Online news comments are often confronted with issues of civility and inclusivity, which are sometimes pegged to the anonymity afforded to contributors in those spaces. In this work we study one form of anonymity in online comments that manifests as users changing their display name when they write a given comment. We undertake a predominantly quantitative analysis of how display names are chan...

In a recent article in Nature [1], titled Gain-assisted superluminal light propagation, experimentalists reported observing a laser pulse propagating faster than the speed of light through a gas cell which served as a amplifying medium. They state that the "peak of the pulse appears to leave the cell before entering it". This article generated a great deal of press attention around the world. F...

This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acquire different perceptions of the importance of political issues. Using data from a weeklong experiment in which subjects either read the print version of the New York Times, the online version of that paper, or received no special exposure, this study finds evidence that people exposed to the Times ...

A historical review of absenteeism in the popular press is presented through a sample of articles appearing in the New York Times from 1904 to 2004. The review demonstrates the negative perception of absenteeism over the years while also exposing diversity in the treatment of absence in terms of perceived causes, effects, and strategies to combat it. The findings offer insight into social expec...

Identifying an opinion target, a primary object of the opinion expression (e.g., the real-world object, event, and abstract entity), is helpful for extracting target-related opinions and detecting user interests. This paper presents a novel framework for target-based opinion analysis, which extracts opinionated sentences and identifies their opinion targets from news articles. To determine whet...