Just a Difficult Election to Poll? How Context Affects Polling Accuracy

Although polling accuracy increases throughout the election, polls are always at least a little wrong on election day. In this article, we attempt to understand how characteristics of particular elections may make them harder (or easier) to predict. In particular, we focus on estimating the impact of voter turnout, electoral change, and vote buying on polling error. We find support for two of the three hypotheses. There is little evidence that voter turnout affects polling error. However, polling errors tend to be higher where there have been large changes in parties’ vote share from the previous election. We also find that higher prevalence of vote buying may be associated with larger polling errors

A large genome-wide association study of age-related macular degeneration highlights contributions of rare and common variants.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng.3448Advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, with limited therapeutic options. Here we report on a study of >12 million variants, including 163,714 directly genotyped, mostly rare, protein-altering variants. Analyzing 16,144 patients and 17,832 controls, we identify 52 independently associated common and rare variants (P < 5 × 10(-8)) distributed across 34 loci. Although wet and dry AMD subtypes exhibit predominantly shared genetics, we identify the first genetic association signal specific to wet AMD, near MMP9 (difference P value = 4.1 × 10(-10)). Very rare coding variants (frequency <0.1%) in CFH, CFI and TIMP3 suggest causal roles for these genes, as does a splice variant in SLC16A8. Our results support the hypothesis that rare coding variants can pinpoint causal genes within known genetic loci and illustrate that applying the approach systematically to detect new loci requires extremely large sample sizes.We thank all participants of all the studies included for enabling this research by their participation in these studies. Computer resources for this project have been provided by the high-performance computing centers of the University of Michigan and the University of Regensburg. Group-specific acknowledgments can be found in the Supplementary Note. The Center for Inherited Diseases Research (CIDR) Program contract number is HHSN268201200008I. This and the main consortium work were predominantly funded by 1X01HG006934-01 to G.R.A. and R01 EY022310 to J.L.H

Replication Data for: Partisan Feedback: Heterogeneity in Opinion Responsiveness

Replication materials for "Partisan Feedback

Replication Data for: Just a Difficult Election to Poll? How Context Affects Polling Accuracy

Although polling accuracy increases throughout the election, polls are always at least a little wrong on election day. In this article, we attempt to understand how characteristics of particular elections may make them harder (or easier) to predict. In particular, we focus on estimating the impact of voter turnout, electoral change, and vote buying on polling error. We find support for two of the three hypotheses. There is little evidence that voter turnout affects polling error. However, polling errors tend to be higher where there have been large changes in parties’ vote share from the previous election. We also find that higher prevalence of vote buying may be associated with larger polling errors

NPS Naval Research Program USV ASW Employment, June 1 – 30, 2014

Naval Research ProgramNPS Naval Research Program; Sponsor POC: CDR Eric Lednicky; NPS POC: CAPT Jeff HyinkJON: W4V0

Inner Retinal Abnormalities in X-linked Retinitis Pigmentosa with RPGR Mutations

Purpose. To investigate in vivo the retinal microstructure in X-linked retinitis pigmentosa (XLRP) caused by RPGR mutations as a prelude to treatment initiatives for this common form of RP