This study examined college students' use of online media for political purposes in the 2008 election. Social media attention, online expression, and traditional Internet attention were assessed in relation to political self-efficacy and situational political involvement. Data from a Web survey of college students showed significant positive relationships between attention to traditional Internet sources and political self-efficacy and situational political involvement. Attention to social media was not significantly related to political self-efficacy or involvement. Online expression was significantly related to situational political involvement but not political self-efficacy. Implications are discussed for political use of online media for young adults.

Given the measurement of temperature at a fixed time θ> 0 and the measurement of temperature in a subregion of the physical domain, we investigate the simultaneous reconstruction of the initial temperature and heat radiative coefficient in a heat conductive system. The stability of the inverse problem is first established, and then the numerical reconstruction is mainly studied. The reconstruction process is done by Tikhonov regularization with the regularizing terms being the L2-norms of gradients, and is carried out in such a way that the temperature solution of the heat equation matches its fixed time observation and its subregion observation optimally in the L2-norm sense. The continuous nonlinear optimization system will be discretized by the piecewise linear finite element method, and the existence of discrete minimizers and convergence of the finite element approximation are shown. The discrete finite element problem is solved by a nonlinear gradient method with an efficient nonlinear multigrid technique for accelerating the reconstruction process. Numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed nonlinear multigrid gradient method for solving the inverse parabolic problem.

A web survey of college students was conducted to examine whether online political expression moderates the effects of political media use on political participation. Results showed that online political expression enhanced the effects of political mobile apps, traditional offline and online media, and social media on political participation. Implications are discussed for a mobilizing role of online media in the democratic process for young adults.