The Impact of 9/11 and its Aftermath on Substance Use and Psychological Functioning: An Overview

This Essay provides a brief summary and evaluation of findings on the mental health and substance abuse consequences of the events of 9/11 throughout the nation and in United States\u27 cities. It also presents new data obtained from clients who entered substance abuse treatment in New York and other cities either before 9/11 or during a six-month period following the events. This Essay discusses how best to interpret these varying research findings. It concludes that crisis produces many responses and most people just coped with 9/11 in their individual ways

The Nurturing Care Framework: From Policies to Parents

When most people think of early childhood development, what comes to mind is preprimary school learning; similarly, when they think about how best to ensure a child turns out well, their thoughts turn to adolescents. The FrameWorks Institute in Washington, DC, calls this “aging up,” a phenomenon that has been demonstrated as a bias in policy and public thinking in several countries, including South Africa (Richter, Tomlinson, Watt, Hunt, & Lindland, 2019). Yet it is the earliest period of life, from conception to two to three years of age, that most strongly regulates our trajectory across the course of our lives (Shonkoff, Richter, van der Gaag, & Bhutta, 2012) and that influences how children cope with early formal learning and the challenges of adolescence

An introduction to family-centred services for children affected by HIV and AIDS

Family-centred services in the context of HIV/AIDS acknowledge a broad view of a "family system" and ideally include comprehensive treatment and care, community agencies and coordinated case management. The importance of family-centred care for children affected by HIV/AIDS has been recognized for some time. There is a clear confluence of changing social realities and the needs of children in families affected by HIV and AIDS, but a change of paradigm in rendering services to children through families, in both high-prevalence and concentrated epidemic settings, has been slow to emerge

The Politics of Tourism in Asia

Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon FoundationTourism, the world's largest industry, has created a variety of complex political problems, particularly in those countries where the primary attraction of tourism is its potential for accelerating development. The political dimensions that have encouraged tourism in the People's Republic of China, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal, and Bhutan are examined in Linda K. Richter's study, which is based on more than 250 interviews with government officials, travel industry representatives, and media officials. Richter concentrates on the reasons for using tourism to advance government policy objectives and on the many ways political and economic problems can frustrate tourism's contribution to national development. All too often, after the expensive infrastructure is developed, luxury goods imported, and lavish promotional efforts expended, nations are left disillusioned with the economic promise of tourism. Disappointing results are often complicated by a preoccupation with the lure of tourism and an underestimation of the industry's needs and of the political pressures of and on government officials. Encouraging an awareness of the political aspects of tourism, the author advocates greater involvement by social and political scientists in monitoring tourism policy, as well as a restructuring and redesigning of programs in this largest sector of international trade

PALS and Open Source

PALS has been working with open source technologies including an electronic resource management (ERM) system, an openURL link resolver, a discovery tool, and an integrated library system (ILS). While these tools provide benefits to your staff and patrons, there are challenges in the configuration and setup. In this session we will share our experiences with working in the open source community - both the obstacles and opportunities

EMBARKING ON AN INTERACTIVE LEARNING JOURNEY: EXPLORING THE INTERACTION VALUE OF VOICEBOTS VERSUS CHATBOTS

This study compares the perceived students’ value-in-interaction of a voicebot versus a chatbot that respectively guides through an interactive, gamified learning journey. 32 students participated in this within-subject experiment while exploring learning content on the evolution of computers in a guided either text-based or voice-based interaction with a conversational agent. We measured the value in relatedness, matching, and service value in a follow-up survey, compared the number of correctly answered quiz questions at the end of the experiment, and discussed student’s experiences in short interviews afterward to gather further qualitative insights. While our quantitative results do not indicate significant differences between the two interaction modes neither in descriptive statistics nor in t-tests, our qualitative results indicate that both conversational agents are perceived as valuable learning facilitators with individual preferences that are student- and context-specific regarding each interaction mode. Finally, we suggest needed further research