State Legislative Process

This chapter explores the history and operation of state legislatures. The urban-rural divide characterizes stark political and social differences that fuel legislative behavior. The content of public policies across the United States is influenced by these divisions and contributes to either the support of or opposition to social change. State legislators are on the front lines of these geographic ideological divides. These variations by region contribute to the increase in single-party control and have generated pronounced policy differences.

American Elegy, Reflux

This is a meditation on bad air as a defining bodily, temporal, political, and atmospheric condition of the twenty-first-century American Dream. In 2020, the novel viral respiratory illness COVID-19 stole the final breaths of nearly 350,000 Americans (and severely damaged the lungs of many, many more). George Floyd and Daniel Prude, unarmed and Black, were suffocated by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rochester, New York, respectively. Protesters marching in the streets for racial justice were tear-gassed under milky skies. Wildfires raged up and down the West Coast of the United States, thickening the air in the mountains, in the valleys, in the woods, in the cities, with particulate matter. And doctors found a malignant mass in the right lung of this author’s mother. This essay uses the double meaning of aspiration (to inhale and to dream) to trace the myriad ways our collective breathing is central to, and curtailed by, the American Aspiration. Grounded through the breath, it traces the deep entanglements of global pandemic, climate change, state violence, and lung cancer, and their combined social, political, and environmental implications for Americans’ collective flourishing, or collective strangulation. Carried on the polar jet stream from rural Oregon, to the streets of Minneapolis and Rochester, to the tobacco plantations of the American South, it is a rhetorical exercise in breathless grief, in having the wind knocked out, in going up in smoke.

Legal Contention and Minorities in Turkey

This chapter analyzes state-minority relations in Turkey as the state sought closer relations with the European Union over the last three decades. It examines the implementation of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights and the domestic courts as well as of legal reforms passed by the Turkish parliament that relate to the cultural demands of two largest minorities in Turkey, the Kurds and the Alevis. It underlines that in Turkey legislative reforms and progressive court judgments in favor of minority rights do not have much effect on shifting state policy on the ground. This is because state officials can act with impunity, enjoying wide discretionary authority and allowing extralegal and informal forms of official discrimination. Official discrimination can be best examined by focusing on administrative implementation rather than legal texts. This study also shows that the implementation of minority rights reforms is a contentious process that largely depends on bottom-up pressures through persistent social and political mobilization. In the absence of a strong movement, neither international pressure nor legal contention is adequate to change state policy on the ground.

Building bridges that change state Islamic universities in Indonesia toward international standard

<span>The learning organization is a strategic process for every university as a public service institution to improve its performance. Learning organizations have an essential role in linking past experiences to future improvements in changing State Islamic Universities in Indonesia to achieve international standards. This study aimed to describe the State Islamic University's learning organization profile in Indonesia and reveal its readiness towards international standards. This study used a survey approach, collecting data through closed questionnaires and open-ended questions involving 300 respondents consisting of lecturers and employees of the State Islamic University of Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta. The data analysis technique used descriptive statistics with a benchmark scale and explanations. The results showed that the average score on all learning organization variables was low, below the benchmark scale. This result was in line with lecturers and employees' perception that most of them (68%) expressed pessimism about universities' readiness to achieve international standards. In conclusion, the State Islamic University of Sunan Kalijaga has not fully become a learning organization as a bridge of change towards an international standard.</span>

Experimental Study on the Axial Tensile Properties of FRP Grid-Reinforced ECC Composites

The axial tensile properties of FRP mesh-reinforced ECC composites (TRE) were investigated experimentally under the consideration of four influencing factors: grid type, number of reinforcement layers, ECC matrix thickness, and sticky sand treatment on the grid surface. The test results showed that the axial stiffness and tensile strength of the composite were significantly increased, and the tensile properties were significantly improved under the effect of FRP grid reinforcement. Increasing the thickness of the ECC matrix can obviously improve the crack resistance of composites. The ultimate tensile strength of FRP lattice-reinforced ECC composites increased significantly with the increase in the number of lattice layers, but had no significant effect on the crack resistance. The tensile properties of CFRP grid-reinforced ECC composites were slightly better compared to BFRP grid-reinforced ECC composites. The crack resistance and ultimate tensile strength of the composites were slightly improved by impregnating the surface of the FRP grid with adhesive-bonded sand treatment. Based on the experimental data, the tensile stress–strain constitutive model of FRP grid-reinforced ECC composites is established. The calculation results show that the theoretical values of the model agree well with the experimental values. Therefore, it can be used to reflect the stress–strain change state of FRP lattice-reinforced ECC composites during axial tension.

The Spatiotemporal Evolution Analysis of Ecosystem Pattern in Wenchuan (Magnitude 8.0) Earthquake Disaster Area, China

The ecological system is the basis of human survival and global environmental protection. In the process of development, countries will pay close attention to the changing state of the ecosystem. Taking the ecosystem pattern as the research object, a three-layer analysis method was proposed. The transfer matrix and landscape index were used as the first layer to analyze the basic changes. Grey correlation, range-coupling coordination and relative priority were used as the second layer to analyze the reasons of the change. The interval-entropy weight, TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution), was used as the third layer to evaluate the quality of the change. The ten counties in the worst-hit areas of the Wenchuan earthquake were analyzed from different angles, with county region, intensity zone and ecosystem as the objects, and the following results were obtained: (1) Taking Mianzhu City as an example, from 2000 to 2010 and 2018, the conversion ratio of forest, grassland and farmland is 54.24, 59.19, 17.21, 20.06, 37.39 and 52.86%, which were distributed in the north, central and southern parts, respectively. (2) Taking the ninth intensity zone as an example, the forest landscape fragmentation increased, disturbance decreased, and species diversity increased. There is a high influence and restriction relationship between ecosystem and landscape pattern in the total landscape area change. Additionally, the relationship between them tends to develop in a benign way. As of 2018, it is in the change state of moderate imbalance-ecosystem lag. (3) Taking the county ecosystem change as an example, urban type is the best in the counties of ecosystem change, of which Shifang is the best and Pingwu is the worst. The results show that this method can effectively compare and analyze the changes in the multi-regional ecosystem pattern, which has the characteristics of universality and can also be applied to the research of ecosystem pattern change in special regions.

Attention Biases Competition for Visual Representation via Dissociable Influences from Frontal and Parietal Cortex

What mechanisms underlie the prioritization of neural representations of visually perceived information to guide behavior? We assessed the dynamics whereby attention biases competition for representation of visual stimuli by enhancing representations of relevant information and suppressing the irrelevant. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) classifiers were trained to discriminate patterns of fMRI activity associated with each of three stimuli, within several predefined ROIs. Participants performed a change-detection task wherein two of three presented items flashed at 1 Hz, one to each side of central fixation. Both flashing stimuli would unpredictably change state, but participants covertly counted the number of changes only for the cued item. In the ventral occipito-temporal ROI, MVPA evidence (a proxy for representational fidelity) was dynamically enhanced for attended stimuli and suppressed for unattended stimuli, consistent with a mechanism of biased competition between stimulus representations. Frontal and parietal ROIs displayed a qualitatively distinct, more “source-like” profile, wherein MVPA evidence for only the attended stimulus could be observed above baseline levels. To assess how attentional modulation of ventral occipito-temporal representations might relate to signals originating in the frontal and/or parietal ROIs, we analyzed informational connectivity (IC), which indexes time-varying covariation between regional levels of MVPA evidence. Parietal-posterior IC was elevated during the task, but did not differ for cued versus uncued items. Frontal-posterior IC, in contrast, was sensitive to an item's priority status. Thus, although regions of frontal and parietal cortex act as sources of top–down attentional control, their precise functions likely differ.