Thursday, July 15, 2010

Student Victimization in U.S. Schools

This report uses data from the 2007 SCS to examine student criminal victimization and the characteristics of crime victims and nonvictims. It also provides findings on student reports of the presence of gangs and weapons and the availability of drugs at school, student reports of bullying and cyberbullying, and fear and avoidance behaviors of crime victims and nonvictims at school.


Source: National Center for Education Statistics

Download full pdf publication | Link to NCES

The Experience of Tenure-Track Faculty at Research Universities: Analysis of COACHE Survey Results by Academic Area and Gender

A new report by COACHE reveals evidence of major differences in work satisfaction between faculty in different academic areas and between men and women within many of those areas. In surveys of untenured assistant professors at research universities, faculty in the physical sciences and humanities were among those satisfied with more aspects of their work lives, while faculty in education and the visual and performing arts were satisfied with the fewest aspects. In additional analysis, COACHE researchers found that gaps in satisfaction between women and men were most prevalent in the social sciences.


Source: Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education.(COACHE)

Download full pdf publication | Download pdf announcement | Link to COACHE Publications

Monday, July 12, 2010

Latinos: Discrete and Insular No More

Abstract:

As part of this symposium to celebrate the publication of a Latinos and the Law casebook by Richard Delgado, Juan Perea, and Jean Stefancic, this Essay considers why the time is ripe for bringing Latinos out of the casebook squibs and into the canon. The primary answer is: numbers. As Latinos become an increasingly large segment of the U.S. population, understanding how they fit into American history and how their presence has shaped the law's development becomes central to understanding the nature of our polity. But the growth of the Latino population into a dominant minority (and an outright majority in some jurisdictions) raises a new set of questions: what happens to our conceptions of rights and responsibilities when a minority starts to take on the characteristics of a majority, or an outright majority ceases to exist? Our conception of the category "Latino" and its place in our politics and constitutional jurisprudence must change as the population grows in size and importance. This Essay explores how and why.


Source: New York University Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

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America's Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2010

The Forum's signature report, America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, provides annual updates on the well-being of children and families in the United States across a range of domains.

The 2010 Childstats website includes 68 tables and 59 figures that describe the population of children and depict their well-being in the areas of family and social environment, economic circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education, and health.


Source: Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics

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| Link to ChildStats.gov

Thursday, July 08, 2010

May it Please the Senate: An Empirical Analysis of the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009

Abstract:
This paper examines the questions asked and answers given by every Supreme Court nominee who has appeared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1939. In doing so, it uses a new dataset developed by the authors. This database, which provides a much-needed empirical foundation for scholarship in emerging areas of constitutional law and political science, captures all of the statements made at the hearings and codes these comments by issue area, subissue area, party of the appointing president, and party of the questioning senator. The dataset allows us to quantify for the fist time such things as which issues are most frequently discussed at the hearings, whether those issues have changed over time, and whether they vary depending on the party of the appointing president and the party of the questioning senator. We also investigate if questioning patterns differ depending on the race or gender of the nominee. Some of our results are unsurprising: for example, the hearings have become longer. Others, however, challenge conventional wisdom: the Bork hearing is less of an outlier in several ways than is frequently assumed, and abortion has not dominated the hearings. We also discover that there is issue area variation over time, and that there are notable disparities in the issues addressed by Democratic versus Republican senators. Finally, we find that female and minority nominees face a significantly different hearing environment than do white male nominees.


Source: UGA Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-12. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1630403

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Tackling inequalities in life expectancy in areas with the worst health and deprivation

Introduction:
The Department of Health has made a serious attempt to tackle health inequalities across England. But, having set a target in 2000 to reduce health inequalities, it was slow to take action and health inequalities were not a top priority for the NHS until 2006.

The NAO report found that, although life expectancy overall has increased, the gap in life expectancy between the national average and the Government’s dedicated “spearhead” areas has continued to widen. The Department will not meet its target to reduce the health inequalities gap by 10 per cent by 2010, as measured by life expectancy at birth, if current trends continue.


Source: United Kingdom National Audit Office

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| Download pdf executive summary | Link to summary and other downloads

Assessing How Marijuana Legalization in California Could Influence Marijuana Consumption and Public Budgets

Summary:
To learn more about the possible outcomes of marijuana legalization in California, RAND researchers constructed a model based on a series of estimates of current consumption, current and future prices, how responsive use is to price changes, taxes levied and possibly evaded, and the aggregation of nonprice effects (such as a change in stigma). Key findings include the following: (1) the pretax retail price of marijuana will substantially decline, likely by more than 80 percent. The price the consumers face will depend heavily on taxes, the structure of the regulatory regime, and how taxes and regulations are enforced; (2) consumption will increase, but it is unclear how much, because we know neither the shape of the demand curve nor the level of tax evasion (which reduces revenues and prices that consumers face); (3) tax revenues could be dramatically lower or higher than the $1.4 billion estimate provided by the California Board of Equalization (BOE); for example, uncertainty about the federal response to California legalization can swing estimates in either direction; (4) previous studies find that the annual costs of enforcing marijuana laws in California range from around $200 million to nearly $1.9 billion; our estimates show that the costs are probably less than $300 million; and (5) there is considerable uncertainty about the impact of legalizing marijuana in California on public budgets and consumption, with even minor changes in assumptions leading to major differences in outcomes.


Source: RAND Corporation

Download full pdf publication | Link to online summary

Monday, June 28, 2010

The Efficacy of Self-Funding a Political Campaign

Whitman and Fiorina take note: while candidates with big war chests hold a significant advantage over their opponents, the advantage is diffused when most of the money comes from a candidate's own pockets. The traditional advantages of being the top fundraiser in a race, or being an incumbent, don't confer the same level of success to self-financiers. That trend holds true for candidates from all parties. In fact, in the last nine years, only 11 percent of self-financed candidates won their races. Early primary results in 2010 show this trend may be continuing.


Source: National Institute on Money and State Politics

Link to online publication

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication

This document is a code of best practices that helps U.S. communication scholars to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances—especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question.

This guide identifies four situations that represent the current consensus within the community of communication scholars about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials.


Source: Center for Social Media Funded by the Ford Foundation through the Center for Social Media’s Future of Public Media Project

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|Link to online overview

Now available from Google Books : Ancient Greek and Latin Texts

As part of its mission to make the world's books searchable and discoverable, Google has digitized over five hundred ancient Greek and Latin books. We present them here downloadable as zip files of images and plain text, and as links to Google Books web pages where you can read them online in full or download PDFs. This collection was selected by Prof. Greg Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University, and compiled by Will Brockman and Jon Orwant of Google. Enjoy!


Link to Google Books Ancient Greek and Latin Texts.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Long-term unemployment experience of the jobless

Introduction:
By the end of 2009, the jobless rate stood at 10.0 percent and the number of unemployed persons at 15.3 million. Among the unemployed, 4 in 10(6.1 million) had been jobless for 27 weeks or more, by far the highest proportion of long-term unemployment on record, with data back to 1948. This brief report compares the incidence of long-term joblessness among different age groups during the current recession."

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Download pdf publication | Link to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report 2010

Background:
The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.

This annual report presents the most comprehensive global assessment of progress to date, based on data provided by a large number of international organizations within and outside the United Nations system. The aggregate figures in the report provide an overview of regional progress under the eight goals and are a convenient way to track advances over time. The report is coordinated and published by the Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.


Source: United Nations

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Do Minimum Wages Really Reduce Teen Employment? Accounting for Heterogeneity and Selectivity in State Panel Data

Abstract:

Traditional estimates of minimum wage effects include controls for state unemployment rates and state and year fixed-effects. Using CPS data on teens for the period 1990 – 2009, we show that such estimates fail to account for heterogeneous employment patterns that are correlated with selectivity among states with minimum wages. As a result, the estimates are often biased and vary with the source of identifying variation. Including controls for long-term growth differences among states and for heterogeneous economic shocks renders the employment and hours elasticities indistinguishable from zero and rules out any but small disemployment effects. Dynamic evidence further shows the nature of bias in traditional estimates, and it also rules out more negative long run effects. We do not find evidence of heterogeneous employment effects in different parts of the business cycle. We also consider predictable versus unpredictable changes in the minimum wage by looking at indexation of the minimum wage in some states.

Source: Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UC Berkeley [via escholarship repository]

Download full pdf publication | Link to eScholarship repository

Ernst & Young's European attractiveness survey Report

Ernst & Young's European attractiveness survey is based on a two-fold, original methodology that reflects, first, Europe's real attractiveness for foreign direct investors, based on Ernst & Young's European Investment Monitor (EIM), and second the ‘perceived’ attractiveness of Europe and its competitors by a representative panel of approximately 800 international decision-makers.


Source: Ernst & Young

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The World Cup and Economics

The 2010 book on the World Cup and Economics is the fourth since the 1998 finals in Paris. A companion to the competition, the book includes a number of new features and contributions from guests such as former South African Central Bank Governor Tito Mboweni, Andy Anson, CEO of England's 2018 World Cup bid, and Kevin Roberts, editorial director of Sports Business Group. As usual, the likely semi-finalists are also tentatively suggested - always a highly contentious move.


Source: Goldman Sachs

Download pdf publication | Link to online abstract at Goldman Sachs

Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees

From Introduction:
Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.


Source: Pew Social and Demographic Trends

Download full pdf report | Link to report online

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Transforming the High School Experience How New York City’s New Small Schools Are Boosting Student Achievement and Graduation Rates

From Overview:
Since 2002, New York City has closed more than 20 underperforming public high schools, opened more than 200 new secondary schools, and introduced a centralized high school admissions process in which approximately 80,000 students a year indicate their school preferences from a wide-ranging choice of programs. At the heart of these reforms lie 123 new “small schools of choice” (SSCs) — small, academically nonselective, four-year public high schools for students in grades 9 through 12. Open to students at all levels of academic achievement and located in historically disadvantaged communities, SSCs were intended to be viable alternatives to the neighborhood high schools that were closing.


Source: MDRC

Download full pdf publication | Download pdf Executive Summary | Link to overview

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Friday, June 11, 2010

The Role of Faith-Based Organizations in HIV Prevention and Care in Central America

Abstract:

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have historically played an important role in delivering health and social services in developing countries; however, little research has been done on their role in HIV prevention and care, particularly in Latin America. This study describes FBO involvement in HIV/AIDS in three Central American countries hard hit by this epidemic: Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. Summarizing the results of key informant and stakeholder interviews with health and FBO leaders and site visits to FBO-sponsored HIV/AIDS clinics, hospices, programs, and other activities, the authors describe the range of FBO activities and assess the advantages of FBO involvement in addressing HIV/AIDS, such as churches' diverse presence and extensive reach, and the challenges to such involvement, such as the unwillingness of some FBOs to discuss condom use and their lack of experience in evaluating the impact of programs. The authors conclude with a discussion of possible ways that FBOs can address the HIV epidemic, both independently and in collaboration with other organizations, such as government ministries of health.

Source: RAND Corporation

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| Link to RAND Record for this item

Monday, June 07, 2010

No Path to Glory: Deterring Homegrown Terrorism

Testimony presented before the House Homeland Security Committee, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment on May 26, 2010.

Source: RAND Corporation

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| Link to RAND Corporation