New forms of mobilization, new people mobilized? Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

Mobilization efforts by parties and candidates during election campaigns tend to reach those who are more likely to vote in the first place. This is thought to be particularly consequential for turnout among the young. Harder and less cost-effective to reach, young adults are less mobilized and vote less often, creating a vicious circle of demobilization. However, new forms of political communication — including online and text messaging — have created expectations this circle might be broken. Is this happening? We examine data from Module 4 of the CSES surveys, looking at the prevalence of different types of party contacts in 38 countries, the profile of voters who are reached, and the effects of these efforts on turnout. New forms of party contacting do matter for turnout and partially reduce the age gap in contacting, but still fail to compensate for the much larger differentials that persist in traditional forms of contacting.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Effect of a dry acidulant coating on the palatability of dry extruded dog food

Citation: Jeffrey, A. M., Aldrich, G. C., Huss, A. R., Knueven, C. J., & Jones, C. K. (2016). Effect of a dry acidulant coating on the palatability of dry extruded dog food. Journal of Animal Science, 94, 114-114. doi:10.2527/msasas2016-242In the pet food industry, Salmonella is getting greater scrutiny because it is considered a “reasonably foreseeable hazard” with the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act. Specifically, there is zero tolerance for any serotype of Salmonella in pet foods. Salmonella contamination was responsible for 78% of the Class I recalls in pet food according to the most recent Reportable Food Registry Report (FDA, 2015). One potential method of Salmonella mitigation shown to be effective was through coating the exterior of the kibble with a powdered dry acidulant, such as sodium bisulfate (SBS; Jones-Hamilton, Co.). Sodium bisulfate coating on both dog and cat kibbles was shown to provide complete mitigation of Salmonella within 14-d storage (Jeffrey et al., 2014). However, it is thought that the use of dry acidulant with a palatant for coating kibble may negatively impact palatability of a dry dog food. Therefore, the objective of this experiment was to determine if the use of a dry acidulant, SBS, would influence the palatability of a dry dog food. A single dry extruded all life stages dog food was collected from a commercial pet food manufacturer before the coating step. The kibble was coated with either 2.2% spray dried chicken liver + 0.2% SBS or 2.2% spray dried chicken liver + 0.2% powdered silica (control). A total of 20 beagles were used in a standard 2-bowl forced choice palatability test method for 2 d. Dogs were fed 400 g of both diets once per day, with bowls rotated daily to address side bias. Results were analyzed using the GLIMMIX procedure of SAS (Cary, NC). The inclusion of SBS did not affect daily preference of diet (P = 0.23). Furthermore, there was no effect of day (P = 0.18) or the interaction of treatment × day (P = 0.98). These results demonstrate that palatability is not affected by the inclusion of SBS with a palatant in the coating of dog food kibble. Considering that the inclusion of SBS has been shown to be effective at mitigating Salmonella in pet food and no negative effects on palatability were observed, the use of a dry acidulant in a dog food coating gives the industry a promising method to control Salmonella contamination of finished dog foods

Multi-touch Interaction Data Analysis System (MIDAS) for 2-D tactile display research

The study of haptic perception and cognition requires data about how humans interact with tactile surfaces in the context of performing cognitive tasks. MIDAS is a set of three tools for the digital capture, coding, analysis, and interpretation of timeseries, multitouch, interactive behaviors on a tactile surface. The MIDAS-logger uses the current screen technology of tablet computers to capture touches (up to ten fingers at high spatial and temporal resolution) through conventional tactile graphics that are overlaid on the screen. The MIDAS-analyser is a software program for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of MIDASlogger touch data, which includes a fully interactive visualization of the data and a yoked display of a conventional simultaneous video recording made of the interactions. MIDAS-tactile protocol analysis (TPA) provides a scheme and a method to enable the rich coding and interpretation of tactile behaviors over multiple spatial and temporal scales. The efficacy of MIDAS was assessed against a set of criteria drawn from the successes and limitations of prior approaches to the study of tactile interactions. To demonstrate the functions of MIDAS, its three components were used to capture, analyze, code, and interpret the behavior of an experienced user and an inexperienced user of tactile graphics as they performed a shape-matching task

The effective mass of two--dimensional 3He

We use structural information from diffusion Monte Carlo calculations for two--dimensional 3He to calculate the effective mass. Static effective interactions are constructed from the density-- and spin structure functions using sumrules. We find that both spin-- and density-- fluctuations contribute about equally to the effective mass. Our results show, in agreement with recent experiments, a flattening of the single--particle self--energy with increasing density, which eventually leads to a divergent effective mass.Comment: 4 pages, accepted in PR

Improved input representation for enhancement of neural network performance

The performance of an associate memory network depends significantly on the representation of the data. For example, it has already been recognized that bipolar representation of neurons with -1 and +1 states out- perform neurons with on and off states of +1 and 0 respectively. This paper will show that a simple modification of the pattern vector to have zero bias will provide even more significant increase for the performance of an associative memory network. The higher order algorithm is used for the numerical simulation studies of this paper. To the lowest order this algorithm reduces to the Hopfield model for auto-associative memory and the bidirectional associative memory (BAM) for hetero-associative memory model respectively. 16 refs., 4 figs., 1 tabs

Proceedings, Pot Chrysanthemum School, 1971

Space management / Robert W. Langhans -- Soils / D. C. Kiplinger -- Nutrition / George L. Staby -- Temperature and photoperiod / Joseph W. Love -- Automated short day control -- R. A. Aldrich -- Growth regulators / James B. Shanks -- Programming for insect-free pot mums / Richard K. Lindquist -- Programming for disease-free pot mums / Lester P. Nichols and Paul E. Nelson -- Where you go wrong / Harry K. Tayam