Protecting Parent-Child Relationships: Determining Parental Rights of Same-Sex Parents Consistently Despite Varying Recognition of their Relationship

[Excerpt] “The family and parental relationship appears secure as long as the members of the family stay within the borders of the states that recognize their relationship. What happens, though, when the family ventures beyond the borders of Vermont, Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut, has yet to be determined. Legislation in almost every other state has addressed whether each state will recognize the couples’ relationship,27 but no state has determined how it will treat the legal relationship between the children of these couples and their parents.28 This article will focus on the fragile legal relationship between same-sex parents and their children and will suggest legislative adjustments that can address this relationship without forcing states to recognize the underlying relationship with the parents. […] Part II will explain the most common methods of addressing parentage issues in traditional family relationships. Part III will review the various methods courts have used to address parentage determinations in same-sex relationships in states where same-sex relationships are not sanctioned. Part IV will explain how courts have addressed parentage determinations in the states that recognize some form of same-sex relationship. Part V will identify potential and actual issues that arise when same-sex couples travel from states that recognize their relationship to those that do not. Finally, Part VI will suggest legislative action that can eliminate the need for varying tests and standards depending on the sexes of the parents.

Positivity Of Equivariant Gromov–Witten Invariants

We show that the equivariant Gromov–Witten invariants of a projective homogeneous space G/P exhibit Graham-positivity: when expressed as polynomials in the positive roots, they have nonnegative coefficients

Equivariant Quantum Schubert Polynomials

We establish an equivariant quantum Giambelli formula for partial flag varieties. The answer is given in terms of a specialization of universal double Schubert polynomials. Along the way, we give new proofs of the presentation of the equivariant quantum cohomology ring, as well as Graham-positivity of the structure constants in equivariant quantum Schubert calculus. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Library Website Visits and Enrollment Trends

Objective – Measures of trends in Iowa State University library website visits per student/faculty/staff headcount show decreased use. Analysis was conducted to test for a relationship between this decrease and decreasing graduate/undergraduate enrollment ratios and decreasing visits to a popular digital collection. The purpose was to measure the influence of these factors and to produce an adjusted measure of trend which accounts for these factors.Methods – Website transaction log data and enrollment data were modelled with Box and Jenkins time series analysis methods (regression with ARMA errors).Results – A declining graduate to undergraduate enrollment ratio at Iowa State University explained 23% of the innovation variance of library website visits per headcount over the study period, while visits to a popular digital collection also declined, explaining 34% of the innovation variance. Rolling windows analysis showed that the effect of the graduate/undergraduate ratio increased over the study period, while the effect of digital collection visits decreased. In addition, estimates of website usage by graduate students and undergraduates, after accounting for other factors, matched estimates from a survey.Conclusion – A rolling windows metric of mean change adjusted for changes in demographics and other factors allows for a fairer comparison of year-to-year website usage, while also measuring the change in influence of these factors. Adjusting for these influences provides a baseline for studying the effect of interventions, such as website design changes. Box-Jenkins methods of analysis for time series data can provide a more accurate measure than ordinary regression, demonstrated by estimating undergraduate and graduate website usage to corroborate survey data. While overall website usage is decreasing, it is not clear it is decreasing for all groups. Inferences were made about demographic groups with data that is not tied to individuals, thus alleviating privacy concerns

Untold stories in organizations

The field of organizational storytelling research is productive, vibrant and diverse. Over three decades we have come to understand how organizations are not only full of stories but also how stories are actively making, sustaining and changing organizations. This edited collection contributes to this body of work by paying specific attention to stories that are neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted or deliberately left silent. Despite the fact that such stories are not voiced they have a role to play in organizational analysis. The chapters in this volume variously explore how certain realities become excluded or silenced. The stories that remain below the audible range in organizations offer researchers an access to study political practices which marginalise certain organisational realities whilst promoting others. This volume offers a further contribution by paying heed to silence and the processes of silencing. These silences influence the choice of issues on organisational agendas, the choice of audience(s) to which these discourses are addressed and the ways of addressing them. In exploring these relatively understudied terrains, Untold Stories in Organizations comprises an important contribution to the organizational storytelling space, opening paths for new trajectories in storytelling research

K-classes of Brill-Noether loci and a determinantal formula

We prove a determinantal formula for the K-theory class of certain degeneracy loci, and apply it to compute the Euler characteristic of the structure sheaf of the Brill-Noether locus of linear series with special vanishing at marked points. When the Brill-Noether number $\rho$ is zero, we recover the Castelnuovo formula for the number of special linear series on a general curve; when $\rho=1$, we recover the formulas of Eisenbud-Harris, Pirola, and Chan-L\'opez-Pflueger-Teixidor for the arithmetic genus of a Brill-Noether curve of special divisors. Our degeneracy locus formula also specializes to new determinantal expressions for the double Grothendieck polynomials corresponding to 321-avoiding permutations, and gives double versions of the flagged skew Grothendieck polynomials recently introduced by Matsumura. Our result extends the formula of Billey-Jockusch-Stanley expressing Schubert polynomials for 321-avoiding permutations as generating functions for skew tableaux.Comment: 31 pages; v2: stronger Theorem C, and improved expositio

Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school

Running title: Growth in readingIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 36-38)Performed pursuant to contract no. 400-81-0030 of the National Institute of Educatio