Getting on the Map: The Political Economy of State-Level Electricity Restructuring

Retail competition in electricity markets is expected to lead to more efficient electricity supply, lower electricity prices, more innovation by suppliers and a greater variety of electric power service packages. However, only a handful of states have currently gone so far as to pass legislation and/or make regulatory decisions to establish retail wheeling. This paper analyzes a variety of factors that may influence the rate at which legislators and regulators move towards establishing retail competition. In general, we find that where one interest group dominates others in the struggle for influence over the decision makers, the net effect seems to push a state forward more quickly when retail wheeling is expected to yield large efficiency gains.

Not Even A Place in Line: Housing Choice Voucher Capacity and Waiting Lists in Illinois, 2015

This "Not Even a Place in Line" report captures the availability in Illinois (or lack thereof) of a core federal affordable housing program -- Housing Choice Vouchers -- to help address the dire need for affordable housing.Seventy-two percent of waiting lists for Housing Choice Vouchers in Illinois are closed. The 51 public housing authorities (PHAs) with closed waiting lists, out of a total of 71 PHAs in Illinois with voucher programs, administer 95 percent of the vouchers available in the state.This means that people in need of affordable rental housing in most every part of Illinois do not have the opportunity to even get in line to secure a federally funded subsidy that would alleviate their poverty and put their household in a better position to thrive

Assessing Descriptive Substance in Free-Text Collection-Level Metadata

Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important information about the features and purpose of individual collections. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in an aggregation of cultural heritage collections. The findings show that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields. Properties such as importance, uniqueness, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator are articulated, as well as other vital contextual information about the intentions of a collector and the value of a collection, as a whole, for scholarly users. The results demonstrate that the semantically rich free-text Description field is essential to understanding the context of collections in large aggregations and can serve as a source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabulariesIMLS NLG Research and Demonstration grant LG-06-07-0020-07published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Probing the Gamma-Ray Burst Rate with Trigger Simulations of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope

The long gamma-ray burst (GRB) rate is essential for revealing the connection between GRBs, supernovae and stellar evolution. Additionally, the GRB rate at high redshift provides a strong probe of star formation history in the early universe. While hundreds of GRBs are observed by Swift, it remains difficult to determine the intrinsic GRB rate due to the complex trigger algorithm of Swift. Current studies usually approximate the Swift trigger algorithm by a single detection threshold. However, unlike the previously flown GRB instruments, Swift has over 500 trigger criteria based on photon count rate and additional image threshold for localization. To investigate possible systematic biases and explore the intrinsic GRB properties, we developed a program that is capable of simulating all the rate trigger criteria and mimicking the image trigger threshold. We use this program to search for the intrinsic GRB rate. Our simulations show that adopting the complex trigger algorithm of Swift increases the detection rate of dim bursts. As a result, we find that either the GRB rate is much higher than previously expected at large redshift, or the luminosity evolution is non-negligible. We will discuss the best results of the GRB rate in our search, and their impact on the star-formation history.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 7th Huntsville Gamma-Ray Burst Symposium, GRB 2013: paper 35 in eConf Proceedings C130414

If Not for Her Sex: The Mysterious Education of American Women, 1750-1850

University of Minnesota M.A. thesis. June 2017. Major: Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Advisor: Karen Miksch. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 70 pages.The topic of educating middle and lower class women, in 1750-1850, has been sparsely annotated in historical research. Historical research hinted that these women were educated far beyond the “female arts,” but little else was written to indicate how women, without substantial means, were able to acquire higher education. Interwoven through historical research on higher education, however, were nuanced mentions that women were educated for professions and acquired high-level literacy. Due to the dearth of research on women’s education during this period, I decided to focus my study on the first women’s post-secondary school: the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Other resources unearthed curriculums of both the Moravian Seminary for Young Women and Mount Holyoke. I looked into their archives to understand who their marketed audience was and what kinds of learning materials were used to teach female students. From the curriculum, I hoped to find women’s motivations for seeking post-secondary education and what women expected from gaining this education. In the 1700s women that were Quakers or Moravians experienced more acceptance and open access to higher education compared to that of their non-secular counterparts. Most [Puritan] women could read, but not write, as it was not deemed necessary for their education. The women that did pursue post-secondary education discontinued this pursuit once married. The general idea about educating lower and middle class women was that it allowed them the ability to educate their children. In the 1800s, most women who sought education, regardless of class, became educated to be useful to their families and communities. Usefulness was of the utmost importance for all genders, post-revolution, to aid in building the new nation. Usefulness was found inside and outside the home, in the public and private spheres. The conclusions drawn from my research reasserted the lack of primary resource documentation of women’s education, particularly in the 1700s and early 1800s. The historical research of women pursuing higher education in early America needs further attention. Discovering how higher education informed the lives of all sexes in the 1700s and 1800s can give us a fuller picture of their contributions to our present. It could aid historians in understanding the lives of a sex that have been obscured by the category of Private Sphere for too long

Probing the Cosmic Gamma-Ray Burst Rate with Trigger Simulations of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope

The gamma-ray burst (GRB) rate is essential for revealing the connection between GRBs, supernovae and stellar evolution. Additionally, the GRB rate at high redshift provides a strong probe of star formation history in the early universe. While hundreds of GRBs are observed by Swift, it remains difficult to determine the intrinsic GRB rate due to the complex trigger algorithm of Swift. Current studies of the GRB rate usually approximate the Swift trigger algorithm by a single detection threshold. However, unlike the previously flown GRB instruments, Swift has over 500 trigger criteria based on photon count rate and additional image threshold for localization. To investigate possible systematic biases and explore the intrinsic GRB properties, we develop a program that is capable of simulating all the rate trigger criteria and mimicking the image threshold. Our simulations show that adopting the complex trigger algorithm of Swift increases the detection rate of dim bursts. As a result, our simulations suggest bursts need to be dimmer than previously expected to avoid over-producing the number of detections and to match with Swift observations. Moreover, our results indicate that these dim bursts are more likely to be high redshift events than low-luminosity GRBs. This would imply an even higher cosmic GRB rate at large redshifts than previous expectations based on star-formation rate measurements, unless other factors, such as the luminosity evolution, are taken into account. The GRB rate from our best result gives a total number of 4571^{+829}_{-1584} GRBs per year that are beamed toward us in the whole universe. SPECIAL NOTE (2015.05.16): This new version incorporates an erratum. All the GRB rate normalizations ($R_{\rm GRB}(z=0)$) should be a factor of 2 smaller than previously reported. Please refer to the Appendix for more details. We sincerely apologize for the mistake.Comment: 52 pages, 17 figures, published in ApJ 783, 24L (2014). An erratum is included. A typo in Eq. 8 is fixed in this versio

Visualizing metal ions in cells: An overview of analytical techniques, approaches, and probes

AbstractQuantifying the amount and defining the location of metal ions in cells and organisms are critical steps in understanding metal homeostasis and how dyshomeostasis causes or is a consequence of disease. A number of recent advances have been made in the development and application of analytical methods to visualize metal ions in biological specimens. Here, we briefly summarize these advances before focusing in more depth on probes for examining transition metals in living cells with high spatial and temporal resolution using fluorescence microscopy. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Cell Biology of Metals