Showing 111 - 120 of 733 Items
Does political advertising persuade?
Date: 2007-12-01
Creator: Michael M. Franz, Travis N. Ridout
Access: Open access
- Well over $1 billion was spent on televised political advertising in the U.S. in 2004. Given the ubiquity of the 30 second spot, one might presume that ads must affect viewers' vote choices. Somewhat surprisingly, though, scholars have yet to make much progress in confirming this claim. In this paper, we leverage a comprehensive dataset that tracks political ads in the nation's top media markets and a survey of presidential and U.S. Senate voters in 2004. We ask whether exposure to presidential and Senate advertising influences voters' evaluations of candidates and the choices that they make at the ballot box. In the end, we find considerable evidence that advertising persuades-and that its impact varies depending on the characteristics of the viewer. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
Evaluating measures of campaign advertising exposure on political learning
Date: 2004-09-01
Creator: Travis N. Ridout, Dhavan V. Shah, Kenneth M. Goldstein, Michael M. Franz
Access: Open access
- Scholars employ various methods to measure exposure to televised political advertising but often arrive at conflicting conclusions about its impact on the thoughts and actions of citizens. We attempt to clarify one of these debates while validating a parsimonious measure of political advertising exposure. To do so, we assess the predictive power of six different measurement approaches - from the simple to the complex - on learning about political candidates. Two datasets are used in this inquiry: (1) geo-coded political advertising time-buy data, and (2) a national panel study concerning patterns of media consumption and levels of political knowledge. We conclude that many traditional methods of assessing exposure are flawed. Fortunately, there is a relatively simple measure that predicts knowledge about information featured in ads. This measure involves combining a tally of the volume of advertisements aired in a market with a small number of survey questions about the television viewing habits of geo-coded respondents.
Evaluating the Return in Ecosystem Services from Investment in Public Land Acquisitions
Date: 2013-06-11
Creator: Kent Kovacs, Stephen Polasky, Erik Nelson, Bonnie L. Keeler, Derric, Pennington, Andrew J. Plantinga, Steven J. Taff
Access: Open access
- We evaluate the return on investment (ROI) from public land conservation in the state of Minnesota, USA. We use a spatially-explicit modeling tool, the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST), to estimate how changes in land use and land cover (LULC), including public land acquisitions for conservation, influence the joint provision and value of multiple ecosystem services. We calculate the ROI of a public conservation acquisition as the ratio of the present value of ecosystem services generated by the conservation to the cost of the conservation. For the land scenarios analyzed, carbon sequestration services generated the greatest benefits followed by water quality improvements and recreation opportunities. We found ROI values ranged from 0.21 to 5.28 depending on assumptions about future land use change, service values, and discount rate. Our study suggests conservation is a good investment as long as investments are targeted to areas with low land costs and high service values. © 2013 Kovacs et al.
Campaign advertising and democratic citizenship
Date: 2004-01-01
Creator: Paul Freedman, Michael Franz, Kenneth Goldstein
Access: Open access
- Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre-existing levels of political information.
Pleiotropic functions of embryonic sonic hedgehog expression link jaw and taste bud amplification with eye loss during cavefish evolution
Date: 2009-06-01
Creator: Yoshiyuki Yamamoto, Mardi S. Byerly, William R. Jackman, William R. Jeffery
Access: Open access
- This study addresses the role of sonic hedgehog (shh) in increasing oral-pharyngeal constructive traits (jaws and taste buds) at the expense of eyes in the blind cavefish Astyanax mexicanus. In cavefish embryos, eye primordia degenerate under the influence of hyperactive Shh signaling. In concert, cavefish show amplified jaw size and taste bud numbers as part of a change in feeding behavior. To determine whether pleiotropic effects of hyperactive Shh signaling link these regressive and constructive traits, shh expression was compared during late development of the surface-dwelling (surface fish) and cave-dwelling (cavefish) forms of Astyanax. After an initial expansion along the midline of early embryos, shh was elevated in the oral-pharyngeal region in cavefish and later was confined to taste buds. The results of shh inhibition and overexpression experiments indicate that Shh signaling has an important role in oral and taste bud development. Conditional overexpression of an injected shh transgene at specific times in development showed that taste bud amplification and eye degeneration are sensitive to shh overexpression during the same early developmental period, although taste buds are not formed until much later. Genetic crosses between cavefish and surface fish revealed an inverse relationship between eye size and jaw size/taste bud number, supporting a link between oral-pharyngeal constructive traits and eye degeneration. The results suggest that hyperactive Shh signaling increases oral and taste bud amplification in cavefish at the expense of eyes. Therefore, selection for constructive oral-pharyngeal traits may be responsible for eye loss during cavefish evolution via pleiotropic function of the Shh signaling pathway. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Demonstration of Dispersive Rarefaction Shocks in Hollow Elliptical Cylinder Chains
Date: 2018-05-11
Creator: H. Kim, E. Kim, C. Chong, P. G. Kevrekidis, J., Yang
Access: Open access
- We report an experimental and numerical demonstration of dispersive rarefaction shocks (DRS) in a 3D-printed soft chain of hollow elliptical cylinders. We find that, in contrast to conventional nonlinear waves, these DRS have their lower amplitude components travel faster, while the higher amplitude ones propagate slower. This results in the backward-tilted shape of the front of the wave (the rarefaction segment) and the breakage of wave tails into a modulated waveform (the dispersive shock segment). Examining the DRS under various impact conditions, we find the counterintuitive feature that the higher striker velocity causes the slower propagation of the DRS. These unique features can be useful for mitigating impact controllably and efficiently without relying on material damping or plasticity effects.
Data Set for North American Colleges and Universities with Italian and Digital Humanities Programs
Date: 2016-09-13
Creator: Crystal Hall
Access: Open access
- This data set represents a first attempt to identify the North American colleges and universities that offer Italian courses at any level and also have support for digital humanities (DH) pedagogy or scholarship at any level. The list of schools with Italian programs was developed using the American Association of Teachers of Italian (AATI) list of undergraduate and graduate programs and College Source as of July 2016. The list was supplemented by checking if institutions listed with CenterNet (for Digital Humanities Centers) also have Italian programs. Overall, 10% of the Italian programs identified were not included in the AATI list, from the level of service courses through Masters degree. A search of each institution’s website was then performed to determine the level of DH resources available. Based on this collected data, 70% of North American colleges and universities that offer Italian also offer support for digital humanities courses or research through a center/lab, courses, major or minor programs, certificates, or graduate programs. A supplemental code sheet is available. Further analysis is provided in the author’s working paper “Digital Humanities & Italian Studies: Intersections and Oppositions” that is part of the State of the Discipline symposium organized by Wellesley College, October 1, 2016. (The data has been updated since the circulation of that paper, so numbers may not match.) The topic will be addressed in more detail based on the related survey and presentation at MLA 2017.
Magni, isabella, lia markey, and maddalena signorini, eds. Italian paleography. other.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Crystal Hall
Access: Open access
Implementing the Optimal Provision of Ecosystem Services
Date: 2013-08-01
Creator: Stephen Polasky, David Lewis, Andrew Plantinga, Erik Nelson
Access: Open access
- Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, while beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners. A regulator interested in providing incentives to landowners for increased provision of ecosystem services often lacks complete information on landowners’ costs. The combination of spatially-dependent benefits and asymmetric cost information means that the optimal provision of ecosystem services cannot be achieved using standard regulatory or payment for ecosystem services (PES) approaches. Here we show that an auction that pays a landowner for the increased value of ecosystem services generated by the landowner’s actions provides incentives for landowners to truthfully reveal cost information, and allows the regulator to implement the optimal provision of ecosystem services, even in the case with spatially-dependent benefits and asymmetric information.
Dismantling the bacterial glycocalyx: Chemical tools to probe, perturb, and image bacterial glycans
Date: 2021-07-15
Creator: Phuong Luong, Danielle H. Dube
Access: Open access
- The bacterial glycocalyx is a quintessential drug target comprised of structurally distinct glycans. Bacterial glycans bear unusual monosaccharide building blocks whose proper construction is critical for bacterial fitness, survival, and colonization in the human host. Despite their appeal as therapeutic targets, bacterial glycans are difficult to study due to the presence of rare bacterial monosaccharides that are linked and modified in atypical manners. Their structural complexity ultimately hampers their analytical characterization. This review highlights recent advances in bacterial chemical glycobiology and focuses on the development of chemical tools to probe, perturb, and image bacterial glycans and their biosynthesis. Current technologies have enabled the study of bacterial glycosylation machinery even in the absence of detailed structural information.