Resources for alternative assessment options

Researchsuggeststhatsocialmediaareleadingtoincreasedpoliticalac-tivity,saysJosephKahne,aprofessorofeducationatMillsCollege,inOak-land,Calif.,andchairmanoftheMacArthurFoundation’sResearchNet-workonYouthandParticipatoryPol-itics.

KaveriSubrah-manyam,aprofessorofpsychologyatCaliforniaStateUniversity,LosAnge-les.

“digitalnatives”—thegenera-tionthathasgrownuponline

makeiteasierandmoretemptingtocommitidentityfraudandhoaxes.

LarryRosen,aprofessorofpsychologyatCalifor-niaStateUniversity,DominguezHills

“TheNo.1problemisthattheUnit-edStatesdoesn’thavedata-protection”requirements,saysAliceMarwick,anassistantprofessorincommunicationandmediastudiesatFordhamUni-versityinNewYorkCity

nearly164millionAmer-icanswereusingsocialmedia,accordingtotheNewYorkCity-basedmedia-researchcompa-nyNielsen,andbyJuly2012thenumberhadrisen5per-cent,toabout172million.

THEISSUES

Tosome,suchdataminingendangerslong-cherishedprivacyrights,butsocialmediasupporterssayitisasmallpricetopayforthebenefitsofonlinesocializing.

Dosocialnetworkingsitesthreatenprivacyrights?

CharlesHarris,apo-liticalsciencemajorand2011graduateofWesternKentuckyUniversityHonorsCollege,inBowlingGreen,whoorga-nizedhislocaluniversitychapterofanationalpeaceandsustainabilitygroup

TheDigitalDivide,”McAfee,June2012,www.mcafee.com/us/about/news/2012/q2/20120625-01.aspx

2006Facebookopenstoanyoneage13orolder....Socialnetworkand“microblogging”siteTwitteropen

NewYork-basedSixDegrees.com—waslaunchedin1997

PopeBenedictXVIsendshisfirstTwittermessageduringhisweeklygeneralaudienceattheVaticanonDec.12,2012

1990byBritishtechnologyde-veloperTimBerners-Lee,

Boyd,Danah,andAliceMarwick

E-Personality

AStanfordUniversitypsychiatristrecountshisexperiencestreatingpeoplewhohavecreatedsocialmediapersonasthataremuchmoreadventurous,risk-taking,confident,sexyandcharismaticthantheirreal-lifepersonalities.Thosepersonasoftencauseproblemsintherelationships—bothonlineandoffline—oftheircreators

Forbackground,seeDanahM.BoydandNicoleB.Ellison,“SocialNetworkSites:De-finition,History,andScholarship,”JournalofComputer-MediatedCommunications,October2007,article11,http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

participatoryculture

LastSeptemberinEurope,Facebookturnedoffitsfacial-recognitionsoftware,whichlinksnamestophotographedfacesbasedonotherphotosthatusershavealready“tagged”withaname.

?

user-generatedcontent

knownasWeb2.0

socialnetworkingsite(SNS)

TheEuropeanUnionrecentlyrequiredsocialmediasitestoturnofftheirfacial-recognitiontechnology.

“Thecivilityargumentdoesn’ttellthewholestory,”saidEvaGalperin,internationalfreedomofexpressioncoordinatoratthenonprofitElectronicFrontierFoundation,whichadvo-catesforonlineprivacy.Forinstance,“uncivildiscourse[is]aliveandwellinvenueswithreal-namepolicies(suchasFace-book),”shesaid

Chronology

Sources:

SocialMediaEngageConsumers

Teensareshowing“adecreaseinrisktaking”frompreviousgenerationswhenitcomestoexpressingthem-selvesandinteractingwithotherpeo-ple,saysKatieE.Davis,anassistantprofessorattheUniversityofWash-ingtonInformationSchoolinSeattle

As Mia Zamora says, “Not thinking something is possible is indeed a failure of the imagination.” And, sometimes, the only way to imagine something is possible is to learn to look at the world from a different perspective. This attitude takes time and care to nurture.

online research help

One of the most significant reforms that did come out of the Commission was ending the policy of lifetime terms for police chiefs.

The cops in that case were ultimately held accountable, when federal prosecutors took up the case and secured convictions of four officers. And by some measures, the LAPD was transformed in the two decades that followed.

By Nicole Flatow

Protesters marching in August after the death of Michael Brown. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CHARLIE RIEDEL

ThinkProgress

Jill Nelson

Contents

Includes bibliographical references

265 pages ; 25 cm

an anthology

What About

Wolverton, Joe, II, JD

The New American

A Washington Post database of fatal police shootings nationwide has yielded a widely cited statistic:

Police officers have a lot of leeway in deciding whether to book people on certain charges. For instance, in some cities, nearly any minor pretext is enough for an officer to arrest a suspect on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. In New York, police are twice as likely to accuse suspects in misdemeanor drug cases of resisting arrest if the suspects are black.

Some economists have criticized the report.

Diamond Reynolds cries outside the governor's residence Thursday in St. Paul, Minn. Reynolds's boyfriend, Philando Castile, was shot and killed after a traffic stop by police last Wednesday. (Jim Mone/AP)

By Max Ehrenfreund and Jeff Guo

f, for instance, blacks use their lived experience with police asevidence that the world is discriminatory, then it is easy to understand why black youth investless in human capital or black adults are more likely to believe discrimination is an importantdeterminant of economic outcomes.

To date, very few police departments across the country either collectdata on lower level uses of force or explicitly punish ocers for misuse of these tactics

Yet, on the most extreme use of force { ocer-involvedshootings { we are unable to detect any racial dierences in either the raw data or when accountingfor controls

n non-lethal uses offorce, there are racial dierences { sometimes quite large { in police use of force, even after ac-counting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioralfactors at the time of the police-civilian interaction.

References

our fourth dataset contains a random sample of police-civilian interactions fromthe Houston police department from arrests codes in which lethal force is more likely to be justied:attempted capital murder of a public safety ocer, aggravated assault on a public safety ocer,resisting arrest, evading arrest, and interfering in arrest. Similar to the event studies above, thesedata come from arrests narratives that range in length from two to one hundred pages.

We use event sum-maries from all incidents in which an ocer discharges his weapon at civilians { including both hitsand misses { from three large cities in Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), six large Florida counties,and Los Angeles County, to construct a dataset in which one can investigate racial dierences inocer-involved shootings.

Stop and Frisk is a practice of theNew York City police department in which police stop and question a pedestrian, then can friskthem for weapons or contraband. The dataset contains roughly ve million observations.

e estimate the extent of racial dierences in police use of force using fourseparate datasets { two constructed for the purposes of this study

NBER Program

Working Paper

FORMOREINFORMATION

U.S.EnergyInformationAdministration

AmericanWindEnergyAssociation

April1,2011

THEISSUES

Supportersofwindenergyalsopointoutthatfargreaternumbersofbirddeaths—millionstotensofmil-lionsyearly—occurbecauseofpes-ticides,attacksbydomesticandferalcatsandcollisionswithwindows,ac-cordingtoFishandWildlifeServiceestimates

MANAGINGEDITOR:ThomasJ.Billitteritjb@cqpress.comASSISTANTMANAGINGEDITOR:KathyKochkkoch@cqpress.comCONTRIBUTINGEDITOR:ThomasJ.Colintcolin@cqpress.comASSOCIATEEDITOR:KennethJostSTAFFWRITERS:MarciaClemmitt,PeterKatelCONTRIBUTINGWRITERS:SarahGlazer,AlanGreenblatt,BarbaraMantel,TomPrice,JenniferWeeksDESIGN/PRODUCTIONEDITOR:OluB.DavisASSISTANTEDITOR:DarrellDelaRosaFACTCHECKER:MichelleHarris

BYDAVIDHOSANSKY

Source:“U.S.WindIndustryYear-End2010MarketReport,”AmericanWindEnergyAssociation,January2011,www.awea.org/learnabout/publications/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=508

DavidHosanskyisafreelancewriterintheDenverareawhospecializesinenvironmentalissues.HepreviouslywasaseniorwriteratCQWeeklyandtheFloridaTimes-UnioninJacksonville,wherehewastwicenominatedforaPulitzerPrize.HispreviousCQResearcherreportsinclude“FoodSafety”and“YouthSuicide

As long as private, regional projects keep getting stymied-and as long as Clack's vision for a national system remains hypothetical-that will continue to be true.

This hypothetical grid recalls the interstate highway system championed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

The most recent high-profile paper making this argument was published in January by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-tion and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Christopher Clack and col-leagues built a model to predict the long-term costs of putting all kinds of energy into the electrical system.

As Gates told the The Atlantic in November, "We need an energy mira-cle."

NE COLD EVENING in February 2008,

A spokeswoman for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas subsequently explained, "The wind died out. That happens."

A national system of electricity transmission could cut power-plant emissions by 80 percent.

BY VAUMIMI VARA

enewable and Sustainable EnergyReviews

RenewableEnergy

Why we still don’t understand the social aspects of wind power: A critique ofkey assumptions within the literature

Mhairi Aitken

The five key assumptions which will be critiqued are:1. The majority of the public supports wind power.2. Opposition to wind power is therefore deviant.3. Opponents are ignorant or misinformed.4. The reason for understanding opposition is to overcome it.5. Trust is key

enewable and Sustainable EnergyReviews

Wind power and the NIMBY-myth: institutional capacity andthelimited significance of public support.

References

may provide useful references forfuture debates relating to new or emerging energy technologies.

As such it is likely that publicperceptions and responses will continue to be of crucialimportance.

The criticisms expressed within this paper should not be takenas being only relevant to the academic literature. The assumptionspresented here have been shown to find their way into policy andpractitioner debates as well as planning debates around particularproposed wind power developments (as highlighted above inrelation to NIMBYism).

has aimed to draw critical attention to keyassumptions underpinning the extant literature relating to publicattitudes and responses to wind power

The majority of the public supports wind power.2. Opposition to wind power is therefore deviant.3. Opponents are ignorant or misinformed.4. The reason for understanding opposition is to overcome it.5. Trust is key.

The arguments presented in this section resonate with theliterature relating to Public Understanding of Science (PUS). ThePUS movement arose in response to a perceived threat to thelegitimacy of science resulting from a breakdown of public trust(Gregory and Miller, 1998).

More balanced descriptionsof wind farm opponents and supporters are provided byBarryet al. (2008),Ellis et al. (2007)andBell et al. (2005).Barry et al.(2008)conducted a rhetorical analysis of documents written byboth supporters and opponents of wind power and confirmedthat

A prominent example of this effect is the now widelydiscredited Not-In-My-BackYard (NIMBY) explanation. Accordingto NIMBY explanations of opposition to wind power develop-ments individuals or communities ‘favour wind power as anabstract concept but oppose wind power projects in their area’(Warren et al., 2005, p. 857).

It has been contended that new wind power developments arebecoming ever more difficult to realise and this is frequentlyattributed, at least partly, to localised public opposition to suchdevelopments (Barry et al., 2008;Bell et al., 2005;Devine-Wright,2007,Ellis et al., 2007;Peel and Lloyd, 2007)

To support thisassumption it routinely refers to opinion poll data or the findingsof surveys to suggest that public support for the technology is, ingeneral, high (for example;Barry et al., 2008;Bell et al., 2005among many others). Although there is some evidence to suggestthat this may be true (seeMcGowan and Sauter, 2005;POST,2007),

The literature relating topublic attitudes and responses to wind power is well-establishedand the assumptions identified within this literature haveimplications for how the technology is discussed in policy andpractice fields. Ultimately it impacts on how the technology isdeveloped and how opponents to its development are perceivedand responded to.

locking away “the most dangerous” prisoners in ultra-high-security facilities where they’re confined to their cells 23hours a day, receive few visitors and are escorted by severalguards during their brief, solitary exercise outings.Some 57 prisons in at least 44 states follow the ultra-isolation“supermax” model

2000 California voters approvedthe Substance Abuse and Crime Pre-vention Ac

Students exhibit different patterns of thinking skills and respond differently to what we do in our classes. As the following example demonstrates, even brief moments of conversation can reveal differences among students

Periodic attempts to bring attention to poverty through assuming poverty oneself—eating off a SNAP (food stamp) budget or sleeping outside—are regularly ridiculed as publicity stunts, but the impact on the participants is far from cosmetic.

Without a presence of poverty in their lives, politicians don’t come to witness or understand the realities on the ground—and perplexingly, few observers seem to advocate that this needs to change.

Consequently, America’s political elite is often woefully out of touch with economic reality for those living in poverty—or even those struggling to stay out of it.

Political office most often comes through compounding connections, where a more-than-middle-class family, influential college peers, work associates, and other social and religious communities all provide a network of resources that ensures the connected become the elected.

only 13 out of 783 members of Congress from 1999 to 2008 came from a “blue-collar” upbringing

Politicians ought to physically encounter the circumstances of their constituents, to observe the trials of the most needy, and most importantly to experience the conditions themselves.

Until larger economic trends are reversed, however, stopgap measures are the only resort.

It’s not surprising that many of the champions for the poor rely on personal experience.

We can’t expect effective and humane policy without representatives who understand, witness, and investigate the experience that they control.

The U.S. spends among the lowest on the poor per capita in the OECD, is the least effective at reducing poverty, and consequently, faces the largest poverty problem.

the likelihood of poor or recently poor representatives in a democracy is slim.

The increased economic segregation of American neighborhoods means that members of Congress are less likely to mingle with poor, though Democrats tend to represent districts with greater inequality (and greater wealth) than Republicans.

For the first time, more than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. Nearly 200 are multimillionaires. One hundred are worth more than $5 million; the top-10 deal in nine digits.

California Crisis

Quoted in “A Gathering Storm — ViolentCrime in America,” Police Executive ResearchForum, October 2006, p. 9, www.policefo-rum.org/upload/Gathering-Storm-PRINT-Final_110473745_1027200610304.pdf.

Should nonviolent drug offendersbe sent to prison?

Chronology

PrisonRape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA)

California prison situ-ation represents an extremeversion of what many pris-oners’-rights advocates andlaw-enforcement officials calla national crisis created by thenation’s incarceration boom

Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice

re-habilitation programs

Meanwhile, there has been a grow-ing movement to protect prisoners’ safe-ty, partly because some prisoners havebeen filing federal civil-rights lawsuitsclaiming their rights were violated byprison administrators who did not pro-tect them from rape.

The Sen-tencing Projec

Vera Institute of Justice

lawmakers cut fundingfor drug and mental-health treatmentprograms — both inside and outsideof prisons — despite the fact that ad-dicts and the mentally ill make up adisproportionate percentage of the na-tion’s inmates

Prison-reform advocates say the grow-ing crime statistics prove the nation’shigh incarceration rates — coupled witha trend away from prisoner educa-tion/rehabilitation programs — are notmaking society safer.

We’re not incarcerating everybodywho should be incarcerated,”

Jason DeParle

Pew CharitableTrusts projects

"It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens."