Does school participatory budgeting (SPB) increase students’ political efficacy? SPB, which is implemented in thousands of schools around the world, is a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making in which students determine how to spend a portion of the school’s budget. We examined the impact of SPB on political efficacy in one middle school in Arizona. Our participants’ (n = 28) responses on survey items designed to measure self-perceived growth in political efficacy indicated a large effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.46), suggesting that SPB is an effective approach to civic pedagogy, with promising prospects for developing students’ political efficacy.

Engineered pavements cover a large fraction of cities and offer significant potential for urban heat island mitigation. Though rapidly increasing research efforts have been devoted to the study of pavement materials, thermal interactions between buildings and the ambient environment are mostly neglected. In this study, numerical models featuring a realistic representation of building-environment thermal interactions, were applied to quantify the effect of pavements on the urban thermal environment at multiple scales. It was found that performance of pavements inside the canyon was largely determined by the canyon geometry. In a high-density residential area, modifying pavements had insignificant effect on the wall temperature and building energy consumption. At a regional scale, various pavement types were also found to have a limited cooling effect on land surface temperature and 2-m air temperature for metropolitan Phoenix. In the context of global climate change, the effect of pavement was evaluated in terms of the equivalent CO2 emission. Equivalent CO2 emission offset by reflective pavements in urban canyons was only about 13.9e46.6% of that without building canopies, depending on the canyon geometry. This study revealed the importance of building-environment thermal interactions in determining thermal conditions inside the urban canopy.

Critical flicker fusion thresholds (CFFTs) describe when quick amplitude modulations of a light source become undetectable as the frequency of the modulation increases and are thought to underlie a number of visual processing skills, including reading. Here, we compare the impact of two vision-training approaches, one involving contrast sensitivity training and the other directional dot-motion training, compared to an active control group trained on Sudoku. The three training paradigms were compared on their effectiveness for altering CFFT. Directional dot-motion and contrast sensitivity training resulted in significant improvement in CFFT, while the Sudoku group did not yield significant improvement. This finding indicates that dot-motion and contrast sensitivity training similarly transfer to effect changes in CFFT. The results, combined with prior research linking CFFT to high-order cognitive processes such as reading ability, and studies showing positive impact of both dot-motion and contrast sensitivity training in reading, provide a possible mechanistic link of how these different training approaches impact reading abilities.

Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a serious lifelong condition, its underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. Recently, neuroimaging-based classifiers for ASD and typically developed (TD) individuals were developed to identify the abnormality of functional connections (FCs). Due to over-fitting and interferential effects of varying measurement conditions and demographic distributions, no classifiers have been strictly validated for independent cohorts. Here we overcome these difficulties by developing a novel machine-learning algorithm that identifies a small number of FCs that separates ASD versus TD. The classifier achieves high accuracy for a Japanese discovery cohort and demonstrates a remarkable degree of generalization for two independent validation cohorts in the USA and Japan. The developed ASD classifier does not distinguish individuals with major depressive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder from their controls but moderately distinguishes patients with schizophrenia from their controls. The results leave open the viable possibility of exploring neuroimaging-based dimensions quantifying the multiple-disorder spectrum.