Consent to Student Loan Bankruptcy Discharge

As the Department of Education reconsiders its rules governing consent to discharge of federal student loans in bankruptcy, this Article argues for the first time that the Department should approach the problem specifically as an operator of programs to promote education and benefit students, rather than as an entity interested only in debt collection. This Article shows that the Department’s rules to date have treated whether to consent to discharge primarily as a pecuniary issue, without regard to the educational goals of the student loan programs. For example, the Department apparently has never considered whether making it difficult to discharge student loans interferes with borrowers’ freedom of career choice or deters students from pursuing higher education in the first place. Discharge should be more predictable for borrowers. The Department’s regulations have given ever more nontransparent discretion to student loan holders to decide whether to oppose discharge. This Article joins the scholarly call for the Department to remedy this situation by adopting objectively defined criteria for loan holders’ consent to discharge. Creating such “safe harbors” for borrowers would eliminate the uncertainty and formidable procedural barriers that attend seeking relief through an adversarial process in bankruptcy court. These barriers may deter as many as 69,000 eligible borrowers a year from seeking to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy. This Article argues that furthering the educational purposes of the student loan programs calls for the Department to consent to discharge more freely. Currently, the only substantive ground for consent is the presence of “undue hardship,” as that term from the Bankruptcy Code has been interpreted by courts. But judicial tests for undue hardship do not take account of discharge-favoring purposes of the student loan programs. To fulfill its mandate, the Department should consent to discharge in cases where failure to do so would thwart the purposes of the student loan programs, even if undue hardship is absent

Nonviolent Protest and Third Party Public Opinion: A Study of the June 1978, Seabrook, New Hampshire, Antinuclear Power Protest

Political protest and nonviolent struggle have had a long history in the United States, dating back to colonial times. During the nineteenth century, nonviolence was associated with such causes as abolition, temperance, antimilitarism, and women\u27s suffrage. More recently, the nonviolent tactics and strategies used in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1950s and 1960s spawned similar activity on a diverse array of issues, including urban poverty, Native American rights, welfare reform, homosexuality, women\u27s rights, and environmental pollution. Although many of these movements have been chronicled and protest has been recognized as an effective method for influencing political and social policy, less is known about the ways by which protest operates to exert such effects. One aspect of this process, the ability of protesters to influence third-party observers, forms the focus of the present study. Surveying the data collected shortly after the 1978 demonstration against the construction of the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear power plant provides an opportunity to examine the views of local townspeople toward the antinuclear protesters. Specifically, this research addresses the following four groups of questions: 1. How did third-party observers view construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant and how did they view demonstrations against construction in terms of legitimacy and appeal? 2. Did third parties perceive the protesters as immature troublemakers or as responsible citizens, and did third parties view the protest as mostly violent or mostly peaceful? 3. To what extent did the protest group\u27s ability to contact the public and legitimize its issue increase its appeal ? Furthermore, how were the protest group\u27s abilities to contact the public, to legitimize its issue, and to generate public appeal interrelated? 4. How did the social and ideological backgrounds of third-party observers relate to the ways in which they perceived protest?https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_dcrs_facbooks/1016/thumbnail.jp

HIV/AIDS Knowledge Sources of College Student-Athletes in a Southern State

This study examined the HIV/AIDS-related knowledge of 93 male and female college student-athletes at a DI institution in Louisiana. Knowledge levels are reported according to the ethnicity and gender of the respondents. Significant differences (p<.05) were found between ethnic groups for general knowledge about HIV/ AIDS and between genders for knowledge of disease transmissior methods and risk-reduction techniques. Survey participants indicated mass media, parents, and peers as the most common sources of HIV/AIDS information, and they preferred videos, small group discussions, and classroom lectures as instructional formats. Results may be useful in the development of more effective HIV/AIDS educational initiatives targeting college student-athletes

Threshold Evolution in Exotic Populations of a Polyphenic Beetle

Polyphenic development is thought to play an important role in the evolution of phenotypic diversity and morphological novelties, yet the evolution of polyphenisms has rarely been documented in natural populations. Here we compare the morphologies of male dung beetles (Onthophagus taurus; Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) from populations introduced to Australia and the eastern United States. Males in this species express two alternative morphologies in response to larval feeding conditions. Males encountering favourable conditions grow larger than a threshold body size and develop a pair of horns on their heads, whereas males that encounter poor conditions do not reach this threshold size and remain hornless. Australian and US populations did not differ in overall body size ranges, but exhibited significant differences in the location of the critical body size threshold that separates alternative male morphs. Australian males remained hornless at much larger body sizes than males in US populations, resulting in substantial and significant differences in the average body size-horn length allometry between exotic populations, as well as significant differences in morph ratios. The phenotypic divergence observed between field populations was maintained in laboratory populations after two generations under identical environmental conditions, suggesting a genetic basis to allometric divergence in these populations. Divergence between exotic O. taurus populations was of a magnitude and kind typically observed between species. We use our results to examine potential causes of allometric divergence in onthophagine beetles, and discuss the evolutionary potential of threshold traits and polyphenic development in the origin of morphological and behavioural diversity

Staircase Codes: FEC for 100 Gb/s OTN

Staircase codes, a new class of forward-error-correction (FEC) codes suitable for high-speed optical communications, are introduced. An ITU-T G.709-compatible staircase code with rate R=239/255 is proposed, and FPGA-based simulation results are presented, exhibiting a net coding gain (NCG) of 9.41 dB at an output error rate of 1E-15, an improvement of 0.42 dB relative to the best code from the ITU-T G.975.1 recommendation. An error floor analysis technique is presented, and the proposed code is shown to have an error floor at 4.0E-21.Comment: To appear in IEEE/OSA J. of Lightwave Technolog

Neurotoxic lesions of the dorsomedial thalamus impair the acquisition but not the performance of delayed matching to place by rats: a deficit in shifting response rules

This study examined the acquisition of a T-maze matching to place task by rats with neurotoxic lesions of the thalamic nucleus medialis dorsalis. This test of spatial working memory also entails learning a task rule that is contrary to the animals’ innate preference. The rats next performed the same matching task over different retention delays. Finally, they were trained on a reversal of the task rule, i.e., to nonmatch to place. Although the lesions produced a clear acquisition impairment on the matching task, there was no evidence of a loss of working memory. A series of control tasks found no appreciable effect on a conditioned cue preference task or on open field activity. The pattern of results shows that medialis dorsalis lesions lead to a selective increase in perseverative behavior that can retard task acquisition. This perseverative deficit closely resembles that observed after prefrontal damage in rats, strongly indicating dysfunction in a common system

HIghMass - High HI Mass, HI-Rich Galaxies at z∼0z\sim0: Combined HI and H2_2 Observations

We present resolved HI and CO observations of three galaxies from the HIghMass sample, a sample of HI-massive ($M_{HI} > 10^{10} M_\odot$), gas-rich ($M_{HI}$ in top $5\%$ for their $M_*$) galaxies identified in the ALFALFA survey. Despite their high gas fractions, these are not low surface brightness galaxies, and have typical specific star formation rates (SFR$/M_*$) for their stellar masses. The three galaxies have normal star formation rates for their HI masses, but unusually short star formation efficiency scale lengths, indicating that the star formation bottleneck in these galaxies is in the conversion of HI to H$_2$, not in converting H$_2$ to stars. In addition, their dark matter spin parameters ($\lambda$) are above average, but not exceptionally high, suggesting that their star formation has been suppressed over cosmic time but are now becoming active, in agreement with prior H$\alpha$ observations.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure

Temporal shifts in ostracode sexual dimorphism from the Late Cretaceous to the late Eocene of the U.S. Coastal Plain

Ostracodes of the superfamily Cytheroidea exhibit sexual dimorphism in the carapace such that males are more elongate than females. This sex difference is attributed to the need of the carapace to accommodate the large male copulatory apparatus, and the degree of dimorphism is an indication of male investment in reproduction. In this study, we examine trends in sexual dimorphism, as a proxy for sexual selection, from the Late Cretaceous to the late Eocene to better understand the long-term effects of the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction. We used mixture models to identify sex clusters from digitized outlines of photographed specimens and estimated size and shape dimorphism as the difference in the mean log area and the mean log length-to-height ratio for male and female clusters. We found dimorphism exhibits a phylogenetic signal; families and genera tend to occupy various restricted subsets of dimorphism space. Previous work documented that the mean and variance in size and shape dimorphism decreased sharply at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary, and here we show that this fauna only partially returns to Cretaceous dimorphism patterns by the late Eocene. Most surprisingly, species with both high size and shape dimorphism, which occurred in a diverse set of taxa before the extinction, remain rare into the late Eocene. These trends suggest sexual selection may respond to several possible demographic and environmental factors, which warrant further investigation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio