Determinants of Student Debt in New England

This paper examines the determinants of average student debt in New England based on financial, institutional and demographic variables. The dataset is derived from CollegeInsight and measures 15 variables across 71 institutions during the 2011-2014 academic school years. Between 2011 and 2014, average student debt increased 7%, tuition and room and board increased 10%, the percentage of Hispanic students increased 20% and the percentage of international students increased 26%. The estimated model, ln(AVDEBT) = 7.401 – 0.090ln(TUITION) – 0.042ln(BOOKS) + 0.433ln(ROOMBOARD) + 0.07ln(ENROLLMENT) – 0.200PUBLIC – 4.106ASIAN – 1.992AFAMERICAN + 0.254HISPANIC + 0.007WHITE + 0.641INTERNATIONAL – 0.676PERCENTFEDDEBT + 1.018PERCENTPELL, indicates that the primary determinants of average student debt in the region are: room and board costs, enrollment, public vs. private classification, the percentage of Asian, African American and international students, the percentage of student debt that comes from federal loans and the percentage of Pell Grant recipients. Other regions in the country could leverage a similar study to understand where the student debt burden is most likely coming from. The resulting information can stir policy discussions amongst institutions and governmental organizations to decrease the burden and ease the so-called student debt crisis

Brands Take a Stand for Good: The Effect of Brand Activism on Social Media Engagement

Brands are entering an era where brand activism and corporate social responsibility strategies are holding a large influence on consumer purchase decision making, rather than the traditional brand product marketing. A major distribution outlet for the rising brand activism strategy is through social media, where users can directly interact with brands and other users surrounding major issues. Higher engagement with such activism campaigns suggests more consumer support for the brand, leading to higher sales performance potential. This study examines the influence of brand activism campaign qualities on social media engagement, specifically on the Twitter platform. Tweets for 8 different brands – Nike, Reebok, Under Armour, Puma, Always, Yoplait, Procter & Gamble, and Airbnb – were collected using RStudio and Twitter APIs and dissected based on their association to the brand’s activism campaign. A survey was also distributed to gather data on several characteristics for each campaign. A Poisson regression was used to analyze the relationship between social media engagement metrics – favorites and retweets – and the characteristics of tweets and campaigns. Brands that are looking to contribute to the activism space, particularly on Twitter, should produce content that is geared towards individuals, rather than society as a whole. Higher engagement will be generated by campaigns that focus on causes with longer-term impact, in addition to campaigns that target both genders rather than being gender specific

Radiation Transfer in the Cavity and Shell of Planetary Nebulae

We develop an approximate analytical solution for the transfer of line-averaged radiation in the hydrogen recombination lines for the ionized cavity and molecular shell of a spherically symmetric planetary nebula. The scattering problem is treated as a perturbation, using a mean intensity derived from a scattering-free solution. The analytical function was fitted to Halpha and Hbeta data from the planetary nebula NGC6537. The position of the maximum in the intensity profile produced consistent values for the radius of the cavity as a fraction of the radius of the dusty nebula: 0.21 for Halpha and 0.20 for Hbeta. Recovered optical depths were broadly consistent with observed optical extinction in the nebula, but the range of fit parameters in this case is evidence for a clumpy distribution of dust.Comment: MNRAS accepted; 10 Fig

VIPER : a 25-MHz, 100-MIPS peak VLIW micro-processor

This paper describes the design and implementation of a very long instruction word (VLIW) microprocessor. The VIPER (VLIW integer processor) contains four pipelined functional units, and can achieve 100 MIPS peak performance at 25 MHz. The procesor is capable of performing multiway branch operations, two load/store operations and up to four ALU operations in each clock cycle, with full register file access to each functional unit. VIPER is the first VLIW microprocessor known that can achieve this level of performance. Designed in twelve months, the processor is integrated with an instruction cache controller and a data cache, requiring 450,000 transistors and a die size of 12.9 by 9.1 mm in a 1.2 µm technology

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Gravitational instantons, extra dimensions and form fields

A broad class of higher dimensional instanton solutions are found for a theory which contains gravity, a scalar field and antisymmetric tensor fields of arbitrary rank. The metric used, a warp product of an arbitrary number of any compact Einstein manifolds, includes many of great interest in particle physics and cosmology. For example 4D FRW universes with additional dimensions compactified on a Calabi-Yau three fold, a torus, a compact hyperbolic manifold or a sphere are all included. It is shown that the solution of this form which dominates the Hartle Hawking path integral is always a higher dimensional generalisation of a Hawking Turok instanton when the potential of the scalar field is such that these instantons can exist. On continuation to Lorentzian signature such instantons give rise to a spacetime in which all of the spatial dimensions are of equal size and where the spatial topology is that of a sphere. The extra dimensions are thus not hidden. In the case where the potential for the scalar field is generated solely by a dilatonic coupling to the form fields we find no integrable instantons at all. In particular we find no integrable solutions of the type under consideration for the supergravity theories which are the low energy effective field theories of superstrings.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure