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The dual conditions of an early emphasis on context within terrorism theory and an existing familiarity of place as point or jurisdiction for hazards researchers led to a subsequent diminished role for place as a core explanatory concept in the study of terrorism. This condition is increasingly untenable. There is growing evidence within the environmental risk-hazards literature and theories of terrorism that holistic understandings of place beyond simply a point on the Earth will enhance knowledge of how individuals might respond to this hazard. Drawing on 93 interviews conducted in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) before the Marathon attacks in 2013, and a subset of additional interviews conducted after, I answer the following question: What role does place play in the way that ordinary people experience vulnerability to terrorism at a micro-scale? I demonstrate that people interpret their risk not simply through the media or representativeness of particular places – ideas which are commonly assumed to amplify risk and fear – but rather that subjective experiences of everyday, practical places actually attenuate such perceptions and emotions. This paper presents several contributions to public policy, including rethinking a place-based paradigm for how emergency managers communicate with the public, how to generate a politics of fear reduction based in place, and how to rethink future studies on terrorism to appreciate the practical places of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories are re-writing what Sherna Berger Gluck famously called the ‘master historical narrative’ of the US WLM, especially in historicizing the efforts of feminists of colour. This paper echoes this by exploring how white feminists embraced racial justice politics, particularly during the early 1970s, when it is often assumed that white feminists failed to enact racial justice. In historicizing the efforts of white anti-imperialist feminists in greater Boston, I maintain that the ‘master historical narrative’ wrote not only black, Chicana and multiracial feminisms out of history, but that it skewed our understanding of the race politics of white, US feminists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Critics of many popular urban school reforms in the United States allege that these reform efforts unfairly insert market forces into the public domain, resulting in widening inequalities. In this paper, I challenge the notion that market forces per se are responsible for the gentrification that school reform often facilitates. Drawing on in-depth interviews, government documents, and media accounts, I analyse one component of school reform in Boston, the overhaul of the city’s public school student assignment policy, which curtailed parental choice (and, therefore, market pressure) within the city’s school system, while still potentially perpetuating inequalities. I discuss the implications of these findings for urban social theory related to education reform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes an incremental granular model (IGM) based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. An IGM is a combination of linear regression (LR) and granular model (GM) where the global part calculates the error using LR. However, traditional CFCM clustering presents some problems because the number of clusters generated in each context is the same and a fixed value is used for fuzzification coefficient. In order to solve these problems, we optimize the number of clusters and their fuzzy numbers according to the characteristics of the data, and use natural imitative optimization PSO algorithm. We further evaluate the performance of the proposed method and the existing IGM by comparing the predicted performance using the Boston housing dataset. The Boston housing dataset contains housing price information in Boston, USA, and features 13 input variables and 1 output variable. As a result of the prediction, we can confirm that the proposed PSO-IGM shows better performance than the existing IGM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the role of subcultural values in the development of violence in schools and among school-aged children. Drawing on the "code of the street" thesis, which identifies schools as important staging grounds in the campaign for respect among young people, this study aims to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing student- and school-level associations between projected violence and self-reported subcultural values revolving around toughness and respect. The analytic sample includes N = 1767 students (53.65% female) in grades 7, 8, and 9 (ages 11–17 years, mean = 13.5 years) at 40 middle and high schools in Boston, MA, Denver, CO, and Miami, FL. Consistent with research involving a variety of adolescent and young adult populations, estimates from multilevel negative binomial regression models reveal a robust positive student-level association between personal adherence to subcultural values and projected violence. However, school-level results indicate a compositional, rather than contextual, effect in which higher school-mean levels of projected violence reflect the aggregate values of individual students rather than independent or interactive processes involving the school-level prevalence of code of the street values. Thus, while code of the street values may be important contributors to youth violence, the school setting appears to play a limited role in transmitting their influence among students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of accessibility by public transit have focused on travel time and not considered the cost of transit fares. It is difficult to include fares in shortest-path algorithms because fares are often path-dependent. When fare policies allow discounted transfers, for example, the fare for a given journey segment depends on characteristics of previous journey segments. Existing methods to characterize tradeoffs between travel time and monetary cost objectives do not scale well to complex networks, or they rely on approximations. Additionally, they often require assumed values of time, which may be problematic for evaluating the equity of service provision. We propose a new method that allows us to find Pareto sets of paths, jointly minimizing fare and travel time. Using a case study in greater Boston, Massachusetts, USA, we test the algorithm's performance as part of an interactive web application for computing accessibility metrics. Potential extensions for journey planning and route choice models are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 600,000 people leave prison and become residents of neighborhoods across the United States annually. Using a longitudinal survey of people returning to Greater Boston, this study examines disparities in neighborhood attainment after prison. Accounting for levels of pre-prison neighborhood disadvantage, Black and Hispanic respondents moved into significantly more disadvantaged areas than Whites. Neighborhood residence was not attained by all: One-quarter of respondents left prison and entered formal institutional settings or lived in extreme social marginality throughout Boston. Neighborhood attachment was patterned by criminal justice involvement and experiences of material hardship in the year after prison. Findings indicate that housing insecurity, re-incarceration, and profound racial disparities in neighborhood context explain the ecological structure of social inequality in urban neighborhoods in an era of mass incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article juxtaposes two U.S. cities' differing educational reactions to mass migrations prior to the Progressive Era. During the nineteenth century, Boston, Massachusetts, developed a model urban education system, one that was visited and replicated throughout the nation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Boston was a relatively communal city in which a small group of elites dominated civic life. As waves of poor, rural New Englanders and, later, Irish immigrants threated the supposed cohesive nature and shared values of the community, Boston's public school system focused on assimilating the newcomers through moral training. Like Boston, Cincinnati, Ohio, created public schools that were toured and studied, largely because of the city's renowned German-English program. Unlike Boston, however, the city and the schools were co-developed by migrants. Highly educated German immigrants and settlers from the East developed the public schools together and, unlike the assimilationist schools in Boston, created an educational system that had a relatively pluralistic mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, "I didn't want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston." Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston's civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children's literature set during or inspired by Boston's desegregation busing plan reflect and respond to the ongoing battle over the history and memory of Boston's civil rights movement and its enduring racial legacy: Busing Brewster, an illustrated children's book for young readers, written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by R. G. Roth; and Gold Dust, a middle-grade novel for adolescents by Chris Lynch. Both works offer representations of an overtly racist past, produced in a historical moment when prevailing ideologies of color blindness and postracialism suggest not only that racism is passe, but that any attempt to redress past racism that takes race into account is itself racist and unjust. Busing Brewster and Gold Dust offer equivocal reflections on urban decline and racial transformations at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both works have as much to tell us about the historical memory of Boston's desegregation efforts as they do about contemporary understandings of race and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, thousands of black high school students in Boston protested their educational marginalization by staging school boycotts, forming student organizations, and leading demonstrations. They demanded dramatic changes in the content and delivery of education in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). They called for a "culturally relevant education" that valued black culture, to be mentored by black educators, and for collaboration between school and community. Through these arguments for the value of black culture, students rejected characterizations of their racial heritage as inadequate -- in a time when theories of cultural inferiority were widespread. Black youth were key players in a decades-long movement led by black Bostonians for educational justice in the BPS. This story challenges a dominant narrative of desegregation and civil rights in Boston, which focuses on busing, white resistance, and court-ordered desegregation. This narrative portrays black Bostonians as apathetic to racial politics and blindly following court-ordered desegregation plans. The story of the black student movement highlights the vital political work performed by black youth in civil rights protest. The erasure of black youth activism from the historical record strengthens stereotypes of black urban teens as apathetic, dangerous, and culturally depraved, which served as a justification for the criminalization of black youth. Their demands for black studies courses, black educators, and the revision of student dress and disciplinary codes forced educators and city leaders to grapple with changing understandings of quality education within the nation's diverse urban public school systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boston's long Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century, before the infamous busing crisis, has not received nearly as much attention as the school desegregation period that was ushered in by Federal court order in 1974. While the story of Boston's busing crisis is well known, my goal is to place that moment within the context of a longer freedom struggle in Boston and highlight the city's history of racial inequality and segregation. By looking at both the nineteenth-century origins of legal discrimination in Boston and the activism during the four decades before the 1970s, I reconstruct these humble but effective efforts in which activists focused mainly on issues of employment, housing, educational equality, and quality of life. The goal of this essay, then, is to contextualize the busing conversation and reconstruct the political context in which black Bostonians embarked on various campaigns to reclaim the legacy of freedom and equality established earlier, in the nineteenth century. In that sense, I argue that Boston was not simply a "southern space" ensconced in the North, but rather was the original template for segregation in the nation, as cited in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).[1] The issues engaged by Boston's freedom movement, from de facto school segregation to employment discrimination, challenge many prevailing popular assumptions about postwar black freedom struggles in other cities. This article aims to investigate the origins of that movement and what gave rise to the unique nature of civil rights organizing activities in Boston before Busing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue rethinking the Boston "Busing Crisis" seeks to examine how the misleading 'busing crisis' narrative took hold as a way to understand Boston race relations. The piece examines the long struggle for school desegregation in Boston and the myriad of tactics used to deflect and delegitmize that struggle through frames of "busing," "neighborhood schools," "choice," and "cultural deprivation" which provided a palatable way for Bostonians to explain and hide school inequalities. Finally, the piece considers the role of the media in legitimating these white framings and delegitimizing the urgency of the struggle against school inequality in the Cradle of Liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Although many time-series studies have established associations of daily pollution variations with daily deaths, there are fewer at low concentrations, or focused on locally generated pollution, which is becoming more important as regulations reduce regional transport. Causal modeling approaches are also lacking. OBJECTIVE: We used causal modeling to estimate the impact of local air pollution on mortality at low concentrations. METHODS: Using an instrumental variable approach, we developed an instrument for variations in local pollution concentrations that is unlikely to be correlated with other causes of death, and examined its association with daily deaths in the Boston, Massachusetts, area. We combined height of the planetary boundary layer and wind speed, which affect concentrations of local emissions, to develop the instrument for particulate matter ≥2.5 μm (PM[sub 2.5]), black carbon (BC), or nitrogen dioxide (NO2) variations that were independent of year, month, and temperature. We also used Granger causality to assess whether omitted variable confounding existed. RESULTS: We estimated that an interquartile range increase in the instrument for local PM[sub 2.5] was associated with a 0.90% increase in daily deaths (95% CI: 0.25, 1.56). A similar result was found for BC, and a weaker association with NO[sub 2] The Granger test found no evidence of omitted variable confounding for the instrument. A separate test confirmed the instrument was not associated with mortality independent of pollution. Furthermore, the association remained when all days with PM[sub 2.5] concentrations > 30 μg/m[sup 3] were excluded from the analysis (0.84% increase in daily deaths; 95% CI: 0.19, 1.50). CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that there is a causal association of local air pollution with daily deaths at concentrations below U.S. EPA standards. The estimated attributable risk in Boston exceeded 1,800 deaths during the study period, indicating that important public health benefits can follow from further control efforts. CITATION: Schwartz J, Bind MA, Koutrakis P. 2017. Estimating causal effects of local air pollution on daily deaths: effect of low levels. Environ Health Perspect 125:23-29; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/EHP232 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have integrated preventive oral health measures into preventive care visits for children at a federally qualified health center in Boston, Massachusetts. The program, started in 2015, covers 3400 children and has increased universal caries risk screening in primary care to 85%, fluoride varnish application rates to 80%, and referrals to a dental home to 35%. We accomplished this by minimizing pressures on providers' workflow, empowering medical assistants to lead the initiative, and utilizing data-driven improvement strategies, alongside colocated coordinated care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, most large US cities have implemented non-emergency incident reporting systems via telephone helplines, websites and more recently, mobile applications. Using data from systems operating in the larger Boston area, and spatial and grounded theory analysis of submitted reports, this article investigates the role of design in shaping the interaction between the citizens and the city. It investigates the following questions: Which assumptions about the users are embedded in design of existing feedback systems? What motivates users to participate, and how do the systems’ design choices correspond with these motivations? By what mechanisms do these systems facilitate and constrain the interaction between citizen and city? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on experiential learning in higher education in the U.S. Topics discussed include the phenomenological study conducted in 2013 concerning the perspectives of students in Northeastern University on cooperative education, the difference between cooperative education model and internship placements, and the impact of cooperative and academic experiences.

Capturing the increase in land value attributable to transit accessibility has become an increasingly examined alternative to fund the transit system, one which demands reliable estimates of the impact of transport improvement on property values. In the context of value capture, this study presents a new method to value transit accessibility. We integrate the Heckman selection model and spatial econometric techniques to account for two issues that are often overlooked in the conventional hedonic price analysis: sample selection and spatial autocorrelation. The modelling framework is applied to the city of Boston to assess the impact of the subway system on single-family property values and gauge the potential for value capture. We find that failing to correct for sample selection and spatial autocorrelation results in significant bias in valuing transit accessibility. This bias might distort estimates of the value-added effect of transit infrastructure investment and misguide policy design for value-capture programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]