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'Visible Signs' explains how semiotic theory can affect the work of art students through clarifying basic communication terms and theoretical contexts through visual examples of graphic work. Concepts in semiotics are explored through examples of contemporary graphic design and fine arts.

A decade after Mexico's watershed 2000 election, Mexicans are disillusioned with democracy and distrustful of politicians, parties, and parliament. Evidence from an original survey, Desencanto Ciudadano en México, indicates that Mexicans' definitions of democracy play an important role in shaping how satisfied they are with it. Those holding a \"substantive\" definition of democracy emphasizing socioeconomic improvement tied to redistribution are significantly less satisfied with democracy than \"liberal\" democrats, who stress rights, or \"electoral\" democrats, who emphasize procedures. Citizen expectations of democracy are an important but missing ingredient in studies of political disillusionment. Dissatisfaction is worrisome because of its impact on political behavior. The disenchanted vote less, are less involved civically, and engage more in legal and illegal protest.

Using data from an original two-wave panel survey of California high school students and a two-wave panel survey of high school students in Chicago, we find that different pedagogical approaches influence different forms of civic and political engagement. Specifically, controlling for prior levels of engagement and demographic factors, we find that open discussion of societal issues promotes engagement with political issues and elections. In contrast, service learning opportunities increase community-based and expressive actions. Both kinds of opportunities promoted commitments to participatory citizenship. These patterns can teach us about the kinds of opportunities (both in school and out) that can shape adolescents' civic and political development.

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of infectious disease forecasting in informing public policy. However, significant barriers remain for effectively linking infectious disease forecasts to public health decision making, including a lack of model validation. Forecasting model performance and accuracy should be evaluated retrospectively to understand under which conditions models were reliable and could be improved in the future. Methods Using archived forecasts from the California Department of Public Health’s California COVID Assessment Tool ( https://calcat.covid19.ca.gov/cacovidmodels/ ), we compared how well different forecasting models predicted COVID-19 hospitalization census across California counties and regions during periods of Alpha, Delta, and Omicron variant predominance. Results Based on mean absolute error estimates, forecasting models had variable performance across counties and through time. When accounting for model availability across counties and dates, some individual models performed consistently better than the ensemble model, but model rankings still differed across counties. Local transmission trends, variant prevalence, and county population size were informative predictors for determining which model performed best for a given county based on a random forest classification analysis. Overall, the ensemble model performed worse in less populous counties, in part because of fewer model contributors in these locations. Conclusions Ensemble model predictions could be improved by incorporating geographic heterogeneity in model coverage and performance. Consistency in model reporting and improved model validation can strengthen the role of infectious disease forecasting in real-time public health decision making.

Local human rights organizations (LHROs) are crucial allies in international efforts to promote human rights. Without support from organized civil society, efforts by transnational human rights reformers would have little effect. Despite their importance, we have little systematic information on the correlates of public trust in LHROs. To fill this gap, we conducted key informant interviews with 233 human rights workers from sixty countries, and then administered a new Human Rights Perceptions Poll to representative public samples in Mexico (n = 2,400), Morocco (n = 1,100), India (n = 1,680), and Colombia (n = 1,699). Our data reveal that popular trust in local rights groups is consistently associated with greater respondent familiarity with the rights discourse, actors, and organizations, along with greater skepticism toward state institutions and agents. The evidence fails to provide consistent, strong support for other commonly held expectations, however, including those about the effects of foreign funding, socioeconomic status, and transnational connections.

Introduction:COVID-19 has caused tremendous death and suffering since it first emerged in 2019. Soon after its emergence, models were developed to help predict the course of various disease metrics, and these models have been relied upon to help guide public health policy.Methods:Here we present a method called COVIDNearTerm to “forecast” hospitalizations in the short term, two to four weeks from the time of prediction. COVIDNearTerm is based on an autoregressive model and utilizes a parametric bootstrap approach to make predictions. It is easy to use as it requires only previous hospitalization data, and there is an open-source R package that implements the algorithm. We evaluated COVIDNearTerm on San Francisco Bay Area hospitalizations and compared it to models from the California COVID Assessment Tool (CalCAT).Results:We found that COVIDNearTerm predictions were more accurate than the CalCAT ensemble predictions for all comparisons and any CalCAT component for a majority of comparisons. For instance, at the county level our 14-day hospitalization median absolute percentage errors ranged from 16 to 36%. For those same comparisons, the CalCAT ensemble errors were between 30 and 59%.Conclusion:COVIDNearTerm is a simple and useful tool for predicting near-term COVID-19 hospitalizations.

In the spring of 2014, a group of prominent commentators slammed the New York–based organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) for maintaining a “revolving door” with the U.S. government. Exhibit A, the critics said, was Tom Malinowski, a senior staffer who had joined HRW in 2001 after seven years working in the U.S. government, returned to government service from 2013 to 2017, and then was elected as a New Jersey congressman in 2018. This and similar cases, the critics said, made HRW appear overly cozy with U.S. officialdom. Given “the impact of global perceptions on HRW's ability to carry out its work,” the letter writers opined, even the “appearance of impropriety” undermined the organization's credibility. To counter these and similar views, HRW has ramped up its criticism of U.S. policies, opened new offices outside North America, and hired more international staff. Other international human rights organizations (IHROs) have done the same, including Amnesty International, another well‐known group whose “moving closer to the ground” strategy has relocated portions of its International Secretariat from London to cities in the Global South. Major private funders, including the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation, have financially supported these globalization efforts. The foregoing letter criticizing HRW is only one of many such exchanges in a lengthy debate ongoing since the 1970s, when human rights groups first began participating in debates over international politics: whose geopolitical interests do human rights groups really serve? When HROs chastise governments, are they geopolitically impartial neutrals advancing universal principles, furthering U.S. geopolitical interests by delegitimizing rivals and promoting liberal‐capitalist ideology, or engaging in global “soft balancing”? All actors in this debate must assume that public opinion is generally on their side; to believe otherwise would be to suggest that HROs have systematically deceived publics worldwide. Until now, however, there has been little systematic investigation of global publics’ actual perceptions of HROs’ relations with the United States. To be sure, survey researchers do regularly ask publics worldwide about their views of the United States. A handful, moreover, have asked the public for their opinions toward human rights principles. The surveys conducted for the current study, however, are the only ones we know of to simultaneously ask about attitudes toward HROs and the U.S. government. As a result, we know little of the relationship between the two. To investigate, we administered our Human Rights Perceptions Poll to 9,380 people through face‐to‐face interviews in six countries in Latin America, North Africa, sub‐Saharan Africa, and South Asia. In India, Morocco, and Nigeria, we surveyed adults living in and around major financial and political centers (Mumbai, Rabat/Casablanca, and Lagos). In Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico, by contrast, our surveys were nationally representative (see Appendix B). We hypothesize that publics do not regard HROs as allies of U.S. foreign policy; instead, we expect them to view rights organizations either as geopolitical neutrals or as counterhegemons. Statistical analysis of our survey data offers support for this claim; in four of the six locales we investigated and in our pooled, all‐country sample, public trust in local HROs (LHROs) is negatively and significantly associated with trust in the U.S. government. The same is true for IHROs in our three Latin American cases and in the pooled sample. As our hypothesis predicted, in none of our cases across world regions is public trust in HROs positively associated with public trust in the U.S. government. These findings cumulatively support our expectation that publics do not view HROs as “handmaidens” of U.S. imperialism. We begin by demonstrating the statistical association between public trust in HROs and mistrust in the U.S. government in Latin America. This is a “most likely” case, as HROs working in and on Latin America have historically opposed U.S.‐supported state repression by right‐wing authoritarians. If people anywhere are likely to view HROs as neutral or opposed to U.S. primacy, they will do so here. Controlling for other relevant factors, we find exactly that: public mistrust in the U.S. government in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico is indeed significantly associated with greater trust in both LHROs and IHROs. The relationship between trust in HROs and in the U.S. government, in other words, is inverse. Extending our investigation to three other world regions offers a more demanding test, given their broader array of cultural, religious, historical, and geostrategic conditions. Still, even outside Latin America we found no positive associations between trust in the U.S. government and trust in HROs. To be sure, HRW's critics may, or may not, be correct in alleging the organization has been closely connected to the U.S. government; our surveys cannot shed light on this question. As far as public opinion goes in our six cases, however, rights organizations have little cause for concern on this count, as the general public does not perceive them as U.S. government allies. Proponents of U.S. soft power, however, should be concerned; if you believe the U.S. government really is a global rights promoter, it should be discomfiting to learn that this view is not widely shared in these six countries.

Local human rights organizations (LHROs) are key domestic and transnational actors, modifying, diffusing, and promoting liberal norms; mobilizing citizens; networking with the media and activists; and pressuring governments to implement international commitments. These groups, however, are reliant on international funds. This makes sense in politically repressive environments, where potential donors fear government retaliation, but is puzzling elsewhere. We interviewed 263 LHRO leaders and key informants from 60 countries, and conducted statistically representative surveys of 6180 respondents in India, Mexico, Morocco, and Nigeria. Based on these data, we believe LHRO funding in non-repressive environments is shaped by philanthropic logics of appropriateness. In the late 1990s, transnational activists successfully mainstreamed human rights throughout the international donor assistance community, freeing up development money for LHROs. Domestic activists in the global South have not promoted similar philanthropic transformations at home, where charitable giving still focuses on traditional institutions. Instead, domestic rights activists have followed the path of least resistance toward international aid, a logic of outcomes produced by variations in global logics of (philanthropic) appropriateness.

A decade after Mexico's watershed 2000 election, Mexicans are disillusioned with democracy and distrustful of politicians, parties, and parliament. Evidence from an original survey, Desencanto Ciudadano en Mexico, indicates that Mexicans' definitions of democracy play an important role in shaping how satisfied they are with it. Those holding a \"substantive\" definition of democracy emphasizing socioeconomic improvement tied to redistribution are significantly less satisfied with democracy than \"liberal\" democrats, who stress rights, or \"electoral\" democrats, who emphasize procedures. Citizen expectations of democracy are an important but missing ingredient in studies of political disillusionment. Dissatisfaction is worrisome because of its impact on political behavior. The disenchanted vote less, are less involved civically, and engage more in legal and illegal protest. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The United States manufactured significant quantities of chemical weapons during the Cold War and the years prior. Because the chemical weapons are aging, storage constitutes an ongoing risk to the facility workforces and to the communities nearby. In addition, the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty stipulates that the chemical weapons be destroyed. The United States has destroyed approximately 90 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile located at seven sites. As part of the effort to destroy its remaining stockpile, the Department of Defense is building the Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant (BGCAPP) on the Blue Grass Army Depot (BGAD), near Richmond, Kentucky. The stockpile stored at BGAD consists of rockets and projectiles containing the nerve agents GB and VX and the blister agent mustard. Continued storage poses a risk to the BGAD workforce and the surrounding community because these munitions are several decades old and are developing leaks. Due to public opposition to the use of incineration to destroy the BGAD stockpile, Congress mandated that non- incineration technologies be identified for use at BGCAPP. As a result, the original BGCAPP design called for munitions to be drained of agent and then for the munition bodies to be washed out using high-pressure hot water. However as part of a larger package of modifications called Engineering Change Proposal 87 (ECP-87), the munition washout step was eliminated. Effects of the Deletion of Chemical Agent Washout on Operations at the Blue Grass Chemical Agent Destruction Pilot Plant examines the impacts of this design change on operations at BGCAPP and makes recommendations to guide future decision making.