What Makes a Great Science Experience? A Program Planning Checklist for Educators

The Science & Technology Program Work Team at Cornell University wanted to know what constitutes a fun, exciting, and successful science-based learning experience for young people. In 2002, 4-H Educators and youth were engaged in the Concept System process that generated 144 unique ideas. These ideas were distilled into 15 clusters, all of which linked to three principal elements of program design: Content, Context, and Delivery. Those results were translated into a checklist for planning science programs, available at . In 2005 and 2006, the team recommended adapting it to other interactive learning experiences and for program evaluation

The re-birth of the "beat": A hyperlocal online newsgathering model

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 754 - 765, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2012.667279.Scholars have long lamented the death of the 'beat' in news journalism. Today's journalists generate more copy than they used to, a deluge of PR releases often keeping them in the office, and away from their communities. Consolidation in industry has dislodged some journalists from their local sources. Yet hyperlocal online activity is thriving if journalists have the time and inclination to engage with it. This paper proposes an exploratory, normative schema intended to help local journalists systematically map and monitor their own hyperlocal online communities and contacts, with the aim of re-establishing local news beats online as networks. This model is, in part, technologically-independent. It encompasses proactive and reactive news-gathering and forward planning approaches. A schema is proposed, developed upon suggested news-gathering frameworks from the literature. These experiences were distilled into an iterative, replicable schema for local journalism. This model was then used to map out two real-world 'beats' for local news-gathering. Journalists working within these local beats were invited to trial the models created. It is hoped that this research will empower journalists by improving their information auditing, and could help re-define journalists' relationship with their online audiences

Citizen candidates under uncertainty

In this paper I add uncertainty about the total vote count to a “citizen candidate” model of representative democracy. I show that in a society with a large electorate, where the outcome of the election is uncertain and where winning candidates receive a large reward from holding office, there will be a two-candidate equilibrium and no equilibria with a single candidate. This work has benefited from valuable comments by Paul Healy, Morgan Kousser, Alejandro Saporiti, Al Slivinski, participants in a seminar in Princeton, and especially by Matt Jackson and Tom Palfrey. Their contribution is gratefully acknowledged