Heuristics and political accountability in complex governance: An experimental test:

A growing body of empirical work suggests that identifying the actors formally tasked with implementing policy can focus attention away from incumbent politicians. We examine the effects on blame attribution and voting intention of (a) the identifiability of a responsible policy worker (administrator), and (b) the evaluability of the policy work or outcome (policy failure), in the context of programs at two federal agencies (loans by the Small Business Administration and inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture). Using a set of online survey experiments with 1105 US adults, we find that the evaluability of a (negative) outcome generally reduces voting intention, but that the identifiability of a policy worker (administrator) tends to shift blame away from the incumbent politician and thus to increase voting intention. These experimental findings provide at least partial support for our theoretical expectations

Constraining the near-core rotation of the gamma Doradus star 43 Cygni using BRITE-Constellation data

Photometric time series of the $\gamma$ Dor star 43 Cyg obtained with the BRITE-Constellation nano-satellites allow us to study its pulsational properties in detail and to constrain its interior structure. We aim to find a g-mode period spacing pattern that allows us to determine the near-core rotation rate of 43 Cyg and redetermine the star's fundamental atmospheric parameters and chemical composition. We conducted a frequency analysis using the 156-days long data set obtained with the BRITE-Toronto satellite and employed a suite of MESA/GYRE models to derive the mode identification, asymptotic period spacing and near-core rotation rate. We also used high-resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio spectroscopic data obtained at the 1.2m Mercator telescope with the HERMES spectrograph to redetermine the fundamental atmospheric parameters and chemical composition of 43 Cyg using the software Spectroscopy Made Easy (SME). We detected 43 intrinsic pulsation frequencies and identified 18 of them to be part of a period spacing pattern consisting of prograde dipole modes with an asymptotic period spacing $\Delta \Pi_{l=1}$ of $2970^{+700}_{-570} \rm s$. The near-core rotation rate was determined to be $f_{\rm rot} = 0.56^{+0.12}_{-0.14}\,\rm d^{-1}$. The atmosphere of 43 Cyg shows solar chemical composition at an effective temperature of 7150 $\pm$ 150 K, a log g of 4.2 $\pm$ 0.6 dex and a projected rotational velocity, $v {\rm sin}i$, of 44 $\pm$ 4 kms$^{-1}$. The morphology of the observed period spacing patterns shows indications of the presence of a significant chemical gradient in the stellar interior.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted by A&

BRITE-Constellation: Data processing and photometry

The BRITE mission is a pioneering space project aimed at the long-term photometric monitoring of the brightest stars in the sky by means of a constellation of nano-satellites. Its main advantage is high photometric accuracy and time coverage inaccessible from the ground. The main aim of this paper is the presentation of procedures used to obtain high-precision photometry from a series of images acquired by the BRITE satellites in two modes of observing, stare and chopping. We developed two pipelines corresponding to the two modes of observing. The assessment of the performance of both pipelines is presented. It is based on two comparisons, which use data from six runs of the UniBRITE satellite: (i) comparison of photometry obtained by both pipelines on the same data, which were partly affected by charge transfer inefficiency (CTI), (ii) comparison of real scatter with theoretical expectations. It is shown that for CTI-affected observations, the chopping pipeline provides much better photometry than the other pipeline. For other observations, the results are comparable only for data obtained shortly after switching to chopping mode. Starting from about 2.5 years in orbit, the chopping mode of observing provides significantly better photometry for UniBRITE data than the stare mode. This paper shows that high-precision space photometry with low-cost nano-satellites is achievable. The proposed meth- ods, used to obtain photometry from images affected by high impulsive noise, can be applied to data from other space missions or even to data acquired from ground-based observations