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NEW SCIENTIST SUBBING TEST 2013
This test comprises two parts. Please ensure that tracked changes are on before you start. Edit the two
articles below to ensure they are easily understandable, enjoyable to read and contain no errors of
spelling, grammar or fact. Feel free to engage your sense of humour for headlines and picture
captions. Extra marks will be awarded for originality. When you have finished, please add your name
to the filename of the document (e.g. Subbing test Jane Doe.doc).
Send the finished document and a CV to [email protected] by 31 May 2013, and use the
email to concisely explain why you are a suitable candidate. Please also indicate your name and what
you are applying for in the subject field of the email, e.g. Subediting internship Charles Darwin.
PART 1
Edit this story, supplying a headline, standfirst, caption for the image and quote. Dummy places for all
of these have been provided, so just overwrite phrases like "Headline max 30 characters" with a
headline. Where something should be a certain number of characters, the spaces between words are
included in that total.
Headline max 30 characters
Short summary/Standfirst max 100 characters
Peter Sargeant
Picture caption here max 35 characters
There is no shortage of firms marketing ways to measure social media
impact. From its US base in San Francisco, for instance, Socialbackers is
pumping out a bewildering array of statistics rating the Facebook pages
of candidates running for the US president, which include Engagement
Rate, measuring responses to posts on the candidates' site, and a metric
called Storytellers, assessing the extent to which other FaceBook users
sharing the candidates' posts on their own walls.
"WE just made history," tweeted Barack Obama, shortly after claiming
victory in the 2008 US election. If that contest proved the value of
social media as a campaining tool, this election season will provide an
historic test for the emerging industry of social media analytics.
Since Obama showed the way, developing a social media strategy has
become a must for serious political candidates. "It is cheap, and has the
possibility of exiting a younger generation," observes Panagiotis
Metaxas, a computer scientist at Welesley College in Massachussetts who
studies the use of of social media in politics.
The message from these measures are mixed. In late February, Republican
frontrunner Mitch Romney led his rivals on the Storytellers metric, but
his Engagement Rate trailed the rest. Rick Santorum had the lowest number
of Face book fans but was gaining new ones at a fastest rate. Its not yet
clear how all of this relates to electoral success, but campaigns should
be able to see whether tweaks to their social media output are having the
desired affect.
The "killer ap" for social media analytics, however, would be helping
campaigns to deliver messages calculated to push the buttons of
particular voters, and identify supporters who need extra attention to
make sure they actually turn to vote. This is called "microtargetting",
and lies at the heart of modern political campaigning.
Such methods can be used to send different direct mailings to voters who
may live next door, but have been identified as belonging to different
subgroups. For instance, a Republican candidate probably wouldn't want to
send messages berating Obama's policies on contraception as an attack on
religious freedom to a young woman likely to be a swing voter concerned
about reproductive health
In theory, peoples behaviour on social media could provide a massive
boost to microtargeting. The difficulty lies in linking Twitter accounts
and Facebook pages to the individuals in campaigns' voter databases. At
present, there is no way to do this other than to manually research each
account, explain Alex Lundry, director of research with TargetPoint
Consulting in Alexandria, Virginia, which includes the Romney campaign
among its clients.
Still, politicians already use social media as a conduit to launch
surreptious attacks against rivals.
Metaxes spotted one such attack during the race in January 2010. This
"Twitter bomb" consists of tweets sent from nine accounts, directly
addressed to individual Twitter users, apparently selected at random, and
linking to a website that attacked the Democratic candidate Martha
Coakley.
The website was registered on the same day as the accounts were created,
using a service that hides the owner’s identity. Two months after
Coakeley lost the election to Publican Scott Brown, it emerged that the
sight was created by a Republican group in Iowa involved in previous
attacks on Democratic candidates.
Researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington have since developed an
automated system to detect similar activity. It has been incorporated
into Truthy, an online tool to study ideas spread over Twitter.
Truthy hasn't revealed any obviously suspicious patterns in tweets
surrounding the currant Republican primaries. But it doesn't mean that
campaigns aren’t manipulating Twitter and Facebook by seeding them with
attack ads disguised as grassroots political chatter. "What we have seen
so far is just the tip of the ice," Menczer suggests. "We have only found
the most obvious, perhaps naive examples."
“Quote to go in here to be as close to 90 characters long as possible”
PART 2
Please edit this story and supply a headline and standfirst.
Headline in 54 characters or less here
Standfirst max 150 characters here
ATHLETES trying to cheat by loading their bodies with genes that make
muscles bigger and more efficient could be caught out if forced to
supply muscle biopsies, but not through urine or blood samples, says
Mauro Giacca of the International Centre of Genetic Engineering and
Biotechnology in Trieste, Italy, who was asked by the World Anti Doping
Agency to create and screen mice loaded with extra copies of a muscleboosting gene called IGF-1.
Giacca injected all four limbs of the mice with a harmless virus
implants IGF-1 into muscle cells. They then tested the endurance
animals by recording how long they could swim before exhaustion.
doped mice swam for three times as long as mice who received the
but no IGF-1 gene. “They had incredible endurance, says Giacca.
that
of the
The
virus,
Autopsies showed that the extra IGF-1 triggered the producton of 10
times more protein than normal in the muscles. Giaaca also saw activity
soar in genes controlling energy production, contraction of muscles and
respiration.
Giacca doubts whether it would be possible to achieve such dramatic
changes through physical exercise alone. "From a muscle biopsy, it would
be possible to distinguish a well-trained athlete from one who'd been
gene-doping for a month," she says. Also detectable were traces of the
bacteria used to deliver the genes. However, no such changes were
detectable in blood or urine from the mice (Human Gene Therapies, DOI:
10.1089/hum.2011.157).
"It may be possible to look for unusual changes in gene profiles but if
this relies on mussel biopsies it won't happen" says Lee Sweeney, of the
University of Pensylvania in Philadelphia, who created the world’s first IGF-1
"supermice" in 2004.
Giacca doubts whether athletes will attempt gene doping this year
because it is technically challenging, but says they may in the future likely through an illegal government pogrom, he says.
He is now working on a study to identify raised levels of micro RNA
related to gene-doping in blood and urine. In principal, he says, it
will be possible.