Wrestling with MUDs To Pin Down the Truth About Special Districts

Federal, state, and local governments encourage and empower special districts--board-run, special purpose local government units that are administratively and fiscally independent from general purpose local governments. Special districts receive incentives, grants, and freedom from limitations (such as limitations on tax and debt) imposed on general purpose local governments. Special districts are treated favorably because they are small in size, which theoretically means they foster democratic participation; are limited in purpose, meaning that states can tailor special districts\u27 powers to serve specific problems; and are viewed as efficient solutions to specific problems. Though special districts have tripled in number over the last fifty years, the rationale justifying their favorable treatment has not been thoroughly scrutinized. One obstacle to such scrutiny is the difficulty in determining a metric of assessment: Too many different kinds of special districts exist, and the scope of districts changes constantly. An imperfect, but no less revealing, method is a close investigation of one type of special district. This Article provides one of the few in-depth reviews of special districts in the academic literature, focusing on the Texas municipal utility district (MUD), originally designed to supply water to unincorporated areas. MUDs--the most common type of special district in the state with the third largest number of special districts--embody both the strengths and weaknesses of special districts. Texas\u27s failure to address MUDs\u27 negative effects reflects our nationwide failure to analyze and correct problematic special districts. This Article discusses MUDs\u27 formation, powers, and scope, and analyzes how MUDs operate without real democratic checks, have too much power, and ineffectively work toward their goals. Throughout, it attempts to engage the central question in modern local government law: the optimality of certain units of government

Still No Jetpacks or Gender Parity: Animated Film from 1980 through 2016

This study examines the gender ratio of characters in the 150 top-grossing full-length animated films from 1980 through 2016. Results show that males hold an overwhelming majority of both central and auxiliary roles. Male characters fill significantly more of the lead or protagonist roles, the speaking roles, the members of the protagonist’s main gang, and the film’s titles. No significant change has occurred over the years (1980–2016) to alter the gender balance; however, an increase in female authors and screenwriters corresponds with an increase in female characters in all of these roles. The underrepresentation of female characters in animated films exemplifies the ways in which popular media reflects and reproduces social inequality

Relational aggression and adventure-based counselinga critical analysis of the literature

Includes bibliographical references

Major John Bradford Homestead archaeological collections report

This report describes a collections management project undertaken on archaeological finds excavated at the Major John Bradford Homestead in 1972 and 1973. One of the chief goals of the project were to clean all artifacts that had not been processed after sorting the materials that had been processed and labeled and to reunite them with their provenience groups. The next goal was to catalogue all of the finds and to re-bag and re-box all of the materials in archivally appropriate bags and acid-free boxes and to provide a box inventory keyed to the catalogue so that future researchers or exhibit designers could readily locate objects of interest. A further goal was to provide a narrative about the excavations and to make suggestions about how to interpret the archaeological evidence and to suggest potential future research. All of these goals were met and are detailed in this report

Fingerprint databases for theorems

We discuss the advantages of searchable, collaborative, language-independent databases of mathematical results, indexed by "fingerprints" of small and canonical data. Our motivating example is Neil Sloane's massively influential On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. We hope to encourage the greater mathematical community to search for the appropriate fingerprints within each discipline, and to compile fingerprint databases of results wherever possible. The benefits of these databases are broad - advancing the state of knowledge, enhancing experimental mathematics, enabling researchers to discover unexpected connections between areas, and even improving the refereeing process for journal publication.Comment: to appear in Notices of the AM

The Birth of a Super Star Cluster: NGC 5253

We present images of the 7mm free-free emission from the radio "supernebula" in NGC 5253 made with the Very Large Array and the Pie Town link. The images reveal structure in the nebula, which has a <~ 1 pc (~50 mas radius) core requiring the excitation of 1200 O7 stars. The nebula is elongated, with an arc of emission curving to the northeast and to the south. The total ionizing flux within the central 1.2" (~20 pc) is 7 x 10^52 s^-1, corresponding to 7000 O7 stars. We propose that the radio source is coincident with a small, very red near-infrared cluster and apparently linked to a larger, optical source some 10 pc away on the sky. We speculate on the causes of this structure and what it might tell us about the birth of the embedded young super star cluster.Comment: Accepted, Astrophysical Journal Letters. 10 pages, including 2 figure