How does the context of income inequality in which people live affect their belief in meritocracy, the ability to get ahead through hard work? One prominent recent study, Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015a), argues that, consistent with the conflict theory, exposure to higher levels of local income inequality leads lower-income people to become more likely to reject-and higher-income people to become more likely to accept-the dominant U.S. ideology of meritocracy. Here, we show that this conclusion is not supported by the study's own reported results and that even these results depend on pooling three distinctly different measures of meritocracy into a single analysis. We then demonstrate that analysis of a larger and more representative survey employing a single consistent measure of the dependent variable yields the opposite conclusion. Consistent with the relative power theory, among those with lower incomes, local contexts of greater inequality are associated with more widespread belief that people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard. * Earlier versions of this work were presented the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association and the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. We thank Larry Bartels and Amber Wichowsky for helpful comments. The paper's revision history and the materials needed to reproduce its analyses can be found on Github here. 1Meritocracy-the idea that if one works hard, one can get ahead-is a core tenet of the American Dream (see, e.g., Hochschild 1995, 21-23). How belief in meritocracy, and in turn the country's dominant ideology, fares in the face of the stark economic inequality that has come to characterize life in the United States is therefore crucial to understanding not only support for redistributive policies to address this inequality but also the continuing legitimacy of the U.S. economic system as a whole.1 Not surprisingly, this question and related ones regarding the relationship between economic inequality and political attitudes and beliefs have attracted considerable scholarly attention of late.In contrast to a range of earlier studies that found that greater inequality tends to be associated with attitudes that reinforce the status quo, Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015a, hereafter NJL) advances the argument that inequality in the United States activates class conflict, leading poorer individuals in local contexts of higher inequality to reject meritocracy and become more class conscious. We demonstrate here, however, that that article crucially misinterprets the interaction term in its model (see, e.g., Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006).Correcting this error reveals that there is little or no support in the paper's results for its conclusion that mere exposure to high levels of inequality stimulates a rejection of meritocracy. Further, we reveal problems with how the article's dependent variable is measured that render its results untrustworthy: even if the NJL results did support the conclusions drawn fro...

Do contexts of greater income inequality spur the disadvantaged to achieve a class consciousness vital to contesting the fairness of the economic system and demanding more redistribution? One prominent recent study, Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015), argues that simple exposure to higher levels of local income inequality lead low-income people to view the United States as divided into haves and have-nots and to see themselves as among the have-nots, that is, to become more likely to achieve such a class consciousness. Here, we show that this sanguine conclusion is at best supported only in analyses of the single survey presented in that study. There is no evidence that higher levels of income inequality produce greater class consciousness among those with low incomes in other similar but neglected surveys.

The r-process has been shown to be robust in reproducing the abundance distributions of heavy elements, such as europium, seen in ultra-metal poor stars. In contrast, observations of elements 26 < Z < 47 display overabundances relative to r-process model predictions. A proposed additional source of early nucleosynthesis is the weak r-process in neutrino-driven winds of core-collapse supernovae. It has been shown that in this site (α,n) reactions are both crucial to nucleosynthesis and the main source of uncertainty in model-based abundance predictions. Aiming to improve the certainty of nucleosynthesis predictions, the cross section of the important reaction 86Kr(α,n)89Sr has been measured at an energy relevant to the weak r-process. This experiment was conducted in inverse kinematics at TRIUMF with the EMMA recoil mass spectrometer and the TIGRESS gamma-ray spectrometer. A novel type of solid helium target was used.

The Electromagnetic Mass Analyser (EMMA) is a new vacuum-mode recoil mass spectrometer currently undergoing the final stages of commissioning at the ISAC-II facility of TRIUMF. EMMA employs a symmetric configuration of electrostatic and magnetic deflectors to separate the products of nuclear reactions from the beam, focus them in both energy and angle, and disperse them in a focal plane according to their mass/charge (m/q) ratios. The spectrometer was designed to accommodate the γ-ray detector array TIGRESS around the target position in order to provide spectroscopic information from electromagnetic transitions. EMMA is intended to be used in the measurement of fusion evaporation, radiative capture, and transfer reactions for the study of nuclear structure and astrophysics. Its complement of focal plane detectors facilitates the identification of recoiling nuclei and subsequent recoil decay spectroscopy. Here we describe the facility and report on commissioning efforts.