Medium Spin Research Articles

Spin modulation of single Fe atoms with thiolate‐poisoned Pd nanoclusters for highly efficient ammonia synthesis

AbstractNitrate reduction toward ammonia is pivotal in energy and environmental domains but faces challenges in achieving simultaneous high selectivity and activity. Manipulating interactions between intermediates and metal species is deemed effective for catalytic enhancement. In this study, a uniformly configured Fe1‐N4 single‐atom catalyst with four‐coordination was synthesized. Subsequent deposition of thiol‐poisoned Pd nanoclusters provided a platform to investigate the neighboring effect of Pd nanoclusters, excluding activity influences from Pd catalysts. Through this neighbor engineering, the Fe 3d electron spin configuration shifted from low spin to medium spin (MS). Experimental and theoretical analyses affirmed that MS Fe species optimized nitrate reduction by enhancing the *NO desorption process. This spin‐modulated Fe single‐atom catalyst demonstrated superior activity (392.16 mmol−1 gcat−1 h−1, ~40 mol−1 gFe−1 h−1) and a Faraday efficiency of 98.6% at −0.5 V vs. RHE, surpassing reported values. This study presents a promising strategy for nitrogen‐chemistry transition metal catalysts.

How do co‐shareholding networks affect negative media coverage? Evidence from China

AbstractThis paper explores the relationship between the co‐shareholding network and negative media coverage in the context of China. We find that the high degree centrality and structural holes of firm's co‐shareholding networks have negative effects on the amount and severity of negative media coverage but through differentiated mechanisms. Focal firms in high degree centrality positions can decrease negative coverage by information sharing through the network, but focal firms in the position of structural holes reduce negative coverage through information control. Our findings can complement both research on the disparate impacts of co‐shareholding networks and the media spin effect.

Curating in the Postdigital Age

Curating in the Postdigital Age

Understanding the Party Brand: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Valence

The valence component of a party’s reputation, or brand, has been less scrutinized than other components of party-based theories of legislatures. This lack of scrutiny results from the difficulty of isolating the valence component from policy-related components and the difficulty of studying legislators’ motives. We overcome these challenges by conducting survey experiments on both voters and state legislators that show (1) that scholars have underestimated the impact of the party valence brand’s potential role in elections, (2) that legislative party leaders pressure members more on votes when the outcome affects the party valence brand, and (3) that the value of the party brand can sometimes directly affect legislators’ votes. Our results provide a rationale for why legislative leaders put so much effort into media spin battles and suggest that parties’ reputations affect legislative leaders’ ability to pass their agenda.

Political Engagement Principles as the Basis for New Regional Self-Determination Processes in Europe

The U.S. presidential campaign in 2008 signified a change on the paradigm of how the political parties deal with local communities. This means that grassroots techniques arose as a key factor for the triumph of Barack H. Obama. After the election, European political parties—even social movements—also adapted some strategies inspired by the U.S. presidential campaigns. The main objective of this article is to analyze how these grassroots techniques have been adapted in a specific scenario: the process of self-determination of Catalonia, an Autonomous Community of Spain that claims to be an independent country after the failing of Estado de las Autonomías (state of autonomies) model. Our method is to explore the parameters that drove the Obama’s first presidential campaign and how they have been applied into the self-determination campaign of Catalonia, such as the creation of local opinion platforms, media spin doctoring, social networking, and the social involvement of foreign actors. We realized that the social commitment with the self-determination process by regional community organizations has had a stronger leadership than the political parties. As a result, we state that political spin doctors in Catalonia could neither drive nor control the framing process of the last parliamentary regional campaign.

The Potential for Stem Cells in Cerebral Palsy—Piecing Together the Puzzle

The substantial socioeconomic burden of a diagnosis of cerebral palsy, coupled with a positive anecdotal and media spin on stem cell treatments, drives many affected families to seek information and treatment outside of the current clinical and scientific realm. Preclinical studies using several types of stem and adult cells--including mesenchymal stem cells, neural precursor cells, olfactory ensheathing glia and Schwann cells--have demonstrated some regenerative and functional efficacy in neurologic paradigms. This paper describes the most common cell types investigated for transplant in vivo and summarizes the current state of early-phase clinical trials. It investigates the most relevant and promising coadministered therapies, including rehabilitation, drug targeting, magnetic stimulation, and bioengineering approaches. We highlight the need for adjunctive combinatorial strategies to successfully transfer stem cell treatments from bench to bedside.

Design of the HTS Permanent Magnet Motor With Superconducting Armature Winding

The superconducting motor generally adopts superconducting magnets to supply high flux density in the air-gap around the rotor. This structure can decrease the volume as a result of the high magnetic load, but it also creates cooling difficulty problems due to the cooling medium's spin sealing. Therefore, the superconducting magnets need frequent maintenance, and this structure cannot be applied in the industry field. So a novel high temperature superconducting motor with a superconducting armature coils is researched. This motor's stator uses ferromagnetic material and the superconducting windings are located in the slots. The ferromagnetic material can decrease the magnetic field in the superconducting coils, so the current carrying ability of the superconducting coils can be increased. The rotor adopts the permanent magnets as the excitation. Such design details of the motor can ensure the superconducting coils can undertake larger current and reduce AC loss. In this paper the electromagnetic field distribution of the HTS motor stator coils is analysed. Finally, the detailed HTS motor parameters are presented to analyse the output torque characteristic. From the characteristics, it can be seen that the novel HTS motor has the same power density as the traditional HTS motor.

Retheorizing Comedic and Political Discourse, or What Do Jon Stewart and Charlie Chaplin Have in Common?

On November 1, 2010, progressive newsblog Huffington Post ran an opinion piece responding to previous weekend's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, held on National Mall by comedie news pundits Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.1 Asking its title Comedians Really Lead Us to Sanity and Civility?, article expressed both gratitude and surprise that it had taken Comedy Central comedians to remind us that life can be lived devoid of nasty rhetoric that has become all too commonplace what passes for [political] discourse these days. Perhaps, writer even suggested, the two comedians could lead effort to bring politics into an atmosphere of disagreement without having to be disagreeable process.2 was hardly a lone voice: rally's staged series of comedie showdowns between Stewart (as advocate of reasonableness politics) and Colbert (in his persona as blowhard advocate of a politics of fear) had seemingly conveyed lessons for many seeking a transformation politics. Although Stewart himself went on record to claim that rally was not political in any way, most interested observers and media pundits sensed a loftier agenda: This event, while originally intended for jest, could possibly become a 'turning point' . . . for having immense impact on how political discourse is conducted future, commented one fan on rally's Facebook page, adding that 'You have created a political movement, intended or not.3 A sign held up by a rally attendee captured a similar sense of paradox: It's a sad day when our politicians are comical and I have to take our comedians politically.4The exact content of rally-including Stewart's wellreported closing monologue which he lambasted news media partisanship and hyperbole-will be addressed later this essay. For purposes of introduction, I want only to note how commonplace these conflations of comedy and politics have become recent years and how they might prompt us to rethink comedy's potential as a mode of political expression. There can be little question that last decade or so has marked something of a golden age political humor. Whether spate of news satire programs {The Daily Show [1996-present]; The Colbert Report [2005-present]), politically themed talk shows (Real Time with Bill Maher [2003-present]), or satirical documentaries (notably Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 [2004] ), our contemporary media landscape has increasingly drawn color from impulse to blend humor and political nonfiction as away of critiquing inadequacies of political and media discourse. One immediate set of questions to ask, then, would be: What are sources of this impulse, and what are its effects? Within existing scholarship, answers usually begin with heavily stage-managed, manufactured quality of contemporary political spectacle and attendant desire, through comedy, to pierce veil of talking points and media spin. turn opens onto discussions about whether news satire programs constitute meaningful political interventions or simply reinforce cynical apathy of young adults who, as is often said, get their news from The Daily Show.5 Yet for all recent academic discussion of these comedic encroachments on political debate, there remains little attempt to explore implications of these developments for a broader theory of comedy, particularly as this intersects with a theory of politics.What I hope to do this essay is to pursue these implications by shifting frame of discussion from question of media sources and effects (potential or real) to that of comedic and political discourse, and I want to do so by taking quite seriously query posed by Huffington Post: Can comedy indeed contribute to a space for political discourse? By what processes and under what conditions might comedy be expected to establish such a space? I take my lead here from recent work of philosopher Jacques Ranciere, whose definition of politics points to a parallel with comedy that this essay aims to develop. …

Finding a Place: Mainland Chinese Fiction in the 2000s

The political, economic and social changes experienced by China over the past decade have been mirrored by transformations in the literary realm. Writers, editors, critics and readers have contended with the acceleration of commercialisation, the rise of the Internet, and the Communist Party's subtly changing attitude to creative freedom. This essay examines the creative responses of three critically acclaimed generations of novelists – born between the 1950s and 1980s – to this new climate. It considers the way in which writers have become entrepreneurs, managing their own personality cults over the Internet and through media spin. It discusses widespread corruption in literary reviewing; the weaknesses in editorial standards that affect the work of even the most mature voices writing today; and the fluid way in which novelists often abandon fiction for other professions or expressive forms, such as film. Finally, it considers the limits of literary freedom in China's one-party cultural system.

"Spin Zones" in American Presidential Elections

"Spin Zones" in American Presidential Elections

A challenge to the spook agencies' media spin

This book Spinning Intelligence investigates this culture, the relationship that exists between security intelligence agencies and other institutions, and lays bare a solidly researched account that is as readable as it is a resource. The book explores whether intelligence agencies operate within a culture of accountability, giving special attention to the most powerful agencies in our post-millennium world.

Prime Objects and Body Doubles

In an age of historical amnesia, media spin, photo hoaxes, and dilute art criticism, what passes as innovation in the art world's parlance is, to say the least, questionable. What, then, qualifies as “the inventive,” particularly in an experimental system such as visual art? If the practice of art is seen as a dynamic of changing attitudes, perspectives, and aesthetic desires, artists might well turn to George Kubler's notion of “prime objects” for one generative answer.1 Prime objects, in Kubler's formulation, may be considered the material by-products of alternative propositions that have been previously neither stated nor possible. Are such speculative solutions the creative engines often driving the ontological structure of objects, works of art included? Or to pose the question in more cynical guise, do such interrogative suppositions even matter at a time when “art fairs are the new disco”?2

Special issue: societal aspects of synthetic biology

Special issue: societal aspects of synthetic biology

Cambodia's Victim Zero: Global and National Responses to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza

Cambodia’s experience with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) since the disease was discovered on a farm outside Phnom Penh in January 2004 reveals important aspects of how a developing country with limited resources and capabilities has responded to a crisis that has global public health implications and, vice-versa, how this global response in turn affected Cambodia. Augmented by a survey sent to individuals deeply involved in HPAI work in Cambodia, this study uses a qualitative research methodology consisting of mostly one-on-one semi-structured interviews across government, the private sector, and the non-governmental sector. Measures have been taken to cope with HPAI such as public awareness campaign ‘Super Moan’ (Super Chicken) and Pandemic Preparedness; border control over the movement of poultry with neighboring countries, particularly Vietnam and Thailand; culling of poultry; and case-based secret compensation. The study provides a background to Cambodian political and modern history, sets the context of aid dependence and tourism, and presents the livestock sector and poultry sub-sector in particular. It then proceeds in three parts, from beginning, middle, to end to show how HPAI evolved, providing a narrative time line of the key policy moments/phases between the first outbreak and to date (December 2008). Three narratives are explored: (1) culling without compensation; (2) the shift to health; and (3) the role of poverty and livelihoods. The study then discusses three key themes that define the political economy of the policy process. These are: (a) Donors and NGOs; (b) Beyond Aid: Other Sources of Revenue and the Importance of Tourism; and (c) Media Spin. The overall analysis of the political economy of HPAI in Cambodia reveals key challenges, obstacles and opportunities for responding to HPAI - and potentially other global epidemics.

Information Operations `Blowback'

The US's adoption of the broad doctrine of `information operations' (IO) in 2003 put information and media strategies on a par with conventional means of military power and made them pivotal to achieving `full-spectrum dominance'. This article focuses on the role of IO in shaping the global media ecology and in the battle for hearts and minds, especially in Muslim-majority countries. However, the author also argues that the impact of such operations at home may be their most important legacy. IO `blowback' occurs as surveillance and propaganda campaigns targeting foreign audiences spill back into the US because of the nature of the global media and information flows. The all-encompassing doctrine also blurs the boundaries between `normal' media spin and public affairs, on the one hand, and propaganda and covert media operations, on the other. The convergence of commercial media and the military and government in such operations is also yielding what some call the military—information—media—entertainment (MIME) complex. Lastly, the US military's heavy reliance on the Internet and other public communication networks means that cyberspace is being retooled to meet national security, surveillance, propaganda and cyberwarfare needs.

Spinning Debates: The Impact of the News Media's Coverage of the Final 2004 Presidential Debate

We demonstrate that the news media's “spin” or analysis following the last presidential debate in 2004 influenced citizens' evaluations of the candidates. The media's “instant analyses” in the twenty-four hours following the debate was decidedly one-sided, favoring President Bush more than Senator Kerry. We show that the news media's spin persuaded potential voters to alter their attitudes regarding the competing candidates. We rely on a multimethodological approach, including an experiment with a quasi-experimental component, a public opinion survey, and a content analysis. To examine the media's spin, we conducted a content analysis of news coverage on television, on the Internet, and in newspapers for the twenty-four hours following the final 2004 presidential debate. Second, to examine how citizens reacted to the media's coverage, we relied on a representative public opinion survey conducted immediately following the debate. In addition, we conducted an experiment where certain individuals were exposed to the debate, while others were not, and we tracked these subjects over the course of a week to determine the stability of their attitudes in the midst of intense media coverage.

Revisiting and Reviewing the Media Spin Surrounding the Gulf Wars

Revisiting and Reviewing the Media Spin Surrounding the Gulf Wars

Spin in the Media - the Media in a (self-)Spin?

The article focuses on the discussion of spin in the Danish media, 
 especially during the 2005 election campaign, in which spin was a 
 prominent issue amongst journalists. The main argument is that this 
 is not primarily an expression of a professional, self-reflective con-
 sciousness regarding the shifts in the relationship between the media, 
 society and politics. Rather, it is an expression of a self-legitimizing 
 meta-discourse that might, however, fail to see the more structurally 
 rooted tendencies that spin is part of - a mediatization of politics - 
 presenting new perspectives and challenges for both politics and the 
 media. These perspectives appear to disintegrate in the comprehen-
 sive but often one-dimensional and self-centered discourse of jour-
 nalists and communication experts, wherein they proclaim every 
 political, communicative initiative as spin in the hunt for the disclosure 
 of political facade.

The Transmission of Political Critique after 9/11: “A New Form of Desperation”?

The Transmission of Political Critique after 9/11: “A New Form of Desperation”?

Quantum mechanical equations of motion of particles and spin in polarized media

Quantum mechanical equations of motion are obtained for particles and spin in media with polarized electrons in the presence of external fields. The motion of electrons and their spins is governed by the exchange interaction, while the motion of positrons and their spin is governed by the annihilation interaction. For particles with spin S ≥ 1, second-order terms in spin are taken into account. The equations obtained can be applied to describe the motion of particles and spin both in magnetic and nonmagnetic media.