Signaling Allyship via Antiracism

Black students face ongoing exclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) classrooms and few studies have looked into strategies to help white professors attract Black students to STEM. Expressing support for anti-racism may help attract Black students to STEM, but this has yet to be explored. An identity safety cue, a signal suggesting one’s identity is valued, can help attract Black students to these STEM classrooms. We focused on anti-racism as an identity safety cue because of the preliminary evidence that support for anti-racism might be helpful for Black students, and the lack of research surrounding anti-racism as an identity safety cue. The present work recruited participants via Prolific, and explored whether the content of an introductory STEM course syllabus, paired with either a white or Black professor, signals allyship and promotes belonging among Black adults. That is, Black participants were assigned to one of four conditions: Black professor-antiracism statement, Black professor-DEI statement, white professor-antiracism statement, or white professor-DEI statement and reported their anticipated belonging in the classroom as well as perceptions the professor was an ally. Based on findings from previous work, we hypothesized that the most anticipated belonging would be signaled when participants viewed a syllabus with anti-racist course content from the Black professor. However, for the white professor, we predicted that he would promote the greatest allyship and anticipated belonging when the syllabus includes anti-racist course content (versus control diversity, equity, and inclusion content) in the syllabus. Participants reported their perceived allyship, interest, similarity, and belonging and trust, all of which were most salient in conditions including the Black professor and in conditions including the antiracism statement. Consistent with past work, the Black professor promoted greater allyship and belonging in the classroom than the white professor. We also found that the antiracism syllabus promoted greater allyship than the syllabus with the general DEI. Taken together, the present work suggests that allyship can be perceived at a higher level when creating a more specific statement promoting antiracism than general DEI. This shows that content and race both have an impact on how Black adults perceive STEM environments and what makes STEM more approachable for Black students

The quality of life of single mothers making the transition from welfare to work

This study examined the quality of life of single mothers making the mandatory transition from welfare to work. The Australian government purported that the benefits of making this transition would include higher incomes, better social participation, and improved wellbeing. It is currently unknown, however, how single mothers currently engaged in welfare to work programs evaluate their quality of life. Quality of life scores for 334 single mothers engaged in welfare to work in Australia were compared with normative data. Participants reported significantly lower quality of life scores than the general population for all quality of life domains, highlighting the need to carefully examine welfare to work policies to ensure they promote participants\u27 quality of life. <br /

Exercise training ameliorates progressive renal disease in rats with subtotal nephrectomy

Exercise training ameliorates progressive renal disease in rats with subtotal nephrectomy. To determine the effect of chronic exercise training on renal function in animals with moderate renal insufficiency, rats with 75% renal ablation were either exercise trained by swimming for two months or remained sedentary. Glomerular filtration rate was significantly higher in trained (1.89 ± 0.07 ml/min) than in sedentary rats (1.52 ± 0.11 ml/min). No change was observed in renal blood flow or the degree of hypertension. Proteinuria was reduced in trained (13.6 ± 4.9 mg/24 hr) compared to sedentary animals (33.5 ± 9.2 mg/24 hr). The degree of glomerulosclerosis was much less prominent in trained animals. Plasma, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol-levels and total triglycerides were reduced in trained compared to sedentary rats. This study suggests that chronic exercise training ameliorates the progression of renal disease and improves plasma lipids in rats with moderate renal insufficiency. The mechanism for this improvement in renal function appears to be independent of the influence of systemic blood pressure

Legitimacy in policing: a systematic review

Police require voluntary cooperation from the general public to be effective in controlling crime and maintaining order. Research shows that citizens are more likely to comply and cooperate with police and obey the law when they view the police as legitimate. The most common pathway that the police use to increase citizen perceptions of legitimacy is through the use of procedural justice. Procedural justice, as described in the literature, comprises four essential components. These components are citizen participation in the proceedings prior to an authority reaching a decision (or voice), perceived neutrality of the authority in making the decision, whether or not the authority showed dignity and respect toward citizens throughout the interaction, and whether or not the authority conveyed trustworthy motives. Police departments throughout the world are implicitly and explicitly weaving the dialogue of these four principles of procedural justice (treating people with dignity and respect, giving citizens “voice” during encounters, being neutral in decision making, and conveying trustworthy motives) into their operational policing programs and interventions. This review synthesizes published and unpublished empirical evidence on the impact of interventions led by the public police to enhance citizen perceptions of police legitimacy. Our objective is to provide a systematic review of the direct and indirect benefits of policing approaches that foster legitimacy in policing that either report an explicit statement that the intervention sought to increase legitimacy or report that there was an application of at least one of the principles of procedural justice: participation, neutrality, dignity/respect, and trustworthy motives

The Impacts of Reward Salience on Rate of Learning & Extinction

Salience of rewards is a critical component to learning and motivation, without salience, motivation would be insubstantial (Berridge, 2012). This study aims to investigate the relationship between reward salience and rate of learning. Rate of learning will be measured by the number of correct lever presses within twenty-to-twenty-five-minute periods. Extinction will additionally be measured to further examine the impact reward salience has on learning. Using standard operant chambers, six female food-restricted rats were trained to lever press the left front lever to obtain a food reward. Rats were separated into two groups, (n=3 per group), an experimental group of rats was trained using sucrose pellets as a reinforcement for pressing the left lever whereas the control group was given standard food pellets as a reinforcement. Rewards were dispensed on variable ratio, VR-2, as this schedule elicits high and steady rates of responding (Ward-Robinson & Honey, 2000). We hypothesized the experimental group would produce significantly more lever presses and result in enhanced rate of learning due to the salience of the sucrose reward. Contrary to what was originally hypothesized, this study showed rodents conditioned to left lever press given a normal food reward not only learned quicker, requiring less shaping, but additionally demonstrated processes of extinction. While qualitative data regarding behavior was collected, sucrose pellets did not clearly demonstrate enhanced rate of learning or elongated extinction processes

Fair relationships and policies to support family day care educators’ mental health: a qualitative study

High quality child care is a population health investment that relies on the capacity of providers. The mental health and wellbeing of child care educators is fundamental to care quality and turnover, yet sector views on the relationship between working conditions and mental health and wellbeing are scarce. This paper examines child care educators\u27 and sector key informants\u27 perspectives on how working in family day care influences educator\u27s mental health and wellbeing

AEGIS: Chandra Observation of DEEP2 Galaxy Groups and Clusters

We present a 200 ksec Chandra observation of seven spectroscopically selected, high redshift (0.75 < z < 1.03) galaxy groups and clusters discovered by the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey in the Extended Groth Strip (EGS). X-ray emission at the locations of these systems is consistent with background. The 3-sigma upper limits on the bolometric X-ray luminosities (L_X) of these systems put a strong constraint on the relation between L_X and the velocity dispersion of member galaxies sigma_gal at z~1; the DEEP2 systems have lower luminosity than would be predicted by the local relation. Our result is consistent with recent findings that at high redshift, optically selected clusters tend to be X-ray underluminous. A comparison with mock catalogs indicates that it is unlikely that this effect is entirely caused by a measurement bias between sigma_gal and the dark matter velocity dispersion. Physically, the DEEP2 systems may still be in the process of forming and hence not fully virialized, or they may be deficient in hot gas compared to local systems. We find only one possibly extended source in this Chandra field, which happens to lie outside the DEEP2 coverage.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in AEGIS ApJ Letters special editio

Convolutional networks inherit frequency sensitivity from image statistics

It is widely acknowledged that trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have different levels of sensitivity to signals of different frequency. In particular, a number of empirical studies have documented CNNs sensitivity to low-frequency signals. In this work we show with theory and experiments that this observed sensitivity is a consequence of the frequency distribution of natural images, which is known to have most of its power concentrated in low-to-mid frequencies. Our theoretical analysis relies on representations of the layers of a CNN in frequency space, an idea that has previously been used to accelerate computations and study implicit bias of network training algorithms, but to the best of our knowledge has not been applied in the domain of model robustness.Comment: Comments welcome

How many dimensions are required to find an adversarial example?

Past work exploring adversarial vulnerability have focused on situations where an adversary can perturb all dimensions of model input. On the other hand, a range of recent works consider the case where either (i) an adversary can perturb a limited number of input parameters or (ii) a subset of modalities in a multimodal problem. In both of these cases, adversarial examples are effectively constrained to a subspace $V$ in the ambient input space $\mathcal{X}$. Motivated by this, in this work we investigate how adversarial vulnerability depends on $\dim(V)$. In particular, we show that the adversarial success of standard PGD attacks with $\ell^p$ norm constraints behaves like a monotonically increasing function of $\epsilon (\frac{\dim(V)}{\dim \mathcal{X}})^{\frac{1}{q}}$ where $\epsilon$ is the perturbation budget and $\frac{1}{p} + \frac{1}{q} =1$, provided $p > 1$ (the case $p=1$ presents additional subtleties which we analyze in some detail). This functional form can be easily derived from a simple toy linear model, and as such our results land further credence to arguments that adversarial examples are endemic to locally linear models on high dimensional spaces.Comment: Comments welcome! V2: minor edits for clarit