Government By and For Millenial America: A Blueprint for 21st Century Government

Using this generation's unique ethos and commitment to pragmatic problem-solving, Millennials across the country have collaborated to design their vision for a 21st century democracy and reject the idea that our system is too broken, too stagnant, and too outdated. They have identified the parts of the system that need to be fixed while articulating what a true democracy should look like. Government By and For Millennial America, the third installment of our blueprint series, tackles some of the most fundamental, divisive, and difficult questions on the purpose of government in furthering our country's progress: how can we hear from more voices? How can we be more transparent? How can government be more egalitarian? How can we both support individual communities and the common good of every American? Most importantly, this pursuit is grounded in one fundamental idea that defines America's distinctive pursuit of self-governance: in the words of our namesake, Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt We set out to craft a blueprint, and discovered, in conversations with over a thousand young people across the country, that the Millennial generation is not yet ready to give up on America's ever evolving experiment in a government by and for the people

"Nothing has convinced me to stop" Young people's perceptions and experiences of persistant offending

Nothing Has Convinced Me To Stop results from the former Scottish Executive tasking the project with consulting young people about persistent offending. The report explores the views and experiences of those living in residential care about how and why they persistently offend, what contributes to their offending behaviour escalating and what helps them to reduce it or indeed stop offending. The consultation focused on areas with high concentrations of 'persistent offenders' in residential care, consulting young people living in various settings - residential units, residential schools, secure units and young offender institutions

"This isn't the road I want to go down" Young people's perceptions and experiences of secure care

The consultation sought to map young people's secure journey ie. their experiences and views of secure care from admission through to final discharge, including the transition from secure care and the services they received to assist them in that transition. It centred on four broad themes intended to elicit young people's individual experiences and perceptions regarding: admission to secure care, time in secure care, exit from secure care, and reflections once left secure care

On the representation of model inadequacy : a stochastic operator approach

Mathematical models of physical systems are subject to many sources of uncertainty such as measurement errors and uncertain initial and boundary conditions. After accounting for these uncertainties, it is often revealed that there remains some discrepancy between the model output and the observations; if so, the model is said to be inadequate. In practice, the inadequate model may be the best that is available or tractable, and so despite its inadequacy the model may be used to make predictions of unobserved quantities. In this case, a representation of the inadequacy is necessary, so the impact of the observed discrepancy can be determined. We investigate this problem in the context of chemical kinetics and propose a new technique to account for model inadequacy that is both probabilistic and physically meaningful. Chemical reactions are generally modeled by a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for the concentrations of the species and temperature. In this work, a stochastic inadequacy operator S is introduced which includes three parts. The first is represented by a random matrix which is embedded within the ODEs of the concentrations. The matrix is required to satisfy several physical constraints, and its most general form exhibits some useful properties, such as having only non-positive eigenvalues. The second is a smaller but specific set of nonlinear terms that also modifies the species’ concentrations, and the third is an operator that properly accounts for changes to the energy equation due to the previous changes. The entries of S are governed by probability distributions, which in turn are characterized by a set of hyperparameters. The model parameters and hyperparameters are calibrated using high-dimensional hierarchical Bayesian inference, with data from a range of initial conditions. This allows the use of the inadequacy operator on a wide range of scenarios, rather than correcting any particular realization of the model with a corresponding data set. We apply the method to typical problems in chemical kinetics including the reaction mechanisms of hydrogen and methane combustion. We also study how the inadequacy representation affects an unobserved quantity of interest— the flamespeed of a one-dimensional hydrogen laminar flame.Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematic

Inhibitory control and children's mathematical ability

Following recent research linking executive functioning to children 's skills, this thesis explores the relationship between children's inhibition effciency and mathematical ability. This relationship was initially explored using six Stroop task variants containing verbal, numerical or pictorial stimuli. The results indicated that, in the numerical variants only, children of lower mathematical abilty possess less effcient inhibition mechanisms, compared to children of higher mathematical ability. Thus, it is proposed that low-abilty mathematicians may possess a domain-specifc problem with the inhibition of numerical information. The increased interference scores of the lowability mathematicians, however, were only evident under those conditions which also required a degree of switching between temporary strategies. A series of experiments also examined children's ability to inhibit prepotent responses and switch between strategies whilst performing mental arithmetic. The aim of these experiments was to provide a more naturalistic and appropriate exploration of the hypothesized relationship between mathematical abilty and inhibition effciency. These results also indicated that low-ability mathematicians possess fewer executive resources to cope with increased inhibition demands. A further systematic manipulation of switching and inhibition demands revealed that the low-abilty mathematicians experienced a particular difculty when both types of inhibitory demands (i.e. inhibiting a prepotent response and inhibiting an established strategy)were present. This suggests that their reduction in inhibition effciency stems from the amount of demands, rather than the type of demands placed on the executive system. Furthermore, the results indicated that inhibition effciency may be a specifc element of mathematical ability rather than an element of intellectual ability in general. The final study involved a group of low-abilty mathematicians and examined the disturbing impact of irrelevant information on their arithmetic word problem solving abilty. This study revealed that irrelevant numerical (IN) information has a more detrimental impact on performance than irrelevant verbal (IV) information. It is proposed that it is more difcult to inhibit IN information, as it appears more relevant to intentions, and thus, enters WM with a higher level of activations. In sum, the results indicate that low-abilty mathematicians have a reduced domainspecific working memory capacity, characterized by ineffcient inhibition mechanisms

Human rights : the search for universality.

Human rights in large part have become a topic of seemingly global appeal. They have become a part of the fabric of the global conversation. Especially within the context of the last sixty years, human rights have become an actionable, practical, and in some cases legally binding set of rights. Current human rights hinge on the idea that all humans no matter where or under what circumstances they were born possess certain rights simply because they were born human. This thesis will discuss the universality of human rights in both theory and in practice. To be more specific, human rights will be discussed by exploring the philosophic foundations of human rights. The language that was used in the structuring and development of the human rights was derived from rights instruments which originated during the Enlightenment Period. However, the underlying philosophy is only representational of a percentage of the people and cultures of the world. Because the underlying philosophy is not cross-cultural, moral and cultural relativism bars human rights from being universal. However, the contention of this thesis is to show that despite the limits of universality in terms of relativism and incoherent philosophic underpinnings, human rights are still a force to be reckoned with as a part of a social construction. A human right may not be an inalienable, inherent right that belongs to a person because he or she is human, but it does have some legitimacy on the grounds that social norms have been constructed over time.--Abstract

A critical investigation of the organizational factors affecting the development of local agenda 21 by a local authority

This thesis uses action research to investigate the organizational factors which are affecting the implementation of local agenda 21, and the accompanying necessary internal changes, in a local authority. Following an examination of literature relating to sustainable development and local agenda 21, organizational culture and attempts to change it are identified as the important areas to be investigated. There is an examination of theory in those areas and a two-stage study is carried out. This allows for the first stage study to be assessed and any gaps, where the research questions are not being answered, to be identified and dealt with in the second stage study. It was found that in local authorities there are sub-cultures, and that the split is along departmental lines, which affect the facilitation of sustainable development to differing degrees. Socially based departments had sub-cultures which were less appropriate for sustainable development then environmentally based ones. The local authorities were making changes of a structural and strategic nature, but as regards human processes, it was found that although authorities were concentrating on trying to raise awareness, the strategies they were using for this were ineffective. Two case studies were also conducted, one of a local authority similar in many ways to the one in the main study and the other of a dissimilar one, to assess whether the findings from the main study might be more generally applicable. The findings from these case studies suggested that the findings were generally applicable