Posts tagged North Carolina
CU study says Romney will be Pres
Oct 4th
Updated election forecasting model
still points to Romney win,
University of Colorado study says
still points to Romney win,
University of Colorado study says
An update to an election forecasting model announced by two University of Colorado professors in August continues to project that Mitt Romney will win the 2012 presidential election.
According to their updated analysis, Romney is projected to receive 330 of the total 538 Electoral College votes. President Barack Obama is expected to receive 208 votes — down five votes from their initial prediction — and short of the 270 needed to win.
The new forecast by political science professors Kenneth Bickers of CU-Boulder and Michael Berry of CU Denver is based on more recent economic data than their original Aug. 22 prediction. The model itself did not change.
“We continue to show that the economic conditions favor Romney even though many polls show the president in the lead,” Bickers said. “Other published models point to the same result, but they looked at the national popular vote, while we stress state-level economic data.”
While many election forecast models are based on the popular vote, the model developed by Bickers and Berry is based on the Electoral College and is the only one of its type to include more than one state-level measure of economic conditions. They included economic data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Their original prediction model was one of 13 published in August in PS: Political Science & Politics, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Political Science Association. The journal has published collections of presidential election models every four years since 1996, but this year the models showed the widest split in outcomes, Berry said. Five predicted an Obama win, five forecast a Romney win, and three rated the 2012 race as a toss-up.
The Bickers and Berry model includes both state and national unemployment figures as well as changes in real per capita income, among other factors. The new analysis includes unemployment rates from August rather than May, and changes in per capita income from the end of June rather than March. It is the last update they will release before the election.
Of the 13 battleground states identified in the model, the only one to change in the update was New Mexico — now seen as a narrow victory for Romney. The model foresees Romney carrying New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Obama is predicted to win Michigan and Nevada.
In Colorado, which Obama won in 2008, the model predicts that Romney will receive 53.3 percent of the vote to Obama’s 46.7 percent, with only the two major parties considered.
While national polls continue to show the president in the lead, “the president seems to be reaching a ceiling at or below 50 percent in many of these states,” Bickers said. “Polls typically tighten up in October as people start paying attention and there are fewer undecided voters.”
The state-by-state economic data used in their model have been available since 1980. When these data were applied retroactively to each election year, the model correctly classifies all presidential election winners, including the two years when independent candidates ran strongly: 1980 and 1992. It also correctly estimates the outcome in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the election through the Electoral College.
In addition to state and national unemployment rates, the authors analyzed changes in personal income from the time of the prior presidential election. Research shows that these two factors affect the major parties differently: Voters hold Democrats more responsible for unemployment rates, while Republicans are held more responsible for fluctuations in personal income.
Accordingly — and depending largely on which party is in the White House at the time — each factor can either help or hurt the major parties disproportionately.
In an examination of other factors, the authors found that none of the following had a statistically significant effect on whether a state ultimately went for a particular candidate: The location of a party’s national convention, the home state of the vice president or the partisanship of state governors.
The authors also provided caveats. Their model had an average error rate of five states and 28 Electoral College votes. Factors they said may affect their prediction include the timeframe of the economic data used in the study and that states very close to a 50-50 split may fall in an unexpected direction due to factors not included in the model.
“As scholars and pundits well know, each election has unique elements that could lead one or more states to behave in ways in a particular election that the model is unable to correctly predict,” they wrote.
All 13 election models can be viewed on the PS: Political Science & Politics website at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PSC.
CU Boulder study: fossils show evolution of bug hearing
Jan 3rd
50-MILLION-YEAR-OLD CRICKET AND KATYDID FOSSILS
FROM COLORADO HINT AT ORIGIN OF INSECT HEARING
FROM COLORADO HINT AT ORIGIN OF INSECT HEARING
How did insects get their hearing? A new study of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils sporting some of the best preserved fossil insect ears described to date are helping to trace the evolution of the insect ear, says a new study involving the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
According to University of Colorado Museum of Natural History paleontologist Dena Smith and University of Illinois Professor Roy Plotnick, who collaborated on the new study at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, or NESCent, in Durham, N.C., insects hear with help from some very unusual ears.
Grasshoppers have ears on their abdomens. Lacewings have ears on their wings. The ears of the tachinid fly are tucked under the chin. “Insects have ears on pretty much every part of their body except on their head proper,” Plotnick said.
Insects have evolved ears at least 17 times in different lineages, said Smith, also an assistant professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department. Smith and Plotnick are trying to figure out when different insects got their ears, and whether predators may have played a role.
Modern insects use their ears to tune in to each other’s chirps, trills and peeps. Think of the chorus of crickets, or the love songs of cicadas. But many species can also pick up sounds beyond the range of human hearing, such as the high-pitched sonar of night-hunting bats, according to Smith and Plotnick.
Crickets, moths and other flying insects have ultrasound-sensitive hearing and can hear bats coming, diving or swerving in midflight to avoid being eaten. Insects that evolved such supersensitive hearing would have had a crucial survival advantage, the researchers said.
“The big evolutionary trigger for the appearance of hearing in many insects is thought to be the appearance of bats,” Plotnick said. “Prior to the evolution of bats we would expect to find ears in relatively few insects, but after that we should see ears in more insect groups,” he explained.
Did insect ears get an upgrade when bats came to be? Before this study the fossil evidence for insect hearing was too poorly preserved or scantily described to know for sure, according to the researchers.
To find out, Plotnick and Smith turned to remarkably well-preserved fossils from a series of lake deposits in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado known as the Green River Formation, where some of the earliest bats are found.
Roughly 50 million years ago, fine-grained sediment covered and buried the animals that lived there and managed to preserve them in exquisite detail. “You can see every tiny feature down to the veins in their wings and the hairs on their legs,” said Smith, who has been studying Green River fossils for more than 15 years.
For this study, the researchers examined fossils from a Green River site in Colorado, focusing on crickets and katydids, which have ears on their front legs, just below their knees.
The team scoured more than 500 museum drawers of Green River fossils for crickets and katydids with intact front legs, looking for evidence of ears. “You can just make them out with the naked eye,” Plotnick said. “They look like the eye of a needle.”
In crickets and katydids living today, the ear is a tiny oval cavity with a thin membrane stretched over it that vibrates in response to sound, much like our own eardrum.
The fossil ears measured half a millimeter in length, and were virtually identical in size, shape and position to their modern counterparts. The findings suggest that this group of insects evolved their supersensitive ultrasonic hearing long before bat predators came to be, the researchers say. “Their bat-detecting abilities may have simply become apparent later,” Smith said. “The next step is to look for ears in other insect groups.”
The study appears in this month’s issue of the Journal of Paleontology. NESCent is a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution and is jointly operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation.
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Boulder war Hero New CU Army ROTC Commander Served three tours in Iraq
Sep 8th
War hereo to lead CU ROTC
In 2003, shortly after arriving in Iraq, an anti-tank mine blew off Army Maj. David Rozelle’s right foot and part of his leg below the knee. Today, after three combat tours in Iraq — two of which came after his injury — Rozelle is the new commanding officer of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Army ROTC program.
“I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now,” Rozelle said. “I love training soldiers and being with soldiers, especially these young leaders here at CU who are going to be great officers.”
Rozelle’s introduction to the Army began as an ROTC cadet at Davidson College in North Carolina, where he graduated in 1995. After his commissioning, Rozelle served in a number of armor and cavalry assignments before 2001 when he received his orders to report to Fort Carson in Colorado Springs for his first day of duty with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.
“9/11 is a special day for me, it’s the day I reported for duty at Fort Carson,” Rozelle said. “A decade later, I’ve gone to war, had my leg blown off, recovered, went back to war a second and third time, and now have come to the University of Colorado to lead and train some of the best officers in the Army. The last 10 years have been a heck of a ride.”
Rozelle started at CU-Boulder in May of this year.
After his 2003 injury, Rozelle was determined not to let the wound define him, and instead vowed to return to service in Iraq. Once his wound healed, he dove into rehabilitation and was fitted with an artificial foot and leg that he wears today. Not only can he walk and run but he also returned to his favorite sport, skiing, just months after his injury. He also returned to Iraq for two additional tours.
“I didn’t let that landmine injury define me, I made it so my recovery from the landmine injury and my return to war was what defined me,” he said.
When it comes to his injury, Rozelle said not only are his students interested, but they’re infatuated with it.
“One of the things I learned eight years ago when I went back to my unit and served again in Iraq was that without meaning to, I was inspiring everybody around me,” he said. “When the cadets are out running and they see me running with them, it’s definitely clear that I’m not going to let them lag behind. It is a motivation for the kids.
“At the same time, it’s also a reminder of the reality of war. I can tell them stories of war because I’ve been there. I’m the old salty pirate back from the sea, missing a leg, so they pay attention.”
Not only did 9/11 and the wars that followed change the way we fight wars, it also changed the way the Army thinks and the way it trains, according to Rozelle.
“Before 9/11 officers in training went into the Army with basic core skills and then the Army provided the on-the-job training,” he said. “After 9/11, your on-the-job training is in Iraq or Afghanistan, so we have to compress a lot more training here in the ROTC phase. The reality is we need leaders now, there’s no time to make them after they graduate.”
One area Rozelle hammers home with his students is the need to develop critical thinking and decision-making skills — skills they will use every day as an officer.
“I also require my soldiers to journal, because they have to be able to accurately record activities in the field, things they saw that were good or bad, so they can remember them and learn from them,” he said.
Rozelle wrote about his experiences in a 2005 book titled “Back in Action: An American Soldier’s Story of Courage, Faith and Fortitude.”
Rozelle will be recognized as a veteran of the Iraq War during the CU vs. Cal-Berkeley football game on Saturday, Sept. 10.
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