Editorial

This issue of the Journal contains three interesting articlesabout central aspects of public opinion research, as well asan equal number of research notes that reflect the range oftopics that interest all public opinion researchers. Toshio Takeshita takes a turn at reconceptualizing agenda-settingstudies, using a taxonomy     

Employee mistreatment and muted voices in the culturally diverse workplace

This study examines mistreatment through the perspectives of employees with different cultural backgrounds and positions in order to understand the ways in which some voices are muted and others are privileged. Mistreatment is interactional, distributive, procedural, or systemic abuse of employees taking place at both interpersonal and institutional levels on the basis of cultural diversity. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with employees of a large research and development organization revealed three types of muted narratives used to respond to mistreatment (muted-but-engaged, angrily disengaged, and resigned) as well as one type of privileged response. The narratives provided evidence of two processes by which voices became muted: repeated silencing over time and silencing through ambiguity of policies.     

Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojekte Virtuelle Maschinen: zSeries- und S/390-Partitionierung

Der gleichzeitige Betrieb mehrerer Gast-Betriebssysteme auf einem einzigen physischen Rechner unter einem Host-Betriebssystem ist eine leistungsfähige moderne Entwicklung. Bekannte Beispiele sind VMware für die IA32-Architektur sowie das Betriebssystem z/VM und die PR/SM-LPAR Einrichtungen der zSeries-Architektur. Die Nutzung eines Betriebssystems als Gast bedingt einen Leistungsverlust. Die als Partitionierung bezeichnete Zuordnung von Systemressourcen zu den einzelnen Gast-Betriebssysteme ist schwierig, wenn eine dynamische Anpassung an sich ändernde Lastprofile erforderlich ist. Diese Probleme lassen sich mittels Erweiterungen der Hardwarearchitektur adressieren, sowie durch Softwarestrukturen, welche diese Erweiterungen nutzen. Die Erweiterungen der Hardwarearchitektur gehen über das hinaus, was auf heutigen Rechnerarchitekturen wie IA32 oder Mips verfügbar ist. Der vorliegende Beitrag erläutert den optimalen Betrieb von Gast-Betriebssystemen und die begleitenden Partitionierungsmöglichkeiten auf der zSeries-Plattform und beschreibt die zusätzlichen Hardware- und Software-Einrichtungen, welche dies ermöglichen.     

传媒经济学研究的历史、方法与范例

本文主要回顾了传媒经济学在西方的发展历程、研究方法以及不同时期的研究议题。传媒经济学是构建于不同的经济学理论和分析方法之上的应用性学科,它致力于研究经济和金融力量如何影响传媒体系和传媒组织。西方传媒经济学创建于20世纪50年代,至今已发展成为一个活跃的和跨学科研究领域。文章认为,西方传媒经济学的主要研究范例包括理论型、应用型和批评型范例;其研究方法可分为行业市场研究、公司研究和影响力研究。在介绍西方传媒经济学研究的同时,本文还简要回顾了传媒经济学在中国的兴起与发展。     

Organizational Power and the Institutional Review Board

In this essay, we respond to the narratives and essays in this issue by examining organizational power issues related to researchers and institutional research boards (IRBs). Rather than taking a singular perspective on power, we use multiple perspectives and suggest that the cumulative analyses provide the best understanding of IRBs and organizational power.     

Analysis of Statistical Question Classification for Fact-Based Questions

Question classification systems play an important role in question answering systems and can be used in a wide range of other domains. The goal of question classification is to accurately assign labels to questions based on expected answer type. Most approaches in the past have relied on matching questions against hand-crafted rules. However, rules require laborious effort to create and often suffer from being too specific. Statistical question classification methods overcome these issues by employing machine learning techniques. We empirically show that a statistical approach is robust and achieves good performance on three diverse data sets with little or no hand tuning. Furthermore, we examine the role different syntactic and semantic features have on performance. We find that semantic features tend to increase performance more than purely syntactic features. Finally, we analyze common causes of misclassification error and provide insight into ways they may be overcome.     

Lighting the Shroud of Turin for Exhibition in 2015

ABSTRACT

Lighting a cultural heritage artifact requires balancing visual perception with preventive conservation, by providing the best lighting (in terms of spectral distribution and quantity) to enable the viewer to appreciate details and color, while limiting photo-induced degradation. The paper outlines the methodology applied by a multi-disciplinary team while lighting the Shroud of Turin at its last public exhibition in 2015. The methodology considered the special requirements of the Shroud, including exposure to ultraviolet light, while providing appropriate display conditions that would meet audience expectations. The desired appearance (readability of the body image and color) was defined with the help of Shroud researchers and confirmed by subjective tests, while appropriate light levels for preservation were set in agreement with standard requirements and using knowledge of the degradation of linen in visible and UV light. The installation provided a controlled environment and a managed visitor route to the Shroud, assuring excellent perception of both details and color, with the lowest illuminance level about 15?lx.     

Applying LDA Topic Modeling in Communication Research: Toward a Valid and Reliable Methodology

ABSTRACT

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models are increasingly being used in communication research. Yet, questions regarding reliability and validity of the approach have received little attention thus far. In applying LDA to textual data, researchers need to tackle at least four major challenges that affect these criteria: (a) appropriate pre-processing of the text collection; (b) adequate selection of model parameters, including the number of topics to be generated; (c) evaluation of the model’s reliability; and (d) the process of validly interpreting the resulting topics. We review the research literature dealing with these questions and propose a methodology that approaches these challenges. Our overall goal is to make LDA topic modeling more accessible to communication researchers and to ensure compliance with disciplinary standards. Consequently, we develop a brief hands-on user guide for applying LDA topic modeling. We demonstrate the value of our approach with empirical data from an ongoing research project.