Examining fatal and nonfatal incidents involving the TASER

Research Summary According to TASER International, nearly 10,000 police departments in the United States have deployed the TASER as a less lethal force alternative in some capacity. Despite the TASER's increasing popularity, serious questions have been raised about the device's physiological side effects; in particular, Amnesty International has reported that more than 300 people have died after being subjected to the TASER. Although a growing body of research has examined the physiological effects of the TASER on animals and healthy human volunteers in laboratory settings, there has been virtually no empirical analysis of “real‐world” fatal and nonfatal TASER cases simultaneously. This article examines all media reports of TASER incidents from 2002 to 2006 through a comprehensive review of LexisNexis and New York Times archives. We compare TASER incidents in which a fatality occurred to TASER incidents in which a fatality did not occur and then employ multivariate analyses to identify the incident and suspect characteristics that are predictive of articles describing TASER‐proximate deaths. Policy Implications Several suspect factors were significantly associated with the reporting of a fatal TASER incident, including drug use (but not alcohol), mental illness, and continued resistance. Multiple deployments of the TASER against a suspect was also associated with the likelihood of the article describing a fatality—especially if the suspect was emotionally disturbed—which raises the possibility that the risk of multiple shocks might not be uniform for all suspects. More research is needed to explore the relationship between mental illness, drug use (illicit or therapeutic), continued resistance, and increased risk of death. In the meantime, police departments should develop specific policies and training governing the use of multiple TASER shocks against individuals who could be in these vulnerable physiological and psychological states.     

Did Jamie Oliver Really Put School Dinners on the Agenda? An Examination of the Role of the Media in Policy Making

Healthy eating is high on the government's agenda in current times and to all intents and purposes the media appears to have played a crucial role in putting it there. While media focus is no doubt intense and playing a vital role in public education (take Jamie Oliver's 2005 Channel 4 documentary, ‘School dinners’, for example), the question that lies at the heart of this article, is whether the media has led the government agenda on healthy eating and school dinners as appears to be the case. A close examination of the evidence suggests otherwise: government policy was already well set before the media began to show a concerted interest and hence its influence on policy‐making is more limited than might be expected. Rather than setting agendas per se, the media's role has been to refine and energise existing policy areas and to facilitate implementation.     

Towards more digital cities? Change in technology use and perceptions across small and medium-sized US cities

ABSTRACT

There is continuous pressure on public managers to adopt information and communication technologies (ICTs) to transform the way cities work. E-government research provides insights on the institutional, organisational, and individual factors that shape technology adoption and use. Yet most studies on small and medium sized cities use cross-sectional data or rely on small samples. We lack a systematic understanding of how technology use in smaller cities has changed over time and where these cities are lagging. Drawing from a multi-year, multi-method national study of city government technology use, we describe advancements and gaps in the enactment of a range of technologies, from social media to open data portals, and explore variation across city population, department type, and manager age. Our findings show that smaller cities still lag in the adoption of key features while local government managers are more inclined to adopt and positively perceive social media than traditional ICTs.     

Is the genie out of the bottle? Digital platforms and the future of clinical trials

Is it possible to conduct impartial clinical trials in a world full of digital networking tools that patients can use to coordinate themselves and act against research protocols? This paper builds on an ethnography of PatientsLikeMe, a company running an internet social media network where patients with different conditions share their clinical data with standardized questionnaires. The company faced a serious dilemma in 2011 when some ALS patients, members of the site, started sharing data about a phase II clinical trial of an experimental drug (NP001) in which some of them were participating, to anticipate the experiment’s outcomes and understand each one’s allocation over trial arms. In parallel, some other patients were using the site and other web tools to coordinate and run their own replication of the trial with homebrew mixes of industrial grade chemicals. PatientsLikeMe researchers reflected on their position as networks managers and eventually decided to use the collected data to develop their own analysis of the efficacy of the original compound, and of the homebrewers’ compound. They presented the NP001 events as a case in point for articulating a new social contract for clinical research. This paper analyses these events, first, by understanding the clinical trial as an experiment organization form that can succeed only as long as its protocol can be enforced; second, we observe how web networks make it dramatically easier for the trial protocol to be violated; finally, we point out how a potentially dangerous confluence of interests over web networks could incubate developments that disrupt the status quo without creating a robust and safe alternative for experimentation. We conclude by warning about the interests of the pharmaceutical industry in exploiting patients’ methodological requests to its own advantage.     

The Politics of Selectivity: Online Newspaper Coverage of Refugees Entering Canada and the United States

Abstract

While scholarly work on Europe’s latest “refugee crisis” has blossomed, less attention has focused on the United States and Canada. My research centers on newspaper coverage of refugees entering these two countries, before and after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015. I conduct a comparative, cultural sociological analysis of 318 online news articles, reconstructing a system of meaning I call the Politics of Selectivity, in which refugees are portrayed as deserving or undeserving of resettlement. A deep, interpretive reading of the data reveals three dimensions of this political arena in which explicit, implicit, and conditional criteria for accepting refugees are articulated.     

Brand Innovation and Value-Creating Practices of the City of Johannesburg’s Twitter Community

Abstract

Brands facilitating and sustaining healthy brand communities on social networks such as Twitter benefit from collaborative engagements where members are inspired to suggest innovative ideas, solve problems and enjoy a sense of commitment to their social membership co-creative space. We explored how brand innovation practices contribute to the collective value-creating practices within the social media-based brand community hosted by the official City of Johannesburg (CoJ) Twitter account. This purposive sample include 1,232 tweets during Youth Day, followed by one in-depth, semi-structured interview with the social media manager of the CoJ Twitter account to confirm and contextualise findings. Thematic analysis in a qualitative design found five of six brand innovation practices, namely animation, openness, linking, structuring and theorisation. The CoJ social media-based brand community was co-created innovatively owing to high levels of engagement, room for fun and effective communication on service delivery issues so that the brand community continuously increases its membership and commitment. Findings confirmed eight of twelve value-creating practices, namely welcoming, empathising, governing, evangelising, justifying, grooming, customising and commoditising. The healthier a brand community, the more extensive the variety of innovation practices for a brand.     

Understanding the Magic of Credibility for Political Leaders: A Case of India and Narendra Modi

The field of political marketing has majorly benefited from the use of social media platforms. This has been true both for eastern and western contexts. The primary areas in political marketing that have majorly benefited from the social media usage have been the political leader and the evaluations of the leader by the voters. In the Indian context too, the use of social media techniques has been hailed as the Holy Grail of political marketing. This estimation is quite apposite. Nevertheless, what must not be forgotten is that the complexities of the bonding between political leaders and voters are not only premised primarily on the efficacy of social media techniques but also include other key dimensions. Thus, this article focuses on the importance of credibility as a key dimension. This dimension is inevitable to make social media techniques as effective as they are in political marketing. To substantiate this, we have comprehensively engaged with the fields such as traits of political leaders, crisis management and collaboration. These deliberations have been contextualized to the case of Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India. Further, these deliberations culminate in an effective framework. Academicians and practitioners of political marketing can extensively utilize this framework.     

中国媒体产业法律制度创新初探

目前中国媒体产业的法律制度变革面临着巨大的压力和广泛的动力 ,在澄清观念之后 ,其产业立法应遵循四大原则。在从宪法到地方部门规章的法律体系中平衡政府、媒体、公众三者的利益。在产业组织政策、产业结构政策和产业分布政策的创新过程中 ,寻求产业发展的推动力和制动力的均衡 ,通过法律制度创新降低市场交易成本 ,中国媒体产业才能在经济、政治、文化三大领域内取得效益最大化。     

关于“三贴近”的传播学解读

我党提出的贴近实际、贴近生活、贴近群众的“三贴近”原则,鲜明地体现了新闻报道的客观真实性、迅速及时性和大众性;它不仅丰富和发展了马克思主义的新闻传播理论,而且对新闻传播工作的实践也具有重要的指导意义。     

Media Freedom and Political Debate in the Digital Era

This article examines the impact of online expression on theories of media freedom. While media freedom has generally been justified instrumentally, the opportunities for expression via the Internet may require greater emphasis on the interests of the individual speaker. Despite this development, this article shows how a small number of speakers will still command a much wider audience and have greater influence over political debate. For such speakers the approach to media freedom devised in the mass media era will remain applicable.