Built to lie: Investigating technologies of deception,surveillance, and control

This article explores technological systems that dissimulate by design. Examples include untrustworthy hotel and workplace thermostats, digital applications to spy on workers and family members, and commercial and law-enforcement systems that surreptitiously collect mobile phone data. Rather than view such cases as exceptional, I argue that deceptive communication systems are hidden articulations of normal technological orders. If deception in itself is not the primary problem with such systems, then transparency alone cannot be the solution. As troubling as institutional opacity might be, an analysis of deceptive systems reveals more fundamental problems: imbalances in power and widespread acquiescence to corporate and state efforts to control individuals, groups, and their data. By moving beyond a quest for (or belief in) technological veracity, scholars could redirect attention to power inequalities and the pressing question of how to live together ethically.     

Children's Museums as Citizens: Four Inspiring Examples

Abstract The audience‐centered mission of childrens' museums has caused these institutions to look at their role in their respective communities and to take bold steps in envisioning new ways of relating to their constituents. Here is a selection of four childrens' museums which have founded inspiring and imaginative programs centered on children's welfare.     

“Not now,maybe later”: The influence of relationship type,request persistence,and alcohol consumption on women's refusal strategies

This study examines strategies employed by women when refusing an unwanted request for increased intimacy. Women (N = 76) orally produced refusal messages to unwanted requests from hypothetical dating partners and friends. The influence of relationship type, request persistence, and alcohol consumption on refusal strategies was examined. Approximately half of the participants (N = 37) drank alcohol before encoding the refusal messages. The results indicate that relationship type influenced women's refusal strategy selection and that request persistence had a more pronounced influence on the refusals to dates’ requests than to friends’ requests. Alcohol consumption did not significantly affect the encoding of refusal strategies. Results suggest that the influence of alcohol consumption on refusals should be examined within the context of the whole message production process.     

STAFF PERCEPTIONS OF BEHAVIORAL PROBLEMS IN NURSING HOME RESIDENTS WITH DEMENTIA: THE ROLE OF TRAINING

Residents of nursing homes with a dementing illness constitute a challenge for direct practitioners because of the presence of behavioral problems often accompanying the illness. A before‐after evaluation design was used to assess characteristics of patients and their staff caregivers at baseline and 1 year after the educational intervention. Overall, resident cognition and functioning declined at posttest, as would be expected due to the nature of the illness. Thirty‐six behaviors were assessed to identify staff perceptions of the frequency and difficulty of managing these behaviors. The most frequently reported behavioral symptoms at baseline were poor personal hygiene and bladder and bowel incontinence; however, after the intervention there were no reports of frequently occurring disruptive behavioral symptoms. Overall, staff perceptions of the frequency and difficulty in managing behavioral symptoms declined by 47% at the post‐test. Although managing difficult behaviors of dementia patients is a challenge for staff in long‐term care facilities, results of this study suggest that through training staff may perceive behavioral symptoms as less problematic and thus be enabled to respond more effectively to specific behavioral problems of the residents.     

Feeding the body politic: metaphors of digestion in Progressive Era US immigration discourse

In the era between the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, nativist advocates for immigration restriction commonly invoked metaphors of eating and digestion to support their cases. This essay draws on political, popular, and scientific discourses around immigration and digestion in order to analyze the affective power of the rhetorically constructed “body politic.” While numerous scholars have addressed the ways immigrants have been variously figured as threats to the nation—as pollutants, toxins, disease, floods, or invading armies—few have analyzed metaphors of eating and digestion. I argue that the national body became a metonym for the ideal (white) citizen body, which supported anti-immigrant rhetoric through metaphors of eating, digesting, and eliminating undesirable aliens—those who did not agree with the national stomach. The body politic came to represent the ideal US American body as individuals were invited to identify with the nation through the trope of the body politic; immigrants who did not share this ideal body were rendered undesirable through their association with indigestibility and disgust. This essay demonstrates the affective and thus political power that digestion metaphors provided, shedding light on an early instantiation of the disgust that pulses through twenty-first-century anti-immigrant discourse in the United States.     

Generating Dichotomous Item Scores with the Four-Parameter Beta Compound Binomial Model

A Monte Carlo simulation technique for generating dichotomous item scores is presented that implements (a) a psychometric model with different explicit assumptions than traditional parametric item response theory (IRT) models, and (b) item characteristic curves without restrictive assumptions concerning mathematical form. The four-parameter beta compound-binomial (4PBCB) strong true score model (with two-term approximation to the compound binomial) is used to estimate and generate the true score distribution. The nonparametric item-true score step functions are estimated by classical item difficulties conditional on proportion-correct total score. The technique performed very well in replicating inter-item correlations, item statistics (point-biserial correlation coefficients and item proportion-correct difficulties), first four moments of total score distribution, and coefficient alpha of three real data sets consisting of educational achievement test scores. The technique replicated real data (including subsamples of differing proficiency) as well as the three-parameter logistic (3PL) IRT model (and much better than the 1PL model) and is therefore a promising alternative simulation technique. This 4PBCB technique may be particularly useful as a more neutral simulation procedure for comparing methods that use different IRT models.