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1. Understanding the role of media in the formation of public sentiment towards the police

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00059-8  

   Succar, Rayan; Ramallo, Salvador; Das, Rishita; Ventura, Roni Barak; Porfiri, Maurizio (December 2024, Communications Psychology)

   Abstract Public sentiment towards the police is a matter of great interest in the United States, as reports on police misconduct are increasingly being published in mass and social media. Here, we test how the public’s perception of the police can be majorly shaped by media reports of police brutality and local crime. We collect data on media coverage of police brutality and local crime, together with Twitter posts from 2010-2020 about the police in 18 metropolitan areas in the country. Using a range of model-free approaches building on transfer entropy analysis, we discover an association between public sentiment towards the police and media coverage of police brutality. We cautiously interpret this relationship as causal. Through this lens, the public’s sentiment towards the police appears to be driven by media-projected images of police misconduct, with no statistically significant evidence for a comparable effect driven by media reports on crimes. 

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2. Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego Summative Evaluation Report. Unpublished report written for The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History.

   Sigmond, Cathy; Krantz, Amanda; Heller, Hannah; Jackson, Rachel (September 2024, Kera Collective)

   With funding from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) grant #2005404, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) launched a bilingual exhibition project called Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego. The project developed a STEM exhibition for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on invention and technology in sports with embedded research into visitors’ exploration of inventive identity. This summative evaluation explores the impact of the exhibition on walk-in visitors and the project’s priority audiences: girls/young women ages 10-17; African American boys/young men ages 10-17; people with disabilities of all ages; and Spanish-speaking Latinx visitors of all ages. The summative evaluation of the Change Your Game / Cambia tu juego exhibition indicated that project team members did a good job at identifying stories that represent many different people and sports. Visitors found it novel to consider invention in relation to sports and games, thus serving as an entry point to inventive identity exploration in terms of ontological-epistemological beliefs within audiences’ role as a museum visitor. The exhibition was especially impactful for youth audiences; approximately half of visitors aged 10-17 said they felt more inventive after seeing the exhibit (p. 48). Beyond ontological-epistemological beliefs, the evaluation results are indeterminate about how the exhibition affected audiences in other areas of identity exploration. The evaluation raises questions about inventive identity to be considered along with the research findings for further exploration. We have shared the summative evaluation with the informal science learning (ISL) community at informalscience.org. 

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3. Uncomfortable Conversations with Faculty and Students in Zoom: Experiences with diversity and inclusion spurred by police brutality and racial injustice in the U.S.

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--39149  

   White, Lance; Hammond, Tracy; Ray, Samantha; Jaison, Donna; Stanley, Christine (February 2022, 2022 CoNECD (Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity))

   The culture within engineering colleges and departments has been historically quiet when considering social justice issues. Often the faculty in those departments are less concerned with social issues and are primarily focused on their disciplines and the concrete ways that they can make impacts academically and professionally in their respective arena’s. However, with the social climate of the United States shifting ever more towards a politically charged climate, and current events, particularly the protests against police brutality in recent years, faculty and students are constantly inundated with news of injustices happening in our society. The murder of George Floyd on May 25th 2020 sent shockwaves across the United States and the world. The video captured of his death shared across the globe brought everyone’s attention to the glaringly ugly problem of police brutality, paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, and US election year, the conditions were just right for a social activist movement to grow to a size that no one could ignore. Emmanuel Acho spoke out, motivated by injustices seen in the George Floyd murder, initially with podcasts and then by writing his book “Uncomfortable Converstations with a Black Man” [1]. In his book he touched on various social justice issues such as: racial terminology (i.e., Black or African American), implicit biases, white privilege, cultural appropriation, stereotypes (e.g., the “angry black man”), racial slurs (particularly the n-word), systemic racism, the myth of reverse racism, the criminal justice system, the struggles faced by black families, interracial families, allyship, and anti-racism. Students and faculty at Anonymous University felt compelled to set aside the time to meet and discuss this book in depth through the video conferencing client Zoom. In these meetings diverse facilitators were tasked with bringing the topics discussed by Acho in his book into conversation and pushing attendees of these meetings to consider those topics critically and personally. In an effort to avoid tasking attendees with reading homework to be able to participate in these discussions, the discussed chapter of the audiobook version of Acho’s book was played at the beginning of each meeting. Each audiobook chapter lasted between fifteen and twenty minutes, after which forty to forty-five minutes were left in the hour-long meetings to discuss the content of the chapter in question. Efforts by students and faculty were made to examine how some of the teachings of the book could be implemented into their lives and at Anonymous University. For broader topics, they would relate the content back to their personal lives (e.g., raising their children to be anti-racist and their experiences with racism in American and international cultures). Each meeting was recorded for posterity in the event that those conversations would be used in a paper such as this. Each meeting had at least one facilitator whose main role was to provide discussion prompts based on the chapter and ensure that the meeting environment was safe and inclusive. Naturally, some chapters address topics that are highly personal to some participants, so it was vital that all participants felt comfortable and supported to share their thoughts and experiences. The facilitator would intervene if the conversation veered in an aggressive direction. For example, if a participant starts an argument with another participant in a non-constructive manner, e.g., arguing over the definition of ethnicity, then the facilitator will interrupt, clear the air to bring the group back to a common ground, and then continue the discussion. Otherwise, participants were allowed to steer the direction of the conversation as new avenues of discussion popped up. These meetings were recorded with the goal of returning to these conversations and analyzing the conversations between attendees. Grounded theory will be used to first assess the most prominent themes of discussion between attendees for each meeting [2]. Attendees will be contacted to expressly ask their permission to have their words and thoughts used in this work, and upon agreement that data will begin to be processed. Select attendees will be asked to participate in focus group discussions, which will also be recorded via Zoom. These discussions will focus around the themes pulled from general discussion and will aim to dive deeper into the impact that this experience has had on them as either students or faculty members. A set of questions will be developed as prompts, but conversation is expected to evolve organically as these focus groups interact. These sessions will be scheduled for an hour, and a set of four focus groups with four participants are expected to participate for a total of sixteen total focus group participants. We hope to uncover how this experience changed the lives of the participants and present a model of how conversations such as this can promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and access activities amongst faculty and students outside of formal programs and strategic plans that are implemented at university, college, or departmental levels. 

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4. Estimating the structure by age and sex of the US sexually active population

   https://doi.org/10.1080/08898480.2024.2301868  

   Bustamante Orellana, Carlos; Lyerla, Jordan; Martin, Aaron; Milner, Fabio; Smith, Elisha (January 2024, Mathematical Population Studies)

   A model combines demographic data provided by the United States Census Bureau for 2021 with survey data on sexual activity from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate the structure by age and sex of the sexually active population in the United States. It also provides the proportions of newly sexually active people by age and sex. The model is based on percentages of sexually active people by age and sex, and on an ordinary differential equation formalizing a “learning process” for the years 2009 to 2019. The data produced fit well with the empirical data for each age and sex. 

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5. Finding Resilience in Unexpected Places: Why Design Still Matters in Shrinking Rural Communities

   https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.Inter.21.6  

   Luz, Ana; Das, Biswa; Peters, David J.; Drinkwater, Jennifer; Zarecor, Kimberly E. (November 2023, ACSA Press)

   Quirindongo, Rico; Theodore, Georgeen (Ed.)

   Most small and rural communities in the United States are shrinking. This population loss is often accompanied by economic and social upheaval—job losses, out migration of young people, school closures, reductions in local services, and deteriorating physical infrastructure. Because design firms cluster in metropolitan areas and most rural commissions are for private clients, architects are largely absent from these places. The AIA Framework for Design Excellence calls for the professional community to enable more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive environments, yet rural places pose a challenge because they remain a strikingly underserved market for architectural services. How can this vision for Design Excellence extend its reach into places where new construction is rare, and architects are not present to learn from and develop relationships with potential clients?This paper presents an overview of an interdisciplinary research project at Iowa State University funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The research begins with this question: why do people in some rural towns perceive their quality of life to be increasing even when the population continues to shrink? Using twenty years of survey data about quality of life, the team identified small rural communities in Iowa where the typical association of population loss with community decline did not appear to hold true. Through interviews, site visits, spatial analysis, and data analysis using machine learning and other methods, the team is working to better understand what influences people’s perceptions of quality of life. Understanding more about these unexpectedly resilient communities requires conversations and building trust in places where few outsiders ever visit. Examples of projects in towns working with the research team include adaptive reuse of closed schools and other abandoned properties; improved recreational spaces and parks; and repurposing underused commercial properties. 

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