In a seminal article published in 2004, John Street argued that celebrity politics has provided a greater expression for the enhancement of democratic behaviour. Consequently, this analysis builds on Street’s thesis to consider the worth of celebrity politics in an era of late modernity. To this end, it employs Henrik Bang’s and John Keane’s constructs of Everyday Makers and Monitory Democracy,...

Peter B. Bach, M.D., M.A.P.P. I n showing that regional spending variations do not correlate with differences in disease burden or outcome, the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has felled the notion that higher health care spending necessarily leads to improved health outcomes. Policymakers have seized on two possible ways to wring savings out of this information. The health care reform bill pass...

Political Hashtag Trends (PHT) is an analysis tool for political leftvs.-right polarization of Twitter hashtags. PHT computes a leaning for trending, political hashtags in a given week, giving insights into the polarizing U.S. American issues on Twitter. The leaning of a hashtag is derived in two steps. First, users retweeting a set of “seed users” with a known political leaning, such as Barack...

During the presidential election of 2008, policy commentators and cultural critics alike had their hands full. The primary race between Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin’s subsequent entry as the vice presidential candidate transformed identity and political discourse in ways we are still trying to comprehend. The primary race caught the Democratic Party and its ―b...

The growing incidence of product safety complaints pertaining to imported goods from China has been one of the most widely covered phenomena in 2007. China’s reputation as the factory of the world suffered immensely, a result of product recalls ranging from poisoned dog food to children’s toys saturated with lead. The Chinese government, as a result, attempted to repair their image as a produce...

This study is a critical mixed-methods investigation of the Joker’s ubiquity within international media discourse. The research comparatively examines myth’s presence Guardian and New York Times’ news reporting (1999–2020), determines intermedia agenda-setting processes. Using corpus linguistics approach, paper also analyses media’s deployment Joker as figure speech, with purpose identifying pr...

To learn a language, one should be exposed to the right environment. A person who used English for his/her entire life would never understand a single Japanese word. Even within the same language, people use the same language very di erently from person to person and from occassion to occasion. For instance, you would nd English written on a NLP research paper (i.e. this one) very di erent from...

This paper examines the linkage patterns of people who posted links on the Facebook “walls” of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain over two years prior to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Linkage patterns indicate the destinations to which participants in these social networking dialogues wished to send other participants. We show a strong integration of the Web 2.0 and new media...

LAST SPRING, A GROUP CALLED MAYors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of US mayors who want more stringent regulation of firearm sales, unveiled a television commercial featuring clips from speeches by the 3 leading presidential candidates. In these clips, Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton (D, NY), Sen Barack Obama (D, Ill), and Sen John McCain (R, Ariz) said they oppose a “gun show loophole” that allo...