Capturing the Effects of Public Opinion Polls on Voter Support in the NY 25th Congressional Election

This thesis explores the relationship between public opinion polls and voter support and asks whether exposure to a public opinion poll creates an unfair advantage for the candidate winning in that poll. The experimental results from this study were used to test the hypothesis that exposure to an opinion poll, with a wide lead for one of two candidates, would cause voter support to increase for the candidate who was leading in the poll (i.e. a bandwagon effect). In 2012, a random sample of 101 registered voters in the NY 25th Congressional District participated in two telephone surveys. In each survey, voters rated their personal support for each of two congressional candidates on a five point scale. After the first telephone survey, respondents were randomly assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received polling data that showed one candidate with a large lead over the other (59% to 41%); meanwhile, the control group received no such polling data. After voters in the experimental group received the opinion poll, both groups were called with a second telephone survey and again asked to rate their support for each of the two congressional candidates using a five point scale. The change in voter support, from the first to the second telephone survey, was compared between the experimental and control groups, with results that failed to establish statistically significant evidence of a bandwagon effect among the voters who received polling data. A multinomial logistic regression analysis was also used to explore the results in more detail but still failed to establish statistically significant evidence of a bandwagon effect that was associated with exposure to polling data alone. Instead, the multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed evidence of a bandwagon effect among some voters who were considered predisposed to support the frontrunner in the poll (i.e. those who shared the same party affiliation and had a lack of other knowledge or information). However, this effect occurred only among a small subset of the final sample and was not statistically significant. In conclusion, this experiment found that exposure to polling data, whether on its own or in conjunction with other variables, did not significantly affect voter support either for the candidate winning or losing in the poll. While these results are limited to the sample of registered voters in this experiment, additional research would be necessary to draw more generalized conclusions about the relationship between exposure to opinion polls and voter support

The Making of the Royal Society Corpus

The Royal Society Corpus is a corpus of Early and Late modern English built in an agile process covering publications of the Royal Society of London from 1665 to 1869 (Kermes et al., 2016) with a size of approximately 30 million words. In this paper we will provide details on two aspects of the building process namely the mining of patterns for OCR correction and the improvement and evaluation of partof-speech tagging

Generating linguistically relevant metadata for the Royal Society Corpus

This paper provides an overview on metadata generation and management for the Royal Society Corpus (RSC), aiming to encourage discussion about the specific challenges in building substantial diachronic corpora intended to be used for linguistic and humanistic analysis. We discuss the motivations and goals of building the corpus, describe its composition and present the types of metadata it contains. Specifically, we tackle two challenges: first, integration of original metadata from the data providers (JSTOR and the Royal Society); second, derivation of additional linguistically relevant metadata regarding text structure and situational context (register)

Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German

We present two comparable diachronic corpora of scientific English and German from the Late Modern Period (17th c.--19th c.) annotated with Universal Dependencies. We describe several steps of data pre-processing and evaluate the resulting parsing accuracy showing how our pre-processing steps significantly improve output quality. As a sanity check for the representativity of our data, we conduct a case study comparing previously gained insights on grammatical change in the scientific genre with our data. Our results reflect the often reported trend of English scientific discourse towards heavy noun phrases and a simplification of the sentence structure (Halliday, 1988; Halliday and Martin, 1993; Biber and Gray, 2011; Biber and Gray, 2016). We also show that this trend applies to German scientific discourse as well. The presented corpora are valuable resources suitable for the contrastive analysis of syntactic diachronic change in the scientific genre between 1650 and 1900. The presented pre-processing procedures and their evaluations are applicable to other languages and can be useful for a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks such as syntactic parsing.This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 232722074 – SFB 1102

COLA II - Radio and Spectroscopic Diagnostics of Nuclear Activity in Galaxies

We present optical spectroscopic observations of 93 galaxies taken from the infra-red selected COLA (Compact Objects in Low Power AGN) sample. The sample spans the range of far-IR luminosities from normal galaxies to LIRGs. Of the galaxies observed, 78 (84%) exhibit emission lines. Using a theoretically-based optical emission-line scheme we classify 15% of the emission-line galaxies as Seyferts, 77% as starbursts, and the rest are either borderline AGN/starburst or show ambiguous characteristics. We find little evidence for an increase in the fraction of AGN in the sample as a function of far-IR luminosity but our sample covers only a small range in infrared luminosity and thus a weak trend may be masked. As a whole the Seyfert galaxies exhibit a small, but significant, radio excess on the radio-FIR correlation compared to the galaxies classified as starbursts. Compact (<0.05'') radio cores are detected in 55% of the Seyfert galaxies, and these galaxies exhibit a significantly larger radio excess than the Seyfert galaxies in which cores were not detected. Our results indicate that there may be two distinct populations of Seyferts, ``radio-excess'' Seyferts, which exhibit extended radio structures and compact radio cores, and ``radio-quiet'' Seyferts, in which the majority of the radio emission can be attributed to star-formation in the host galaxy. No significant difference is seen between the IR and optical spectroscopic properties of Seyferts with and without radio cores. (Abridged)Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ, February 200

Activity theory as a supportive framework in design of navigation equipment

This study reports on the use of Activity Theory as a supportive framework in a design process. Crews on Fast Patrol Boats in the Royal Norwegian Navy were observed during high-speed navigation in coastal waters. The unit of analysis was the navigation team of five persons in their work. Activity was regarded as situated actions shaped by tools, objects and constraints. The framework of Activity Theory was used to form a design language that encompassed the aspects relevant to design and navigation. Based on the findings, a prototype of a automated steering system was built. We suggest that in design process, Activity Theory moves the focus from the technical qualities of artefacts towards how artefacts are used as tools to mediate activity.Cette étude rend compte de l’utilisation de la théorie de l’activité comme support à un processus de conception. Des équipages de vedettes rapides de la marine royale norvégienne ont été observés au cours de navigation à grande vitesse en eaux côtières. L’unité de l’analyse était un équipage de cinq personnes pendant leur travail. L’activité a été considérée en tant qu’actions situées, déterminée par des outils, des objets et des contraintes. Le cadre de la théorie de l’activité a été utilisé pour élaborer un langage de conception englobant les questions concernant la conception et la navigation. À partir des résultats obtenus, un prototype d’une commande de pilotage automatisée a été réalisé. Nous suggérons que la théorie de l’activité change la centration du processus de conception : des propriétés techniques des artefacts vers la manière dont ils sont utilisés comme outils médiateurs de l’activité.Este estudio da cuenta de la utilización de la teoría de la actividad como soporte para un proceso de diseño. Se han realizado observaciones de tripulaciones de lanchas rápidas de la real marina noruega, en el transcurso de navegación a gran velocidad en aguas territoriales. La unidad de análisis fue una tripulación de cinco personas durante su trabajo. La actividad fue considerada en tanto que acciones situadas, determinadas por las herramientas, los objetos y las dificultades. Para poder elaborar un lenguaje de diseño que englobe les cuestiones referidas al diseño y a la navegación, se ha utilizado el enfoque de la teoría de la actividad. A partir de los resultados obtenidos, se ha realizado un prototipo de dispositivo de pilotaje automático. Concluimos señalando que, durante el proceso de diseño, la teoría de la actividad desplaza el foco de atención. Mientras que el diseño tradicionalmente se centra sen la calidad técnica de los artefactos, la teoría de la actividad hace foco en la manera en que los artefactos son utilizados como herramientas mediadoras de la actividad

La théorie de l’activité comme aide à la conception d’équipement de navigation

Cette étude rend compte de l’utilisation de la théorie de l’activité comme support à un processus de conception. Des équipages de vedettes rapides de la marine royale norvégienne ont été observés au cours de navigation à grande vitesse en eaux côtières. L’unité de l’analyse était un équipage de cinq personnes pendant leur travail. L’activité a été considérée en tant qu’actions situées, déterminée par des outils, des objets et des contraintes. Le cadre de la théorie de l’activité a été utilisé pour élaborer un langage de conception englobant les questions concernant la conception et la navigation. À partir des résultats obtenus, un prototype d’une commande de pilotage automatisée a été réalisé. Nous suggérons que la théorie de l’activité change la centration du processus de conception : des propriétés techniques des artefacts vers la manière dont ils sont utilisés comme outils médiateurs de l’activité.This study reports on the use of Activity Theory as a supportive framework in a design process. Crews on Fast Patrol Boats in the Royal Norwegian Navy were observed during high-speed navigation in coastal waters. The unit of analysis was the navigation team of five persons in their work. Activity was regarded as situated actions shaped by tools, objects and constraints. The framework of Activity Theory was used to form a design language that encompassed the aspects relevant to design and navigation. Based on the findings, a prototype of a automated steering system was built. We suggest that in design process, Activity Theory moves the focus from the technical qualities of artefacts towards how artefacts are used as tools to mediate activity.Este estudio da cuenta de la utilización de la teoría de la actividad como soporte para un proceso de diseño. Se han realizado observaciones de tripulaciones de lanchas rápidas de la real marina noruega, en el transcurso de navegación a gran velocidad en aguas territoriales. La unidad de análisis fue una tripulación de cinco personas durante su trabajo. La actividad fue considerada en tanto que acciones situadas, determinadas por las herramientas, los objetos y las dificultades. Para poder elaborar un lenguaje de diseño que englobe les cuestiones referidas al diseño y a la navegación, se ha utilizado el enfoque de la teoría de la actividad. A partir de los resultados obtenidos, se ha realizado un prototipo de dispositivo de pilotaje automático. Concluimos señalando que, durante el proceso de diseño, la teoría de la actividad desplaza el foco de atención. Mientras que el diseño tradicionalmente se centra sen la calidad técnica de los artefactos, la teoría de la actividad hace foco en la manera en que los artefactos son utilizados como herramientas mediadoras de la actividad