Developing an overarching legal framework for critical service delivery in America’s cities: Three recommendations for enhancing security and reliability

State and Local governments must develop an overarching legal foundation to manage critical service delivery in an electronic environment. Prior to establishing a foundation, decision-makers must first adopt a philosophy that focuses and harnesses expressions of law and public policy. The research and development community must supports the nation’s efforts with programs designed to aid in the risk assessment process. These programs must focus on identifying better ways to quantify risk, understanding infrastructure interdependency, and measuring cascading damages flowing from service outages. Finally, State and Local leaders should adopt security guidelines for industry and government service providers. Guidelines involve ten well-defined process requirements, all of which must be implemented to provide services online and in a safe and secure manner.     

Not an outgroup, not yet an ingroup: Immigrants in the Stereotype Content Model

Stereotype research depicts the generic immigrant as incompetent and untrustworthy. The current research expands this image, specifying key information dimensions (e.g. nationality, socioeconomic status) about immigrants. To see how perceivers differentiate among particular immigrant groups, we extend a model of intergroup perception, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902), to immigrant subgroups. The SCM predicts that perception centers on competence and warmth, and relates to targets’ perceived status and competition within society. Specified by nationality, race, ethnicity, and class, images of immigrants differ by both competence and warmth, with most groups receiving ambivalent (low–high or high–low) stereotypes rather than the uniform low–low for the generic immigrant. As predicted, ambivalent stereotypes reflect target nationality combined with socioeconomic status, supporting the SCM's ambivalent stereotypes and social structural hypotheses, as well as better defining immigrant stereotypes and their contingencies.     

Do Phonological and Executive Processes in English Learners at Risk for Reading Disabilities in Grade 1 Predict Performance in Grade 2?

This study determined the degree to which the phonological and executive components of memory reflect language‐specific capacities in reading achievement. We tested whether the memory processes in a sample of English‐language learners that played a major role in predicting second‐language acquisition and risk for reading disability (RD) in Grade 1 (Swanson, Sáez, Gerber, & Leafstedt, 2004) also predicted reading performance in Grade 2. The present results showed that Spanish short‐term memory (STM) performance in Grade 1 predicted basic Spanish‐reading skills and Spanish comprehension in Grade 2, whereas Grade 1 English STM performance predicted English vocabulary and English comprehension in Grade 2. More importantly, children at risk for RD in Grade 1 differed from the counterparts in Grade 2 on both English and Spanish measures of reading, whereas their memory deficits were isolated to Spanish STM and working memory (WM). The relationship between language‐specific processes in memory and reading are discussed.