Bandidos Mexicano

Twin day sounded like an innocent enough theme for Homecoming spirit week at a high school. It was just people wearing matching clothes, taking some pictures, and laughing a bit. But that day, six girls walked to class in bright ponchos, giant sombreros, and stick-on mustaches, wielding fake green cards to boot. They were followed by a seventh with “Border Patrol” scrawled in black marker on a sign taped to her back. [excerpt

Kendrick Lamar and Hip-Hop as a Medium for Social Change

This paper provides a context and then analysis of Kendrick Lamar\u27s albums as they relate to advocating and affecting social change. The purpose is to show through example how hip-hop (and music in general) can act as an avenue towards creating positive change for oppressed peoples

Making a Great Performance: A Step-by-Step Guide

This project is meant to synthesize the body of knowledge I gained from my First-Year Seminar and my own research into a practical guide for excellence in performance. In it I address a number of stages and steps necessary for successful performance and various ways of going about those. While it focuses more heavily on the performance of music, due to my background and my intention to become a music educator, much of the text can be used in any field

Universal wave functions structure in mixed systems

When a regular classical system is perturbed, non-linear resonances appear as prescribed by the KAM and Poincar\`{e}-Birkhoff theorems. Manifestations of this classical phenomena to the morphologies of quantum wave functions are studied in this letter. We reveal a systematic formation of an universal structure of localized wave functions in systems with mixed classical dynamics. Unperturbed states that live around invariant tori are mixed when they collide in an avoided crossing if their quantum numbers differ in a multiple to the order of the classical resonance. At the avoided crossing eigenstates are localized in the island chain or in the vicinity of the unstable periodic orbit corresponding to the resonance. The difference of the quantum numbers determines the excitation of the localized states which is reveled using the zeros of the Husimi distribution.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

The Trials of a New Teacher

Tim, a new teacher, faces challenges as he works towards changing the environment in a high school music program

Measuring monetary policy in open economies

The paper extends Bernanke and Mihov's [6] closed-economy strategy for identification of monetary policy shocks to open-economy settings, accounting for the simultaneity between interest-rate and exchange-rate innovations. The methodology allows a separate treatment of two distinct monetary policy shocks, one that operates through open market operations, and another one that takes place through interventions in the foreign exchange market. Implementation of this strategy to the case of Argentina provides the stylized facts necessary to choose among competing theoretical models of this economy. In addition to studying the effects of monetary policy innovations, the present study sheds light on the endogenous component of monetary policy. In this regard, the paper finds that, notwithstanding the relative stability of the exchange rate and the accumulation of large amounts of international reserves, the central bank in Argentina has been far from absorbing balance of payments shocks in a currency-board fashion. The growing level of international reserves can be rationalized, instead, as the monetary authority's response to terms of trade, supply and domestic currency demand shocks.Currencies and Exchange Rates,Debt Markets,Economic Stabilization,Emerging Markets,Economic Theory&Research

Numerical identification of boundary conditions on nonlinearly radiating inverse heat conduction problems

An explicit and unconditionally stable finite difference method for the solution of the transient inverse heat conduction problem in a semi-infinite or finite slab mediums subject to nonlinear radiation boundary conditions is presented. After measuring two interior temperature histories, the mollification method is used to determine the surface transient heat source if the energy radiation law is known. Alternatively, if the active surface is heated by a source at a rate proportional to a given function, the nonlinear surface radiation law is then recovered as a function of the interface temperature when the problem is feasible. Two typical examples corresponding to Newton cooling law and Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law respectively are illustrated. In all cases, the method predicts the surface conditions with an accuracy suitable for many practical purposes