The 'Bling City': an investigation into Dubai and the Middle East
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the 1930s Dubai’s population was reaching 20,000, a quarter of whom were expatriates. The discovery of oil in Dubai (1966) improved the Emirate’s fortune but the rulers, the Maktoum family, wanted Dubai to be an economic hub so in the 1980s they took a strategic plan to emerge as a major international quality tourism destination. \nBy 2000, expatriates came in very large numbers to Dubai with the prospect of lucrative jobs and a luxurious lifestyle. The influx of these foreigners has resulted in a tabloid frenzy publishing stories about everything and anything that they get up to. This has led to a misinformed view of Dubai amongst British readers and uncertainty about whether you face arrest for holding your partner’s hand in public or failing to wear Arabic traditional dress. \nThis special exercise explores some of the areas of Dubai that are not discussed in the British Press such as the Muslim women who are not oppressed but are liberated to work and conversely the poor conditions and brutality of its prison system. Additionally, stories from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Fujairah (UAE) are featured in this special exercise. It further includes an interview with a mother who survived domestic abuse and imprisonment at the hands of her husband and with the woman who saved her life, shelter owner Sharla Musabih. \nAdditionally, this project looks at the greater context of the articles written, critically examining how the British media today represents the Middle East. It considers how much space foreign news is allocated and how this affects British people’s understandings of certain countries in the Middle East. It ultimately argues that the British Press apportions a small amount of space for foreign news because of the public interest, the decline in the number of foreign correspondents and the practical difficulties which such correspondents face when reporting on the Middle East. As a result easily sourced and entertaining ―Sexpat‖ articles about the Middle East are pushed forward as a substitute for foreign news.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".