The Economic Status of Blacks in Boston

In recent years, special attention has been given to problems of racism in Boston. Without question, highly publicized steps have been taken by civic, business, religious, and neighborhood groups to combat racism, bigotry and discrimination. Frequently, these initiatives have also been supported by municipal and state governments or administrations. Strategies for improving the racial climate in Boston, initiated by the Covenant for Racial Justice, the Boston Committee, the Coalition for a Better Boston, and now, the newly created PARTNERSHIP, as well as some pronouncements of Mayor Flynn and Governor Dukakis administrations must be applauded. However, despite such courses of actions, there is convincing evidence to support the contention that the roots of racial and ethnic discrimination have not been fully addressed. Further, there exists a telling discontinuity between rhetoric and demonstrated success in alleviating the basic problems of racial discord and race-based exclusion from the social and economic infrastructure of the Boston community

Dynamics of Minority Education: An Index to the Status of Race and Ethnic Relations in the United States

Throughout this century scholars and legal experts have devoted special attention to the issue of race and ethnicity as a determinant of life chances in the United States. Some of the more influential treatises in the social and behavioral sciences, many of which have become classics, addressed fundamental, derivative (and often more compelling) extensions of race and ethnicity. They focused on such topics as race-based group dominance, ethnic stratification, structural inequality based upon racial or ethnic identification, beliefs in inherent racial superiority and status privilege, class exploitation, the nature of prejudice, and the maintenance of power over groups defined as subordinate in an ethnically and racially stratified social system. All of these themes are clearly related to the current status of minorities in higher education

The text compositional architecture of university lectures: an exploration of genre and periodicity in spoken academic discourse

This thesis explores the text-compositional options that are available for the construction of university-style lectures. In doing so, it employs techniques developed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to investigate how lectures are structured in terms of “genre” and the related issue of what is termed “hierarchy of periodicity”. It applies these techniques to the analysis of a small selection of university lectures to explore the ways in which, and the degree to which, these texts are structured as genres and the extent to which they are simultaneously structured by waves of foreshadowing and reiteration (or periodicity). As to the possible conclusions that might be reached from this type of analysis, this thesis will propose that the principles of “hierarchy of periodicity” and “genre complexes” are likely to be important options for structuring in university lectures, since all of the texts analyzed were found to be structured by such mechanisms. It will also proposes that lectures, although forms of speech, are structured in ways that are closer to forms of writing and that lectures as a set of texts can be categorized by the extent to which they display or do not display, the text-compositional arrangements of such (written) texts

Middle School Principals’ Perception of the Effect of Technology on Job Effectiveness

The use of computers and computer-based applications is prevalent in schools, from the classroom to the principal’s office. This study of middle school principals in Virginia and West Virginia addressed the following eight questions: (a) What computer technology applications are available to middle school principals? (b) What are the perceived levels of abilities of the middle school principal in regard to computer and keyboarding skills? (c) To what extent do differences exist in the skill levels of principals in demographic groupings? (d) To what extent are applications and programs used by middle school principals? (e) Is there a difference in usage among principals of different demographic groups? (f) Which administrative tasks are the most likely to be related to computer technology? (g) How do principals perceive computer technology affects their ability to perform specific job responsibilities? and (h) To what extent do differences in perception of how job effectiveness is affected by technology exist among middle school principals of different demographic variables? The study determined that principals overwhelmingly found the use of computer technology made them more effective administrators and the perceptions are consistent through a variety of demographic areas including age, gender, education, and years of experience. This study found Internet usage, e-mail communications and word processing applications to be computer applications most used by administrators. The study found that principals most often used the computer for writing, gathering data, and planning work schedules; the administrative responsibilities most related to technology were discipline, staff communications, and attendance. The study also found that principals have access to computer technology at school and at home, but only 46% of the principals could access the school/district network away from the school setting. Principals stated that they had been using the computer at work throughout their careers, and the highest rates of weekly usage were 6-10 hours a week and 16-20 hours per week

Neuronal Responses to Water Flow in the Marine Slug Tritonia diomedea

The marine slug Tritonia diomedea mustrely on its ability to touch and smell in order to navigate because it is blind. The primaryfactor that influences its crawling direction is the direction of water flow (caused bytides in nature). The sensory cells that detect flow and determine flow directionhave not been identified. The lateral branch of Cerebral Nerve 2 (latCeN2) has beenidentified as the nerve that carries sensory axons to the brain from the flow receptors inthe oral tentacles. Backfilling this nerve to the brain resulted in the labeling of a numberof cells located throughout the brain. Most of the labeled cells are concentrated in the cerebral ganglion where the nerve enters thebrain. The medial and lateral branches of CeN2 were backfilled for comparison of thepattern of cells from each nerve. A map of the cells innervated by latCeN2 reveals thelocation of the stained cells. Extracellular recording from latCeN2 revealed itsinvolvement in the detection of water flow and orientation. The nerve becomes activein response to water flow stimulation. Intracellular recordings of the electricalactivity of these cells in a live animal will be the next step to determine if these cells arethe flow receptors

Youth and Jobs: A Bibliography of Publications, 1980-1986, with Selected Annotations

This working bibliography of publications on youth employment and unemployment covers the period between 1980 and mid-1986. It is designed to be of assistance to researchers seeking a reference tool that may facilitate their research and/or expedite efforts to review recent literature on the complex subject of youth employment, unemployment and outreach initiatives intended to address the problem. The areas encompassed by this document attest to the magnitude and scope of the problem of moving young people into the labor market. Assuming a need to be able to work through the maze of studies on youth and work, a plan of action was pursued. This plan is explicated in the organization of this document which is divided into three sections

Amelia II: A Program for Missing Data

Amelia II is a complete R package for multiple imputation of missing data. The package implements a new expectation-maximization with bootstrapping algorithm that works faster, with larger numbers of variables, and is far easier to use, than various Markov chain Monte Carlo approaches, but gives essentially the same answers. The program also improves imputation models by allowing researchers to put Bayesian priors on individual cell values, thereby including a great deal of potentially valuable and extensive information. It also includes features to accurately impute cross-sectional datasets, individual time series, or sets of time series for different cross-sections. A full set of graphical diagnostics are also available. The program is easy to use, and the simplicity of the algorithm makes it far more robust; both a simple command line and extensive graphical user interface are included

A Unified Approach to Measurement Error and Missing Data: Overview, Sociological Methods and Research

Although social scientists devote considerable effort to mitigating measurement error during data collection, they often ignore the issue during data analysis. And although many statistical methods have been proposed for reducing measurement error-induced biases, few have been widely used because of implausible assumptions, high levels of model dependence, difficult computation, or inapplicability with multiple mismeasured variables. We develop an easy-to-use alternative without these problems; it generalizes the popular multiple imputation (MI) framework by treating missing data problems as a limiting special case of extreme measurement error, and corrects for both. Like MI, the proposed framework is a simple two-step procedure, so that in the second step researchers can use whatever statistical method they would have if there had been no problem in the first place. We also offer empirical illustrations, open source software that implements all the methods described herein, and a companion paper with technical details and extensions (Blackwell, Honaker, and King, 2014b).Governmen