The Representation of Blacks and Hispanics in Media Depictions of the Catholic Church

Fifty years ago, Pope Paul VI promulgated the Decree on Means of Social Communication at the end of the second session of the Second Vatican Council.2 In this document, the Council outlined the responsibilities of the media in the rapidly-changing post WWII global society. Here, Smith and Malik present the results of an empirical study of the media’s approach to the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis I. They show that the media reinforces stereotypes of the U.S. Catholic Church as a white institution by choosing to over-represent Catholic membership as well as leadership as overwhelmingly white, and by underrepresenting Black and Hispanic membership and leadership. In their fascinating interpretation of this study’s significance, they find that White Catholics may blame institutional factors for our society’s racial inequalities, but these same White Catholics are blind to the fact that the Catholic Church, as an institution, actually plays a role in perpetuating racial inequalities

Juror Questions During Trial: A Window into Juror Thinking

The jury has undergone a dramatic transformation from its earliest incarnation when jurors acted as witnesses, investigators, and tribunal. In the modern American jury trial, the parties determine what jurors learn during the proceedings. Jurors of today, assigned the role of audience members until deliberations begin, typically speak in the courtroom only during jury selection and through their verdict at the end of the trial. In light of their enforced silence throughout the trial, jurors have no opportunity to clarify or check on their interpretation of the evidence and they provide few external indications about their thinking as the trial unfolds. Although post- trial juror interviews and jury simulations contribute to our understanding of how jurors react to evidence, these indirect sources are not the on-line reactions of jurors during trial. The modern veil on juror participation that conceals juror thinking during trial, however, is being lifted partially in a small, but increasing, number of American courtrooms. In these courtrooms, jurors are permitted to submit questions for witnesses during trial. The questions that the jurors submit provide a unique window into juror thinking during the trial

Adjusting tropical marine water quality guideline values for elevated ocean temperatures

Increased frequency of summer heatwaves and poor water quality are two of the most prevalent and severe pressures faced by coral reefs. While these pressures often co-occur, their potential risks to tropical marine species are usually considered independently. Here, we extended the application of multisubstance-Potentially Affected Fraction (ms-PAF) to a nonchemical stressor, elevated sea surface temperature. We then applied this method to calculate climate-Adjusted water quality guideline values (GVs) for two reference toxicants, copper and the herbicide diuron, for tropical marine species. First, we developed a species sensitivity distribution (SSD) for thermal stress based on published experimental data for 41 tropical benthic marine species using methods adapted from water quality GV derivation. This enabled quantitative predictions of community effects as temperatures exceeded acclimation values. The resulting protective temperature values (PTx) were similar to temperatures known to initiate coral bleaching and are therefore relevant for application in multistressor risk assessments. The extended ms-PAF method enabled the adjustment of current water quality GVs to account for thermal stress events. This approach could be applied to other ecosystems and other non-contaminant stressors (e.g., sediment, low salinity, anoxia, and ocean acidification), offering an alternative approach for deriving environmental GVs, reporting and assessing the risk posed by multiple stressors

Deionization Shocks in Crossflow

Shock electrodialysis is a recently developed electrochemical water treatment method which shows promise for water deionization and ionic separations. Although simple models and scaling laws have been proposed, a predictive theory has not yet emerged to fit experimental data and enable system design. Here, we extend and analyze existing "leaky membrane" models for the canonical case of a steady shock in cross flow, as in recent experimental prototypes. Two-dimensional numerical solutions are compared with analytical boundary-layer approximations and experimental data. The boundary-layer theory accurately reproduces the simulation results for desalination, and both models predict the data collapse of the desalination factor with dimensionless current, scaled to the incoming convective flux of cations. The numerical simulation also predicts the water recovery increase with current. Nevertheless, both approaches cannot quantitatively fit the transition from normal to over-limiting current, which suggests gaps in our understanding of extreme electrokinetic phenomena in porous media

Testing for Genomic Control of Ephemeral Leaf Phenotypes in \u3cem\u3eArtemisia tridentata\u3c/em\u3e

Climate change is driving ever increasing ecological stresses on native plant communities. Furthering our understanding of how plants, particularly keystone species of important ecosystems, deal with these stresses will be essential for the success of conservation and restoration efforts Artemisia tridentate is a keystone species of western North America and has experience sharp population declines in recent decades due to human activity. During the late winter and early spring months, A. tridentate grows large ephemeral leaves that provide more surface area for light capture and photosynthesis while resources are abundant. Then, during the onset of drought stress during the summer months, the ephemeral leaves will drop. We hypothesize that the timing of ephemeral leaf dropping is correlated to important water use efficiency traits and are under genomic control. To test these hypotheses, plants of a population of A. tridentate near Marsing, ID were tracked and phenotyped from late spring though summer. Early and late ephemeral leaf dropping individuals then had their genomes sequenced for genetic association tests. We find that there are statistically significant differences for leaf phenotypes among individuals, suggesting that the water use efficiency will vary within the population. Genetic tests are on-going to determine if these traits are genetically determined

Education Aspirations and Barriers to Achievement for Street‐Involved Youth in Victoria, Canada

Much of the literature on street‐involved youth focuses on their deficits, including their high risk of withdrawing before completing high school, which is often interpreted as a rejection of formal education. Missing from the literature is an understanding of street‐involved youth’s educational aspirations. We employed thematic analysis of qualitative data from in‐person interviews with a purposive sample of street‐involved youth (N = 69) residing in one city in Canada, who were partly or fully disengaged from school at the time of the interview. We asked the youth to talk about their opinions of formal education, its importance for young people, whether learning was important for them, and whether they imagined returning to school/continuing with school. We discovered that the majority of youth had a positive view of school/formal education and stated they liked learning new things and recognized the benefits of continuing/completing their education. At the same time, the youth identified material hardship and other barriers to achieving their educational goals. We discuss these findings in light of the relevant literature and make policy recommendations to improve educational success for youth struggling with poverty and homelessness in Canada

Experience of discrimination in egalitarian societies: the Sámi and majority populations in Sweden and Norway

The Sámi people stand out as the only Indigenous minority in an egalitarian European context, namely the Nordic Countries. Therefore, inequalities that they may face are worth closer inspection. Drawing on the distinction between inequalities among individuals (vertical) and between groups (horizontal), we investigate how different types of inequalities affect the Sámi today. We formulate a series of hypotheses on how social, economic, cultural, and political inequalities are linked with discrimination experience, and test these with original data from a population survey conducted in northern Norway and northern Sweden simultaneously in 2021. The findings show that Sámi ethnic background increases the probability of experiencing discrimination. While individual-level economic inequality is also pertinent, this does not directly materialise as between-group inequality. Instead, minority language use is a strong predictor of discrimination experience, revealing the socio-cultural nature of ethnic inequalities. Cross-country differences are only reflected in the effect of minority language use

Ab Initio No Core Shell Model - Recent Results and Further Prospects

There has been significant recent progress in solving the long-standing problems of how nuclear shell structure and collective motion emerge from underlying microscopic inter-nucleon interactions. We review a selection of recent significant results within the ab initio No Core Shell Model (NCSM) closely tied to three major factors enabling this progress: (1) improved nuclear interactions that accurately describe the experimental two-nucleon and three-nucleon interaction data; (2) advances in algorithms to simulate the quantum many-body problem with strong interactions; and (3) continued rapid development of high-performance computers now capable of performing $20 \times 10^{15}$ floating point operations per second. We also comment on prospects for further developments.Comment: Invited paper presented at NTSE-2014 and published online in the proceedings (see footnote on p.1

PDBselect 1992–2009 and PDBfilter-select

PDBselect (http://bioinfo.tg.fh-giessen.de/pdbselect/) is a list of representative protein chains with low mutual sequence identity selected from the protein data bank (PDB) to enable unbiased statistics. The list increased from 155 chains in 1992 to more than 4500 chains in 2009. PDBfilter-select is an online service to generate user-defined selections