Changing Preferences for Brexit: Identifying the Groups with Volatile Support for 'Leave'

This paper explores the dynamics of support for the UK’s departure from the EU over the course of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017. It further identifies groups with a particular profile in terms of political attitudes and behaviours and explores whether these groups show a marked change in their support for leave. The paper draws on two contrasting perspectives on voter volatility. While the first one considers the phenomenon to be a characteristic of whimsical, uninterested and disengaged people, the second one sees it in a more positive light as it associates volatility with the informed and emancipate citizen holding politicians to account. The study uses Waves 6, 7 and 8 of Understanding Society and conducts various analyses, including latent class analysis (LCA), to explore the research questions. LCA yields four groups with distinct political profiles. Only one of these groups, labelled “the highly engaged and satisfied”, shows a significant increase in support for leave. The other groups, including “the non-engaged” and “the dissatisfied”, are not becoming significantly more or less supportive of leave. The results are thus more in accordance with the second perspective

Robust seismic velocity change estimation using ambient noise recordings

We consider the problem of seismic velocity change estimation using ambient noise recordings. Motivated by [23] we study how the velocity change estimation is affected by seasonal fluctuations in the noise sources. More precisely, we consider a numerical model and introduce spatio-temporal seasonal fluctuations in the noise sources. We show that indeed, as pointed out in [23], the stretching method is affected by these fluctuations and produces misleading apparent velocity variations which reduce dramatically the signal to noise ratio of the method. We also show that these apparent velocity variations can be eliminated by an adequate normalization of the cross-correlation functions. Theoretically we expect our approach to work as long as the seasonal fluctuations in the noise sources are uniform, an assumption which holds for closely located seismic stations. We illustrate with numerical simulations and real measurements that the proposed normalization significantly improves the accuracy of the velocity change estimation

Attitudes to legal authority in adulthood: inter-individual differences and intra-individual stability

This paper considers whether and how attitudes towards legal authority change over time in the British adult population. We apply latent trajectory and autoregressive models using the 1996, 2000 and 2012 sweeps of the British Cohort Study of 1970; after controlling for gender, education, occupational social class, interest in politics and religion, we found that from the age of 26 to the age of 42, the cohort becomes more liberal regarding obedience to the law, the death penalty and stiffer sentencing, but more authoritarian regarding censorship; moreover, individual-level characteristics are associated with inter-individual differences over time, in particular: as occupational social class and level of education increase, attitudes tend to be more liberal; interest in politics is positively associated with less authoritarian attitudes; those who define themselves as non-religious tend to be more liberal; the effect of gender varies by attitude: females are more authoritarian towards censorship, but more liberal regarding capital punishment and stiffer sentencing. The analyses reported here give support at the micro level to the hypotheses of relative consistency and stability of attitudes to legal authority, as well providing evidence for important social cleavages

Poster: Continual Network Learning

We make a case for in-network Continual Learning as a solution for seamless adaptation to evolving network conditions without forgetting past experiences. We propose implementing Active Learning-based selective data filtering in the data plane, allowing for data-efficient continual updates. We explore relevant challenges and propose future research directions

Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation.

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition

Design and Characterization of Modified Comb Patch Antennas

This work deals with the proposal of a novel type of microstrip antenna, called MCPA the modified comb patch antenna. The proposed antennas is composed of n parallel conductors, fed by a common microstrip. A dedicated mathematical framework, based on the multiconductors transmission line formalism, is proposed for antenna analysis and design. The analytical model is numerically validated with full-wave simulations, resulting in a 5% error in the predicted resonant patch length. A numerical study of antenna matching, size, radiation performance is carried out. The matching increases as the number of conductors increases, whilst gain of comb antennas made of n conductors are about half dB higher than the equivalent full patch counterpart. Then, an eighty conductors was realized and measured to assess the frequency response of the antenna, as well as its radiation performances. An error of 1% between the predicted and measured value resonance frequency was observed. A difference of about 0.67 dB was found for the measured maximum antenna gain, with respect to the simulated one. The proposed antenna design is appealing for printed electronics and wearable, on-textile applications

8000 years of coastal changes on a western Mediterranean Island: A multi proxy approach from the Posada plain of Sardinia

A multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental investigation was conducted to reconstruct the Holocene history of coastal landscape change in the lower Posada coastal plain of eastern Sardinia. In this paper, millennial-scale human-sea level-environment interactions are investigated near Posada. Biostratigraphic and palynological approaches were used to interpret the chromo-stratigraphy exhibited by a series of new clothes taken from the coastal plain. This new study elucidates the main palaeoecologiocal changes, phases of shoreline migration and relative sea-level change during the lat 8000 years. The results indicate the major role of sea-level stabilisation and high sediment supply in driving major landscape changes, especially during the Neolithic period (6-4th millennia BC), and the long-term settlement history of this coastal area. It is concluded that human occupation of the coastal plain, from prehistoric to historical times, was most likely constrained by the rapid evolution if this coastal landscape.LR/7 2010 Regione Sardegn