Michelle Nunn’s midterm result shows that Georgia’s demographics may be shifting to favor the Democrats

In Georgia’s Senate race Republican David Purdue defeated Democrat Michelle Nunn by nearly eight points, despite polling that had shown a much closer contest. Jamie L. Carson, Joel Sievert, and Ryan D. Williamson reflect on Georgia’s midterm election results, writing that in gaining more than 40 percent of the vote, Nunn outperformed many previous Democratic candidates in the state. They argue that if the Democratic Party continues to field good candidates in Georgia, shifting demographics may mean that they will be able to take statewide races within a few election cycles

PatientExploreR: an extensible application for dynamic visualization of patient clinical history from electronic health records in the OMOP common data model.

MotivationElectronic health records (EHRs) are quickly becoming omnipresent in healthcare, but interoperability issues and technical demands limit their use for biomedical and clinical research. Interactive and flexible software that interfaces directly with EHR data structured around a common data model (CDM) could accelerate more EHR-based research by making the data more accessible to researchers who lack computational expertise and/or domain knowledge.ResultsWe present PatientExploreR, an extensible application built on the R/Shiny framework that interfaces with a relational database of EHR data in the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership CDM format. PatientExploreR produces patient-level interactive and dynamic reports and facilitates visualization of clinical data without any programming required. It allows researchers to easily construct and export patient cohorts from the EHR for analysis with other software. This application could enable easier exploration of patient-level data for physicians and researchers. PatientExploreR can incorporate EHR data from any institution that employs the CDM for users with approved access. The software code is free and open source under the MIT license, enabling institutions to install and users to expand and modify the application for their own purposes.Availability and implementationPatientExploreR can be freely obtained from GitHub: https://github.com/BenGlicksberg/PatientExploreR. We provide instructions for how researchers with approved access to their institutional EHR can use this package. We also release an open sandbox server of synthesized patient data for users without EHR access to explore: http://patientexplorer.ucsf.edu.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Replication Data for "Public Attitudes Toward Presidential Veto Powers"

Data and R code to replicate analysis in "Public Attitudes Toward Presidential Veto Powers

Public attitudes toward presidential veto powers

Previous research on presidential powers has demonstrated predictable variation in the level of support for presidential usage of those powers. However, much of this work has focused solely on unilateral powers. Here, we seek to further explore public attitudes towards constitutionally prescribed powers—namely that of the executive veto. Using original survey data, we find that public support of the president’s use of the veto is dependent on respondent partisanship as well as approval of both the president and Congress. Overall, our findings provide some support for previous research on the topic, but also offer new insights. First, we find a higher baseline level of support for presidential powers. Second, our results indicate that the president’s copartisans are more supportive of the veto even after controlling for presidential and congressional approval

Replication Data for: Congressional Candidates in the Era of Party Ballots

Replication data and R files for "Congressional Candidates in the Era of Party Ballots" and the supplemental online appendix

Analysis of reflections in GNSS radio occultation measurements using the phase matching amplitude

It is well-known that in the presence of super-refractive layers in the lower-tropospheric inversion of GNSSradio occultation (RO) measurements using the Abel trans-form yields biased refractivity profiles. As such it is problem-atic to reconstruct the true refractivity from the RO signal.Additional information about this lower region of the atmo-sphere might be embedded in reflected parts of the signal. Toretrieve the bending angle, the phase matching operator canbe used. This operator produces a complex function of theimpact parameter, and from its phase we can calculate thebending angle. Instead of looking at the phase, in this paperwe focus on the function’s amplitude. The results in this pa-per show that the signatures of surface reflections in GNSSRO measurements can be significantly enhanced when usingthe phase matching method by processing only an appropri-ately selected segment of the received signal. This signatureenhancement is demonstrated by simulations and confirmedwith 10 hand-picked MetOp-A occultations with reflectedcomponents. To validate that these events show signs of re-flections, radio holographic images are generated. Our resultssuggest that the phase matching amplitude carries informa-tion that can improve the interpretation of radio occultationmeasurements in the lower troposphere.open access</p

Replication Data for: Nationalization and the Incumbency Advantage

Legislative scholars have investigated both the growth in the incumbency advantage since the early 1970s as well as its decline in recent decades, but there are several unanswered questions about this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine the incumbency advantage across a much wider swath of history to better understand its connection with changing levels of electoral nationalization. Based on an analysis of U.S. House elections extending back to the antebellum era, we find that the incumbency advantage fluctuates in predictable ways over time with changes in nationalization, which can be a product of both institutional and political conditions. We also demonstrate that the increased influence of local forces in congressional elections may not be strictly necessary nor sufficient for the existence of an incumbency advantage

Comparing reflection signatures in radio occultation measurements using the full spectrum inversion and phase matching methods

Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation (GNSS-RO) is an important technique used to sound the Earth's atmosphere and provide data products to numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as well as toclimate research. It provides a high vertical resolution and SI-traceability that are both valuable complements toother Earth observation systems. In addition to direct components refracted in the atmosphere, many received RO signals contain reflected components thanks to the specular and relatively smooth characteristics of the ocean. These reflected components can interfere the retrieval of the direct part of the signal, and can also contain meteorological information of their own, e.g., information about the refractivity at the Earth's surface. While the conventional method to detect such reflections is by using radio-holographic methods, it has been shown that it is possible to see reflections using wave optics inversion, specically while inspecting the amplitude of the output of phase matching (PM). The primary objective of this paper is to analyze the appearance of these reflections in the amplitude output from another wave optics algorithm, namely the much faster full spectrum inversion (FSI). PM and FSI are closely related algorithms - they both use the method of stationary phase to derive the bending angle from a measured signal. We apply our own implementation of FSI to the same GNSS-RO measurements that PM was previously applied to and show that the amplitudes of the outputs again indicate reflection in the surface of the ocean. Our results show that the amplitudes output from the FSI and PM algorithms are practically identical and that the reflection signatures thus appear equally well

Determining the refractivity at the bottom of the atmosphere using radio occultation

High accuracy of impact height is important to get reliableRadio Occultation (RO) measurements of the atmosphere refractivity.We have made an investigation on how accuratelywe can measure the impact height at ground level using waveoptics simulations, realistic refractivity profiles, a realisticsimulator for an advanced RO instrument including noise,and using phase matching for the inversion. The idea of theinvestigation is to increase the measurement accuracy of impactheight at low altitudes and to give reliable measurementseven in cases of super-refractive layers. We present statisticson the accuracy and precision of the determination of theimpact height at ground, as well as the resulting accuracy andprecision in the measured refractivity