Women work for peace, and men wage war—cooperative women, conflictual men. These images pervade conventional wisdom about the efficacy of women in leadership roles and decision-making environments, but imagery is not always grounded in reality. Feminist international relations literature is examined to understand how domestic gender equality may help predict a state's international crisis behavior. The authors use the record of female leaders as primary decision makers during international crises and then test the relationship between domestic gender equality and a state's use of violence internationally. The International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set and multinomial logistic regression are used to test the level of violence exhibited during international crises by states with varying levels of domestic gender equality. Results show that the severity of violence in crisis decreases as domestic gender equality increases.

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Land use and land cover (LULC) patterns play an important role in the establishment and spread of invasive plants. Understanding LULC changes is useful for early detection and management of land-use change to reduce the spread of invasive species. The primary objective of this study is to analyze and predict LULC changes in Connecticut. LULC maps for 1996, 2001 and 2006 were selected to analyze past land cover changes, and then potential LULC distribution in 2018 was predicted using the Multi-Layer Perceptron Markov Chain (MLP_MC) model. This study shows that the total area of forest has been decreasing, mainly caused by urban development and other human activity in Connecticut. The model predicts that the study area will lose 5535 ha of deciduous forest and gain 3502 ha of built-up area from 2006 to 2018. Moreover, forests near built-up areas and agriculture lands appear to be more vulnerable to conversion. Changes in LULC may result in subtle spatial shifts in invasion risk by an abundant invasive shrub, Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii). The gain of developed areas at the landscape scale was most closely linked to increased future invasion risk. Our findings suggest that the forest conversion needs to be controlled and well managed to help mitigate future invasion risk.

Abstract:This study examined the potential of simulations to bolster interest in middle school social studies classrooms. Using a pre-post design, we examined 305 middle school students (49% female) who participated in the web-based GlobalEd simulation. Unlike the motivation declines middle school students usually experience, participants in this