Affirmative Action in College Admissions: A Compelling Need and a Compelling Warning

Higher education has been historically recognized as the very door to opportunity and success for our nation\u27s youths and future leaders. Following the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the cry and pressure for access to America\u27s college campuses have intensified, especially along the lines of racial and gender discrimination. The long record of oppression has translated into an intense debate over the feasibility of affirmative action as a viable policy to rectify the past and the present This article will afford a brief overview of the necessity of affirmative action in college admissions as well as an analysis and assessment of this policy from the perspective of Critical Race Theory

Numerical analysis of distribution patterns in the British and European floras

Imperial Users onl

The New Zealand Construction Contracts Amendment Act 2015 - For Better or Worse?

Adjudication has been statutorily introduced as an alternative dispute resolution method in 14 jurisdictions including New Zealand. Whilst adjudication under the New Zealand Construction Contracts Act 2002 has been hailed a success, further refinements were proposed in the Construction Contracts Amendment Bill first published in 2013. As part of the legislative process, 48 submissions were made to the Commerce Committee. There was general support for most of the amendments, but some parties expressed concerns on some of the changes. A documentary analysis of the Amendment Bills and submissions to the Commerce Committee was made to critically evaluate the changes proposed and establish if they were improvements. The findings show the major changes proposed include (i) removing most of the distinctions between the treatment of residential and commercial contracts under the Act, (ii) extending the scope of the Act to apply to contracts for certain professional services, (iii) removing the distinction between enforcement of payment determinations and of those relating to rights and obligations, and (iv) making the enforcement process more efficient. The findings also show that during a period of over two years from when the Bill was first introduced in January 2013, one other significant improvement for retentions to be held in trust was made. A few proposals to further refine the Bill such as the suggestion to mandate retentions to be kepts in a separate trust account were however not accepted. The Construction Contract Amendment Bill (Bill 97-3) was uninanimously passed during the third and final reading in Parliament on 20 October 2015 with most of the amendments coming into force on 1 December 2015, those incorporating professional services on 1 September 2016, and the retention provisions on 31 March 2017. Royal assent was given on 11 October 2015 leading to the enactment of the Construction Contracts Amendment Act 2015

Modelling of AlAs/GaAs interfacial structures using high-angle annular dark field (HAADF) image simulations

High angle annular dark field (HAADF) image simulations were performed on a series of AlAs/GaAsinterfacial models using the frozen-phonon multislice method. Three general types of models were considered—perfect, vicinal/sawtooth and diffusion. These were chosen to demonstrate how HAADFimage measurements are influenced by different interfacialstructures in the technologically important III–V semiconductor system. For each model, interfacial sharpness was calculated as a function of depth and compared to aberration-corrected HAADF experiments of two types of AlAs/GaAs interfaces. The results show that the sharpness measured from HAADF imaging changes in a complicated manner with thickness for complex interfacialstructures. For vicinal structures, it was revealed that the type of material that the probe projects through first of all has a significant effect on the measured sharpness. An increase in the vicinal angle was also shown to generate a wider interface in the random step model. The Moison diffusion model produced an increase in the interface width with depth which closely matched the experimental results of the AlAs-on-GaAs interface. In contrast, the interface width decreased as a function of depth in the linear diffusion model. Only in the case of the perfect model was it possible to ascertain the underlying structure directly from HAADFimage analysis

Mobility and Gender at the Top Tail of the Earnings Distribution

The increasing share of the top fractile in the earnings distributions of several Anglo- Saxon heritage economies since the 1970s has been dramatic, and well documented. To date, however, little is known about the socio-economic origins and gender composition of the very top tail in the modern era. This paper takes a first step in filling some of the holes in our knowledge. We use a tax-filer data base for Canada for the period 1983-2003 that contains about eighty million observations. We show first that male earners in the top one thousandth of the distribution come very disproportionately from families with incomes in the top decile. In contrast, individuals in the remaining part of the top centile have more dispersed socio-economic origins. Second we show that female participation in the top fractiles has been very low, and that growth in participation has been slow yet definite. In contrast, female earnings in this echelon are almost on par with male earnings. Third, we show that there is an enormous asymmetry between the genders when it comes to spousal earnings: high-earning women have very high-earning spouses, but not vice versa. ‘Secondary males’ have earnings levels almost ten times as high as ‘secondary females’, suggesting that, even at this extremely elevated earnings level there is truth to the adage about who lies ‘behind’ successful individuals. Finally, it is illustrated that the earnings concentration that has characterised the last three decades did not change with the end of the ‘tech boom’ in the year 2000.

Insertion loss measuring apparatus having transformer means connected across a pair of bolometers Patent

High impedance alternating current sensing transformer device between two bolometers for measuring insertion loss of test componen