K-12 public school finance in Missouri: an overview

Education ; Missouri

The Weaponization of Poverty: An Investigation Into United States Military Recruitment Practices In High Schools Of Low-Income Communities In The Inland Empire

Military recruitment in the United States is a highly contentious subject that has yielded a multitude of prior research across a variety of academic concentrations. To further the conversation, I narrow my focus to Southern California’s Inland Empire (IE) to explore practices of military recruitment in high schools that serve students in low-income communities. I begin with a general overview of life and labor in the Inland Empire before moving into prior research on military recruitment. My empirical research consists of five in-depth interviews documenting the lived experiences of individuals hailing from and attending high school in low-income communities of the Inland Empire. Conclusions are drawn affirming the presence of targeted military recruitment in low-income high schools of the IE through participation in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), as well as resulting from educational policy that has disproportionately restricted academic curriculum in low-income schools. My analysis further explores connections between labor and military recruitment in the IE before concluding with discussions as to how the military strategically utilizes the cultural structure of the IE to target recruits on a personal level

K-12 Public School Finance in Missouri: An Overview

The level and distribution of spending for public K-12 education remains a contentious matter of policy in many states because of increasing expectations for school performance and widespread school finance litigation. In this paper, the authors examine the policies that have generated school funding in Missouri and the outcomes of these policies in terms of the overall level of school spending and interdistrict spending gaps. Interdistrict inequality in average spending is higher in Missouri than in surrounding states, but the spending gaps are equalizing in the sense that poor children tend to be concentrated in districts with above-average spending. A new school funding formula is grounded on a purported link between spending and student achievement. Since that association is tenuous statistically, challenges are likely to arise as this new scheme is fully implemented

Competitive Inhibition Can Linearize Dose-Response and Generate a Linear Rectifier

SummaryMany biological responses require a dynamic range that is larger than standard bi-molecular interactions allow, yet have the ability to remain off at low input. Here, we mathematically show that an enzyme reaction system involving a combination of competitive inhibition, conservation of the total level of substrate and inhibitor, and positive feedback can behave like a linear rectifier—that is, a network motif with an input-output relationship that is linearly sensitive to substrate above a threshold but unresponsive below the threshold. We propose that the evolutionarily conserved yeast SAGA histone acetylation complex may possess the proper physiological response characteristics and molecular interactions needed to perform as a linear rectifier, and we suggest potential experiments to test this hypothesis. One implication of this work is that linear responses and linear rectifiers might be easier to evolve or synthetically construct than is currently appreciated

Geometries, the principle of duality, and algebraic groups

Jacques Tits gave a general recipe for producing an abstract geometry from a semisimple algebraic group. This expository paper describes a uniform method for giving a concrete realization of Tits's geometry and works through several examples. We also give a criterion for recognizing the automorphism of the geometry induced by an automorphism of the group. The E6 geometry is studied in depth.Comment: The writing has been cleaned up since v

Book Reviews

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT: CHIEF JUSTICE. By Alpheus Thomas Mason. CONTRACT LAW IN AMERICA. By Lawrence M. Friedman. SEX, PORNOGRAPHY & JUSTICE. By Albert B. Gerber

'Permanent Parabasis': Beckettian Irony in the Work of Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee

This thesis considers the influence of the writing of Samuel Beckett on that of Paul Auster, John Banville and J.M. Coetzee through the lens of Romantic irony, as formulated by Friedrich Schlegel and, later, Paul de Man. The broad argument is that the form of irony first articulated by the Jena Romantics is brought in Beckett’s work to something of an extreme, and that this extremity represents both one of his most characteristic achievements and a unique and specifically troublesome challenge for those who come after him. The thesis hence explores how Auster, Banville and Coetzee respond to and negotiate this irony in their own work, and contrasts their respective responses. Put briefly, I find that all three writers to one extent or another deflect Beckett’s irony, while engaging with it: Auster adopts certain stylistic and structural aspects of Beckett’s work, but on the whole reaches fundamentally different epistemological and existential conclusions; Banville engages closely with the epistemological and existential challenge posed by Beckett’s irony, and attempts to balance this with a contrasting sense of the capacity of art and the imagination to make meaning of the world; and Coetzee, after an initial attempt at stylistic imitation, moves away from this but remains fundamentally influenced by certain insights into subjectivity and ethical relation he derives from Beckett’s work. Of Auster’s work, I consider most closely ‘White Spaces’ and The New York Trilogy, arguing that the former represents a transitional development toward the tone, perspective and voice of the latter; of Banville’s, Doctor Copernicus and Eclipse, contrasting the former’s confidence in human capacities for knowledge of the world and the self with the latter’s more Beckettian skepticism and disenchantment; and of Coetzee’s, In the Heart of the Country with Waiting for the Barbarians, showing how the latter abandons the former’s marked Beckettian stylistic traces while continuing to evidence the influence of Beckett’s work in the depiction of matters such as subjectivity, language and interpersonal relation. By way of conclusion, I consider how such later writing might reshape or alter our understanding of Beckett’s work, and propose directions for further research into the place of Romantic irony in Modern and contemporary fiction

Selbstkontrolle mit kleinen Fehlern

In aller Regel bestätigen renommierte Kollegen die Zuverlässigkeit einer eingereichten Forschungsarbeit. Doch manchmal entgeht ihnen etwas