5,401 research outputs found
Are today’s youth more tolerant? Trends in tolerance among young people in Britain
Attitudes towards social groups that have traditionally been marginalised or discriminated against have changed markedly in Britain over the past three decades. This change is particularly marked in attitudes towards homosexuality and racial diversity which, as public opinion surveys have regularly shown, have become more accepting over time. This change is often attributed to older, less tolerant generations being replaced by young cohorts who are more inclusive and open minded in their attitudes to cultural others. The paper explores this argument by examining trends in people’s attitudes towards a variety of minorities, including the said groups, but also immigrants and foreign workers. It starts with a discussion of several perspectives predicting different trends with regards to these attitudes. A distinction is made between optimistic ones (i.e. those anticipating rising levels of tolerance) and pessimistic ones (i.e. those expecting stable or declining levels of tolerance). Subsequently, the paper presents trend analyses and an analysis of age, cohort and period effects to broadly assess the explanatory power of these perspectives. Using these approaches, we find that tolerance towards racial minorities and homosexuality has indeed risen across the board, and that young people are also more accepting of these groups than their parents or grandparents and previous generations of young people. These trends broadly support the optimistic perspectives. However, we also find that prejudice has not disappeared from youth attitudes altogether; for a sizeable minority of youth, it has merely shifted its focus to immigration. Not only have unwelcoming attitudes towards immigrants generally become stronger, young people are not always the most tolerant age group regarding this social group. These findings are thus more in line with the expectations of the pessimistic perspectives
Social media and youth political engagement: Preaching to the converted or providing a new voice for youth?
Amidst concern about declining youth political engagement, it is often suggested that social media can provide a solution to this challenge. In this article, however, we argue that these online tools have not thus far mobilised a new audience to become engaged in either institution-oriented activities or political expression. Instead, we found that some young people are far more engaged in using social media for political purposes than others, and that a substantial proportion of young adults never use social media for this purpose. Using latent class analysis (LCA) of a unique web survey of young Britons aged 22–29, we show that the principal driver of online political engagement is political interest (even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics). On this basis, we conclude that social media may be providing a new outlet for some young adults; it is not re-engaging the young adults who have already lost interest in politics
Immigrants, inclusion, and the role of hard work: exploring anti-immigrant attitudes among young people in Britain
Previous research on youth attitudes towards immigration has tended to focus on explaining
why young people are more accepting of immigrants than their elders. In this article,
therefore, we focus on the young people that are opposed to immigration. First, we use
nationally representative survey data from young adults in England to highlight that a
substantial minority hold negative attitudes towards immigrants. In the second half of the
paper, we then turn to qualitative data (in-depth interviews) to explore how young people talk
about and justify holding these negative attitudes. Both the qualitative and the quantitative
data suggest that anti-immigrant attitudes among young people are linked to the perception
that immigrants pose an economic and cultural threat, and to the spread of culturalised forms
of citizenship. What the qualitative data also reveal, however, is how these distinct discourses
reinforce one another and how they intersect with other types of prejudice. We will argue that
the idea of Hard Work is central to understanding anti-immigrant attitudes, as this has
become a deeply-embedded cultural norm that is being used to include and exclude
(immigrants and others), and to distinguish between who is deserving of membership of
British society and who is not
Nodal domain distributions for quantum maps
The statistics of the nodal lines and nodal domains of the eigenfunctions of
quantum billiards have recently been observed to be fingerprints of the
chaoticity of the underlying classical motion by Blum et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett.,
Vol. 88 (2002), 114101) and by Bogomolny and Schmit (Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 88
(2002), 114102). These statistics were shown to be computable from the random
wave model of the eigenfunctions. We here study the analogous problem for
chaotic maps whose phase space is the two-torus. We show that the distributions
of the numbers of nodal points and nodal domains of the eigenvectors of the
corresponding quantum maps can be computed straightforwardly and exactly using
random matrix theory. We compare the predictions with the results of numerical
computations involving quantum perturbed cat maps.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Second version: minor correction
Method and apparatus for attaching physiological monitoring electrodes Patent
Adhesive spray process for attaching biomedical skin electrode
Application of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine to Ameliorate Sepsis Induced Ileus
Graduate
Basi
What is the probability that a random integral quadratic form in variables has an integral zero?
We show that the density of quadratic forms in variables over that are isotropic is a rational function of , where the rational
function is independent of , and we determine this rational function
explicitly. When real quadratic forms in variables are distributed
according to the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) of random matrix theory, we
determine explicitly the probability that a random such real quadratic form is
isotropic (i.e., indefinite).
As a consequence, for each , we determine an exact expression for the
probability that a random integral quadratic form in variables is isotropic
(i.e., has a nontrivial zero over ), when these integral quadratic
forms are chosen according to the GOE distribution. In particular, we find an
exact expression for the probability that a random integral quaternary
quadratic form has an integral zero; numerically, this probability is
approximately .Comment: 17 pages. This article supercedes arXiv:1311.554
Probing neutrino masses with CMB lensing extraction
We evaluate the ability of future cosmic microwave background (CMB)
experiments to measure the power spectrum of large scale structure using
quadratic estimators of the weak lensing deflection field. We calculate the
sensitivity of upcoming CMB experiments such as BICEP, QUaD, BRAIN, ClOVER and
PLANCK to the non-zero total neutrino mass M_nu indicated by current neutrino
oscillation data. We find that these experiments greatly benefit from lensing
extraction techniques, improving their one-sigma sensitivity to M_nu by a
factor of order four. The combination of data from PLANCK and the SAMPAN
mini-satellite project would lead to sigma(M_nu) = 0.1 eV, while a value as
small as sigma(M_nu) = 0.035 eV is within the reach of a space mission based on
bolometers with a passively cooled 3-4 m aperture telescope, representative of
the most ambitious projects currently under investigation. We show that our
results are robust not only considering possible difficulties in subtracting
astrophysical foregrounds from the primary CMB signal but also when the minimal
cosmological model (Lambda Mixed Dark Matter) is generalized in order to
include a possible scalar tilt running, a constant equation of state parameter
for the dark energy and/or extra relativistic degrees of freedom.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. One new figure and references added. Version
accepted for publicatio
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