Tag Archives: White House

How your government is ignoring you

If it seems the federal government has largely ignored the public’s biggest concerns for the past 70 years, it’s because it has, contends a new book by a Michigan State University political scientist.

In “Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945,” Matt Grossmann argues the president, Congress and Supreme Court have failed to respond to popular opinion when passing laws or issuing executive orders and decisions that lead to new policy. (more…)

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Q&A: Climate change is already here, says ‘father of green chemistry’

Paul Anastas, the Yale chemist widely known as the “father of green chemistry,” talks about greenhouse gases, science policy, Richard Nixon, and being “a sworn enemy of the status quo.” (more…)

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Using IBM’s Crowdsourced Supercomputer, Harvard Rates Solar Energy Potential of 2.3 Million New Compounds

White House Applauds Citizen Science, Big Data Initiative

CAMBRIDGE, MA – 24 Jun 2013: The search for more versatile and less expensive materials for solar energy received a boost today as Harvard launched a free database that catalogues the suitability of 2.3 million organic, carbon compounds for converting sunlight into electricity.

Harvard’s Clean Energy project — which screened the molecules using World Community Grid, an IBM-managed virtual supercomputer that harnesses the surplus computer power donated by volunteers — is believed to be the most extensive investigation of quantum chemicals ever performed. (more…)

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Research by CU-Boulder Physicists Creates ‘Recipe Book’ for Building New Materials

By showing that tiny particles injected into a liquid crystal medium adhere to existing mathematical theorems, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have opened the door for the creation of a host of new materials with properties that do not exist in nature.

The findings show that researchers can create a “recipe book” to build new materials of sorts using topology, a major mathematical field that describes the properties that do not change when an object is stretched, bent or otherwise “continuously deformed.” Published online Dec. 23 in the journal Nature, the study also is the first to experimentally show that some of the most important topological theorems hold up in the real material world, said CU-Boulder physics department Assistant Professor Ivan Smalyukh, a study senior author. (more…)

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Prewar Citizen Complaints to Government Explored in ‘This is Not Civil Rights’

George Lovell, UW associate professor of political science, is the author of “This Is Not Civil Rights: Discovering Rights Talk in 1939 America,” published in October by University of Chicago Press. He answered a few questions about his book for UW Today.

What is the basic concept behind “This is Not Civil Rights”?

The book examines more than 1,000 citizen complaint letters regarding rights from the late years of the Great Depression along with replies written by federal government officials. Looking at what people complained about, and how they tried to justify their claims, reveals how popular understandings of rights and the role of government develop over time. (more…)

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