Targeted Advertising and Voter Turnout: An Experimental Study of the 2000 Presidential Election

Scholars disagree whether negative advertising demobilizes or stimulates the electorate. We use an experiment with over 10,200 eligible voters to evaluate the two leading hypotheses of negative political advertising. We extend the analysis to examine whether advertising differentially impacts the turnout of voter subpopulations depending on the advertisement痴 message. In the short term, we find no evidence that exposure to negative advertisements decreases turnout and little that suggests it increases turnout. Any effect appears to depend upon the message of the advertisement and the characteristics of the viewer. In the long term, we find little evidence that the information contained in the treatment groups・advertisements is sufficient to systematically alter turnout.

More complex congressional oversight over government agencies means reduced influence relative to that of the White House

The oversight and review of government agencies is an important part of Congress’ function. But can this oversight become so complex that it actually reduces the influence of Congress over policymaking in the federal bureaucracy? Using a survey of more than 2,000 government executives, Joshua Clinton finds that the more Congressional committees that are involved in agency oversight, the more empowered the president is compared to Congress. He writes that this may stem from a tendency for some committees to ‘free-ride’ off of the efforts of others, and divisions across committees over what they wish the agency to do

Changing Owners, Changing Content: Does Who Owns the News Matter for the News?

The press is essential for creating an informed citizenry, but its existence depends on attracting and maintaining an audience. It is unclear whether supply-side effects – including those dictated by the owners of the media – influence how the media cover politics, yet this question is essential given their abilities to set the agenda and frame issues that are covered. We examine how ownership influences media behavior by investigating the impact of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in August 2007. We collect data on every front-page story and editorial for 27 months, and we compare the difference in political coverage between the New York Times (NYT) and WSJ using a difference-in-differences design. We show that the amount of political content in the opinion pages of the two papers were unchanged by the sale, but the WSJ’s front-page coverage of politics increased markedly relative to the NYT. Similar patterns emerge when comparing the WSJ’s content to the USA Today and the Washington Post. Our finding highlights potential limits to journalists’ ability to fulfill their supposed watchdog role in democracies without interference from owners in the boardroom

Choice Overload and Partial Season Ticket Sales

This study utilizes a consumer choice experiment to assess if choice overload exists with partial season ticket packages of a Major League Soccer (MLS) team. Individuals were randomly assigned to one of three conditions with an increasing number of partial season ticket options. Study results indicate as the number of options available increases, buyers are more likely to feel the decision-making process was difficult and regret the decision they made. However, participants were generally satisfied to be afforded so many options, and increasing the number of ticket plan options did not appear to affect purchase intent or potential purchase satisfaction

The Statistical Analysis of Roll Call

We develop a Bayesian estimation procedure for spatial models of roll call voting. We show how a Bayesian approach to roll call analysis overcomes shortcomings and idiosyncracies of NOMINATE (some of which are not widely recognized). Our Bayesian approach (a) applies to any legislative setting, irrespective of size, legislative extremism, or the number of roll calls available for analysis; (b) provides a mechanism for directly incorporating auxiliary information as to the dimensionality of the underlying policy space, the identity of extremist legislators, key votes and the evolution of the legislative agenda; (c) lets us integrate measurement of legislative preferences with the analysis of those preferences. Notes to NEMP, May 2002 This paper sets out our ‘‘basic setup’ ’ (a Bayesian statistical operationalization of the Euclidean spatial voting model with roll call data), and constrasts it with the NOMINATE algorithms of Poole and Rosenthal. In the talk I will be considering extensions to our model, so as to accommodate and/or test conjectures in the literature on legislative politics (most prominently, the ‘‘party discipline’ ’ hypothesis, and conjectures about legislative responsiveness to constituency interests)

X Y Z CHAMBER MUSIC COMPOSITION FOR VIOLIN, VIOLONCELLO, DOUBLE BASS, MARIMBA, AND PERCUSSION

This work features multiple meters sounding simultaneously and a harmonic scheme limited to four four-part interval collections. Each of the four interval collections sounds alone for severaL phrases before moving to another collection and before later sounding simultaneously with another collection. The pitch content of each interval collections is a major triad joined by one non-triadic pitch. The index of interval content for each of the four harmonic collections governs consistency throughout the work. A detailed formal scheme of the entire work outlining harmony, meter, and density of melodic activity was created before specific pitches and rhythms were composed. This scheme balanced the sequence of harmony, meter, and melodic density with varying levels of change that reflect duration considerations inspired by Fibonnacci's Golden Ratio

InCloud: Incremental Learning for Point Cloud Place Recognition

Place recognition is a fundamental component of robotics, and has seen tremendous improvements through the use of deep learning models in recent years. Networks can experience significant drops in performance when deployed in unseen or highly dynamic environments, and require additional training on the collected data. However naively fine-tuning on new training distributions can cause severe degradation of performance on previously visited domains, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper we address the problem of incremental learning for point cloud place recognition and introduce InCloud, a structure-aware distillation-based approach which preserves the higher-order structure of the network's embedding space. We introduce several challenging new benchmarks on four popular and large-scale LiDAR datasets (Oxford, MulRan, In-house and KITTI) showing broad improvements in point cloud place recognition performance over a variety of network architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to effectively apply incremental learning for point cloud place recognition.Comment: 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022

GeoAdapt: Self-Supervised Test-Time Adaptation in LiDAR Place Recognition Using Geometric Priors

LiDAR place recognition approaches based on deep learning suffer from significant performance degradation when there is a shift between the distribution of training and test datasets, often requiring re-training the networks to achieve peak performance. However, obtaining accurate ground truth data for new training data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in complex or GPS-deprived environments. To address this issue we propose GeoAdapt, which introduces a novel auxiliary classification head to generate pseudo-labels for re-training on unseen environments in a self-supervised manner. GeoAdapt uses geometric consistency as a prior to improve the robustness of our generated pseudo-labels against domain shift, improving the performance and reliability of our Test-Time Adaptation approach. Comprehensive experiments show that GeoAdapt significantly boosts place recognition performance across moderate to severe domain shifts, and is competitive with fully supervised test-time adaptation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/GeoAdapt.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) November 202

The behaviour of political parties and MPs in the parliaments of the Weimar Republic

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Analysing the roll-call votes of the MPs of the Weimar Republic we find: (1) that party competition in the Weimar parliaments can be structured along two dimensions: an economic left–right and a pro-/anti-democratic. Remarkably, this is stable throughout the entire lifespan of the Republic and not just in the later years and despite the varying content of votes across the lifespan of the Republic, and (2) that nearly all parties were troubled by intra-party divisions, though, in particular, the national socialists and communists became homogeneous in the final years of the Republic.Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstan