why demography matters continued on page F2 Demography has been in the news a lot lately. The November 2012 presidential election highlighted how changing U.S. demographic patterns—especially growing racial and ethnic diversity—helped re-elect President Barack Obama. Hispanics emerged as a key voting bloc, joining other demographic segments of the U.S. electorate (e.g., women, young people, sin...

When Congress enacted the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997, it was heralded as a model of bipartisan, incremental health policy. However, despite the program's achievements in the ensuing decade, SCHIP's reauthorization triggered political conflict, and efforts to expand the program stalemated in 2007. The 2008 elections broke that stalemate, and in 2009 the new Congres...

This article describes a US political corpus comprising 245 speeches given by senators John McCain and Barack Obama during the years 2007–2008. We present the main characteristics of this collection and compare the common English words most frequently used by these political leaders with ordinary usage (Brown corpus). We then discuss and compare certain metrics capable of extracting terms best ...

In this paper a study is described on the prosodic voice wave characteristics of different rhetorical styles. Analysed were pitch, intensity and duration features of segments annotated ethos, pathos and/or logos in the 2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address of Barack Obama (USA). It was discovered that ethos shows a lower mean pitch and a slower speech rate, possibly to confer more...

On Monday, President Barack Obama challenged the United States automobile companies to create a credible model to survive and succeed in the competitive global market. That market now has a new entry, the Tata Nano, launched in Mumbai, India, a week ago. It is easy to dismiss the Nano as a small, basic, poor man’s car that will cause a mere ripple on the world market. The Nano defies this initi...

1 Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, 310 Trent Drive, Durham, NC 27710, USA; E-Mails: [email protected] (R.A.K.); [email protected] (A.L.); [email protected] (C.J.P.) 2 Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University, 9 Circuit Drive, Durham, NC 27708, USA 3 National Institute for Medical Research, 2448 Barack Obama Drive, P.O. Box 9653, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; E-Ma...

We decompose distributional preferences into fair-mindedness (weight on oneself vs. others) and equality-efficiency tradeoffs, and measure both at the individual level in a large and diverse sample of Americans. We find considerable heterogeneity in both the extent of fairmindedness and willingness to trade off equality and efficiency, much of which cannot be explained by standard socioeconomic...