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People think that Harry Potter, Spiderman and Gandalf would vote the same way they do, whereas Darth Vader, Cruella de Vil and Joffrey Baratheon would vote for the rival party.

New research from the University of Southampton shows how people in the UK and U.S. believe that they admire would share their voting preferences, while those they dislike would vote the other way.

The paper “Heroes and villains: motivated projection of political identities” is published in Political Science Research & Method.

Li and colleagues used a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS), which, while new to the world of seismology, is already used to monitor pipelines and power cables for defects. The method involves sending laser light pulses over optical fibers and measuring the intensity of the signals reflected back from imperfections in the fiber. Slight stretching or contracting of the fiber (say, from an) can change the reflected signals.

Based on the pulse’s time of return, you can pinpoint when and where along the cable the disturbance occurred. Because light gets reflected from thousands of imperfection points along fibers, a kilometers-long stretch of cable can act as thousands of seismometers. This means significantly more seismic data, leading to higher resolution, which allows pinpointing the location of smaller seismic activity.

The Caltech researchers have converted preexisting optical cables into a DAS array. Telecom companies usually lay down more fiber than they need, and the research team taps into some of this “dark” unused fiber. With permission from the California Broadband Cooperative, the team set up a DAS transceiver at one end of a length of fiber-optic cable along the border between California and Nevada.

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS)※1, which measures the strain on optical fibers installed on the seafloor, has enabled earthquakes to be observed along fiber optic cable transects, in contrast to the conventional observations using ocean bottom instruments. DAS observations were conducted on seafloor fiber optic cables offshore of Muroto, Japan to observe slow earthquakes※2 in the Nankai Trough region.