New Releases by Michael Johns

This project seeks to equip parents and leaders in the local church to disciple their children and adolescents in biblical sexuality. Chapter 1 explains the context, rationale, purpose, goals, and research methodology of the project. Chapter 2 establishes the biblical-theological foundation for biblical sexuality discipleship through an exegesis of Ephesians 5:31-32, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, and 1 Corinthians 6:16-20. Chapter 3 explains that the process of biblical sexuality discipleship is the responsibility of both the parents and the church. Chapter 4 details the history, preparation, and implementation of the five-session training class. Chapter 5 evaluates the purpose and goals of the ministry project. This chapter also reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of the project, including suggestions for change along with theological and personal reflections.

Spectacular vision of short poetic stories, redefining life, love, happiness, and sorrow, with mildly graphic overtones throughout.

A local rock star once said, “San Francisco is forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality.” No American city has such a broad sweep of staggering views—of the ocean, of a huge bay, of surrounding hills—or such a high opinion of its own worth. San Francisco has always been rich, too; the city’s great wealth has long underwritten the broadmindedness so vital to its charm. But there is much more to the City by the Bay than money and rarefied air, and, in San Francisco, Michael Johns intimately portrays the history and surprisingly complex sensibilities that give this small city its outsized personality. Johns explores how, despite its sophistication, San Francisco retains a frontier quality that has always attracted seekers—of fortune, power, pleasure, refuge, rebellion. Yet the city is more than irreverent, independent, and a bit outside the law: it’s also historically progressive, technologically innovative, and open to all kinds of people and ideas. As Johns shows us, San Francisco is an easy place to be different—a home to the Beats and the hippies, a vibrant LGBT community and left-wing politics, the rise of Burning Man, and the creation of technologies that make today’s San Francisco the City of Apps. From Haight-Ashbury to the Tenderloin, Chinatown to the Mission, Johns’s urban journey blends historical narrative, personal reflections on the city today, and a treasure trove of images for a true San Francisco treat.

Community college students often lack an academic plan to guide their choices of coursework to achieve their educational goals, in part because counseling departments typically lack the capacity to advise students at scale. This randomized controlled trial tests the impact of guaranteed access to one of two alternative counseling sessions (group workshops or one-on-one counseling), each of which was combined with targeted "nudging." Outcome measures included scheduling and attending the counseling session, completing an academic plan, and re-enrolling in the following semester. Evidence suggests that both variations on the intervention increase academic plan completion rates by over 20 percentage points compared to a control group that did not receive guaranteed access to a counseling session or the automated nudges. Exploratory evidence suggests that when combined with nudging, the guarantee of workshop counseling is as effective as the guarantee of one-on-one counseling in causing students to schedule and attend academic planning appointments. The following are appended: (1) Study background and intervention characteristics; (2) Study data sources, design and analysis; (3) Supplemental tables; and (4) Descriptions of MySite, Sherpa, and My Academic Plan systems.

The New Minorities of Europe: Social Cohesion in the European Unionargues that while the EU currently faces economic issues, it is pressed with larger questions and potential problems due to the backlash against those who move freely inside the union. It uses the intra-EU migrants, particularly the Polish community who moved post-2004 into Britain and to a lesser extent Ireland, as the case through which to examine these issues. The book argues that the traditional definitions of minorities and migrants are no longer valid in the EU and we should look at all groups collectively through a continuum of social cohesion based on their ability to access rights. The book traces the development of free movement in the EU, the movement of the intra-EU migrants, and the challenges and growing chilly climate they and other non-EU immigrants face across Europe. The book concludes with a proposal for the development of a High Commission on Social Cohesion in the European Union similar to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities who could use Quiet Diplomacy to try to work with minority groups in all their forms and the EU member states to address these issues.

"An uncompromising look at his younger self and the Nicaraguan revolution . . . that compels readers to question their own motivations and beliefs." — The Americas When Michael Johns joined a Sandinista militia in 1983, a fellow revolutionary dubbed him a rábano, a radish: red on the outside but white on the inside. Now, more than twenty-five years later, Johns appreciates the wisdom of that label as he revisits the questions of identity he tried to resolve by working with the Sandinistas at that point in his life. In The Education of a Radical, Johns recounts his immersion in Marxism and the Nicaraguan sojourn it led to, with a painful maturation process along the way. His conversion began in college, where he joined a student group called the Latin American Solidarity Association and traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, for research on his senior thesis. Overwhelmed by the poverty he witnessed, he experienced an ideological transformation. When a Marxist professor later encouraged him to travel to Nicaragua, the real internal battle began for him, a battle that was intensified by the U.S. invasion of Grenada and its effect on the Sandinistas, who believed they were the next target for an imminent American invasion. Before he knew it, Johns was digging trenches and learning how to use an AK-47. His intellectual ideals came face-to-face with revolutionary facts, and the results would perplex him for years to come. Bringing to life a vivid portrait of the sometimes painful process of reconciling reality with romanticized principles, The Education of a Radical encapsulates a trove of truths about humanity, economics, and politics in one man''s memorable journey.

Mexico City assumed its current character around the turn of the twentieth century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). In those years, wealthy Mexicans moved away from the Zócalo, the city''s traditional center, to western suburbs where they sought to imitate European and American ways of life. At the same time, poorer Mexicans, many of whom were peasants, crowded into eastern suburbs that lacked such basic amenities as schools, potable water, and adequate sewerage. These slums looked and felt more like rural villages than city neighborhoods. A century—and some twenty million more inhabitants—later, Mexico City retains its divided, robust, and almost labyrinthine character. In this provocative and beautifully written book, Michael Johns proposes to fathom the character of Mexico City and, through it, the Mexican national character that shaped and was shaped by the capital city. Drawing on sources from government documents to newspapers to literary works, he looks at such things as work, taste, violence, architecture, and political power during the formative Díaz era. From this portrait of daily life in Mexico City, he shows us the qualities that "make a Mexican a Mexican" and have created a culture in which, as the Mexican saying goes, "everything changes so that everything remains the same."

There exists a diverse variety of human behavior models, spanning multiple disciplines, each addressing a particular aspect of the whole problem of creating agents that behave realistically. This research focuses on the benefits and challenges of attempting to assemble such models into a unified system. It will be shown that, despite the inevitable complexity involved, the integration of human behavior models into a common framework can provide opportunities to leverage the work and assumptions of existing models to simplify the introduction of new ones.

The Ghetto Prophets/profits is an urban inspirational book. A modern-day Prince of Egypt, the book focuses on the struggles of people of color trying to create a better life for themselves and their children while battling issues of morality and desires. Tina and Jimmy are young and in love. Jimmy sells drugs and Tina doesn’t agree with it but tries to live with it. When they have a son (Kenny) Tina finds it hard to live with Jimmy’s occupation and the pressure of raising a child. Tina sercomes to the pressure and turns to drugs, and eventually leaves her family. Tina has another child (Kayla) that Jimmy does not know about. Tina gives Kayla to a Christian couple (the Holmes) while she tries to get off of drugs. Jimmy raises Kenny and the Holmes raise Kayla . The two children grow up in the same neighborhood not knowing that they are brother and sister. Circumstances bring the two of them together, and both are faced with choices and decisions.

Describing a test as a measure of an ability certain groups are stereotyped to lack can hurt the performance of members of those groups. Steele and his colleagues call this effect stereotype threat (1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002). Now well established, less is known about how stereotype threat reduces performance. The studies described in this dissertation were designed to follow up on past research showing that stereotype threat reduces performance by constraining working memory (Schmader & Johns, 2003). The primary hypothesis is that people experiencing stereotype threat devote cognitive resources that would normally be used for task performance to trying to avoid feelings of anxiety. In the first study, women completed an implicit reaction time measure of anxiety and a measure of working memory capacity under stereotype threat or non-stereotype threat conditions. The implicit measure was described as either related or unrelated to anxiety. The results revealed that women under stereotype threat showed evidence of increased anxiety when the implicit measure was described in neutral terms. However women in this condition showed evidence of anxiety avoidance when it was described as a measure of anxiety. Performance on the implicit measure was also correlated with stereotype threat-induced reductions in working memory. The second study tested whether eliminating the need to avoid feeling anxious would increase working memory. Caucasian and Latino participants completed the same implicit measure and working memory task under conditions that have been shown to create stereotype threat for Latinos. Half the participants were told that anxiety would not harm their performance on an intelligence test and the remaining participants were not given any information about the effect of anxiety on performance. The results showed that informing Latino participants that anxiety would not harm performance reduced anxiety avoidance on the implicit measure and also improved their working memory. However, anxiety avoidance was not correlated with working memory reductions. The results of these studies provide evidence that anxiety avoidance might be one factor that contributes to the effect of stereotype threat on test performance. Limitations of these studies and suggestions for future research are discussed.

"An exceptionally wide-ranging and balanced examination of American culture in the 1950s. Johns spans the cultural horizon from food and clothing to music, literature, art, architecture and politics. In highly readable prose, he transmits his enthusiasm for the subject and conveys the sights, sounds, and smells of ordinary everyday life in America a generation ago. His book will be important to anyone seriously studying this crucial and largely misunderstood period in American life."—Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America."

Nauplii from 4 commercially available geographical collections of Artemia and nauplii hatched from the Reference Artemia Cysts were compared for their effects on survival and growth of Rhithropanopeus harrisii larvae. In addition, nauplii from these sources were analyzed for their fatty acid and chlorinated hydrocarbon contents. Despite differences in the amounts of a few important polyunsaturated fatty acids, as well as in the chlorinated hydrocarbon content, there was little variation in the survival and development rates of R. harrisii fed these Artemia sources as food. However, growth of R. harrisii from hatching to megalopa was significantly higher on the strain from France, intermediate in the Reference, Brazil and Chinese strains, and poorest on the Chaplin Lake (Canada) strain. The Reference strain is shown to be one of the better sources of Artemia nauplii with regard to their use in crab culture and therefore represent a good standard for future research studies.