Floridians\u27 Right to Choose or Refuse Vaccinations

Every state must strike the right balance between an individual\u27s freedom to make medical choices and the state\u27s role in protecting the public health and the welfare of its people. Florida, by and through its Constitution, has afforded heightened protections for individual self-determination over medical treatment decisions and evaluates infringement of these private medical rights with strict scrutiny. This article is about legal rights for adults to obtain or refuse vaccines and for parents to decide the timing or administration of any vaccine or group of vaccines proposed for their school-aged, preschool, newborn, or unborn children. I argue that States have an obligation to their people to strive for herd immunity from contagious viruses. However, I urge using voluntary measures to encourage vaccination when such measures can be protective of public health. I also argue that the protections of the Florida Constitution regarding individual liberties and privacy could be emulated by other states to elevate state actions involving forced medical procedures from the rational basis test to a heightened level of scrutiny (strict scrutiny). In short, this article is about freedom to choose what medical treatments are put into your body or your children\u27s bodies. In the face of potential new vaccine mandates, understanding the scope of a person\u27s freedom to choose whether to take one or more COVID-19 vaccines, or any vaccine, is important both as a matter of individual liberty and privacy, and as an important public health concern

Continuing the Great Work: A Tribute to Thomas Berry

Continuing the Great Work: A Tribute to Thomas Berry by Patrick Tolan Profound scholar and author, Father Thomas Berry, recognized and related human destiny to the destiny of the universe. In his book, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, and in his teaching, Berry challenged humanity to enter into a new era in harmony with the universe. This article is a tribute to Thomas Berry, recognizing the importance of his contribution to a new and emerging field of Earth Jurisprudence and launching an Earth Jurisprudence and Environmental Justice Journal that will afford thinkers and scholars the opportunity to continue his great work. Like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, Thomas Berry shared a profound respect for the Earth and advocated a deeper understanding of the need to treat the Earth and her bountiful resources prudently and ethically. To these core values, Berry added additional wisdom, insight, and perception that captures the messages of earlier authors, but adds the dimension of spirituality. Through the lens of decades of religious studies of the East and the West, Native and indigenous traditions and established religions, Berry saw the tapestry of spiritual truth in creation and extended this understanding to the necessary interplay of humans as but one constituent element which ought to function in harmony with all of the universe. Recognizing the laws of nature trump the laws of man is critical to reorienting behavior to what is ultimately sustainable and eternal. While earlier writers acknowledge a need for a healing approach and a need for laws that both heal and restore balance, Berry understood that these needs are intrinsic as well as communal; that each individual conscious self was part of a greater universal self. Berry asks us to re-envision human-Earth relations as we enter an Ecozoic Era where humans may not simply rely on the regenerative powers of the Earth herself, but also must engage in a cultural paradigm shift toward a viable human situation on a viable planet. Continuing the great work requires exploring and developing these opportunities for conversion. Reinventing law and governance systems so that all beings could be legally protected as subjects and not objects was at the core of his thinking. More specifically, in the field of law and jurisprudence, Berry calls for a paradigm where inherent rights exist not just for people, but “the inherent rights of the natural world are recognized as having legal status.” The challenge then, for an Earth Jurisprudence, is identifying a legal framework conducive to a mutually enhancing Earth-human relationship. While this humble tribute can’t approach the eloquence of Thomas Berry, whose prose was “more akin to that of poetry, art, myth, or storytelling,” it can help to introduce those who don’t know Thomas Berry to his life and work, and can serve to remind those who knew him of what made him so special. It is fitting not only to reflect upon and pay tribute to his profound contributions, but also to consider pathways forward. The best way to honor Thomas Berry’s teaching is to continue in his great work. As Thomas Berry explained, “[a]ll creatures of Earth are looking to us for their destiny. Among these are our children and grandchildren, who depend on our decisions for the sustenance and flourishing of the life systems of the planet. This remains one of our primary challenges in the twenty-first century.

Development of Boys and Young Men of Color: Implications of Developmental Science for My Brother's Keeper Initiative

This report describes the My Brother's Keeper Initiative. The report summarizes ideas gleaned from developmental science that may be useful in efforts to reach five of the six initiative's goals: school readiness; third-grade literacy; high school and college graduation; and reduction of violence. The authors discuss features of the initiative designed to promote more positive outcomes and highlight the contributions that developmental science may make to each. Policy recommendations are provided and a discussion about how developmental science may contribute to national dialogue and policy formation

Fractal geometry of spin-glass models

Stability and diversity are two key properties that living entities share with spin glasses, where they are manifested through the breaking of the phase space into many valleys or local minima connected by saddle points. The topology of the phase space can be conveniently condensed into a tree structure, akin to the biological phylogenetic trees, whose tips are the local minima and internal nodes are the lowest-energy saddles connecting those minima. For the infinite-range Ising spin glass with p-spin interactions, we show that the average size-frequency distribution of saddles obeys a power law $<\psi(w) > \sim w^{-D}$, where w=w(s) is the number of minima that can be connected through saddle s, and D is the fractal dimension of the phase space

Mentoring Interventions to Affect Juvenile Delinquency and Associated Problems: A Systematic Review

Mentoring is one of the most commonly used interventions to prevent, divert, and remediate youth engaged in, or thought to be at risk for delinquent behavior, school failure, aggression, or other antisocial behavior. In this update we report on a meta-analytic review of selective and indicated mentoring interventions that have been evaluated for their effects on delinquency outcomes for youth (e.g., arrest or conviction as a delinquent, self-reported involvement) and key associated outcomes (aggression, drug use, academic functioning). Of 164 identified studies published between 1970 and 2011, 46 met criteria for inclusion. Mean effects sizes were significant and positive for delinquency and academic functioning with trends (marginal significance level) for aggression and drug use. Effect sizes were modest by Cohen’s differentiation. However, there was heterogeneity in effect sizes across studies for each outcome. The obtained patterns of effects suggest mentoring may be valuable for those at-risk or already involved in delinquency and for associated outcomes. Comparison of study design (RCT vs. QE) did not show significant differences in effects. Moderator analysis showed larger effects when professional development was the motivation of the mentors for involvement, but not for basis of inclusion of participants (environmental vs. person basis of risk), presence of other interventions, or assessment of quality of fidelity. We also undertook the first systematic evaluation of key processes that seem to define how mentoring may aid youth (e.g. identification/modeling, teaching, emotional support, advocacy) to see if these related to effects. Based on studies we could code for the presence or absence of each as part of the program effort, analyses found stronger effects when emotional support and advocacy were emphasized. These results suggest mentoring is as effective for high-risk youth in relation to delinquency as many other preventive and treatment approaches and that emphasis on some theorized key processes may be more valuable than others. However, the collected set of studies is less informative than expected with quite limited specification about what comprised the mentoring program and implementation features. The juxtaposition of popular interest in mentoring and empirical evidence of benefits with the limited reporting of important features of the interventions is seen highlights the importance of more careful and extensive evaluations. Including features to understand testing of selection basis, program organization and features, implementation variations, and theorized processes for effects will greatly improve understanding of this intervention. All are essential to guide effective practice of this popular and very promising approach

Linking informant discrepancies to observed variations in young children’s disruptive behavior

Article in press in the Journal of Abnormal Child PsychologyPrior work has not tested the basic theoretical notion that informant discrepancies in reports of children’s behavior exist, in part, because different informants observe children’s behavior in different settings. We examined patterns of observed preschool disruptive behavior across varying social contexts in the laboratory and whether they related to parent-teacher rating discrepancies of disruptive behavior in a sample of 327 preschoolers. Observed disruptive behavior was assessed with a lab-based developmentally sensitive diagnostic observation paradigm that assesses disruptive behavior across three interactions with the child with parent and examiner. Latent class analysis identified four patterns of disruptive behavior: (a) low across parent and examiner contexts, (b) high with parent only, (c) high with examiner only, and (d) high with parent and examiner. Observed disruptive behavior specific to the parent and examiner contexts were uniquely related to parent-identified and teacher-identified disruptive behavior, respectively. Further, observed disruptive behavior across both parent and examiner contexts was associated with disruptive behavior as identified by both informants. Links between observed behavior and informant discrepancies were not explained by child impairment or observed problematic parenting. Findings provide the first laboratory-based support for the Attribution Bias Context Model, which posits that informant discrepancies are indicative of cross-contextual variability in children’s behavior and informants’ perspectives on this behavior. These findings have important implications for clinical assessment, treatment outcomes, and developmental psychopathology research.Lauren S. Wakschlag: NIMH grants R01 MH68455 and MH62437, National 0-3, and Shaw and Children’s Brain Research Foundations; Patrick H. Tolan and David B. Henry: CDC grant U49/CE 000732, NICHD grant R01 HD042030, and NIDA grant R01 DA02082

Stressful events and individual beliefs as correlates of economic disadvantage and aggression among urban children.

This study examined 3 factors that were hypothesized to increase risk for aggression among urban children: economic disadvantage, stressful events, and individual beliefs. Participants were 1,935 African American, Hispanic, and White elementary-school boys and girls assessed over a 2-year period. The relation between individual poverty and aggression was only significant for the White children, with significant interactions between individual and community poverty for the other 2 ethnic groups. With a linear structural model to predict aggression from the stress and beliefs variables, individual poverty predicted stress for African American children and predicted beliefs supporting aggression for Hispanic children. For all ethnic groups, both stress and beliefs contributed significantly to the synchronous prediction of aggression, and for the Hispanic children, the longitudinal predictions were also significant. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for preventive interventions in multiethnic, inner-city communities.The research was supported by Grant MH-48034 from the National Institute of Mental Health and Cooperative Agreement CCU510017 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83500/1/1995.Guerra_etal.StressfulEvents&IndiBeliefsasCorrelatesofEconDisadvantage&AggAmongUrbChildrn.JourofCnsulting&ClinPsych.pd