This paper introduces the special issue on cannabis use in Europe. It describes data on the prevalence of cannabis use in Europe and the more limited data on the prevalence of cannabis use disorders, ...one of the most common forms of drug problem treated in many countries in Europe. It summarises what research has indicated about the adverse effects of acute and chronic cannabis use and discusses potential health system responses that may reduce some of these harms. These include public education about the risks of cannabis use; screening and brief interventions in primary medical settings; and specialist treatment for cannabis use disorders. It briefly indicates the special issues that may need to be addressed in dealing with the high rates of comorbidity between cannabis use disorders, other types of drug use disorders, and common mental disorders.
In this work, using experiments, we investigate the role of the name of a technology on the informed evaluation of that technology. We argue that a name can influence interpretations by activating ...cognitive structures. Using genomics-accelerated breeding as a case, we show that the name ‘genomics’ makes people evaluate related information as similar to genetic modification. Replacing the name ‘genomics’ with ‘natural crossing’ causes evaluations similar to those for traditional breeding. The results show that a name can have a strong influence on public attitudes, and we call for more consideration in choosing a name for a technology.
Tax increment financing (TIF) is a mechanism used by municipal governments throughout the United States to fund public and private urban development projects. This paper examines the trajectories of ...TIF in the state of California and the City of Chicago, where the expansion of TIF as a mechanism for publicly financed development is inextricable from disinvestments in social reproduction and the transformation of public funding for K-12 education. Taking seriously the divergent paths of TIF in each case, we argue that the framework of social reproduction helps expand the scope of TIF as a “policy in place,” bringing into view other path and place-dependent factors that shape the adaptation and implementation of public finance mechanisms. Bridging the literature on urban policy and feminist political economy, we suggest that scholars must investigate the place-specific entanglements of social reproduction and public finance if we are to understand how mechanisms such as TIF are adopted, expanded, or curtailed within the broader framework of neoliberal urban governance. In making such an intervention, we expand on calls to attend to the ways public finance can heighten or mitigate economic inequality.
How does platformization work as vehicle for the integration of public online education into a private global digital infrastructure? And how can education technologies ('edtech') be governed at ...various levels to benefit the public good? In this article, we examine online environments in primary schools in The Netherlands, a traditionally strong public-school system, where platformization has substantially impacted the precarious balance between private and public interests. Mapping the Dutch edtech landscape, we trace how the integration of digital learning platforms and learning management systems into digital learning environments are propelled by two complementary yet competing strategies: interoperability and intraoperability. We argue that the latter challenges the first. Securing education's public interests necessitates a coordinated governance effort at the sectoral, national and European levels.
The public/private distinction is central to higher education but there is no consensus on 'public'. In neo-classical economic theory, Samuelson distinguishes non-market goods (public) that cannot be ...produced for profit, from market-based activity (private). This provides a basis for identifying the minimum necessary public expenditure, but does not effectively encompass collective goods, or normative elements. In political theory 'public' is often understood as state ownership and/or control. Dewey regards social transactions as 'public' when they have relational consequences for persons other than those directly engaged, and so become matters of state concern. This is more inclusive than Samuelson but without limit on costs. Neither definition is wholly satisfactory, each offers something, and each can be used to critically interrogate the other. The article synthesises the two approaches, applying the resulting analytical framework with four quadrants (civil society, social democracy, state quasi-market and commercial market) to higher education and research.
The Education Myth questions the idea that education represents the best, if not the only, way for Americans to access economic opportunity. As Jon Shelton shows, linking education to economic ...well-being was not politically inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, public education was championed as a way to help citizens learn how to participate in a democracy. By the 1930s, public education, along with union rights and social security, formed an important component of a broad-based fight for social democracy. Shelton demonstrates that beginning in the 1960s, the political power of the education myth choked off powerful social democratic alternatives like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin's Freedom Budget. The nation's political center was bereft of any realistic ideas to guarantee economic security and social dignity for the majority of Americans, particularly those without college degrees. Embraced first by Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, Republicans like George W. Bush also pushed the education myth. The result, over the past four decades, has been the emergence of a deeply inequitable economy and a drastically divided political system.
Interaction is an important channel to offer users insights in interactive visualization systems. However, which interaction to operate and which part of data to explore are hard questions for public ...users facing a multi-view visualization for the first time. Making these decisions largely relies on professional experience and analytic abilities, which is a huge challenge for non-professionals. To solve the problem, we propose a method aiming to provide diverse, insightful, and real-time interaction recommendations for novice users. Building on the Long-Short Term Memory Model (LSTM) structure, our model captures users' interactions and visual states and encodes them in numerical vectors to make further recommendations. Through an illustrative example of a visualization system about Chinese poets in the museum scenario, the model is proven to be workable in systems with multi-views and multiple interaction types. A further user study demonstrates the method's capability to help public users conduct more insightful and diverse interactive explorations and gain more accurate data insights.
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