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Higher Turnout, Greater Inequality? A Precinct-Level Analysis Of Income Inequality In U.S. Presidential Voting, 2016 To 2020
No full textThe relationship between income and voter turnout is crucial to understanding U.S. democracy. Previous research has revealed that richer people tend to vote at higher rates than lower income people. But this research relied on survey data and was subject to response and social desirability bias, producing widely varying estimates of the size of the income-based turnout gap. Using data with official, geocoded precinct election results for the entire nation, the authors examine how precinct-level income is associated with changes in voter turnout between the 2016 and 2020 elections. The authors find a dramatic income gradient in precinct voter turnout and that this inequality became larger in 2020 compared with 2016. When comparing top-decile precincts with bottom-decile precincts (\u3e38,000), the authors estimate turnout gaps of 17 percentage points in 2016 and 27 percentage points in 2020. These results are robust in regression analysis controlling for critical features and spatial dependence
Frost Heave Physical Simulation Testing Apparatus
No full textThe uplift forces exerted on lightly loaded pile foundations through the heaving stresses developed in freezing soils can have a significant impact on the design and cost of the foundations for utility scale solar generation facilities. Since the adfreeze stress that exerts the uplift force is highly dependent on the soil type, a one-size fits all approach to this frost heaving behavior is ineffective. To solve this issue, a testing apparatus was designed that can be repeatedly used to more accurately determine the heaving stresses that will develop given a specific soil type. The testing apparatus uses the soil collected from the site and an environmental control chamber to simulate in situ conditions and determine the frost depth and the adfreeze stress. Utilizing this testing apparatus may help firms more accurately determine the loading experienced by the piles and thus help design them more efficiently, reducing the cost of the solar facility development. The designed apparatus was shown to successfully simulate in-situ behavior. Multiple physical simulation tests were run on a Silt with Sand (ML), and a strong relationship between the frost depth and the measured uplift force was determined. Using these results an adfreeze stress of 12.88 psi was determined, and its proximity to the expected 14.5 psiK[1] indicates that this testing approach may accurately predict in situ behavior
Designing an Affordable Motion Capture System for Multi-Robot Research and Education
No full textIn this work, we propose a low-cost motion capture system for real-time tracking of multiple robots’ positions and orientations in indoor environments, specifically tailored for research and educational applications. Precise localization is essential for evaluating robotics algorithms such as decentralized multi-agent control, cooperative path planning, and collision avoidance. [1-3] However, commercial motion capture systems like Vicon and OptiTrack cost between 150,000, making them inaccessible for many smaller institutions, student clubs, and low-resource labs. To address this challenge, we developed an affordable alternative based on three ceiling-mounted 1080p USB cameras and AprilTags. Our system operates at 30 Hz and achieves a spatial accuracy of approximately 10 cm. The system architecture includes camera calibration (intrinsic and extrinsic), pose estimation using solvePnP, coordinate fusion, and TCP-based data streaming. Its effectiveness was validated through real-to-simulation and simulation-to-real experiments involving multiple mobile robots. By balancing accuracy, cost, and scalability, the system provides a practical and accessible platform for real-time multi-robot tracking
Uganda Unhinged : Re-evaluating the Ugandan Asian Expulsion
No full textThis paper seeks to re-evaluate the Ugandan Asian expulsion of 1972 in terms of both chronology and culpability. Existing literature generally implicates Gen. Idi Amin as the primary, if not sole instigator of the expulsion crisis. Using Ugandan and Kenyan newspaper coverage from the pre-expulsion era, in addition to an analysis of Dr. Milton Obote’s economic policy, I argue that Uganda had already traversed far down the path to expulsion by the time Amin seized power. Dr. Obote initiated an economic campaign that targeted Asian merchants, in addition to issuing threats of expulsion as a negotiation tactic with world leaders. Newspapers, meanwhile, scapegoated the Asian community, producing the necessary public sentiment to justify expulsion. These findings indicate that expulsion became a reality earlier than previously accepted and suggest Obote and East African newspapers bore a great responsibility in producing the crisis
Indigenismo, Anti-Communism, and \u3cem\u3ela Revolución\u3c/em\u3e: Historicizing The Relationship Between State-Sponsored Indigenism and Anti-Communism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
No full textWhen Dystopia Becomes Political Criticism: Why Margaret Atwood Wrote \u3cem\u3eThe Handmaid\u27s Tale\u3c/em\u3e
Get PDFWhen Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she didn’t think it’d still be relevant nearly forty years later. Yet, her use of historical imagination helped her create a novel that permeates time and space. This essay explores the production and reception of The Handmaid’s Tale, asking how the novel was both a product of the political and cultural context of its production in the 1980s and a critique of Atwood’s own contemporary moment. Atwood drew on biblical themes, Puritan history, and the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu to construct Gilead\u27s social and political order and comment on American and international politics of the 1980s. In both drawing on the past and commenting on the present, Atwood’s The Handmaid\u27s Tale reflected a key characteristic of the dystopian genre while also subverting and challenging the genre. Despite being published nearly forty years ago, the author and readers alike have continued to point to the novel in their efforts to raise awareness of reproductive issues and assert women\u27s autonomy against a misogynistic state. Additionally, Atwood’s utilization of historical imagination enables us to think differently about history, not as something that both started and ended in the past, but as something current, omnipresent, and complex
Red Midge Larvae Are An Invertebrate Alternative Diet To Beef Liver For Planarian Husbandry
No full textFreshwater planarians are an emerging model for toxicology and neuroscience because of their amenability to rapid behavioral screening and remarkable ability to regenerate a cephalized nervous system. As invertebrates, planarians can help reduce the use of vertebrates in research; however, laboratories typically maintain planarians on diets of homogenized organic beef or chicken liver, raising ethical concerns with feeding a vertebrate diet. Organic liver is difficult to obtain, and preparation methods vary, introducing intra- and interlaboratory variability. Here, we show that Dugesia japonica planarians can be maintained for over a year on commercially available red midge larvae (RML), a natural prey of freshwater planarians. We found only minor effects on reproduction and gene expression. To explore dietary effects on behavior and chemical sensitivity, we compared the results of a chemical screen using dimethyl sulfoxide, diazinon, and fluoxetine on adult and regenerating D. japonica. We found that differences in potency and bioactivity for planarians on liver and RML diets were on par with inter-experiment variability of planarians fed the same diet. We also show that RNA interference is feasible with RML. Because RML requires no preparation and sustains planarian populations long-term, this invertebrate diet can substitute liver and help reduce the use of vertebrates in research
Navigating Power And Positionality In Ethnographic Spaces
No full textThis article examines the influence of power and positionality in music research. I use key ethnographic moments of music making in Jamaican Maroon communities, the insights of a range of scholars, and my intersecting perspectives to investigate the following questions: How is access to cultural knowledge predicated on who we are, and who we are not? What does power sound like, and with whom and in what contexts does it reside? In what ways do histories of colonial domination and legacies of resistance reverberate through music and performance traditions, and how are those histories felt and heard in the present day
On The Boundary Criterion For Relative Cubulation: Multiended Parabolics
No full textIn this note, we extend the boundary criterion for relative cubulation of the first author and Groves to the case when the peripheral subgroups are not necessarily one-ended. Specifically, if the boundary criterion is satisfied for a relatively hyperbolic group, we show that, up to taking a refined peripheral structure, the group admits a relatively geometric action on a CAT(0) cube complex. We anticipate that this refinement will be useful for constructing new relative cubulations in a variety of settings