The Problem of Confirmation in the Everett Interpretation

I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they do not succeed in overcoming this incoherence

Included, but Deportable: A New Public Health Approach to Policies That Criminalize and Integrate Immigrants.

There has been a burst of research on immigrant health in the United States and an increasing attention to the broad range of state and local policies that are social determinants of immigrant health. Many of these policies criminalize immigrants by regulating the "legality" of their day-to-day lives while others function to integrate immigrants through expanded rights and eligibility for health care, social services, and other resources.Research on the health impact of policies has primarily focused on the extremes of either criminalization or integration. Most immigrants in the United States, however, live in states that possess a combination of both criminalizing and integrating policies, resulting in distinct contexts that may influence their well-being.We present data describing the variations in criminalization and integration policies across states and provide a framework that identifies distinct but concurrent mechanisms of deportability and inclusion that can influence health. Future public health research and practice should address the ongoing dynamics created by both criminalization and integration policies as these likely exacerbate health inequities by citizenship status, race/ethnicity, and other social hierarchies

Learner-centered social support: enhancing online distance education for underserved rural high school students in the United States

Over the past decade, federal programs in the United States have largely addressed the well-documented problem of differences in basic access to technology between rural schools and their suburban and urban counterparts. Consequently, rural schools are better able to prepare their students for post-secondary education and the workplace where digital literacy is essential. As technology access improves, online distance education (ODE) is seen as a solution to significant challenges faced by rural schools, including a lack of highly-qualified teachers and declining population. However, ODE has high attrition rates, partly because participants’ social needs are often neglected. Additionally, students' success depends on their abilities to engage in self-regulated learning, effective time management and self-reflection, skills that many high school students are still developing. This paper describes an experimental research study funded by the U.S. Department of Education, currently underway in rural high schools across the U.S. The research adds to a growing body of work that attempts to expand understanding of the digital divide. Increasingly, schools realise that this is no longer an issue of mere access to equipment; education technology projects should incorporate strategies that ensure the success of previously marginalised communities. Our intervention, based on the APA’s Learner- Centered Principles, involves training on-site facilitators to provide social support for students involved in ODE. Preliminary findings indicate that the intervention group has a significantly lower dropout rate