace standard energy norms so that layers can be captured. In this article, we focus on the convergence analysis in a balanced norm on Bakhvalov-type rectangular meshes. In order to achieve our goal, a novel interpolation operator, which consists of a local $$L^2$$ projection operator and the Lagrange interpolation operator, is introduced for a convergence analysis of optimal order in the balanced norm. The analysis also depends on the stabilities of the $$L^2$$ projection and the characteristics of Bakhvalov-type meshes. Furthermore, we obtain a supercloseness result in the balanced norm, which appears in the literature for the first time. This result depends on another novel interpolant, which consists of the local $$L^2$$ projection operator, a vertices-edges-element operator and some corrections on the boundary.

Balance (Climate and Environment Coverage)

Balance – as a journalistic norm in the domain of climate change reporting – is measured by analyzing both coverage of the debate over anthropogenic contributions to global warming (i.e., the existence of anthropogenic global warming) and coverage of decisions regarding action on global warming (i.e., actions regarding global warming) (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004). Field of application/theoretical foundation: Balance is a commonly investigated and internationally agreed-upon journalistic norm that ensures that journalists portray different sides of a story in a neutral and objective way (Westerståhl, 1983). In science reporting, more specifically in reporting on climate change, this journalistic norm can lead to biased reporting in that sense that journalistic coverage does not mirror the scientific understanding (i.e., climate change does exist and action is needed) (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004). References/combination with other methods of data collection: There are experimental studies that test the effects of differentially balanced news stories (e.g., Clarke et al., 2014; Dixon & Clarke, 2012), largely confirming that balanced coverage reduces confidence in a scientific consensus and heightens uncertainty of science, risks, etc. Example studies: Boykoff & Boykoff (2004); Boykoff (2007); Clarke (2008); Clarke et al. (2014); Dixon & Clarke (2012) Information on Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004 Authors: Maxwell T. Boykoff & Jules M. Boykoff Research question: The prevalence of the norm of balance in reporting on climate change and the degree to what this coverage’s adherence to balance led to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming (i.e., its existence) and resultant action. Object of analysis: A sample (636 articles) of the US prestige-press coverage of global warming, i.e., New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal Time frame of analysis: between 1988 and 2002 Info about variables Variables: Two measures of balance: (a) Coverage of the debate over anthropogenic contributions to global warming (i.e., existence) (b) Coverage of decisions regarding action on global warming (i.e., action) Level of analysis: Newspaper article Variables and values: (a) First measure: Coverage of the debate over anthropogenic contributions to global warming (i.e., existence) Article only presents argument that anthropogenic global warming exists, clearly distinct from natural variations Article presents both sides, but emphasizes that anthropogenic global warming exists, still distinct from natural variation Article presents a balanced account of debates surrounding existence of anthropogenic global warming Article presents both sides, but emphasizes dubious nature of the claim that anthropogenic global warming exists (b) Second measure: Coverage of decisions regarding action on global warming (i.e., action) Dominant coverage of decisions/assertions regarding immediate/mandatory action to deal with global warming Balanced accounts of various decisions regarding action Dominant coverage of decisions/assertions regarding cautious/voluntary approaches to deal with global warming Reliability: Intercoder reliability rate of 93% Codebook: Table 1 in Boykoff & Boykoff (2004, p. 128)

Criminal accountability at what cost? Norm conflict, UN peace operations and the International Criminal Court

How do international organisations (IOs) balance norms that have conflicting prescriptions? In this article, we build on the literature on norm contestation and norm conflict to identify four ways in which IOs might respond to norm conflicts: (1) consistent norm prioritisation; (2) ad hoc norm prioritisation; (3) balanced norm reconciliation and (4) imbalanced norm reconciliation. How IOs are more likely to respond, we argue, depends on the salience of the norm conflict and the relative strength of the conflicting norms. We illustrate our argument by investigating the norm conflicts that the United Nations (UN) encountered between traditional UN peacekeeping norms and the norm of international criminal accountability in the context of assistance by UN peace operations to the International Criminal Court. Distinguishing between behaviour and discourse as well as headquarters and field levels, we argue that the UN’s response strategies have been largely successful at reducing the tensions generated by the norm conflicts, but that in the longer term they run the risk of both undermining the international criminal accountability norm and damaging the acceptance and credibility of UN peace operations.

Rebutting Four Arguments in Favour of Resolving ius cogens Norm Conflicts by Means of Proportionality Tests

Abstract The text casts doubt on the utility of proportionality tests to resolve conflicts between peremptory norms of public international law with reference to an argument advanced by João Ernesto Christófolo. Responding to Christófolo, the text maintains that subjecting conflicts between peremptory norms to a proportionality analysis entails judicial law-making, does not safeguard the interests protected by peremptory norms and that the use of proportionality tests cannot be justified with reference to the desired completeness of international law. Instead, the text argues that conflicts between peremptory norms should be dealt with head-on by openly acknowledging the existence of an irresolvable norm conflict and that, if at all, proportionality tests must be applied with utmost care to avoid that the interests of those undertaking a proportionality analysis prevail over the interests of those whose interests the balanced norms in questions are intended to protect.

In climate news, statements from large businesses and opponents of climate action receive heightened visibility

Whose voices are most likely to receive news coverage in the US debate about climate change? Elite cues embedded in mainstream media can influence public opinion on climate change, so it is important to understand whose perspectives are most likely to be represented. Here, I use plagiarism-detection software to analyze the media coverage of a large random sample of business, government, and social advocacy organizations' press releases about climate change (n = 1,768), examining which messages are cited in all articles published about climate change in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today from 1985 to 2014 (n = 34,948). I find that press releases opposing action to address climate change are about twice as likely to be cited in national newspapers as are press releases advocating for climate action. In addition, messages from business coalitions and very large businesses are more likely than those from other types of organizations to receive coverage. Surprisingly, press releases from organizations providing scientific and technical services are less likely to receive news coverage than are other press releases in my sample, suggesting that messages from organizations with greater scientific expertise receive less media attention. These findings support previous scholars' claims that journalistic norms of balance and objectivity have distorted the public debate around climate change, while providing evidence that the structural power of business interests lends them heightened visibility in policy debates.

Saddle point least squares for the reaction–diffusion problem

We consider a mixed variational formulation for the reaction–diffusion problem based on a saddle point least square approach with an optimal test norm and nonconforming trial spaces. An Uzawa type iterative process for solving the discrete mixed formulations is proposed and choices for discrete stable spaces are provided. The implementation requires a nodal basis only for the test space, and assembly of a global saddle point system is avoided. For the test space, we use piecewise linear spaces of functions on Shishkin type meshes that provide almost optimal approximation in the standard symmetric elliptic formulation. Our saddle point least squares method has the advantage that the order of approximation of the solution in a balanced norm is improved if compared with the standard variational approach. Numerical results are included to support the proposed method.

Fifty years after surgeon general’s report: cultural cognition, biased assimilation, and cigarette smoking risk perceptions among college students

Research suggests that cultural worldviews bias how and what people think about various societal risks. But how does this mechanism manifest when people receive balanced information about a highly publicised health issue such as cigarette smoking? Using the cultural cognition worldview scales, we demonstrate that despite the considerable interventions post the 1964 landmark Surgeon General’s Report, young adults in the U.S. still perceive smoking risks in ways that affirm their cultural worldviews along two dimensions: egalitarianism-hierarchism and individualism-communitarianism. Those who subscribe to hierarchical and individualistic worldviews were more dismissive of the risks associated with cigarette smoking and exposure, while egalitarians and communitarians associated smoking with higher risks. We observed an interaction between the two worldview dimensions. Besides, exposed to balanced information – as is often the case in media coverage based on the journalistic norm of balance – about the risks and benefits of smoking, those who are concurrently hierarchical and individualistic in their outlook assimilated information about benefits while discounting the dangers of smoking. Egalitarian communitarians (on the other end of the continuum) discounted the benefits information vis-à-vis the risk information. Thus, culturally-biased cognition of risk perception does not only apply to novel and abstract risks but also highly publicised ones. Communication and public policy implications are discussed.

The Prevalence and Rationale for Presenting an Opposing Viewpoint in Climate Change Reporting: Findings from a U.S. National Survey of TV Weathercasters

AbstractThe journalistic norm of balance has been described as the practice of giving equal weight to different sides of a story; false balance is balanced reporting when the weight of evidence strongly favors one side over others—for example, the reality of human-caused climate change. False balance is problematic because it skews public perception of expert agreement. Through formative interviews and a survey of American weathercasters about climate change reporting, we found that objectivity and balance—topics that have frequently been studied with environmental journalists—are also relevant to understanding climate change reporting among weathercasters. Questions about the practice of and reasons for presenting an opposing viewpoint when reporting on climate change were included in a 2017 census survey of weathercasters working in the United States (N = 480; response rate = 22%). When reporting on climate change, 35% of weathercasters present an opposing viewpoint “always” or “most of the time.” Their rationale for reporting opposing viewpoints included the journalistic norms of objectivity and balanced reporting (53%), their perceived uncertainty of climate science (21%), to acknowledge differences of opinion (17%), to maintain credibility (14%), and to strengthen the story (7%). These findings show that climate change reporting from weathercasters sometimes includes opposing viewpoints, and possibly a false balance, but further research is necessary. Moreover, prior research has shown that the climate reporting practices among weathercasters are evolving rapidly and so the problem of false-balance reporting may already be self-correcting.

Difficulties with balance: Normative contestation, ambiguity and change in reporting AIDS denialism

The controversy about policy on HIV/AIDS in South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki provides an opportunity to study how journalists manage normative difficulties in practice and sheds light on normative change. The politically supported entry of AIDS dissidents into debate and policy-making posed a significant difficulty to journalists in the light of the established norm of balance, which requires journalists to deal even-handedly with the full range of views in a controversy. However, orthodox science and the medical establishment saw the AIDS dissidents’ views as both wrong and dangerous, and progressively delegitimised the dissident view and pushed it out of the public debate. The article traces this process, focusing on the ways in which journalists managed the normative challenge. Some insights about the nature of norms that emerged were that part of journalists’ difficulty is shown to be due to a fundamental vagueness and ambiguity in understandings of balance, which is shown to include two quite different areas of application, identified here as ‘balance of opinion’ and ‘balance of evidence’. Read in the light of the proceduralism of Habermasian discourse ethics, the episode also provides new insight into ways in which broad norms come to be applied in concrete historical circumstances, and how they are adjusted through strongly contested discourses.

Balanced-norm error estimates for sparse grid finite element methods applied to singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion problems

Abstract We consider a singularly perturbed linear reaction–diffusion problem posed on the unit square in two dimensions. Standard finite element analyses use an energy norm, but for problems of this type, this norm is too weak to capture adequately the behaviour of the boundary layers that appear in the solution. To address this deficiency, a stronger so-called ‘balanced’ norm has been considered recently by several researchers. In this paper we shall use two-scale and multiscale sparse grid finite element methods on a Shishkin mesh to solve the reaction–diffusion problem, and prove convergence of their computed solutions in the balanced norm.

Reassessing balance: News coverage of Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal before and during #metoo

Sexual abuse became an important part of news coverage in the months leading up to Donald Trump’s presidency and continued to dominate news cycles with the emergence of the #metoo movement. Yet, it remains to be seen whether the increasing amount of stories about sexual abuse have actually advanced social justice. We conducted content and textual analyses of newspaper, cable television, and online coverage of the Access Hollywood scandal before and during the #metoo movement ( N = 1890) to understand how the journalistic objectivity norm of balance via issue dualism influenced reporting on sexual abuse. Television and right-leaning media had the highest levels of rape myth acceptance in their coverage for both time periods. The use of issue dualism advantaged Trump as Bill Clinton and other prominent accused men shifted focus away from Trump and largely overlooked the women coming forward against Trump. The objectivity norm of balance reduced and politicized this complex issue, as well as gave power to Trump’s retaliation while minimizing the serious accusations that have been brought against him.

English

Error estimates of finite element methods for reaction-diffusion problems are often realized in the related energy norm. In the singularly perturbed case, however, this norm is not adequate. A different scaling of the H1 seminorm leads to a balanced norm which reflects the layer behavior correctly. We discuss the difficulties which arise for systems of reaction-diffusion problems.

United States news media and climate change in the era of US President Trump.

The Donald J Trump administration's strategy to disengage and downplay the Paris Climate Agreement will likely result in a slight decrease in the already low levels of US news media global warming coverage. This is because significant limitations with the news media's ability to adequately cover climate change predated the administration. First, studies indicate that advertising interests and editors have always challenged journalists' abilities to adequately report on climate change issues. Instead of climate change stories, editors often prefer more sensational topics that garner higher ratings and approval with advertisers. Second, the journalistic norm of balance and the role of sourcing give climate skeptics exceptional media exposure, which creates a "false balance" or equivalency between skeptics and scientists. Third, the massive power and influence of the fossil fuel industry's public relations arm has also had a tremendous impact on public (mis)understanding of climate change. Fourth, a trend toward declining climate change coverage and "climate silence" in US media is developing. Media corporations have substantially eliminated the number of environmental journalists that cover climate change. The overall effect of these limitations distorts public understanding of climate change and delays potential government action. Moving away from a predominantly commercial media system to one with a substantial noncommercial component can improve US journalism, whereas using advertising to increase rates for environmentally unsound products and services may also help mitigate global warming. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:202-204. © 2018 SETAC.

Balancing life and work by unbending gender: Early American women psychologists' struggles and contributions.

Women's participation in the work force shifted markedly throughout the twentieth century, from a low of 21 percent in 1900 to 59 percent in 1998. The influx of women into market work, particularly married women with children, put pressure on the ideology of domesticity: an ideal male worker in the outside market married to a woman taking care of children and home (Williams, 2000). Here, we examine some moments in the early-to-mid-twentieth century when female psychologists contested established norms of life-work balance premised on domesticity. In the 1920s, Ethel Puffer Howes, one of the first generation of American women psychologists studied by Scarborough and Furumoto (1987), challenged the waste of women's higher education represented by the denial of their interests outside of the confines of domesticity with pioneering applied research on communitarian solutions to life-work balance. Prominent second-generation psychologists, such as Leta Hollingworth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Florence Goodenough, sounded notes of dissent in a variety of forums in the interwar period. At mid-century, the exclusion of women psychologists from war work galvanized more organized efforts to address their status and life-work balance. Examination of the ensuing uneasy collaboration between psychologist and library scholar Alice Bryan and the influential male gatekeeper E. G. Boring documents gendered disparities in life-work balance and illuminates how the entrenched ideology of domesticity was sustained. We conclude with Jane Loevinger's mid-century challenge to domesticity and mother-blaming through her questioning of Boring's persistent focus on the need for job concentration in professional psychologists and development of a novel research focus on mothering.

Robust exponential convergence of [formula omitted]-FEM in balanced norms for singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion problems: Corner domains

The hp-version of the finite element method is applied to singularly perturbed reaction–diffusion type equations on polygonal domains. The solution exhibits boundary layers as well as corner layers. On a class of meshes that are suitably refined near the boundary and the corners, robust exponential convergence (in the polynomial degree) is shown in both a balanced norm and the maximum norm.

Food security of Bashkortostan: Problems and solutions

This article considers the fulfillment of the regional market of Bashkortostan with domestic farming products compared with the average figures across Russia. The analysis covers the foreign trade balance of basic farming goods and food regimens of households by product supply with regard to balanced norms. The main suppliers of import-substituting stock are determined, as well as the key problems of their government support and the main domestic reserves of producers of farming goods.