Unlocking the Ballot: The Past, Present, and Future of Alaska Native Voting Rights

Racial oppression in American democracy is older than America itself. While most existing scholarship focuses on the historical disenfranchisement of Black and Latinx voters, this Note tells the story of the voting rights of a smaller, but still noteworthy marginalized American community: Alaska Natives. By contextualizing the history of Alaska Native disenfranchisement within the broader national landscape, this Note seeks to illuminate the ways in which the Alaska Native experience is similar to, and unique from, the experiences of other marginalized American communities. Although this history and present are rife with troubling discrimination, inequity, and non-compliance, this Note is ultimately a hopeful one, concluding that Alaska can – and must – take the burdensome but necessary steps required to fully establish and protect the voting rights of its Native people

Soulmate

Soulmate is a 4,300 word short story about a sentient orange dress and the man who wears it. Enjo

Lattice Size in Higher Dimension

The lattice size of a lattice polytope is a geometric invariant which was formally introduced in the context of simplification of the defining equation of an algebraic curve, but appeared implicitly earlier in geometric combinatorics. Previous work on the lattice size was devoted to studying the lattice size in dimension 2 and 3. In this paper we establish explicit formulas for the lattice size of a family of lattice simplices in arbitrary dimension.Comment: 8 page

New NC Charter Schools: A Causal and Demographic Inquiry

On a fateful day in May, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States declared the segregation of students in public schools throughout the nation to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, forever eliminating the previously prevailing “separate but equal” mentality and taking a monumental step towards racial equality in American education. Since that day, however, and particularly in the past few decades, many more complex and pressing issues have emerged in the American system of education including low teacher pay, inadequate funding and resources, and large achievement gaps between communities, races, and socioeconomic levels, to name a few. Politicians, non-profits, and community leaders alike have identified the dire need for substantive education reform in the United States, and many ideas have been tested throughout the nation, with varying success. Among the many efforts to improve the quality and equality of public education in the United States since Brown v. Board has emerged the charter school movement. From Long Island to Little Rock to Los Angeles and in countless communities in between, charter schools have been established to pursue the goals of greater school flexibility with simultaneous accountability to high standards within the public model. Despite the two decades that have passed since the first charter schools emerged in the United States, however, the jury is still out regarding the overall national effectiveness of these hybrid institutions. Rather, more localized studies have proven more effective in determining the overall success of charter schools in comparison to traditional public schools. The goal of this thesis is to provide just such a localized preliminary analysis of new North Carolina charter schools through the lens of demographic representation and balance rather than pure academic achievement. Its theory, methods, and analysis investigate the effectiveness of new North Carolina charter schools in creating comprehensive education reform by maintaining the equal access to education proclaimed decades ago in Brown v. Board, and more recently supported and incentivized in President Obama’s 2009 Race to the Top program. This thesis takes a two-pronged approach to its investigation of new North Carolina charter schools. First, it seeks to identify factors that significantly contribute to the establishment of new charter schools in certain locations, attempting to answer the simple question “what factors contribute to whether or not a charter school emerges in a certain community in North Carolina?” Second, it investigates the demographic balance of new North Carolina charter schools in comparison with those of corresponding traditional public schools, attempting to answer the question “do new North Carolina charter schools serve a representative population of their communities?” This investigation will approach these questions with the following hypotheses: H1: Counties with larger demographic changes, more diverse populations, higher and more dense populations, and lower-performing traditional public schools are more likely to have a new charter school than counties with smaller demographic changes, less diverse populations, lower and less dense populations, and higher-performing traditional public schools. H2: Demographics of new North Carolina charter schools are not representative of their communities or balanced with their corresponding traditional public school. In investigating these hypotheses, this thesis will use the following structure. After providing necessary historical background information and a review of existing literature regarding racial diversity in education, the charter school movement, and the current status of racial diversity and charter schools within North Carolina, I will describe the ways in which this research contributes to the existing body of knowledge about the topic. Subsequently, I will explain my hypothesis, the theoretical structure in which it is grounded, and the methods through which it was researched. I will then present the data collected for both hypotheses with any necessary logistical explanations. Finally, I will present an analysis of the data, a subsequent conclusion about the validity of my hypotheses, its structural limitations, and the ways in which it can be improved or expanded upon in future research.Bachelor of Art

Low Latency Previews for Links Embedded in Documents

This disclosure describes surfacing metadata within link bubbles in documents to enable reduction in user context switching and improve reading efficiency. Per techniques of this disclosure, when a user links to another file or external link from within a document, a link bubble is provided that includes metadata such as the title of the linked document or folder. The link bubble includes a thumbnail image and preview text and provides the user a quick preview of the linked document. Forward caching is utilized to improve response time for retrieval of the linked document. Cached link metadata information can be displayed in the link bubble when a request for the metadata information is made within a threshold time of a previous request for link metadata information. This reduces latency on duplicate requests and faster response and avoids link metadata staleness

QCD Mass Inequalities in the Heavy Quark Limit

QCD inequalities are derived for the masses of mesons and baryons containing a single heavy quark using the heavy quark effective field theory. A rigorous lower bound is obtained for the $\bar\Lambda$ parameters of the heavy quark effective theory that parameterize $1/m$ corrections, $\bar\Lambda$ > 237 MeV for mesons, and $\bar \Lambda > 657$ MeV for baryons. The inequalities on $\bar\Lambda$ imply the inequalities $m_c < 1627$ MeV and $m_b < 5068$ MeV for the mass parameters of the heavy quark effective field theory.Comment: 10 pages, 0 figures, uses harvma

Fiber scrambling for high-resolution spectrographs. I. Lick Observatory

In this paper, we report all results obtained with a fiber scrambler on the Hamilton spectrograph at Lick Observatory. We demonstrate an improvement in the stability of the instrumental profile using this fiber scrambler. Additionally, we present data obtained with a double scrambler that further improves the stability of the instrument by a factor 2. These results show that errors related to the coupling between the telescope and the spectrograph are the dominant source of instrumental profile variability at Lick Observatory. In particular, we show a strong correlation between instrumental profile variations and hour angle, most likely due to pointing-dependent illumination of the spectrograph optics