Let Ralph do it: a bridge to the unchurched

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1504/thumbnail.jp

Culture and Context: Stories and Lessons from the Field - Book I

Culture and Context: Stories and Lessons from the Field - Book I identifies themes and knowledge gained from the project and outlines recommendations for the field and donors. The book describes CFYS and offers lessons for the field and those working with youth-development or youth organizing groups. This work builds on Power and Possibilities, the first report summarizing the efforts of the Collaborative Fund for Youth-Led Social Change, published in 2003.Critical to Book I are the Voices from the Field stories and Ideas in Action examples. Raising the voices of youth and adult program partners was critical to this work and thus central to understanding the impact of CFYS. Authored by grantee partners, "Voices from the Field" are first-hand accounts from West Virginia, Milwaukee, Denver, San Francisco, and Oakland that describe the core issues faced by organizations working at the intersect of youth development, youth organizing, and gender. "Ideas in Action" are examples provided by our grantee partners that illustrate key points

Entire curves avoiding given sets in C^n

Let $F\subset\Bbb C^n$ be a proper closed subset of $\Bbb C^n$ and $A\subset\Bbb C^n\setminus F$ at most countable ($n\geq 2$). We give conditions of $F$ and $A$, under which there exists a holomorphic immersion (or a proper holomorphic embedding) $\phi:\Bbb C\to\Bbb C^n$ with $A\subset\phi(\Bbb C)\subset\Bbb C^n\setminus F$.Comment: 10 page

Establishing endangered species recovery criteria using predictive simulation modeling

Listing a species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and developing a recovery plan requires U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to establish specific and measurable criteria for delisting. Generally, species are listed because they face (or are perceived to face) elevated risk of extinction due to issues such as habitat loss, invasive species, or other factors. Recovery plans identify recovery criteria that reduce extinction risk to an acceptable level. It logically follows that the recovery criteria, the defined conditions for removing a species from ESA protections, need to be closely related to extinction risk. Extinction probability is a population parameter estimated with a model that uses current demographic information to project the population into the future over a number of replicates, calculating the proportion of replicated populations that go extinct. We simulated extinction probabilities of piping plovers in the Great Plains and estimated the relationship between extinction probability and various demographic parameters. We tested the fit of regression models linking initial abundance, productivity, or population growth rate to extinction risk, and then, using the regression parameter estimates, determined the conditions required to reduce extinction probability to some pre-defined acceptable threshold. Binomial regression models with mean population growth rate and the natural log of initial abundance were the best predictors of extinction probability 50 years into the future. For example, based on our regression models, an initial abundance of approximately 2400 females with an expected mean population growth rate of 1.0 will limit extinction risk for piping plovers in the Great Plains to less than 0.048. Our method provides a straightforward way of developing specific and measurable recovery criteria linked directly to the core issue of extinction risk

Hermitian symmetric polynomials and CR complexity

Properties of Hermitian forms are used to investigate several natural questions from CR Geometry. To each Hermitian symmetric polynomial we assign a Hermitian form. We study how the signature pairs of two Hermitian forms behave under the polynomial product. We show, except for three trivial cases, that every signature pair can be obtained from the product of two indefinite forms. We provide several new applications to the complexity theory of rational mappings between hyperquadrics, including a stability result about the existence of non-trivial rational mappings from a sphere to a hyperquadric with a given signature pair.Comment: 19 pages, latex, fixed typos, to appear in Journal of Geometric Analysi

Convergence of random zeros on complex manifolds

We show that the zeros of random sequences of Gaussian systems of polynomials of increasing degree almost surely converge to the expected limit distribution under very general hypotheses. In particular, the normalized distribution of zeros of systems of m polynomials of degree N, orthonormalized on a regular compact subset K of C^m, almost surely converge to the equilibrium measure on K as the degree N goes to infinity.Comment: 16 page