NEW SCIENTIST SUBBING TEST 2012



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 enquiries@ 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.

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Peter Sargeant

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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."

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PART 2

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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 muscle-boosting gene called IGF-1.

Giacca injected all four limbs of the mice with a harmless virus that implants IGF-1 into muscle cells. They then tested the endurance of the animals by recording how long they could swim before exhaustion. The doped mice swam for three times as long as mice who received the virus, but no IGF-1 gene. “They had incredible endurance, says Giacca.

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.

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