Fear, Itself The Threat Constructions Of Tea Party Candidates In The 2010 Republican Primaries

This study explores the role that a faith-driven discourse has played in the electoral success of the Tea Party movement. The popularity of the Tea Party movement among conservative Protestant populations has led researchers to depict an emerging theological political ideology. Few have considered the historical and religious influences on the Tea Party brand, despite the fact that it has garnered support from a segment of the conservative American population which have traditionally used religious rationalisation as the basis for their political opinions. This thesis examines these historical and religious influences by means of a discourse analysis. This allows for the success of Tea Party candidates to be understood in the context of the mobilisation of a “nation at threat” narrative, cast ostensibly in religious language. I find that the linking of political opponents to the concepts of socialism, unconstitutional practices and immoralism allowed for a consistent narrative to emerge, whereby certain conceptions of the American identity were prioritised and deemed “acceptable”. I conclude that the electoral success of the Tea Party can be explained by the mobilisation of a primarily faith-driven discourse that gains traction through the mobilisation of threat to American society. The need for further research to account for the religious and economics aspect of the Tea Party movement is clea

The twisted Floer homology of torus bundles

Given a torus bundle $Y$ over the circle and a cohomology class $[\omega]\in H^2(Y;\mathbb{Z})$ which evaluates nontrivially on the fiber, we compute the Heegaard Floer homology of $Y$ with twisted coefficients in the universal Novikov ring.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

A comparison of data holdings at World Data Centres for geomagnetism in Edinburgh and Kyoto

Geomagnetic data are held by a number of World Data Centres (WDC) with each Centre having different holdings and different methods of distribution. These Centres are run by institutes in Boulder, Edinburgh, Kyoto, Moscow and Mumbai. Using data from two of these WDCs we describe methods to compare temporal coverage of data, and, importantly, the data themselves. This study examines the hourly data common to Edinburgh and Kyoto and gives details of the number of observatory-years of data where disagreements are found, and quantifies the level of disagreement. We show several examples of datasets that differ between the two WDCs, and report on the nature of the differences in detail. Finally, we explore possible reasons for the differences found between the data holdings and suggest next steps towards the unification of the WDC data holdings

Differentially Private Simple Genetic Algorithms

We study the differentially private (DP) selection problem, where the goal is to select an item from a set of candidates that approximately maximizes a given objective function. The most common solution to this problem is to use the exponential mechanism. The issue with this approach is that the exponential mechanism must compute the objective function for all possible candidates in the domain. For many real-world problems, the length of the domain is exponential, making this approach impractical. Genetic algorithms (GAs) use the principles of evolution in nature to efficiently search through large domains and find the best candidate. However, current work applying DP to GAs exhibits poor utility and the results are difficult to reproduce. This work provides a new DP GA based on the popular simple genetic algorithm from the non-private literature. The biggest challenge is the number of selections made in the simple GA, each consuming a part of the privacy budget under DP. Our design reduces the number of selections and takes advantage of advanced composition techniques to overcome this challenge without impeding the heuristics that make the simple GA effective. We evaluate our solution over four different datasets using both convex and non-convex problems. The results demonstrate that our GA outperforms previous work in DP GAs as well as DP local search techniques. We further show that our DP GA offers increased utility across different datasets for efficiently scaling the exponential mechanism to large domains. Finally, we demonstrate that our general solution is competitive in utility or efficiency with state-of-the-art problem-specific solutions

Extremes in worldwide geomagnetic activity

Geomagnetic storms pose a hazard to many modern technologies. Therefore understanding how severe such storms could be is important to a wide range of space weather data and forecast end-users. Extreme value statistical (EVS) methods are therefore applied to a global set of geomagnetic observatory data to determine the one in 100 and one in 200 year extreme values in the north, east and horizontal field strengths and their time rates-of-change. We use one-minute digital data from geographically widely distributed observatories with typically a few decades of digital operations. Individual generalised Pareto distribution functions are fitted to the tail of each observatory data distribution, above some threshold marking the onset of extreme activity for that location. We discuss the return levels, for the one in 100 and one in 200 year events, with respect to the geographical distribution of the observatories, the proximity to auroral and equatorial electrojets and compare results with a separate EVS study of European-only magnetic observatory dat

An investigation of the relationship between the occurrence of learning disabilities in children and the child rearing behaviors of their mothers: an exploratory study

The present study investigated the relationship between the occurrence of children's learning disabilities and the nature of the child rearing behaviors exhibited by their mothers. Seventy mothers and their children served as Ss, the experimental group consisting of 35 mothers of learning disabled children and the control group consisting of 35 mothers of children having no learning problems