Extracting energy from air - is this the future of fuel?
Researchers in the UK and US are working on new techniques to create fuels like methanol, diesel and even petrol from the atmosphere around us - the key component being used is CO2. Bloomberg has a light overview video of the work being done by a UK company called Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS). The process involves pulling in air and extracting the CO2 component (.04% of our atmosphere and rising). The CO2 gets combined with hydrogen and a catalyst to make a simple hydrocarbon– and from there can be converted to any number of fuels that are useable in vehicles. The researchers note that the process is inefficient (read costly) at this point, though efficiency may increase when scaled up to an industrial-sized refinery.
UK based AFS is not the only group looking at generating useable fuel from CO2. Researchers at at a US company called Liquid Light, have discovered a method to combine CO2 with formic acid to create isobutanol, a fuel that could be used in car engines and generators. Separate research has shown that the formic acid component can also be created directly from CO2 through a new method using a solar panel and the raw CO2 gas.
What does it mean for Cleanleap countries?
Transport of diesel fuel for generators in remote communities is a large component of the price of energy there. Could these systems allow for onsite creation of fuel?
AFS claims that its process is "near carbon neutral" - of course burning methanol or synthetic diesel would release CO2, but the math on neutrality would take into account the CO2 that's extracted from the air.
CO2's relative scarcity in the atmosphere (.04%) may require these new processes to expend a significant amount of energy to obtain enough CO2 for its use as a viable fuel. As CO2 is often a waste product from industrial sources like cement factories and power plants (that's what CCS is about), would that make a more viable and cheaper source of CO2 than extracting it from the air? I've put these questions to AFS and the researchers at Liquid Light. I'll update this article with their responses.
Update: An earlier version of this article stated that Liquid Light's research was carried out in association with UCLA. This is not the case, however UCLA is conducting similar independent research.


text:
Measure A $2,406 School Tax Official Documents
Measure A = $2,406 tax for 8 years = approximately $20,000 per parcel
On March 5, 2013, Piedmont voters will be asked to consider ballot Measure A to allow every parcel to be equally taxed $2,406 for 8 years to support the Piedmont schools. (To find the tax rate in the official documents, read to the end of the official materials and look under RATES.) If the tax plus the allowed 2% annual increase is levied every year during the 8 year term, the total for each property will be approximately $20,000 per parcel. The official ballot material states:
School District ballot language for Measure A
To prevent local school funding from expiring and to maintain the quality of Piedmont's schools, to attract, train and retain qualified teachers, to protect programs in math, science and technology, to continue funding for music, visual and performing arts programs, and to keep textbooks and instructional technology up-to-date, shall the Piedmont Unified School District continue to levy a special tax as specified in the voter pamphlet, with all funds staying in Piedmont to benefit our schools?
Voters are to cast their vote either yes or no.
Impartial Analysis from the Alameda County Counsel
Measure A, a Piedmont Unified School District ("District") special parcel tax measure, seeks voter approval to authorize the District to levy an eight-year special parcel tax in the amount set forth in the measure on each assessor's parcel beginning July 1, 2013, to fund the programs set forth in the measure. The District's voters previously authorized a special parcel tax assessment at variable rates that will expire on June 30, 2014. This measure will replace those variable tax rates with a flat tax rate and extend the special parcel tax assessment through June 30, 2021.
A school district has the authority to levy special taxes upon approval by two-thirds of the votes cast on the special tax proposal. (See Cal. Const. Art. XIII A, § 4; Art. XIII C, §2; Cal. Gov't Code §§ 50075-50077, 50079, & 53722.)
If two-thirds of the qualified electors voting on this measure vote for approval, the funding revenue will be used for the specific purposes set forth in the full text of the measure printed in this sample ballot. Those purposes include, but are not limited to: teacher recruitment, training and retention; maintaining textbooks and instructional technology up-to-date; protecting math, science, and technology programs; and funding music, visual, and performing arts programs. The monies collected shall be accounted for separately and shall be expended only for those specified purposes.
If the measure passes, the special tax shall be assessed at the rate of $2,406.00 per parcel. The Board of Education ("Board") will determine annually the amount of the levy for the following fiscal year up to the maximum allowable rate. On an annual basis, the Board may increase the maximum allowable amount by up to 2% from the previous year.
As part of the annual budget process, the Board shall determine the total amount of the special tax and its assessed rate as outlined in the measure printed in this sample ballot. The accountability measures of California Government Code sections 50075.1 and 50075.3 shall apply to the special taxes levied under this measure.
The tax will be collected by the Alameda County Treasurer-Tax Collector at the same time and in the same manner as ad valorem property taxes are collected. Homeowners who are residing on their property and qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) may be exempt. Individuals seeking such an exemption must apply to the District on or before July 1 of each tax year.
If two-thirds of the qualified electors voting on this measure do not vote for approval, the measure will fail, and the previously-approved special tax assessment at the variable rates will continue through June 30, 2014
Arguments For Measure A
Piedmont schools are among the best in California. Exceptional teachers, challenging programs and support from parents and the community all contribute to high student achievement.
Since 1985, Piedmont schools have benefited from stable local funding provided by our school parcel tax. The parcel tax automatically expires periodically. Piedmont voters reauthorized it in 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2009. Now the parcel tax is again set to expire.
Measure A provides nearly $9.5 million in annual funding for Piedmont schools + 30% of the school's budget. This is equivalent to 100 teachers or 60 instructional days. If Measure A fails, every classroom in Piedmont will be impacted. Teachers will be laid off, class sizes will increase, and many instructional programs will be eliminated.
As required by court decision Measure A sets a flat tax amount per parcel. In the past voters approved a yearly increase up to 5%. This measure caps the potential yearly increase to no more than 2%.
Every penny from Measure A will stay in Piedmont to benefit our schools and cannot be taken away by the State.
Measure A does not expand the educational program, but continues stable local funding for comprehensive programs in language arts, math, science and the arts.
Measure A is essential to continue to attract, train and retain the best teachers.
Measure A will keep class sizes smaller, preserve AP courses that help students qualify for excellent colleges, protect counseling services and maintain outstanding academic programs.
Good schools help protect Piedmont property values. Whether you have children in the schools or not, Measure A is a sound investment in our community and its children.
Please help us preserve quality schools in Piedmont. Please vote YES.
s/ Richard Raushenbush, President of Piedmont Board of Education
s/ Nancy McHugh, President, Piedmont Educational Foundation
s/ Dane Copeland, President, Associated Parent Clubs of Piedmont (APCP)
s/ Jon Elliott, First Chair of School Parcel Tax Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC)
s/ Sue Kawaichi, Former Member and President of Piedmont Board of Education
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rebuttal to Arguments For
We support Piedmont's good schools. We want them to continue and thrive, and we are willing to pay for them with substantial taxes. But, the size of the tax requires that it be raised fairly and spent wisely. Measure A eliminates the independent oversight committee, and instead, proposes a subcommittee appointed by the very School Board that would be overseen. That's not right.
Measure B, the current school tax, continues into 2014. There is time to get the subsequent tax measure right. Why is the School Board pushing so hard to rush through a poorly designed tax proposal?
Tax fairness is another problem. Piedmonters know that our good schools raise property values. Larger properties increase in value by a larger amount than smaller properties, so they should pay more tax. Measure A's flat rate results in smaller parcels paying up to 80 times more per square foot than larger parcels. The tax should be levied on a per-squarefoot parcel and/or dwelling basis. That would be fair and uniform.
The top school districts comparable to Piedmont offer a senior exemption. Measure A doesn't. This would create an untenable burden for senior Piedmonters with limited incomes.
With more time, a fair tax with strong oversight and a senior exemption can be crafted to fund Piedmont's good schools. Measure B doesn't expire until 2014. Vote NO now, so we can vote YES when a better tax measure is proposed.
s/ James P. McCrea, Piedmont Homeowner
s/ Gregory Jurin, Piedmont Resident
s/ George D. Childs, Jr., Concerned Citizen
s/ Aaron Salloway, Piedmont Homeowners
s/ Bruce Joffe, Concerned Citizen
Arguments Against Measure A
We Piedmonters are happy to pay more for schools, and our excellent schools are the proud result. However, no other community's school tax approaches Measure A's $2406 per parcel cost. Given the high cost, an equitable and progressive tax is needed. This can be done and provide the $9,500,000 asked for.
With 2% escalators, homeowners are being asked for $20,651 over 8 years. This financial burden falls heavily on the smaller property owners. At the extreme, a small lot owner will pay 80 times more per square foot than what the largest lot owner pays. Small lots include many fixed income seniors who most need relief from this highest in the state school tax. The fixed parcel tax is regressive, a progressive tax is needed.
Since good schools enhance property values, the most equitable solution is a tax according to dwelling area which is currently allowed for Community Colleges under Government Code 50079.1. Piedmont Unified School District should work with other districts affected by the Borikas v. Alameda Unified School District Appeals Court decision to make the minor legislative changes needed for a per square foot dwelling tax.
A senior exemption is included in all other top-ranked California school districts with a school support tax. In our region, most school districts include a senior exemption. Piedmont does not have a senior exemption and this must be included. The proposed SSI exemption for low-income seniors is meaningless in Piedmont.
A truly independent citizen oversight committee must be included in the proposed tax; currently, there is none. Piedmont schools are an integral part of our fine community; let's keep it that way, but fairly.
VOTE NO on MEASURE A. Instead, let us vote on a tax in November that is equitable, has genuine citizen oversight and a meaningful senior exemption.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rebuttal to Arguments Against
Make no mistake, if Measure A fails and our existing school parcel tax expires, one of every three dollars that currently support our schools will be gone. A no vote means:
Dozens of teachers will be laid off
Class sizes will increase
Specialized instruction in math, science, reading and writing will be reduced
Many honors and advanced placement courses that allow students to attend good colleges will be eliminated
School counselors and librarians will be cut
Cuts of this magnitude will devastate Piedmont schools.
A recent Appeals Court decision requires Piedmont to modify our existing parcel tax that has been in place for 27 years. The court decision requires that the school district modify the existing tax so all Piedmont property owners pay the same rate, fair and simple.
For almost three decades Piedmont residents have invested in improving our school district. Today it is ranked among the best in the state. People move to Piedmont for the schools and home values are a direct result of our quality schools.
The district has already made significant budget reductions. Measure A maintains the current minimum funding necessary to provide the excellent education Piedmonters expect.
Finally, the opponents simply have their facts wrong. Low-income seniors are exempt from Measure A. An independent oversight committee is required. There is no legislation pending or anticipated that will allow a different structure.
Whether you have children in the schools or not Measure A is a sound investment in our community.
Please vote Yes.
s/ Tamra C. Hege, 40-year Resident, Former Member Piedmont Board of Education
s/ Ann Trutner, 57-year Resident, Former Member Piedmont Board of Education
s/ Bill Drum, 40-year Resident
s/ Sue Smegal, Former Member Piedmont Board of Education
s/ Wesley J. Smith, Piedmont resident since 1978
Full Text of Measure A
PIEDMONT SCHOOL SUPPORT TAX
This Measure may be known and referred to as the "School Support Tax", or as Measure "A".
For over a generation, the residents of the District have approved parcel taxes to support District programs for the students in Piedmont schools. Parcel taxes have allowed the District to establish and maintain a full range of educational offerings for students, including visual arts, performing arts and music, as well as comprehensive programs in math, science and technology. The depth and range of these programs have supported student achievement and preparation for success after graduation. Student achievement scores rank among the best in the State and students are admitted to, and successful at, excellent colleges and universities. Parcel taxes have proven crucial to the District's financial health, currently providing over a third of total District revenues.
The purpose of this Measure "A" is to continue the tradition of support in a measure with an eight (8) year term, which will provide the District and its taxpayers both stability and predictability in base parcel tax support. The proposed parcel tax is called "The School Support Tax." It will replace the local funding approved by the voters of the District on June 2, 2009, as Measure "B", which will otherwise expire as of July 1, 2014. This Measure "A" will replace the variable tax rate found in Measure "B", with a flat tax in order to comply with recent developments in case law.
This Measure will prevent existing school funding from expiring by continuing to provide local revenue that cannot be taken by the State and will maintain Piedmont's excellent quality of public education by attracting, training and retaining qualified teachers, maintaining small class sizes, and protecting instructional programs and services, including art and music, world language, advanced placement, school libraries, classroom technology and student counseling.
The Board of Education will fund all of the programs and purposes listed above unless it determines in any given year that changes in student population, fiscal constraints, or other changes in State or Federal funding make doing so infeasible or inadvisable. In any event, the Board of Education will not fund any program, purpose, or reduction, other than those listed above, from the proceeds of the special taxes.
The School Support Tax would be in effect, beginning July 1, 2013, at the rate shown below on each assessor's parcel located wholly or partially within the boundaries of the Piedmont Unified School District, and end on June 30, 2021.
ACCOUNTABILITY PROCEDURES
(a) Annual Tax Hearing: The Board of Education will administer this continuing tax with the financial rectitude and community participation it has demonstrated in the past. Each year, as part of the annual budget adoption process, the Board will first determine the total amount of expenditures necessary to provide a superior educational program, including the specialized services and programs detailed above, and deduct therefrom the projected revenue to be gathered from sources other than this special tax.
(b) Determination of Levy: The difference, if any, between the cost of the programs and funding from other sources shall be the maximum amount of funds to be derived from the tax authorized by this Measure for such year. If the necessary funds are such that the maximum rates set forth below are not needed, then the Board of Education shall reduce these rates proportionately so that only the necessary amount of funds are raised.
(c) Notice of Tax Hearing: Prior to the levying of the special tax in any given year, the Board of Education will conduct a public hearing on the matter. Notice of the time, date, and place of hearing shall be published pursuant to Government Code section 6061 at least once in a newspaper of general circulation in the District and at least fifteen (15) days prior to the hearing. Following the public hearing each year, the Board of Education shall adopt a resolution establishing the amount of tax to be raised for that year and the rate per parcel, which shall not exceed the amounts enumerated below. Any tax levied shall become a lien upon the properties against which taxes are assessed and collectible as herein provided.
(d) Statutory Requirements: In accordance with the requirements of California Government Code sections 50075.1 and 50075.3, the following accountability measures, among others, shall apply to the special taxes levied in accordance with this Measure: (a) the specific purposes of the special tax shall be those purposes identified above; (b) the proceeds of the special tax shall be applied only to those specific purposes identified above; (c) a separate, special account shall be created into which the proceeds of the special taxes must be deposited; and (d) an annual written report shall be made to the Board of Education of the District showing (i) the amount of funds collected and expended from the proceeds of the special taxes and (ii) the status of any projects or programs required or authorized to be funded from the proceeds of the special taxes, as identified above, and (iii) recommendation to the Board of Education as to the levy amount for the subsequent year's tax.
(e) School Support Tax Advisory Subcommittee: An annual written report shall be prepared and submitted to the Board of Education by the School Support Tax Advisory Subcommittee ("Subcommittee") of the Budget Advisory Committee ("BAC"). All residents of the Piedmont Unified School District are eligible to apply for membership on the BAC on an annual basis. Members of the Subcommittee must be homeowners in the Piedmont Unified School District community and subject to the School Support Tax and not current employees of PUSD. Each year there shall be no fewer than three (3) and no more than five (5) volunteers identified by November of each year to serve on the Subcommittee. It is the responsibility of the District Superintendent or designee to verify eligibility of the volunteers. The President and Vice President of the Board of Education shall approve all nominees to the Subcommittee. The Subcommittee shall work directly with the Chief Business Officer of the District to review School Support Tax uses and report to the Board of Education at the first public hearing held each year to determine the subsequent year's levy. Members of the Subcommittee commit to regularly attend meetings of the BAC. The Board will adopt the specific charge of the School Support Tax Advisory Subcommittee no later than May 5, 2013, after two public hearings at Regular School Board meetings. Any change to the charge of the Subcommittee will require public hearings at Regular Board meetings and must be approved by the Board.
ADMINISTRATION OF TAX
(a) Manner of Tax: Subject to two-thirds approval of the voters, the qualified special tax shall become effective as of July 1, 2013, and be collected by the Alameda County Tax Collector at the same time, in the same manner, and subject to the same penalties as general ad valorem property taxes collected by said tax collector. The tax and penalty shall bear interest at the same rate as the rate for unpaid ad valorem property taxes until paid.
(b) Tax Issues: With respect to all general property tax matters within its jurisdiction, the Alameda County Tax Assessor or other appropriate County tax official shall make all final determinations of tax exemption or relief for any reason, and that decision shall be final and binding. With respect to matters specific to the levy of the special tax, the decisions of the District shall be final and binding. The procedures described herein, and any additional procedures established by the Board of Education, shall be the exclusive claims procedure for claimants seeking an exemption, refund, reduction, or re-computation of the special tax. The District, in coordination with the County, shall determine whether it will be the District or the County who shall determine the issue.
(c) Supplemental Regulations: The Board of Education may adopt such additional or supplemental procedures as it deems necessary or convenient for the administration of the special tax.
(d) Parcel Tax Exemptions: Homeowners who are residing on their property and qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) may be exempt. This could apply to adults who are blind or otherwise disabled, with limited income and resources, as well as to people 65 years of age and older without disabilities who meet the income limits prescribed by SSI. Individuals seeking such exemption must submit an application to the District, including proof that the individual has been determined to be eligible for SSI by the Social Security Administration, on or before July 1 of each tax year. The District shall provide a list to the Tax Collector on an annual basis, on or before a date established by the Tax Collector of each year, of the parcels which the District has approved for the SSI Exemption, as described herein.
The special tax shall be assessed at the rate of $2,406, per parcel.
For parcels divided by Tax Code Area lines, the payment for the portion of the parcel within the Piedmont Unified School District shall be the same as the above.
ADJUSTMENT OF RATE
The Board will determine, on an annual basis, the amount of the levy for the following fiscal year, up to the maximum allowable rate shown above. The Board may also increase the maximum allowable amount by up to 2% from the previous year. If, in any given year, the Board elects to levy an amount less than the maximum allowable rate, it may, in subsequent years, levy the maximum allowable rate.
PROTECTION OF FUNDING
Current law forbids any decrease in State or Federal funding to the District because of the District's adoption of a parcel tax. However, if any such funds are reduced because of the adoption of this parcel tax, then the amount of the special taxes will be reduced annually as necessary in order to restore such State or Federal funding.
Filed under:	*All News, Election News, News - School Budget

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The goal and sole objective of education has been sidelined and often misinterpreted simply because our so-called teachers do not even know why they should teach but are only after their monthly pay.
The book Issues on Campus is a preparatory guide and a path director to all aspirants, undergraduates, postgraduates in any higher institution of study. The experience is based on the day-to-day occurences in Nigerian Universities and every chapter sets out in a unique way that creates a compelling and intriguing effect. Stories that illustrate concerned incidences are narrated with simple language that will make the reader feel the circumstance real and take the neccessary caution. It is a book that should not be found missing in the family bookshelf, students mini library, bookstores and schools' library as it will help redirect and regain the lost focus and value of education. This book was reviewed and recommended by men in different level of academics: The Ebonyi State Commissioner for Education, The Dean of Students' Affairs, Ebonyi State University, The Rector Akanu Ibiam Federal Polytechnic, Unwana, The Dean of Students' Affairs, Federal University of Technology, Owerri, The Dean of Students' Affairs, Federal Polytechnic, Nekede amongst others.
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Today is day 27 of the month long writing challenge sponsored by Two Writing Teachers. This is my second year participating in this challenge! What fun and growth!
Ed Emberley was a familiar name to our children as they were growing up. His books were always out on rainy Saturdays guiding our children to draw virtually anything. Our kids appreciated the simplistic step by step instructions that helped them become instant artists. The well worn books then made an appearance in my classroom and my students relished the times during indoor recess and writers workshop when they could feel accomplished at using simple shapes to generate a complete illustration for fun or for their stories. So when I read there was an exhibit showcasing his work at the local art museum I knew I had to go.
The exhibit was delightful and full of joy. The museum made every effort to allow children to touch and experience Ed's art. The "do not touch the drawings" signs were replaced with "please touch" plaques. Murals replicating his work were painted across the walls and a giant Paul Bunyan's house, that echoed the illustration in one of his books, was constructed in the middle of the room. Drawing paper was placed in a corner along with a collection of the Ed Emberley Drawing series. Colorful tiles were placed in a light box for attendees to manipulate and play with light and color. The exhibit was all so very kid-friendly, welcoming, and uplifting. One couldn't help but smile as they walked out of the little room. I know I was smiling, but I also left with a powerful message: Everyone can be an artist - thanks to Ed Emberley!
Your post goes well with Kathleen's post this morning about growth mindset. Everyone can be an artist--love that reminder.
What a great exhibit! Kids must love it, and so would I! Wow! I wonder if it travels to other cities?
Wait!!! Hold on!!!! Hold the phone!!! I looked it up. It's in Worcester, MA! That's not too far away for me! I'm going! Thanks for the tip!
When I was the librarian at my former school, the Ed Emberley books were old, but extremely popular. I hadn't known about him until I became the librarian. The kids were excellent instructors.
I went to it, too! A small, but great exhibit. My favorite book as a child was Drummer Hoff, so I was in heaving seeing the original wood blocks. Amazing. Such a talented man!


RE: The tariff classification of truffles from Italy.
In your letters dated May 15, 2001, and June 21, 2001, you requested a tariff classification ruling.
Your letters describe four products: fresh whole truffles, fresh sliced truffles, frozen whole truffles, and grated truffles preserved in olive oil and salt. Each is vacuum packed in airtight plastic bags.
The applicable subheading for the fresh whole truffles and the fresh sliced truffles will be 0709.52.0000, Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTS), which provides for other vegetables, fresh or chilledmushrooms and trufflestruffles. The rate of duty will be free.
Under this provision, the fresh whole truffles and the fresh sliced truffles from Italy, classified in subheading 0709.52.0000 HTS, are subject to a 100 percent ad valorem rate of duty.
The applicable subheading for the frozen whole truffles will be 0710.80.7060, HTS, which provides for vegetables (uncooked or cooked by steaming or boiling in water), frozenotherothernot reduced in sizeother other. The rate of duty will be 11.3 percent ad valorem.
The applicable subheading for the grated truffles preserved in olive oil and salt will be 2003.20.0000, HTS, which provides for mushrooms and truffles, prepared or preserved otherwise than by vinegar or acetic acidtruffles. The rate of duty will be free.


Darien Fenton's Redundancy Protection Bill is before the House this week (provided National doesn't cancel Private Members' Day again).
80% of Kiwis (basically, the non-unionised ones) don't have any redundancy protection. If they lose their jobs, they're out on their arse with nothing. All other developed countries, except the US of course, have protections in place for workers who lose their jobs and income through no fault of their own.
c) further compensation for redundancy in the amount of 2 weeks' remuneration for each subsequent full or partial year of the employees' continuous employment with the employer, up to a maximum entitlement of 26 weeks' remuneration.
That's based on minimums that unionised workers receive.
Will the Bill pass? Labour, Anderton, and the Greens are behind it. Last I heard, the Maori Party were going to back it. ACT are against it, of course. But National is said to still be mulling it over.
Help John Key make the right decision for all the working Kiwis who are still losing their jobs every week. If you have any of the Hard Times postcards around, mail them off. Or email Key at j.key@ministers.govt.nz and tell him to do the right thing.
I've seen a few people unexpectedly made redundant with nothing more than outstanding pay. Then they have to find a job and try to deal with WINZ (always a bit of a pain with weeks between appointments) while living off their savings.
Frequently it only takes a month or two to get into a poverty spiral that is really hard to get out of if they don't have family and friends that they can get support from.
Redundancy should not be an issue for competent managers. You can normally use natural attrition if you recognise an issue arising in the business. The real issue is that at present there really isn't a penalty cost for managers shedding people. There should be. It will greatly assist in getting rid of the deadwood managers and business owners.
Just on a side issue. I have no idea if it is Brownlee's incompetent management of the house, or his deliberate policy of getting rid of members day debates, but he has managed to probably miss more members days than any other 'leader' of the house through an apparent mismanagement of the legislative programme.
Personally, I'm leaning towards the incompetence scenario. Anyone else got any ideas?
One could make the observation that the National Party, collectively, are *terrible* employers. They bad-mouth their staff publicly. describing thousands of them as "waste"….and not making any useful differentiation between or among them. They make it clear they won't be paying anyone any more money, with the implicit assumption they are being paid too much already (You know – Cops, nurses, teachers, fire fighters, prison staff….and so on).
That this is the party generally seen as representing business owners and employers is even worse. Any competent HR manager would look at this behaviour and recoil in horror.
The wonder of it all is that anyone on a wage working for these people actually votes for them. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. No wonder emotive wedge issues were crucial to the last election. They needed something to distract from the reality of what they say and do.
Thanks to everyone who has supported this bill through the Fair Deal in Hard Times Campaign. It's not over if the bill doesn't proceed. We will keep campaigning on this right through to the next election.
I bet you will, Labour are always very generous with other peoples money.
As an employer this Bill has my wholesale support.
An excellent move… one of the best I've seen from Labour this term. A real point of difference politically, takes the party back to its core business, and addresses a real need.
Having found myself redundant more than once (indeed, as Tane once commented here long ago, employing me seems like a guarantee of eventual insolvency 😀 ) I can attest that lprent's description of what happens above is correct. For most people, more than a month or two between jobs and you're on a downward spiral of losing your home and your savings from which it takes years to recover, if at all.
Then that 80% are idiots, there are numerous companies who offer income protection, it should not be the job of the employer to pay redundancy to workers they no longer need or want.
Tough luck, and once again I note that you are being economic with the truth, sadly they have access to my money via WINZ.
If they have not put anything aside for a rainy day then that is their problem not mine.
Business owners already have to carry sick leave, holidays, maternity leave, bereavement leave and a host of other government imposed costs, compulsory redundancy is a stupid idea that does nothing to foster personal responsibility.
Good attempt at a smoke-screen, big bruv, but when it comes down to it you're just being an apologist for businesses that are so incompetently run that they can't cope with the entirely predictable costs of New Zealand's regulatory environment … and when they do go broke, they're so poorly managed that they can't even make provision for their workers.
Don't think of this as an additional cost on employers – think of it as societal insurance against incompetent management.
The only smoke screen emerging from this discussion is the one you put up re "incompetent management".
Of course this is an additional cost on employers, you cannot class it as anything else, it is also another reason as to why an employer would think twice, and then a third time, about talking on extra staff when things begin to pick up again.
Insurance is not something that should be left to what you call "society" , insurance is a personal item and something that any smart worker would have.
I note that Labour did nothing about this during their long and disastrous term in power, only now do they think this is such an important piece of legislation.
You make an interesting point about our regulated environment, under this stupid piece of legislation a boss would be forced to take into account a persons length of employment when working out who is going to be made redundant, if things are tight he may well be forced to pay off a good and productive worker who has not been with the company for a long time over a lazy and unproductive long term time server.
Business is the survival of the fittest, the workers should be in the same boat, a boss looking at redundancies should be able to get rid of who he wants when he wants and not have to worry about paying out ridiculous redundancy packages.
Are you serious? I mean, if you deliberately set out to illustrate my point about incompetent management you couldn't have done better.
If the business has been putting up with – in your words – "a lazy and unproductive long term time server" without doing anything about the employee's performance, then it's clearly bad management. Anyone with the faintest speck of HR expertise knows that there is a structured and straightforward process for performance management, and this expertise is both widely taught (e.g. NZIM) and available as external expertise from a great many providers. And putting up with poor performance whilst refusing to take advice about fixing the problem is pretty much the definition of managerial stupidity.
It's clear from your example that both society and workers need protection from this kind of poor management, and there is no reason why the costs of this ineptitude should be inflicted on the staff, their families or the taxpayer.
You weren't quite right when you said that business is survival of the fittest – it's more akin to survival of the smartest. In that context, Darien's proposal isn't a redundancy provision so much as a stupidity tax.
"If the business has been putting up with in your words "a lazy and unproductive long term time server' without doing anything about the employee's performance, then it's clearly bad management. Anyone with the faintest speck of HR expertise knows that there is a structured and straightforward process for performance management, and this expertise is both widely taught (e.g. NZIM) and available as external expertise from a great many providers. And putting up with poor performance whilst refusing to take advice about fixing the problem is pretty much the definition of managerial stupidity.
Spoken like a man who has never run a small business in his life and spoken like a man who drips with the arrogance of the liberal, educated left.
Sure, big companies will have HR departments, and these people are well skilled, however, you know as well as I do that the vast majority of business in NZ are small to medium and most are run by owner operators.
These people might be extremely talented at what they do, their skills are fantastic, however they are not people who have been to university, often they work a full day and then go home and try and do the books, for you to suggest that they are "bad managers" just shows that you know very little about the real world.
I suspect this is more of your smoke screen, like all from the left you and the truth are strangers, you seek to paint every employer as the big bad company when you know this is not the case.
Somebody once said that we are a nation of shop keepers, that has not changed, when many of them make a bad staff choice it is not as easy as you people keep insisting it is to get rid of bad staff.
bb: Jez that is extremely simple minded of you, and shows a complete inability to learn from your past mistakes.
If there is one thing that you should have learnt from uttering such statements here is that your mindless prejudices do not match with reality. There are quite a number of commentators here who have run businesses, who still run businesses, who have managed businesses, who own businesses, and who have or do employ staff. That includes me for most of those.
The majority of them on this site are centre, centre-left or just left. Basically they're not ideological right bigots like you and can think past simplistic prejudices and slogans that you get stuck on.
I read a totally inadequete article of yours on Clint Heines blog during the weekend. Apparently it was on Street who I gather you thought was 'troughing' the system.
During the entire article there wasn't one bit of information about what she was alleged to have done, or even a link to it. There wasn't even a link to anything to where people were alleged to have defended her. In fact the whole post was pretty well devoid of information apart from the garbage from your uninspired brain.
Now I know that the wee mutual mastubation society that is the NZ wingnut bloggers probably have some idea of what you were talking about. However how about doing something really basic and letting everyone else know as well.
Who's actually defending her because she's gay? Has someone actually said, "It's ok cause she's gay?" The post is a bit vague. No links, no quotes. Seems like projection to me. Not surprised.
I'm surprised that even Clint lets you tarnish his site with a rubbish post like that… You're even letting the wingnuts down..
You felt so moved by the article that you had to come here and comment?
Is that because like all bullies you can only play when you make the rules?, or are you afraid your comment might be deleted?
I must have hit the mark though for you to make mention of it, guess I must have hit a raw nerve.
You know I've wondered why Clint ever decided to let bruv post on his site.
I'm pretty sure he just keeps him around because in a way he makes Clint seem relatively sane and coherent.
Didn't comment on Clint Heines blog because I went to have a hunt for whatever it was you were talking about – you sure as hell weren't telling anyone. Didn't get back to cricket heaven to give you your required education.
Forgot about it until I saw you pop up here acting like a dork.
So I took an opportunity to give you some basic training in the fundamentals of how to write a post. The first rule is to assume that not everyone already knows the story already, outline it, and provide links for people to track into if they want to.
You don't want me to point out your writing flaws?
Income protection insurance provides an income stream for you should you become unable to work due to an injury or illness. In the event of a claim, the insurer will pay an amount (normally up to 75% of your gross salary in Australia) until you have recovered sufficiently to work again, or up until the maximum benefit period as stated in the policy which is normally 2 year, 5 year or up to age 65.
1. Which companies offer the "we'll cover you if your employer proves to be a dickhead and his business goes bust" flavour of income protection?
2. How do they do their risk assessment? They must be good, because most of the dickheads who employed me and then went bust (some owing me basic things like wages and, in Australia, superannuation) certainly had me fooled with their flash offices and fancy cars.
3. What would the premiums be like?!
Yes BB we would all like to know this one.
In fact, I think I will remember this question and keep asking you it, every time I see you on a thread. Until you give an answer.
Hundreds of thousands of working people would be prepared to pay premiums to such a company, (myself included).
So don't keep it to yourself, please.
No, actually spoken like a man who's been running businesses since the late 1980s, and who currently employs 22 staff. Over the years, some have been excellent performers, some less so, and I've only had to performance manage a couple. So you might want to be cautious about thinking that you speak for all employers when you clearly don't – not all of us conform to your kindergarten stereotypes.
3 …. and the business can't or won't make provision for paying them a fair redundancy.
That's a small number of companies, and this is a very small impost on the cost of doing business.
I agree with big bruv, haven't these people heard of insurance? If they can't figure that one out then I'm not too happy to pay twice, for my own insurance to keep me out of trouble and for their welfare payments after they failed to take out insurance.
Why should the staff have to buy insurance to protect themselves from incompetent management?
Name me one company that would pay out a redundancy for you if your employer failed to make the payment. I bet you can't.
If as you claim you are indeed an employer (and for the sake of this discussion lets pretend that you are) then please tell me why you think it is your job to pay redundancy if you decide that you no longer need a number of your staff.
When you hire a new worker you are buying his time and perhaps his skill depending on the type of work, that should be the end of the matter.
He works 40 hours, you make money from him and at the end of the week he receives a portion of that money.
There is no earthly reason why you as an employer should have to cover him for his refusal or stupidity in not putting something aside for a 'rainy day'.
Thankfully the bill stands very little chance of passing, one would hope that the unions take its defeat with good grace and start to educate their members (and non members) on the issue of personal responsibility.
An employer's responsibilities extend beyond having to pay their employees at the agreed rate. Only a sociopath would think otherwise.
Rubbish, if I work for a company they buy my time, I expect nothing more from them nor do I seek it.
When that working day is done I go home and tend to forget about work until it is time to switch on again the next day.
If I am good at what I do then I expect to be paid handsomely, if not then I will take my skills somewhere else.
Two and a half sentences to contradict yourself and find an obligation that employers have over and above paying employees at the agreed rate. Well done.
Yep, have to agree with you there Armchair, providing a safe working environment is the one other obligation that an employer should have to provide.
That is about it though.
Well I dunno about that. I reckon that meeting the terms and conditions of the employment contract would be pretty much obligatory.
And in the absence of law or contract, the obligation to pay regularly and on time has always been big in my book.
BB, what's the name and phone number of that insurance company?
I suspect you and I are a couple of light-years apart on the philosophy of this discussion, but it's a fair question and one that deserves a fair answer.
The context for this is the fact that I had to make one staff member redundant at the beginning of 2009, after she'd been with the company for about 2.5 years. Revenue had dried up in the area she was working in, and our profitability at the time was not high enough to let me keep her on whilst we tried to develop a new section of the market. So I made her redundant, and paid her out pretty much according to Darien's proposed formula – 4 weeks for her first year, and two weeks for each of the other two years (rounded up from 1.5) that she worked.
The reason I did so had quite a lot to do with fairness, and the assumption of risk. The way we were billing her services was that she was getting just over a third of her hourly rate as income – the other two thirds was going in overheads, downtime and margin. So the bulk of the risk of having her on the payroll was being absorbed by the company, but we were also taking the bulk of the revenue. It was my decision to take her on, and my assumption of the risks that went with that – when she applied for and got the job, at no point did I say to her that she needed to assume the risks of a market downturn in her personal planning or finances. It certainly didn't say that in her job description, either.
Basically the social contract is that the investors assume the risks, and the employees only take a portion of the income they earn in recognition of the fact that they don't share in those risks. Investors go into companies with their eyes open about the likely risks and rewards, but expecting employees to share in the downside with no share of the upside seems completely unfair to me – particularly when no-one is prepared to spell it out in those terms when they're employed.
So out of a sense of justice and fairness, I paid out redundancy to her. I didn't promise her a job for life, it didn't send the company broke, and it didn't result in creeping socialism that rotted the brains of all the staff members. But it did give her enough income to bridge the gap between leaving us and finding her next job, and it did provide a sop to my conscience about the fact that I'd made someone redundant who enjoyed their job, and had a mortgage and a family like the rest of us.
Which probably means that I don't measure up as a rapacious capitalist, standing astride the bodies of my competitors, fighting my way to the top in some bizarre Darwinian struggle. So be it. Other people's motivations and the decisions they would likely make in the same circumstances are different – as the saying goes, YMMV. But it's what felt fair to me.
@Clarke : good on you. There are many employers who see it the same way as you do and it's refreshing to hear from you on this blog.
Your bill would have had far more credibility had you put it forward during your time in government, you choose not to do so, like many I am left wondering why this was the case.
I suspect that your bill is nothing more than a sop to the unions and payback for their support of you, no doubt your pals in the union movement are quite happy that this bill has been voted down as it had it succeeded then they would not have been able to use the threat of redundancy as a way of frightening more fools to hand over some of their hard earned wages to some thug by way of union dues.
It is not often I agree with Henare but he was dead right today, this bill was/is the height of hypocrisy, it got what it deserves.
Nonsense big bruv. You should have listened to Darien's reply about redundancy legislation not being necessary at the time. I would go one further and say Labour could be trusted to bring unemployment down even further, which they did.
NActional however can't be trusted to do anything but privatise, create cheap, desperate unemployed and that was reason enough alone for Labour to start concentrating on the bill knowing that the untruths and misleading spin by Joyce and Co would mislead the fickle public who would vote in these carpetbaggers. Even Maori understood that and even the United Future voter was swayed into voting for Darien's bill until his NActional masters reminded him that he was meant to be voting against it.


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Apartment - Murcia (Los Dolores) , Built Surface 108m2, 3 Bedrooms, 2 Bathrooms, Lift, Urbanizacion.
House - Murcia (El Puntal) , Built Surface 134m2, 195m2, 3 Bedrooms, 1 Bathrooms.
Office - Murcia (Atalayas) , Built Surface 67m2, Lift.
House - Murcia (El Puntal) , Built Surface 121m2, 13m2, 2 Bedrooms, 1 Bathrooms.
Apartment - Murcia (El Ranero - San Basilio) , Built Surface 49m2, 1 Room, 1 Bathrooms, Lift.
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text:
Jae-Young Son
PsychBlog & Jelly
Influential Living Psychologists: Women & POC
About a month ago, a website called "The Best Schools" published a list entitled "The 50 Most Influential Living Psychologists in the World." Readers immediately noticed that there was a disturbing lack of Martian psychologists included on this list (after all, they didn't specify that "in the world" had to refer to Earth!).
Far less amusing was the number of women and people-of-color (POC) who were chosen to represent "influential" living psychologists. By my count, 78% of those listed were male, and 100% of them were white. I want to stress that all of the individuals included on that list are brilliant scientists who have certainly made important impacts on the field - it is not my goal to diminish their accomplishments.
However, as a POC psychologist-in-training, I was inspired to crowdsource a new list of influential living psychologists, one that highlighted the lives and accomplishments of important female and POC figures who had been previously overlooked. In other words, for those of us who look at such lists and think, "Is there room in this field for people who look like me?", my goal is to expand the record, not to correct it.
I want to caveat that this list should not be taken as any sort of "big-t" Truth. It reflects the (undoubtedly idiosyncratic) inclinations of a select group of Twitter users. (As a concrete example, I observed a few instances in which individuals' nominations consisted exclusively of professors from their own affiliated university!) But I do believe that it captures some amount of "little-t" truth, and it gives us hope for a future in which individuals from historically-marginalized backgrounds are increasingly well-represented in our science.
In total, there were a stunning 396 unique individuals who received nominations. Most of them had not been previously included on the list published by "The Best Schools." Although I had originally intended to identify the top 50, my current list consists of 71 individuals due to ties (and I'd rather err on the side of celebrating more people's accomplishments than fewer!). They are listed below in alphabetical order. Descriptions were pulled and lightly edited from nominees' personal websites and/or Wikipedia.
Renée Baillargeon
Dr. Baillargeon's research focuses on early causal reasoning in four core domains: physical reasoning, psychological reasoning, biological reasoning, and sociomoral reasoning. She assumes that each domain is equipped with a skeletal explanatory framework that enables infants to reason and learn about events in the domain.
Mahzarin Banaji
Dr. Banaji studies thinking and feeling as they unfold in social context, with a focus on mental systems that operate in implicit or unconscious mode. She studies social attitudes and beliefs in adults and children, especially those that have roots in group membership. She explores the implications of her work for questions of individual responsibility and social justice in democratic societies.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
Dr. Barrett's theory of constructed emotion hypothesizes that "anger," "sadness," "fear," and similar mental events are not basic building blocks in the mind, but instead are mental events that result from the dynamic interplay of more basic brain networks that are not themselves specific to emotion. Her lab studies how emotions emerge from prediction signals in the brain that function as concepts to categorize incoming sensory inputs from the body and the surrounding context, constructing experiences and perceptions of emotion.
Dorothy Bishop
Dr. Bishop researches language impairments in children. In some cases, language difficulties have an obvious cause, such as hearing loss or a condition such as Down's syndrome. In other cases, children have particular difficulty learning to talk or understand language for no obvious reason. Professor Bishop has studied children with 'specific language impairment' or SLI, who make up around 3% of the population but tend to be neglected by researchers. Using twin studies, she has investigated the genetic component to these disorders, and has worked with molecular geneticists to find out which genes are involved.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Dr. Blakemore's research focuses on neurocognitive development in typically developing adolescents. She is particularly interested in the development of the social brain, as well as how the brain matures to enable cognitive control, a collection of brain processes that guide thought and behaviour in accordance with internally generated goals or plans.
Marilynn Brewer
Dr. Brewer's major interests include (1) social cognition, the perception and cognitive representation of individual persons and person "types"; (2) intergroup relations, especially the study of ingroup biases and the effects of contact between groups on intergroup acceptance; and (3) social identities and the self-concept.
Susan Carey
Dr. Carey's research concerns the development of concepts in the child and adult (i.e., over ontogenesis), and the cultural construction of concepts over history. Her research is informed by insights from philosophical analyses of concepts, historical analyses of conceptual change in science, and experimental studies of human infants, young children and adults, and of non-human primates.
Laura Carstensen
Dr. Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, which explores innovative ways to solve the problems of people over 50 while improving the well-being of people of all ages. She is best known in academia for socioemotional selectivity theory, a life-span theory of motivation.
BJ Casey
Dr. Casey is a world leader in human neuroimaging and its use in typical and atypical development. She is a world leader in human neuroimaging and its use in typical and atypical development. She examines developmental transitions across the life span, especially during the period of adolescence. Her work is grounded in translational studies from genetically altered mice to human patients, developing models for several mental health problems that affect millions of young people today.
Margaret Clark
Dr. Clark's research focuses on optimal intra- and interpersonal functioning close relationships, the social functions of emotion, and the intersection of those two areas. She is interested in the normative nature of interpersonal processes as they occur within family relationships, friendships, and romantic relationships and in how the norms that apply to such relationships differ from those that apply to relating to acquaintances and business partners.
Leda Cosmides
Dr. Cosmides is best known for her work in pioneering the new field of evolutionary psychology, which weaves together cognitive science, human evolution, hunter gatherer studies, neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology, in an attempt to understand and map the human mind and brain.
Michelle Craske
Dr. Craske has published extensively in the area of fear, anxiety, and depression. In addition to over 392 research articles, she has written academic books on the topics of the etiology and treatment of anxiety disorders, gender differences in anxiety, translation from the basic science of fear learning to the understanding and treating of phobias, and principles and practice of cognitive behavioral therapy, as well as several self-help books and therapist guides.
William E. Cross, Jr.
Dr. Cross is one of America's leading theorists and researchers on black identity development and racial-ethnic identity development. His text, Shades of Black, is a classic in the field. He was swept-up by the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Subsequently, he constructed Nigrescence Theory to explicate the identity change process linked to social movement dynamics.
Nilanjana Dasgupta
Dr. Dasgupta's research challenges the assumption that implicit prejudice and stereotypes are immutable and identifies circumstances under which they can be changed. Some of her projects identify conditions that reduce implicit bias while other projects identify conditions that magnify implicit bias. Some projects focus on changing implicit stereotypes about outgroups whereas others focus on changing the impact of ingroup stereotypes on individuals' own self-concept and life decisions.
Patricia Devine
Dr. Devine is interested in how people manage the intrapersonal and interpersonal challenges associated with prejudice in our contemporary society. One main focus for recent work focused on the sources of motivation, internal and external, for responding without prejudice and the unique challenges these alternate sources of motivation create for managing the interpersonal aspects of intergroup relations.
Adele Diamond
Dr. Adele Diamond is one of the pioneers in the field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and researches executive functions which depend on prefrontal cortex (PFC) and interrelated brain regions. Executive functions include 'thinking outside the box' (cognitive flexibility), mentally relating ideas and facts (working memory), and giving considered responses rather than impulsive ones, resisting temptations and staying focused (inhibitory control, including selective attention).
Lisa Diamond
Dr. Lisa Diamond studies the development and expression of sexual identity and orientation over the life course. She is particularly interested in investigating the potential underpinnings of different subtypes of sexual-minority experience (such as stable versus fluctuating patterns of attraction and exclusive versus bisexual patterns), and examining how these patterns relate to tonic levels and phasic changes in gonadal hormones, oxytocin, HPA axis activity, and autonomic nervous system activity.
Angela Duckworth
Dr. Duckworth's research focuses on two traits that predict achievement: grit and self-control. Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations. On average, individuals who are gritty are more self-controlled, but the correlation between these two traits is not perfect: Some individuals are paragons of grit but not self-control, and some exceptionally well-regulated individuals are not especially gritty.
Carol Dweck
Dr. Dweck's work bridges developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality psychology, and examines the self-conceptions people use to structure the self and guide their behavior. Her research looks at the origins of these self-conceptions, their role in motivation and self-regulation, and their impact on achievement and interpersonal processes.
Alice Eagly
Dr. Eagly is known for her research on the psychology of gender, especially sex differences and similarities in leadership, prosocial behavior, aggression, partner preferences, and sociopolitical attitudes. She has also published on the content of stereotypes, and has proposed social role theory as a theory of sex differences and similarities, and of the origins of sex differences in social behavior. She has also researched attitudinal selectivity in information processing.
Jennifer Eberhardt
Dr. Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide ranging array of methods—from laboratory studies to novel field experiments—Dr. Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes within the domain of criminal justice.
Jacquelynne Eccles
Dr. Eccles has conducted research on a wide variety of topics including gender-role socialization, teacher expectancies, classroom influences on student motivation, and social development in the family and school context. She has made seminal contributions to the study of achievement-related decisions and development. Most notably, her expectancy-value theory of motivation and her concept of stage-environment have served as perhaps the most dominant models of achievement during the school years, contributing to extensive research and reform efforts to improve the nature of secondary school transitions.
Phoebe Ellsworth
Dr. Ellsworth is noted for her work in law and psychology, where she has conducted research on jury behavior and decision making, public opinion and the death penalty, and eyewitness identification. She is also known for her research in emotion, including facial emotions, cognition and emotion, and interpretation of emotion. Dr. Ellsworth is known for her contributions to appraisal theory, emotions and culture, challenges of emotion and language, and for her writing on William James. In much of her research, Dr. Ellsworth has intertwined an interest in cultural differences.
Martha Farah
Dr. Farah is a cognitive neuroscientist who works on problems at the interface of neuroscience and society. These include the effects of childhood poverty on brain development, the expanding use of neuropsychiatric medications by healthy people for brain enhancement, novel uses of brain imaging (e.g. legal, diagnostic and educational contexts), and the many ways in which neuroscience is changing the way we think of ourselves as physical, mental, moral and spiritual beings.
Susan Fiske
Dr. Fiske's research addresses how stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are encouraged or discouraged by social relationships, such as cooperation, competition, and power. In laboratory studies, she examines how a variety of relationships affect people forming impressions of others. Society's cultural stereotypes and prejudice also depend on relationships of power and interdependence. Group status and competition affect how groups are (dis)liked and (dis)respected. In cultural surveys, she examines the content of group stereotypes based on race, gender, age, (dis)ability, income, and more, finding patterns in the ways that society views various groups.
Uta Frith
Dr. Frith is best known for her research on autism spectrum disorders. Throughout her career, she has been developing a neuro-cognitive approach to developmental disorders, and has specifically investigated specific cognitive processes and their failure in autism and dyslexia. Her aim is to discover the underlying cognitive causes of these disorders and to link them to behavioural symptoms as well as to brain systems. She aims to make this research relevant to the education of people with development disorders and to contribute to a better quality of their everyday life.
Susan Gelman
Dr. Gelman's research investigates the development of concepts and language in childhood. Research topics include: categorization and inductive reasoning; psychological essentialism; generic concepts and generic language; social categories (including gender, race, traits, and human difference); ownership, authenticity, and object history; parent-child conversations; and semantic development.
Dedre Gentner
Dr. Gentner is a prominent researcher in the study of analogical reasoning, and has published extensively on: the semantics of word classes and their effects on acquisition of language; structure-mapping in similarity; similarity in long-term memory versus similarity in reasoning; comparison processes in learning and development; relational language and relational cognition; analogical processes in the history of science; comparison processes in education; and mental models.
Morton Gernsbacher
Dr. Gernsbacher's research focuses on the cognitive processes and mechanisms that underlie language comprehension. She has challenged the view that language processing depends upon language-specific mechanisms, proposing instead that it draws on general cognitive processes such as working memory and pattern recognition. During recent years, her research has focused on the cognitive and neurological processes of people with autism. She has posited that the speech difficulties associated with autism stem from motor planning challenges, not from intellectual limitations or social impairment.
Lila Gleitman
Dr. Gleitman's work has concerned the mental lexicon and its interface with syntax, language acquisition, and the relation between language and thought. She is an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language.
Phillip Goff
Dr. Goff is the co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity, and an expert in contemporary forms of racial bias and discrimination, as well as the intersections of race and gender. Dr. Goff conducts work exploring the ways in which racial prejudice is not a necessary precondition for racial discrimination. That is, despite the normative view of racial discrimination—that it stems from prejudiced explicit or implicit attitudes—his research demonstrates that situational factors facilitate racially unequal outcomes.
Adele Goldberg
Dr. Goldberg's research focus is on the psychology of language, including theoretical and experimental aspects of grammar and its representation, acquisition of form-function correspondences, and syntactic priming. Her works aim to illuminate parallels between language and other cognitive processes. She is best known for her work on constructions, statistical preemption, the creation and development of the artificial construction learning paradigm, and the suggestion that both statistics (particularly in the form of skewed input) and the functions of constructions play an important role in learning.
Susan Goldin-Meadow
Dr. Goldin-Meadow began her studies exploring whether children who lack a (usable) model for language can nevertheless create a language with their hands. She has found that deaf children whose profound hearing losses prevent them from learning the speech than surrounds them, and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign, invent gesture systems which are structured in language-like ways. This interest led to her current work on the gestures that accompany speech in hearing individuals. She has found that gesture can convey substantive information – information that is often not expressed in the speech it accompanies.
Alison Gopnik
Dr. Gopnik's research explores how young children come to know about the world around them. The work is informed by the "theory theory" – the idea that children develop and change intuitive theories of the world in much the way that scientists do. Most recently, she has been concentrating on young children's causal knowledge and causal learning across domains, including physical, biological and psychological knowledge. In collaboration with computer scientists, she is using the Bayes Net formalism to help explain how children are able to learn causal structure from patterns of data, and she has demonstrated that young children have much more powerful causal learning mechanisms than was previously supposed.
Janet Hyde
Dr. Hyde's research falls in the areas of psychology of women, human sexuality, and gender-role development. One current research project focuses on the emergence of gender differences in depression in adolescence, using data from our longitudinal project, The Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. Another current project, funded by the National Science Foundation, uses the technique of meta-analysis to synthesize available data on gender differences and similarities in mathematics performance. Another current project evaluates whether single-sex schooling actually produces better outcomes than coeducational schooling.
Olcay Imamoğlu
Dr. Imamoğlu has conducted research focusing on: the interplay between self, relationships, and well-being across cultures; a new model of self-construction: The Balanced Integration-Differentiation (BID) Model; gender, marital relations, and satisfaction across cultures; the social psychology of older adults, and environmental assessment; and social cognition and affect.
Marcia Johnson
Dr. Johnson uses cognitive behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques to investigate the nature of human cognition and memory. She has published research on topics such as: a component process analysis of memory and cognition; reality monitoring/source monitoring; the relation between emotion and cognition; the "self" in cognition; and changes in cognition associated with aging.
Nancy Kanwisher
Dr. Kanwisher studies the functional organization of the human brain as a window into the architecture of the mind. Over the last 20 years, her lab has played a central role in the identification of several dozen regions of the cortex in humans that are engaged in particular components of perception and cognition. Many of these regions are very specifically engaged in a single mental function such as perceiving faces, places, bodies, or words, or understanding the meanings of sentences or the mental states of others.
Shinobu Kitayama
Dr. Kitayama's research focuses on cultural variations in self, cognition, emotion, and motivation. Over the last two decades, he has used a variety of experimental methods to document a wide array of East-West differences in psychological processes. His more recent work has explored regional, social class, as well as age differences and similarities in psychological tendencies to understand their socio-cultural underpinnings. He has also pioneered the use of neuroscience measures such as fMRI and EEG in the investigation of the dynamic, recursive interaction between culture and the brain, thereby contributing to the emerging field of cultural neuroscience.
Marta Kutas
Dr. Kutas studies how meaning is organized, accessed, and constructed in the brain, focusing specifically on understanding how context shapes language and memory processing. Her studies track these cognitive and neural processes in both healthy and clinical individuals across the adult lifespan, primarily by assessing patterns of brainwaves recorded at the scalp as well as reaction times to various visual and auditory stimuli.
Ellen Langer
Dr. Langer is a social psychologist and the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. She has been described as the "mother of mindfulness" and has written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health. Her recent work is concerned with the interaction of mindfulness and health, business, and education.
Elizabeth Loftus
Dr. Loftus studies human memory. Her experiments reveal how memories can be changed by things that we are told. Facts, ideas, suggestions and other post-event information can modify our memories. The legal field, so reliant on memories, has been a significant application of the memory research. Loftus is also interested in psychology and law, more generally.
Asifa Majid
Dr. Majid investigates the nature of categories and concepts in language, in non-linguistic perception and cognition, and the relationship between them. She adopts a large-scale cross-cultural approach in order to establish which aspects of categorisation are fundamentally shared, and which language-specific. Using an interdisciplinary approach, she has researched domains such as space, event representation and more recently the language of perception.
Brenda Major
Dr. Major is an international expert in the psychology of stigma and how people perceive and cope with stigma and discrimination. A core theme of her work is psychological resilience – how people maintain their sense of self-esteem, psychological well-being and physical health despite exposure to discrimination, negative life events, and adversity.
Ivana Markova
Dr. Markova's main theoretical research interests are the ontology and epistemology of theory in social psychology, and the interdependence between social thinking, dialogue and semiotics. Empirical research concerns social representations of democracy, individualism and responsibility in post communist Europe and the study of dialogues between people with impaired speech and their partners.
Hazel Markus
Dr. Markus' research focuses on the role of self in regulating behavior and on the ways in which the social world shapes the self. Her work examines how cultures, including those of nation or region of origin, gender, social class, race, ethnicity, religion, and occupation, shape thought, feeling, and action. She is the co-director of SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions) at Stanford University.
Wendy Berry Mendes
Dr. Mendes researches embodiment: how emotions, thoughts, and intentions are experienced in the body and how bodily responses shape and influence thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Current research areas include coping with stigma and discrimination, dyadic intergroup interactions, affect contagion, mind-body relations across the life course, influence of emotional labeling on emotional experience and effects of stress on decision-making.
Brenda Milner
Dr. Milner discovered that Patient HM could learn and remember particular types of tasks, and that his memories of the past before the operation were seemingly intact. With this revelation, she established that people have multiple memory systems, governing different activities like language or motor skills, opening the way for a greater understanding of how the brain works. Dr. Milner also conducted much of the early work that established how the different hemispheres of the brains interact, which has had an enormous impact on understanding cognitive learning, language, sensations and emotions.
Elissa Newport
Dr. Newport's primary research interest is in the acquisition of language by young children, in the relationship between language acquisition and language structure, and in the acquisition of language by children and adults after damage to the brain. She also studies maturational effects on language learning, comparing children to adults as first and second language learners, and asking why children perform better than adults in language acquisition.
Betsy Levy Paluck
Dr. Paluck's research is motivated by two ideas: The first idea is that social psychological theory offers potentially useful tools for changing society in constructive ways. The second idea is that studying attempts to change society is one of the most fruitful ways to develop and assess social psychological theory. Much of her work has focused on prejudice and conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions.
Elizabeth Phelps
Dr. Phelps' research examines the cognitive neuroscience of emotion, learning and memory. She is particularly interested in extending animal models of emotional learning to human behavior, understanding emotion's influence in episodic memory, studying the impact of emotion on perception, attention and expression, and extending the basic mechanisms of emotional learning to social behavior, decision making and economics.
Molly Potter
Dr. Potter's research has focused on very short-term memory for pictures, words, and scenes, and she has received international acclaim for introducing the RSVP paradigm. RSVP stands for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, and the method has been harnessed to examine the earliest levels of information processing in humans.
Valerie Purdie Greenaway
Dr. Purdie Greenaway's research integrates existing knowledge of human biological systems with intergroup ("us" vs. "them") dynamics. Specifically, her research focuses on neurophysiologic pathways involved in stereotype threat; dialogues about past racial injustice, implicit power, and activation of the sympathetic nervous system; and incorporating biomarkers related to stress to understand physiological mechanisms linking concealment of a stigmatized identity and psychological distress and dysregulated eating.
V.S. Ramachandran
Dr. Ramachandran is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, which has two distinct agendas—a practical one and a theoretical one. The practical goal is to help develop new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric patients, e.g., chronic pain, stroke, anorexia and childhood autism. The theoretical agenda is to understand the neural basis of human behavior: the question of how the activity of the human brain gives rise to all the richness of our conscious experience.
Jennifer Richeson
Dr. Richeson's research examines multiple psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity. Her work generally concerns the ways in which sociocultural group memberships such as race, gender, and socio-economic status impact the way people think, feel, and behave, especially during interactions with members of different sociocultural groups. Through her teaching and research, Richeson hopes to contribute to a better understanding of intergroup relations, including how best to foster culturally diverse environments that are cohesive.
Laurie Santos
Dr. Santos explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind by comparing the cognitive abilities of human and non-human primates. Her studies focus on a number of different primate species and incorporate methodologies from cognitive development and cognitive neuroscience. Her research examines the following broad questions: what domains of knowledge are unique to the human mind? Given that human infants and non-human primates both lack language, what similarities and differences do we see in the expression of non-linguistic domains of knowledge?
Rebecca Saxe
Dr. Saxe's research is motivated by big questions: How does the human brain ‒ an electrical and biological machine ‒ construct abstract thoughts? What aspects of our brains and minds are universal, shared by all humans, and how much is specific to a culture, or unique to an individual? How do children's brains change as they grow up? How do developmental disorders, like autism, affect brain development? She often asks these questions in the domain of social cognition: how people think about people.
Denise Sekaquaptewa
Dr. Sekaquaptewa's experimental research program focuses on implicit stereotyping, prejudice, stereotype threat, and effects of category salience on test performance and academic motivation. Her current projects include studies of how environmental factors influence women students in math and science, and how stereotypes affect interracial communication.
James Sidanius
Dr. Sidanius' primary research interests include the interface between political ideology and cognitive functioning, the political psychology of gender, group conflict, institutional discrimination and the evolutionary psychology of intergroup prejudice. His most important theoretical contribution to date is the development of social dominance theory, a general model of the development and maintenance of group-based social hierarchy and social oppression.
Tania Singer
Dr. Singer's research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior, and she is recognised as a world expert on empathy. Her work focuses on social cognition, social moral emotions such as empathy, compassion, envy and fairness, social decision making, and communication. She is interested in the determinants of cooperation and prosocial behavior as well as the breakdown of cooperation and the emergence of selfish behavior.
Dr. Smith's central theoretical question is the study of developmental process and mechanisms of change. Her work focuses on early changes in perception, language, and action and how those changes in these areas support each other particularly around the age that children break into language. Her research takes a systems approach, seeking to understand how multiple components interact over nested time scales and levels of analysis and how, in so doing, they yield an individual's developmental path.
Elizabeth Spelke
Dr. Spelke's research focuses on the sources of uniquely human cognitive capacities, including the capacity for formal mathematics, the capacity for constructing and using symbolic representations such as maps, the capacity for developing comprehensive taxonomies of objects, and the capacity for reasoning about other humans and their social groups. Dr. Spelke studies these capacities by investigating their origins and growth in human infants and children, by considering human cognition in relation to the capacities of nonhuman primates, and by comparing the capacities of humans from diverse cultures.
Sanjay Srivastava
Dr. Srivastava studies the dynamics of personality in social contexts. He defines "personality" broadly to include traits, identities, roles, emotions, and motivations, and studies personality in many social contexts, including among strangers, in couples, in small groups, and in online societies. He uses a variety of research methods, including laboratory experiments and observations, ecological assessments, longitudinal studies, surveys, and both laboratory-based and automated analyses of digital data, including "big data" methods for large-scale research in social media.
Claude Steele
Dr. Steele is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to explain real-world problems such as the underperformance of female students in mathematics and science classes as well as black students in academic contexts. Dr. Steele has spearheaded many successful interventions aimed at reducing the negative effects of stereotype threat, including how to provide critical feedback effectively to a student under the effects of stereotype threat, and how teacher practices can foster a feeling of identity safety.
Derald Wing Sue
Dr. Sue is a pioneer in the field of multicultural psychology, multicultural education, multicultural counseling and therapy, and the psychology of racism/antiracism. He has performed extensive multicultural research and writing in psychology and education, and his theories and concepts have paved the way for a generation of younger scholars interested in issues of minority mental health and multicultural psychology.
Shelley Taylor
Dr. Taylor is well known for her work showing that people tend to hold positive illusions of themselves and that it can be healthy to do so, the mechanisms by which stress affects health, and the influence that early experiences can have on how our bodies process stress. Together with her student, Dr. Susan Fiske, she worked to expand the nascent field of social cognition, which examines the ways people think about other people and the influences on those thoughts.
Anne Treisman
Dr. Treisman researches visual attention, object perception, and memory. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, a two-stage model of visual object perception. During her long career, Dr. Treisman has experimentally and theoretically defined the issue of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects that guide human thought and action.
Barbara Tversky
Dr. Tversky is a leading authority in the areas of visual-spatial reasoning and collaborative cognition. Her specific research interests include spatial language and thinking, event perception and cognition, diagram production and comprehension, gesture, diagram, and language in thinking and in communication, diagrams for discovery and design, creativity, design, art, thinking tools, teaching tools, and design tools.
Leslie Ungerleider
Dr. Ungerleider is the Chief of the NIMH Section on Neurocircuitry, which is devoted to establishing the links between neural structure and cognitive function, especially in the visual modality. Her work on visual attention and perception has shown that in a typical scene many different objects compete for neural representation due to the limited processing capacity of the visual system. Her recent work has shown that, similar to the processing of other stimulus categories, the processing of stimuli with emotional valence is under top-down control, requiring attentional resources.
Simine Vazire
Dr. Vazire's research examines people's self-knowledge of their own personality and behavior. Her goal is to measure how people differ from one another not just at the trait level but also in their patterns of fluctuations across different roles and situations. She examines how much insight people have about their own and close others' traits and patterns. She is also interested in how personality and social relationships (e.g., friendship) influence well-being. Finally, she is interested in research methods, and factors that affect the validity and replicability of psychological research.
Janet Werker
Dr. Werker's research focuses on understanding the roots of language acquisition by studying speech perception in infancy, the mechanisms by which native speech sound categories are acquired, and how speech perception supports early word learning. She studies infants growing up in different language environments, infants growing up bilingual, and infants with, or at risk for, developmental disabilities. Adult studies focus on speech perception and lexical processing of both spoken language and visual speech. More recently, she has also begun exploring the nature of critical periods, and epigenetic processes that underlie developmental change.
Some of the individuals who were nominated have recently passed, and are memorialized here:
Nalini Ambady
Dr. Ambady was a leading expert on nonverbal behavior and interpersonal perception. Her research found that humans perceive nonverbal cues in response to novel people or situations, and that the information gleaned from an instant impression is often as powerful as information gleaned by getting to know a situation or person over a longer period of time. She and Robert Rosenthal coined the term "thin slices" to refer to such instantaneous non-verbal cues. Dr. Ambady died on October 28, 2013 after a long struggle with leukemia.
Çiğdem Kağıtçıbaşı
Dr. Kağıtçıbaşı was known for her belief that Western psychology could not account for the whole of humanity, and that it needed to recognise the experiences of those living in non-Western cultures and geographies. She was also passionate about the field of child development, and her work on parent education programs eventually led to the establishment of the Mother Child Education Foundation (MOCEP), which had the goal of implementing early childhood education, family literacy, functional adult literacy and women's support programs.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Dr. Karmiloff-Smith was an expert in developmental disorders, with a particular interest in Williams syndrome. She viewed modularization as a process that results in (rather than begins with) successively more developed and modularized knowledge representations. She also argued for the importance of studying developmental disorders, not as broken processes, but as developmental trajectories that take different paths from the typical and, as a result, provide unique insights into the mechanisms that foster developmental change in all children.


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Home Sponsor Content That They Lived: African Americans Who Changed the World by Rochelle Riley...
That They Lived: African Americans Who Changed the World by Rochelle Riley and Cristi Smith-Jones
Wayne State University Press
In February 2017, Rochelle Riley was reading Twitter posts and came across a series of black-and-white photos of four-year-old Lola dressed up as different African American women who had made history. Rochelle was immediately smitten. She was so proud to see this little girl so powerfully honor the struggle and achievement of women several decades her senior. Rochelle reached out to Lola's mom, Cristi Smith-Jones, and asked to pair her writing with Smith-Jones's incredible photographs for a book. The goal? To teach children on the cusp of adolescence that they could be anything they aspired to be, that every famous person was once a child who, in some cases, overcame great obstacles to achieve.
"I talked to Cristi about my one-woman campaign to make America's public schools teach a complete history of America rather than the segregated histories we teach now," Riley says. "My campaign, ONE AMERICA, ONE HISTORY, begins with the single idea that our goal should not be to uncover hidden figures. Our goal should be to stop hiding them. I returned a few months later with my grandson, Caleb, so Cristi could honor African-American men through his face. We chose men whose impacts were historic and whose words, ideas, and ideals were lasting. His favorite photo shoot was of Frederick Douglass because, well, he loved the hair."
That They Lived: African Americans Who Changed the World features Riley's grandson and Lola photographed in timeless black and white, dressed as important individuals such as business owners, educators, civil rights leaders, and artists, alongside detailed biographies that begin with the figures as young children who had the same ambitions, fears, strengths, and obstacles facing them that readers today may still experience. Muhammad Ali's bike was stolen when he was twelve years old and the police officer he reported the crime to suggested he learn how to fight before he caught up with the thief. Bessie Coleman, the first African American female aviator, collected and washed her neighbors' dirty laundry so she could raise enough money for college. When Duke Ellington was seven years old, he preferred playing baseball to attending the piano lessons his mom had arranged.
New York Times bestselling author Alice Randall says, "That They Lived is an instant classic. Words and images, the past and the future, weave back and forth in a stunningly original children's book, until we see and hear the American Dream becoming an American reality as the young people depicted—and the young people reading—come to know their history and their power."
Smith-Jones says, "I am a stay-at-home wife and mother turned amateur photographer, and I could never have imagined that we would reach so many people. It felt as though we were continuing the legacies of women who made it possible for generations of children to achieve their dreams. They have already affected Lola's life, and I hope that Lola carries those legacies with her as she forges her own path."
That They Lived fills in gaps in the history that American children have been taught for generations. For African American children, it will prove that they are more than descendants of the enslaved. For all children, it will show that every child can achieve great things and work together to make the world a better place for all.
That They Lived: African Americans Who Changed the World by Rochelle Riley and Cristi Smith-Jones, published by Wayne State University Press, is now available everywhere books are sold.
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