How to make better mistakes in public policy

We all make mistakes, a tendency which also extends to those who work in public policy. Despite this seemingly universal tendency, we often only hear about successes. Bucking this trend, Kevin Arceneaux and Daniel Butler describe a recent pilot program aimed at boosting civic engagement in a Midwestern town, based on Get Out the Vote literature. Rather than increasing the number of people who volunteered for town committees as intended, the three tactics they tested actually had no effect or reduced the chances that people would volunteer

It doesn't make any sense : self and strategies among college students with learning disabilities

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on July 31, 2007)Vita.Thesis (Ph. D.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2006.Even though there has been increasing awareness of and accommodations for college students with learning disabilities, many of them still face various forms of stigmatization from instructors and peers. In this research project, I exam the ways in students with learning disabilities are stigmatized in academic and nonacademic settings, how they responded, or accounted, for their disability when questioned by others, and the strategies which they used to cope with problematic situations. This research is based on qualitative interviews of twenty-three college students with learning disabilities. Although the respondents viewed their learning disability as a minor issue, they did report problematic and embarrassing situations during their college career. Individuals with LD were concerned about the negative perceptions that others had of their LD label. To cope with stigmatization, college students with learning disabilities strategically performed tasks in order to minimize the negative reactions from peers and teachers. They also developed a series of accounts to neutralize the questions of their actions or their disability status. For this dissertation, I use Goffman's concept of impression management and information control to examine how college students with learning disabilities strategically use the performance of reading, writing, and other tasks associated with learning to present a positive self-concept. This dissertation looks at college students who are successful in managing the stigma associated with LD. While other learning disability narratives emphasize the all-encompassing, this study focuses on how individuals with learning disabilities attempt to control the effects and the significance of LD in everyday life.Includes bibliographical reference

Fox News pushes Democrats and Republicans to bemore conservative, especially around election time

Since it premiered in 1996, Fox News has become the most watched cable news network in America, pushing forward a partisan view which has been critical of President Obama and the Democratic Party. But does Fox News actually influence the way that we are governed? In new research which examines how House members vote, Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, René Lindstädt and Ryan Vander Wielen find that when Fox News is available in members’ constituencies, they are more likely to adopt more conservative policy positions – whether they are Republican or Democrat. They also find that this effect is most pronounced around election time, and is nearly nonexistent immediately after elections

The electoral effectiveness of constituency campaigning in the 2010 British General Election: The ‘triumph’ of Labour?

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Electoral Studies. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V.This article establishes a model of likely campaign effectiveness, before examining the intensity of constituency campaigning at the 2010 general election in Britain and its subsequent impact on electoral outcomes, using both aggregate and individual level data. It shows that constituency campaigning yielded benefits in varying degrees for all three main parties and that Labour’s constituency campaign efforts were effective despite the electoral context, and ultimately affected the overall outcome of the election. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of the circumstances under which campaigns are likely to be more or less effective, and provide further evidence that a carefully managed campaign stands the most chance of delivering tangible electoral payoffs

F12RS SGR No. 13 (Stop Light)

A RESOLUTION To thank the city of Baton Rouge and the State of Louisiana for installing red lights at the intersection of West Parker and Burbank

Reporting guidelines for experimental research: A report from the experimental research section standards committee.

The standards committee of the Experimental Research section was charged with preparing a set of reporting guidelines for experimental research in political science. The committee defined its task as compiling a set of guidelines sufficient to enable the reader or reviewer to follow what the researcher had done and to assess the validity of the conclusions the researcher had drawn. Although the guidelines do request the reporting of some basic statistics, they do not attempt to weigh in on statistical controversies. Rather, they aim for something more modest but nevertheless crucial: to ensure that scholars clearly describe what it is they did at each step in their research and clearly report what their data show. In this paper, we discuss the rationale for reporting guidelines and the process used to formulate the specific guidelines we endorse. The guidelines themselves are included in Appendix 1

Lessons Learned from Deploying an Analytical Task Management Database

Defining requirements, missions, technologies, and concepts for space exploration involves multiple levels of organizations, teams of people with complementary skills, and analytical models and simulations. Analytical activities range from filling a To-Be-Determined (TBD) in a requirement to creating animations and simulations of exploration missions. In a program as large as returning to the Moon, there are hundreds of simultaneous analysis activities. A way to manage and integrate efforts of this magnitude is to deploy a centralized database that provides the capability to define tasks, identify resources, describe products, schedule deliveries, and generate a variety of reports. This paper describes a web-accessible task management system and explains the lessons learned during the development and deployment of the database. Through the database, managers and team leaders can define tasks, establish review schedules, assign teams, link tasks to specific requirements, identify products, and link the task data records to external repositories that contain the products. Data filters and spreadsheet export utilities provide a powerful capability to create custom reports. Import utilities provide a means to populate the database from previously filled form files. Within a four month period, a small team analyzed requirements, developed a prototype, conducted multiple system demonstrations, and deployed a working system supporting hundreds of users across the aeros pace community. Open-source technologies and agile software development techniques, applied by a skilled team enabled this impressive achievement. Topics in the paper cover the web application technologies, agile software development, an overview of the system's functions and features, dealing with increasing scope, and deploying new versions of the system

Fscan Code Development For Advanced Ligo Detector Characterization

The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) is an experiment designed to provide direct detection of gravitational waves. Its searches for periodic gravitational waves are highly susceptible to long-duration noise that appears as spectral lines. FScan is a tool for finding spectral lines and is used to identify the lines that appear in the gravitational-wave data; it is also used to characterize LIGO\u27s detectors. This thesis details work in rewriting the plotting portion of FScan, making improvements to the FScan driver script, and writing code to assist in the tracking of wandering spectral lines. In particular, this thesis presents the line tracking code, LineTrack.py, and serves as its documentation

Economic Impact of Homebuyer Training Programs: A Case Study

The significance of Homebuyer training as a tool of economic developments is often underestimated. The assistance and education provided by these programs function as a platform to promote and achieve economic development goals. Homebuyer training programs prepare individuals for the home buying process including budgeting and credit, predatory lending, and foreclosure prevention methods. In 2002 Hirad and Zorn conducted a quasi-experimental evaluation analyzing pre-purchase counseling’s impact on 90-day delinquency rates. Analyzing nearly 40,000 loans their research revealed a statistically significant decline in 90-day delinquency rates from homebuyers who attended classroom counseling. Current literature recognizes the significance of Homebuyer Training Programs, yet there is a need to understand the economic benefits. / Previous studies have focused on success of Home Buyer Training Programs based on delinquency rates. This study will focus on developing a tool kit for assessing a link between Homebuyer Training Programs and economic development. As part of this study a sample of Neighborhood Development Foundation Homebuyer Training Program participants will be examined. Home buying procedural expenses concerning Real Estate, Title Company, Lender, and Government services were extracted from Neighborhood Development Foundation internal documents. Preliminary results indicate that there is a short-term net economic impact of this Homebuyer Training Program. The economic impact for business government and the public will be evaluated in order to support expanding Homebuyer Training Programs Nation Wide

A Comparative Study Of Two Methods Of Defining The Stieltjes Integrals

The primary objective of this paper is a close examination of the differences in the class of functions f and g when f is Integrable with respect to g according to the definition of the integral based on the use of upper and lower sums as compared to the definition of the integral based on the trapezodial sum approach. The differences in the proofs of certain theorems relative to the properties and existence of the Integral will also be examined. In order to clearly distinguish between these approaches to the integral, the writer considers only one method of taking limits of the defining sums, namely the refining of partitions. Clearly, the limit of these sums under the requirement of the norm of the partitioning having limit zero introduces another difference in the possible existence of the integral and is not considered in this paper