Multiculturalism is unpopular with the majority – even though it makes for happier societies

How do people feel about multicultural policies? Ethnic majorities tend to resent them, and feel less safe in societies with a number of affirmative and rights-based policies, write Pamela Irving Jackson and Peter Doerschler. As a result, governments have come under pressure to ensure policies that tackle inequality benefit everyone. Yet both ethnic majorities and minorities declare themselves happier with their lives and governments when they live in states with multicultural policies

Development of probability of detection data for structural health monitoring damage detection techniques based on acoustic emission

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques have been developed as a cost effective alternative to currently adopted Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods which have well understood levels of performance. Quantitative performance assessment, as used in NDT, needs to be applied to SHM techniques to establish their performance levels as a basis for technique comparison and also as a requirement for practical aerospace application according to set regulations. One such measurand is Probability of Detection (POD). This paper reports experiments conducted to investigate the location accuracy of the Acoustic Emission (AE) system in monitoring events from HsuNielson and fatigue crack AE sources as a route to establish the POD of AE in SHM. It was found that fatigue crack tips could be located at 90% POD within 10 mm accuracy

U.S. Energy Scenarios for the 21st Century

Discusses three divergent paths for U.S. energy supply and use from 2000 through 2035, and the effect of climate policy on the three scenarios

Radical Right-Wing Parties in Western Europe and their Populist Appeal: An Empirical Explanation

In a majority of Western European countries, the vote share cast for radical right-wing populist parties in national elections was over 10% by 2015, reaching 46% in Austria’s 2016 presidential election. Policy agendas of national governments have also moved to the right, demonstrating greater restrictiveness on immigration and skepticism toward the EU. With data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, European Social Survey, Multiculturalism Policy Index, and Parliaments and Governments Database, we extend current models of electoral support for far-right parties by assessing whether the ethnic majority’s sense of discrimination and safety help explain the allure of the right-wing message. Does right-wing populist voting by majority group members reflect their sense of being personally disadvantaged in a multicultural state beyond their more general opposition to immigration as bad for the country? Building on the multivariate model of voter preference developed by Inglehart and Norris (2016), we look specifically at majority group members in thirteen Western European states and add two measures of personal grievance: sense of being in a group that is discriminated against and fear of walking alone at night. Our results suggest that along with their stance against immigration and multiculturalism, their socioeconomic appeals and ideological signals, radical right-wing populist parties draw majority group members’ votes by stoking their sense of personal grievance as members of a group that is discriminated against

A selective role for neuronal activity regulated pentraxin in the processing of sensory-specific incentive value

Neuronal activity regulated pentraxin (Narp) is a secreted neuronal product which clusters AMPA receptors and regulates excitatory synaptogenesis. Although Narp is selectively enriched in brain, its role in behavior is not known. As Narp is expressed prominently in limbic regions, we examined whether Narp deletion affects performance on tasks used to assess motivational consequences of food-rewarded learning. Narp knock-out (KO) mice were unimpaired in learning simple pavlovian discriminations, instrumental lever pressing, and in acquisition of at least two aspects of pavlovian incentive learning, conditioned reinforcement and pavlovian-instrumental transfer. In contrast, Narp deletion resulted in a substantial deficit in the ability to use specific outcome expectancies to modulate instrumental performance in a devaluation task. In this task, mice were trained to respond on two levers for two different rewards. After training, mice were prefed with one of the two rewards, devaluing it. Responding on both levers was then assessed in extinction. Whereas control mice showed a significant preference in responding on the lever associated with the nondevalued reward, Narp KO mice responded equally on both levers, failing to suppress responding on the lever associated with the devalued reward. Both groups consumed more of the nondevalued reward in a subsequent choice test, indicating Narp KO mice could distinguish between the rewards themselves. These data suggest Narp has a selective role in processing sensory-specific information necessary for appropriate devaluation performance, but not in general motivational effects of reward-predictive cues on performance