Youth Voice and the Promise and Peril of Affirmative Governmentality: An Analysis of New York City’s Borough Student Advisory Councils

This study addresses civil society and the state’s shifting approach towards the incorporation of youth in governmental decision-making since the 1990s, and the recent ascendance of youth voice councils as a method of civic engagement. It uses the New York City Youth Leadership Council Initiative and the Borough Student Advisory Councils as case studies. Relying on the author’s ethnographic participant observation and youth-voice frameworks, the paper provides an analysis of the individual, organizational and systems level effects of the New York Department of Education’s BSAC program. Further, the paper discusses affirmative governmentality as a lens through which to critically examine the use of youth councils and youth voice initiatives. The NYC case suggests that, even as youth voice expands in municipal government, it does so in narrow, scripted ways-- forwarding a model of affirmative governmentality in the process. The analysis raises questions about the opportunities and limits of youth councils as strategies for meaningful youth politicization

The Effect of Unique Labels on Face Perception in Infancy

Faces are universally important for a variety of reasons, ranging from identifying individuals to conveying social information. During the first year of life, infants’ experience with commonly encountered face groups shapes how infants perceive familiar and unfamiliar faces. Between 6 and 9 months of age, infants become worse at differentiating among individual faces from unfamiliar face groups (e.g., other-species faces), a process known as “perceptual narrowing”. Labeling faces from a previously unfamiliar face group has been found to promote individual-level differentiation, as well as expert neural processing for the face group. However, it is currently unclear what influences individual-level labels have on face perception at the neural level during the label learning process. The current study investigated effects of individual labels on neural responses to a previously unfamiliar face group by providing in-lab training experience and recording two types of neural responses – event-related potentials and steady state visual evoked potentials – during and immediately after label-face learning. Results indicate that 6- and 9-month-old infants use labels to learn about unfamiliar faces in different ways, such that labels impact face processing earlier in the learning period and across more stages of processing in older versus younger infants. Additionally, at 9 months, infants still differentiate among exemplars within an unfamiliar face group, and brief individuating experience localizes processing over face-related brain regions. The results of this study contribute to our understanding of what infants gain from a single labeling experience and how neural responses related to face processing change with learning and across the first year of life

The Broken Home or Broken Society: A Sociological Study of Family Structure and Juvenile Delinquency

Despite the great interest in the relationship between family structure and delinquent behavior generally, very little agreement among researchers as well as the general public has been reached on the issue to this day. The present study examines whether family structure plays a role in juvenile delinquency. More precisely, it explores whether single parents are more likely to have their adolescent children involved in delinquency than are two parents. This analysis does not support the structural hypotheses, which argues that single parents have children who are at an increased risk of being involved in delinquent behavior. While these findings provide further evidence that children living with single parents are not at an increased risk of being involved in delinquent behavior, additional research is needed to further evaluate the causes and risks associated with involvement in delinquent behavior

Synthetizing hydrodynamic turbulence from noise: formalism and applications to plankton dynamics

We present an analytical scheme, easily implemented numerically, to generate synthetic Gaussian 2D turbulent flows by using linear stochastic partial differential equations, where the noise term acts as a random force of well-prescribed statistics. This methodology leads to a divergence-free, isotropic, stationary and homogeneous velocity field, whose characteristic parameters are well reproduced, in particular the kinematic viscosity and energy spectrum. This practical approach to tailor a turbulent flow is justified by its versatility when analizing different physical processes occurring in advectely mixed systems. Here, we focuss on an application to study the dynamics of Planktonic populations in the ocean

Evaluating the performance of survey-based operational management procedures

The design and evaluation of survey-based management strategies is addressed in this article, using three case-study fisheries: North Sea herring, Bay of Biscay anchovy and North Sea cod, with a brief history and the main management issues with each fishery outlined. A range of operational management procedures for the case study stocks were designed and evaluated using trends that may be derived from survey indices (spawner biomass, year-class strength and total mortality) with an array of simple and more structured observation error regimes simulated. Model-free and model-based indicators of stock status were employed in the management procedures. On the basis of stochastic stock-specific simulations, we identified the following key determinants of successful management procedures: (i) adequate specification of the stock-recruit relationship (model structure, parameter estimates and variability), (ii) knowledge of the magnitude and structure of the variation in the survey indices, and (iii) explication of the particular management objectives, when assessing management performance. More conservative harvesting strategies are required to meet specified targets in the presence of increasing stochasticity, due to both process and observation error. It was seen that survey-based operational management procedures can perform well in the absence of commercial data, and can also inform aspects of survey design with respect to acceptable levels of error or bias in the surveys