At the intersection of behavioral and institutional studies of policy making lie a series of questions about how elite choices affect mass public opinion. Scholars have considered how judicial decisions—especially US Supreme Court decisions—affect individuals’ support for specific policy positions. These studies yield a series of competing findings. Whereas past research uses opinion surveys to assess how individuals’ opinions are shaped, we believe that modern techniques for analyzing social media provide analytic leverage that traditional approaches do not offer. We present a framework for employing Twitter data to study mass opinion discourse. We find that the Supreme Court’s decisions relating to same-sex marriage in 2013 had significant effects on how the public discussed same-sex marriage and had a polarizing effect on mass opinion. We conclude by connecting these findings and our analyses to larger problems and debates in the area of democratic deliberation and big-data analysis.

The Erasmus Plus programme ‘Innovative Education and Training in high power laser plasmas’, otherwise known as PowerLaPs, is described. The PowerLaPs programme employs an innovative paradigm in that it is a multi-centre programme where teaching takes place in five separate institutes with a range of different aims and styles of delivery. The ‘in class’ time is limited to four weeks a year, and the programme spans two years. PowerLaPs aims to train students from across Europe in theoretical, applied and laboratory skills relevant to the pursuit of research in laser–plasma interaction physics and inertial confinement fusion (ICF). Lectures are intermingled with laboratory sessions and continuous assessment activities. The programme, which is led by workers from the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Crete, and supported by co-workers from the Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Bordeaux, the Czech Technical University in Prague, Ecole Polytechnique, the University of Ioannina, the University of Salamanca and the University of York, has just completed its first year. Thus far three Learning Teaching Training (LTT) activities have been held, at the Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Bordeaux and the Centre for Plasma Physics and Lasers (CPPL) of TEI Crete. The last of these was a two-week long Intensive Programme (IP), while the activities at the other two universities were each five days in length. Thus far work has concentrated upon training in both theoretical and experimental work in plasma physics, high power laser–matter interactions and high energy density physics. The nature of the programme will be described in detail and some metrics relating to the activities carried out to date will be presented.

The formal commissioning of the IRWG occurred at the 1991 Buenos Aires General Assembly, following a Joint Commission meeting at the IAU GA in Baltimore in 1988 that identified the problems with ground-based infrared photometry. The meeting justification, papers, and conclusions, can be found in Milone (1989). In summary, the challenges involved how to explain the failure to achieve the milli-magnitude precision expected of infrared photometry and an apparent 3% limit on system transformability. The proposed solution was to redefine the broadband Johnson system, the passbands of which had proven so unsatisfactory that over time effectively different systems proliferated, although bearing the same “JHKLMNQ” designations; the new system needed to be better positioned and centered in the spectral windows of the Earth's atmosphere, and the variable water vapour content of the atmosphere needed to be measured in real time to better correct for atmospheric extinction.

We report on a direct epitaxial growth approach for the heterogeneous integration of high speed III-V devices with Si CMOS logic on a common Si substrate. InP-based heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBTs) structures were successfully grown on patterned Si-on-Lattice-Engineered-Substrate (SOLES) substrates using molecular beam epitaxy. DC and RF performance similar to those grown on lattice-matched InP were achieved in growth windows as small as 15×15μm2. This truly planar approach allows tight device placement with InP-HBTs to Si CMOS transistors separation as small as 2.5 μm, and the use of standard wafer level multilayer interconnects. A high speed, low power dissipation differential amplifier was designed and fabricated, demonstrating the feasibility of using this approach for high performance mixed signal circuits such as ADCs and DACs.

Our direct growth approach of integrating compound semiconductors (CS) and silicon CMOS is based on a unique silicon template wafer with an embedded CS template layer of Germanium (Ge). It enables selective placement of CS devices in arbitrary locations on a Silicon CMOS wafer for simple, high yield, monolithic integration and optimal circuit performance. HBTs demonstrate a peak current gain cutoff frequency ft of 170GHz at a nominal collector current density of 2mA/μm2. To the best of our knowledge this represents the first demonstration of an InP-based HBT fabricated on a silicon wafer.

Several writers have asked whether there exist among states varying predispositions to support the United Nations. Hayward Alker has answered this question with reference to the voting patterns of member nations in support of increased UN activities particularly in the peacekeeping field. More recently Robert Keohane has ranked states by using a support measure based on delegation size and has suggested that size of national delegations to the United Nations is indicative of support for the organization.