As the Obama administration prepares to disperse economic stimulus money for infrastructure, a timely new book sheds light on special districts, the “shadow governments” that will be responsible for spending a large portion of these funds.

“What really captured my interest was the enormous scale of some of the public works projects undertaken by special districts,” says Louise Nelson Dyble of the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at USC.

Specifically, Dyble traces the history of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District as a case study of high-stakes infrastructure development.

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“You’ve come a long way, baby.” – Virginia Slims cigarette campaign.

“We’ve come a long way, baby.” – typical response from American voters after the 2008 presidential election.

Ironically, Barack Obama’s election could turn out to have negative consequences in addressing racial injustices in the United States, according to new research.

Social psychologists from the University of Washington and Tulane University who surveyed a group of students before and after last November’s election found that belief in the need for future racial progress and support of policies that address racial inequality fell in the week following the election. However, their beliefs about the rate of racial progress made in the U.S. and support for the so-called Protestant work ethic – the idea that anything is possible with hard work – increased in the same time period.

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The secondary confession – also known as snitching – is widely accepted as valid evidence in criminal prosecution. Yet, the first behavioral study to investigate whether people will provide false secondary confessions has raised significant concerns about the use of such evidence when informants are offered incentives, according to University of Arkansas psychology researchers Jessica K. Swanner and Denise R. Beike.

“The results of our study were interesting but discouraging,” Beike said. “With the use of incentives, we should have seen an increase in true secondary confessions. But an incentive actually did the opposite. It brought forward not the reluctant informant, but the opportunistic.”

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Calling New Orleans “the canary in the global warming coal mine,” two Tulane professors say the Crescent City must embrace unconventional thinking in order to recover in a sustainable way from Hurricane Katrina while withstanding a continual threat from rising sea levels, diminishing wetlands and future storms. They stress that the No. 1 priority for Louisiana should be to combat global warming and accelerated sea-level rise.

In the commentary “Sustaining Coastal Urban Ecosystems” published in the latest issue of the London-based journal Nature Geoscience, Torbjörn E. Törnqvist, associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Douglas J. Meffert, deputy director of the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, also say New Orleans must concentrate more of its population on the 50 percent of its land mass that lies above sea level.

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Paul Gootenberg, Professor of History and Co-Director of Latin American Studies at Stony Brook University in New York, published a controversial new book on the history of modern cocaine, the illicit drug that menaced U.S. cities during the 1980s and prompted an Andean “War on Drugs” which is now in its third decade. The book, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug, is published by the University of North Carolina Press, and is based on more than a decade of research in international archives, including specially declassified U.S. documents of the DEA and its predecessors.

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Transgender youth face extremely high levels of victimization in school, even more so than their non-transgender lesbian, gay and bisexual peers. But they are also more likely to speak out about LGBT issues in the classroom, according to ”Harsh Realities: The Experiences of Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools,” the first comprehensive study on transgender students, released today by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

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Muslim-American filmmaker Justin Mashouf will be screening his feature documentary, Warring Factions, on March 25th as a part of the annual New York University Shuruq Festival. 24 year old Mashouf will be screening the 70 minute documentary in addition to speaking about his experiences in Iran, his detention by Homeland Security and the confiscation of his video footage on suspicion of terrorism.

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Cambridge Healthtech Institute announces its Second Annual Advanced Biofuels Development Summit, to be held April 20-21, 2009 at the Marriott at Metro Center in Washington, D.C. This conference is aimed at addressing key issues surrounding the creation of “economic sustainability” for advanced biofuels. Prior to the main conference a hands-on interactive workshop will focus on the Obama Administration’s emerging biofuels policies, programs and initiatives. Newly added speaker Roger Conway, Director, Office of Energy Policies and New Uses, OCE, USDA will be a featured speaker at the workshop. Conway will provide insight into the developing policies and programs for advanced biofuels under the new administration.

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The International Coalition for Genital Integrity (ICGI) calls on all state Medicaid programs still covering newborn circumcision to cease that coverage so the funds can be diverted to healing children; this follows a letter published yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health that raised significant new concerns about this unnecessary—and often harmful—surgery.

“Newborn circumcision places infants at immediate risk of bleeding, infection, MRSA, permanent loss of the foreskin’s benefits, penile damage, and in rare cases, death,” explains John W. Travis, M.D., M.P.H., and co-author of the letter. “It is harmful and unethical to place infants at immediate risk for these complications just to possibly reduce risk of adult acquired sexually transmitted diseases, especially when other prevention methods exist and are superior.”

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The Declaration of Independence may proclaim that all men are created equal, but American whites tend to distribute their prejudice unequally toward certain members of minority groups, according to new research.

A series of six studies conducted by University of Washington and Michigan State University psychologists shows that whites react more negatively to racial minority individuals who strongly identify with their racial group than to racial minority individuals who weakly identify with their group.

The research, published in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an explanation for why some Blacks report personally experiencing more prejudice than others.

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