Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Iterative Approach To Ground Penetrating Radar At The Maya Site Of Pacbitun, Belize, Sheldon Skaggs, Terry G. Powis, Clara R. Rucker, George Micheletti

Publications and Research

Ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys provide distinct advantages for archaeological prospection in ancient, complex, urban Maya sites, particularly where dense foliage or modern debris may preclude other remote sensing or geophysical techniques. Unidirectional GPR surveys using a 500 MHz shielded antenna were performed at the Middle Preclassic Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize. The survey in 2012 identified numerous linear and circular anomalies between 1 m and 2 m deep. Based on these anomalies, one 1 m × 4 m unit and three smaller units were excavated in 2013. These test units revealed a curved plaster surface not previously found at …

Total Youth Arrests For Violent Crime Still Falling Nationwide, Jeffrey A. Butts

Publications and Research

Youth arrests for violent crime are declining across the country. Using Federal Bureau of Investigation data, this databit details trends from 1980 to 2015 and demonstrates how the nation is still seeing a 20-year decline in violent youth crime.

The Capacity Of Cognitive Control Estimated From A Perceptual Decision Making Task, Tingting Wu, Alexander J. Dufford, Melissa-Ann Mackie, Laura J. Egan, Jin Fan

Publications and Research

Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted. In this behavioral study, we manipulated the information rate of cognitive control by parametrically varying both the uncertainty of stimul measured as information entropy and the exposure time of the stimuli. We used the relationship between the participants’ response accuracy and the information rate of cognitive control (in bits per second, bps) …

New Approaches To Data-Driven Civilian Oversight Of Law Enforcement: An Introduction To The Second Nacole/Cjpr Special Issue, Daniel L. Stageman, Nicole M. Napolitano, Brian Buchner

Publications and Research

In April of 2016, National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) and John Jay College partnered to sponsor the Academic Symposium “Building Public Trust: Generating Evidence to Enhance Police Accountability and Legitimacy.” This essay introduces the Criminal Justice Policy Review Special Issue featuring peer-reviewed, empirical research papers first presented at the Symposium. We provide context for the Symposium in relation to contemporary national discourse on police accountability and legitimacy. In addition, we review each of the papers presented at the Symposium, and provide in-depth reviews of each of the manuscripts included in the Special Issue.

An Analysis Of Electronic Cigarette And Cigarette Advertising In Us Women’S Magazines, Corey Hannah Basch, Jennifer Mongiovi, Grace Clarke Hillyer, Danna Ethan, Rodney Hammond

Publications and Research

Background: Traditional cigarette advertising has existed in the US for over 200 years. Studies suggest that advertising has an impact on the initiation and maintenance of smoking behaviors. In recent years, electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) emerged on the market as an alternative to the traditional tobacco cigarette. The purpose of this study was to describe advertisements in popular US magazines marketed to women for cigarettes and e-cigarettes.

Methods: This study involved analyzing 99 issues of 14 popular US magazines marketed to women.

Results: Compared to advertisements for traditional cigarettes, advertisements for e-cigarettes were more often found in magazines geared toward the …

Resource Description And Access: Internationalizing, Teaching And Learning Rda Cataloging Abroad, Sheau-Yueh J. Chao

Publications and Research

This article presents the history and development of cataloging codes, an overview of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) training courses, the author’s experiences in library teaching and learning, cultural exchanges with the Chinese librarians at the National Central Library (NCL), international librarianship in cataloging, library technology and development in Taiwan as well as the National Central Library and the Library Association of China (LAC), and key findings of RDA in its development and transition, implementation, and implications.

Hackathons For Libraries And Librarians, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Hackathons can be ideal opportunities for libraries and librarians to promote new services and tools. In these social events, attendees form teams and work on a project together within a given time limit. This article explains hackathons, provides a brief history, and details how libraries and librarians can get involved. Similar event structures, like hack days and edit-a-thons, are also considered.

From Sensory Perception To Lexical-Semantic Processing: An Erp Study In Non-Verbal Children With Autism, Chiara Cantiani, Naseem A. Choudhury, Yan H. Yu, Valerie L. Shafer, Richard G. Schwartz, April A. Benasich

Publications and Research

This study examines electrocortical activity associated with visual and auditory sensory perception and lexical-semantic processing in nonverbal (NV) or minimally-verbal (MV) children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Currently, there is no agreement on whether these children comprehend incoming linguistic information and whether their perception is comparable to that of typically developing children. Event-related potentials (ERPs) of 10 NV/MV children with ASD and 10 neurotypical children were recorded during a picture-word matching paradigm. Atypical ERP responses were evident at all levels of processing in children with ASD. Basic perceptual processing was delayed in both visual and auditory domains but overall was …

New Trade, New Politics: Intra-Industry Trade And Domestic Political Coalitions, Mary Anne Madeira

Publications and Research

Why are industries highly active in some battles over international trade policies, but in other instances, individual firms are highly active and industry groups are subdued? I argue that rising intra-industry trade in the postwar period has undermined traditional trade coalitions and created new opportunities for individual firms to become politically active. Drawing on new trade theories from economics, as well as work on firm heterogeneity and lobbying, I argue that industry associations become less active as intra-industry trade increases due to competing trade preferences among member firms. At the same time, individual firms become more politically active. My results …

Statistical Learning In Specific Language Impairment And Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Meta-Analysis, Rita Obeid, Patricia J. Brooks, Kasey L. Powers, Kristen Gillespie-Lynch, Jarrad A. G. Lum

Publications and Research

Impairments in statistical learning might be a common deficit among individuals with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Using metaanalysis, we examined statistical learning in SLI (14 studies, 15 comparisons) and ASD (13 studies, 20 comparisons) to evaluate this hypothesis. Effect sizes were examined as a function of diagnosis across multiple statistical learning tasks (Serial Reaction Time, Contextual Cueing, Artificial Grammar Learning, Speech Stream, Observational Learning, and Probabilistic Classification). Individuals with SLI showed deficits in statistical learning relative to age-matched controls. In contrast, statistical learning was intact in individuals with ASD relative to controls. Effect sizes did …

The Limits Of Liberal Planning: The Lindsay Administration's Failed Plan To Control Development On Staten Island, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

Staten Island grew rapidly after the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened in 1964. Mayor John Lindsay introduced a plan to control and guide development there, and encouraged planned unit development. The Rouse Company, then building Columbia, Maryland, was contracted to plan new communities for the southern third of Staten Island to more than double the borough’s population. State Senator John Marchi introduced legislation for the South Richmond Development Corporation in 1971. The plan called for the city to use eminent domain to buy property and transfer it to the Rouse Company, which would also construct residential towers on landfill in Raritan …

Inducing Application Of Interdisciplinary Frameworks: Experiences From The Domains Of Information Literacy And Responsible Conduct Of Research, Anne E. Leonard, Jean E. Hillstrom

Publications and Research

Constructivist frameworks for information literacy and research ethics can be developed and nurtured in the context of an interdisciplinary course. Using the frameworks of two disciplines, students went on an experiential journey in support of ethics foundations through guest lectures and active learning exercises. This study describes the development and content of the responsible conduct of research and information literacy modules and discusses the role of each in an interdisciplinary course. Learning goals for both modules were evaluated by examining student responses in a free-writing exercise at the end of the semester, concluding with a discussion of the structural and …

Associations Between Mental Health And Ebola-Related Health Behaviors: A Regionally Representative Cross-Sectional Survey In Post-Conflict Sierra Leone, Theresa S. Betancourt, Robert T. Brennan, Patrick Vinck, Tyler J. Vanderweele, Dayo Spencer-Walters, Joshua Jeong, Adeyinka M. Akinsulure-Smith, Phuong Pham

Publications and Research

Background

Little attention has been paid to potential relationships between mental health, trauma, and personal exposures to Ebola virus disease (EVD) and health behaviors in post-conflict West Africa. We tested a conceptual model linking mental health and trauma to EVD risk behaviors and EVD prevention behaviors.

Methods and Findings

Using survey data from a representative sample in the Western Urban and Western Rural districts of Sierra Leone, this study examines associations between war exposures, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, depression, anxiety, and personal EVD exposure (e.g., having family members or friends diagnosed with EVD) and EVD-related health behaviors among 1,008 …

Tellin' It Like It Is: Politics And Donald Trump's Language, Aaron Barlow

Publications and Research

A lot about Trump’s success, and about the new verbal armament he wields (not to mention the old of the rest of the political field) can be learned from George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Trump may be a naif when it comes to language but, as they say, “out of the mouths of babes…. ” Though his own language reflects more closely William Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflowing’ than it does the considered speech and writing Orwell advocates, he has identified the weakness of his opponents much in the way Orwell did seventy years ago.

Should The New England Education Research Organization Start A Journal In The Age Of Audit Culture? Reflections On Academic Publishing, Metrics, And The New Academy, Edward Lehner, Kate Finley

Publications and Research

A large regional educational research association can straightforwardly establish a scholarly journal associated with its annual meeting. However, this work underscores the complicated scholarly ecosystem that an association enters when publishing a journal. The social sciences’ scholarly literature exists in a related series of networks that could be described as a type of “audit culture.” Within audit culture, two major academic publishers, Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, have established competing, yet strikingly collinear, journal metrics systems: Scopus and Web of Science, respectively. These and other bibliometrics systems are used to assess, order, and rank the supposed value of a researcher’s work. …

Rethinking Greece: Despina Lalaki On Hellenism, State-Building, Archaeology And The "Democratic West", Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Collective Influence Algorithm To Find Influencers Via Optimal Percolation In Massively Large Social Media, Flaviano Morone, Byungjoon Min, Lin Bo, Romain Mari, Hernán A. Makse

Publications and Research

We elaborate on a linear-time implementation of Collective-Influence (CI) algorithm introduced by Morone, Makse, Nature 524, 65 (2015) to find the minimal set of influencers in networks via optimal percolation. The computational complexity of CI is O(N log N) when removing nodes one-by-one, made possible through an appropriate data structure to process CI. We introduce two Belief-Propagation (BP) variants of CI that consider global optimization via message-passing: CI propagation (CIP) and Collective- Immunization-Belief-Propagation algorithm (CIBP) based on optimal immunization. Both identify a slightly smaller fraction of influencers than CI and, remarkably, reproduce the exact analytical optimal percolation threshold obtained in …

Archives, Education, And Access: Learning At Interference Archive, Bonnie Gordon, Lani Hanna, Jen Hoyer, Vero Ordaz

Publications and Research

Archives are a tool for education and the access policy of an archive affects what kind of education takes place in its space. In this paper, we describe how Interference Archive (IA), a community archive in Brooklyn, New York, provides access through an open stacks policy and experiential learning, which allows for unique educational opportunities. These methods of providing access are intended to subvert representational power, allowing visitors, donors, and volunteers to take part in deciding how histories are told, how materials are accessed, and how the collection is re-used as a resource for learning about contemporary and historical social …

A Comparison Of Cepstral Coefficients And Spectral Moments In The Classification Of Romanian Fricatives, Laura Spinu, Jason Lilley

Publications and Research

In this paper we explore two methods for the classification of fricatives. First, for the coding of the speech, we compared two sets of acoustic measures obtained from a corpus of Romanian fricatives: (a) spectral moments and (b) cepstral coefficients. Second, we compared two methods of determining the regions of the segments from which the measures would be extracted. In the first method, the phonetic segments were divided into three regions of approximately equal duration. In the second method, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) were used to divide each segment into three regions such that the variances of the measures within …

Incorporating Ethical Consumption Into Electronic Device Acquisition: A Proposal, Jennifer Poggiali

Publications and Research

This essay proposes that librarians practice ethical consumption when purchasing electronic devices. Though librarians have long been engaged with environmentalism and social justice, few have suggested that such issues as e-waste and sweatshop labor should impact our decisions to acquire e-readers, tablets, and other electronics. This article presents a philosophical framework for evaluating the ethics of these acquisitions, as well as guidelines for librarians considering specific purchases. Ultimately, the article argues that librarians should consider curtailing the purchase of new electronics on the basis of the environmental and social justice impact of the manufacture and disposal of such devices.

The Cradle Of Democracy And The Longue Durée Of A Crisis: Some Thoughts From The Perspective Of Historical Sociology, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

The relationship between Modern Greece and the West has always been a complex and tortuous one. Greece as “the cradle of democracy” – a construct at the intersection of western modernity’s political imaginary and Greek national identity – a terribly familiar and powerful cliché which to a great extent, still today, informs our imagination and politics has been at the heart of this relationship. It is rather a truism to suggest that democracy lies at the political core of the civilization that the West insists offering to the rest of the world, yet we tend to forget that this is …

Performing Ourselves At The Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This interview sits alongside an extended version edited for Amanda Curreri’s solo exhibition, The Calmest of Us Would be lunatics, which took place from January 21–May 8, 2016, at Rochester Art Center, in Rochester, Minnesota. Curreri dug through the archival collection of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the country, and their journal, The ladder, at the Tretter Collection in LGBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. The exhibition is titled after a line in Emily Dickinson’s 1877 letter to Elizabeth Holland which reads, “Had we the first intimation of the Definition of Life, the calmest of …

Modes Of Mindfulness: Prophetic Critique And Integral Emergence, David Forbes

Publications and Research

As mindfulness becomes more secular and popular, there are more arguments about its purpose and use value. Because of its disparate uses, many proponents of any one side often talk past each other and miss their mark. This paper employs an integral meta-theory that accounts for subjective, inter-subjective, objective, interobjective, and developmental perspectives on mindfulness. This helps categorize modes of mindfulness in order to clarify their purposes and functions within a society characterized by neoliberal principles and structures. It adopts the standpoint of a prophetic critique similar to those critiques of McMindfulness and insists on the inseparability of both universal …

At Last, A Good, Long Look At Open Access For The Humanities, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

Book review of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future by Martin Paul Eve, published by Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Durable Collaborations: The National Forum On Youth Violence Prevention, Kathleen A. Tomberg, Jeffrey A. Butts

Publications and Research

In 2012, the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College began to publish the results of an assessment conducted between Summer 2011 and Summer 2012. The project conducted surveys and measured the effectiveness of the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention. In 2016, with the support of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the research team tracked perceptions and opinions in each community involved in the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention.

Communication Practices In The Us And Syria, Rebecca S. Merkin, Reem Ramadan

Publications and Research

This study highlights Syrian communication practices using comparative tests with the United States communication as a baseline. Additionally, theoretical findings on individualism and collectivism theory are extended to include findings from Syria. Multivariate Analysis of Covariance was used to test culture’s effect in demographically similar (in age, SES, and education) student convenience samples, with the covariate communication adaptability, on dependent variables: empathy, social confirmation, social composure, friendships, non-verbal immediacy, social self-efficacy, and general self-efficacy. Results indicated that Syrians possess more empathy, social confirmation, and perceived general self-efficacy in comparison to U.S. citizens who have greater social composure, friendships, non-verbal immediacy …

Intertemporal Poverty Among Older Americans, Gulgun Bayaz-Ozturk, Sean Macdonald

Publications and Research

This study uses aggregate intertemporal poverty indices proposed by Gradin, Del Rio, and Canto (2012) to measure poverty among older American households of different races from 2001 through 2009 employing data from the Health and Retirement Study. The findings indicate that the incidence of intertemporal poverty is higher among Black and Hispanic households and that it is also more intense and of longer duration. In our investigation of antipoverty effects of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, we find that the program has a significant impact in reducing intensity and inequality of poverty among poor populations. However, it does not significantly …

The Financial Implications Of Merging Proactive Cctv Monitoring And Directed Police Patrol: A Cost-Benefit Analysis., Eric L. Piza, Andrew M. Gilchrist, Joel M. Caplan, Leslie W. Kennedy, Brian A. O'Hara

Publications and Research

Objectives: This study presents a cost–benefit analysis of an intervention pairing proactive CCTV monitoring with directed police patrol in Newark, NJ. A recent randomized control trial found that the strategy generated significant crime reductions in treatment areas relative to control areas. The current study focuses on the financial implications of the experimental strategy through a cost–benefit analysis.

Methods: The study begins by measuring the costs and benefits associated with the experimental strategy, the findings of which can inform agencies with existing CCTV infrastructure. Follow-up analyses measure the costs and benefits of the intervention for agencies absent existing CCTV infrastructure, meaning …

Editorial: The Temporal Dynamics Of Cognitive Processing, Timothy M. Ellmore, Peter F. Dominey, John F. Magnotti

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Venlafaxine Treatment Reduces The Deficit Of Executive Control Of Attention In Patients With Major Depressive Disorder, Yanghua Tian, Jing Du, Alfredo Spagna, Melissa-Ann Mackie, Xiaosi Gu, Yi Dong, Jin Fan, Kai Wang

Publications and Research

Attention plays an essential role in supporting other cognitive functions and behavior, and disturbance of attention is one of the most common symptoms in major depressive disorder (MDD). Although treatment with venlafaxine for MDD symptoms has been shown to reduce deficits in cognition and emotion regulation, it remains unclear whether venlafaxine improves specific attentional functions. We used the Attention Network Test to measure the attentional functions of alerting, orienting, and executive control before and after treatment with venlafaxine in patients with MDD compared to untreated healthy controls. Before treatment, the MDD group showed a selective impairment in alerting and executive …