Checks And Balances: 2015 Update

Checking accounts are a vital financial tool, utilized by 9 in 10 American households. This report provides the third annual evaluation of disclosure, overdraft, and dispute resolution policies and practices of 45 of the nation's 50 largest retail banks, totaling 66 percent of all domestic deposit volume. Pew's Model Summary Disclosure Box for Checking Accounts served as the template for rating each bank's disclosure documents to determine best or good practices for overdraft and dispute resolution. Additionally, this report identified trends among the 32 institutions examined in all three Checks and Balances reports to date. To ensure that all checking accounts are safe and transparent, Pew has also developed a set of policy recommendations and urges the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to incorporate these policies in new rules on overdraft practices and arbitration clauses

Evaluation of land ownership, lease status, and surface features in five geopressured geothermal prospects

This study was accomplished for the purpose of gathering information pertaining to land and lease ownership, surface features and use and relevant environmental factors in the Lake Theriot (West and East), Kaplan, Bayou Hebert and Freshwater Bayou geopressured geothermal prospects in Louisiana, and the Blessing geopressured geothermal prospect in Texas. This information and recommendations predicated upon it will then be used to augment engineering and geological data utilized to select geopressured geothermal test well sites within the prospects. The five geopressured geothermal prospects are briefly described and recommendations given

Onset of magnetism in B2 transition metals aluminides

Ab initio calculation results for the electronic structure of disordered bcc Fe(x)Al(1-x) (0.4<x<0.75), Co(x)Al(1-x) and Ni(x)Al(1-x) (x=0.4; 0.5; 0.6) alloys near the 1:1 stoichiometry, as well as of the ordered B2 (FeAl, CoAl, NiAl) phases with point defects are presented. The calculations were performed using the coherent potential approximation within the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method (KKR-CPA) for the disordered case and the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital (TB-LMTO) method for the intermetallic compounds. We studied in particular the onset of magnetism in Fe-Al and Co-Al systems as a function of the defect structure. We found the appearance of large local magnetic moments associated with the transition metal (TM) antisite defect in FeAl and CoAl compounds, in agreement with the experimental findings. Moreover, we found that any vacancies on both sublattices enhance the magnetic moments via reducing the charge transfer to a TM atom. Disordered Fe-Al alloys are ferromagnetically ordered for the whole range of composition studied, whereas Co-Al becomes magnetic only for Co concentration >0.5.Comment: 11 pages with 9 embedded postscript figures, to be published in Phys.Rev.

Mourning the Living: Surrey’s “Wyatt Resteth Here,” Henrician Funerary Debates, and the Passing of National Virtue

Les critiques semblent ne pas avoir encore remarqué comment l’élégie « Wyatt Resteth Here » (1542) de Henry Howard, comte de Surrey, illustre une relation importante entre la poésie et le rituel religieux dans l’Angleterre des débuts de la modernité. L’auteur propose qu’en créant un modèle funéraire pour la commémoration de Thomas Wyatt, Surrey profite de l’intérêt populaire pour les questions théologiques portant sur les fins dernières (mort, jugement, paradis, enfer) et qui a connu un regain dans les années 1520 et 1530, suite aux publications de Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale et de leurs collègues. L’auteur montre comment Surrey donne à ses lecteurs la possibilité d’assister à un service funéraire imaginaire en l’honneur de Wyatt. Ces lecteurs se rassemblent, forment une communauté à travers l’Angleterre, et portent le deuil pour la personne dont le corps est présent dans le poème. De plus, Surrey utilise l’aspect communautaire de la mort de Wyatt pour faire voir à ses lecteurs l’importante crise de l’identité nationale par la perte de la vertu anglaise. La mort de Wyatt entre en relation d’analogie avec la disparition de cette vertu, qui a souffert sous le règne tyrannique d’Henri VIII. Surrey identifie la poésie comme source de restauration nationale, en raison de sa capacité à commémorer le passé, offrir une autre vision de la réalité, et à redonner aux lecteurs les outils pour repenser leur monde conformément à cette vision

Exploration of Contemporary Social Issues as Depicted in Chinese TV Dramas

viii, 116 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.As Mainland China transitions from a planned socialist economy to one more market-focused, its economic successes have garnered attention worldwide. However, this astounding economic growth brought with it a number of negative side effects, including corruption and a resurgence ofprostitution. Gender relations have also undergone major shifts from state mandated gender equality in the Mao era to a call for the refeminization ofwomen in the Reform era. How is the Chinese population navigating this transition? In this thesis, I utilize existing melodrama theory and relevant sociological studies to explore how three Chinese TV dramas-I'm Not a Hero (2004), Close to You, Make Me Warm (2006), and Give Me a Cigarette (2006), later renamed Evening Rain--expose and explore some of these existing social problems, providing a platform for their viewers to reflect on and explore these issues on their own.Committee in Charge: Tze-Ian Sang, Chair; Alison Groppe; Eileen Oti

Zwei Beispiele nichtlinearer Dynamik: Solitonen in planaren Ferromagneten - Chaos in Quantensystemen

With many refs.SIGLECopy held by FIZ Karlsruhe; available from UB/TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman