Inequality and Electoral Accountability: Class-Biased Economic Voting in Comparative Perspective

Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we exam- ine how OECD electorates respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 advanced democracies, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distributive interests by punishing governments for concentrating income gains among the rich. We find no indication that non-rich voters punish rising inequality, and substantial evidence that electorates positively reward the concentration of aggregate income growth at the top. Our results suggest that governments commonly face political incentives systematically skewed in favor of inegalitarian economic outcomes. At the same time, we find that the electorate’s tolerance of rising inequality has its limits: class biases in economic voting diminish as the income shares of the rich grow in magnitude

Whose News? Class-Biased Economic News in the United States

There is substantial evidence that voters’ choices are shaped by assessments of the state of the economy and that these assessments, in turn, are influenced by the news. But how does the economic news track the welfare of different income groups in an era of rising inequality? Whose economy does the news cover? Drawing on a large new dataset of US news content, we demonstrate that the tone of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the richest households, with little sensitivity to income changes among the non-rich. Further, we present evidence that this pro-rich bias emerges not from pro-rich journalistic preferences but, rather, from the interaction of the media’s focus on economic aggregates with structural features of the relationship between economic growth and distribution. The findings yield a novel explanation of distributionally perverse electoral patterns and demonstrate how distributional biases in the economy condition economic accountability

Survey of Research Approaches Utilised in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Publications

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has been described as the fastest growing academic development movement in higher education. As this field of inquiry matures, there is a need to understand how SoTL research is conducted. The purpose of our study was to inform this debate by investigating research approaches used in SoTL publications. We analysed 223 empirical research studies published from 2012 to 2014 in three explicitly focused SoTL journals. We classified the studies as either qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods using an analytical framework devised from existing literature on research methods. We found that the use of the three research designs was fairly evenly distributed across the papers examined: qualitative (37.2%), quantitative (29.6%), and mixed methods (33.2%). However, there was an over-reliance on data collection from a single source in 83.9% of papers analysed, and this source was primarily students. There was some, but limited, evidence of the use of triangulation through the use of multiple data collection instruments (e.g. survey, assessment tasks, grade databases). Similarly, only one-third of publications classified as mixed methods integrated the analysis and interpretation of the qualitative and quantitative data equally within the study. We conclude that current SoTL research is characterised by methodological pluralism but could be advanced through inclusion of more diverse approaches, such as close reading, and adoption of strategies known to enhance the quality of research, for example, triangulation and visual representation

The Accelerations of Stars Orbiting the Milky Way's Central Black Hole

Recent measurements, of the velocities of stars near the center of the Milky Way have provided the strongest evidence for the presence of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy, but the observational uncertainties poorly constrain many of the properties of the black hole. Determining the accelerations of stars in their orbits around the center provides much more precise information about the position and mass of the black hole. Here we report measurements of the accelerations for three stars located ~0.005 pc from the central radio source Sgr A*; these accelerations are comparable to those experienced by the Earth as it orbits the Sun. These data increase the inferred minimum mass density in the central region of the Galaxy by an order of magnitude relative to previous results and localized the dark mass to within 0.05 +- 0.04 arcsec of the nominal position of Sgr A*. In addition, the orbital period of one of the observed stars could be as short as 15 years, allowing us the opportunity in the near future to observe an entire period.Comment: To appear in September 21 2000 issue of Natur

Experiments on Multidimensional Solitons

This article presents an overview of experimental efforts in recent years related to multidimensional solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates. We discuss the techniques used to generate and observe multidimensional nonlinear waves in Bose-Einstein condensates with repulsive interactions. We further summarize observations of planar soliton fronts undergoing the snake instability, the formation of vortex rings, and the emergence of hybrid structures.Comment: review paper, to appear as Chapter 5b in "Emergent Nonlinear Phenomena in Bose-Einstein Condensates: Theory and Experiment," edited by P. G. Kevrekidis, D. J. Frantzeskakis, and R. Carretero-Gonzalez (Springer-Verlag

A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district

In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and environmental activism are interwoven in acts of linguistic citizenship that constitute the ‘rememorying’ of a history that has remained persistently obscured. We argue that rememorying advances a politics of reminding which counters the Rainbow Nation’s institutionalised politics of forgetting, as well as anthropological accounts that consider Indigenous activist invocations of history as merely ‘therapeutic’. Through an engagement with the memory activism of the GKC, we identify how reconstructing word-histories, reliving historical traumas, retelling histories of sites of memory, seeing oneself mirrored in one’s ancestors, and the nexus of land, memory, and time form the basis for shared meaning-making, bringing impetus, focus, and intergenerational continuity to struggles for environmental and land justice

Primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma in HIV: report of two cases

Primary mediastinal large B cell lymphoma (PMLBCL) is a subtype of diffuse large B cell lymphoma arising in the mediastinum with distinctive clinical and morphological features. Though diffuse large B cell lymphoma is one of the most common non-Hodgkin lymphoma associated with AIDS, there are no data available regarding the association of HIV and PMLBCL. We report here two cases of PMLBCL arising in AIDS patients. In both cases, PMLBCL presented in a setting of low CD4 T-cell count as rapidly enlarging mediastinal mass. The morphologic and immunophenotypic findings are characteristic of PMLBCL. One of the two patients, a 25-year-old woman who had localized disease and evidence of Epstein–Barr virus in lymphoma cells, did not respond to chemotherapy and died of disease progression 5 months after diagnosis. The second patient, a 38-year-old male with disseminated disease, responded to therapy and is disease-free after 9 months of follow-up

Vascular health, diabetes, APOE and dementia: the Aging, Demographics, and Memory Study.

INTRODUCTION: Evidence from clinical samples and geographically limited population studies suggests that vascular health, diabetes and apolipoprotein epsilon4 (APOE) are associated with dementia. METHODS: A population-based sample of 856 individuals aged 71 years or older from all contiguous regions of the United States received an extensive in-home clinical and neuropsychological assessment in 2001-2003. The relation of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, medication usage, and APOE epsilon4 to dementia was modelled using adjusted multivariable logistic regression. RESULTS: Treated stroke (odds ratio [OR] 3.8, 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.0, 7.2), untreated stroke (OR 3.5, 95% CI 1.7, 7.3), and APOE epsilon4 (OR 2.8, 95% CI 1.7, 4.5) all increased the odds of dementia. Treated hypertension was associated with lower odds of dementia (OR 0.5, 95% CI 0.3, 1.0). Diabetes and heart disease were not significantly associated with dementia. A significant interaction was observed between APOE epsilon4 and stroke (P = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Data from the first dementia study that is representative of the United States population suggest that stroke, the APOE epsilon4 allele and their interaction are strongly associated with dementia.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are