Security-Autonomy-Mobility Roadmaps: Passports To Security for Youth

Taking the highway along the California coast and swinging inland into one of the state\u27s agricultural belts, the hills appear golden in the distance, spotted with gnarled oak trees. Vineyards rise up on either side of the highway, and occasionally cowboys may be seen in the distance herding grazing cattle. Yet as clouds of dust rise from the fields in this agricultural community, the idyllic scene fades dramatically in the town of Rancho Benito, a community wearing the signs of the hard economic times. This once relatively prosperous community is now a place in which many families sit down to dinner in dramatically different circumstances than just a few years ago. After the 2008 recession hit this community, gaping holes appeared in all areas of the economy. Just driving through town, one sees evidence in the strip malls of the failure of one local business after another. Local industry has felt the ravages of the new economic landscape, from a partially empty mall to burgeoning bargain stores. While not all families have endured the same kind or degree of economic insecurity, nonetheless they dwell in a community strongly affected by the Great Recession. While not all have directly felt the effects on their immediate personal circles, all community members live in an environment indelibly stamped by the recession\u27s imprint

Venture Labor, Media Work, and the Communicative Construction of Economic Value: Agendas for the Field and Critical Commentary

At the International Communication Association’s 2014 conference in Seattle, Washington, along with other panelists, Laura Robinson, Jeremy Schulz, Alice E. Marwick, Nicole S. Cohen, C. W. Anderson, Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Enda Brophy, and Gina Neff presented their work across two panels, respectively entitled “Venture Labor: Work and ‘The Good Life’” and “Laboring for the ‘Good (Part of Your) Life.’” After the conference, panelists synthesized their conclusions. Critical commentary was invited from a range of prominent international scholars: Paul Hirsch, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Ofer Sharone, Barry Wellman, Dimitrina Dimitrova, Tsahi Hayat, Guang Ying Mo, Beverly Wellman, and Antonio Casilli

New Fieldsites, New Methods: New Ethnographic Opportunities

As the rapid rate of the adoption and normative use of information technologies accelerates, sociologists must expand the sociological imagination to explore a host of questions related to mediated communication. From Twitter to YouTube, the media convergence anticipated at the close of the millennium is coming into being. Blogs, vlogs, Web browsing, e-mail, and old time television, radio, and phone are all increasingly accessible via digital technologies. Furthermore, not only can we consume these digital media, but we can now produce them easily and quickly. Yet, sociological methods have not kept pace with the profound changes in communication ensuing from the Information Revolution. Although the quotidian use of new media continues to grow by leaps and bounds, there is little consensus on how we can best collect and analyze new media data. This chapter begins to address these issues by examining how ethnographic methods have been adapted to explore new media and digital communication. We find that three central tensions have shaped the adoption of ethnographic methods in new media environments since the advent of cyberethnography in the mid 1990s. The three tensions that we identify and discuss are the character of mediated interaction (e-mail, IM, blogging, texting, etc.) as a social process, text as interaction, and the relationship between the observer and the observed. Our analysis draws upon both the current work in the fi eld and foundational works that established cyberethnography as a legitimate methodological undertaking. Each section presents a history of salient texts detailing methodological growth and innovation. We bring these texts together to close each section with an eye to methodological and ethical implications under the heading “Stories from the Field.” This section provides analysis of challenges in methodological adaptation and related ethical concerns that will be of increasing importance vis-à-vis user-driven content. We close our chapter with a review of how the strengths of traditional ethnography are especially suited to examine future waves of digital phenomena. In evaluating the commonalities between traditional and mediated ethnographic practice, we argue that although new twists in the evolution of the Internet may require ethnographers to continually adapt their methodological tool kits, they will not reduce the salience of the method. In reviewing different tensions in the evolution of cyberethnographic methods, we find that the seeming newness of much of the cyberethnographic endeavor is a reworking, rather than a replacing, of traditional ethnographic methods. Finally, just as cyberethnographers argued a decade ago that the novelty of the Web will likely fade as information technology increasingly becomes just another taken-for-granted part of everyday life (Webb, 1999), we argue that once cyberethnography has been incorporated into the corpus of sociological methods, its legitimacy will be beyond question

The column density towards LMC X-1

We measure the neutral absorption towards the black hole X-ray binary system LMC X-1 from six archival soft X-ray spectra obtained with the gratings and/or CCD detectors on Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Swift. Four spectral models for the soft continuum have been investigated. While the powerlaw model may overestimate NH considerably, the others give consistent results. Taking the lower metalicity of the Large Magellanic Cloud into account, we find equivalent hydrogen column densities of N_H = (1.0-1.3)*10^22 cm^-2, with a systematic dependence on the orbital phase. This variation of the neutral absorption can nearly explain the orbital modulation of the soft X-ray flux recently detected with the All Sky Monitor (ASM) on the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE).Comment: 4 pages, accepted for publication as a Letter in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Moral alchemy: How love changes norms

We discuss a process by which non-moral concerns (that is concerns agreed to be non-moral within a particular cultural context) can take on moral content. We refer to this phenomenon as moral alchemy and suggest that it arises because moral obligations of care entail recursively valuing loved ones’ values, thus allowing propositions with no moral weight in themselves to become morally charged. Within this framework, we predict that when people believe a loved one cares about a behavior more than they do themselves, the moral imperative to care about the loved one's interests will raise the value of that behavior, such that people will be more likely to infer that third parties will see the behavior as wrong (Experiment 1) and the behavior itself as more morally important (Experiment 2) than when the same behaviors are considered outside the context of a caring relationship. The current study confirmed these predictions. Keywords: Moral learning, Ethics of care, Recursive value, UtilityNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (STC Award CCF-1231216

16-Month-Olds Rationally Infer Causes of Failed Actions

Sixteen-month-old infants (N = 83) rationally used sparse data about the distribution of outcomes among agents and objects to solve a fundamental inference problem: deciding whether event outcomes are due to themselves or the world. When infants experienced failed outcomes, their causal attributions affected whether they sought help or explored.Templeton Foundation (Award)James S. McDonnell FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award

Inferring Beliefs and Desires From Emotional Reactions to Anticipated and Observed Events

Researchers have long been interested in the relation between emotion understanding and theory of mind. This study investigates a cue to mental states that has rarely been investigated: the dynamics of valenced emotional expressions. When the valence of a character's facial expression was stable between an expected and observed outcome, children (N = 122; M = 5.0 years) recovered the character's desires but did not consistently recover her beliefs. When the valence changed, older but not younger children recovered both the characters' beliefs and desires. In contrast, adults jointly recovered agents' beliefs and desires in all conditions. These results suggest that the ability to infer mental states from the dynamics of emotional expressions develops gradually through early and middle childhood.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (STC Award CCF-1231216

Triality for homogeneous polynomials

Through the triality of SO(8,C) we study three interrelated homogenous basis of the ring of invariant polynomials of Lie algebras, which give the basis of three Hitchin fibrations, and identify the explicit automorphisms that relate them.Comment: 14 Pages, 3 Figure

Toddlers infer unobserved causes for spontaneous events

Previous research suggests that children infer the presence of unobserved causes when objects appear to move spontaneously. Are such inferences limited to motion events or do children assume that unexplained physical events have causes more generally? Here we introduce an apparently spontaneous event and ask whether, even in the absence of spatiotemporal and co-variation cues linking the events, toddlers treat a plausible variable as a cause of the event. Toddlers (24 months) saw a toy that appeared to light up either spontaneously or after an experimenter’s action. Toddlers were also introduced to a button but were not shown any predictive relation between the button and the light. Across three different dependent measures of exploration, predictive looking (Study 1), prompted intervention (Study 2), and spontaneous exploration (Study 3), toddlers were more likely to represent the button as a cause of the light when the event appeared to occur spontaneously. In Study 4, we found that even in the absence of a plausible candidate cause, toddlers engaged in selective exploration when the light appeared to activate spontaneously. These results suggest that toddlers’ exploration is guided by the causal explanatory power of events.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Faculty Early Career Development ProgramTempleton FoundationJames S. McDonnell Foundation (Collaborative Interdisciplinary Grant on Causal Reasoning

Giving the Giggles: Prediction, Intervention, and Young Children's Representation of Psychological Events

Adults recognize that if event A predicts event B, intervening on A might generate B. Research suggests that young children have difficulty making this inference unless the events are initiated by goal-directed actions. The current study tested the domain-generality and development of this phenomenon. Replicating previous work, when the events involved a physical outcome, toddlers (mean: 24 months) failed to generalize the outcome of spontaneously occurring predictive events to their own interventions; toddlers did generalize from prediction to intervention when the events involved a psychological outcome. We discuss these findings as they bear on the development of causal concepts.Templeton Foundation (Grant 12667)James S. McDonnell FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.). (CAREER Award 0744213