Margins within margins?: voices Speaking through a study of the provision of an educational program for the children of one Australian show circuit

This paper examines the tactics used by the Showmen's Guild of Australasia in successfully lobbying for the development of a distance education program for their children. The Guild is considered to be a 'marginalized' group, meaning members have less access to wealth, power, and status. Since 1930, members of the Showmen's Guild and their families have traveled from town to town providing agricultural and equestrian shows. Despite the diversity of backgrounds and experiences among people connected with the show circuit, the Guild is highly organized and has been politically active. Informal sanctions have been effective in enforcing group discipline and in presenting the image of a single body of opinion. In addition, investment in sophisticated machinery and technology has resulted in show people having the financial resources to buy homes and have a political voice via more 'normalized channels'. Although members learn early that they are a marginalized group and are perceived as different from the mainstream, the group maintains close ties and often celebrates its difference. Implications for educational program development center on the goals of educational programs designed for disadvantaged groups, and the status of other marginalized groups and their efforts to contest their marginalized status. (LP

Topology of Cell-Aggregated Planar Graphs

We present new algorithm for growth of non-clustered planar graphs by aggregation of cells with given distribution of size and constraint of connectivity k=3 per node. The emergent graph structures are controlled by two parameters--chemical potential of the cell aggregation and the width of the cell size distribution. We compute several statistical properties of these graphs--fractal dimension of the perimeter, distribution of shortest paths between pairs of nodes and topological betweenness of nodes and links. We show how these topological properties depend on the control parameters of the aggregation process and discuss their relevance for the conduction of current in self-assembled nanopatterns.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Towards Development Of A Decision Support System For Water Resource Development In Semi-Arid Micro-Catchments

IES Working Paper.The objective of the paper is to bring together, within a single holistic framework, the principle findings of the research into the physical and human aspects a study in Romwe micro-catchment in southern Zimbabwe. The framework is developed using Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) to identify and model the central aspects of both physical and human environment (at both the micro and macro scale), and their impacts on each other. In particular I look at the likely impact of effective catchment management (here taken to be physical and technical interventions) on the probability of livelihoods improving. BBNs offer an exciting new way of bringing together very disparate data sources within useful frameworks, which could then be used not only for decision making about development needs, but also to target better the next generation of research. For groundwater, a sizeable improvement in supply can be achieved by moving from poor to good catchment management under medium rainfall conditions, but not under poor or good rainfall. For improved surface water and improved soil moisture, it is particularly under low rainfall conditions that it is worth moving from poor to good catchment management. It is clear from the results that physical catchment management on its own is incapable of having a major impact on peoples’ livelihoods other than within a very narrow range of parameters. The suggestion is that outside this range, the decision as to whether or not to lake a physical catchment management approach has a negligible impact on water resources and even less on livelihoods. In relative terms a number of factors both extraneous (wider economy, underlying geology), and internal (community cohesion, skills levels) to the community rank equally or more highly in terms of general impact on well being.Funding for the study was provided by the Department for International Development Micro-Catchment Management Project. DFID Project No: R730

Reflected Brownian motion in a wedge: sum-of-exponential stationary densities

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the stationary density of semimartingale reflected Brownian motion in a wedge to be written as a finite sum of terms of exponential product form. Relying on geometric ideas reminiscent of the reflection principle, we give an explicit formula for the density in such cases

The Impact of Food Insecurity on University Students Academic Success

Award for best Applied Experience. Abstract This is a pilot project being conducted at St Cloud State University with the purpose of helping to alleviate financial insecurity as well as food insecurity for St Cloud State University students so that they can succeed to their highest abilities. We are an on campus project being run to help students who are in need of financial assistance. We work together to provide a safe, nurturing, and welcoming environment for students to come and discuss some of the issues and problems they might be facing. We work together as a team to help serve these students and connect them with the tools and resources that they need in order to succeed. Previous literature and research shows a strong inverse relationship between academic achievement and food insecurity. The goal of our project is to help shed light on the prevalence of food insecurity faced by many students at St Cloud State University and help offer them programs, resources, and tools in order to help them strive to their highest abilities

Measuring the Hausdorff Dimension of Quantum Mechanical Paths

We measure the propagator length in imaginary time quantum mechanics by Monte Carlo simulation on a lattice and extract the Hausdorff dimension $d_{H}$. We find that all local potentials fall into the same universality class giving $d_{H}=2$ like the free motion. A velocity dependent action ($S \propto \int dt \mid \vec{v} \mid^{\alpha}$) in the path integral (e.g. electrons moving in solids, or Brueckner's theory of nuclear matter) yields $d_{H}=\frac{\alpha }{\alpha - 1}$ if $\alpha > 2$ and $d_{H}=2$ if $\alpha \leq 2$. We discuss the relevance of fractal pathes in solid state physics and in $QFT$, in particular for the Wilson loop in $QCD$.Comment: uuencoded and compressed shell archive file. 8 pages with 7 figure

Large Fluctuations in Locational Marginal Prices

This paper investigates large fluctuations of Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) in wholesale energy markets caused by volatile renewable generation profiles. Specifically, we study events of the form ℙ(LMP∉∏ni=1[α−i,α+i]), where LMP is the vector of LMPs at the n power grid nodes, and α−,α+∈ℝn are vectors of price thresholds specifying undesirable price occurrences. By exploiting the structure of the supply-demand matching mechanism in power grids, we look at LMPs as deterministic piecewise affine, possibly discontinuous functions of the stochastic input process, modeling uncontrollable renewable generation. We utilize techniques from large deviations theory to identify the most likely ways for extreme price spikes to happen, and to rank the nodes of the power grid in terms of their likelihood of experiencing a price spike. Our results are derived in the case of Gaussian fluctuations and are validated numerically on the IEEE 14-bus test case