Party over Pocketbook? How Party Cues Influence Opinion When Citizens Have a Stake in Policy

Do political parties influence opinion when citizens have a personal stake in policy? With an experimental design that exploits a naturally occurring, sharp variation in party cues, we study the effects of party cues during a collective bargaining conflict over the salary and work rights for public employees in Denmark. Even in this context—where the self-interest of public employees was strongly mobilized and where their party went against it—we find that party cues move opinion among partisans at least as much as in previous studies. But party cues do not lead citizens to go against their self-interest. Rather, we show that party cues temper the pursuit of self-interest among public employees by moderating the most extreme policy demands. These findings highlight an unappreciated potential of political parties to moderate—not fuel—extreme opinion.

Node-Dependent Kinematics and Multidimensional Finite Elements for the Analysis of Single/Double Swept, Composite Helicopter Blades

This paper deals with finite element analysis of helicopter blades with single and double swept geometries made by metallic and composite materials. First, classical and refined beam theories are combined at the element level via a node-dependent kinematic (NDK) concept, which was recently introduced by the authors. Such an NDK approach enables the accuracy/efficiency ratio of the solution to be tuned according to the level of fidelity required by the design phase. Second, one-dimensional NDK models are combined with the possibility to introduce solid elements in those regions of the blade with a sharp variation of the geometries. The numerical examples consider a swept-tip rectangular beam and a double-swept helicopter blade with a realistic airfoil. Natural frequencies and through-the-layer stress distributions are reported to demonstrate the flexibility and computational efficiency of the proposed methodology.

Effect of preceding rabi crops on yield of succeeding Deshi and Tossa jute

An experiment was conducted at the Jute Research Regional Station, Kishoreganj of Bangladesh Jute Research Institute, during 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 to find out the effects of preceding crops, viz. wheat, potato, lentil, and fallow on yield of succeeding jute crops. The experiment was laid out in a randomized complete block design with four replications. The results revealed that plant height and base diameter of CVL-1 and O-9897 were not affected significantly by the preceding rabi crops. The fibre and stick yields of both the jute varieties were affected significantly. The highest fibre yield of CVL-1 (3.90 t ha-1 and 3.77 t ha-1) and O-9897 (3.51 t ha-1 and 2.93 t ha-1) was recorded when those were grown after potato and the yield was the lowest when grown after wheat and fallow land in both the years. There was no sharp variation in harvest index, which showed inconsistent between the years.Bangladesh Agron. J. 2014, 17(2): 15-19

Tailoring of the carbon nanowall microstructure by sharp variation of plasma radical composition

In this paper we propose a new and simple method to tune the carbon nanowall microstructure by sharp variation of CH4/H2 plasma conditions.

Sediment Transport in the Quanzhou Bay

Observations on 6 ship moorings during the spring and neap tides show that the suspended sediment concentration (SSC) changed according to the variation of the local tidal forcings under the normal weather conditions. During the neap tide, the measured concentration of suspended sediment is comparable to that of Jinjiang River, the only external sediment source in the course of observations; while during the spring tide, the observed SSC is one order higher than that of Jinjiang, meaning that relative to the riverine impact, the tidal current is more probably responsible for the sharp variation of SSC between the spring and neap cycle.

Viscous profiles of vortex patches

We deal with the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations with vortex patches as initial data. Such data describe an initial configuration for which the vorticity is discontinuous across a hypersurface. We give an asymptotic expansion of the solutions in the vanishing viscosity limit which exhibits an internal layer where the fluid vorticity has a sharp variation. This layer moves with the flow of the Euler equations.