Sports events such as the Olympics are ideal venues for a country to exercise public diplomacy and to promote a competitive identity. Along this line of theorizing, the present study examined how Britain planned and presented the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and how the media in Britain, the United States, and China portrayed the show, specifically focusing on the salience of media coverage, valence of particular attitudes expressed, and differences in themes coverage. A content analysis was conducted on 221 news stories sampled from major media outlets in these countries. Results showed only a few themes with unique Britishness were prominently and positively covered, whereas others without distinctive British characteristics were less mentioned. Implications for public diplomacy are discussed.

A semiconductor photocatalytic process has been studied extensively in recent years because of its intriguing advantages in environmental remediation. In this study, a two-phase swirl-flow monolithic-type reactor is used to study the kinetics of photocatalytic degradation of Eosin B for two different operating configurations: substrate-to-catalyst and liquid-to-catalyst illumination modes. True kinetic rate constants were determined as a function of the light intensity and catalyst layer thickness after correcting for mass-transfer limitation. In addition, the effects of several other parameters such as pH, dissolved oxygen, and temperature were examined. This new reactor appears to be an attractive choice for kinetic studies of heterogeneous photocatalysis.

In this paper； we evaluate the performance of power line communications (PLC) networks in tree-based topology with repeaters. The introduction of repeaters in the network has the potential to increase the global capacity of the PLC system. The number and position of the repeaters along the distribution cable have to be optimized according to the network configuration. In the OPERA Specification which is one of the most popular proposals in PLC system design； using Time Division and Frequency Division repeaters is the technology which can guarantee full coverage and provide spatial reuse. The spatial reuse capability increases greatly the performance of the network maximizing the aggregate capacity of the whole PLC cell. As we believe that traffic streams in a certain power line communication network will mainly be oriented towards the network head end (HE) or gateway therefore forming a tree-based architecture. We provide analytical evaluation of the impact of repeaters on network performance in this context and validate our results through simulations.