The Minuses of PLUS Loans; Trends, Issues, and Opportunities for Parents Who Borrow for College

As college costs rise, students aren’t the only ones facing the financial burden of education-related debt. In this paper, parent borrowing through the PLUS loan system, which is a federal program that provides parents and graduate students with access to funding for higher education costs, is examined. The systemic issues present in the PLUS loan system along with the rise in overall borrowing suggest the need for improved policies to help increase borrower awareness and improve loan outcomes. This paper is unique in that it addresses parent PLUS loan borrowing at the school level in order to identify factors that are associated with increases in borrowing and determine if borrowing is statistically different at the 1,712 public, private nonprofit, and private for-profit institutions analyzed. This paper finds a strong association between average net price and average parent PLUS loan borrowing at all institutions, but the borrowing sensitivity to average net price is greatest at public institutions compared to private nonprofit and private for-profit institutions. Given the observed differential patterns of borrowing across these institutions, targeted student loan reforms should address financial aid award letter standardization, enhancements to the College Scorecard, improved disclosures of loan costs, and modifications to the repayment plan options currently available for parent PLUS loan borrowers

A Progressive Universal Noiseless Coder

The authors combine pruned tree-structured vector quantization (pruned TSVQ) with Itoh's (1987) universal noiseless coder. By combining pruned TSVQ with universal noiseless coding, they benefit from the “successive approximation” capabilities of TSVQ, thereby allowing progressive transmission of images, while retaining the ability to noiselessly encode images of unknown statistics in a provably asymptotically optimal fashion. Noiseless compression results are comparable to Ziv-Lempel and arithmetic coding for both images and finely quantized Gaussian sources

What\u27s It All About? Finding the Appropriate Problem Definition in Mediation

In this article, we propose four mechanisms to enable mediation participants to explore problems broadly and then to decide what problem definition is most appropriate for the mediation of their case: A three-step systematic method for determining the problem to be addressed; Two variations of a rule that could be adopted by courts (and private providers) that would require lawyers or mediators to implement this systematic way of working with problem definition; and A new rule under which a court (or private) mediation program would offer to customize any mediation in order to seek the most appropriate problem definition We offer these mechanisms here to stimulate a dialogue regarding the most effective and administrable approaches that could give parties-especially one-shot players-the opportunity to influence the focus of their mediation sessions

Is That All There Is? The Problem in Court-Oriented Mediation

The alternative process of mediation is now well-institutionalized and widely (though not universally) perceived to save time and money and satisfy lawyers and parties. However, the process has failed to meet important aspirations of its early proponents and certain expectations and needs of one-shot players. In particular, court-oriented mediation now reflects the dominance and preferences of lawyers and insurance claims adjusters. These repeat players understand the problem to be addressed in personal injury, employment, contract, medical malpractice and other ordinary civil non-family disputes as a matter of merits assessment and litigation risk analysis. Mediation is structured so that litigation issues predominate; other potential issues - personal, psychological, relational, communitarian - disappear. This approach to mediation may be satisfactory to many parties and appropriate for courts that must engage in the mass processing of cases. But at least some individual one-shot players, who suddenly must seek redress or defend themselves, need something more. This Article describes a case involving such parties, dealing with their son\u27s heart-breaking disabilities and the narrow problem definition of their two mediations. We consider why the problem definition of their mediations mattered to these parties and how the mediation sessions could have been different. We then propose a systematic method that would enable the customization of mediation sessions, along with three initiatives that courts and private dispute resolution provides could adopt. These initiatives would provide parties with the opportunity to choose whether they wish to engage in a customized process. We also explore why courts should take the lead in experimenting with the breadth of the problems to be resolved by non-family civil court-oriented mediation

Activity detection in conversational sign language video for mobile telecommunication

The goal of the MobileASL project is to increase accessibility by making the mobile telecommunications network available to the signing Deaf community. Video cell phones enable Deaf users to communicate in their native language, American Sign Language (ASL). However, encoding and transmission of real-time video over cell phones is a powerintensive task that can quickly drain the battery. By recognizing activity in the conversational video, we can drop the frame rate during less important segments without significantly harming intelligibility, thus reducing the computational burden. This recognition must take place from video in real-time on a cell phone processor, on users that wear no special clothing. In this work, we quantify the power savings from droppin

Reducing Versatile Bat Wing Conformations to a 1-DoF Machine

Recent works have shown success in mimicking the flapping flight of bats on the robotic platform Bat Bot (B2). This robot has only five actuators but retains the ability to flap and fold-unfold its wings in flight. However, this bat-like robot has been unable to perform folding-unfolding of its wings within the period of a wingbeat cycle, about 100 ms. The DC motors operating the spindle mechanisms cannot attain this folding speed. Biological bats rely on this periodic folding of their wings during the upstroke of the wingbeat cycle. It reduces the moment of inertia of the wings and limits the negative lift generated during the upstroke. Thus, we consider it important to achieve wing folding during the upstroke. A mechanism was designed to couple the flapping cycle to the folding cycle of the robot. We then use biological data to further optimize the mechanism such that the kinematic synergies of the robot best match those of a biological bat. This ensures that folding is performed at the correct point in the wingbeat cycle

The Changing Nature of Urban Poverty in China

Our analysis is based upon the three round China Household Income Project (CHIP) surveys of household income carried out by an international team under the aegis of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Science. The CHIP studies defined household disposable income to include direct subsidies, income-in-kind, and the rental value of owned housing, in keeping with standard international practice. Income thus defined has exceeded income as officially defined and has changed differently, as well, especially in urban areas where formerly large subsidies faded away while rental value of owned housing burgeoned with the housing reform (Khan & Riskin, 2001, 2005). After summarizing available estimates of the size and trends of urban poverty, we use an urban poverty line fashioned by Khan (Khan & Riskin 2001; Khan 2004) to examine the changing characteristics of China's urban poor, and then explore whether recent declines in urban poverty are the fruits of the direct benefits and safety net programs that China has been establishing

A Progressive Universal Noiseless Coder

We describe an adaptation of Itoh and Kawabata's universal noiseless coder that allows for progressive transmission of images. The system is based on a tree structure, and codewords stored at internal nodes of the tree allow for early reproductions of the input image. When the encoder reaches a leaf of the tree, it continues transmitting until the compression is lossless. Compression results compare favorably to Ziv-Lempel coding of both images and finely quantized Gaussian sources