Australian votes in the making: a critical review of voter behaviour research in Australia

Raphaella Kathryn Crosby conducted a critical review of the theory and method of voter behaviour research, with a focus on the 2019 Australian federal election. She found there was little agreement or consensus among the research, and no common narrative of the election. Using a Grounded Theory approach she identified five distinct battlegrounds of the 2019 election, and proposed two new theories to explain seemingly illogical voter behaviour

"The Hangout was Serious Business:" Exploring Literacies and Learning in an Online Sims Fan Fiction Community

abstract: The purpose of this study is to explore the literacy practices members of an online fan community engage in to participate in the space and to question what learning happens through that participation. This dissertation is the product of a two-year virtual ethnographic study of The Sims Writers' Hangout (SWH), a discussion forum website established by fans of The Sims to support members' interests in creating and sharing Sims fan fiction. Affinity space theory informs an understanding of SWH's organization, and a definition of literacies as situated, social practices also frames the study. Data were collected following a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, which guided systematic observation and interactions with eight key informants. The data corpus includes hundreds of pages of discussion forum posts, member profiles, moderator-created norming texts, numerous digital, multimodal Sims fan fiction texts, virtual interview responses from informants, field notes, and additional virtual artifacts, such as informants' websites and Flickr® photostreams. Study results are presented within three separate manuscripts prepared for publication and presentation, each exploring different lines of inquiry related to SWH. Chapter 3 focuses on tensions visible in the forum discussions to argue for an expansion of affinity space theory that accounts for the “hanging out” members do in the space. Chapter 4 analyzes one informant's literacy practices using a Design perspective. This analysis reveals the collaborative nature of Sims fan fiction literacies. The final manuscript (Chapter 5) offers an analysis of SWH pedagogy using Bernstein's pedagogic device concept. Data illustrate how pedagogic discourse in this online, informal learning space aligns with and challenges Bernstein's theory. Finally, Chapter 6 offers conclusions about how these three analyses expand our understanding of adolescent literacies and 21st century learning. This chapter also contains implications for theory and practice, recommendations for future research, and reflections on lessons learned.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Curriculum and Instruction 201

A Letter of A. C. Van Raalte to Philip Phelps

A letter of A. C. Van Raalte to Philip Phelps in which he expresses his disagreement for the apparent support of the Union School, as action he deems dangerous to the support of Hope College. This Christian Community is rightly served on their dearest interest to become an appendix only to a political caucus....As long as people dance around the school-board you can do nothing with them.https://digitalcommons.hope.edu/vrp_1870s/1138/thumbnail.jp

End-to-End Secure Messaging with Traceability Only for Illegal Content

As end-to-end encrypted messaging services become widely adopted, law enforcement agencies have increasingly expressed concern that such services interfere with their ability to maintain public safety. Indeed, there is a direct tension between preserving user privacy and enabling content moderation on these platforms. Recent research has begun to address this tension, proposing systems that purport to strike a balance between the privacy of \u27\u27honest\u27\u27 users and traceability of \u27\u27malicious\u27\u27 users. Unfortunately, these systems suffer from a lack of protection against malicious or coerced service providers. In this work, we address the privacy vs. content moderation question through the lens of pre-constrained cryptography [Ananth et al., ITCS 2022]. We introduce the notion of set pre-constrained (SPC) group signatures that guarantees security against malicious key generators. SPC group signatures offer the ability to trace users in messaging systems who originate pre-defined illegal content (such as child sexual abuse material), while providing security against malicious service providers. We construct concretely efficient protocols for SPC group signatures, and demonstrate the real-world feasibility of our approach via an implementation. The starting point for our solution is the recently introduced Apple PSI system, which we significantly modify to improve security and expand functionality