Anxiety and the Post-Modern Student

When I first started teaching at Loyola University Chicago over 26 years ago, the only times I heard the word anxietyhad to do with math or science anxiety. As educators, we felt equipped to fix any math and science anxiety that impeded our students’ learning. But what about general anxiety or depression that goes beyond impeding learning and affects all aspects of the students’ life? How do we help our students with something we are usually not trained to identify, much less “fix”

[Review of] Mariama Ba. So Long A Letter

So Long A Letter is the story of Ramatoulaye, a recently-widowed Sengalese [Senegalese] woman, as she writes to her long-time friend Aissatou. It is the articulate, often anguished narrative of a Muslim woman faced with the sudden second marriage of her husband of twenty-five years. Although polygamy is accepted by her religion and her society, Ramatoulaye feels rejected and betrayed. Yet she chooses to remain in her marriage and prepares to share equally her husband with her new co-wife, as dictated by Muslim law. Her husband, however, abandons her completely, to manage their twelve children alone. Upon his death five years later, she is faced not only with grief and confused emotion but also with enormous debts he compiled in wooing his new young wife and her greedy mother. Ramatoulaye\u27s dignity and quiet strength overcome her bitterness and pain, and she is able to begin forging her own happiness again while responding to her family\u27s changing needs

Individual Party Donors: True Allies or Free Agents?

Habitual party donors represent an important revenue source for American political parties. What remains unclear is whether the party committees can also count on these donors to support the congressional candidates who represent the parties’ best chances for seat maximization. Utilizing structural equation modeling and contribution data from the 2006 to the 2012 election cycles, I find habitual party donors and certain new party donors respond to changes in party control of the House by providing more support to incumbents when their party is in the majority and more support to nonincumbents when their party is in the minority. Moreover, party donors are more likely to give to congressional candidates, especially those competing in priority races, than nonparty donors. Party donors additionally are revealed to be an important funding source for congressional candidates

The Fundraising Disadvantages Confronting American Political Parties

In the wake of the Bi-Partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 and subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court, American political parties face greater regulation than interest groups in terms of their ability to finance federal elections. While parties continue to be constrained by contribution limits, nearly all interest groups can now raise and spend money in unlimited amounts to influence elections. Further, many new groups formed to take advantage of these legal changes. Few studies address the ramifications of these developments for political parties’ fundraising capabilities. To see whether these disadvantages hamper party fundraising, I examine parties’ direct fundraising costs overtime and I use structural equation analysis to investigate the giving habits of party donors overtime. I find the fundraising cost of each dollar raised has risen and habitual party donors provide significant support to Super PACs. Habitual party donors have also become less consistent givers in the Democratic Party. I discuss the relationship of these findings to changes in party fundraising tactics and their implications for future efforts by the parties to maintain their revenue streams

Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): linking star formation histories and stellar mass growth

We present evidence for stochastic star formation histories in low-mass (M* < 1010 M⊙) galaxies from observations within the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey. For ˜73 000 galaxies between 0.05 < z < 0.32, we calculate star formation rates (SFR) and specific star formation rates (SSFR = SFR/M*) from spectroscopic Hα measurements and apply dust corrections derived from Balmer decrements. We find a dependence of SSFR on stellar mass, such that SSFRs decrease with increasing stellar mass for star-forming galaxies, and for the full sample, SSFRs decrease as a stronger function of stellar mass. We use simple parametrizations of exponentially declining star formation histories to investigate the dependence on stellar mass of the star formation time-scale and the formation redshift. We find that parametrizations previously fit to samples of z ˜ 1 galaxies cannot recover the distributions of SSFRs and stellar masses observed in the GAMA sample between 0.05 < z < 0.32. In particular, a large number of low-mass (M* < 1010 M⊙) galaxies are observed to have much higher SSFRs than can be explained by these simple models over the redshift range of 0.05 < z < 0.32, even when invoking mass-dependent staged evolution. For such a large number of galaxies to maintain low stellar masses, yet harbour such high SSFRs, requires the late onset of a weak underlying exponentially declining star formation history with stochastic bursts of star formation superimposed