Have Americans’ Attitudes Become More Polarized? – an Update

Objective: I update the analysis of attitudinal polarization originally presented in DiMaggio, Evans and Bryson (DEB) (1996) by using newly available years of survey data. Method: Like DEB, I derive aggregate distributional parameters for social groups in each year of the surveys, and then regress the year of the surveys on each parameter. Results: As in DEB’s original paper, there is little evidence of general polarization in attitudes between the early 1970s and today. However, while DEB found some evidence that polarization in the public may be the result of polarization in our political system, with the additional years of data this conclusion is inescapable. Conclusions: While political scientists have recently found polarization among our elected officials on economic issues, it seems clear that members of the public who are involved with politics are becoming polarized on moral issues. Political scientists should follow up on this research to see not only if elected officials are polarized on these issues, but the causal direction of the link between officials and the public.

Morals Not Knowledge

In a time when conservative politicians challenge the irrefutability of scientific findings such as climate change, it is more important than ever to understand the conflict at the heart of the “religion vs. science” debates unfolding in the public sphere. In this groundbreaking work, John H. Evans reveals that, with a few limited exceptions, even the most conservative religious Americans accept science’s ability to make factual claims about the world. However, many religious people take issue with the morality implicitly promoted by some forms of science. Using clear and engaging scholarship, Evans upends the prevailing notion that there is a fundamental conflict over the way that scientists and religious people make claims about nature and argues that only by properly understanding moral conflict between contemporary religion and science will we be able to contribute to a more productive interaction between these two great institutions

Observation of Infrared and Radio Lines of Molecules toward GL2591 and Comparison to Physical and Chemical Models

We have observed rovibrational transitions of acetylene and HCN near 13 microns in absorption toward GL2591. We also observed rotational lines of CS, HCN, H2CO, and HCO+. The combined data are analyzed in terms of models with a cloud envelope with density gradients and discrete regions of hot, dense gas, probably near the infrared source. The abundance of HCN is enhanced by a factor of 400 in the gas producing the infrared absorption, in agreement with chemical models which involve depletion of molecules onto grains and subsequent sublimation when temperatures are raised.Comment: 34 pages, postscript with 14 postscript figure files, uuencoded compressed and tar'ed; unpacks self with csh. In case of problems, contact [email protected]

An Update on the Science of Acidification in the Adirondack Park

This paper provides a review of the science pertaining to all aspects of acidification in the Adirondack Park, updating an earlier review of the science (Cook et al. 2002). The review supports an ongoing social science investigation into the willingness to pay for ecological improvements that would result from reduced acid deposition. This paper builds a bridge between the physical science and social science by providing the background that will allow researchers to accurately summarize the crucial elements of ecological status and improvement in a stated preference survey.acid rain, acidification, stated preference, willingness to pay, benefit estimation

Searching for Machos (and other Dark Matter Candidates) in a Simulated Galaxy

We conduct gravitational microlensing experiments in a galaxy taken from a cosmological N-body simulation. Hypothetical observers measure the optical depth and event rate toward hypothetical LMCs and compare their results with model predictions. Since we control the accuracy and sophistication of the model, we can determine how good it has to be for statistical errors to dominate over systematic ones. Several thousand independent microlensing experiments are performed. When the ``best-fit'' triaxial model for the mass distribution of the halo is used, the agreement between the measured and predicted optical depths is quite good: by and large the discrepancies are consistent with statistical fluctuations. If, on the other hand, a spherical model is used, systematic errors dominate. Even with our ``best-fit'' model, there are a few rare experiments where the deviation between the measured and predicted optical depths cannot be understood in terms of statistical fluctuations. In these experiments there is typically a clump of particles crossing the line of sight to the hypothetical LMC. These clumps can be either gravitationally bound systems or transient phenomena in a galaxy that is still undergoing phase mixing. Substructure of this type, if present in the Galactic distribution of Machos, can lead to large systematic errors in the analysis of microlensing experiments. We also describe how hypothetical WIMP and axion detection experiments might be conducted in a simulated N-body galaxy.Comment: 18 pages of text (LaTeX, AASTeX) with 12 figures. submitted to the Astrophysical Journa

`t Hooft Anomaly Matching for QCD

I present a set of theories which display non-trivial `t Hooft anomaly matching for QCD with $F$ flavors. The matching theories are non-Abelian gauge theories with "dual" quarks and baryons, rather than the purely confining theories of baryons that `t Hooft originally searched for. The matching gauge groups are required to have an $F\pm 6$ dimensional representation. Such a correspondence is reminiscent of Seiberg's duality for supersymmetric (SUSY) QCD, and these theories are candidates for non-SUSY duality. However anomaly matching by itself is not sufficiently restrictive, and duality for QCD cannot be established at present. At the very least, the existence of multiple anomaly matching solutions should provide a note of caution regarding conjectured non-SUSY dualities.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, version to be published in PR