Tag: research

Two candidates are running for the District 2 seat on Madison's City Council. On TLNA, where I lead and guide neighborhood input when evaluating development proposals, my appreciation of the concerns of neighbors, as well as the needs of both the city and developers, has grown. Due to years of advocacy for my neighborhood, District 2, and the City of Madison, I understand city processes, the important role of city staff and how city ordinances are crafted and enacted. My years of working with District 2 neighbors on parking, traffic issues, and pedestrian/bike safety, gives me the knowledge to represent and convey the District's diversity of opinions on Common Council. I'm a community organizer who has been organizing the community for progressive candidates. The 2nd District has more than 1,000 new housing units since our last competitive alder election. Our next alder needs to engage these new residents and bring everyone into the political process. Madison has an affordable housing crisis. I want to see us rewrite our neighborhood plans more often and ask neighborhoods themselves to find places to accommodate new growth. Since then, the people of my community have given me a sense of place that I have never had anywhere else.

“A larger share of BME voters supported Brexit than have ever voted for the Conservative party, although there are now differences in support among different ethnic minority groups,” said Omar Khan, the director of Runnymede. “If Theresa May had held on to the diverse seats won by David Cameron in 2010 she would have an outright majority.” The research by Runnymede estimated that around 1 in 10 of the registered voters at the 2017 election were from a minority background, the equivalent of 4.8 million people and an increase of 10% since 2010. One in five Labour voters were from ethnic minorities compared with one in 20 voters for Conservative candidates, and Muslim support for Labour rose from 74% to 87% between 2015 and 2017, according to Runnymede’s analysis of Understanding Society, an official household longitudinal study that allows researchers to look at how voting patterns have changed. The proportion of the minority ethnic vote that went to Labour was in line with opinion polling conducted after the election. “In 2017 we went backwards,” said Binita Mehta-Parmar, a leading Conservative party campaigner, speaking at the launch of the Runnymede research in Westminster. Britain’s BME population is becoming increasingly critical. Ethnic minority communities are dispersing to towns, suburbs and coasts. The Conservatives will need to take parliamentary seats we have ignored for decades.” Nicole Martin of the University of Manchester, who authored the Runnymede report, said approximately a third of BME voters backed Brexit, with British Indians and African-Caribbean people most likely to vote to leave the European Union. Seema Malhotra, the Labour MP for Feltham and Heston in west London, which is 45% white and 41% Asian, said there was a feeling that Brexit would allow greater Commonwealth immigration. It is also a story of aspiration and there is an issue about how we respond to that.

Unless the country’s economic management evolved, there was a risk of stagnation, Overholt said, describing the thesis in his new book China’s Crisis of Success. Second, the whole economy finds itself over-leveraged. And as powerful interest groups pushed on policy, so politics was also transformed. To overcome such problems, a country needed both an economic plan and a political plan, Overholt said. The plan would subject state-owned enterprises to market-based reforms, but this “steps on the toes of every power group in China”, he said. The optimistic result: Economic reform is successful and the country then turns to fixing the politics. But interest groups had become stronger, richer and increased the political problem, he said. Economic reform does not happen. Interest groups took control of the government protected themselves against both domestic and foreign competition, leading to a long period of economic stagnation. If they’re not successful with economic reform, they’ll have a bigger political problem”.

Time WASHINGTON – Scores of scientists working for the federal government say that under the Trump administration, political concerns outweigh scientific rigor and budget cuts hamper their mission, a new survey shows. Sponsored by the liberal-leaning Union of Concerned Scientists and conducted by Iowa State University, the survey concludes that scientists fear speaking up – particularly about climate change, which President Donald Trump has dismissed as a "hoax" created by China to gain a competitive edge. That sentiment was highest at the EPA (32 percent) and the National Park Service (25 percent). About one in five reported they had avoided working on climate change or using the phrase “climate change” without explicit orders to do so. Overall concern was highest at the EPA, where Trump-appointed leadership has been spearheading the president's deregulation agenda. But Energy Secretary Rick Perry's declaration in 2016 that climate change is a "contrived phony mess" also sent a deflating message to federal scientists, said Santer, a National Academy of Sciences member who was the lead researcher on last year's paper refuting Pruitt. "And that makes it more difficult to have a public discussion on how best to address the very serious problem of human-caused climate change." "I believe in this agency. One survey respondent from the USGS said an Interior Department directive requiring that a political appointee review research grants of $50,000 or more to make sure they align with Secretary Ryan Zinke's priorities "impedes new and ongoing research." "The current administration has overall enforced certain science policies which harm the public in general," according to the anonymous agency employee cited in the survey.

We track a lot of data here at OpenSecrets. Sometimes, that data reveals something unusual – an anomaly, if you will. That is why we have a handy tool called the Anomaly Tracker to highlight these unusual findings. An anomaly, as we define it, is an occurrence that is out of the ordinary. It is not necessarily an indication that there is something amiss or nefarious. Lawmakers receiving more than 50 percent of their itemized contributions from out of state. PACs giving at least $7,500 to a candidate’s Leadership PAC but nothing to the candidate’s committee. But we can only discover so much on our own. Contest runs as long as there is money involved in American elections. Happy hunting.

A key finding is that people traveling from places with very high levels of political advertisements experienced a more extreme holiday-shortening effect. Many Americans avoid talking politics at family gatherings. Among the people in these politically mismatched families, 6 in 10 said their families keep politics out of their conversations. The cellphone data merely reveal that, broadly speaking, people had less opportunity to talk about politics because of the shorter gatherings on average, and the tendency for some people to stay home rather than travel as they did in 2015. For example, the partisan beliefs of people who traveled or stayed home were assumed to track the partisan leanings of their home voting precincts. To protect privacy, the researchers tracked people only at the precinct or Zip code level, Chen said: “We do not try and identify where someone lives at the level of a street address.” The researchers also assumed that people exposed to political ads over the course of many months continue to feel the polarizing effects weeks after the election, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview, Chen acknowledged that it is difficult to isolate the cause of the observed change in behavior captured by the cellphone data. A striking feature of this intensifying tribalism is that Americans have grown more negative in their views of people affiliated with the other major political party. Since 1994, there has been a near-tripling in the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who say they have a “very unfavorable” view of the other party, according to a report published last year by the Pew Research Center. And that’s new.” Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said of the study by Chen and Rohla, “It’s very intriguing, and sounds like a very innovative study, which is certainly telling us something of sobering importance about the way political polarization is affecting American life.” He added, “There's nothing happening in American politics now to suggest it will be better at Thanksgiving in 2020.”

Politics always features, however. Some are brilliant at building a national brand through Eurovision. In the last century, Europe loved Brand UK. He resigned after the 2008 contest. The UK ended up mid-table, with over 100 points. “Not winning” won’t show this. If the professionals like Storm but the public do not, we can read that as disapproval. Songs in English have dominated the contest this century, winning every year except 2007 – and last year, when the winner was in Portuguese. Eurovision, like political Europe, is a liberal project. The professionals’ votes are announced first, so we shall have to wait till the end of the evening to see what Eurovision’s public voters have to say about SuRie – and by extension about Britain.

By Andrew Nicla | 22 hours ago Welcome to the eighth installment of The State Press Politics Roundup, where we bring you the week's coverage of on-campus and local politics. In recent USG and campus news ABOR approves ASU tuition increases The Arizona Board of Regents approved tuition proposals for the next academic year from the state's public universities Thursday. USG reflects on abysmal election turnout Student government elections ended last week, drawing the lowest overall voter turnout since 2008, despite efforts by current and newly elected USG officials to increase "student engagement." Candidates cited a lack of student interest, uncontested tickets and nuances in campus culture as possible factors for the low turnout. This week's reporting ASU academics "heartened" by funding boost to solar energy University researchers rejoiced over Congress' passing of H.R. 1625, which increases funding by 14 percent to the Energy Efficiency and the Renewable Energy Office. The court is currently hearing a lawsuit brought forth by Attorney General Mark Brnovich in which he claims the group of students are not eligible to receive it. School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership fights national criticism ASU's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership has faced criticism for its Western-centric philosophy and its financial supporters from some since its founding last spring. Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter. Related Stories ASASU elections end with the lowest voter turnout since 2008 By Tina Giuliano | 04/05/18 9:07pm Arizona Board of Regents approves 2018-2019 tuition proposals By Andrew Howard and MacKinley Lutes-Adlhoch | 04/05/18 1:39pm A conversation about the March for Our Lives demonstrations in Phoenix By Cassandra Laubach | 23 hours ago

Lawfare's Ben Wittes joins Chuck to talk about Trump's next steps if he were to meet with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc About: MSNBC is the premier destination for in-depth analysis of daily headlines, insightful political…

Researchers Identify Gene for Awfulness. LEEDS (The Borowitz Report)—In a finding that has wide-ranging implications for society, British researchers at the University of Leeds announced on Saturday that they have identified the gene for awfulness. The study, which focussed on one adult male and three of his adult children, makes a persuasive argument that there is a “powerful dominant gene” that makes people heinous. “When we began our research, we wanted to find an adult male with pronounced characteristics of horribleness,” Alistair Dorrinson, the scientist who led the study, said. “In studying three of his adult offspring, we found that they were all carriers of the gene that makes one smug, tone-deaf, and oblivious to the fate of others.” Additionally, certain subtraits of awfulness, such as an inability to tell the truth, appear to be genetically mediated, Dorrinson said. Hopes that the gene for horribleness might eventually become diluted as its carriers mate with the general population were dashed when the scientists studied the mating history of the adult daughter in the sample group. “Unfortunately, those who carry the gene for awfulness are more likely to reproduce with other carriers of the same gene,” the scientist said. Andy Borowitz is the New York Times best-selling author of “The 50 Funniest American Writers,” and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news, for newyorker.com. Read more »