Hateful comments, swearwords and sometimes even death threats are becoming a reality for many people today in online environments. This is especially true for journalists, politicians, artists, and other public figures. This paper describes how hate directed towards individuals can be measured in online environments using a simple dictionary-based approach. We present a case study on Swedish po...

During a January 2004 speech at an Arkansas medical center, President Bush remarked, “[W]e’ve got too many darn lawsuits, too many frivolous and junk lawsuits that are affecting people. . . . [W]e need medical liability reform to make sure that medicine is affordable and available. . . . Lawsuits don’t heal patients. That’s a fact.” Despite the fact that medical malpractice reform has been the ...

A rare collection of personality assessments from 103 Italian politicians revealed predictable patterns of contrasts and similarities with personality dimensions from a large normative sample (N = 4,578). Three modal personality characteristics distinguished politicians, with their significantly higher levels of Energy, Agreeableness, and Social Desirability, from the general public. Comparabil...

Politicians adopt a variety of linguistic strategies in their speeches to connect with their audience. To name one, appraisal, as a system of interpersonal meaning, is concerned with evaluation where resources are used for negotiating social relationships. Despite their significance in shaping texts, there have hardly been any extensive inventories of appraisal tools contrasting electoral speec...

This paper examines Twitter networks of South Korean politicians. We have constructed the Following-follower and the Mention network between politicians and analyzed their relationship through various statistical tests and network analysis. Unlike other politician‟s network such as bill cosponsorship and hyperlink network, the Twitter politician network lies in the embeddedness context, implyin...

A report on the 5th Internet, Law and Politics conference hosted by the UOC in July 2009. The author, who attended the conference as rapporteur and wrote a ‘live blog’ during the two-day event, reviews some of the contributions, reflects on the theme of social networking sites (‘pro or con?’) and explores the different approaches of the disciplines of law and of political science, suggesting th...

Due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the Iranian and English contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (DMs) between the two cultures. To this end, three s...

BACKGROUND Accurate identification of sheep nematodes is a critical point in epidemiological studies and monitoring of drug resistance in flocks. However, due to a close morphological similarity between the eggs and larval stages of many of these nematodes, such identification is not a trivial task. There are a number of studies showing that molecular targets in ribosomal DNA (Internal transcri...

Two main career paths are prevalent among politicians in modern democracies: there are career politicians (i.e., politicians who work in the political sector until retirement), and political careers (i.e., there are politicians who leave politics before retirement and work in the private sector). In this paper, we propose a dynamic equilibrium model of the careers of politicians in an environme...