Utilizing The Wire to Teach about Justice-Oriented Citizenship

“Charm City: Down to The Wire?” is the title of an elective class developed by Sarah Taylor, a teacher at a private school in Baltimore. In the class, students explore their city and social justice issues from a framework that correlates to Westheimer and Kahne's (2004) concept of justice-oriented citizenship. Not only do students analyze problems depicted so vividly in the television series The Wire, they investigate and problem-solve to create possible solutions for enduring problems that afflict their city. This study considers the connection of class activities to justice-oriented citizenship and how the course can be replicated in other communities.     

Private-Sector Corruption: Measurement and Cultural Origins

Research on corruption has made substantial progress in recent years. Yet, most studies still treat corruption as a homogenous phenomenon. This article argues that private-sector corruption can be distinguished conceptually from public-sector corruption, which has been in the spotlight of empirical research. We introduce the first indicator of private-sector corruption covering a large cross-section of countries. This new indicator is used to extend a recent empirical study on the cultural determinants of public-sector corruption (Kong and Volkema in Soc Indic Res 127(1):139–152, 2016). We find that self-serving leadership in high-income countries is associated with more corruption in both the public and the private sector. Furthermore, individualistic leadership in low-income countries is linked to reduced private-sector corruption. Next, we test a number of alternative cultural explanations for differences in private-sector corruption across countries. Overall, our results suggest that specific forms of corporate leadership culture matter for private-sector corruption, but also religious identity and trust play an important role.     

Advanced interaction media in nuclear power plant control rooms

The shift from analog to digital Instruments (related mainly to information visualization) and Controls in Nuclear Power Plant Main Control Rooms (NPP MCR) is a central current topic of investigation. In NPP MCR, digitalization was implemented gradually, analog and digital systems still coexisting for the two main systems related to safety--Safety Instruments and Control System (SICS) and Process Instruments and Controls System (PICS). My ongoing research focuses on the introduction of Advanced Interaction Media (AIM) such as stereoscopic 3D visualization and multi-touch surfaces in control rooms. This paper proposes a Safety-Centric approach for gathering the Design Rationale needed in the specification of such novel AIM concepts as well as their evaluation through user tests. Beyond methodological research, the final output of the current research is to build an experimental simulator aiming to enhance improvements in Human-Systems Integration (HSI). This paper provides an overview of the topics under consideration.     

家庭结构、重大疾病和农村劳动力迁移

在四川省大样本农户调查数据基础上,利用Probit模型分析了家庭结构特征对农村年轻劳动力迁移的影响。研究发现在控制个人特征的前提下：三代同堂家庭显著支持了年轻劳动力外出,而核心家庭对劳动力的外出有显著负面影响;家庭中有未成年人会限制年轻劳动力的外出;年轻配偶的重大疾病显著地影响了年轻人的外出老年人的严重疾病反而促使年轻劳动力外出,但如果家庭中存在未成年人,则老年人的严重疾病会对年轻劳动力迁移产生显著负面影响。研究结果突出体现了当前中国农村劳动力迁移在很大程度上是一种家庭内部的分工行为,在制定社会保障政策时应该予以重视。     

Implementation of a collaborative model for opioid overdose prevention on campus

Abstract

Drug overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50, a crisis that is driven by an increasingly potent supply of illicit opioids. College-aged adults are more likely than any other age group to engage in opioid misuse. Naloxone, the antidote for an opioid overdose, can save the life of an opioid overdose victim if it is readily available and administered quickly. The University of Texas at Austin implemented a collaborative model for proactive opioid overdose prevention in 2016. This model includes stocking naloxone in residence halls and providing it to police officers, training resident advisors and police officers to respond to suspected overdoses, and engaging student pharmacists in a service learning program to increase naloxone access and awareness among university students. Programmatic experiences and key recommendations for U.S. campuses are shared by faculty, student, and community leaders.     

Conditional Euro Area Sovereign Default Risk

We propose an empirical framework to assess the likelihood of joint and conditional sovereign default from observed CDS prices. Our model is based on a dynamic skewed-t distribution that captures all salient features of the data, including skewed and heavy-tailed changes in the price of CDS protection against sovereign default, as well as dynamic volatilities and correlations that ensure that uncertainty and risk dependence can increase in times of stress. We apply the framework to euro area sovereign CDS spreads during the euro area debt crisis. Our results reveal significant time-variation in distress dependence and spill-over effects for sovereign default risk. We investigate market perceptions of joint and conditional sovereign risk around announcements of Eurosystem asset purchases programs, and document a strong impact on joint risk.     

The immigrant experience: Houstonians’ family attitudes and behaviors

ABSTRACT

Although there is extensive scholarship that examines differences in family behaviors and attitudes between whites and blacks, there are very few studies that examine these differences across whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians in the United States. In the current study, we do so by examining data from the 2011 Houston Area Survey. We explore Houstonians’ likelihood of engaging in interracial relationships, attitudes toward working mothers, and attitudes toward same-sex marriage. Houston was selected as the target of the study given its rise as the most racially and ethnically diverse metropolitan area in the nation. Non-white Houstonians are more likely to date members of other racial/ethnic groups. With regard to attitudes toward working mothers, only Latino and Asian immigrants hold less accepting views than whites. Finally, the results with regard to same-sex marriage equality suggest that increased migration and diversity within Houston could hasten social change and acceptance.     

Considerations on the ‘Replication Problem’ in Sociology

We re-examine the so-called “replication problem” in sociology—a scarcity of published studies dedicated to reproducing findings from prior research. We do this in part by considering the larger epistemological traditions of the natural sciences and humanities. We make three primary arguments: that (1) replication studies are more prevalent than is commonly perceived, (2) calls for and discussions of replication do not attend enough to issues of theory, and (3) we should reconsider as a discipline how we evaluate replications. In developing this third argument, we draw on the concept of episteme, discussing two epistemes that concurrently exist in sociology: the scientific project and the aesthetic object. The former overlaps with approaches to knowledge growth in the natural sciences, the latter with the humanities. We propose that sociology is situated between these extremes, presenting unique challenges for replication research. In particular, nuanced considerations of replications in sociology foreclose any simplistic accounts of a replication problem in the discipline.     

Comprehensive definitions of breakdown points for independent and dependent observations

Summary. We provide a new definition of breakdown in finite samples, with an extension to asymptotic breakdown. Previous definitions centre on defining a critical region for either the parameter or the objective function. If for a particular outlier configuration the critical region is entered, breakdown is said to occur. In contrast with the traditional approach, we leave the definition of the critical region implicit. Our proposal encompasses previous definitions of breakdown in linear and non-linear regression settings. In some cases, it leads to a different and more intuitive notion of breakdown than other procedures that are available. An important advantage of our new definition is that it also applies to models for dependent observations where current definitions of breakdown typically fail. We illustrate our suggestion by using examples from linear and non-linear regression, and time series.     

The Role of Domain Satisfaction in Explaining the Paradoxical Association Between Life Satisfaction and Age

Although aging is associated with declines in many life domains, overall life satisfaction does not appear to decline sharply with age. One explanation for this paradoxical finding is that several life domains improve with age such that increases in certain domains balance the decreases in others. Because different issues are problematic at different life stages, it is likely that specific domains display different life trajectories compared to overall life satisfaction. The observed pattern for overall life satisfaction is likely due to a bottom-up approach. Life and domain satisfaction data from 8?years of the British Household Panel Study were analyzed to evaluate this hypothesis. Results indicated that satisfaction with some life domains increased after middle age (e.g. social life), whereas satisfaction with other life domains decreased (e.g. health). Additionally, results illustrated that although domain satisfaction scores demonstrate distinct trajectories, the aggregate of these distinct domains resembled the overall life satisfaction trajectory. These findings have implications for top-down and bottom-up models of life satisfaction.