Query: THE FUTURE OF NATIONAL NEWS AGENCIES IN EUROPE Case study 1

title: The future of national news agencies in Europe case study 1: the impact of globally changing media systems on the business and innovation policy of the European international news agencies AFP, dpa and EFE
abstract: The purpose of this paper is to delineate the influences of globally changing media systems on the business and innovation policy of European international news agencies, as exemplified by the three agencies AFP, dpa and EFE, and paying special attention to their future. The methodology has been that of a case study approach including in depth interviews with news agency representatives from AFP, dpa and EFE who are experts in the field of study. This case study provides useful insights for news agency professionals as well as for researchers investigating the current and future situation both of news agencies and of global media systems. It further presents a valuable opportunity for professionals to deduce practical implications for the future development of their agencies

title: The future of national news agencies in Europe case study 4: business model innovation in media owned national news agencies
abstract: This study examines business model innovation in media owned national news agencies through a case study analysis of the Press Association (PA) (UK) TT News Agency (Sweden) and Austria Presse Agentur (APA) Responding to growing competition and technological changes, all these agencies have pursued a search for new business models. We argue here that these agencies have diversified their business in two key ways: by building new value added products and services and by searching for new corporate and institutional customers. They have all adopted an innovative, diversified model that can be conceptualised as a multi sided platform. The nature of this business model means that, while the subsidising of one side of the platform may be necessary, operating a news wire service at the core of the company, even with a negative margin, may be a financially viable business model.

title: The future of national news agencies in Europe case study 2: the survival challenges for news agencies in a small market: News agencies in the Baltic countries
abstract: This case study provides complementary explanatory information for understanding the current state and future prospects of European national news agencies. It focuses on the Baltic news agencies, BNS (Estonian and Lithuanian branches) LETA (Latvia) and ELTA (Lithuania) as examples of news services in small markets. Our purpose was to investigate how news agencies in small markets respond to the challenges of the internet, digitalisation and the social media era, which has altered their formerly indispensable position in the news ecosystem. All the news agencies in the Baltic countries declare as their primary role the serving of society with reliable and diverse information. In order to survive competition, news agencies, especially small ones, need to be innovative, creative and able to adapt and improve their services and products. This Baltic case study draws on available documentation and on ten interviews with editors in chief, CEOs and journalists.

title: The future of national news agencies in Europe: Case study 3: The changing relation between news agencies and the state
abstract: This case study analyses the relationship between European news agencies and the state. On the basis of interviews, official documents and secondary sources, we examine recent developments in the relationship with the state in a sample of four countries Finland, France, Poland and Spain representing different kinds of media systems. While the evolution of this relationship has been different and unique in each country, they are all bound by the competition rules of the European Union, and the challenges that the agencies face are similar. In general, European news agencies are struggling to keep their basic news services profitable. We argue that in the age of fake news and disinformation the social and democratic value of these news services is much greater than their economic value to their owners. From the democracy perspective, these services can be understood as a public good, and therefore the subsidising of content with a high information value can be in the public interest if certain preconditions are met. At the same time, safeguarding the editorial, and in particular the structural, independence of the agencies from political control is essential.

title: MAGIC and Fermi LAT gamma ray results on unassociated HAWC sources
abstract: The HAWC Collaboration released the 2HWC catalog of TeV sources, in which 19 show no association with any known high energy (HE; E 10 GeV) or very high energy (VHE; E 300 GeV) sources. This catalog motivated follow up studies by both the MAGIC and Fermi LAT observatories with the aim of investigating gamma ray emission over a broad energy band. In this paper, we report the results from the first joint work between HAWC, MAGIC and Fermi LAT on three unassociated HAWC sources: 2HWC J2006+341, 2HWC J1907+084* and 2HWC J1852+013* Although no significant detection was found in the HE and VHE regimes, this investigation shows that a minimum 1 degree extension (at 95% confidence level) and harder spectrum in the GeV than the one extrapolated from HAWC results are required in the case of 2HWC J1852+013* while a simply minimum extension of 0.16 degrees (at 95% confidence level) can already explain the scenario proposed by HAWC for the remaining sources. Moreover, the hypothesis that these sources are pulsar wind nebulae is also investigated in detail.

title: A Cold Neptune Beyond the Snow Line in the Provisional \textit{WFIRST} Field
abstract: We present the analysis of the microlensing event OGLE 2015 BLG 1670, detected in a high extinction field, very close to the Galactic plane. Due to the dust extinction along the line of sight, this event was too faint to be detected before it reached the peak of magnification. The microlensing light curve models indicate a high magnification event with a maximum of $A_\mathrm{max}\gtrsim200$ very sensitive to planetary deviations. An anomaly in the light curve has been densely observed by the microlensing surveys MOA, KMTNet, and OGLE. From the light curve modeling, we find a planetary anomaly characterized by a planet to host mass ratio, $q=\left(1.00^+0.18}_{ 0.16}\right)\times10^ 4} at the peak recently identified in the mass ratio function of microlensing planets. Thus, this event is interesting to include in future statistical studies about planet demography. We have explored the possible degeneracies and find two competing planetary models resulting from the $s\leftrightarrow1/s$ degeneracy. However, because the projected separation is very close to $s=1$ the physical implications for the planet for the two solutions are quite similar, except for the value of $s$ By combining the light curve parameters with a Galactic model, we have estimated the planet mass $M_2=17.9^+9.6}_{ 8.8}\mathrm{M}_\oplus$ and the lens distance $D_\mathrm{L}=6.7^+1.0}_{ 1.3}\mathrm{kpc} corresponding to a Neptune mass planet close to the Galactic bulge. Such events with a low absolute latitude |b|\approx1.1\\mathrm{deg} are subject to both high extinction and more uncertain source distances, two factors that may affect the mass measurements in the provisional \textit{WFIRST} fields. More events are needed to investigate the potential trade off between the higher lensing rate and the difficulty in measuring masses in these low latitude fields.

title: Family History Digital Libraries
abstract: Popular computer technologies may be used effectively today to assemble historical data about families into accurate and meaningful narratives, whether by family members themselves or by professional historians. A major technology development effort was the Digital Library Initiative of the 1990s, led by the National Science Foundation, that set the stage for several aspects of current family history archiving. To provide contrast with this vast collective effort, and prepare for consideration of family data challenges, the distinctive life of trapper and utopian Sewell Newhouse (1806 1888) is summarized, highlighting the fact that human fame is capricious and can distort historical records. The next example of connections between kinds of data and human meanings, one activity of a rural family in the early 1940s, links to general principles of the relationship between humans and nature, and between individuals and world events. Consideration of the career of genealogist Louis Effingham de Forest (1891 1952) suggests how the profession of family historian may evolve, while raising questions about how families may handle uncomfortable facts that may be discovered. The conclusion combines photographs and census data to show how the structure of a nuclear family may be delineated for the period 1900 1940. The great popularity of online genealogical services, despite their severe limitations, suggests that family history work has great potential for the future, but only if efficient and effective methods can be developed to collect information about our past and assemble the fragments into accurate and meaningful narratives. Professional genealogists have existed for over a century, and recently a new profession of digital curator has emerged (Botticelli et al. 2011) Defined by Wikipedia, "Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely."1 Yet in most cases much of the historical work must be done by family members themselves, which means that they will need instruction on how to find relevant antique information, how to assemble and preserve the information describing their own lives, and how to handle the neces1en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_curation.  Family histories are both intimate and cosmopolitan, connecting oneself to the wider world, linking from today to both yesterday and tomorrow. I would not have been able to write this book, had I not belonged to a family that cared very much about its own history, or had I not inherited two centuries of family documents, photographs covering 17 decades, and home movies and videos covering 9 decades. While trained in sociology, my dissertation and several later works were historical studies, and for a quarter century I have worked at the intersection of social and computer sciences at the National Science Foundation. 1.1 The Digital Library Initiative In 1994, the National Science Foundation made six major investments in developing new technologies, which could today contribute to family history systems, here listed in Table 1.1. Called the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) this ambitious activity continued about a decade, going through two additional stages, the second focused on smaller but more diverse grants, then the third stage aimed to partner with other nations, recognizing that by definition the World Wide Web was international (Griffiths 2004; Lesk 2012) I had hoped there would be a fourth stage, developing digital library technologies suitable for use by families and small organizations, but that never happened. A member of the DLI team, I represented the social sciences, and the six grants in Table 1.1 were managed by my computer science colleague, Stephen Griffin. These grants were made in September 1994, for a total of $26,842,849, which was about $44,000,000 in 2017 dollars, according to the inflation calculator placed online by the US government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.2 Today, anyone who wants to can go to the online NSF grants abstract search system to read the original abstracts describing the grants, and take a few simple steps to find additional information.3 For example, the one paragraph abstract of the Michigan grant says: "This project conducts research that will lead to the implementation and deployment of a digital library testbed and environment of textual, video, still image, and data sets, from both primary and secondary information suppliers. The project will make available capabilities and services to a large number of users at multiple locations. The basic approach is one of self assembling agent based federation of distributed 2data.bls.gov/cgi bin/cpicalc.pl, accessed October 2017. 3www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp. 1.1 The Digital Library Initiative 3 Ta bl e 1. 1 T he si x or ig in al gr an ts of th e D ig ita lL ib ra ry In iti at iv e G ra nt ID T itl e Pr in ci pa li nv es tig at or U ni ve rs ity C os t 94 11 28 7 T he U ni ve rs ity of M ic hi ga n D ig ita lL ib ra ri es R es ea rc h Pr op os al D an ie lA tk in s U M ic hi ga n, A nn A rb or $4 ,3 57 ,1 99 94 11 29 9 In fo rm ed ia :I nt eg ra te d Sp ee ch ,I m ag e an d L an gu ag e U nd er st an di ng fo r C re at io n an d E xp lo ra tio n of D ig ita lV id eo L ib ra ri es Ta ke o K an ad e C ar ne gi eM el lo n $4 ,8 78 ,6 59 94 11 30 6 T he St an fo rd In te gr at ed D ig ita lL ib ra ry Pr oj ec t H ec to r G ar ci aM ol in a St an fo rd $4 ,5 16 ,5 73 94 11 31 8 B ui ld in g th e In te rs pa ce :D ig ita lL ib ra ry In fr as tr uc tu re fo r a U ni ve rs ity E ng in ee ri ng C om m un ity B ru ce Sc ha tz U Il lin oi s, U rb an aC ha m pa ig n $4 ,6 74 ,2 32 94 11 33 0 T he A le xa nd ri a Pr oj ec t: To w ar ds a D is tr ib ut ed D ig ita lL ib ra ry w ith C om pr eh en si ve Se rv ic es fo r Im ag es an d Sp at ia lly R ef er en ce d In fo rm at io n Te re nc e Sm ith U C al if or ni a, Sa nt a B ar ba ra $4 ,3 94 ,1 88 94 11 33 4 T he E nv ir on m en ta lE le ct ro ni c L ib ra ry :A Pr ot ot yp e of a Sc al ab le In te lli ge nt ,D is tr ib ut ed E le ct ro ni c L ib ra ry R ob er tW ile ns ky U C al if or ni a, B er ke le y $4 ,0 21 ,9 98 4 1 Connections Between Family Data and Wider Meanings collections."4 The abstract also lists the programs involved in theDLI that contributed funding, as luck would have it naming my own program first, that together define the conceptual location of the DLI: Sociology; History and Philosophy of Science, Engineering and Technology; Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research; Digital Society and Technologies, Information and Knowledge Management; Digital Libraries and Archives; Applications of Advanced Technologies. However, DLI was not merely an NSF effort, because The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) formed a three partner team with NSF to achieve a technological revolution. Abstracts list the principal investigators (PIs) who received the grants and ran the research projects. The Michigan PI, Daniel Atkins, is well known, possessing a Wikipedia page that mentions: "He led workshops to develop the National Science Foundation (NSF) Digital Library Initiative, which included joint programs with the European Commission."5 It links to his academic webpage that reports today he is "Professor Emeritus of Information, School of Information andProfessor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering."6 Another link goes to a highly influential document usually called The Atkins Report, but more formally, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, dating from January 2003.7 A third link goes to a February 8, 2006, news item in the online NSF archive, that announces: "Dr. Atkins will join NSF on June 5 as Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) which has a Fiscal Year 2006 budget of $127 million.8 So, Atkins and the other DLI PIs were extremely influential people, but given that this book concerns family history, what do we immediately know from these sources about this particular person's family? He and his wife set up a scholarship fund at the University of Michigan, and its webpage says, "Dan and Monica have two children and five grandchildren, all of whom live in Ann Arbor. 'Being mom and grandma is the job that trumps them all, says Monica."9 The second grant in the table, Informedia, was a pioneering effort to develop automatic means to achieve "the integrated application of speech, language and image understanding technologies for efficient creation (acquisition, recognition, segmentation, and indexing) and exploration (query, search, retrieval, and display)" of a library of digital videos.10 This is directly relevant for family histories, because antique homemovies can be translated into digital videos, andmuch of contemporary life can now be documented through instant videos recorded by common mobile devices. Within two years, the project was t

title: Child neuropsychopharmacology: good news. the glass is half full
abstract: Rapoport nicely illustrates the past and present of paediatric neuropsychopharmacology and what is even more interesting also speculates about the future of this field. She posits the debate as either more or less e.g. prescription of psychotropic drugs to children and adolescents than needed, with the relevant clinical implications and diagnostic controversies linked to it. I will address the debate from a complementary view, that of hazards and opportunities for child neuropsychopharmacology. Let's start with the empty part of the glass. I agree with Rapoport that we are far from discovering new drugs that cure or dramatically change the course of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents. We first have to discover what needs to be fixed or repaired, i.e. the pathophysiology of psychiatric conditions at the molecular level. Only then will we be able to develop drugs targeted to altering a priori known biological mechanisms. This makes the field of neuropsychopharmacology a risky business: the old paradigms (e.g. monoamine release, dopamine blockade) seem to be exhausted, while the search for new mechanisms of action is uncertain, since in most cases we lack the science that should drive the development of such new drugs. This is even more true in times of economic crisis, when drug companies gravitate toward more secure markets, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. This is a clear threat to the search for new treatments for very prevalent and disabling mental disorders. Big Pharma's pull out from neuropsychopharmacology is a consequence of some of these problems 1. Turning now to the half full part of the glass, we have to acknowledge that, while the field of child neuropsychopharmacology has always lagged behind that of adult neuropsychopharmacology, this has been changing in the last decade, as both the US Food and Drug Administration (Pediatric Research Equity Act, 2003) and the European Medicines Agency (regulations 1901/2006 and 1902/2006) have not only provided extension patents for drug companies that have pediatric plans, but also required companies to conduct clinical trials in children, if their drugs have the potential to be used in that population, when they are seeking approval for an indication in adults. For many years, drugs with proven efficacy in adults have been used in children with no evidence either for efficacy or safety and tolerability. This is not going to be the case anymore if these rules stay in place. The flip side of the coin is the difficulty drug companies face in recruiting patients for such clinical trials, and the economic burden added to the already extremely high cost of drug development. While it is clear that data from pediatric populations are needed, this should not come at the expense of making the business of developing drugs for mental disorders unaffordable. Nevertheless, we as a field should take advantage of the enormous amount of data generated by these pediatric clinical trials conducted for many psychiatric disorders 2. Some data are also valuable for assessing non drug related hypotheses, such as those concerning the clinical course and predictive markers in pediatric mental disorders provided by longitudinal trials with large patient samples. The high rate of prescription of drugs such as antipsychotics and stimulants in children reported in the US 3,4 is in no way the rule in Europe, although prescription rates of psychotropics have also increased, to a much lesser extent, in some European Union countries 5. It is worrisome to see that the prescription rate of antipsychotics in the US is approximately five times the prevalence of psychotic disorders in the pediatric population. This clearly means that such drugs are prescribed without evidence or with only marginal evidence of efficacy, as is the case for conduct disorders without mental retardation. As many of these drugs are out of patent, more clinical trials need to be funded with public money. Since many patients need to be recruited for these trials and this is not an easy task, it seems very important to prioritize this type of studies among those launched at the initiative of the European Commission or the National Institute of Mental Health. Networks such as that on child and adolescent neuropsychopharmacology established by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology are also a good way to improve recruitment at centres with a solid background in this field. Although mostly discovered by serendipity, as we lack the knowledge of the pathophysiology needed to direct the targets, some drugs used in child psychiatry have larger effect sizes than those used in other areas of medicine. For instance, drugs prescribed for asthma, headache or atopic dermatitis have lower effect sizes than those used to treat attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Still, they are much less controversial. We should not allow the stigma related to mental disease to preclude us from providing the right treatment to our patients. If that were to happen, the stigma would have the dual deleterious effect of marginalizing our patients and depriving them of the benefit of drugs that have been shown to improve their quality of life and functioning. We are under close scrutiny, and some recent movements in the US e.g. (prescription of drugs to children under 7 years of age diagnosed as bipolar) work against us as a field. It has taken great effort and excellent professionals like J. Rapoport to arrive where we are now. We should take advantage of new opportunities, such as translational psychiatry studies that allow us to assess the behavioural effects of genetic variants or molecular induced changes. These include large cohort studies that will shed light on normal and abnormal development or the wealth of data on short and long term efficacy, safety and tolerability of new drugs that pharmaceutical companies are now requested to generate. One further opportunity is the increasingly accepted view that we should move towards early intervention and prevention and that most psychiatric conditions develop during childhood and adolescence 6. That should shift the target, not only of drug discovery but also of therapeutic approaches in general, toward a younger population than is typically included in clinical trials. We should not waste these opportunities or cook our own goose by diverging from evidence based treatment algorithms. It is our children's mental health that is at stake.

title: Egypt's Media Ecology in a Time of Revolution
abstract: In 1984 William Beeman published a brief but useful essay on the media ecology of Iran before, during and after the revolution. After briefly discussing the relationship between interpersonal gossip "the grapevine" and state television and radio, he discusses the dramatic changes in the news media as the revolution progressed, only to settle back into its original role as a voice for the regime albeit a new regime. The Egyptian uprising had new elements absent in the Iranian revolution, most notably social media and satellite television. Social media does not replace either "the grapevine" of networks of face toface interaction nor the monodirectional power of television (which was, in fact, somewhat less unitary than 1970s Iran because of satellite programming) Rather, it offers a way to extend the "grapevine" networks to link otherwise geographically separated individuals into an entirely new public sphere, on the one hand, and to appropriate, supplement, comment on and reframe other media on the other. The revolutionary media ecology of Egypt in particular the ways various media index, image and influence one another suggests that (unlike Iran) whatever the ultimate political outcome of the uprisings, the mediascape of Egypt after the revolution will be significantly different than it was before January 25. At times newly introduced mass media have produced revolutionary effects in the societal management of time and energy as they forged new spaces for themselves. Thus media are cultural forces as well as cultural objects. In operation, they produce specific cultural effects that cannot be easily predicted (Beeman 1984: 147) Revolutions are extraordinary times in any society. As they break down pre existing political, economic and social structures, they usher in periods of enormous creativity and imagination. In his work on social and cultural process, anthropologist Victor Turner described this period as "anti structure" that period in which the structures of everyday life of the immediate past have been disrupted or overturned, but new structures have not yet emerged to replace them (1969) Borrowing the language of ritual studies, Turner argues that as revolutions move a people from one state to another, they usher in a period of "liminality" in which the world is turned upside down and old rules do not apply. Unlike traditional rites of passage, however, in which the outcome of the process is known, during a social and political revolution the contingent nature of the future engenders a state of creativity, energy and imagination in which transformational possibilities seem endless (1974) Media play at least two key roles in this process. On the one hand, their institutional roles their relations with the state and communities of reader/viewers may be abruptly changed. On the other hand, as social forces they will play various roles in the revolutionary process. These processes are recursive: transformations in the relations between press and state, for example, will affect the capacity a medium has for contributing, through its representation of various narratives and key symbols, to social change. And the reverse is also true: changes in the ways media represent events in society can lead to shifts in institutional relations between various media industries, as well as between media and their audiences, or with the state. One of the few efforts to analyze such processes is a brief but insightful essay by William O. Beeman on the media ecology of Iran before, during and after the revolution (1984) After briefly discussing the relationship between interpersonal gossip "the grapevine" newspapers, and state television and radio, he discusses the dramatic changes in the news media as the revolution progressed, as well as the way these mainstream media settled back into their original role as a voice for the regime albeit a new regime.  State newspapers not only reported events from the government's perspective, but constructed heroic narratives around the persons of leading government figures, and the Mubarak family in particular. 2. Party newspapers are published by officially sanctioned political parties. Fourteen of Egypt's political parties had the right to publish their own newspapers, receiving a small subsidy from the government and sometimes the use of government presses. Most of these were small, weekly publications, with the exception of the daily newspapers published by Al Wafd and Al Ahrar. Although by definition these newspapers took antigovernment positions on many issues, state domination was exercised through control of subsidies, and journalists and editors were liable to prosecution under emergency law if they violated certain taboos, such as direct criticism of the president or his family. 3. Independent newspapers, also often called opposition newspapers, are for profit newspapers licensed by the state. The most prominent are Al Masry Al Youm, Al Dostor and El Shorouk. Owners of independent newspapers must be cleared by several security and intelligence agencies in order to receive a state licensure, and the State Information Service can revoke the license at any time. Some have been required to (pay to) use state presses to publish. Independent newspapers were not pre censored but were subject to prosecution under vague laws that prohibited journalists and broadcasters from saying or writing things that might damage "the social peace," "national unity," "public order" or "public values." Part of the genius of the regime was that such laws were inconsistently enforced. No journalist, blogger or television reporter knew exactly where the lines were drawn or when the police might show up because they had crossed an invisible line. This produced a self censorship far more efficient and cost effective than direct pre censorship would have been, while allowing the regime to state truthfully that there was no state censorship of news. 4. International newspapers. The foreign press is usually subdivided into regional and international, the former consisting of other mostly Arabic language newspapers (but including those published by Arab communities seeking press freedom in Europe) and the latter consisting of newspapers in languages other than Arabic and published from sites outside the Middle East. Although the international press is free from both censorship and prosecution, it is against the law to "damage Egypt's reputation abroad" by criticizing the government in foreign media, making sources for stories on Egypt necessarily less forthright in speaking to foreign reporters than they might otherwise be. Broadcast television in Egypt followed a similar pattern of domination by the state. Since its establishment in 1960, Egyptian television has always been regarded as the voice of the Egyptian government. Terrestrial channels and Egyptian satellite channels are under direct government supervision, operation and ownership. The Egyptian Radio and Television Union or ERTU, housed in the Maspero Building in central Cairo, is the state agency that operates all terrestrially broadcast television in Egypt. Since 2009, ERTU has also included the Nile TV International satellite network. Both the ERTU and the television sector chairmen are appointed by the Minister of Information. A handful of private channels exist but continually face the dilemma of creating programming that will attract audiences without provoking the authorities. The first private channel was Dream TV, established in 2001 by Egyptian businessman Ahmed Bahgat. Another major private TV channel is OTV (now ONTV) owned by Naguib Sawiris. All private channels are subject to indirect control by ERTU, which is the main shareholder of Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC) and Nilesat, services crucial to private broadcasting. Additionally, companies producing television shows in the EMPC require licenses from the Public Authority for Investment and Free Zones, which can suspend or refuse to renew licenses in the case of questionable content. And, of course, Egypt's emergency law granted the government complete freedom to punish political criticism. Among other things, ERTU forbade rival television news programs, so private channels had to make do with talk shows and political commentary. In 2010, on the eve of the revolution, Reporters Without Borders ranked Egypt 127 out of 178 in its Press Freedom Index, which evaluates both print and television newsmaking. The Internet began in Egypt as a university intranet system that connected to the global Internet in 1993. In 1994 the government created the Regional Information Technology and Software Engineering Center (RITSEC) which provided free internet access to public and private corporations, government agencies, NGOs and professionals (Kamal and Hussein 2001) Private Internet providers were licensed in 1996, and in 2002 the government began to offer "free" dialup Internet services through a revenue sharing agreement between private ISPs and the national telephone company (Elamrani 2002) These measures at making Egypt a Middle Eastern leader in Internet use were effective; there were nearly 20 million Internet users in Egypt by the time of th

title: Human Spaceflight in Social Media Promoting Space Exploration Through Twitter
abstract: While space based technologies for Earth applications are flourishing, space exploration activities suffer from a lack of public awareness as well as decreasing budgets. However, space exploration benefits are numerous and include significant science, technological development, socioeconomic benefits, education, and leadership contributions. Recent robotic exploration missions have positively influenced public perception by utilizing video and social media communication. How can these new communication technologies be used to better serve human spaceflight? How can space agencies and astronauts inspire tax paying citizens, and thus politicians, to commit to an ambitious, global human spaceflight program based on international collaboration? This article analyzes how the Twitter network related to human spaceflight is organized, measuring how influence and relationships are linked, to better capture the best practices and enhance the promotion of space exploration. We outline the Twitter network and organization related to human spaceflights and show how the use of media (i.e. photos and videos) in tweets can affect the notoriety and popularity of Twitter accounts. We investigate the cultural differences of astronaut followers. This article crystallizes the study performed on the Twitter human spaceflight network. This is the first study analyzing the use of social media to communicate about human spaceflight and its potential. Future work needs to be done to characterize the effectiveness of using such a platform to build adequate support for human spaceflight, in comparison to more conventional communication tools.  To turn back now would be to deny our history, our capabilities, said James Michener. The aerospace industry has successfully commercialized Earth applications for space technologies, but human space exploration seems to lack support from both financial and human public interest perspectives. Space agencies no longer enjoy the political support and public enthusiasm that historically drove the human spaceflight programs. If one uses constant year dollars, the $16B National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) budget dedicated for human spaceflight in the Apollo era has fallen to $7.9B in 2014, of which 41% is dedicated to operations covering the International Space Station (ISS) the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion, and commercial crew programs. The European Space Agency (ESA) maintains a budget of 400Me for human spaceflight, approximately 10% of its total budget. While mission successes continue under these constraints, financial as well as renewed public support is required for human exploration to become a strategic and high priority among many nations. Exploration is the expansion of the realm of human experience, the redefinition of what it means to be human, and despite the nondirect benefits for society, numerous rationales rely on it. Primary and secondary rationales justify human spaceflight. Primary ones, which rely on the presence of humans, include national pride, international leadership, and inspiration. Secondary rationales where humans augment the benefits of missions include science, economic development, and education. Human spaceflight is an efficient way to build identity and contribute to national stature. Human spaceflight remains a powerful instrument for international diplomacy, which can promote peaceful international relations. The ISS is the best example, currently. Space exploration also offers an 'extraordinary opportunity to stimulate math, science and engineering excellence' in countries involved in these programs, a significant benefit, as many governments currently place high priority on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The rationales of human spaceflight are more topical than ever, but the paradigm needs to change in order to build a strong and ambitious space exploration program. In the time of a flat world within a global economic crisis, international collaboration appears to be the Manuscript presented at the International Astronautical Congress, 65, Toronto, Canada, September 29 October 3, 2014.  As a coordination of financial and intellectual resources, international collaboration increases the scope of programs beyond the capabilities of individual space agencies. 'Engage the public in exploration' is one of the 8 common goals and objectives that the International Space Exploration Coordination Group defined, in order to build a sustainable human space exploration endeavor that will last for decades. Communication in Human Spaceflight Astronauts are the incarnation of space exploration; they embody national prestige, inspire younger generations, and represent a very efficient way to gain public support, therefore providing an incentive for nations to fund human spaceflight programs. However, astronauts remain very nationalistic: their influence is difficult to spread across borders, especially due to language barriers and lack of identification. This issue presents an obstacle for ambitious international cooperation. As astronaut Gerhard Thiele states in the 'European Identity through Space' report, 'while in the astronauts' country the news coverage is usually very broad and at a prominent place in the newspaper or the TV news, in other European media the space mission usually receives hardly more than a short mention. What is true among the European countries collaborating within ESA is an even greater reality between different agencies. In addition to the cultural gap that can form between an astronaut and the public, a loss of general awareness about astronauts and their activities is observed. For example, Americans are currently less able to name an American astronaut than was the case right after the Apollo era. According to Gabriel Almond, the engagement of the citizens depends on a combination of interest in the topic and a sense of being adequately informed about it, and recent studies have shown that both the well informed public and the public interested in human spaceflight have relatively low awareness compared to other public policy issues. However, the communication paradigm is rapidly changing with the development of the Web 2.0, an expression referring to the interactive and collaborative evolution of the Internet. Information is now exchanged through blogs, social networks, web applications, and wikis. Li and Bernoff define it as 'the social trend in which people use technologies and get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions. They call it the 'groundswell. These new interactive tools are changing the way space agencies communicate and the way the public perceives human spaceflight: the groundswell is crossing borders, gathering people from all over the world, and broadcasting inspiring videos and pictures. Already several examples have reached the public in a very inspiring way: Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gained more than 22 million views on his 'Space Oddity' YouTube video, and inspired the entire space community, especially the Anglo Saxon world. The video of the Curiosity landing, demonstrating both the technological challenge of the mission and the human joy of the ground control staff, has gone viral and was part of the Google Zeitgest 2012, summarizing the year 2012. Other salient examples have demonstrated an effective use of social network to convey messages, make the space community react, and inspire the Web: the Rosetta campaign during the summer of 2014 was a case in point. The interactive tools provided by the Internet are also very useful to educate and provide informal education supplemental to a classroom activity. Different social phenomena are involved in this new communication tool: public information, public education, public engagement, public support, and public participation. However, one does not necessarily lead to another. Public participation seems to be a key phenomenon to endure public involvement. Some campaigns have successfully demonstrated the benefits of public participation: the #HumansInSpace campaign, where Twitter users were asked to provide ideas for human spaceflight program, or NASA spacesuit design vote. The groundswell is a relatively inexpensive communication tool, prone to cross the borders of culture and language, and appears to be the adapted tool to build the space exploration program of tomorrow, based on international collaboration. Twitter for Human Spaceflight Communication One of the common objectives that space agencies share is to use interactive communication tools to provide virtual experiences using real and live exploration data. Google or Youtube are particularly adapted to inform, communicate, interact, and inspire large and different communities of Internet users. However, they are all different in the way they work and connect people. Twitter, launched in March 2006, is one of the most notable and used real time message routing platforms, also known as a microblogging service. The principle is that users can communicate to their network through short instant messages called tweets, limited to 140 characters. The network is based on the 'following principle, in which each user chooses who to 'follow' to receive tweets from this account. The nature of Twitter, through its simplicity, utility, and mobility, makes it particularly effective platform to disse