Don\u27t Count Them Out Just Yet: Toward the Plausible Use of Race-Preference Student Assignment Plans

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Supreme Court\u27s recent decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 11 could serve to broaden the permissible use of race beyond the boundaries presently permitted by the Court. In this highly fractionalized decision, five justices ultimately agreed that the race-based student assignment plans before their review could not withstand judicial scrutiny. One of these justices, Justice Kennedy, agreed with the plurality\u27s conclusion, but rejected the plurality\u27s assessment that it is never permissible to use race-preference student assignment plans absent evidence of de jure segregation. His concurrence, when read together with the reasoning of the Court\u27s four dissenting justices, offers a plausible scenario under which future courts could find precedential support to uphold challenged race-preference student assignment plans as constitutionally permissible

Finding Success in the Cauldron of Competition: The Effectiveness of Academic Support Programs

This article provides an in-depth analysis of our comprehensive study of the Pace Academic Support Program. Section II of the article discusses the purpose and design of ASPs generally, and Pace Law School\u27s program specifically. Section III describes the research design, methodology, and procedures used for this study. Section IV evaluates and analyzes the findings, with an in-depth analysis of the impact each service yields to ASP students, as well as the statistical significance of such benefits. Section V evaluates the importance of background criteria and the impact that such variables have on ASP participants and non-participants. Section V also discusses whether any of these background variables allow some students to derive a greater benefit from the program than other students participating in the same service. Section VI elaborates on the benefits of participation in an ASP, while Section VII elaborates on the impact of background variables on the performance of students

Tracing scientific influence

Scientometrics is the field of quantitative studies of scholarly activity. It has been used for systematic studies of the fundamentals of scholarly practice as well as for evaluation purposes. Although advocated from the very beginning the use of scientometrics as an additional method for science history is still under explored. In this paper we show how a scientometric analysis can be used to shed light on the reception history of certain outstanding scholars. As a case, we look into citation patterns of a specific paper by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.Comment: 25 pages LaTe

Toward understanding of the whole developing economic situation

Economic forecasting ; Economics - Study and teaching

The Uninsured at the Starting Line: Findings from the 2013 Kaiser Survey of Low-Income Americans and the ACA

In January 2014, the major coverage provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into full effect. These provisions include the creation of new Health Insurance Marketplaces where low and moderate income families can receive premium tax credits to purchase coverage and, in states that opted to expand their Medicaid programs, the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to almost all adults with incomes at or below 138% of the federal poverty level (FPL). The ACA has the potential to reach many of the 47 million Americans who lack insurance coverage, as well as millions of insured people who face financial strain or coverage limits related to health insurance. Though implementation is underway and people are already enrolling in coverage, policymakers continue to need information to inform coverage expansions. Data on the population targeted for coverage expansions can help policymakers target early efforts, provide insight into some of the challenges that are arising in the first months of new coverage, and evaluate the ACA's longer-term effects. The Kaiser Family Foundation has launched a new series of comprehensive surveys of the low and moderate income population to provide data on these groups' experience with health coverage, current patterns of care, and family situation. This report, based on the baseline 2013 Kaiser Survey of Low-Income Americans and the ACA, provides a snapshot of health insurance coverage, health care use and barriers to care, and financial security among insured and uninsured adults across the income spectrum at the starting line of ACA implementation. The report also examines how findings from the baseline survey can help policymakers understand and address early challenges in implementing health reform

Eigenfactor : Does the Principle of Repeated Improvement Result in Better Journal Impact Estimates than Raw Citation Counts?

Eigenfactor.org, a journal evaluation tool which uses an iterative algorithm to weight citations (similar to the PageRank algorithm used for Google) has been proposed as a more valid method for calculating the impact of journals. The purpose of this brief communication is to investigate whether the principle of repeated improvement provides different rankings of journals than does a simple unweighted citation count (the method used by ISI).Comment: bibliographic information correcte

The soybean crop for fattening western lambs

Cover title

Estimating achievement from fame

We report a method for estimating people's achievement based on their fame. Earlier we discovered (cond-mat/0310049) that fame of fighter pilot aces (measured as number of Google hits) grows exponentially with their achievement (number of victories). We hypothesize that the same functional relation between achievement and fame holds for other professions. This allows us to estimate achievement for professions where an unquestionable and universally accepted measure of achievement does not exist. We apply the method to Nobel Prize winners in Physics. For example, we obtain that Paul Dirac, who is hundred times less famous than Einstein contributed to physics only two times less. We compare our results with Landau's ranking

Word count of teacher's and children's directions in first grade reading workbooks

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit