Tracking the alignment of attitudes toward COVID containment policies and left-right self-identification

Research on opinion polarization has focused on growing divides in positions toward political issues between the more politically and ideologically engaged parts of the population. However, it is fundamentally difficult to track the alignment process between ideological group identity and issue positions because classically controversial political issues are already strongly associated with ideological or partisan identity. This study uses the COVID pandemic as an unique opportunity to investigate polarizing trends in the population. Pandemic management policies were not a politicized issue before COVID, but became strongly contested after governments all across the world initiated policies to contain the pandemic. We use data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) to track trajectories in attitudes toward current COVID measures over the course of more than a year of the pandemic. We differentiate individuals by their ideological self-identity as measured by left-right self-placement. Results suggest that all ideological groups viewed the containment measures as similarly appropriate in the very beginning. However, already in the first weeks, individuals who identify as right-wing increasingly viewed the policies as too extreme, whereas centrists and left-wing identifiers viewed them as appropriate. Opinion differences between left-wing and right-wing identifiers solidified over the course of the pandemic, while centrists fluctuated between left and right self-identifiers. However, at the end of our observation period, there are signs of convergence between all groups. We discuss these findings from the perspective of theoretical models of opinion polarization and suggest that polarization dynamics are likely to stop when the political context (salience of certain issues and concrete material threats) changes

Longitudinal Perspectives on Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion : Mass Media, Neighborhoods and Residential Mobility

A growing strand of research in the social sciences demonstrates that social trust and other indicators of social cohesion are lower in ethnically diverse localities. This negative association has reached the status of a stylized fact, an empirical regularity that stimulates a host of empirical and theoretical work that tries to explain, contest and replicate the association. The interest in this association in sociology might be due to the fact that the implications of this broader strand of literature go beyond the local effects of ethnic diversity. They touch upon the question whether immigration affects aggregate societal integration, and thus link to a topic that is of interest to sociologists since the early beginning of the discipline. Against the backdrop of this larger scholarly debate, this thesis is part of a broader research agenda that not only empirically investigates the association between neighborhood diversity and social cohesion itself (see study III), but also focuses on the processes that surround this association. One pillar of this agenda is a focus on processes of ethnic segregation and individual residential choice that create what is later measured as neighborhood ethnic composition (see study II). A second pillar moves the debate on social cohesion to higher levels of analysis by focusing on macro-level sources of group threat such as the national media (see study I). In Study I, Mass Media and Concerns about Immigration in Germany in the 21st Century: Individual-Level Evidence over 15 Years , Christian S. Czymara and I use panel data to analyze how the attention that the topic of migration receives in the mainstream media predicts within individual changes in concerns about immigration in Germany from 2001 to 2015. A particular focus is on the question whether local ethnic composition moderates the media salience effect. In study II, I analyze White Flight for the German case. White Flight is widely known in the U.S. American literature, describing mobility flows of ethnic majority individuals out of neighborhoods with high shares of other ethnic groups. Here, I focus on one plausible mechanism for White Flight: having children. The fact that parents might change their neighborhood preferences strongly after having children is often noted in the literature, but there is still a lack of longitudinal evidence. I address this gap by relying on panel fixed-effects models to account for time-stable neighborhood and household specific traits. Study III deals with a core element of social cohesion: individual social connections to neighbors. Previous studies on the association between ethnic diversity and local social cohesion are mostly cross-sectional. Extending prior research, I add a dynamic element to the analysis: the length of residence in a neighborhood. I empirically show whether the formation of contacts with neighbors over time depends on the ethnic diversity of the neighborhood. However, asking a longitudinal research question also poses empirical challenges. As a potential means to address those issues, I propose a method to deal with possible bias due to selective mobility out of neighborhoods during the period of observation

OTS Letter to Countrywide re Ratings

This letter is directed to the Countrywide Bank, FSB, Board of Director

OTS letter to FDIC re Examination of WaMu

This letter is addressed to Stan Ivi

OTS letter to FDIC re WaMu ratings

This letter is addressed to Stan Ivi

Autofluorescence lifetime augmented reality as a means for real-time robotic surgery guidance in human patients.

Due to loss of tactile feedback the assessment of tumor margins during robotic surgery is based only on visual inspection, which is neither significantly sensitive nor specific. Here we demonstrate time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy (TRFS) as a novel technique to complement the visual inspection of oral cancers during transoral robotic surgery (TORS) in real-time and without the need for exogenous contrast agents. TRFS enables identification of cancerous tissue by its distinct autofluorescence signature that is associated with the alteration of tissue structure and biochemical profile. A prototype TRFS instrument was integrated synergistically with the da Vinci Surgical robot and the combined system was validated in swine and human patients. Label-free and real-time assessment and visualization of tissue biochemical features during robotic surgery procedure, as demonstrated here, not only has the potential to improve the intraoperative decision making during TORS but also other robotic procedures without modification of conventional clinical protocols

Catalyst of hate? Ethnic insulting on YouTube in the aftermath of terror attacks in France, Germany and the United Kingdom 2014–2017

In the last 20 years, several major terror attacks conducted in the name of political Islam hit Western Europe. We examine the impact of such terror attacks on hostile behaviour on social media from a cross-national perspective. To this end, we draw upon time-stamped, behavioural data from YouTube and focus on the frequency and popularity (‘likes’) of ethnically insulting comments among a corpus of approximately one hundred thousand comments. We study aggregate change and use individual-level panel data to investigate within-user change in ethnic insulting in periods leading up to and following major terror events in Germany, France and the UK. Results indicate that terror attacks boost interest in immigration-related topics in general, and lead to a disproportional increase in hate speech in particular. Moreover, we find that attack effects spill over to other countries in several, but not all, instances. Deeper analyses suggest, however, that this pattern is mainly driven by changes in the composition of users and not by changing behaviour of individual users. That is, a surge in ethnic insulting comes from hateful users newly entering online discussions, rather than previous users becoming more hateful following an attack