Growing Tea with Subnational Roots: Tea Party Affiliation, Factionalism, and GOP Politics in State Legislatures

Most research has examined the influence of the Tea Party as a social movement or loose organization, but less is known about its influence within legislative party politics, especially at the state level. In this paper, we argue that in this context the Tea Party is primarily an intraparty faction that has caused significant divisions inside the Republican Party. Using an original dataset of legislators across 13 states for the years 2010 to 2013, we examine legislator and district-level characteristics that predict state legislators’ affiliation with the Tea Party. Our results reveal that in some respects legislators affiliated with the Tea Party are a far-right wing of the Republican Party. However, by other measures that capture anti-establishment political sentiment, Tea Party affiliated legislators comprise a factional group attempting to transform the Party in ways that go beyond ideology. These findings have important implications for the future prospects of the GOP

MadRadar: A Black-Box Physical Layer Attack Framework on mmWave Automotive FMCW Radars

Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) millimeter-wave (mmWave) radars play a critical role in many of the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) featured on today's vehicles. While previous works have demonstrated (only) successful false-positive spoofing attacks against these sensors, all but one assumed that an attacker had the runtime knowledge of the victim radar's configuration. In this work, we introduce MadRadar, a general black-box radar attack framework for automotive mmWave FMCW radars capable of estimating the victim radar's configuration in real-time, and then executing an attack based on the estimates. We evaluate the impact of such attacks maliciously manipulating a victim radar's point cloud, and show the novel ability to effectively `add' (i.e., false positive attacks), `remove' (i.e., false negative attacks), or `move' (i.e., translation attacks) object detections from a victim vehicle's scene. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our attacks on real-world case studies performed using a real-time physical prototype on a software-defined radio platform

A Modular Platform For Collaborative, Distributed Sensor Fusion

Leading autonomous vehicle (AV) platforms and testing infrastructures are, unfortunately, proprietary and closed-source. Thus, it is difficult to evaluate how well safety-critical AVs perform and how safe they truly are. Similarly, few platforms exist for much-needed multi-agent analysis. To provide a starting point for analysis of sensor fusion and collaborative & distributed sensing, we design an accessible, modular sensing platform with AVstack. We build collaborative and distributed camera-radar fusion algorithms and demonstrate an evaluation ecosystem of AV datasets, physics-based simulators, and hardware in the physical world. This three-part ecosystem enables testing next-generation configurations that are prohibitively challenging in existing development platforms

The injury workforce in Western Australia: Findings from a cross-sectional survey

Issue addressed: Since 1986, injury prevention and control has been classified as a National Health Priority. However, no reviews into the injury prevention workforce have been conducted in Australia since 2011 and to date; none has focused specifically on the injury prevention and safety promotion sector in Western Australia (WA). This research sought to review the scope of the injury prevention and safety promotion workforce in WA to gain a greater understanding of sector characteristics, work and needs. Methods: An online, cross-sectional survey was conducted between mid-January and mid-March 2018. Participants were required to be: (a) based in WA or have a program running within WA; and (b) working in injury prevention and safety promotion relating to programs, policy or legislation development, implementation and/or evaluation within intentional (eg interpersonal violence, suicide and self-harm) or unintentional injuries (eg transport, poisoning, falls, drowning, burns) or farm, child and community, occupational health and safety, sport and recreation and trauma. Results: The research found that participants were predominantly female (82%), aged 40 years or older (66.1%) and were employed full time (55.6%). The majority of participants worked in falls prevention (38.5%), alcohol and other drugs (38.0%), injury in general (31.8%) and community safety (30.7%). Conclusions: Findings demonstrate significant heterogeneity with a core workforce supported by a range of non-core and indirect actors. Identifying characteristics and needs of the workforce supports coordinated capacity building to implement effective injury prevention and safety promotion initiatives. With this being the first review of the workforce in WA, this article highlights the need to more regularly audit the sector to determine its breadth and composition. So what?: In the light of the recent announcement by the Commonwealth for a new national Injury Prevention Strategy, this study provides timely insights into the injury prevention and safety promotion sector in WA

Consequences of Low Risk and Hazardous Alcohol Consumption among University Students in Australia and Implications for Health Promotion Interventions

Background: Hazardous alcohol consumption and associated harms are high among young university students. The university environment is conducive to excessive alcohol consumption with studies finding young university students to drink alcohol at higher levels than their non-university peers. Methods: A random sample of 18 - 24-year-old undergraduate, internal university students completed a survey (n = 2465) to investigate differences in self-reported personal, secondhand and witnessed alcohol-related harms, alcohol expectancies, pre-loading, and friends’ alcohol consumption between low risk and hazardous drinkers. Univariate and multivariate analyses are reported. Results: Almost 40% of students who had consumed alcohol in the past year reported drinking at hazardous levels. Univariate analyses found students who reported hazardous drinking reported significantly higher scores relating to experienced, second-hand, witnessed and academic problems compared to low risk drinkers. Hazardous drinkers were also more likely to pre-load, to drink at higher levels when pre-loading, have more friends who drank alcohol, have more friends who drank at hazardous levels and to score higher on alcohol expectancies. However both low risk and hazardous drinkers experienced a range of harms due to their own drinking including hangover (71.2%), unprotected sex (19.3%), regretted sex (16.8%) and drink-driving (17%).Looking after an intoxicated student (34.3%) and witnessing someone pass out (37.5%) were issues for all drinkers. Experienced alcohol related harms, academic problems, alcohol expectancies, close friends’ level of alcohol consumption, pre-loading in the last four weeks and level of consumption when pre-loading were predictors of hazardous drinking (p < 0.001). Conclusion: Young undergraduate university students are at risk of a range of academic, social, emotional and physical harms associated with their own and other students’ alcohol consumption. There is a need for integrated programs to address university drinking culture and effect positive changes

Teen Dating Violence Victimization: Associations Among Peer Justification, Attitudes Toward Gender Inequality, Sexual Activity, and Peer Victimization

The current study, grounded in a social learning theoretical framework, examined attitudes and behaviors associated with verbal and physical teen dating violence (TDV) victimization. Because TDV varies by gender in both frequency and severity, these associations were examined first within the overall sample, and then by gender to further investigate these differences. A total of 1,884 adolescents (49.2% boys; 50.8% girls; average age 14.79 years; SD = .58) who reported ever dating someone were included in the analysis. Specifically, peers’ justification of TDV, attitudes supporting gender inequality, sexual activity, and peer victimization were included to determine their cross-sectional association with verbal and physical TDV victimization. Data were analyzed separately for boys and girls. Results indicated that peers’ justification of TDV, peer victimization, sexual activity, and attitudes supporting gender inequality were each associated with higher physical and verbal TDV victimization for girls and boys. Most of these factors remained significant when separated by gender, except for sexual activity and attitudes supporting gender inequality, which were not associated with physical TDV victimization for boys and girls, respectively. Implications for practice and research are discussed

Implementation of a Human Trafficking Educational Module for College Students: Pre/Post Design

This research study aimed to implement an educational module and to determine the effectiveness of that module on increasing the awareness of human trafficking and risk factors for incoming freshman students at a medium-size, Southern university from September 2021 through November 2021. Two hundred students consented and participated in the study by completing the pretest and posttest to indicate their knowledge of human trafficking before and after being presented an online educational module. The pre and posttest included 10 questions with 24 possible responses. An average of 12.34 correct responses were provided on the pretest and 19.13 were correct responses on the posttest. This data indicates a 58.6% improvement in awareness of human trafficking risk factors. A one-tailed pair-wise student’s t-test and a single factor ANOVA were used to compare pretest scores with posttest scores both resulting in a p value of \u3c 0.001. The results of the study support the original hypothesis that students will have greater knowledge and awareness of human trafficking, as evidenced by a positive change in pretest to posttest scores, after completing the educational module on human trafficking. Limitations were found in the study as some students did not complete both the pre and posttest. The researchers believe this could be addressed through a stepwise testing module where one has to complete the first step to proceed to the next

Habitable Climates: The Influence of Obliquity

Extrasolar terrestrial planets with the potential to host life might have large obliquities or be subject to strong obliquity variations. We revisit the habitability of oblique planets with an energy balance climate model (EBM) allowing for dynamical transitions to ice-covered snowball states as a result of ice-albedo feedback. Despite the great simplicity of our EBM, it captures reasonably well the seasonal cycle of global energetic fluxes at Earth's surface. It also performs satisfactorily against a full-physics climate model of a highly oblique Earth-like planet, in an unusual regime of circulation dominated by heat transport from the poles to the equator. Climates on oblique terrestrial planets can violate global radiative balance through much of their seasonal cycle, which limits the usefulness of simple radiative equilibrium arguments. High obliquity planets have severe climates, with large amplitude seasonal variations, but they are not necessarily more prone to global snowball transitions than low obliquity planets. We find that terrestrial planets with massive CO2 atmospheres, typically expected in the outer regions of habitable zones, can also be subject to such dynamical snowball transitions. Some of the snowball climates investigated for CO2-rich atmospheres experience partial atmospheric collapse. Since long-term CO2 atmospheric build-up acts as a climatic thermostat for habitable planets, partial CO2 collapse could limit the habitability of such planets. A terrestrial planet's habitability may thus depend sensitively on its short-term climatic stability.Comment: Minor changes, references added. 34 pages, 13 figures, accepted by Ap

Rapid West Nile Virus Antigen Detection

We compared the VecTest WNV antigen assay with standard methods of West Nile virus (WNV) detection in swabs from American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and House Sparrows (Passer domesticus). The VecTest detected WNV more frequently than the plaque assay and was comparable to a TaqMan reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction

Probing the Nuclear and Circumnuclear Activity of NGC1365 in the Infrared

We present new far-infrared (70-500micron) Herschel PACS and SPIRE imaging observations as well as new mid-IR Gemini/T-ReCS imaging (8.7 and 18.3micron) and spectroscopy of the inner Lindblad resonance (ILR) region (R<2.5kpc) of the spiral galaxy NGC1365. We complemented these observations with archival Spitzer imaging and spectral mapping observations. The ILR region of NGC1365 contains a Seyfert 1.5 nucleus and a ring of star formation with an approximate diameter of 2kpc. The strong star formation activity in the ring is resolved by the Herschel/PACS imaging data, as well as by the Spitzer 24micron continuum emission, [NeII]12.81micron line emission, and 6.2 and 11.3micron PAH emission. The AGN is the brightest source in the central regions up to lambda~24micron, but it becomes increasingly fainter in the far-infrared when compared to the emission originating in the infrared clusters (or groups of them) located in the ring. We modeled the AGN unresolved infrared emission with the CLUMPY torus models and estimated that the AGN contributes only to a small fraction (~5%) of the infrared emission produced in the inner ~5kpc. We fitted the non-AGN 24-500micron spectral energy distribution of the ILR region and found that the dust temperatures and mass are similar to those of other nuclear and circumnuclear starburst regions. Finally we showed that within the ILR region of NGC1365 most of the on-going star formation activity is taking place in dusty regions as probed by the 24micron emission.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA