Nativity and Environmental Risk Perception: An Empirical Study of Native-Born and Foreign-Born Residents of the USA

This study examines the major differences between native-born and foreign-born residents of the United States on measures of environmental risk perception and risk attitudes. Hypotheses derived from the cultural theory of risk were tested. Discriminant analysis of the General Social Survey (GSS) and International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data was conducted using environmental and technological risk perception and attitudes modules. The results indicate that foreign-born respondents are more risk averse and skeptical about sources of information about environmental risks than their native-born counterparts. While there are some points of agreement, these groups exhibit dissimilar environmental risk perception on several measures. Native-born respondents scored significantly lower on risk perception and attitudes toward technological and environmental risks relative to their foreign-born counterparts. Methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed

Compatibility of state assignments and pooling of information

© 2015 American Physical Society. We say that two (or more) state assignments for one and the same quantum system are compatible if they could represent the assignments of observers with differing information about the system. A criterion for compatibility was proposed in [Phys. Rev. A 65, 032315 (2002)PLRAAN1050-294710.1103/PhysRevA.65.032315]; however, this leaves unanswered the question of whether there are degrees of compatibility which could be represented by some quantitative measure, and whether there is a straightforward procedure whereby the observers can pool their information to arrive at a unique joint state assignment. We argue that such measures are only sensible given some assumption about what kind of information was used in making the state assignments in the first place, and that in general state assignments do not represent all of the information possessed by the observers. However, we examine one particular measure and show that it has a straightforward interpretation, assuming that the information was acquired from a particular type of measurement, and that in this case there is a natural rule for pooling information. We extend this measure to compatibility of states for k observers and show that the value is the solution to a semidefinite program. Similar compatibility measures can be defined for alternative notions of state compatibility, including post-Peierls and equal support compatibilities

U.S. Cancer Statistics: Highlights from 2020 Mortality and Incidence with Comparison to 2019 Incidence to Assess the Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted health services, leading to delays and reductions in cancer screening, diagnosis, and reporting to some central cancer registries. This may have contributed to an observed decline in 2020 incidence for most cancer sites.Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) produce updated U.S. Cancer Statistics data. These data are the official federal cancer statistics for the United States. The U.S. Cancer Statistics provides cancer information about the U.S. population. Information about new cancer cases (incidence) comes from CDC\u2019s National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) and NCI\u2019s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program, and information about cancer deaths comes from CDC\u2019s National Center for Health Statistics. The latest data release includes information about new cancer cases and deaths through 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Soon after, stay-at-home orders, business and school shutdowns, and travel advisories were implemented in the United States to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Additionally, some health care systems reduced access to routine care. These measures, along with concern about getting COVID-19, interrupted cancer screening, diagnosis, and care as people postponed or deferred health care visits, particularly from March to May 2020.Cancer rates normally change from year to year, in part because of changes in screening test use, diagnostic practices, and treatment. In addition, some changes in 2020 may be from disruptions in cancer care caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reporting of cancer cases may have been delayed from disruptions in registry operations (for example, reduced access to medical records or central cancer registry staff reassigned to COVID-19 response efforts). Changes in incidence may be apparent immediately whereas changes in death rates may take years to see. This year\u2019s U.S. Cancer Statistics Highlights presents rates for new cancer cases and deaths occurring in 2020, with data from previous years as a comparison

Immigration-Related Worksite Enforcement: Performance Measures

[Excerpt] Over the past few years, the media have been filled with reports about worksite enforcement operations, commonly referred to as immigration raids. These operations represent the public face of efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to curtail the employment of unauthorized immigrants (illegal aliens). According to 2006 estimates, there are some 7.8 million unauthorized workers in the U.S. civilian workforce. DHS’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is responsible for Immigration-related worksite enforcement, or enforcement of the prohibitions on unauthorized employment in Section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). The INA §274A provisions, sometimes referred to as employer sanctions, make it unlawful for an employer to knowingly hire, recruit or refer for a fee, or continue to employ an alien who is not authorized to be so employed. Today, ICE’s worksite enforcement program is focused primarily on cases that involve critical infrastructure facilities and cases involving employers who commit “egregious violations” of criminal statutes and engage in worker exploitation. Employers who violate INA prohibitions on the unlawful employment of aliens may be subject to civil monetary penalties and/or criminal penalties. Criminal investigations may result in defendants being charged with crimes beyond unlawful employment and being subject to the relevant penalties for those violations. Various measures are available to examine the performance of ICE’s worksite enforcement program. They include Final Orders for civil monetary penalties, administrative fines, administrative arrests, criminal arrests, criminal indictments and convictions, and criminal fines and forfeitures. In recent years, ICE has generally focused less on administrative fines and more on administrative and criminal arrests, criminal prosecutions, and criminal fines and forfeitures. The data presented here show increases in these latter measures in recent years. At the same time, however, when considered in terms of the estimated size of the unauthorized workforce or the potential number of employers employing these workers in violation of the law, ICE’s worksite enforcement program can seem quite small. Enforcement activity by the Department of Labor (DOL) is also relevant to a discussion of federal efforts to curtail unauthorized employment. DOL, which is responsible for enforcing minimum wage, overtime pay, and related requirements, focuses a significant percentage of its enforcement resources on a group of low-wage industries that employ large numbers of immigrant—and presumably large numbers of unauthorized—workers. Related background information can be found in CRS Report RL33973, Unauthorized Employment in the United States: Issues and Options, and a discussion of related legislation can be found in CRS Report RL34204, Immigration Legislation and Issues in the 110th Congress. This report will be updated when new data become available

Irrigation water use and its effective efficiency in Portugal

The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected with high confidence that the conditions (drought and high temperatures) in the Southern Europe will worsen. It stated that this region that includes Portugal is already vulnerable and will experience a reduction in water availability, hydropower potential and crop yield and productivity. The evidence of such conditions have already struck Portugal when during the 2004-2005 hydrological year experienced one of its worst droughts in decades. Between June to September 2005, the whole country was classified as experiencing sever to extreme drought according to the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). At the same time, Portugal was developing its new Water Law based on the requirements of the so called Water Framework Directive of the European Union. Its Article 11 states that one of the basic and required measures is to promote efficient and sustainable use of water. As a consequence of these two factors, the Portuguese Government adopted a series of adaptation measures, one of them being a ten year National Program for Efficient Use of Water. This paper will present this program in its irrigation water use, analyse its effective efficiency and discuss advantages and disadvantages of the portfolio of measures that are being considered. Until recently, classical efficiency defined as the ratio of the beneficial output to input was mostly used to calculate irrigation water efficiency. But in this study, the effective efficiency (EE) indicator was used which is defined as the ratio of beneficial output to the effective demand. Beneficial output is essentially net evapotranspiration. The preliminary results show an EE of about 60% corresponding to an effective water demand of about 6.6 billion cubic meter per year. This quantity of water is more than 85% of total water demand in Portugal. The cost of supplying this amount of water is estimated to be about half a billion Euros per year resulting in about 200 millions of Euros of losses. Some specific results of two river basins namely the international Douro River Basin will be presented in this paper. The Program sets a goal of improving the EE to 65% to be achieved in 10 years by 2015. Four areas of intervention were proposed to achieve this goal: information and education, training and technical help, legislation and normalisation, and Measurement and conversion of equipments of water use

The WTO Comes to Dinner: U.S. Implementation of Trade Rules Bypasses Food Safety Requirements

A Special Report By Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch and Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. A review of U.S. government "system" audits of five nations (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Australia and Canada) reveals that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)'s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) deemed "equivalent" systems with sanitary measures that differ from FSIS policy, and in some cases, violate the express language of U.S. laws and regulations. Because FSIS has refused to respond to Public Citizen Freedom of Information Act requests for correspondence and other documentation regarding these equivalency decisions, it is impossible to determine what is the current status of these issues and whether they have been resolved by regulators. - The U.S. law requiring meat to be inspected by independent government officials was violated by Brazil and Mexico and they retained their eligibility to export to the United States. - The USDA's zero tolerance policy for contamination by feces was repeatedly violated by Australia, Canada and Mexico. - U.S. regulations requiring monthly supervisory reviews of plants eligible to export be conducted on behalf of USDA by foreign government officials were violated by Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Mexico, several of whom are seeking to avoid this core requirement of U.S. regulation. Monthly reviews are vitally important to remind the meat industry that the meat inspector who works the line in the plant is backed by the weight of the government and to double-check the work of meat inspectors on a regular basis. - Even though U.S. regulations requiring that a government official -- not a company employee -- sample meat for salmonella microbial contamination, the USDA approved company employees performing this task as part of an equivalency determination with Brazil and Canada. - Even though U.S. regulations require certain microbial testing to be performed at government labs, the U.S. approved testing by private labs as part of the equivalency determination with Brazil, Canada and Mexico. - Unapproved and/or improper testing procedures and sanitation violations have been re-identified by FSIS year after year for Australia, Brazil, Canada and Mexico, but the countries have retained their eligibility to export to the United States. - After its regulatory systems was designated "equivalent," Mexico began using alternative procedures for salmonella and E. coli that had never been evaluated by FSIS, yet the country retained its eligibility to import to the United States. - Australia and Canada were allowed to export to the United States while using their own methods and procedures for such matters as E. coli testing, postmortem inspection, monthly supervisory reviews and pre-shipment reviews while awaiting an equivalency determination from FSIS. - FSIS auditors and Canadian food safety officials continue to disagree about whether particular measures have already been found "equivalent" by FSIS, yet Canadian imports remained uninterrupted. - The regulatory systems of Brazil and Mexico have been rated equivalent even though the countries plead insufficient personnel and monetary resources to explain their inability to carry out all required functions

Workforce Investment Act: Labor Should Consider Alternative Approaches to Implement New Performance and Reporting Requirements

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In a period of significant budget constraints, it is more vital than ever for federal programs to have good performance information. The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 took a significant step in that direction by introducing greater accountability for employment and training programs than prior programs. WIA established performance measures to look at a broad array of participant outcomes such as job placement and retention, earnings, skill gains, and customer satisfaction. WIA also required 17 programs, funded by four different agencies, to centralize service delivery through a one-stop center system. More recently, as part of efforts to link program performance to the budget, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) introduced common performance measures--similar to some of the WIA measures--for most federally funded job training programs that share similar goals. The U.S. Department of Labor's (Labor) Employment and Training Administration (ETA) further defined the common measures for all programs it oversees and proposed a new, standardized reporting format, known as the ETA Management Information and Longitudinal Evaluation (EMILE) reporting system to facilitate reporting them. However, state workforce agencies and others raised substantial concerns about the timing and scope of the EMILE reporting system. Despite delaying EMILE, Labor recently took steps to move ahead with reporting changes for the common measures, requiring states to implement these changes by July 1, 2005. Given the importance of these issues and their potential impact on the quality of the performance data, Congress asked us to examine (1) states' concerns about implementing Labor's proposed EMILE reporting system and (2) the effect that the implementation of common measures and other new reporting changes might have on states' ability to collect data and report on WIA's performance.

Do Prejudice Concerns Undermine Intimacy in Cross-Group Interactions?

Race relations in the United States can seem like an intractable problem. Psychological research identifies one clear route to reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations: cross-group friendship. When individuals have close friends of other races, they develop more positive attitudes towards outgroup members and become less prejudiced toward those groups. However, creating cross-group friendships can be difficult. For example, majority group members (i.e., Whites) often experience anxiety about appearing prejudiced, which ironically deteriorates the quality of their cross-group interactions. Aside from anxiety, however, little is known about the mechanisms: How in particular does the concern of appearing prejudiced affect initial friendship formation? I recruited 69 White female undergraduate students and paired them each with a Black confederate. I randomly assigned participants to a threat or control condition. The experimenter told participants that some past participants felt their partners seemed racist (threat condition) or partners did not communicate clearly, e.g., had messy handwriting (control condition). Next, participants selected questions to ask their partner. These questions varied on several dimensions including how intimate and racially-charged they were as well as how likely they would elicit negative information, competence-related information, and warmth-related information. Finally, participants filled out self-report measures assessing interracial anxiety, interest in outgroup contact, self-protectiveness, social anxiety, internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS/EMS), and authenticity. I found mixed evidence in support of our hypotheses: those in the threat condition asked marginally less intimate questions (M = 2.71, SD = 0.29) compared to those in the control condition (M = 2.82, SD = 0.26), t(67) = -1.68, p = .098, 95% CI [-0.24, 0.02]. The effect of condition on intimacy did not depend on EMS: b = -0.01, SE = 0.06, 95% CI [-0.13, 0.10], t(68)= -0.22, p = .826, ß = -0.04. Interestingly, however, I did find clear differences by condition on the selection of competence-eliciting questions t(67) = -2.57, p = .013, 95% CI [-0.26, -0.03]. Those in the threat condition were less likely to ask questions that could reveal their partner's level of competence (M = 2.44, SD = 0.21) than those in the control condition (M = 2.58, SD = 0.25). Asking less intimate and competence-eliciting questions within cross-race interactions can cause less meaningful friendships to form between these groups, thus providing less opportunity for positive attitudes to be cultivated. This lack of opportunity can continue to fuel the racial segregation seen today, making race relations more difficult to manage. Understanding intergroup interactions can empower people to develop more meaningful cross-group friendships in their everyday lives and improve race relations as a whole.College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program: Undergraduate Research ScholarshipNo embargoAcademic Major: Psycholog

Implementation Choices for the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009

Synthesizes policy analyses and discussions with experts of provisions in the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act to strengthen outreach and enrollment and improve quality of care. Recommends steps to ensure effective implementation

Using Data to Drive State Improvement in Enrollment and Retention Performance

Outlines the RWJF Maximizing Enrollment program's core performance measures for Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program enrollment and retention, designed to assess state efforts to better utilize data to monitor and improve outreach and policy