Description: This article discusses the media and communication industry. Abstract: The media and communication industries are experiencing unprecedented change and evolution in the 21st century. This article examines this process with a case study method by analyzing the traditional and new media sectors using the following criteria: the markets in which they are engaged, the leaders in each of the respective industries, the economic potential of these industries, and their continuing evolution and transforming processes. The article argues that the media and communications industries can no longer be identified in terms of core sectors such as broadcasting or newspapers, but rather to a different structure of activities involving such areas as content, distribution, and search features. Further, the paper posits that new theoretical and methodological tools are needed by scholars to better understand the massive changes and transformation occurring across the media sector. A series of propositions concludes the paper, offering a framework on which to build future research and analysis.

Description: This article discusses human-centered design. For more than two decades, user-centered design (UCD) has been the guiding philosophy and process in the field of design from both practice and pedagogy perspectives. Although there is no singular agreement on just what constitutes UCD and many different names for and "flavors" of UCD have emerged - human-centered design, just to name a few-nearly every version relies on an early and continual interaction with people who will actually use the product. Designers then use findings from the interactions (e.g. surveys, focus groups, card sorting exercises, document reviews, scenario-based testing, and plus-mining testing) to guide the design solutions.

Description: This article discusses peer review. Funding agencies and research councils around the world rely on peer review to assess the potential impacts of proposed research. This article compares the procedures of two major public science agencies - the US National Science Foundation and the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme - for evaluating ex ante the potential societal impact of research proposals. In this paper the authors survey the state of the art and discuss some of the conceptual questions that arise in using ex ante peer review to assess the societal impact of scientific research.

Description: This article discusses non-Markovian nonstationary completely positive open-quantum-system dynamics. Abstract: By modeling the interaction of a system with an environment through a renewal approach, we demonstrate that completely positive non-Markovian dynamics may develop some unexplored nonstandard statistical properties. The renewal approach is defined by a set of disruptive events, consisting in the action of a completely positive superoperator over the system density matrix. The random time intervals between events are described by an arbitrary waiting-time distribution. We show that, in contrast to the Markovian case, if one performs a system preparation (measurement) at an arbitrary time, the subsequent evolution of the density-matrix evolution is modified. The nonstationary character refers to the absence of an asymptotic master equation even when the preparation is performed at arbitrary long times. In spite of this property, we demonstrate that operator expectation values and operators correlations have the same dynamical structure, establishing the validity of a nonstationary quantum regression hypothesis. The nonstationary property of the dynamics is also analyzed through the response of the system to an external weak perturbation.

Description: This article discusses experimental quenching of harmonic stimuli. Abstract: We show that liquid crystals in the weak turbulence electroconvective regime respond to harmonic perturbations with oscillations whose intensity decay with an inverse power law of time. We use the results of this experiment to prove that this effect is the manifestation of a form of linear response theory (LRT) valid in the out-of-equilibrium case, as well as at thermodynamic equilibrium where it reduces to the ordinary LRT. We argue that this theory is a universal property, which is not confined to physical processes such as turbulent or excitable media, and that it holds true in all possible conditions, and for all possible systems, including a complex networks, thereby establishing a bridge between statistical physics and all the fields of research in complexity.