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While a comparably large amount of research has looked into the uses of Twitter at the hands of politicians, relatively little work has been done how Facebook is being used in this regard. The current paper expands our insights into the uses of social media by politicians by presenting a study of party leaders' uses of Facebook during the 2013 Norwegian election campaign. The paper focuses on two overarching areas: gauging the different themes brought up by the party leaders in their posts and the types of feedback (understood here as likes, comments and shares) that these activities appear to result in. Results indicate that the types of content least provided by the politicians – acknowledging the support of others or criticizing the actions by political peers or media actors – emerge as the most popular in this regard. Results further show that the most common type of feedback is likes – a finding that suggesting that a reassessment of the viral qualities of Facebook for purposes like these is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The uses of the popular microblogging service Twitter for political purposes have been discussed by scholars and political pundits alike. While suggestions have been made that the conversational aspects of the microblog could serve to instigate online deliberation between equals, rather few studies have investigated such claims empirically. This paper presents such an empirical study, based on a large-scale data set of tweets concerning the 2011 Danish parliamentary election. By combining state-of-the-art data collection and analysis techniques with theoretically informed matters for discussion, we provide an assessment of political Twitter activity among high-end users of the microblog during a one-month period leading up to the election. Identifying a series of user types, findings indicate that while the bulk of the studied activity bares characteristics of a representative public sphere, traces of a participatory public sphere were also discerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discuss the methodological and ethical challenges associated with large-scale analyses of political communication aided by computer-assisted methods of data collection. They believe that the media and communication scholars need to be able to critically assess the positive aspects and drawbacks of the approach. Two sets of challenges are presented in developing a comparative project in online political communication, methodological and ethical challenges.

Aim of investigation: Glucose intolerance, which characterizes diabetes and prediabetes, has been described as a major driver of inflammation-mediated disease progression. To date, only a few pro-inflammatory serum proteins have been characterized in diabetes and prediabetes patients. Methods: Here, we use a panel of 92 pro-inflammatory proteins to characterize serum obtained from subjects having Type 2 diabetes mellitus with painful neuropathy (T2DM; n=42) or prediabetes (Pre-DM; n=23), compared to healthy controls (n=42). Results: Using principle component and multivariate partial least-squares discriminant analyses, the patient groups were distinguishable from healthy controls with 98% accuracy. Surprisingly, contrary to our expectations classic pro-inflammatory proteins (interleukin-8, interferon y, and others) were reduced in the patient groups compared to controls. Additionally, adenosine deaminase (ADA) and eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E- binding protein-1 (4E-BP1) were markedly elevated and caspase-8 (CASP-8) clearly decreased compared to controls. Comparing the T2DM and Pre-DM groups revealed that neurotrophin-3, nerve growth factor-p, and human glial-derived neurotrophic factor where increased in the Pre-DM group, but not in the T2DM group with established neuropathy. Conclusion: Using a multiplex biomarker screening in blood samples we can clearly separate patients with diabetes and polyneuropathic pain, from a group of patients with prediabetes and from healthy controls. The findings may give new understanding about the ongoing pathophysiology. These results suggest that some of these factors may actually represent the efforts of protective homeostatic responses which act to limit tissue injury and drive healing, rather than pro-inflammatory molecules causing progressive tissue damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study on Twitter use by SJ, the national Swedish train operator. The aim of the study is to investigate how SJ (known on Twitter under the handle @SJ_AB) made use of the platform at hand to communicate with customers during the tumultuous Christmas season of 2010. The paper features an analysis of an extensive data set containing 3,394 tweets tagged as relevant and archived during the winter of 2010/11. Findings show that while SJ are indeed utilizing Twitter to communicate with their customers, the discerned communicative patterns are mostly pertaining to what is described as an "office hour"--approach -- making use of the Twitter platform in a way that largely conforms to established routines of organizational communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]