Green criminology and the reconceptualization of school violence: Comparing green school violence and traditional forms of school violence for school children

School crime and violence continue to be important topics of criminological inquiry. Forms of violence that have received much attention from criminologists include school gun violence, assaults, and bullying. What appears missing from criminological studies are analyses of different forms of violent victimization imposed on school children related to environmental injustice, pollution, and exposure to toxins. In this article, we argue for the interpretation of these harms as violent victimizations. To facilitate this, we draw upon definitions of violent victimization developed in green criminology, conceptualizing exposure to environmental toxins as violent assault, and introduce the term green school violence (GSV). Next, we draw upon the medical, environmental, and public health literature to offer a series of examples of GSV in the United States, discuss numerous environmental hazards present in American schools, and describe their scope and severity. A conservative estimate of the frequency of GSV suggests that far more school children are victimized by GSV than forms of interpersonal acts of violence

STORIES OF CONTAMINATED WASTE DUMP SITES IN AMSKAPI PIKUNI BLACKFEET COUNTRY

Abstract: Significant health disparities affect much of the American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) and Native Hawaiian (NH) populations of America.3,6,10,11,14 Inequalities in health care and delivery of services for these populations are a contributing factor to disparate health conditions.2 Lack of equity in areas such as social services18, education, environmental contaminants5,7,8,17, historical trauma1 and acute poverty[a1] [KP2] 16, 19 strongly influence health conditions4. People residing within the remaining tribal lands of the Northern Plains experience markedly higher incidence of disease than other ethnicities within this nation10, ultimately resulting in higher frequency of death and preventable death.2 Cancer is one of the most prevalent diseases that impacts the Amskapi Piikani people of Northern Montana[a3] . Amskapi Pikuni history has been passed down via oral tradition for hundreds of generations, with creation stories beginning some 20,000 years ago in their present territory. The natural rhythm of life was in the seasonal movement of camps and the summertime gathering together of their many bands. This was the traditional time of passing on the history of the confederated tribes and had always been the way of the Siksikaitapi, “the Original People”. Stories were accepted as fact, not just as anecdotal tales. A record of population, seasonal hunts, warrior activities and society responsibilities, gatherings of nations, ceremonial structures, band movement and simple day-to-day lifestyles all emerged from verbal retellings. For example, accounts of hunting buffalo on foot, before the horse came to the Northern Plains, go unquestioned. While tools, skulls and bone fragments have been found at the sites, the stories are much richer than just the archaeological record. There is little tangible evidence regarding most aspects of the traditional oral history record of the Pikuni, yet few Pikuni doubt that the stories are true. For many decades, people of the Amskapi Pikuni Nation (also known by others as Southern Blackfeet or Southern Piegan) have shared stories of “something bad” being dumped secretly within the boundaries of their lands, the last of the hunting and gathering territories that still remain in Blackfeet sovereignty. While the actual dumping events took place about fifty years ago, there may still be time to recover direct evidence of toxic disposals. Over the years, stories addressing contaminated waste and the locations of rumored dump sites have also been linked with perceived cancer clusters among residents who lived below the Hudson Bay Divide ridge and along the Del Bonita Roa

REVENUE IMPACTS OF MPP BRANDED FUNDS: A FIRM LEVEL ANALYSIS

The USDA recently redirected the Market Access Program (MAP) to allocate all branded products export promotion funds to small firms and cooperatives. The redirection was, in part, a response to reports by the General Accounting Office that were critical of past allocations of export promotion funds to large, experienced exporters. This study uses a firm level analysis to examine firms' effectiveness in using Market Promotion Program (MPP, which is now the MAP) funds to increase revenues. Whereas point estimates suggested that smaller firms were more effective in translating MPP funds into increased revenue than larger firms, these point estimates for small firms were statistically indistinguishable from zero. In contrast, large firms showed an increase in revenue of greater than one dollar for every dollar of MPP funds. Further, the revenue increase was statistically significant. Thus, the firm level analysis supports neither the GAO hypotheses nor the recent program changes.export promotion programs, export sales, export revenues, Market Promotion Program, firm-level analysis, joint estimation, Financial Economics,

Revenue Impacts of MPP Branded Funds: A Firm-Level Analysis

The USDA's Market Access Program (formerly Market Promotion Program) recently underwent a major change to redirect all branded products export promotion funds to small domestic firms and cooperatives. The redirection responded to criticisms by the General Accounting Office of past allocations of branded products export promotion funds to large, experienced exporters. This study uses a firm-level analysis to examine whether firm size and export experience matter in how effectively firms use the promotion funds to increase their revenues. The results support neither the GAO criticisms nor the recent program redirection.International Relations/Trade,

Implementing Social and Emotional Learning Standards by Intertwining the Habits of Mind with the CASEL Competencies

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) adopted a set of three standards for social and emotional learning (SEL) in August 2018. In doing so, they have paved the way for explicit instruction in and assessment of 21st-century skills. The three-goal framework selected by NYSED (2018) is modeled after the five competencies of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL, 2018). The authors are overjoyed by this movement to promote dual objective learning (Vermette & Kline, 2017) targeting affective and cognitive goals, but are hesitant to use the CASEL (2018) framework for such SEL standards. Prior to NYSED’s (2018) adoption of the new standards, the authors championed the use of Costa and Kallick’s 16 Habits of Mind (2000) as the best dispositional framework. Now, however, the authors argue that cross-walking the Habits of Mind (Costa & Kallick, 2000) to the CASEL (2018) competencies unlocks previously untapped potentials of both frameworks. This article outlines how such an overlap between the frameworks can be achieved, and proposes how the Habits of Mind (Costa & Kallick, 2000) can be directly used by the students as evidence of their development of the competencies

Simultaneous aluminum, silicon, and sodium coordination changes in 6 GPa sodium aluminosilicate glasses

We present the first direct observation of high-coordinated Si and Al occurring together in a series of high-pressure sodium aluminosilicate glasses, quenched from melts at 6 GPa. Using ^(29)Si MAS NMR, we observe that a small amount of Al does not have a significant effect on the amount of ^VSi or ^(VI)Si generated, but that larger Al concentrations lead to a gradual decrease in both these species. ^(27)Al MAS NMR spectra show that samples with small amounts of Al have extremely high mean Al coordination values of up to 5.49, but that larger Al concentrations cause a gradual decrease in both ^VAl and ^(VI)Al. Although mean Al and Si coordination numbers both decrease with increasing Al contents, the weighted combined (Al+Si) coordination number increases. Silicon and Al resonances shift in frequency with increasing pressure or changing Al concentration, indicating additional structural changes, including compression of network bond angles. Increases in the ^(23)Na isotropic chemical shifts indicate decreases in the mean Na-O bond lengths with increasing pressure, which are more dramatic at higher Al contents. Recovered glass densities are about 10 to 15% greater than those of similar ambient pressure samples. However, the density increases due to the combined coordination changes of Al and Si are estimated to total only about 1 to 2%, and are roughly constant with composition despite the large effects of Al content on the individual coordinations of the two cations. Thus, effects of other structural changes must be significant to the overall densification. Apparent equilibrium constants for reactions involving the generation of high-coordinated species show systematic behavior, which suggests an internal consistency to the observed Si and Al coordination number shifts

Analyzing a Piece of Teaching through the Lens of The ABC\u27s of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them

For the continuing development of quality instructional practices, educators must have access to the findings of research and be in a position to explore applications of those findings. We think we may have found such a resource: A 2016 book titled The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically proven approaches, how they work, and when to use them by Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair is a concise, insightful, and applicable set of 26 short articles that explain key learning factors, provide examples, and identify the supporting scholarship. In this article, a first-year middle school science teacher and a veteran teacher educator collaborate and offer teacher educators and professional developers an overview of the 26 factors and an interpretation of how to effectively utilize this text. The article opens with a vignette of a middle school science lesson that readers may analyze anyway they wish. The debriefing offered in the article introduces the ABC framework by identifying the various principles as they are utilized in the learning experience. Then the authors describe and comment on the entire set of 26 factors and speak to the book’s great potential for helping teachers integrate research-supported findings into their daily efforts

Semi-automated curation of protein subcellular localization: a text mining-based approach to Gene Ontology (GO) Cellular Component curation

Background: Manual curation of experimental data from the biomedical literature is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Nevertheless, most biological knowledge bases still rely heavily on manual curation for data extraction and entry. Text mining software that can semi- or fully automate information retrieval from the literature would thus provide a significant boost to manual curation efforts. Results: We employ the Textpresso category-based information retrieval and extraction system http://www.textpresso.org webcite, developed by WormBase to explore how Textpresso might improve the efficiency with which we manually curate C. elegans proteins to the Gene Ontology's Cellular Component Ontology. Using a training set of sentences that describe results of localization experiments in the published literature, we generated three new curation task-specific categories (Cellular Components, Assay Terms, and Verbs) containing words and phrases associated with reports of experimentally determined subcellular localization. We compared the results of manual curation to that of Textpresso queries that searched the full text of articles for sentences containing terms from each of the three new categories plus the name of a previously uncurated C. elegans protein, and found that Textpresso searches identified curatable papers with recall and precision rates of 79.1% and 61.8%, respectively (F-score of 69.5%), when compared to manual curation. Within those documents, Textpresso identified relevant sentences with recall and precision rates of 30.3% and 80.1% (F-score of 44.0%). From returned sentences, curators were able to make 66.2% of all possible experimentally supported GO Cellular Component annotations with 97.3% precision (F-score of 78.8%). Measuring the relative efficiencies of Textpresso-based versus manual curation we find that Textpresso has the potential to increase curation efficiency by at least 8-fold, and perhaps as much as 15-fold, given differences in individual curatorial speed. Conclusion: Textpresso is an effective tool for improving the efficiency of manual, experimentally based curation. Incorporating a Textpresso-based Cellular Component curation pipeline at WormBase has allowed us to transition from strictly manual curation of this data type to a more efficient pipeline of computer-assisted validation. Continued development of curation task-specific Textpresso categories will provide an invaluable resource for genomics databases that rely heavily on manual curation