83 research outputs found
Why educated Republicans are still less likely to trust childhood vaccinations than educated Democrats
There is overwhelming evidence that the benefits of vaccinations outweigh their risks. But why do so many continue to be skeptical of their use? In new research, Mark Joslyn and Steven Sylvester find that education is an important predictor of trust in vaccine science, and that Democrats are more influenced by this effect than Republicans. They write that these differences may be down to Republicans’ tendency to distrust government and science
Democrats are more likely than Republicans or Independents to blame genetics for obesity – including their own.
More than 70 percent of American adults are overweight, with over a third in the obese category, but the public in general does not support a greater role for government in tackling this problem. In new research, Don Haider-Markel and Mark Joslyn look at whether or not Americans think that obesity is caused by biology or a result of individual choice. Although they find that 86 percent believe it is due to lifestyle habits, there is also a political component: 15 percent of Democrats favor genetics as the cause of obesity compared to 10 percent of Republicans. These attributions also have policy implications: those who felt that obesity is down to genetics were more likely to resist discriminatory hiring practices based on weight
Gun Policy, Opinion, Tragedy, and Blame Attribution: The Conditional Influence of Issue of Frames
This is the publisher's version, which is also available electronically from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0022-3816.00077.Political events and policy discussion set parameters for debate and help to determine how an issue
comes to be defined. Though existing research has examined the effects of alternative representations
of political issues on public opinion, less attention has been given to highly salient issues,
such as gun policy, and the potential effect of framing on causal attributions of blame for tragic
events. This study expands the framing research to include opinion on policies concerning guns as
well as the attributions of blame following the school shooting in Littleton, Colorado. We test
several hypotheses using data from two field polls—one examining support for concealed handgun
laws and the other examining blame attribution following the shootings at Columbine High School.
We find that alternative gun frames influence opinion about concealed handgun laws as well as
attributions of blame for Columbine. However, the effect is conditional, hinging on the nature of
respondents’ predisposition and existing knowledge. We consider these findings within the context
of the policy-making process.
“The aftermath of that shooting . . . has had an even more profound impact on the country
than all the school shootings last year did. And you can see it by what is happening in the
Congress now.”
—President Clinton referring to the impact of the Littleton, Colorado, school shootings
on the gun policy debate (Sobieraj 1999)
“I have to tell you, it’s amazing to us, there’s a whole lot of us going “Wow” . . . After all
these school shootings we thought maybe we could get a discussion going, introduce some
ideas, but this is tremendous.”
—Janet Parshall of the Family Research Council after the House passed three religious
amendments meant to reduce school violence following the Littleton shootings (Rosin
1999
Minority Group Interests and Political Representation: Gay Elected Officials in the Policy Process
This is the publisher's version, which is also available electronically from http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0022-3816.00026Of key importance to groups in a democracy is the political representation of their interests in the
policy process. The most obvious strategy of groups to achieve representation is to elect officials
that identify with group interests. Our research examines the political representation of lesbian and
gay interests, exploring the influence of openly gay elected officials on domestic partner policies.
Based on the literature, we select and operationalize variables that may influence policy adoption. Analysis on a dataset of 270 localities suggests that elected gay officials are an important determinant for achieving substantive political representation. Our findings also suggest that supportive non-gay elected officials can effectively represent gays in the policy process
Real-time RFI Mitigation in Radio Astronomy
As the use of wireless technology has increased around the world, Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) has become more and more of a problem for radio astronomers. Preventative measures exist to limit the presence of RFI, and programs exist to remove it from saved data, but the use of algorithms to detect and remove RFI as an observation is occurring is much less common. Such a method would be incredibly useful for observations in which the data must undergo several rounds of processing before being saved, as in pulsar timing studies. Strategies for real-time mitigation have been discussed and tested with simulated data, but ideally the results of any approach would be validated by a detailed comparison of the final data products with and without mitigation applied. The goal of this project is to develop an RFI mitigation approach based on strategies suggested by Buch et al.(2016) and to test this program on real data from the observation of pulsar J1713+0747 at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. We use a Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) filter to identify interference in the observation and replace the compromised data with random Gaussian noise to match a characteristic radio signal from space. In order to verify our results, we analyze the pulsar’s timing residuals obtained both from the mitigated data and from data processed through offline RFI removal software. Comparing the two, our preliminary findings indicate that our program is able to significantly improve the quality of timing results from the observation
HyperNetX: A Python package for modeling complex network data as hypergraphs
HyperNetX (HNX) is an open source Python library for the analysis and
visualization of complex network data modeled as hypergraphs. Initially
released in 2019, HNX facilitates exploratory data analysis of complex networks
using algebraic topology, combinatorics, and generalized hypergraph and graph
theoretical methods on structured data inputs. With its 2023 release, the
library supports attaching metadata, numerical and categorical, to nodes
(vertices) and hyperedges, as well as to node-hyperedge pairings (incidences).
HNX has a customizable Matplotlib-based visualization module as well as
HypernetX-Widget, its JavaScript addon for interactive exploration and
visualization of hypergraphs within Jupyter Notebooks. Both packages are
available on GitHub and PyPI. With a growing community of users and
collaborators, HNX has become a preeminent tool for hypergraph analysis.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figure
Immediate Reward Bias in Humans: Fronto-Parietal Networks and a Role for the Catechol-O-Methyltransferase 158Val/Val Genotype
The tendency to choose lesser immediate benefits over greater long-term benefits characterizes alcoholism and other addictive disorders. However, despite its medical and socioeconomic importance, little is known about its neurobiological mechanisms. Brain regions that are activated when deciding between immediate or delayed rewards have been identified
Beyond technical fixes: climate solutions and the great derangement
Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data
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