Beacons In Brief

This second issue in P/PV's In Brief series focuses on the San Francisco Beacon Initiative and P/PV's recently released evaluation results. The Beacon Initiative established after-school programs in eight public schools in low-income San Francisco neighborhoods. P/PVs 36-month evaluation examined key developmental and academic outcomes. Beacons In Brief summarizes our findings and discusses their implications in the context of larger questions about the after-school field

Review of Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62 by Melvin G. Deaile

Review of Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62 by Melvin G. Deaile

Survey of the Reduviidae (Heteroptera) of Southern Illinois, Excluding the Phymatinae, With Notes on Biology

A survey of the nonphymatine reduviids of southern Illinois was con­ducted from April 1996 to November 1998. In addition to county distributions, information was collected on times of occurrence of adults and nymphs and associated habitats. These data were supplemented with label information associated with southern Illinois specimens housed in the Southern Illinois University Entomology Collection (SIUEC). Twenty-five species were collected during this survey. An additional six species housed in the SIUEC were collected previously in southern Illinois but not during the survey. Of the 31 species, nine are state records: Ploiaria hirticornis, Rocconota annulicornis, Sinea complexa, Microtornus purcis, Rasahus hamatus, Saica elkinsi, Oncocephalus geniculatus, Pnirontis languida, and Pnirontis modesta

Archaeological Investigations at the Wade (GC-38) and Estes (GC-49) Sites in the Sabine River Basin, Gregg County, Texas

Buddy C. Jones conducted extensive archaeological investigations in the 1950s and 1960s at many sites in the mid-Sabine River basin of East Texas, especially on Caddo sites of various ages in Gregg, Harrison, and Rusk counties. However, that work has not illuminated our understanding of the archaeology of the Caddo Indian peoples that lived along this stretch of the Sabine River as much as it could have, primarily because little of the work completed by Jones was ever published, or the results and findings shared with professional and avocational archaeological colleagues working in the region. The Caddo archaeology of the Gregg County stretch of the Sabine River, in particular, is poorly known by comparison with the archaeological record in the upper Sabine River or to the archaeological studies recently completed downstream in Harrison County at sites such as Pine Tree Mound (41HS15). To begin to develop a better appreciation of the Caddo archaeology in the mid-Sabine River basin, we have made a concerted effort to analyze and document collections obtained by Jones from Caddo sites in Gregg County and the surrounding region. In this article, we discuss the archaeological findings from the Wade and Estes sites discovered and investigated by Jones in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sites are near each other in the southeastern part of Gregg County. The Wade site is on a landform near the confluence of Peatown Creek and Dutchman Creek, northern-flowing tributaries to the Sabine River. The Estes site is on a large alluvial terrace on the north side of the Sabine River, across from the confluence of Dutchman Creek and the Sabine River This article focuses particularly on the excavations of portions of an ancestral Caddo house structure at the Wade site and the analysis of the substantial decorated sherd assemblages at both the Wade and Estes sites

Platforms, the First Amendment and Online Speech: Regulating the Filters

In recent years, online platforms have given rise to multiple discussions about what their role is, what their role should be, and whether they should be regulated. The complex nature of these private entities makes it very challenging to place them in a single descriptive category with existing rules. In today’s information environment, social media platforms have become a platform press by providing hosting as well as navigation and delivery of public expression, much of which is done through machine learning algorithms. This article argues that there is a subset of algorithms that social media platforms use to filter public expression, which can be regulated without constitutional objections. A distinction is drawn between algorithms that curate speech for hosting purposes and those that curate for navigation purposes, and it is argued that content navigation algorithms, because of their function, deserve separate constitutional treatment. By analyzing the platforms’ functions independently from one another, this paper constructs a doctrinal and normative framework that can be used to navigate some of the complexity. The First Amendment makes it problematic to interfere with how platforms decide what to host because algorithms that implement content moderation policies perform functions analogous to an editorial role when deciding whether content should be censored or allowed on the platform. Content navigation algorithms, on the other hand, do not face the same doctrinal challenges; they operate outside of the public discourse as mere information conduits and are thus not subject to core First Amendment doctrine. Their function is to facilitate the flow of information to an audience, which in turn participates in public discourse; if they have any constitutional status, it is derived from the value they provide to their audience as a delivery mechanism of information. This article asserts that we should regulate content navigation algorithms to an extent. They undermine the notion of autonomous choice in the selection and consumption of content, and their role in today’s information environment is not aligned with a functioning marketplace of ideas and the prerequisites for citizens in a democratic society to perform their civic duties. The paper concludes that any regulation directed to content navigation algorithms should be subject to a lower standard of scrutiny, similar to the standard for commercial speech