Essays on Religion and Political Behavior: How Religion Facilitates Political Development and Change

This dissertation investigates several unexplored topics regarding the influence of Americans\u27 religion on their political attitudes and behaviors. First, it posits that religious socialization enables and constrains the development of a child\u27s party identification and moral issue attitudes over time. Using the Youth Parent Socialization Panel Study, three indicators of a parent\u27s religion are employed to predict a child\u27s politics early in life, over time, and across generations. The results show an evolving role of parental religious socialization on individuals\u27 party identification and moral issue attitudes. In particular, for newer generations, parental religious beliefs have supplanted historical, religious-belonging-based religious measures in predicting their child\u27s political attitudes. The results provide a possible mechanism for the newly emerging religio-political conflicts observed today. Second, there is an analysis of how changes in individuals\u27 religiosity of beliefs and behaviors relate to changes in their political attitudes and behaviors over time. Theories of social identity and cognitive consistency imply that if an individual changes one of these factors, they should also update the other. Continuing to employ the Youth Parent Study, the results show that as individuals become more religiously traditional they are more likely to be affiliated with the Republican Party and take increasingly conservative positions on moral issues. Whereas, individuals who become religiously secular gravitate toward the Democrats and take increasing liberal positions on moral issues. But the connection between religiosity and political attitudes only emerged starting in the 1980s. These results challenge research that argues religio-political sorting primarily happens for the youngest generations. Finally, this research explores the well-cited association between religious attendance and political participation. Three separate theoretical possibilities are considered: a direct, indirect, and null relationship. The analysis shows that individuals who regularly attend religious services are more likely to engage in both civic and political activities than occasional or infrequent attenders. But the relationship between religious attendance and political participation is primarily indirect, via civic engagement, and far weaker than stated by earlier literature. Taken together, each of these topics fills a significant gap in the literature by exploring some of the processes in which religion affects politics early in life and over an individual\u27s lifecycle

Experimental evidence for the role of cantori as barriers in a quantum system

We investigate the effect of cantori on momentum diffusion in a quantum system. Ultracold caesium atoms are subjected to a specifically designed periodically pulsed standing wave. A cantorus separates two chaotic regions of the classical phase space. Diffusion through the cantorus is classically predicted. Quantum diffusion is only significant when the classical phase-space area escaping through the cantorus per period greatly exceeds Planck's constant. Experimental data and a quantum analysis confirm that the cantori act as barriers.Comment: 19 pages including 9 figures, Accepted for publication in Physical Review E in March 199

Dirac-harmonic maps from index theory

We prove existence results for Dirac-harmonic maps using index theoretical tools. They are mainly interesting if the source manifold has dimension 1 or 2 modulo 8. Our solutions are uncoupled in the sense that the underlying map between the source and target manifolds is a harmonic map.Comment: 26 pages, no figur

A study of quantum decoherence in a system with Kolmogorov-Arnol'd-Moser tori

We present an experimental and numerical study of the effects of decoherence on a quantum system whose classical analogue has Kolmogorov-Arnol'd-Moser (KAM) tori in its phase space. Atoms are prepared in a caesium magneto-optical trap at temperatures and densities which necessitate a quantum description. This real quantum system is coupled to the environment via spontaneous emission. The degree of coupling is varied and the effects of this coupling on the quantum coherence of the system are studied. When the classical diffusion through a partially broken torus is < hbar, diffusion of quantum particles is inhibited. We find that increasing decoherence via spontaneous emission increases the transport of quantum particles through the boundary.Comment: 19 pages including 6 figure

A composite score combining waist circumference and body mass index more accurately predicts body fat percentage in 6- to 13-year-old children

Purpose: Body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference (WC) are widely used to predict % body fat (BF) and classify degrees of pediatric adiposity. However, both measures have limitations. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether a combination of WC and BMI would more accurately predict %BF than either alone. Methods: In a nationally representative sample of 2,303 6- to 13-year-old Swiss children, weight, height, and WC were measured, and %BF was determined from multiple skinfold thicknesses. Regression and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to evaluate the combination of WC and BMI in predicting %BF against WC or BMI alone. An optimized composite score (CS) was generated. Results: A quadratic polynomial combination of WC and BMI led to a better prediction of %BF (r 2=0.68) compared with the two measures alone (r 2=0.58-0.62). The areas under the ROC curve for the CS [0.6*WC-SDS+0.4*BMI-SDS] ranged from 0.962±0.0053 (overweight girls) to 0.982±0.0046 (obese boys) and were somewhat greater than the AUCs for either BMI or WC alone. At a given specificity, the sensitivity of the prediction of overweight and obesity based on the CS was higher than that based on either WC or BMI alone, although the improvement was small. Conclusion: Both BMI and WC are good predictors of %BF in primary school children. However, a composite score incorporating both measures increased sensitivity at a constant specificity as compared to the individual measures. It may therefore be a useful tool for clinical and epidemiological studies of pediatric adiposit

Quantum and classical chaos for a single trapped ion

In this paper we investigate the quantum and classical dynamics of a single trapped ion subject to nonlinear kicks derived from a periodic sequence of Guassian laser pulses. We show that the classical system exhibits diffusive growth in the energy, or 'heating', while quantum mechanics suppresses this heating. This system may be realized in current single trapped-ion experiments with the addition of near-field optics to introduce tightly focussed laser pulses into the trap.Comment: 8 pages, REVTEX, 8 figure

Barriers to Usable Security? Three Organizational Case Studies

Usable security assumes that when security functions are more usable, people are more likely to use them, leading to an improvement in overall security. Existing software design and engineering processes provide little guidance for leveraging this in the development of applications. Three case studies explore organizational attempts to provide usable security products

Climate response to large, high-latitude and low-latitude volcanic eruptions in the Community Climate System Model

Explosive volcanism is known to be a leading natural cause of climate change. The second half of the 13th century was likely the most volcanically perturbed half-century of the last 2000 years, although none of the major 13th century eruptions have been clearly attributed to specific volcanoes. This period was in general a time of transition from the relatively warm Medieval period to the colder Little Ice Age, but available proxy records are insufficient on their own to clearly assess whether this transition is associated with volcanism. This context motivates our investigation of the climate system sensitivity to high- and low-latitude volcanism using the fully coupled NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM3). We evaluate two sets of ensemble simulations, each containing four volcanic pulses, with the first set representing them as a sequence of tropical eruptions and the second representing eruptions occurring in the mid-high latitudes of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The short-term, direct radiative impacts of tropical and high- latitude eruptions include significant cooling over the continents in summer and cooling over regions of increased sea-ice concentration in Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter. A main dynamical impact of moderate tropical eruptions is a winter warming pattern across northern Eurasia. Furthermore, both ensembles show significant reductions in global precipitation, especially in the summer monsoon regions. The most important long-term impact is the cooling of the high-latitude NH produced by multiple tropical eruptions, suggesting that positive feedbacks associated with ice and snow cover could lead to long-term climate cooling in the Arctic

Coherent Control of Quantum Chaotic Diffusion

Extensive coherent control over quantum chaotic diffusion using the kicked rotor model is demonstrated and its origin in deviations from random matrix theory is identified. Further, the extent of control in the presence of external decoherence is established. The results are relevant to both areas of quantum chaos and coherent control.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let