Incoming Editor’s Statement

In this editor\u27s statement, I will share JPP&M\u27s editorial philosophy and mission with our readers, as well as important information regarding our Web site, new JPP&M activities, section editors, and special issues and conferences. The following JPP&M editorial philosophy and mission should be of interest to readers and all prospective contributors

Review of: It Just Ain\u27t Fair: The Ethics of Health Care for African Americans (Annette Dula & Sara Goering eds.)

Review of: It Just Ain\u27t Fair: The Ethics of Health Care for African Americans (Annette Dula & Sara Goering eds., Praeger 1994) About the editors and contributors, acknowledgements, bibliography, foreword by Mark Siegler, index, notes. L.C. 93-43780, ISBN 0-275-94494-8. [ 336 pp. Paper $19.95. P.O. Box 5007, Westport CT 06881-5007.

Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap

In the recent years Wikis have become an attractive platform for social studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns. However, contributions made to Geo-wikis_wiki-based collaborative mapping projects_ differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those who posses local knowledge about a specific area and therefore cross-platform studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two European capital cities. We categorise different type of temporal patterns and report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age. We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity patterns of Wikipedia.Comment: Submitte

Eliciting New Wikipedia Users' Interests via Automatically Mined Questionnaires: For a Warm Welcome, Not a Cold Start

Every day, thousands of users sign up as new Wikipedia contributors. Once joined, these users have to decide which articles to contribute to, which users to seek out and learn from or collaborate with, etc. Any such task is a hard and potentially frustrating one given the sheer size of Wikipedia. Supporting newcomers in their first steps by recommending articles they would enjoy editing or editors they would enjoy collaborating with is thus a promising route toward converting them into long-term contributors. Standard recommender systems, however, rely on users' histories of previous interactions with the platform. As such, these systems cannot make high-quality recommendations to newcomers without any previous interactions -- the so-called cold-start problem. The present paper addresses the cold-start problem on Wikipedia by developing a method for automatically building short questionnaires that, when completed by a newly registered Wikipedia user, can be used for a variety of purposes, including article recommendations that can help new editors get started. Our questionnaires are constructed based on the text of Wikipedia articles as well as the history of contributions by the already onboarded Wikipedia editors. We assess the quality of our questionnaire-based recommendations in an offline evaluation using historical data, as well as an online evaluation with hundreds of real Wikipedia newcomers, concluding that our method provides cohesive, human-readable questions that perform well against several baselines. By addressing the cold-start problem, this work can help with the sustainable growth and maintenance of Wikipedia's diverse editor community.Comment: Accepted at the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-2019

[Review of] Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. People of the Book: Holstein Thirty Scholars Reflect on their Jewish Identity

People of the Book is an important contribution to ethnic studies and identity politics. It is a dense and reflective collection of essays which defines Judaism in personal and scholarly contexts. As one of the contributors, Nancy Miller, says: It\u27s not easy to write about being Jewish (168). The editors divide the essays into four parts. After the introductory essay, Part 2, Transformations, examines how the authors\u27 activism grows out of their Jewish heritage. Negotiations, looks at Jewish definition in the context of other Jewish and non-Jewish communities, and Explorations, shows the relationship between being Jewish and pursuing a discipline. Meditations, is an application of previous themes to specific literary works. Certain concerns cross over all four sections to make the search for identity continuous and shared

“Doing something that’s really important”: meaningful engagement for teachers as a resource for transformative work with student writers in the disciplines.

[About the book] The editors and contributors to this collection explore what it means to adopt an "academic literacies" approach in policy and pedagogy. Transformative practice is illustrated through case studies and critical commentaries from teacher-researchers working in a range of higher education contexts—from undergraduate to postgraduate levels, across disciplines, and spanning geopolitical regions including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cataluña, Finland, France, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Key questions addressed include: How can a wider range of semiotic resources and technologies fruitfully serve academic meaning and knowledge making? What kinds of writing spaces do we need and how can these be facilitated? How can theory and practice from "Academic Literacies" be used to open up debate about writing pedagogy at institutional and policy levels

Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development (Review Article)

This is a large volume with around 300 entries and 130 contributors, mostly from the USA. The editors are child developmental psychologists. ‘Spiritual development’ is taken to be ‘aboutbecoming a whole person, someone who stands for something that defines and gives meaning to being human…There is religion without spirituality and spirituality without religion’ (p. xxiii). Religion is viewed as one route to spirituality, but not the only route. This article reviews the Encyclopedia entries, complains about many of the selection decisions (especially to promote belly dancing and crop circles and ignore Sikhism and the Bahai faith). It concludes that the combination of psychology and study of religions has not worked. It contains many worthwhile articles of broad interest on applied psychology, but extreme caution is needed regarding its entries on religion

Book review: food, power and agency by Jürgen Martschukat and Bryant Simon

In Food, Power and Agency, editors Jürgen Martschukat and Bryant Simon bring together contributors to explore how food, power and agency contribute to the formation of ‘culinary capital’ around the world. This is a rich and invigorating account of the forces shaping our everyday food and eating practices, both historically and in the present day, finds Gurpinder Lalli

Book review: green growth: ideology, political economy and the alternatives edited by Gareth Dale, Manu V. Mathai and Jose Puppim de Oliveira

In Green Growth: Ideology, Political Economy and the Alternatives, editors Gareth Dale, Manu V. Mathai and Jose Puppim de Oliveira bring together a range of contributors to challenge the green growth paradigm and outline alternative approaches. This is a rigorous and compelling book that Geoff Goodwin recommends to all those looking to better understand our current environmental crisis