The Cultural Politics of Homeland Security: Negotiating Muslim Identities After Sept. 11

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.This project is motivated by the premise that the experience of the Muslims in the U.S. after 9/11 can profoundly affect the effectiveness of U.S. homeland security policies and measures in the long run. The project seeks to understand how Muslim identities are negotiated in the especially hostile environment in the U.S. after 9/11, and how individual and community predicaments involved in such negotiations can be destabilizing without being properly understood and addressed at the level of national politics.Mershon Center for International Security Studiesproject summar

The random k-matching-free process

Let $\mathcal{P}$ be a graph property which is preserved by removal of edges, and consider the random graph process that starts with the empty $n$-vertex graph and then adds edges one-by-one, each chosen uniformly at random subject to the constraint that $\mathcal{P}$ is not violated. These types of random processes have been the subject of extensive research over the last 20 years, having striking applications in extremal combinatorics, and leading to the discovery of important probabilistic tools. In this paper we consider the $k$-matching-free process, where $\mathcal{P}$ is the property of not containing a matching of size $k$. We are able to analyse the behaviour of this process for a wide range of values of $k$; in particular we prove that if $k=o(n)$ or if $n-2k=o(\sqrt{n}/\log n)$ then this process is likely to terminate in a $k$-matching-free graph with the maximum possible number of edges, as characterised by Erd\H{o}s and Gallai. We also show that these bounds on $k$ are essentially best possible, and we make a first step towards understanding the behaviour of the process in the intermediate regime

HOW TO INCREASE MIGRANT RESILIENCE IN CANADA: WHAT THE LEGAL SYSTEM CAN DO TO HELP

Immigration is important to Canada. Migrants replenish our declining population, help drive our economy, and contribute to our labour market. By 2036, almost half of the Canadian population will be either first-generation or second-generation immigrants. While the migrant experience varies, it is recognized to be deeply challenging. Among these barriers is often the need to engage with the complex legal system during and after the settlement process. This paper uses the literature to better understand the benefits of migrants in Canada, concept of resilience, benefits of diversity in the workplace, and how law firms can leverage diversity to perform better. This paper demonstrates how law firms can benefit simultaneously while they help migrants foster higher levels of resilience by increasing their access to legal services. Research is used to provide both practical steps to take when incorporating diversity and metrics to consider when assessing the effectiveness of these efforts. Current news regarding corporate decisions are used to demonstrate the directions corporations and society are taking regarding their views on diversity. Recommendations are made to both the government and legal field to help address issues regarding access to legal services

Interview by Li Po Kwan Luka

Wong Kwan Cheung, Joseph, is a 41 years-old man. He suffered from a disease called Glass-bone when he was three, so he became a handicapped person. He has lived in hospital for about 7 years, so when he finished his study in primary school, he was an adult already. Although he couldn\u27t go into secondary school, he never gives up himself, he still studies at home. If you know him, you must know why he is always happy, that is because he can get many people\u27s loves, especially his mother\u27s love

Understanding Racial Disparities in Exposure to Traffic-Related Air Pollution: Considering the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Population Distribution

This study investigates the effect of spatiotemporal distributions of racial groups on disparities in exposure to traffic-related air pollution by considering people’s daily movement patterns. Due to human mobility, a residential neighborhood does not fully represent the true geographic context in which people experience racial segregation and unequal exposure to air pollution. Using travel-activity survey data containing individuals’ activity locations and time spent at each location, this study measures segregation levels that an individual might experience during the daytime and nighttime, estimates personal exposure by integrating hourly pollution maps and the survey data, and examines the association between daytime/nighttime segregation and exposure levels. The proximity of each activity location to major roads is also evaluated to further examine the unequal exposure. The results reveal that people are more integrated for work in high-traffic areas, which contributes to similarly high levels of exposure for all racial groups during the daytime. However, white people benefit from living in suburbs/exurbs away from busy roads. The finding suggests that policies for building an extensive and equitable public transit system should be implemented together with the policies for residential mixes among racial groups to reduce everyone’s exposure to traffic-related air pollution and achieve environmental justice

Natural environments and suicide mortality in the Netherlands: a cross-sectional, ecological study

Background: Natural outdoor environments, such as green spaces (ie, grass, forests, or parks), blue spaces (ie, visible bodies of fresh or salt water), and coastal proximity, have been increasingly shown to promote mental health. However, little is known about how and the extent to which these natural environments are associated with suicide mortality. Our aim was to investigate whether the availability of green space and blue space within people's living environments and living next to the coast are protective against suicide mortality. Methods: In this cross-sectional, ecological study, we analysed officially confirmed deaths by suicide between 2005 and 2014 per municipality in the Netherlands. We calculated indexes to measure the proportion of green space and blue space per municipality and the coastal proximity of each municipality using a geographical information system. We fitted Bayesian hierarchical Poisson regressions to assess associations between suicide risk, green space, blue space, and coastal proximity, adjusted for risk and protective factors. Findings: Municipalities with a large proportion of green space (relative risk 0·879, 95% credibility interval 0·779–0·991) or a moderate proportion of green space (0·919, 0·846–0·998) showed a reduced suicide risk compared with municipalities with less green space. Green space did not differ according to urbanicity in relation to suicide. Neither blue space nor coastal proximity was associated with suicide risk. The geographical variation in the residual relative suicide risk was substantial and the south of the Netherlands was at high risk. Interpretation: Our findings support the notion that exposure to natural environments, particularly to greenery, might have a role in reducing suicide mortality. If confirmed by future studies on an individual level, the consideration of environmental exposures might enrich suicide prevention programmes

Curriculum Design of Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability in Secondary School

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing numerous sectors with its transformative power, while at the same time, there is an increasing sense of urgency to address sustainability challenges. Despite the significance of both areas, secondary school curriculums still lack comprehensive integration of AI and sustainability education. This paper presents a curriculum designed to bridge this gap. The curriculum integrates progressive objectives, computational thinking competencies and system thinking components across five modules—awareness, knowledge, interaction, empowerment and ethics—to cater to varying learner levels. System thinking components help students understand sustainability in a holistic manner. Computational thinking competencies aim to cultivate computational thinkers to guide the design of curriculum activities

ConceptEVA: Concept-Based Interactive Exploration and Customization of Document Summaries

With the most advanced natural language processing and artificial intelligence approaches, effective summarization of long and multi-topic documents -- such as academic papers -- for readers from different domains still remains a challenge. To address this, we introduce ConceptEVA, a mixed-initiative approach to generate, evaluate, and customize summaries for long and multi-topic documents. ConceptEVA incorporates a custom multi-task longformer encoder decoder to summarize longer documents. Interactive visualizations of document concepts as a network reflecting both semantic relatedness and co-occurrence help users focus on concepts of interest. The user can select these concepts and automatically update the summary to emphasize them. We present two iterations of ConceptEVA evaluated through an expert review and a within-subjects study. We find that participants' satisfaction with customized summaries through ConceptEVA is higher than their own manually-generated summary, while incorporating critique into the summaries proved challenging. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for designing summarization systems incorporating mixed-initiative interactions.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure