Continued Bipartisan Support For Expanded Background Checks On Gun Sales: More Polarized Views of the NRA's Influence

Two years after the failure of Senate legislation to expand background checks on gun purchases, the public continues to overwhelmingly support making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks. Currently, 85% of Americans -- including large majorities of Democrats (88%) and Republicans (79%) -- favor expanded background checks, little changed from May 2013 (81%).The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted July 14-20, 2015 among a national sample of 2,002 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (700 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 1,302 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 758 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older.As previous Pew Research Center surveys have found, there is broad support for expanded background checks even from those who say it is more important to protect gun rights than to control gun ownership

Voters Skeptical that 2016 Candidates Would Make Good Presidents: Highly Polarized Reactions to Trump, Clinton Becoming President

A year before the next president takes office, voters are skeptical that any of the leading 2016 candidates would make a good president, according to this national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Jan. 7-14 among 2,009 adults,including 1,525 registered voters. Moreover, of nine candidates included in the survey, far more voters say each would make a "terrible" than "great" president

New loci associated with birth weight identify genetic links between intrauterine growth and adult height and metabolism.

Birth weight within the normal range is associated with a variety of adult-onset diseases, but the mechanisms behind these associations are poorly understood. Previous genome-wide association studies of birth weight identified a variant in the ADCY5 gene associated both with birth weight and type 2 diabetes and a second variant, near CCNL1, with no obvious link to adult traits. In an expanded genome-wide association meta-analysis and follow-up study of birth weight (of up to 69,308 individuals of European descent from 43 studies), we have now extended the number of loci associated at genome-wide significance to 7, accounting for a similar proportion of variance as maternal smoking. Five of the loci are known to be associated with other phenotypes: ADCY5 and CDKAL1 with type 2 diabetes, ADRB1 with adult blood pressure and HMGA2 and LCORL with adult height. Our findings highlight genetic links between fetal growth and postnatal growth and metabolism

John Clare and place

This chapter tackles issues of place in the self-presentation and critical reception of John Clare, and pursues it across a number of axes. The argument centres on the placing of Clare both socio-economically and ‘naturally’, and limitations exerted upon perceptions of his work. Interrogating criticism this chapter finds a pervasive awkwardness especially in relation to issues of class and labour. It assesses the contemporary ‘placing’ of Clare, and seemingly unavoidable insensitivities to labour and poverty in the history industry, place-naming, and polemical ecocriticism. It assesses the ways Clare represents place – in poverty, in buildings, in nature – and, drawing on Michel de Certeau, considers the tactics Clare uses to negotiate his place. It pursues trajectories to ‘un-place’ Clare: the flight of fame in Clare’s response to Byron; and the flight of an early poem in songbooks and beyond, across the nineteenth century

Ideology in political children‘s literature : informing and socializing America‘s youth

This interdepartmental English and political science thesis focuses on political children‘s literature as a tool of socialization. The stories, characters and illustrations of children‘s literature entertain and educate; they are ideological apparatuses through which political behaviors and processes can be communicated. Understanding the ideology of each text through close reading and analysis is necessary for an assessment of the way each book is used as a tool of socialization. Socialization occurs not only between reader and text within social spaces, thus the ways in which the specificity of a book‘s ideological message intersects with the space in it is read, be this the public sphere of the school or the private sphere of the home, is also examined. The subgenres of political children‘s books discussed in my thesis attempt to influence readers‘ views of political processes, issues, or ideologies. Explanatory children‘s books explain how specific political processes work; issue books raise awareness of a political issue and in doing so, take either a positive or a negative position on that topic; partisan books have an explicit partisan point of view and encourage reader identification with a particular political party. Two books from each subgenre are analyzed using literary theory and discussed in political context. Because political children‘s books raise awareness of politics by instilling values and processes necessary for the continuation of our political system in a creative and literary way, they are instrumental in the socialization process and significant to the fields of both English and political science