Quieter Hour – A Friendlier Shopping Experience for People with Autism

This thesis centers on autism and the exclusionary effects of it. While there is a wealth of new research on this diagnosis indicating that while there is an entire spectrum of autism, many people are fully functional in society. Many of these people simply have limitations. If these limitations were attended to by society, there would be no need for exclusion of people with these types disabilities. Many of the changes needed to promote an environment of inclusion instead of exclusion are not incredibly difficult to make, yet they have not been made. While people on the spectrum are excluded from all kinds of activites, the most exclusionary are some of the most basic. Many people with autism reports that they avoid going to stores and into public places because it is too overwhelming. These places are often loud and bright. There is so much going on that it becomes a place filled with more anxiety than anything else for them. Due to this, people with autism avoid many public spaces overall, furthering the exclusion they already face by society. A remedy to one area of this problem is a Quieter Hour. This is when a grocery store dims their lights, turns off the background music, turns off the checkout sounds and posts signs indicating that it is a Quieter Hour for one hour per week. While these changes may seem small, they make a large difference for someone with autism. This changes the environment from one that is too overwhelming to one that is manageable, maybe even pleasant

The Perils and Promise of America's Legacy Cities in the Pandemic Era

COVID-19's devastating impact is likely to be more severe and long-lasting in "legacy cities," or older industrial cities, like Detroit, especially for minority communities. But promising, new collaborative local efforts and leadership—particularly if they are shored up by key policy fixes—can make a difference in whether and how legacy cities recover from the crisis and emerge stronger on the other side.This report was published by the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings with support, in part, by the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation

Don\u27t forget about geography

Maps are a fundamental form of human communication, and for millennia geographers have created maps that measure and describe features and phenomena on the Earth\u27s surface. Yet since the quantitative revolution of the 1960s, the ancient scientific discipline of geography has become increasingly devalued within the academe and misunderstood by the general public. A review of the academic affiliations and job titles of the esteemed authors from the JOSIS 10th anniversary edition is indicative of how constant rebranding and renaming of geography has resulted in fragmentation of the discipline. While terms such as Spatial Data Science‚ have a cross-disciplinary appeal, other terms such as geoinformation , geoinformatics‚ , geographic data science , and geographical information science‚ primarily conflate geography and computer science. Geographers have been valued for our ability to addressed complex problems and create maps that cross scientific boundaries since antiquity. To reclaim a position of centrality within the academe and the minds of public we must be unequivocal that the central value proposition for geography is the fundamental form of human communication that geographers can truly claim as their own: the map

Inspire Magazine: A Critical Analysis of its Significance and Potential Impact Through the Lens of the Information, Motivation, and Behavioral Skills Model

This paper presents an analysis of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s English language publication Inspire that was conceptualized and conducted on the basis of the Information- Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) framework. The IMB model has been widely tested, validated, and applied across a range of behavior change interventions, and provides both a conceptual and analytic framework to examine the range and quality of content featured across the 11 issues of Inspire that were published and distributed online starting in July of 2010. Inspire has been implicated in multiple instances of terrorism cases in the U.S. and its impact and potential can be analyzed on the extent to which it effectively targets core attitudes, perceptions of social normative support for violence, and its regular featuring of behavioral skills such as bomb making, weapons training, and emphasizing a creative and do-it-yourself ethos

An alternative proof method for possibilistic logic and its application to terminological logics

Possibilistic logic, an extension of first-order logic, deals with uncertainty that can be estimated in terms of possibility and necessity measures. Syntactically, this means that a first-order formula is equipped with a possibility degree or a necessity degree that expresses to what extent the formula is possibly or necessarily true. Possibilistic resolution, an extension of the well-known resolution principle, yields a calculus for possibilistic logic which respects the semantics developed for possibilistic logic. A drawback, which possibilistic resolution inherits from classical resolution, is that it may not terminate if applied to formulas belonging to decidable fragments of first-order logic. Therefore we propose an alternative proof method for possibilistic logic. The main feature of this method is that it completely abstracts from a concrete calculus but uses as basic operation a test for classical entailment. If this test is decidable for some fragment of first-order logic then possibilistic reasoning is also decidable for this fragment. We then instantiate possibilistic logic with a terminological logic, which is a decidable subclass of first-order logic but nevertheless much more expressive than propositional logic. This yields an extension of terminological logics towards the representation of uncertain knowledge which is satisfactory from a semantic as well as algorithmic point of view