Identifying the Prevalence of Courses on Mental Illness in Criminal Justice Education

Persons with Mental Illness (PMIs) require unique consideration and individualized attention in the criminal justice system. Research has demonstrated the prevalence with which police come into contact with these individuals, the unique considerations made by courtrooms serving PMIs, the overrepresentation of PMIs in correctional settings, and the problems PMIs experience when reentering the community from incarceration. Given the growth of attention to this area, and the increased reality of challenges that criminal justice professionals encounter when working with PMIs, this paper explores the prevalence of courses on mental illness in criminal justice undergraduate programs in the United States. The current review of over 640 curricula in the United States illustrates that courses devoted solely to the topic of mental illness in the criminal justice system are particularly rare. The importance of offering more courses in the interface between mental illness and criminal justice for future professionals in the field is discussed.     

Community Networks: Rules of Behavior and Social Structure

This article investigates the intertwining relationships between the Gemeinschaft and the Gesellschaft dimension of a community network (CN)—that is, of a virtual community whose members' common interest is a locality, in our case the city of Milan, Italy. The article looks through the experience of the last 7 years of life on RCM—the Milan Community Network—to reflect on the role that the sharing of rules of behavior has on the evolution of social structure in a virtual community. It identifies three phases of development—the design phase, the first growth phase, and the most recent phase—and presents the social structure set up to guarantee governance of the CN. The conclusions show that the third phase is not an actual stable state, as the continuous evolution of the societal and technological context requires continuous redesign of the CN itself in order to meet the renewed demands of a new context.     

Making the Pap smear into the "right tool" for the job

Despite being a rather recalcitrant tool, the "Pap smear" is today the major cancer screening technology in the world. This paper examines how and why hetrogeneous actors chose to advocate the Pap smear as a screen for cervical cancer in the late 1940's, and to tinker both in and far beyond the diagnostic laboratory for over 50 years to make the Pap smear "fit" as a screening and clinical technology. Tinkerings included gendering the division of labour, attempting to automate reading of smears, juggling costs, exploring alternative screening technologies, pushing for regulation of laboratories, and settling for locally-negotiated orders of clinical accuracy instead of global standardization, still elusive today.     

The status of girls’ education in Education for All Fast Track Initiative partner countries

This viewpoint examines girls’ performance in primary education in the countries that joined the Education for All Fast Track Initiative between 2002 and 2008. At the time they joined the initiative, a first group of countries (high performers) had already achieved high and equal enrollment of girls and boys. Significant progress is evident in a second group of countries (good performers) after joining the initiative. In contrast, a third group of countries (weak performers) continue to struggle to achieve any increase in girls’ enrollment. The article summarizes the various interventions that countries have adopted to encourage girls to attend school and then highlights the importance of developing strategic plans based on extensive collaboration between development partners and government. The viewpoint concludes by describing the three challenges that remain: increasing learning, reducing the number of out-of-school girls, and improving girls’ performance in fragile and post-conflict countries.     

数字时代的长文

目前,篇幅较长的文章面临着严峻的挑战.怎样才能够持续吸引网络读者的注意力?因为网络读者更可能喜欢快速点击而不是一页一页地阅读.内容维护者的新群体说,正是移动设备和应用程序增强了长文的吸引力,并再次创造出能坐下来认真阅读的读者.