How an Orphan Taught Me to Smile

2013 essay contest winner William McHenry\u27s How an Orphan Taught me to Smil

Teaching Tip: Evaluating Visualizations with a Compact Rubric

Students now have readily available and powerful tools to access, manipulate, combine, and visualize data. Acquiring data and visual literacy requires more than knowledge of how to use these tools. Students need to engage with assignments that challenge them to make relatively complex visualizations, interpret them, and explain why these interpretations matter for given problem situations. This paper describes how to structure feedback for these assignments. The few published visualization evaluation rubrics are mainly oriented toward how-to-do-it heuristics. This paper makes a contribution by presenting, defining, and giving examples of the use of an innovative compact rubric for evaluating visualizations (CRVE). This rubric eliminates some of the length and complexity of heuristic evaluation, focusing on interpretation and relevance. In a graduate business intelligence course, students showed definite improvement over the course of the semester in the construction of visualizations, telling a story with headlines, and striving for data exploration. However, higher levels of technical correctness of visualizations did not necessarily correspond to better interpretations. This finding underscores the importance of emphasizing interpretation through a feedback mechanism like the CRVE presented here

Wakanda College Retention Program: Developing Black and Brown Young Men

Currently, urban education is filled with great disparities related to issues of equity and access to a quality education for African American and Mexican American male students in secondary education settings. These groups are plagued with negative stereotypical images and subjected to the belief that they are inherently inferior to White students and incapable of academic and social success. Their social capital, which stems from their racial diversity, is not celebrated on any level in any educational space. Research for this study will show how the Wakanda College Retention program (WCR) has successfully addressed this disparity by employing the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework in its dissemination of services offered to its African American and Mexican American male student body. The goal of WCR is to ensure not only that its male student body is academically prepared for college but also that throughout their tenure in the program, students develop a keen awareness and appreciation for their respective communities. The goal of this research is to supply counter-narratives that challenge the linear perspectives held by Whitedominant culture of African American and Mexican American male students that disempower who they are

Layers of Limbo: Governing Vulnerable & Displaced Populations in Thailand

In Thailand, the international community is confronted by one of the most protracted and complicated migration crises in the world. By examining this complex issue from the vantage point of a variety of stakeholders – the Royal Thai Government (RTG), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and donor governments (e.g. the United States) – our project aims to illuminate the divergent, at times contradictory, incentives that undermine cooperative efforts to find ‘durable solutions’ to protect vulnerable populations over the longer term. The project then draws from literature on experimental forms of governance to evaluate alternative pathways to overcome collective action problems that could have both theoretical and policy implications

The Russian Federation\u27s Y2K Policy: Too Little, Too Late?

In the first six months of 1999 the Russian Federation government instituted a wide range of policies related to fixing the Year 2000 Problem, culminating in an attempt to pass a Y2K Law, a Presidential Decree, and other governmental actions. Many systems are not expected to be fully remediated in time. Drawing extensively on Russian sources, this paper outlines the evolution of government policies, gives an overview of the state of Y2K remediation as of July 1999, and outlines the key provisions of the government\u27s policies. It is concluded that the Russian government\u27s largely administrative approach to solving the Y2K problem is fairly ineffective and may lead to wider ranging consequences for the economic system as a whole

E-Government and Democracy in Russia

Against the backdrop of creeping authoritarianism by the Putin administration, this paper examines whether or not Russian efforts to enact e-government are enhancing, inhibiting, or neutral towards the establishment of preconditions for democracy in Russia. Eighty official regional governmental websites in 2003 and 85 in 2004 are examined to benchmark their contents according to a set of measures related to Information, Communications / Participation, Action / Transaction, and Integration. This paper also considers the contributions of the Electronic Russia (E-Russia) program launched in 2002 as a nine-year, $2.57B effort to bring e-government to Russia. It is concluded that the main thrust of the websites was on the Information category, with some increases in the Communications / Participation from 2003 to 2004. Almost no services were enacted. Using a detailed analysis of the E-Russia expenditures, it is concluded that this program was focused more on building infrastructure than on building up e-government websites or increasing Internet access. Most support is found for the proposition that Russian e-government efforts so far have done little to enhance the preconditions for democracy, but at the same time should not be viewed as a Potemkin village, i.e. as a means to conceal moves away from democracy

Measuring E-Government: A Case Study Using Russia

Numerous studies of global electronic government adoption use the presence or absence of website functions to measure development levels and create rankings. This paper investigates whether these ratings really reflect the overall status of e-government by using a case study of the 89 regional governments in Russia. It provides the results of two waves of evaluating these websites using measures derived from prior e-government studies. These website levels are correlated to available data reflecting the status of e-government in many of these regions. It is concluded that website levels are only loosely coupled to the overall state of e-government in these regions. It is therefore hazardous to draw too many conclusions about the development of e-government in various countries using relative rankings that are only based on websites. As a case study, this paper illustrates what can and cannot be done when highly limited data are available

The Internet in India and China

This article compares the diffusion of the Internet in China and India. Using a six–dimension framework for characterizing the state of the Internet in a nation, we observe that, while both nations have made significant progress since our last comparison (in 1999), China enjoys a substantial lead over India. We also examine determinants of Internet diffusion. We find that the Chinese Internet has benefited from economic and trade reform begun in the late 1980s, a strong government commitment to the Internet, complementary human and capital resources, etc. The two nations have very different governments and policies, leading to differing approaches to the introduction of telecommunication competition and infrastructure development. China has pursued a strategy of competition among government–owned organizations while India has set policy via recommendations of publicly visible task forces. It remains to be seen whether India’s relatively transparent and market driven approach to Internet policy (and access) will prove effective in the long run. India and China have approximately 40 percent of the world population, and most of their inhabitants live in rural villages that lack basic telephone service. If the Internet is to succeed in raising the level of human development and curtailing migration to teeming urban centers, it must succeed in India and China. What we learn there may enable us to provide communication and information to the world\u27s 1.5 million unconnected villages

CROSS-CULTURAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH: THE CASE OF EASTERN EUROPE AND THE USSR

This paper discusses the specific problems and issues involved in studying information technologies in Eastern Europe and the USSR in the more general context of cross-cultural information technology (IT) research. The results reported are based on eight years of research into international information technologies by the Mosaic Group at the University of Arizona. The problems of doing this kind of work, where field and empirical studies are often impractical, are examined. Four analytical techniques, supported by a computer-based research environment, are advanced as means to solve these problems

Scientific Computing in the Soviet Union

In the last decade, the Soviet Union has placed increased emphasis on the development of high-speed computers and networks for use in scientific, economic, and military applications. When Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev labeled supercomputer development a top priority task for our science and economy in April, 1987, he added new urgency to the production of machines that would both support activities in these applications and also serve as high-profile standard-bearers for perestroika, his program of restructuring and modernization for the nation. The Soviets have also undertaken some major projects in networking, including the creation of a nationwide packet-switched network for the Academy of Sciences, work on network access to databases on scientific literature, and local area networks at a number of institutes