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From fact-checking to debunking: The case of Elections24Check during the 2024 European Elections
Get PDFMisleading and false information is an issue in the European public sphere. This article analyzes the verified disinformation by fact-checkers during the 2024 European Parliament elections. From the lens of fact-checking, as a journalism practice to fight against disinformation, this research explores the European initiative Elections24Check, a collaborative fact-checking project associated with the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. The research aims: on the one hand, to demonstrate the prevalence of debunking over fact-checking; and on the other, to dissect the thematic nature, format, typology, and deceitful technique of the hoaxes verified during the last European elections. Using content analysis, the sample comprised 487 publications verified by 32 different fact-checkers across a total of 28 countries for one month related to the 2024 European elections. The results present implications regarding the collaborative fact-checking project that made a greater effort to verify other contextual disinformation issues rather than checking disinformation directly involved in the elections and EU politics. Also, this case study revealed the shift in the European fact-checking movement with the prevalence of debunking activity over scrutinizing public statements. Finally, the verified disinformation underscored the continued dominance of text as the primary format for spreading false information and the predominance of content decontextualization. The results of this study aim to deepen the understanding of fact-checking in the European media landscape.This research was supported by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA), belonging to the European Commission, Jean Monnet (Erasmus) Future of Europe Communication in Times of Pandemic Disinformation (FUTEUDISPAN; No: 101083334‐JMO‐2022‐CHAIR). Nevertheless, the authors bear sole responsibility for the content of this article, and the EACEA assumes no liability for the utilization of the disclosed information. This study also belongs to a Spanish National Project of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (2022). Project reference: PID2022‐142755OB‐I00. Moreover, this research was also funded by Universidad de La Sabana (No: COMCORP‐3–2023), associated with the research group Centro de Investigaciones de la Comunicación Corporativa Organizacional (CICCO). This research was also supported by a University teacher training grant (FPU22/01905), awarded to one of the co‐authors by the Spanish Ministry of UniversitiesThis article draws on the Elections24Check database, to which the EFCSN has granted us access for our research purposes, and for whose collaboration we express our gratitude
Modeling the performance of electrosprayed catalyst layers in the cathode of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells
Get PDFCatalyst layers produced by electrospray (ES) have shown to be a viable route to improve the performance of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) due to their good ionic and mass transport properties. In this work, the behavior of ES cathodes is examined numerically for the first time. A model accounting for macro-scopic transport in the flow field and in the membrane electrode assembly (MEA) is coupled to a microscopic CL model. The results show that the ES behavior can be explained by a particular multiscale arrangement of liquid water. ES reduces the tortuosity of the ionomer conduction network and promotes water uptake in the ionomer. However, this higher water uptake is accompanied in ES by superhydrophobicity at macroscale (θcl ≃ 150◦ ) resulting from the dendritic morphology of the pore surface (Cassie-Baxter type). Superhydrophobicity reduces free liquid water in pores (i.e., liquid water not dissolved in the ionomer), and thereby the oxygen transport resistance. As a result, the performance is improved both under oxygen limiting and self-humidifying conditions. In addition, the optimal ionomer mass fraction of ES is lower than the conventional value (0.15 vs. 0.3) and the ionomer distribution is more uniform, which leads to an improved performance at low Pt loading.This work was supported by the projects PORHYDRO1 TED2021-131620B-C21/AEI and PORHYDRO2 TED2021-131620B-C22/AEI European Union Next Generation EU/PRTR, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, Spanish Research Council
Mapping Generative AI rules and liability scenarios in the AI Act, and in the proposed EU liability rules for AI liability
Get PDFThe Paper aims to explore whether the current ecosystem of existing and still-to-be adopted rules on artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the European Union does fully and adequately address the liability for damages caused by Generative AI system. It maps first and primarily the distinctive features and functional characteristics of Generative AI likely to impact on regulatory and legal considerations and, in particular, on determining the specific regulatory regime governing Generative AI and on tracing and allocating liability along the value chain pursuant to the AI Act. On the basis of this mapping exercise, the Paper focuses on testing the liability rules as provided for the draft Artificial Intelligence Liability Directive and the Revised Product Liability Directive and assessing their sufficiency and effectiveness in the face of Generative AI. Beyond the assessment of the rules laid down in the above-referred texts, the Paper briefly describes other liability scenarios to be explored in future works.Funding for APC: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Agreement CRUE-Madroño 2024)
Optimal placement of wind farms via quantile constraint learning
No full textWind farm placement arranges the size and the location of multiple wind farms within a given region. The power output is highly related to the wind speed on spatial and temporal levels, which can be modeled by advanced data-driven approaches. To this end, we use a probabilistic neural network as a surrogate that accounts for the spatiotemporal correlations of wind speed. This neural network uses ReLU activation functions so that it can be reformulated as mixed-integer linear set of constraints (constraint learning). We embed these constraints into the placement decision problem, formulated as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem. Specifically, conditional quantiles of the total electricity production are regarded as recursive decisions in the second stage. We use real high-resolution regional data from a northern region in Spain. We validate that the constraint learning approach outperforms the classical bilinear interpolation method. Numerical experiments are implemented on risk-averse investors. The results indicate that risk-averse investors concentrate on dominant sites with strong wind, while exhibiting spatial diversification and sensitive capacity spread in non-dominant sites. Furthermore, we show that if we introduce transmission line costs in the problem, risk-averse investors favor locations closer to the substations. On the contrary, risk-neutral investors are willing to move to further locations to achieve higher expected profits. Our results conclude that the proposed novel approach is able to tackle a portfolio of regional wind farm placements and further provide guidance for risk-averse investors.This work is part of the R&D project PID2023-151013NB-I00, funded by
MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF/EU. And Wenxiu Feng also
acknowledges the support from China Scholarship Council, China, Grant No.
202106890026
Enhanced Exciton-Plasmon Interaction Enabling Observation of Near-Field Photoluminescence in a WSe2-Gold Nanoparticle Hybrid System
No full textMonolayer transition metal dichalcogenides, such as tungsten diselenide, have recently attracted considerable attention due to their reduced dielectric screening and direct bandgap, which result in high exciton binding energy and strong photoluminescence. The integration of monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides with plasmonic nanoparticles enhances their optoelectronic properties through localized surface plasmons and strong electromagnetic confinement. We investigated the photoluminescence response of the hybrid system of monolayer tungsten diselenide and gold nanoparticle arrays through near-field mapping. Our study demonstrated a significant enhancement of the excitonic emission by the excited gold nanoparticles via near-field interaction. We examined the impact of exciton–plasmon-polariton coupling on the far-field response of the hybrid system. There, we observed the phenomenon of exciton-induced transparency, which indicates the intermediate coupling regime and helps resonantly enhance the light-matter interaction in monolayer tungsten diselenide. The second harmonic generation intensity from the hybrid system was shown to follow the linear spectral response of the hybrid system, thereby demonstrating the enhanced coupling between surface plasmons and excitons. Our research offers insights into the impact of intermediate coupling on the optical properties of hybrid exciton–plasmon systems, which is crucial for the development of advanced nanophotonic devices.This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), CRC/SFB 1375 NOA ‘Nonlinear Optics down to Atomic scales’(Project number 398816777), EXC 2051 (Project number 390713860), and International Research Training Group 2675 ‘META-ACTIVE’, project number 437527638. A.I.B. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Spanish national project No. PID2022-137857NA-I00. A.I.B. thanks MICINN for the Ramon y Cajal Fellowship (grant No. RYC2021-030880-I). F.E. acknowledges Bundesministerium fur Bildung and Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research) support via NanoScopeFutur-2D (Project Number 13XP5053A)
The socio-structural basis of the long-term declien in traditional left-right class votign in affluent democracies, 1964-2019
No full textHow can we explain the long-term decline in the class-based voting cleavage observed in high-income democracies since the 1960s' The causes of this decline are far from being fully understood. We hypothesize that the decline in this cleavage between the working class and other classes is connected to the shrinkage of the working class, increases in economic prosperity, and a reduction in levels of inequality. To test these hypotheses, we use a newly-assembled dataset including sixteen advanced democracies with a long temporal coverage (1964-2019) and a class voting index based on the difference between the proportion of a particular social class in a party's electorate and the proportion of this social class in the electorate as a whole. Models using country fixed effects confirm a decline in the class-based voting cleavage across Western democracies. Controlling for several political variables, the size of the working class constitutes the best predictor of declines in class voting in affluent democracies
Quantum Computing in the RAN with Qu4Fec: Closing Gaps Towards Quantum-based FEC processors
No full textProceedings of: ACM SIGMETRICS 2025, 9-13 june 2025. Stony Brook, New York (USA)In mobile communication systems, the increasing densification of radio access networks is creating unprecedented computational stress for baseband processing, threatening the industry's sustainability, and new computing paradigms are urgently needed to improve the efficiency of wireless processors. Quantum computing promises to revolutionize many computing-intensive tasks across diverse fields and therefore may be the key to realizing ultra-dense next-generation mobile systems that remain economically and environmentally viable. This paper investigates the potential of Quantum computing to accelerate Forward Error Correction (FEC), the most compute-heavy component of wireless processors. We first propose Qu4Fec, a novel solution for decoding Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes on Quantum Processing Units (QPUs), which we show to outperform state-of-the-art approaches, by reducing the Block Error Rate (BLER) by nearly an order of magnitude in simulation. We then implement Qu4Fec on a real-world QPU platform to study its practical viability and performance. Our experiments reveal that current cutting-edge QPU architectures curb the capabilities of FEC and expose the underlying factors, including long qubit chains, scaling, and quantization. Based on these insights, we suggest original blueprints for future QPUs that can better support Quantum-based wireless processors. Overall, this paper provides a reliable reality check for the feasibility of wireless processing on Quantum annealers: as QPUs start to be considered part of a possible 6G landscape, our work may open new research paths towards the design of FEC methods for Quantum-powered wireless processors.This work is supported by the ORIGAMI and TrialsNet projects, which have received funding from the SmartNetworks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 101139270 and 101095871. This work is also partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation and the European Union- NextGenerationEU through the UNICO 5G I+D 6G-CLARION project
A meshless method to compute the proper orthogonal decomposition and its variants from scattered data
Get PDFComplex phenomena can be better understood when broken down into a limited number of simpler ‘components’. Linear statistical methods such as principal component analysis and its variants are widely used across various fields of applied science to identify and rank these components based on the variance they represent in the data. These methods can be seen as factorizations of the matrix collecting all the data, assuming it consists of time series sampled from fixed points in space. However, when data sampling locations vary over time, as with mobile monitoring stations in meteorology and oceanography or with particle tracking velocimetry in experimental fluid dynamics, advanced interpolation techniques are required to project the data onto a fixed grid before the factorization. This interpolation is often expensive and inaccurate. This work proposes a method to decompose scattered data without interpolating. The approach employs physics-constrained radial basis function regression to compute inner products in space and time. The method provides an analytical and mesh-independent decomposition in space and time, demonstrating higher accuracy. Our approach allows distilling the most relevant ‘components’ even for measurements whose natural output is a distribution of data scattered in space and time, maintaining high accuracy and mesh independence.This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 949085). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them
Guía de ayudas a medios y publicidad institucional para el Tercer Sector de la Comunicación
Get PDFLa presente guía expone el funcionamiento de las ayudas a medios de comunicación y la publicidad institucional, destacando su relevancia como posibles fuentes clave de financiación para medios del Tercer Sector y aquellos que se autodefinen como independientes. Se analizan las distintas subvenciones y partidas de publicidad institucional, el marco regulador que las rige y las dificultades que enfrentan estos medios para acceder a dichos recursos, especialmente por desconocimiento o por una normativa poco adaptada a su realidad, lo que refuerza la necesidad de difundir esta información y promover el debate. Dirigida a medios con una función social destacada, la elaboración de este documento se ha basado en un análisis exhaustivo de normativas estatales, autonómicas y europeas sobre subvenciones y publicidad institucional, así como de resoluciones judiciales y documentos técnicos clave, con el objetivo de clarificar los criterios de adjudicación y promover una distribución más justa y equitativa de los recursos públicos