Promoting Positive Youth Development by Examining the Career and Educational Aspirations of African American Males: Implications for Designing Educational Programs

African American males experience poor academic performance, high absenteeism at school, and are at increased risk of being involved in violence than other racial groups. Given that the educational outlook for African American males appears bleak, it is important to assess the aspirations of these adolescent males in order to find the gap between aspirations and educational attainment. In order to promote positive development within this population, it is essential that factors that affect African American males be identified. A survey was administered to male students attending elementary, middle, and high schools in a local school district. A cross-sectional study was conducted to examine the career and educational aspirations of African American males. A total of 473 males were surveyed: 45% African American, 22% Caucasian, 13% biracial, and 19% Other (including Asian American, Hispanic, Native American). The results revealed that African American males aspired to attend college at the same rate as other ethnic groups. Also, African American males were more likely to aspire to be professional athletes than males from other ethnic groups. Important factors to consider when designing a program are discussed as well as future research and limitations.     

Collaborative Decision Making in Urban Regeneration: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective

In this paper we examine the processes and participants in urban regeneration with a view to identifying the nature of collaborative decision making in a particular policy arena. Recognizing that the environment in which public managers operate is a complex nexus of agency, structure, environment, and feedback processes, we apply a complex adaptive systems (CAS) framework comprised of agents, rules, outcomes, decision factors, and processes within the public policy arena—in this case urban regeneration in Ireland—in order to explore collaborative decision making in the public domain. The CAS framework draws particular attention to self-organizing features of the system under study and to the emergence of agents, order (“rules”), and outcomes. Using this framework, we found that three of the six urban regeneration projects (“systems”) in our study featured the emergence of project specific agents as important facilitators of collaborative decision making and as key contributors to the expansion of system scope.     

Disconnection and resistance: anti-terrorism and citizenship in the UK

The corroding impacts of anti-terrorism measures on citizenship have been much discussed in recent years. Drawing on qualitative research from the UK, this article argues that citizens do indeed frequently feel that aspects of citizenship – such as rights, duties, identity claims and the ability to participate in the public sphere – have been significantly dampened by developments in this policy area. At the same time, however, participants in our research also articulated a number of strategies through which they or others have sought to resist the logics, exercise and impacts of anti-terrorism powers. These included voicing explicit opposition to particular measures, resisting ‘outsider’ or ‘victim’ subject positions, and a refusal to withdraw from established forms of political engagement. Whilst such resistance should not be overstated, we argue that these strategies emphasise the co-constitutive rather than linear relationship between public policy and citizenship. Anti-terrorism powers do indeed impact upon citizenship claims, for instance in the curtailment of formal rights. Equally, the everyday, lived, experiences and practices of citizenship contribute to, and help shape, the perceptions and understandings of anti-terrorism policy from within the citizenry     

Affect-ing discourse: towards an embodied discourse analytics

The contemporary retheorisation of affect is impacting on an increasingly wide range of disciplines/inter-disciplines in the human sciences. Of particular relevance for this paper are, on the one hand, the emphasis on embodiment and, on the other, the ideas of “flow”, “intensity” and “contagion”. Together, these challenge traditional views of affect as equivalent to emotion, emanating from the self and ending at the boundary of the self. Discourse studies has not yet been significantly influenced by the “affective turn” now taking place within social and cultural theory. It has largely maintained, albeit implicitly, the traditional view of affect. Yet, if all human interaction is inflected with affect, in the sense indicated above, a different model of discourse seems called for. This paper aims to make a contribution to the development of a new “affect-ed” discourse analytics by identifying a variety of linguistic and discursive phenomena that could contribute to such a project. We draw primarily on the work of linguistics, bringing to notice a range of phenomena that may be unfamiliar either because of their technicality or because of the problematic status of linguistics in much cultural theory. The paper proceeds via a brief genealogical account of current affect theory to note a range of language phenomena that have been or can be read in terms of individual feeling and suggests an analysis of several forms of interaction re-read in terms of affective contagion. This section of the paper constitutes a preliminary inventory of components of an affect-ed discourse analytics.     

Creating an enabling environment for housing: Recent reforms in Mexico

Abstract

A recent World Bank policy statement on housing advocates the reform of government policies, institutions, and regulations to enable housing markets to work more efficiently. The policy statement identifies several instruments that governments can use to address housing market constraints, and to improve the performance of the housing sector as a whole, while paying particular attention to the needs of the poor.

In recent years, the government of Mexico has employed many of the enabling instruments described in the World Bank's housing policy statement. This article reviews the role of housing in the Mexican economy and the major reforms that the Mexican government has implemented to improve the operation of the housing market so that private lenders and home builders can play an expanded role in addressing the country's housing needs. The World Bank has supported the government's reform program, and since 1985 it has lent more than $1.2 billion to Mexico for low‐income housing projects.     

Achieving Economic Self-Sufficiency Through Housing Assistance: An Assessment of a Self-Sufficiency Program of the Housing Authority of Champaign County,Illinois

ABSTRACT

This study examines the early impact of a Local Self-Sufficiency (LSS) program of the Housing Authority of Champaign County (HACC), Illinois, on recipients’ total annual household income and earnings, and employment. In 2013, HACC, through LSS, mandated work requirements for households with working-age, able-bodied adult members and imposed sanctions on those who did not meet the program requirements. We find that, between 2012 and 2014, the LSS program led to an average increase of $2,283 in earnings for an individual household. In aggregate, this allowed HACC to serve an additional 98 (9%) LSS-eligible households for a year. Also, LSS-eligible households experienced an increase in the employment–adult ratio by 11.6 percentage points. The LSS program also had a larger impact for more economically disadvantaged households with no prior work history.     

Cross-validation of the Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ): an offender risk and need assessment measure on Australian, British, Canadian, Singaporean, and American offenders

The Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ) is a 72-item self-report measure designed to predict violent and nonviolent recidivism among adult criminal offenders. The results from using samples from Australia, Canada, England, Singapore, and two samples from the United States (North Carolina and Pennsylvania) indicated that (a) the SAQ has sound psychometric properties, with acceptable reliability and concurrent validity for assessing recidivism and institutional adjustment; (b) there were no significant differences among the scores of the White, African American, Hispanic, and Aboriginal Australian offenders on the SAQ; (c) there were no significant differences among offenders who completed the SAQ for research purposes versus offenders who completed it as part of a decision-making process. Results provided support for the validity of the SAQ to be used with the culturally diverse offenders involved in this research and provided further evidence that contradicts concerns that the SAQ as a self-report measure may be susceptible to lying, and self-presentation biases.     

The application of miniplex primer sets in the analysis of degraded DNA from human skeletal remains

A new set of multiplexed PCR primers has been applied to the analysis of human skeletal remains to determine their efficacy in analyzing degraded DNA. These primer sets, known as Miniplexes, produce shorter amplicons (50-280 base pairs (bp)) than standard short tandem repeat (STR) kits, but still utilize the 13 CODIS STR loci, providing results that are searchable on national DNA databases. In this study, a set of 31 different human remains were exposed to a variety of environmental conditions, extracted, and amplified with commercial and Miniplex DNA typing kits. The amplification efficiency of the Miniplex sets was then compared with the Promega PowerPlex 16 system. Sixty-four percent of the samples generated full profiles when amplified with the Miniplexes, while only 16% of the samples generated full profiles with the Powerplex 16 kit. Complete profiles were obtained for 11 of the 12 Miniplex loci with amplicon sizes less than 200 bp. These data suggest smaller PCR amplicons may provide a useful alternative to mitochondrial DNA for anthropological and forensic analysis of degraded DNA from human skeletal remains.     

DNA analysis of digested tomato seeds in stomach contents

Examination of stomach contents is one of the important steps in medical legal autopsy. Vegetative materials such as stems, roots, and seeds in stomach contents can be valuable evidence for providing investigative leads in death investigation. Currently, the identification of plant materials relies on microscopic and morphologic examination. We have found that many seeds are often protected from acid degradation during stomach digestion by their tough exterior seed coat. Tomato seeds were selected as a model system to assess DNA analysis and plant variety marker identification. The DNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism method was performed to determine if the DNA obtained from single seeds could be used for PCR analysis. From the amplified fragment length polymorphism results, some candidate markers for individualizing seeds from morphologically distinct tomatoes were identified. These data on DNA analysis of tomato seeds indicate amplified fragment length polymorphism is a viable procedure for the individualization of seeds from stomach contents in forensic investigations.