[Discursive Alliances in the Debate on Migration?] / Diskursallianzen in der Migrationsdebatte?: Politischer Parallelismus zwischen Medien und Parteien im Framing der Flucht- und Asylmigration im Jahr 2018.

Our study on political parallelism in Germany examines the extent to which media reflect the parties' central frames in the debate on refugee and asylum migration. Thereby, we consider discursive alliances of individual media outlets and parties. In this context, we moreover address important questions of public sphere theory: Do the media function as organs of particular viewpoints, or do they set the ground for free opinion building by a broad and balanced representation of competing frames? In addition, we discuss the extent to which the media offer political parties a fair opportunity to make their positions observable to the public. Empirically, we analyze the extent of political parallelism based on a content analysis of 18 media outlets and official documents of the seven parties in the German Bundestag. At the level of issue-specific statements, we measure value-based frames. This approach enables us to describe the substance of mediated viewpoints concisely and to identify similarities between media and parties with regard to the framing of the issue. Furthermore, our method allows us to locate media and parties within the space of a basic political cleavage (integration vs. demarcation). Referring to a concept of political sociology enables us to describe the proximity and distance of media and parties in a condensed way.

On-line monitoring of methanol and methyl formate in the exhaust gas of an industrial formaldehyde production plant by a mid-IR gas sensor based on tunable Fabry-Pérot filter technology.

On-line monitoring of key chemicals in an industrial production plant ensures economic operation, guarantees the desired product quality, and provides additional in-depth information on the involved chemical processes. For that purpose, rapid, rugged, and flexible measurement systems at reasonable cost are required. Here, we present the application of a flexible mid-IR filtometer for industrial gas sensing. The developed prototype consists of a modulated thermal infrared source, a temperature-controlled gas cell for absorption measurement and an integrated device consisting of a Fabry-Pérot interferometer and a pyroelectric mid-IR detector. The prototype was calibrated in the research laboratory at TU Wien for measuring methanol and methyl formate in the concentration ranges from 660 to 4390 and 747 to 4610 ppmV. Subsequently, the prototype was transferred and installed at the project partner Metadynea Austria GmbH and linked to their Process Control System via a dedicated micro-controller and used for on-line monitoring of the process off-gas. Up to five process streams were sequentially monitored in a fully automated manner. The obtained readings for methanol and methyl formate concentrations provided useful information on the efficiency and correct functioning of the process plant. Of special interest for industry is the now added capability to monitor the start-up phase and process irregularities with high time resolution (5 s).