Celebrating Stonewall at 50: A Culturally Geographic Approach to Introducing LGBT Themes

July 28, 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of a police raid on the Stonewall Inn. During this raid, police verbally, and in some cases, physically accosted patrons of the Stonewall Inn. Events from this encounter eventually set off a series of protests by members and allies of the LGBT community. These protests came to be known as the Stonewall Riots. On June 24, 2016, the Stonewall Inn became the first U.S. National Monument dedicated to LGBT history. While this event served as a pivotal role in the gay rights movement, this article begins with an investigation into the geographical and spatial conditions surrounding the Stonewall Inn and its neighborhood. In asking, “Why New York City, why Stonewall?” we attempt to establish a cultural version of geography that uses a National Monument as a way for students to engage in the world around them through an examination of human/environment relationships. To explore this further and to celebrate Stonewall at 50, we present a pedagogical framework using articles, letters, photographs, podcasts, and Google Earth.     

The Manifestation of Campbell's Law: Consequences of Eliminating of Social Studies From the Curriculum

The manifestation of Campbell's Law is examined in light of the current era in American public schools of high stakes testing inclusive of narrowed curriculums and teaching to the test. The decades-long practice of reducing instructional time of non-tested subjects, which includes social studies fundamentals, has resulted in a less informed citizenry. Social studies instruction promotes citizens who are able to make informed decisions that are inclusive of differentiating between facts, generalizations, and opinions without bias. The construction of individual viewpoints through a narrow lens without discrimination between opinions and historical facts is of concern today as Americans form opinions regarding controversial social issues and engage in social activism.     

Gender differences in work-schooling decisions in rural North India

Based on a rural sample of North Indian children and adolescents, this paper addresses the determinants of participation in work and schooling. The empirical model includes market and domestic work as separate alternatives to schooling in a trivariate probit framework, allowing also for combinations of these activities as well as idleness. This differentiation sheds new light on gender differences in the work-school decisions in North India. While more traditional determinants (like wealth or parental education) mostly affect the trade-off between schooling and the gender specific work activity (market work for boys and domestic work for girls), monetary incentives (wages and schooling costs) are more closely related to market work for both sexes. Girls are also more likely to work for the market if their economic contribution can be made within the family (for instance if the household owns animals). Proxies for cultural factors turn out to play especially a role for participation in the gender non-specific work activities; for instance, overall female labor force participation shifts girls?? activities from domestic towards market work.     

Infants Experience Perceptual Narrowing for Nonprimate Faces

Perceptual narrowing—a phenomenon in which perception is broad from birth, but narrows as a function of experience—has previously been tested with primate faces. In the first 6 months of life, infants can discriminate among individual human and monkey faces. Though the ability to discriminate monkey faces is lost after about 9 months, infants retain human face discrimination, presumably because of their experience with human faces. The current study demonstrates that 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants are able to discriminate nonprimate faces as well. In a visual paired comparison test, 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants (n = 26) looked significantly longer at novel sheep (Ovis aries) faces, compared to a familiar sheep face (p = .017), while 9‐ to 11‐month‐olds (n = 26) showed no visual preference, and adults (n = 27) had a familiarity preference (p < .001). Infants’ face recognition systems are broadly tuned at birth—not just for primate faces, but for nonprimate faces as well—allowing infants to become specialists in recognizing the types of faces encountered in their first year of life.     

A new class of matrix variate elliptically contoured distributions

Summary A new class of matrix variate elliptically contoured distributions is defined. Properties of this class of distributions are studied. Examples of distributions which belong to this class are also presented. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Research supported by the FRC Major Grant, Bowling Grant, Bowling Green State University.