Pharmaceuticals, Political Money, and Public Policy: A Theoretical and Empirical Agenda

Congress has consistently failed to solve some serious problems with the cost, effectiveness, and safety of pharmaceuticals. In part, this failure results from the pharmaceutical industry convincing legislators to define policy problems in ways that protect industry profits. By targeting campaign contributions to influential legislators and by providing them with selective information, the industry manages to displace the public’s voice in developing pharmaceutical policy

Prospects for Campaign Finance Reform: The Role of Policy Narratives, Cultural Predispositions, and Political Knowledge in Collective Policy Preference Formation

Objective: Although campaign finance is a growing concern, pollsters rarely ask the public about reform. We use the variation in public support for campaign finance reform to determine factors important to collective policy preference formation. Methods: Using a national survey, we factor analyze the latent dimensions of various reforms, and rely on an experimental design to explain the role cultural theory, policy narratives, and political knowledge plays in preference formation. Results: The reform debate groups along two dimensions: adding or removing limitations, or ending the dependence on money altogether. We show policy narratives are most influential, and cultural theory has more explanatory value, among those with higher levels of political knowledge, and policy narratives tend to increase support among those who already support reform, and mitigate the opposition from other cultural types. Conclusion: If it were up to the public, prospects for campaign finance reform, even public financing, would be high

External Shear in Quadruply Imaged Lens Systems

We use publicly available N-body simulations and semi-analytic models of galaxy formation to estimate the levels of external shear due to structure near the lens in gravitational lens systems. We also describe two selection effects, specific to four-image systems, that enhance the probability of observing systems to have higher external shear. Ignoring additional contributions from "cosmic shear" and assuming that lens galaxies are not significantly flattened, we find that the mean shear at the position of a quadruple lens galaxy is 0.11, the rms shear is roughly 0.15, and there is roughly a 45% likelihood of external shear greater than 0.1. This is much larger than previous estimates and in good agreement with typical measured external shear. The higher shear primarily stems from the tendency of early-type galaxies, which are the majority of lenses, to reside in overdense regions.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, ApJ in press, minor revision

Organized Interests in Congressional Elections

Why do political action committees (PACs) donate money to some candidates and not others? Answers to this PAC-strategy question take two different forms. First, scholars emphasize demand-side variables of the legislative market (e.g., geographic location of PAC donors), culminating in the organizational presence model of PAC strategy, which discounts legislative strategies and finds that PACs donate to ideologically friendly, electorally vulnerable candidates who campaign where PACs have an organizational presence. Second, public choice scholars emphasize supply-side variables of the legislative market (e.g., congressional member attributes), culminating in the legislative asset model of PAC strategy, finding that PACs donate to the lowest cost congressional members in the best position to provide legislation, or a legislative strategy. Using data from the Center for Responsive Politics, I test each model using every PAC donation to a congressional candidate from 1990-2006, organized by the geographic location of PAC donor-bases and the PAC's policy sector. I find both models deficient in explaining PAC strategy. Only a small portion of PACs make decisions bounded by the geography of individual donors, making most PACs the nationalizing force many feared in the early 1980s. While PACs exhibit a clear strategy that seeks legislative benefit, the statistical significance of the legislative asset model comes from its ability to explain small donations with more accuracy than large PAC donations. In an attempt to reconcile these two approaches, I re-specify the legislative asset model with a conditional hypothesis: PACs donate money according to legislator characteristics and legislative strategies, but predominantly within the geography of its donor-base. This conditional hypothesis forms the foundation of a new mediated model, as the legislative strategy of PACs is mediated by the geographical distribution of its donor-base. This conditional hypothesis improves the explanatory power of PAC-strategy models marginally; however, the representational flaw in the PAC system still remains: PAC money creates financial constituencies that deviate from the geographic constituencies, exacerbating the differences between organized and unorganized interests in American political life

Birds of the Northcentral Alaska Peninsula, 1976-1980

Between spring 1976 and fall 1980 we studied the occurrence, abundance, and habitat use of birds over a 2000 square km segment of the northcentral Alaska Peninsula. During this period observers were present 473 days and obtained records for all seasons. A total of 125 species was recorded; 63% (79 of 125) were water-associated. The breeding avifauna was found to be a mixture of Panboreal (49%), North American (34%), and Aleutican (17%) species. The Aleutican group was dominant in terms of biomass and numbers of individuals during the nonbreeding period. Forty-two species were confirmed breeding in the area and another 19 were suspected of breeding. The majority of birds occurred as migrants; 14 species were considered permanent residents and an additional 20 were winter residents. ... The area is a principal late summer and fall molting and staging area for several species of arctic and subarctic nesting waders and seaducks and emperor geese .... From late September through mid-October the density of water birds over the entire littoral and nearshore area approached 1000 birds square km. This density was exceeded many fold for certain species on particular segments of habitats in the area.Key words: birds, Alaska Peninsula, abundance, migration, nesting, habitat, distribution, zoogeographyMots clés: oiseaux, péninsule d'Alaska, abondance, migration, saison des nids, habitat, distribution, zoogéographi

Remodeling of the Metabolome during Early Frog Development

A rapid series of synchronous cell divisions initiates embryogenesis in many animal species, including the frog Xenopus laevis. After many of these cleavage cycles, the nuclear to cytoplasmic ratio increases sufficiently to somehow cause cell cycles to elongate and become asynchronous at the mid-blastula transition (MBT). We have discovered that an unanticipated remodeling of core metabolic pathways occurs during the cleavage cycles and the MBT in X.laevis, as evidenced by widespread changes in metabolite abundance. While many of the changes in metabolite abundance were consistently observed, it was also evident that different female frogs laid eggs with different levels of at least some metabolites. Metabolite tracing with heavy isotopes demonstrated that alanine is consumed to generate energy for the early embryo. dATP pools were found to decline during the MBT and we have confirmed that maternal pools of dNTPs are functionally exhausted at the onset of the MBT. Our results support an alternative hypothesis that the cell cycle lengthening at the MBT is triggered not by a limiting maternal protein, as is usually proposed, but by a decline in dNTP pools brought about by the exponentially increasing demands of DNA synthesis

The Spitzer Gould Belt Survey of Large Nearby Interstellar Clouds: Discovery of A Dense Embedded Cluster in the Serpens-Aquila Rift

We report the discovery of a nearby, embedded cluster of young stellar objects, associated filamentary infrared dark cloud, and 4.5 mu m shock emission knots from outflows detected in Spitzer IRAC mid-infrared imaging of the Serpens-Aquila Rift obtained as part of the Spitzer Gould Belt Legacy Survey. We also present radial velocity measurements of the region from molecular line observations obtained with the Submillimeter Array (SMA) that suggest the cluster is comoving with the Serpens Main embedded cluster to the north. We therefore assign it 3 degrees the same distance, 260 pc. The core of the new cluster, which we call Serpens South, is composed of an unusually large fraction of protostars (77%) at high mean surface density (> 430 pc(-2)) and short median nearest neighbor spacing (3700 AU). We perform basic cluster structure characterization using nearest neighbor surface density mapping of the YSOs and compare our findings to other known clusters with equivalent analyses available in the literature.Astronom

Connectivity between white shark populations off Central California, USA and Guadalupe Island, Mexico

Marine animals often move beyond national borders and exclusive economic zones resulting in a need for trans-boundary management spanning multiple national jurisdictions. Highly migratory fish vulnerable to over-exploitation require protections at international level, as exploitation practices can be disparate between adjacent countries and marine jurisdictions. In this study we collaboratively conducted an analysis of white shark connectivity between two main aggregation regions with independent population assessment and legal protection programs; one off central California, USA and one off Guadalupe Island, Mexico. We acoustically tagged 326 sub-adult and adult white sharks in central California (n=210) and in Guadalupe Island (n=116) with acoustic transmitters between 2008-2019. Of the 326 tagged white sharks, 30 (9.20%) individuals were detected at both regions during the study period. We used a Bayesian implementation of logistic regression with a binomial distribution to estimate the effect of sex, maturity, and tag location to the response variable of probability of moving from one region to the other. While nearly one in ten individuals in our sample were detected in both regions over the study period, the annual rate of trans-regional movement was low (probability of movement = 0.015 yr-1, 95% credible interval = 0.002, 0.061). Sub-adults were more likely than adults to move between regions and sharks were more likely to move from Guadalupe Island to central California, however, sex, and year were not important factors influencing movement. This first estimation of demographic-specific trans-regional movement connecting US and Mexico aggregations with high seasonal site fidelity represents an important step to future international management and assessment of the northeastern Pacific white shark population as a whole