Give Me Shelter: Responding to Milwaukee County's affordable housing challenges

Few issues better capture the complex and controversial nature of urban problems facing Metropolitan Milwaukee than the issue of affordable housing. Encompassing matters of racial segregation, poverty and failed public-private partnerships, the Milwaukee metro area's struggle to provide a safe, decent and affordable supply of housing to low-income citizens has been a difficult one. Even before the national economic meltdown, countless reports documented the severe housing burden facing low-income citizens in Milwaukee County. That burden, combined with the scarcity of affordable housing in suburban parts of southeast Wisconsin, has cemented the region's place as one of the most racially segregated in the country. In today's economy, those problems have intensified

A Couples-based Approach to the Problem of Workless Families

The goal of this paper is to evaluate a “couples-based” policy intervention designed to reduce the number of Australian families without work. In 2000 and 2001, the Australian Government piloted a new counseling initiative targeted towards couple-headed families with dependent children in which neither partner was in paid employment. Selected women on family benefits (who were partnered with men receiving unemployment benefits) were randomly invited to participate in an interview process designed to identify strategies for increasing economic and social participation. While some women were interviewed on their own, others participated in a joint interview with their partners. Our results indicate that the overall effect of the interview process led to lower hours of work among family benefit recipients in the intervention group than the control group, but to greater participation and hours in job search and in study or training for work-related reasons. Whether women were interviewed with their partner or not had no effect on the level of economic and social activity of participants.

A Weaverian Analysis of the Secular Humanism/Christianity Arguments

Since the Renaissance, the unclearly defined movement known as Humanism has been a part of society. However, it is only recently that the movement itself has caused significant controversy. What is responsible for this sudden outbreak of humanism hysteria? Is it even to be classified as a problem? To many, especially the Catholic church and many fundamentalist groups, it presents an overt threat. A vital area of controversy centers around education and the fight between a religious-based curriculum and the more recent secular studies. The issues, it appears, are often obscured by the rhetoric. Indeed, Karl Wallace sees rhetoric as determining opinion or fact on any question of public doubt (1954, p. 127), but the basic problem is a lack of agreed-upon terms so the issues can be rationally resolved. In this treatise, the reach of humanism and its rhetoric into the schools was examined. As Donald Clark notes in Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (1957), rhetoric can serve to teach morals and ethics. As will be shown, this concept is one of the main battlegrounds between humanism and conservative Christianity. An examination of the Humanist Manifesto II, in terms of Weaver\u27s analysis, revealed the clash of god terms and devil terms in a distinctly secular document. Finally, an examination of the rhetoric involved provides insight into the basic ideology and purposes of humanists and their opponents. Examination of anti-humanist rhetoric helped define elements of humanism. Richard Weaver\u27s method of rhetorical analysis was used to diagnose the arguments of both sides to provide a more comprehensive picture of the rhetorical clashes between the two groups

A Weaverian Analysis of the Secular Humanism/Christianity Arguments

Since the Renaissance, the unclearly defined movement known as Humanism has been a part of society. However, it is only recently that the movement itself has caused significant controversy. What is responsible for this sudden outbreak of humanism hysteria? Is it even to be classified as a problem? To many, especially the Catholic church and many fundamentalist groups, it presents an overt threat. A vital area of controversy centers around education and the fight between a religious-based curriculum and the more recent secular studies. The issues, it appears, are often obscured by the rhetoric. Indeed, Karl Wallace sees rhetoric as determining opinion or fact on any question of public doubt (1954, p. 127), but the basic problem is a lack of agreed-upon terms so the issues can be rationally resolved. In this treatise, the reach of humanism and its rhetoric into the schools was examined. As Donald Clark notes in Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (1957), rhetoric can serve to teach morals and ethics. As will be shown, this concept is one of the main battlegrounds between humanism and conservative Christianity. An examination of the Humanist Manifesto II, in terms of Weaver\u27s analysis, revealed the clash of god terms and devil terms in a distinctly secular document. Finally, an examination of the rhetoric involved provides insight into the basic ideology and purposes of humanists and their opponents. Examination of anti-humanist rhetoric helped define elements of humanism. Richard Weaver\u27s method of rhetorical analysis was used to diagnose the arguments of both sides to provide a more comprehensive picture of the rhetorical clashes between the two groups

Taking Chances: The Effect of Growing Up on Welfare on the Risky Behavior of Young People

We analyze the effect of growing up on welfare on young people's involvement in a variety of social and health risks. Young people in welfare families are much more likely to take both social and health risks. Much of the apparent link between family welfare history and risk taking disappears, however, once we account for family structure and mothers' decisions regarding their own risk taking and investment in their children. Interestingly, we find no significant effect of socio-economic status per se. Overall, we find no evidence that growing up on welfare causes young people to engage in risky behavior.youths, welfare, risky behavior, socio-economic disadvantage

Educational Scaffolding for Students Stuck in a Virtual World

Virtual worlds provide students with educational opportunities to explore and have experiences that are difficult to provide in reality. However, ensuring that students stay motivated and on task is important if the learning goals are to be achieved. Building on the findings of previous studies involving agent-based virtual worlds, adaptive collaborative learning and intelligent agents, we have designed an empathic intelligent virtual agent that provides educational scaffolding to encourage and support the students to understand what they are learning with less frustration. We have identified models of ‘stuck’ behaviour and corresponding empathic response patterns that we have incorporated into the behaviours of the intelligent virtual agents in the XXX Virtual World for science inquiry

The company is here to do goodness to us:Imaginaries of development, whiteness, and patronage in Sierra Leone's agribusiness investment deals

In this paper, we consider how references to ‘development’ are deployed to convince communities to lease their land to agribusiness investors in Sierra Leone. We argue that promises of development made by companies resonate with the aspirations for development that communities already have. The already existing ‘imaginaries’ of development, actual conditions of economic hardship and the material relations of power bound up in who does the ‘asking’ for land mean that communities need little convincing to give their land. Imaginaries of development are effective not only because of the promises of development themselves, but also because of how these imaginaries function through the role of coloniality – and ‘whiteness’ in particular. Analyses that focus only on the coercive power of elites in making land deals miss the degree to which companies’ promises of development fit into already existing imaginaries of a more prosperous future

Foreword: Rise of the Machines: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and the Reprogramming of Law

This Foreword provides an overview of Rise of the Machines: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and the Reprogramming of Law, a symposium hosted by the Fordham Law Review and cosponsored by the Fordham Law School’s Neuroscience and Law Center