Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Assessing Compliance To Water Resources And Reconstruction Framework During Post-Conflict Reconstruction Borno State, Muritala Olaniyi Oke Dr

Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies

Northeast and northwest of Nigeria have, as a result of activities of Boko Haram, bandit and kidnappers, had their public and private properties destroyed. Governments and other stakeholders, upon some successes of the military, have started post-conflict reconstruction to rebuild the war-torn urban and rural communities with the provision of water taking the center stage. This paper looks at the utilisation of Water Resources and a Reconstruction framework for integrating water projects into reconstruction processes. This paper rests on the argument that water projects during reconstruction should not be handled as “normal” water projects and that a more culturally and …

What Senior U.S. Leaders Say We Should Know About Cyber, Dr. Joseph H. Schafer

Military Cyber Affairs

On April 6, 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative hosted a panel discussion on the new National Cybersecurity Strategy. The panel featured four senior officials from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), the Department of State (DoS), the Department of Justice (DoJ), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The author attended and asked each official to identify the most important elements that policymakers and strategists must understand about cyber. This article highlights historical and recent struggles to express cyber policy, the responses from these officials, and the author’s ongoing research to improve national security cyber policy.

Beyond Statistical Significance: A Holistic View Of What Makes A Research Finding "Important", Jane E. Miller

Numeracy

Students often believe that statistical significance is the only determinant of whether a quantitative result is “important.” In this paper, I review traditional null hypothesis statistical testing to identify what questions inferential statistics can and cannot answer, including statistical significance, effect size and direction, causality, generalizability, and changeability of the independent variable. I illustrate these issues with examples from an empirical study of the association between how much time teenagers spent playing video games and time spent reading. I describe how study design and context determine each of those aspects of “importance,” and close by summarizing how to provide a …

Review Of A Framework For Sustainable Thinking: Is Ql For Citizenship Even Possible?, Nathan D. Grawe

Numeracy

Van Antwerp and Heun's A Framework for Sustainability Thinking offers an extensive collection of data related to sustainability with an emphasis on energy. Intended for a primary audience of undergraduate students, the authors set the data in the context of the IPARX identity which notes that impacts (I) are the product of population (P), affluence (A), resource intensity of economic activity (R), and impact of the resources (X). In addition to being a useful text for seminars focused on sustainability and energy use, the book provides a context for contemplating the roles of expertise vs. general quantitative literacy when addressing …

An Introduction To A Framework For Sustainability Thinking, Jeremy Van Antwerp, Matthew Kuperus Heun

Numeracy

Van Antwerp, Jeremy and Matthew Kuperus Heun. 2022. A Framework for Sustainability Thinking: A Student’s Introduction to Global Sustainability Challenges; (Springer, Cham) 275 pp. ISBN 978-3-0317-9184-0.

A Framework for Sustainability Thinking: A Student’s Introduction to Global Sustainability Challenges presents basic information related to sustainability challenges in the context of a cognitive framework that allows students to evaluate problems and potential solutions from a quantitative perspective. Moreover, numerous end-of-chapter discussion questions and project ideas examine moral, ethical, and worldview aspects of sustainability choices and tradeoffs between different approaches to sustainability.

Author’S Reflections On Making Sense Of Numbers: Quantitative Reasoning For Social Research, Jane E. Miller

Numeracy

Miller, Jane E. 2021. Making Sense of Numbers: Quantitative Reasoning for Social Research. (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications) 608 pp. ISBN 978-1544355597.

This article introduces and provides an excerpt from Making Sense of Numbers: Quantitative Reasoning for Social Research, published by Sage. The book explains and illustrates how making sense of numbers involves integrating concepts and skills from mathematics, statistics, study design, and communications, along with information about the specific topic and context under study. It teaches how to avoid making common errors of logic, calculation, and interpretation by introducing a systematic approach and a healthy dose of skepticism …

An Introduction To Calling Bullshit: Learning To Think Outside The Black Box, Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

Numeracy

Bergstrom, Carl T. and Jevin D. West. 2020. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. (New York: Random House) 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509202.

While statistical methods receive greater attention, the art of critically evaluating information in everyday life more commonly depends on thinking outside the black box of the algorithm. In this piece we introduce readers to our book and associated online teaching materials—for readers who want to more capably call “bullshit” or to teach their students to do the same.

Be Careful! That Is Probably Bullshit! Review Of Calling Bullshit: The Art Of Skepticism In A Data-Driven World By Carl T. Bergstrom And Jevin D. West, James B. Schreiber

Numeracy

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. 2021. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. NY: Random House. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509189

The authors provide a journey through the numerical bullshit that surrounds our daily lives. Each chapter has multiple examples of specific types of bullshit that each of us experience on any given day. Most importantly, information on how to identify bullshit and refute it are provided so that reader finishes the book with a set of skills to be a more engaged and critical interpreter of information. The writing has a quick and lively …

The Author’S Reflections On No B.S. (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe In Black People Enough Not To Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People, Ivory A. Toldson

Numeracy

Toldson, Ivory. A. 2019. No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People (Boston, MA: Brill-Sense) 194 pp. ISBN 978-9004397026.

This essay provides an introduction to No BS (Bad Stats): Black People Need People Who Believe in Black People Enough Not to Believe Every Bad Thing They Hear About Black People. In the essay, the author discusses how cynical views about the educational potential of Black children motivated him to write a book that challenges negative statistics. The essay also outlines the harmful …

Effects Of Quantitative Literacy On Healthcare Decision-Making: An Aural Context, Robert G. Root, Sonia Bhala

Numeracy

We propose a relationship between sensory modality, numerical formatting, and performance on a survey simulating healthcare decision-making. We examine the current literature on aural health literacy, and specifically aural literacy coupled with health numeracy. We then create a survey instrument called the Bhala test for this purpose and demonstrate that it is moderately internally consistent and provides results that correlate with the NUMi assessment, a widely accepted measure of health numeracy. The quantitative information provided in the Bhala test has two treatments, percentage and natural frequency formats, in an effort to determine which format is easier for subjects to use …

Taking Multiple Regression Analysis To Task: A Review Of Mindware: Tools For Smart Thinking, By Richard Nisbett (2015), Jason Makansi

Numeracy

Richard Nisbett. 2015. Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.(New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux). 336 pp. ISBN: 9780374536244

Nisbett, a psychologist, may not achieve his stated goal of teaching readers to “effortlessly” extend their common sense when it comes to quantitative analysis applied to everyday issues, but his critique of multiple regression analysis (MRA) in the middle chapters of Mindware is worth attention from, and contemplation by, the QL/QR and Numeracy community. While in at least one other source, Nisbett’s critique has been called a “crusade” against MRA, what he really advocates is that it not be used as …

Using Meta-Analysis To Assess Affective Outcomes In A Multi-Course Qr Module Intervention, James Friedrich, Kelley D. Strawn

Numeracy

When quantitative reasoning(QR) interventions share a common hypothesis or goal, a promising approach for evaluation involves integrating separate analyses through the use of meta-analysis. This paper reports an assessment of a module-based QR intervention distributed across 20 courses at a single institution. Topics and participating courses were diverse, including arts & humanities, quantitative behavioral sciences, and natural sciences & mathematics groupings, but all addressed the shared affective goals of reducing student QR self-doubt and increasing appreciation for QR value and utility. With a local framework to guide module development, we assess these outcomes using reliable self-report measures in a pre-post …

The Ultimatum Game: An Introduction To Quantitative Literacy In A Social Justice Context, Robert G. Root

Numeracy

The Ultimatum Game is a two-person, multiple-strategy game widely used in the experimental social sciences to demonstrate the human propensity for costly punishment in response to inequitable treatment. The game serves to provide quantitative evidence for a diversity of fairness norms across cultures. The play of the game and its interpretation offer nuanced views of the nature and importance of quantitative literacy. Its use in a writing seminar connecting quantitative literacy and social justice is described.

Paired Measures Of Competence And Confidence Illuminate Impacts Of Privilege On College Students, Rachel M. Watson, Edward Nuhfer, Kali Nicholas Moon, Steven Fleisher, Paul Walter, Karl Wirth, Christopher Cogan, Ami Wangeline, Eric Gaze

Numeracy

We seek to understand how the experiences of groups that differ in gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation produce college-level educational performances that differ from the experiences of the dominant majority group. We employ two datasets: a National Database of 24,701 participants and a Paired-Measures Database with 3,323 participants. Both datasets provide demographic information, socioeconomic conditions of status as first-generation student, English as a first language, and interest in majoring in science, and competency scores on understanding science as a way of knowing obtained from the Science Literacy Concept Inventory. The Paired-Measures Database includes additional self-assessed competence ratings that enabled quantifying …

Roots And Seeds: Finding Our Place In The Social Practice Nexus That Is Quantitative Literacy, H. L. Vacher, Nathan D. Grawe

Numeracy

The purpose of our new Roots and Seeds feature is to provide an open-access space to archive first-hand accounts of QL activities that have preceded our journal (2008). The first two contributions in the collection appeared last issue: Linda Sons on the making of what has come to be known as the 1994 Sons Report (Mathematics Association of America), and Dorothy Wallace on her path to the Quantitative Literacy Design Team for Mathematics and Democracy (2001), and the questions that bedeviled them then – and us now. In this issue, we get Rick Gillman’s account of how the committee that …

Numeracy And Social Justice: A Wide, Deep, And Longstanding Intersection, Kira Hamman, Victor Piercey, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

We discuss the connection between the numeracy and social justice movements both in historical context and in its modern incarnation. The intersection between numeracy and social justice encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and quantitative topics, but within that variety there are important commonalities. We examine the importance of sound quantitative measures for understanding social issues and the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in this work. Particular reference is made to the papers in the first part of the Numeracy special collection on social justice, which appear in this issue.

An Uncommon Textbook: Review Of Common Sense Mathematics By Ethan Bolker And Maura Mast, Bernard Madison

Numeracy

Ethan D. Bolker and Maura B. Mast. 2016. Common Sense Mathematics.(Washington DC.: Mathematics Association of America) ISBN-13: 978-1-93951-210-9.

Common Sense Mathematics is an integrative quantitative reasoning (QR) textbook that is built around scores of exercises derived from authentic circumstances from public media and other public sources. The exercises elicit responses from students requiring extensive communication and analyses and distinguish the book from ones typically encountered in a mathematics or science course. Responses to exercises often require one-half page or more of writing and can occupy considerable class time in discussion. The book has material for a one- or two-semester …

Calculus Of The Impossible: Review Of The Improbability Principle (2014) By David Hand And The Logic Of Miracles (2018) By Lásló Mérő, Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

David J. Hand. 2014. The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0374175344.

Lásló Mérő. 2018. The Logic of Miracles: Making Sense of Rare, Really Rare, and Impossibly Rare Events (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0300224153.

David Hand and Lásló Mérő both grapple with the occurrence of seemingly impossible events in these two popular science books. In this comparative review, I describe the two books, and explain why I prefer Hand's treatment of the impossible.

Forewarned Is Forearmed: Review Of Curbing Catastrophe: Natural Hazards And Risk Reduction In The Modern World By Timothy H. Dixon (2017), Jason Makansi

Numeracy

Timothy H. Dixon. 2017. Curbing Catastrophe: Natural Hazards and Risk Reduction in the Modern World. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press) 300 pp. ISBN 978-1108113663.

Curbing Catastrophe for the most part lives up to what is claimed in the foreword: “…a compelling account of recent and historical disasters, both natural and human-caused, drawing on common themes and providing a holistic understanding of hazards, disasters, and mitigation for anyone interested in this important and topical subject.” This is a pretty thorough treatment of an extraordinarily complex subject, and the gaps identified in this review should be considered explications more than …

Co-Authorship Analysis Of The Speleothem Proxy-Climate Community: Working Together To Tackle The Big Problems, Micheline L. Campbell, John N. Callow, Gavan S. Mcgrath, Hamish A. Mcgowan

International Journal of Speleology

Understanding the environmental context of speleothem palaeo-climate proxies is fundamental to their interpretation. We analyse four methodological approaches to accomplish this: stalactite discharge analysis, proxy/process tracer studies, discharge modelling, and geophysics. Datamining produced citation data sets that reflected these methodological sub-disciplines. Social network analysis is used to examine co-authorship within and between these sub-disciplines, and between the joint methodological community and the broader speleothem proxy climate community. Members of the sub-disciplines have become more connected to one another over time, and to members of the other sub-disciplines. High degrees of connectivity between and within communities allows for the rapid and …

Rain Rituals As A Barometer Of Vulnerability In An Uncertain Climate, L. Jen Shaffer

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

Researchers and aid agencies, seeking to improve their understanding of local climate change responses, adaptation, and vulnerability, frequently interact with communities around the world who strongly emphasize their religious beliefs and practices. Dismissal and misunderstandings of these local perspectives can slow assessments of local climate vulnerability and development of adaptive capacity. In this paper, I show how analysis of rain ritual failure exposes the multiple stressors Ronga communities in southern Mozambique face, and as such, serves as a proxy measure for climate vulnerability at the local level. Oral histories and targeted interviews with participating elders, local chiefs, and community members …

Models As Weapons: Review Of Weapons Of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy By Cathy O’Neil (2016), Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

Cathy O’Neil. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York, NY: Crown) 272 pp. ISBN 978-0553418811.

Accessible to a wide readership, Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy provides a lucid yet alarming account of the extensive reach of mathematical models in influencing all of our lives. With a particular eye towards social justice, O’Neil not only warns modelers to be cognizant of the effects of their work on real people—especially vulnerable groups who have less power to fight back—but also encourages laypersons to take initiative …

Why I Believe People Need Painting By Numbers, Jason Makansi

Numeracy

Jason Makansi.2016. Painting By Numbers: How to Sharpen Your BS Detector and Smoke Out the Experts (Tucson AZ: Layla Dog Press). 196 pp. ISBN 978-0998425900.

This piece briefly introduces my Painting By Numbers, which aims to take the core messages of the QL/QR community from academic and professional circles to the rest of the citizenry. I describe the book in the context of the critical need for the most basic numeracy tools to help consumers of news, information, and analysis—delivered through traditional and contemporary social media outlets—determine where a reported numerical result lies on the scale from utter nonsense …

Quantitative Map Literacy: A Cross Between Map Literacy And Quantitative Literacy, Ming Xie, H. L. Vacher, Steven Reader, Elizabeth Walton

Numeracy

We define quantitative map literacy (QML), a cross between map literacy and quantitative literacy (QL), as the concepts and skills required to accurately read, use, interpret, and understand the quantitative information embedded in a geospatial representation of data on a geographic background. Long used as tools in technical geographic fields, maps are now a common vehicle for communicating quantitative information to the public. As such, QML has potential to stand alongside health numeracy and financial literacy as an identifiable subdomain of transdisciplinary QL.

What concepts and skills are crucial for QML? The obvious answer is, “It depends on the type …

Assessing Preservation Priorities Of Caves And Karst Areas Using The Frequency Of Endemic Cave-Dwelling Species, Eugen Nitzu, Marius Vlaicu, Andrei Giurginca, Ioana N. Meleg, Ionut Popa, Augustin Nae, Ştefan Baba

International Journal of Speleology

Endemic and rare species as bioindicators of habitat vulnerability were used to develop protection and management plans for biotope prioritization (mainly islands habitats, lava tubes or groundwaters). Due to their narrow distribution, the endemic species (species confined to a restricted geographic area) are more susceptible to ecological disequilibrium and habitat loss than the widespread ones. Consequently, endemics become endangered in the context of ecological disturbance caused by anthropogenic pressure, making them suitable candidates to assess environmental preservation needs. Taking into consideration that most of the stygobitic and troglobitic species are endemic and confined to specific karst areas, based on their …

Towards Food Service Sustainability In Suburban Environments By Optimally Locating Shared Anaerobic Digester Units, Rebecca Loraamm, Joni Downs, Robert Alonso Bair, Daniel Yeh

Suburban Sustainability

Anaerobic digestion is an effective method for reducing food waste at the consumer level. Drawbacks associated with this strategy include high construction costs for multiple digester units and limited public awareness of the method’s commercial potential. Given the large scale problem of food waste, an approach establishing community partnerships between local businesses and primary schools is offered to combat the problem of food waste. Optimizing the placement of shared digester units enabling utilization by multiple stakeholders is the suggested mitigation method. This research explores application of the p-median problem to determine the set of optimal sites for shared anaerobic digester …

How Random Noise And A Graphical Convention Subverted Behavioral Scientists' Explanations Of Self-Assessment Data: Numeracy Underlies Better Alternatives, Edward Nuhfer, Steven Fleisher, Christopher Cogan, Karl Wirth, Eric Gaze

Numeracy

Despite nearly two decades of research, researchers have not resolved whether people generally perceive their skills accurately or inaccurately. In this paper, we trace this lack of resolution to numeracy, specifically to the frequently overlooked complications that arise from the noisy data produced by the paired measures that researchers employ to determine self-assessment accuracy. To illustrate the complications and ways to resolve them, we employ a large dataset (N = 1154) obtained from paired measures of documented reliability to study self-assessed proficiency in science literacy. We collected demographic information that allowed both criterion-referenced and normative-based analyses of self-assessment data. …

Military Cyber Professionals Have An Important Part To Play In The Obama-Trump Transition, Michael V. Hayden

Military Cyber Affairs

Over the course of decades in service, I have experienced multiple presidential transitions. Each new Commander in Chief updates policies, personnel, and priorities…especially when the transition involves a new political party. In this respect, the current transition from the Obama to the Trump administration is no different. While this periodic exercise of our democracy may seem disruptive to some, it is a true opportunity for military cyber professionals to help shape our future national security posture.

Culture And Conservation: Beyond Anthropocentrism, Nathan Poirier

Journal of Ecological Anthropology

No abstract provided.

Review Of Sustainable Energy -- Without The Hot Air By David Mackay (2009), Kira Hamman

Numeracy

David MacKay. Sustainable Energy: Without the hot air. (Cambridge, England: UIT Cambridge Ltd., 2009). 384 pp. ISBN 978-0954452933 (also available as a free e-book).

Physicist David MacKay transforms what has historically been a debate fraught with skepticism and hysteria into an informed conversation. He does this by providing clear, accurate quantitative information on energy production and consumption in a form that allows comparison and invites thoughtful analysis. By recalibrating power into kilowatt-hours per day per person, he makes the numbers meaningful on an individual level. He then meticulously estimates the productive capacity of various renewable energy sources, explores alternative …