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Visitation in prison is associated with a low recidivism rate after release, but the causality is not clear. This paper tries to estimate the effect of visitation experience on the recidivism outcome of state prisoners in Missouri, using an instrumental variable approach. The instrumental variable used for identification is the distance from a prison to an address before incarceration. The results support that visitation has a causal effect on recidivism in the short run. Further analysis shows that employment is an important channel of the visitation effect. However, no discernible effect on housing stability is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including casino industry in Indiana, whether casinos in Missouri are competitors, and the issues of crime and casinos.

The article presents information about the fifty-third annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference took place on May at the Marriott Pavilion Downtown in Saint Louis, Missouri. Official registration was 566, including 77 new members. mere were 159 first timers of which 72 were students. A breakdown of the registration revealed 44 percent affiliated with academic institutions, 37 percent commercial, 10 percent government, 6 percent nonprofit, and 3 percent other. A total of 460 people were listed as participants in a variety of roles: session organizers, plenary speakers, short-course instructors, panelists, chairs, discussants, authors, and presenters of papers. In keeping with the tradition for conferences held during even-numbered years, the conference site was shared by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), whose conference ran May 13-15. Joint AAPOR/WAPOR paper sessions included the themes of public opinion in developing countries, comparisons across cultures, and surveys and the courts.

Simple Summary: Breast cancer is a leading cause of death in women in the United States. However, there exist inequalities in outcomes of breast cancer and medically underserved populations by race, insurance status, educational background, and geography. Here, we present efforts by the Siteman Cancer Center to address disparities over the past 15+ years. As an academic center, we have partnered with community organizations to help support patients and reduce barriers to receiving care. We also ran a mobile van to offer mammograms to women living in both urban and rural areas of Missouri. These efforts resulted in earlier detection of breast cancer and increased use of mammograms. The mammography van managed to reach mostly poor, uninsured, or underinsured women with limited educational backgrounds. This work demonstrates the potential for collaborations between academic and community partners to improve community health outcomes. Community-based participatory strategies are a promising approach to addressing disparities in community health outcomes. This paper details the efforts of Siteman Cancer Center to achieve breast health equity over the past 15+ years. We begin by describing the activities and successes arising from our breast health community partnerships including identifying priorities, developing recommendations, and implementing patient navigation services to advance breast health. This system-wide coordinated navigation approach that includes primary and specialty care providers helped to increase potential impact on reducing breast health disparities by expediting care, increasing care efficiency, and standardizing referral procedures across systems for all women including those who are uninsured and underinsured. We also discuss a mobile mammography unit that has been deployed to serve women living in both urban and rural regions. The van reached a particularly vulnerable population that was mostly poor, uninsured, and with limited educational backgrounds regardless of their zip code of service. This work shows that collaborations between academic and community partners have resulted in decreased late stage at diagnosis and improved access to mammography. Furthermore, we offer lessons learned and recommendations that may be applicable to other communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elaine J. Lawless demonstrates a deep and abiding concern for the ethical questions posed by narratives: how they are told and collected, the implications of these narratives (and the telling of these) for their tellers' lives, the relationship between teller and listener/writer, and how these narratives are retold and reconstructed for a reader far removed from the original context. From her work on women's folk traditions, life stories, and self-representation within master narratives in religious contexts to her work with survivors of domestic violence to the aftermath of the intentional flooding and destruction of the African American community of Pinhook, Missouri, Lawless provides a framework for considering the poetics and politics of reciprocal ethnography. This paper discusses Lawless's multifaceted use and sophisticated understanding of narrative as not only text but also as ethical practice throughout her collected works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of peer effects on farmers' decision to adopt Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This relationship is analysed by means of a Bayesian spatial autoregressive probit model applied to spatially explicit data describing the awareness, attitudes, and adoption of UAVs by 809 Missouri farmers. Results show that it is not only the farmers' characteristics, awareness, and attitudes towards UAVs that affect adoption, but also the adoption behaviour and traits of neighbouring peers. Peer effects arise both from UAV adoption of nearby farmers and from spatial spillovers of farmers' characteristics, awareness of UAV agricultural applications, expectations of economic and environmental benefits from UAV use and perceived neighbour privacy concerns in the use of UAVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early stress detection is critical for proactive field management and terminal yield prediction, and can aid policy making for improved food security in the context of climate change and population growth. Field surveys for crop monitoring are destructive, labor-intensive, time-consuming and not ideal for large-scale spatial and temporal monitoring. Recent technological advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and high-resolution satellite imaging with frequent revisit time have proliferated the applications of this emerging new technology in precision agriculture to address food security challenges from regional to global scales. In this paper, we present a concept of UAV and satellite virtual constellation to demonstrate the power of multi-scale imaging for crop monitoring. Low-cost sensors integrated on a UAV were used to collect RGB, multispectral, and thermal images during the growing season in a test site established near Columbia, Missouri, USA. WorldView-3 multispectral data were pan-sharpened, atmospherically corrected to reflectance and combined with UAV data for temporal monitoring of early stress. UAV thermal and multispectral data were calibrated to canopy temperature and reflectance following a rigorous georeferencing and ortho-correction. The results show that early stress can be effectively detected using multi-temporal and multi-scale UAV and satellite observation; the limitations of satellite remote sensing data in field-level crop monitoring can be overcome by using low altitude UAV observations addressing not just mixed pixel issues but also filling the temporal gap in satellite data availability enabling capture of early stress. The concept developed in this paper also provides a framework for accurate and robust estimation of plant traits and grain yield and delivers valuable insight for high spatial precision in high-throughput phenotyping and farm field management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on Norcross, Georgia-based Rock-Tenn Co.'s plan to close its laminated paperboard products facility in Wright City, Missouri.

This paper describes a course offered over the past two summers (2000 and 2001) in the Sociology/Criminal Justice and Criminology Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The course brought college students together with system-involved girls for an eight-week mentoring program. The development and a description of the course are presented, along with the rationale for providing this type of relationally-oriented program to girls. Based primarily on analyses of student papers, there is an exploration of the experiences, perceptions, and changes in attitudes and beliefs of the student mentors. The goal of the course was to provide enriching educational experiences for the students and to provide beneficial and often unavailable services to girls involved in the juvenile justice system. This assessment shows that the course was successful in achieving those outcomes and high-lights the key components of a positive and productive relationship between mentor and mentee. This process analysis demonstrates the successes and problems and issues faced in the implementation of such a course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about how agencies behaved in previous disasters could allow us to predict agency behavior and network structure in response to future events. In this paper, we review studies of two different disasters that occurred in the USA to provide insight into some of the common characteristics of disaster relief efforts. Specifically, the studies discussed explore how agencies involved in disaster relief operations formed and maintained partnerships by comparing survey results from Joplin, Missouri (EF-5 Tornado in 2011) and the New Jersey Coast (Hurricane Sandy in 2012). The objective of this paper is to analyze partnership creation, length, and conclusion in networks of agencies responding to disasters. 80 agencies were interviewed and over 500 partnerships were analyzed. The analysis of the data provides a building block to guide the development of inputs for future models of agency behavior and interaction. One key result was that the survey data indicated only a third of the strategic and tactical partnerships that were leveraged to support the relief effort were formalized prior to the disaster event. Additionally, it was found that partnerships between Non-Governmental Organizations were the most stable relationship. This paper provides insight into how agencies involved in disaster relief could manage their partnerships to achieve their goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing international concern about the lack of civic engagement among the youth in many nations. These concerns have sparked renewed interest in the quantity and quality of civic education in public schools in the United States. The objective of this study is to determine if the concerns about civic education are about the sufficiency of academic content related to civic education or if the concerns reflect a lack of consensus regarding the question of "What makes a good citizen?" To address this question, this paper examines state social studies content standards from five U.S. states to determine if specific perspectives on citizenship are present in the standards and which perspectives are emphasized. University websites are also analyzed to assess their focus on citizenship. The study finds that the citizenship education in K-12 schools is robust, and specific perspectives are emphasized. This emphasis on specific perspectives, as opposed to a lack of academic content related to civic education, may be at the heart of the debate over citizenship education. [Paper originally prepared for presentation at the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration conference, July 6-10, 2015, Paris, France.]

The purpose of this review is to highlight the work of Dr. James D. Anderson, whose contributions to educational and historical scholarship has provided critical counter evidence demonstrating that the African American community has represented nothing less than the full embrace of the promise of education. Over the span of his career, his body of work has shifted our understanding of the role of African Americans in educational leadership, informed legal debates related to access and opportunity, and has contributed to civic discourse associated with public education. The work of Dr. Anderson was also instrumental in a number of desegregation and affirmative action cases, including Liddell v.Missouri , Jenkins v. Missouri , Knight v. Alabama , U.S. andAyers v. Fordice , and Gratz v. Bollinger. Drawing on his seminal book and numerous articles and position papers, our review article highlights a few of the ways in which Dr. Anderson's contributions demonstrate the relationships between political, economic, legal, and educational interests of African Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an attempt to use a theoretical framework of social action to analyze and describe how a small community in the Lead Belt of Missouri acquired fire protection through volunteer group effort. The analysis showed that a theoretical social action model is a useful tool for studying the group processes involved in community development. The results indicate that a community development contest acts as a catalytic agent in stimulating volunteer group efforts toward the improvement of physical facilities in a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative meta-analysis explored the nature of successful collaboration between teachers and school librarians. Three action research studies of school librarians who integrated instruction or curriculum through collaboration with teachers are examined to understand more about what strategies made the collaboration successful. Strategies used by the librarians to collaborate more effectively with teachers are presented, as well as measures that can be used to determine successful collaboration. The findings indicate that the school librarians in this study used many different strategies to lead the collaboration to success. These strategies included initiating the collaboration, securing support from the principal, identifying a shared vision with all collaborators, collecting and analyzing data about the progress of the collaboration, holding regular meetings, and documenting the collaboration. This paper was presented for the AASL Research into Practice track at the 2019 AASL National Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

The article discusses several documents which were discovered in the archives of the State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center-Cape Girardeau facility with regards to the late attorney Robert Burett "R.B." Oliver and the Oliver Law Firm. According to the article, the documents which as known as the Oliver papers include records of legal cases involving the peonage practices in Missouri. The life and career of attorney Allen Laws Oliver is also examined.

Emergency departments (ED) in the USA treat 136.9 million cases annually and account for nearly half of all medical care delivered. Due to high demand and limited resource (such as doctors and beds) availability, the median waiting time for ED patients is around 90 minutes. This research is motivated by a real-life case study of an ED located in central Missouri, USA, which faces the problem of congestion and improper workload distribution (e.g., overburdened ED doctors). The objective of this paper is to minimize patient waiting time and efficiently allocate workload among resources in an economical manner. The systematic framework of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), along with discrete-event simulation modeling approach, is employed to analyze current operations and potential improvement strategies. Alternative scenarios pertaining to process change, workforce planning, and capacity expansion are proposed. Besides process performance measures (waiting time and resource utilization), other criteria, such as responsiveness, cost of adoption, and associated risk, are also considered for evaluating an alternative. The experimental analysis indicates that a change in the triage process (evenly distributing medium-acuity patients among doctors and mid-level providers) is economical, easy to implement, reduces physician workload, and improves average waiting time by 20%, thereby making it attractive for short-term adoption. On the other hand, optimizing the workforce level based on historical demand patterns while adopting a triage process change delivers the best performance (84% reduction in waiting time and balanced resource utilization), and is recommended as a long-term solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kauffman School is a public charter school serving students from low-income neighborhoods in Kansas City, Missouri. This paper used a matched comparison group design to estimate the impacts of the Kauffman School on student achievement, attendance, and suspensions. We found that the Kauffman School had large positive impacts on student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science. This paper also used qualitative data to explore possible mechanisms for the school's effects. We found evidence that the Kauffman School's hallmarks are being implemented faithfully, and that stakeholders believe the school's methods are having a positive influence on students' attitudes and performance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]