The Segmented Electorate: Presidential Campaigns and Their Consequences in an Information Age

It is common to think of presidential elections as long campaigns waged by two warring powers, each competing for the hearts-and-minds of American voters. Yet this metaphor masks considerable variation in how voters experience the campaign in the run-up-to Election Day. We focus on how the rise of candidate-centered campaigns in has created a situation in which some voters experience an avalanche of information from the campaigns and others hear next to nothing. We argue that when we carefully consider which voters should be most responsive to campaign information, that the pattern of segmentation that exists does not advance a nation-wide campaign about the health of American politics

The contribution of insects to global forest deadwood decomposition

The amount of carbon stored in deadwood is equivalent to about 8 per cent of the global forest carbon stocks. The decomposition of deadwood is largely governed by climate with decomposer groups—such as microorganisms and insects—contributing to variations in the decomposition rates. At the global scale, the contribution of insects to the decomposition of deadwood and carbon release remains poorly understood. Here we present a field experiment of wood decomposition across 55 forest sites and 6 continents. We find that the deadwood decomposition rates increase with temperature, and the strongest temperature effect is found at high precipitation levels. Precipitation affects the decomposition rates negatively at low temperatures and positively at high temperatures. As a net effect—including the direct consumption by insects and indirect effects through interactions with microorganisms—insects accelerate the decomposition in tropical forests (3.9% median mass loss per year). In temperate and boreal forests, we find weak positive and negative effects with a median mass loss of 0.9 per cent and −0.1 per cent per year, respectively. Furthermore, we apply the experimentally derived decomposition function to a global map of deadwood carbon synthesized from empirical and remote-sensing data, obtaining an estimate of 10.9 ± 3.2 petagram of carbon per year released from deadwood globally, with 93 per cent originating from tropical forests. Globally, the net effect of insects may account for 29 per cent of the carbon flux from deadwood, which suggests a functional importance of insects in the decomposition of deadwood and the carbon cycle

The Dynamics of Democracy: Politicians, People, and the Press

158 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.While scholars have questioned and analyzed the influence of the media on politics through the lens of news reporting, there has been far less attention invested in whether editorials matter for policy outcomes. Editorials offer publishers and editors an opportunity to express openly their views on the issues of their choice; the extent to which these opinions matter is the central theme of this dissertation. Chapter One develops the conceptual argument for how and why editorials matter to the policy process, while Chapter Two documents the use of editorials on the floor of the House and Senate. Chapter Three develops a means of precisely identifying the ideology of two prominent national newspapers, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, over the course of the last five decades. The subsequent chapter uses these measures along with equivalent ones for members of Congress, the president, and the public in order to address the question of who influences whom among these actors. The results of this analysis are surprising: politicians exert influence on both the press and the public, while the press and the public remain largely exogenous to policy decisions. Chapter Five follows the results of the aggregate level analysis with a case study of the minimum wage, demonstrating that the previous chapter's conclusions hold true at a different level of analysis. Chapter Six summarizes the results of the dissertation and offers several possible avenues for future research.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

What is next for the neurobiology of temperament, personality and psychopathology?

This paper represents the outcome of a multidisciplinary discussion on what works, what does not, and what can be improved, in ongoing work on biobehavioral taxonomies and their biomarkers. The authors of this paper, representing a wide spectrum of biobehavioral disciplines (clinical, developmental, differential psychology, neurophysiology, endocrinology, psychiatry, neurochemistry, and neurosciences), have contributed more extensive opinions to the Theme Issue 'Neurobiology of temperament, personality and psychopathology: what's next?'. The authors identified 10 directions in international and multidisciplinary cooperation, and multiple insights for 'what is next' for each of these directions