Citizenship,Pluralism, and Modern Public Space

The article begins with the realist assumption in political science that posits that political violence and chaos occurs in the absence of the state, and that the international system is congenitally anarchic. Using the Y2K problem and the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York as two instances of violent political phenomena within global modernity, this article examines notions of citizenship, pluralism, and their relationships with modern public space through the lens of 'public disaster' scenarios in which the breakdown of centralized systems of power tends to lead to chaos. However, public disasters also appear to create the opposite effect of bonding communities together in the face of adversity that leads to greater social cohesion rather than the breakdown of social institutions. The article tries to resolve this apparent enigma through several theories of public space, democracy, and civil society.     

Bureaucratic Neglect and Oppression in Child Welfare: Historical Precedent and Implications for Current Practice

Historically, child maltreatment has been seen as an issue warranting the involvement of the American government. However, over time, the definition of child maltreatment has changed; typically, maltreatment is often understood as a violation of the parental right to care for and protect a child. Consequently, the government, through systems such as child protective services is expected to be the acceptable parental alternative. As illustrated by the numerous negative outcomes experienced, it is clear that the system is not meeting the needs of abused and neglected children. This bureaucratic neglect is allowed to occur because of population primarily served by the child welfare system, the poor and families of color. In this way, dynamics of power and privilege manifest in the differing expectations of appropriate care between biological parents and the foster care system.     

Sharing of emotional memories with a listener: differences between adolescents and emerging adults

Research demonstrated a strong influence of personal narratives on emotions linked to memories. However, few studies considered shared narratives and the role of listener’s behavior, especially in adolescence and emerging adulthood. This paper aims to explore the impact of listening attitude on emotions related to memories in adolescents and emerging adults. A total of 157 participants were asked to choose a memory: in the experimental conditions (Attentive Listening, AL vs. Detached Listening, DL), they narrated it to a listener, in the Control Group, they internally reflected about it. Emotions linked to memory at the first time, to narrative/reflection, and to memory after 15 days were measured, as well as the perception of listener’s behavior. Results showed that participants perceived the differences of the listening, although adolescents perceived less listener’s detached stance. Moreover, among adolescents, positive emotions increased after narrative for both experimental conditions, instead, among emerging adults, only AL condition participants increased their positive emotions. Moreover, adults maintained the positive effects of narrative also after 15 days. Authors discussed the role of an empathic context and the adolescent egocentrism in shared narratives about personal memories.     

On using Bayesian networks for complexity reduction in decision trees

In this paper we use the Bayesian network as a tool of explorative analysis: its theory guarantees that, given the structure and some assumptions, the Markov blanket of a variable is the minimal conditioning set through which the variable is independent from all the others. We use the Markov blanket of a target variable to extract the relevant features for constructing a decision tree (DT). Our proposal reduces the complexity of the DT so it has a simpler visualization and it can be more easily interpretable. On the other hand, it maintains a good classification performance.     

Young children's social withdrawal and teacher–child relationship quality: A cross-cultural comparison between the Netherlands and China

The present study investigated how young children's (5-to-8-year-olds) social inhibition and solitary behavior were associated with teacher–child relationship quality and whether these associations differed across the Netherlands and China. The Dutch sample included 35 teachers and 201 children (49% girls). The Chinese sample consisted of 19 teachers and 152 children (50% girls). Teachers rated children's social inhibition and solitary behavior, and their relationship (closeness, conflict) with each child. Multilevel linear modeling revealed that in both countries, social inhibition was associated negatively with closeness and solitary behavior was associated positively with conflict. These associations were equally strong in China and the Netherlands. One association differed across countries: Social inhibition was associated negatively with conflict in the Netherlands, whereas this association was not significant in China. As such, cultural values could affect how social inhibition links to teacher–child relationships. Caution is recommended when generalizing findings from one country to another country.     

Modeling Sequential Information Acquisition Behavior in Rational Decision Making

Most real‐life decisions are made with less than perfect information and there is often some opportunity to acquire additional information to increase the quality of the decision. In this article, we define and study the sequential information acquisition process of a rational decision maker (DM) when allowed to acquire any finite amount of information from a set of products defined by vectors of characteristics. The information acquisition process of the DM depends both on the values of the characteristics observed previously and the number and potential realizations of the remaining characteristics. Each time an observation is acquired, the DM modifies the probability of improving upon the products already observed with the number of observations available. We construct two real‐valued functions whose crossing points determine the decision of how to allocate each available piece of information. We provide several numerical simulations to illustrate the information acquisition incentives defining the behavior of the DM. Applications to knowledge management and decision support systems follow immediately from our results, particularly when considering the introduction and acceptance of new technological products and when formalizing online search environments.     

Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone was a foundational second-wave feminist thinker. Firestone's radical feminism argued for a future where technology was used to eliminate sexism by freeing women from childbirth and liberating both men and women from the patriarchal nuclear family. In many important ways, Firestone's work is the precursor for contemporary cyberfeminist writing, especially the work of Donna Haraway. This paper examines Shulamith Firestone and her contribution to the information age.     

An exploration of the relationships between student racial background and the school sub-contexts of office discipline referrals: a critical race theory analysis

A growing body of research indicates that exclusionary school discipline practices disproportionately impact students of color. Some scholars have theorized that racial disparities likely vary across school sub-contexts, as implicit bias in perceptions of student behavior may be more influential in locations where students and adults have weaker relationships (e.g. bathrooms and hallways, compared to the classroom). Guided by Critical Race Theory, this study used administrative data from a large urban school district (n = 20,166 discipline incidents, 9,170 students, and 185 schools) to consider the relationship between student race and the locations where youth are disciplined. Results indicate that Black, Latino/a, and Multiracial youth were no more likely than White students to have a discipline incident take place outside the classroom. These findings suggest attention is needed to the role of systemic bias and colorblind policies and practices in discipline disparities.     

Search for relevant subsets of binary predictors in high dimensional regression for discovering the lead molecule

One of the main problems that the drug discovery research field confronts is to identify small molecules, modulators of protein function, which are likely to be therapeutically useful. Common practices rely on the screening of vast libraries of small molecules (often 1–2 million molecules) in order to identify a molecule, known as a lead molecule, which specifically inhibits or activates the protein function. To search for the lead molecule, we investigate the molecular structure, which generally consists of an extremely large number of fragments. Presence or absence of particular fragments, or groups of fragments, can strongly affect molecular properties. We study the relationship between molecular properties and its fragment composition by building a regression model, in which predictors, represented by binary variables indicating the presence or absence of fragments, are grouped in subsets and a bi-level penalization term is introduced for the high dimensionality of the problem. We evaluate the performance of this model in two simulation studies, comparing different penalization terms and different clustering techniques to derive the best predictor subsets structure. Both studies are characterized by small sets of data relative to the number of predictors under consideration. From the results of these simulation studies, we show that our approach can generate models able to identify key features and provide accurate predictions. The good performance of these models is then exhibited with real data about the MMP–12 enzyme.     

International education in secondary schools explored: a mixed-method examination of one Midwestern state in the USA

In recent years, more and more attention has been paid to international education in schools in the USA. Education professionals, business leaders, and politicians realize that schools and school leaders must identify multiple opportunities for students to interact with and experience a global society. Nationally, there has been a considerable investment of funds by several key foundations and much political talk about the need to push American education towards a model of schooling that expressly responds to the need for internationally competent citizens. Using mixed methodology design, this study is fueled by a desire to better understand several overarching elements in international education. In short, the authors of this paper posit that no further research, policy formation, or program development within the realm of international education for public schools can be undertaken until an understanding of the current state of international education and the capacity for internationalization is empirically explored.