Hamline University is a private liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Founded in 1854, Hamline is known for its emphasis on experiential learning, service, and social justice. The university is named after Bishop Leonidas Lent Hamline of the United Methodist Church. Hamline is the oldest university in Minnesota, the first coeducational university in the state, and is one of five Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities. The university is composed of the College of Liberal Arts, School of Education, School of Business, and the Creative Writing Programs. Hamline is a community of 2,117 undergraduate students and 1,668 graduate students.
Demographic changes such as aging and fertility portend many things. They include impacts for labor and employment, pensions, and schooling. But do demographic changes implicate political change? A generation ago, American scholars examined racial demographic changes in the US and forecasted an ‘emerging Democratic majority’. This did not occur. But, since that prediction, the US as well as the rest of the world has experienced generational shifts, seeing the exiting of the pre-WWII and now the post-WWII or Baby Boomer generations and their replacement with the Millennials and Gen Z. Using the US as a case study, this paper examines the political impact which the shift in generations has had upon American politics, along with predictions regarding what this shift will mean for the immediate future. The thesis is that much of the conflict in US politics in the last twenty years has been driven in part by generation differences. Moreover, while there are generally significant generation differences in political attitudes in the US, such differences are not uniform, and they are mediated by race, class, and gender such that while there are possibilities for significant political change in terms of party composition and public policy, there is no guarantee regarding the exact direction.
Research on racial disparities in the criminal legal system generally examines isolated sentencing decisions, rather than the "package" of punishment that defendants experience. Using Minnesota court administrative data from 2004 to 2017, we specify multivariate and instrumental variables models to simultaneously estimate the outcomes of three elements of racialized punishment: incarceration, probation, and monetary sanctions. We instrument incarceration using jail capacity, which accounts for confounding and the simultaneity of incarceration and other punishment forms. Our results show racial patterning in the "mix" of punishment for similarly situated defendants. Before accounting for this mix, Black, Hispanic, and Native American defendants appear to receive less probation and lower monetary sanctions, but longer incarceration than White defendants. After accounting for instrumented incarceration, monetary sanctions and probation are racialized beyond incarceration in complex ways: Black, Hispanic, and Native American defendants receive lower monetary sanctions as compared to White defendants, and probation for Black and Native American defendants is higher after adjustment. The contours of this racialized package depend critically upon whether the state guidelines recommend a prison sentence. These results show that punishment can be modeled as experienced-as a constitutive package of costs, surveillance, and confinement constrained by structural features of state sentencing guidelines.
Exposure to lethal or non-lethal police-involved shootings within communities has been shown to negatively impact individual mental health. Most literature has found this association through survey data that cannot speak to contemporaneous and cumulative impacts of police shootings. Given heterogeneity in both policing and community characteristics, immediate and granular mental health outcomes related to police-involved shootings must be explored. Our study examines how temporal community-level exposure to police shootings influences rates of mental health condition diagnosis at the ZCTA (ZIP code tabulation area) and month level using hospital discharge data from Minneapolis, Minnesota. For our exposures, we created a cumulative counter of police-involved shootings within ZCTAs and a lagged exposure indicator of police-involved shootings in the previous month. Using two-way fixed effect panel models, we find a nonlinear relationship between cumulative shooting exposure and rate of mental health diagnosis. As cumulative shootings increase, their effect on overall mental health diagnosis rate in Minneapolis increases until reaching a peak and then diminishes. This trend is similar across racial groups. This may be due to sensitization (increases in response to a certain point) and desensitization (diminishing responses after that point) as police shootings accumulate. In contrast, the effect of recent shooting exposures is null and weak, suggesting that it is the initial compounding, concentrated nature of police violence that exacts the greatest toll on community mental health. Findings highlight the need to investigate temporal exposure to police violence at granular levels to further understand its negative mental health impacts on community health.
Working memory, or the ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind, is a critical component of human intelligence and executive functioning. It is correlated with performance on various cognitive tasks, including measures of fluid intelligence, which encompasses reasoning and problem solving. We use a comprehensive set of classic working memory tasks to estimate the working memory capacity of large language models (LLMs). We find that in most cases, LLMs exceed normative human scores. However, we do not find that the increased capacity of working memory is associated with higher performance on other executive functioning tasks or problem solving benchmarks. These results suggest that LLMs may have deficits in attentional control and cognitive flexibility, which result in difficulties with inhibiting automatic responses and adapting to shifting information. Our findings suggest that current reasoning models have mixed results in compensating for these deficits.
The proliferation of sexual discourses in the digital age, accompanied by ongoing media panics over the perceived adverse effects of online sexual content, reflects persistent societal tensions about technology’s role in shaping sexual norms. While previous research has examined the spread of sexual advice on social media, there is limited understanding of how users engage with and reshape this advice. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how TikTok users interact with sex experts through a qualitative content analysis of top videos and their most-liked comments (n = 500). Our analysis reveals 4 mechanisms by which users engage with sexual advice: (1) challenging and validating expert authority, (2) collaboratively co-producing knowledge, (3) debating norms of intimacy and pleasure, and (4) finding and sharing emotional support and solidarity. Through these interactions, expertise on TikTok becomes a collective and evolving form of knowledge production.
