Finding Meaning in the Flag: Rebel Flag

I’m sure that as fans of history, at some point in your pursuit of knowledge, you have either read or heard the phrase “language is key”. This is something my professors have harped on, class after class, explaining that the way we talk about things shapes the way they are viewed. This lesson holds true for the Union perspective of the Confederate flag during the war. In all the documents written by Northerners that I looked over for this post, I did not come across a single mention of the “Confederate flag.” This was because the flag was pretty consistently, and intentionally, known as the “rebel flag.” This term was used for each subsequent version of the flag, showing that each of the flags had the same meaning for Northerners, regardless of the changing design

Policy and Practice Brief: Conducting Outreach to Transition-Aged Youth; Strategies for Reaching Out to Youth with Disabilities, Their Families, and Agencies that Serve Them

This brief focuses on strategies for assisting Benefits Planning, Assistance and Outreach Programs and Protection and Advocacy Projects in conducting outreach to transition-aged youth. Practical applications are identified and resources are provided to assist projects in reaching this untapped population

After Over-Privileged Permissions: Using Technology and Design to Create Legal Compliance

Consumers in the mobile ecosystem can putatively protect their privacy with the use of application permissions. However, this requires the mobile device owners to understand permissions and their privacy implications. Yet, few consumers appreciate the nature of permissions within the mobile ecosystem, often failing to appreciate the privacy permissions that are altered when updating an app. Even more concerning is the lack of understanding of the wide use of third-party libraries, most which are installed with automatic permissions, that is permissions that must be granted to allow the application to function appropriately. Unsurprisingly, many of these third-party permissions violate consumers’ privacy expectations and thereby, become “over-privileged” to the user. Consequently, an obscurity of privacy expectations between what is practiced by the private sector and what is deemed appropriate by the public sector is exhibited. Despite the growing attention given to privacy in the mobile ecosystem, legal literature has largely ignored the implications of mobile permissions. This article seeks to address this omission by analyzing the impacts of mobile permissions and the privacy harms experienced by consumers of mobile applications. The authors call for the review of industry self-regulation and the overreliance upon simple notice and consent. Instead, the authors set out a plan for greater attention to be paid to socio-technical solutions, focusing on better privacy protections and technology embedded within the automatic permission-based application ecosystem

Collective Intelligence Analytics Dashboard Usability Evaluation

Online deliberations can reach a size where it is not possible anymore to quickly infer what is going on in a debate. This report presents results from the usefulness and usability evaluation of visualisations that aid the sense-making of large debates. Based on the results of the evaluations we prepared a set of recommendations to inform CI tool providers about the usefulness and usability of each visualisation

Training for success: A guide for peer trainers

[Excerpt] Training for Success: A Guide for Peer Trainers is a guide to help villagers, like you, teach others to operate a business like the one you operate. It was developed as part of the ILO project Alleviating Poverty through Peer Training (APPT). The project was designed to reduce poverty among people with disabilities in Cambodia by using village-based peer trainers to teach others. The purpose of this guide is to teach you, a possible peer trainer, how to teach others to replicate your business! The APPT project helped more than 950 people, mostly with disabilities, start businesses over a fi ve-year period. More than 200 peer trainers were involved. Many of the peer trainers also had disabilities. And, since the project paid special attention to women, most of the trainers and trainees were women, some with disabilities, some without. This guide was developed to help train peer trainers and is based on years of ILO experience. It was field-tested as part of a series of workshops for peer trainers conducted by the APPT project in the provinces of Siem Reap, Kompong Thom and Pursat in 2007. Training for Success: A Guide for Peer Trainers will be used by people like yourself who are already peer trainers or who want to start training others. Ideally, it should be used as part of a workshop that teaches you how to be a peer trainer

Conscious surgery: influence of the environment on patient anxiety

Aims: i) To investigate anxiety arising from the experience of the clinical environment during surgery under local/ regional anaesthesia and, ii) to uncover the specific aspects patients find anxiety provoking and possibly dissuade them from opting for such anaesthesia. Background: Operating theatres have historical been designed for safe, efficient surgery on the unconscious patient and not primarily designed for the care of the ‘awake’ patient. However, with the rise in day surgery, the quantity of surgery performed under local/ regional anaesthesia is increasing. Method: As part of a larger study investigating anxiety within modern elective day surgery, adult patients undergoing surgery and local/ regional anaesthesia (n=214) were provided with a questionnaire on the day of surgery for return by mail 24 - 48 hours following surgery. Findings: The experience of being awake, possibly feeling surgeon, seeing body cut open or surgery being more painful were anxiety provoking aspects. Utilising factor analysis ‘intra-operative apprehension’, ‘anaesthetic information provision and ‘health control’ were identified as central features. Moreover, when employing multiple regression, apprehension associated with the intra-operative experience and anaesthetic information provision were significantly associated with an increase in the overall level of anxiety. Conclusions: Although the surrounding clinical environment has previously been a cause of apprehension, the sensations associated with the physical act of surgery on the conscious self appear also to have a considerable influence. Focusing care upon managing patient intra-operative experience and providing anaesthetic information in advance may help limit anxiety and expel the apparent misapprehensions associated with conscious surgery

Awkward gestures

A consideration of how irreverent approaches to fashion illustration can open a space for more critical approaches to the form - challenging idealised representations of the body, bringing a sense of 'humanness' to fashion or by reflecting on what our preoccupation with fashion says about human nature in the 21st Century. The article focussed on the work of Helen Bullock, Florence Shaw and Damien Florebert Cuypers and included interviews with all three in reference to the article topic. This article was commissioned by Varoom! for their politics themed issue

The Mathematics of Information Science

This paper describes a course, The Mathematics of Information Science, which was taught at Towson University in Spring 1998, 1999, and 2000. This course is the junior level interdisciplinary course of the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation program. The effectiveness of the course in teaching problem solving techniques and abstract mathematical ideas is documented. The students constructed their own knowledge from laboratory experiences involving digital logic circuits. They were subsequently challenged to abstract this knowledge and to find ways to solve progressively more difficult problems using these digital logic circuits. The mathematics of encoding and decoding information constituted the major mathematical content of the course. This course is shown to be effective in introducing prospective elementary and middle school teachers to abstract mathematical ideas and problem solving techniques