Neither of the above actions are the right words. But it is true that I am officially inactivating The Aviat. I will leave the website up, so that you may still read my wonderful (not really) words, BUT I will no longer be active (at all) on this blog. That means no more posts or articles, no more updates. It will be a totally inactive blog.
And I'm really sorry I wasn't able to fulfill my promise of writing more full-length articles. The reason why I'm inactivating The Aviat is because I've started a new similar venture (which will be launched soon, hopefully) that deals with public policy and I'm dedicating myself to that full-time. Thank you for all your support and thank you for reading all this time. When I launch my new venture, I WILL update this blog about it, and I hope that you may bring your business over there. Besides that, this blog is officially dead. My personal blog, Lia From The Aviat is also officially inactivated. Thank you so much, Lia R.G.
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Research about implicit bias helps us to better understand the Hello, kind readers! Today, I would like to start off this post by introducing to you a research project called Project Implicit. Project Implicit was launched by collaborating researchers from Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington. It is a study in psychology, and focuses on something called implicit social cognition, which is thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control.
For the general public, Project Implicit has two parts: Social Attitudes and Mental Health. We’ll be focusing on the Social Attitudes aspect, which lets you take something called an Implicit Association Test (IAT), a test of sorts that measures attitudes and beliefs—in this case, about society—that people otherwise may be unwilling to report or unaware of in the first place. Project Implicit’s site on Harvard includes a variety of IATs; however, many of them are focused on race and ethnicity. For example, the Asian IAT tests whether you have a bias towards European Americans, Asian Americans, or neither, and how strong that bias is. Other race and ethnicity IATs include the African American, Arab-Muslim, Race, Skin Tone, and Native IATs. Descriptions of these tests are found on the Project Implicit website. T.R. Johnson for The Atlantic did a wonderful article on his experience with Project Implicit. Johnson is a black man who tested for a strong bias towards whites in the African American IAT. Please read it, I thought it was quite interesting*. Anyways, now that I have given you enough background on Project Implicit, why is something like this, albeit extremely fascinating, being featured on my blog? Project Implicit is psychology and sociology, and The Aviat is a public policy blog. Well, after taking a couple of the IATs myself when I first learned of Project Implicit, I thought about how things like this—psychology and sociology—could be applied to public policy in the bigger picture. Of course, implicit biases and public policy come together in the vast field of criminal justice. Like I mentioned earlier, many of the IATs focused on race and ethnicity. And it seems that policies in criminal justice are teeming with questions on the involvement of race. From the Northwestern Law Review, “Today, the growing body of implicit bias research is widely recognized as having important implications on criminal justice policies and the jury system in particular. But without a jurisprudential framework to remedy illegal discrimination grounded in implicit bias, lawyers are left on their own to detect and address the implicit bias of jurors in an ad hoc fashion”. The author also noted that law school taught her “how to make constitutional arguments, to structure an opening statement, and to properly object to evidence, but not how to suss out the implicit biases of a sixty-five year old Asian-American man who owns a gas station in the inner city”. This problem presents itself hugely in the court, with jurors and lawyers and judges who all have their own implicit biases. An article for the California Law Review from UC Berkeley argued about the matter of antidiscrimination laws. “…discontinuities between jurisprudential models of intergroup bias and the real world phenomena those models purport to represent have serious negative effects. These negative effects include normative ambiguity, adjudicative inefficiency and inaccuracy, and perhaps even an exacerbation of the very intergroup tensions antidiscrimination laws were enacted to diffuse”. The article goes on to claim “…judges sometimes incorporate empirically testable social science claims into their legal reasoning without even noticing that they are doing so”. In point, “…those who criticize the use of insights from empirical social psychology in shaping or applying antidiscrimination doctrines are overlooking one extremely important point-social psychology is already there. In discrimination cases, as elsewhere, judges are constantly using "intuitive" or "common sense" psychological theories in the construction and justification of legal doctrines and in their application to specific legal disputes”. What to do about that is a whole different issue. The Kirwan Institute from the Ohio State University cites the Kalamazoo Police Department in Michigan as a force that connected public policy and implicit bias. Researchers at the police department found that “police stopped Black motorists more than twice as often as they stopped White motorists. However, despite searching, handcuffing, and arresting more Blacks, Whites were more likely to be found with contraband such as guns and drugs”. The department’s Public Safety Chief then required racial bias training for all officers, mandated officers to document probable cause for every search conducted, and established a more personalized, community-based approach by interacting with residents. “As a result of these efforts, overall crime has declined by 7%, all while officers have initiated fewer traffic stops”. In the Kirwan Institute’s same Implicit Bias Review, the authors cite many arguments on whether to address implicit bias in the law and court system, starting page 19, as well as the question of what approach to take. Alright, hopefully this helped you understand how psychology is connected to public policy. After all, public policy is a wide-reaching field, with a huge "sphere of influence". That's why I believe it is so important for everyone to know even a little bit about public policy, government, and political science. All of the documents I cited in this post are very interesting, though they are quite hefty for casual reading. But please take a look when you have some time! *More information on Project Implicit can be found on its FAQs. Thank you for reading this post. To read more, keep scrolling down this blog or check out my full-length Public Policy articles. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or whatever social platform you like for updates, or subscribe to my newsletter for monthly updates. Until next time, Lia R.G. Hello, kind readers, and welcome to another installment of Resource Spotlight. Last time, the spotlight was on the Government Publishing Office, a great database of easily accessible government documents.
However, today, we look at Google Scholar as the featured resource on Resource Spotlight. Hello, kind readers! Welcome to the first installment of The Aviat's new weekly series, The Week in Review, which brings you the latest news on all things public policy, government, and law. Articles are hand-picked by me, and will hopefully give you something fresh and interesting to read.
Government Releases 16 Years of Data About Solar Weather (NPR) An executive order signed by Obama last October was finally implemented on January 30th, 2017, when the government released 16 years' worth of space weather data from the U.S.'s Global Positioning System. An overview of the data was published in the journal Space Weather. Duterte, democracy, and defense (Brookings) This article is all about U.S. foreign policy with the Philippines, regarding certain dangerous situations that the May 2016 election of the Philippines' new president, Rodrigo Duterte, and how relations with the Philippines can play a role in foreign policy with China. On January 27, 2017, President Trump approved an executive order that banned Syrian refugees from entering the country indefinitely, all other refugees for 120 days, and citizens of the countries Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
This is a huge policy change, so of course it's important to be informed about this. Very informed. With that said, these following articles may help you on your journey to becoming informed about Trump's immigration policy: "Trump's Executive Order on Immigration: What We Know and What We Don't" NY Times "President Trump's Immigration Order, Annotated" NY Times "What's the Legal Status of Trump's Immigration Order?" The Atlantic "At a Glance: Implementing the Trump Foreign Policy Agenda"* Council on Foreign Relations To learn more about recent immigration and refugees topics and issues in general (please note that some of these articles may have been published after Trump issued his order): Cato Institute:
Please refer to my Official List of Research Sources for more places to go and things to read on these topics. Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, please follow my Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter for more updates. You can read more posts here or articles on my Public Policies page. *This article was published a day before the order was signed. However, it still does have a lot of interesting information and commentary. All of the articles/pages I link are worth a read. Hello, kind readers!
So I know I said that I wouldn't have any more small update or irrelevant posts...but this one is important. A week ago, I created another blog called Lia From The Aviat (LFTA) which is a more casual blog about my everyday life. I also post small updates on there, so you know why I don't post something in a while. Go check it out, and I suggest you do especially in this month and the coming months because, as I said on LFTA, I will not be posting anything related to public policy on The Aviat in January, and maybe in February as well. That's because I am so busy...well, you can read the rest on LFTA. Anyways, I will mainly be on LFTA, giving everyone updates on what I'm doing and where I've been. Thanks as always for your continued support. I talk about think tanks like Cato, Brookings, Hoover, etc…way too much. For good reason, since they are excellent sources of information. But they are not the only good ones out there. So I wanted to shine the spotlight on a new player for a change: the Government Publishing Office (GPO). So what the GPO does is publish and bind documents for the government. According to the website, the GPO is “the Federal Government’s official, digital, secure resource for producing, procuring, cataloging, indexing, authenticating, disseminating, and preserving the official information products of the U.S. Government”. I know. It sounds boring. But just head to the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications! You can enter a keyword or a specific search term and it will pull up numerous free, digital documents dating back to the 1700s (yes, that old), including congressional hearings, audits, reports, bills/resolutions, speeches, and all sorts of government documents. This document that I found through the GPO, a House committee hearing on unexploded ordnance in Laos, seriously inspired my article on UXO in Laos. It is so useful to be able to read things that our representatives say when considering legislation…I hope that you can find interest in this as well.
If I had to sum up the GPO in three words, they would be: Official, Digital, Secure (totally ripped that off from the GPO’s website). And what’s not to like about that? You’ll find real-life documents on the actions of the government. It is a wonderful source for research since you can use the thoughts and opinions of legislators/government agencies, and you can find really good quotes on there on a large variety of political topics (these people make speeches for a living). Well, I hope you will check it out and give it a try! As always, you can check out my Official List of Resources for more equally trustworthy resources. Hello, kind readers. To go along with my last post, Top 5 Tips on Staying Informed, I detailed a recent example of how I tried to stay informed: I saw this tweet on my Twitter feed (from The Hill), and since I recalled hearing about supposed UN conflicts between the U.S. and Israel, and since I was actually planning to write an article about this eventually, I got a bit interested. So I clicked on the link, and it sent me to this short article on how Obama decided to not support an Israeli move during a UN session. After that, I wondered if the US had made any move thus far to cut support to Israel. I did this simple Google search of “did the us cut funding to israel”, but the results were pretty disappointing. The websites given were total not-trustworthy sources for research. The only remotely trustworthy source on the first page of the search was Reuters (not shown in the picture, sorry), and I couldn’t even trust that half of the time. Determined still, I went to the Cato Institute to try to figure things out, because although Cato does have a conservative bias, they have an article on about every subject on this Earth, so Cato is definitely a go-to for me, for basically any topic. I was happy when this showed up as the first search result. It led me to reading a somewhat-entertaining (I love public policy, but even I don’t find it entertaining often) article on the US subsidizing Israeli policies. And the answer is: no, we have not cut funding, so the question is, should we? (ooh, maybe I’ll do an article about this after all!)
And that was an example of my tip #3, which was following news sources/policy institutions on Twitter and checking out tweets to see what was new, which is so easy and convenient to do, especially with a mobile app, and it was also a little bit of tips #4 and #5, since you always have to keep an open mind for effective public policy research. IMPORTANT NOTE: As you can tell, I am no longer MIA, and I am officially back from a long trip, and I am glad that I did not try to post anything during my trip because the Wi-Fi was very unreliable...but now I am happy to be back. I hope you all have had a wonderful 2016, and I hope you are looking forward to this new year (please refer to my New Year’s Update if you want to know what’s going on with The Aviat). And, for something new, I have formally introduced myself on The Aviat’s home page, but in case you missed it, my name is Lia and I have a great interest in public policy and political science. So, I will be referring to myself as ‘Lia’ from now on. Other details of my identity will remain unknown…but I got tired of not having a name to go by on The Aviat! So there we go. Thanks as always for reading. For updates, check out my Twitter, or subscribe to my newsletter! Happy New Year! Stay informed, stay curious. With the massive interconnectivity that dominates this so-called Digital Age, it should be easier than ever to stay informed. Now, it’s just about making the effort to do so. Here are my tips:
Read something you disagree with.
Listen to National Public Radio (NPR) when you can.
Follow the people I follow on my Twitter.
Keep an open mind.
Assume you know less than you actually do.
And…that is a wrap. Thanks so much for reading! If you liked this post, you can subscribe to my newsletter or follow my Twitter for updates! If you want more, you can go read my articles on public policy on this very website. And if you thought this was helpful or useful, like/tweet/comment below, and make sure to share this page! Stay informed, stay curious. Hello, kind readers, and happy Christmas Eve! Today is the last day you’ll hear of me this year. I will be abroad starting tomorrow and until New Year’s Eve, so it’s safe to say that I will be inactive for the rest of this year.
Past that, I have a few changes that I want to make clear to you all.
Thank you so much for reading! Subscribe to my newsletter or follow my Twitter for updates like this one. Have a wonderful rest of the year! Stay informed, stay curious. |
LIA R.G.The writer of The Aviat. Non-partisan and non-PC. ARCHIVES
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