The Effect of Water Content on the Gamma-ray Attenuation Factor of the Reactor Shielding Concrete

The surrounding conditions of the shielding concrete, (moisture and temperature), affect the water content within it, and therefore, the attenuation coefficient of the concrete. In this study, the impact of changing the amount of water, in four types of local candidate shielding concretes was investigated. The concrete attenuation coefficient of gamma-rays has been identified experimentally and computationally using the MCNP-4C code. The results show a significant decrease in the attenuation coefficient of each the four concrete samples due to the water losses, especially between 20- 100 oC. Acceptable compatibility was noticed between the measured and calculated results of the attenuation coefficient of the studied concrete samples.

Ship Detection for Optical Remote Sensing Images Based on Visual Attention Enhanced Network

Ship detection plays a significant role in military and civil fields. Although some state-of-the-art detection methods, based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have certain advantages, they still cannot solve the challenge well, including the large size of images, complex scene structure, a large amount of false alarm interference, and inshore ships. This paper proposes a ship detection method from optical remote sensing images, based on visual attention enhanced network. To effectively reduce false alarm in non-ship area and improve the detection efficiency from remote sensing images, we developed a light-weight local candidate scene network( L 2 CSN) to extract the local candidate scenes with ships. Then, for the selected local candidate scenes, we propose a ship detection method, based on the visual attention DSOD(VA-DSOD). Here, to enhance the detection performance and positioning accuracy of inshore ships, we both extract semantic features, based on DSOD and embed a visual attention enhanced network in DSOD to extract the visual features. We test the detection method on a large number of typical remote sensing datasets, which consist of Google Earth images and GaoFen-2 images. We regard the state-of-the-art method [sliding window DSOD (SW+DSOD)] as a baseline, which achieves the average precision (AP) of 82.33%. The AP of the proposed method increases by 7.53%. The detection and location performance of our proposed method outperforms the baseline in complex remote sensing scenes.

Popularity equilibrium: Testing a general theory of local campaign effectiveness

Parties and candidates target campaign resources where they are most likely to pay electoral dividends. At the individual level it has been shown that some individuals are more likely to be persuaded by campaign contacts than others. In a parallel tradition of measuring campaign effectiveness at the macro level, previous research has demonstrated that local candidate campaign effort measured is significantly related to electoral performance. However, while there is evidence suggestive of macro level effects, there is little systematic evidence about the district level conditions under which campaign efforts are most productive. Drawing on extensive data across six UK general elections between 1992 and 2015, we advance a theory of local campaign efficacy and test a general model of popularity equilibrium. We demonstrate that there is a curvilinear relationship between the underlying level of party support in an electoral district and the intensity of the district-level campaign – there is a ‘sweet-spot’ for maximizing the returns of campaign effort.

Local Candidate Effects in Canadian Elections

What impact do local candidates have on elections in single member district plurality electoral systems? We provide new evidence using data from a large election study carried out during the 2015 Canadian federal election. We improve on the measurement of local candidate effects by asking over 20,000 survey respondents to rate the candidates in their constituency directly. We present three estimates. We find that when all voters are considered together, local candidate evaluations are decisive for approximately 4 per cent of voters. Second, these evaluations are decisive for the outcome of 10 per cent of constituency contests. Third, when models are estimated for each constituency, we find significant evaluation effects for 14 per cent of candidates.

What do voters do when they like a local candidate from another party?

We address two questions: How many voters particularly like a candidate from another party? And do these voters vote for their preferred party or their preferred candidate? We use the Making Electoral Democracy Work data for the 2015 Canadian federal election in three provinces (British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec). We find that one voter out of ten particularly liked a candidate from a party other than the one he or she preferred. For two out of five of such voters, the preference for the local candidate trumped the party preference.

Party Polarization in Legislatures with Office-Motivated Candidates*

We develop a theory of legislative competition in which voters care about local candidate valence and national party positions that are determined by the parties’ median legislators. As long as election outcomes are sufficiently predictable, the only stable equilibria exhibit policy divergence between the parties. If the degree of uncertainty about election outcomes decreases, and if voters place less weight on local candidates’ valence, polarization between the parties increases. Furthermore, a systematic electoral shock makes the party favored by the shock more moderate, while the disadvantaged party becomes more extreme. Finally, we examine data on state elections and the ideological positions of state legislatures and find patterns that are consistent with key predictions of our model.

Is the ‘Local Candidate’ Advantage a Myth? Analysing the Effects of Localism in the 2015 UK General Election

This paper studies the question of the so-called electoral advantage of local candidates. We use a diverse range of data sources to estimate whether a candidate residing in the same constituency they compete has any advantage at all. We then compare the effect of the factual information against a measure of perception of residence, taken from the British Election Study Internet Panel. We propose different methodological innovations from traditional analyses of this issue. We first concentrate on the top two candidates of the most competitive constituencies, and use a measurement of perception calculates using Multilevel Regression with Post-stratification. We use mediation analysis to estimate the overall effects. Our findings show that local candidates have an advantage only if they are perceived as local, and that incumbents are usually perceived as more local than challengers.