The wide swings in debate performances by this year’s presidential candidates reflect the fact that in modern campaigns, a candidate’s image is the message, according to linguistic anthropologists who have studied presidential campaigns.
Candidates send important messages to voters through even their smallest gestures, the researchers say. For example, in this year’s first debate, President Barack Obama often looked down at the podium and was criticized for appearing disengaged. In subsequent debates Obama directly addressed his Republican opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and increased the use of a hammering hand gesture sometimes called the “power grip.” (more…)
Police officers and students exhibit an apparent “hierarchy of bias” in making a split-second decision whether to shoot suspects who appear to be wielding a gun or, alternatively, a benign object like a cell phone, research conducted by the University of Colorado Boulder and San Diego State University has found.
Both the police and student subjects were most likely to shoot at blacks, then Hispanics, then whites and finally, in a case of what might be called a positive bias, Asians, researchers found. (more…)
ANN ARBOR— It’s a common refrain during the political season—Republicans and Democrats talk past one another. They claim they live in different universes or come from different species, with little hope for extending empathy across the political aisle.
But University of Michigan researcher Yesim Orhun and her colleague Oleg Urminsky of the University of Chicago say that there exists a greater respect for one another’s views than is generally assumed. (more…)
A new species of plant-eating dinosaur with tiny, 1-inch-long jaws has come to light in South African rocks dating to the early dinosaur era, some 200 million years ago.
This “punk-sized” herbivore is one of a menagerie of bizarre, tiny, fanged plant-eaters called heterodontosaurs, or “different toothed reptiles,” which were among the first dinosaurs to spread across the planet. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Whether the Higgs boson exists could be settled by the end of summer, say University of Michigan physicists involved in the search for the missing piece of particle physics’ Standard Model.
“We’re zooming in,” said Jianming Qian, physics professor in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts. “We are increasing the data set and improving our search algorithms. With certain luck, we may be able to discover it this summer, but it depends on nature.”
Qian is one of the 28 U-M researchers involved in experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. He’ll spend most of his time through August in Geneva, where more than 1,000 scientists from around the world have been looking for Higgs since the collider turned on about four years ago. (more…)
Evolutionary biologist Sir Peter Crane has been dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) since 2009. A former director of Chicago’s Field Museum and chief executive of England’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he recently spoke with Yale News about F&ES’ internationalism, the role of business in environmental management, and what it was like to be knighted at Buckingham Palace, among other topics. The following is an edited version of that conversation. (more…)
A U physicist will help determine if neutrinos can outrace light
Back in 2007, a physics experiment clocked elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos going faster than light.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. If the speed of light in a vacuum—denoted “c” by physicists—isn’t the universal speed limit, it would mean that Einstein put the wrong number in his famous E=mc2 equation.
University of Minnesota physicist Marvin Marshak was part of the experiment, called MINOS. It clocked beams of neutrinos shot from Fermilab, a national physics lab near Chicago, to a detector 457 miles away in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota.(more…)
*Blue Gene/Q tackles major challenges of the day, delivers up to 100 petaflops at peak performance*
ARMONK, NY – 15 Nov 2011: IBM todayannounced its next generation supercomputing project, Blue Gene/Q, will provide an ultra-scale technical computing platform to solve the most challenging problems facing engineers and scientists at faster, more energy efficient, and more reliable rates than ever before. Blue Gene/Q is expected to predict the path of hurricanes, analyze the ocean floor to discover oil, simulate nuclear weapons performance and decode gene sequences.
When it is fully deployed in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the system, named “Sequoia”, is expected to achieve 20 petaflops at peak performance, marking it as one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The capabilities this system represents will help ensure United States leadership in high performance computing (HPC) and the science it makes possible. Moreover, Blue Gene/Q is expected to become the world’s most power-efficient computer, churning out 2 gigaflops per watt. (more…)
