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Military Recruitment on High School and College Campuses: A Policy and Legal Analysis
[Excerpt] In recent years, many academic institutions have enacted rules that protect individuals who are gay from discrimination on campus. As a result, some high schools and institutions of higher education have sought to bar military recruiters from their campuses and/or to eliminate Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs on campus in response to the military\u27s Don\u27t Ask, Don\u27t Tell (DADT) policy, which prohibits homosexual conduct by members of the armed services. These efforts, however, have largely been thwarted due to several laws that bar giving federal funds to campuses that block access for military recruiters.
These laws include the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, which amended the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by requiring high schools that receive federal funds to provide certain student contact information to military recruiters upon request and to allow recruiters to have the same access to students as employers and colleges. This provision is different from similar Department of Defense (DOD) provisions that allow DOD to compile directory information on high school students for military recruitment purposes and that require colleges and universities that receive federal funds to give military recruiters the same access to students and campuses that is provided to other employers. Known as the Solomon Amendment, the latter provision was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in the 2006 case Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR).
This report describes the various laws regarding military recruitment on high school and college campuses, as well as discusses the policy and legal issues that they may raise. Meanwhile, several bills that would amend these military recruitment provisions have been introduced in the 111th Congress, including H.R. 1026, H.R. 1091, and S. 87
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Homosexuals and the U.S. Military: Current Issues
[Excerpt] In 1993, new laws and regulations pertaining to homosexuals and U.S. military service came into effect reflecting a compromise in policy. This compromise, colloquially referred to as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” holds that the presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion which are the essence of military capability. Service members are not to be asked about nor allowed to discuss their homosexuality. This compromise notwithstanding, the issue has remained politically contentious.
Prior to the 1993 compromise, the number of individuals discharged for homosexuality was generally declining. Since that time, the number of discharges for homosexual conduct has generally increased until recently.
Constitutional challenges to the former and current military policies regarding homosexuals followed in the wake of the new 1993 laws and regulations. Based on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick that there is no fundamental right to engage in consensual homosexual sodomy, the courts have uniformly held that the military may discharge a service member for overt homosexual conduct. However, the legal picture was complicated by the Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas which overruled Bowers by declaring unconstitutional a Texas law that prohibited sexual acts between same sex couples. In addition, unsettled legal questions remain as to whether a discharge based solely on a statement that a service member is homosexual transgresses constitutional limits. Meanwhile, efforts to allow individuals of the same sex to marry legally appear unlikely to affect the DOD policy in the near term, since such individuals are barred from serving in the military, although court challenges are possible.
In recent years, many academic institutions have enacted rules that protect homosexuals from discrimination on campus. As a result, colleges, universities, and even high schools have sought to bar military recruiters from their campuses and/or to eliminate Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs on campus because of the DOD policy on homosexuals in the military. At the same time, legislation has been enacted that bars giving federal funds to campuses that block access for military recruiters. On March 6, 2006, the Supreme Court reversed a federal appeals court ruling in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), and upheld the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment, which prohibits certain federal funding to higher educational institutions that deny access by military recruiters to their students equal to that provided to other employers. On November 14, 2006, the San Francisco school board voted 4-2 to phase out Junior ROTC over two years. That phase-out was later delayed by an additional year.
This report will be updated as events warrant
Constraint Satisfaction with Counting Quantifiers
We initiate the study of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in the
presence of counting quantifiers, which may be seen as variants of CSPs in the
mould of quantified CSPs (QCSPs). We show that a single counting quantifier
strictly between exists^1:=exists and exists^n:=forall (the domain being of
size n) already affords the maximal possible complexity of QCSPs (which have
both exists and forall), being Pspace-complete for a suitably chosen template.
Next, we focus on the complexity of subsets of counting quantifiers on clique
and cycle templates. For cycles we give a full trichotomy -- all such problems
are in L, NP-complete or Pspace-complete. For cliques we come close to a
similar trichotomy, but one case remains outstanding. Afterwards, we consider
the generalisation of CSPs in which we augment the extant quantifier
exists^1:=exists with the quantifier exists^j (j not 1). Such a CSP is already
NP-hard on non-bipartite graph templates. We explore the situation of this
generalised CSP on bipartite templates, giving various conditions for both
tractability and hardness -- culminating in a classification theorem for
general graphs. Finally, we use counting quantifiers to solve the complexity of
a concrete QCSP whose complexity was previously open
Vortex energy and vortex bending for a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate
For a Bose-Einstein condensate placed in a rotating trap, we give a
simplified expression of the Gross-Pitaevskii energy in the Thomas Fermi
regime, which only depends on the number and shape of the vortex lines.
Then we check numerically that when there is one vortex line, our simplified
expression leads to solutions with a bent vortex for a range of rotationnal
velocities and trap parameters which are consistent with the experiments.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. submitte
Compaction dynamics in ductile granular media
Ductile compaction is common in many natural systems, but the temporal
evolution of such systems is rarely studied. We observe surprising oscillations
in the weight measured at the bottom of a self-compacting ensemble of ductile
grains. The oscillations develop during the first ten hours of the experiment,
and usually persist through the length of an experiment (one week). The weight
oscillations are connected to the grain--wall contacts, and are directly
correlated with the observed strain evolution and the dynamics of grain--wall
contacts during the compaction. Here, we present the experimental results and
characteristic time constants of the system, and discuss possible reasons for
the measured weight oscillations.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figure
Early-type galaxies in the Chandra COSMOS Survey
We study a sample of 69 X-ray detected Early Type Galaxies (ETGs), selected
from the Chandra COSMOS survey, to explore the relation between the X-ray
luminosity of hot gaseous halos (L_X, gas) and the integrated stellar
luminosity (L_K) of the galaxies, in a range of redshift extending out to
z=1.5. In the local universe a tight steep relationship has been stablished
between these two quantities (L_X,gas~ L_K^4.5) suggesting the presence of
largely virialized halos in X-ray luminous systems. We use well established
relations from the study of local universe ETGs, together with the expected
evolution of the X-ray emission, to subtract the contribution of low mass X-ray
binary populations (LMXBs) from the X-ray luminosity of our sample. Our
selection minimizes the presence of active galactic nuclei (AGN), yielding a
sample representative of normal passive COSMOS ETGs; therefore the resulting
luminosity should be representative of gaseous halos, although we cannot
exclude other sources such as obscured AGN, or enhanced X-ray emission
connected with embedded star formation in the higher z galaxies. We find that
most of the galaxies with estimated L_X<10^42 erg/s and z<0.55 follow the
L_X,gas- L_K relation of local universe ETGs. For these galaxies, the
gravitational mass can be estimated with a certain degree of confidence from
the local virial relation. However, the more luminous (10^42<L_X<10^43.5 erg/s)
and distant galaxies present significantly larger scatter; these galaxies also
tend to have younger stellar ages. The divergence from the local L_X,gas - L_K
relation in these galaxies implies significantly enhanced X-ray emission, up to
a factor of 100 larger than predicted from the local relation. We discuss the
implications of this result for the presence of hidden AGN, and the evolution
of hot halos, in the presence of nuclear and star formation feedback.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication on ApJ on May 27 201
Shape deformations and angular momentum transfer in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates
Angular momentum can be transferred to a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate by
distorting its shape with an external rotating field, provided the rotational
frequency is larger than a critical frequency fixed by the energy and angular
momentum of the excited states of the system. By using the Gross-Pitaevskii
equation and sum rules, we explore the dependence of such a critical frequency
on the multipolarity of the excitations and the asymmetry of the confining
potential. We also discuss its possible relevance for vortex nucleation in
rotating traps.Comment: 4 pages revtex, 2 figures include
Fracture Surfaces as Multiscaling Graphs
Fracture paths in quasi-two-dimenisonal (2D) media (e.g thin layers of
materials, paper) are analyzed as self-affine graphs of height as a
function of length . We show that these are multiscaling, in the sense that
order moments of the height fluctuations across any distance
scale with a characteristic exponent that depends nonlinearly on the order of
the moment. Having demonstrated this, one rules out a widely held conjecture
that fracture in 2D belongs to the universality class of directed polymers in
random media. In fact, 2D fracture does not belong to any of the known kinetic
roughening models. The presence of multiscaling offers a stringent test for any
theoretical model; we show that a recently introduced model of quasi-static
fracture passes this test.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Quality Aspects of Butter Marketing in South Dakota
The future well-being of the dairy industry in South Dakota may depend to a large extent on progress made in improving butter quality. About two-thirds of the dairy output in the state is exported to other states, mostly as bulk butter. Little of this butter qualifies as Grade A, and a sizeable proportion of it is below Grade B. Improvement in quality is necessary if South Dakota butter is to command top prices on the wholesale markets. It is particularly important in the light of the increasing competition which butter faces from margarine as a spread. Data for the study were gathered from a sample of 20 creameries in 1950 and from all of the South Dakota creameries in 1951. These data shed some light on the relationship between butter quality and prices received by creameries. The data also provide information on the relationship between the different measures of butter quality and various cream procurement, processing, and butter marketing methods prevailing in South Dakota at the time of the surveys
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