Motives and characteristics of gift-giving at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Public institutions of higher learning need to increase reliance on private financial support for a portion of their revenue stream due to decreases in public financial support and increases in institutional needs. To help meet university demands for private funding, fundraising bodies, such as university foundations, need to target their limited resources in directions that will yield the greatest financial results. One way to do this is to identify individuals who are more likely to provide monetary gifts to the university and target fundraising efforts toward them; The purpose of this study was to build a predictive model that was based on the motives and characteristics of gift-giving by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas alumni. The study would determine the relationship among these variables to the level of gift-giving. In total, 18 variables were selected and used in this study; Descriptive statistics were use to demonstrate the frequency distribution and the measure of central tendency for each variable being studied. The relationships among various variables to the level of gift-giving were determined by utilizing artificial neural network technology. This study was delimited to a sample of the total population of over 35,000 alumni at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The sample consisted of three study groups: (1) a sub-sample of alumni who contributed {dollar}10 to {dollar}1,000 at least one time, (2) a sub-sample of alumni who were non-contributors, and (3) all alumni who contributed over {dollar}1,000 at least one time; Overall, the study demonstrated that there were small differences between the three study groups. There is little evidence to support the ability to predict gift-giving at various levels of giving, using the motives and characteristics that were under review in this study. There is moderate predictive ability, in terms of repeat giving for contributors of over {dollar}1,000, with six predictive variables: the academic college from which one has received their degree, the number of years following graduation before giving for the first time, the desire for a tax deduction, the amount contributed, giving to another higher educational institution, and marital status

Review: A Pedagogy of Powerful Communication: Youth Radio and Radio Arts in the Multilingual Classroom

In this review of Dana Walker\u27s 2014 book A Pedagogy of Powerful Communication: Youth Radio and Radio Arts in the Multilingual Classroom, Jillian Belanger recounts the project\u27s four main aims of media production, community engagement, student confidence, and language development, and offers insight to what made Walker\u27s work engaging English Learners with youth radio production a success, including recommendations for how her findings might be replicated in other environments

Light mixed sneutrinos as thermal dark matter

In supersymmetric models with Dirac neutrino masses, a left-right mixed sneutrino can be a viable dark matter candidate. We examine the MSSM+$\tilde\nu_R$ parameter space where this is the case with particular emphasis on light sneutrinos with masses below 10 GeV. We discuss implications for direct and indirect dark matter searches, including the relevant uncertainties, as well as consequences for collider phenomenology.Comment: 33 pages, 14 figures; one figure and references adde

Exploring compressed supersymmetry with same-sign top quarks at the Large Hadron Collider

In compressed supersymmetry, a light top squark naturally mediates efficient neutralino pair annihilation to govern the thermal relic abundance of dark matter. I study the LHC signal of same-sign leptonic top-quark decays from gluino and squark production, which follows from gluino decays to top plus stop followed by the stop decaying to a charm quark and the LSP in these models. Measurements of the numbers of jets with heavy-flavor tags in the same-sign lepton events can be used to confirm the origin of the signal. Summed transverse momentum observables provide an estimate of an effective superpartner mass, which is correlated with the gluino mass. Measurements of invariant mass endpoints from the visible products of gluino decays do not allow direct determination of superpartner masses, but can place constraints on them, including lower bounds on the gluino mass as a function of the top-squark mass.Comment: 22 pages. v2: Discussion of competition between 2-body and 4-body stop decays corrected. References adde

Surface criticality in random field magnets

The boundary-induced scaling of three-dimensional random field Ising magnets is investigated close to the bulk critical point by exact combinatorial optimization methods. We measure several exponents describing surface criticality: $\beta_1$ for the surface layer magnetization and the surface excess exponents for the magnetization and the specific heat, $\beta_s$ and $\alpha_s$. The latter ones are related to the bulk phase transition by the same scaling laws as in pure systems, but only with the same violation of hyperscaling exponent $\theta$ as in the bulk. The boundary disorders faster than the bulk, and the experimental and theoretical implications are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.