Dgadi-Dugarang: Talk Loud, Talk Strong: A Tribute to Aboriginal leader Uncle Ray Jackson, 1941-2015

In this brief memorial essay, we pay tribute to the late Uncle Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and tireless social justice activist. Uncle Ray Jackson’s social justice work encompassed a broad spectrum of social movements. Throughout his work, he insistently brought into focus critical relations between national and transnational formations of settler-colonial power, between its racist modalities of governance and the lived violence that it produced for its targeted subjects, including Indigenous peoples, refugees and asylum seekers and other ‘suspect’ peoples and racial undesirables. We also mark one of Uncle Ray Jackson’s most significant contributions to the ongoing assertion of unceded Aboriginal sovereignty in the context of the Australian settler-colonial state: his establishment of a number of Aboriginal Passport Ceremonies. We discuss the political significance of these ceremonies for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples

State And Local Government Administration: A Symposium

It is stated by some authors of state and local government textbooks that if states did not exist in America they would have to be created. Undoubtedly this is to underscore the importance of the geographical decentralization of government in a country with such an extensive area a.s the United States. What the cliche does not explain is that governmental decentralization accomplished through a federal system is far different from governmental decentralization by a central government decision in a unitary system. Shifting the focus from the constitutional, legal aspects of federalism to the political, policy aspects--from layer cake federalism to marble cake or picket fence federalism-has obscured the fact that the fifty states are separate entities of government, each with its source of power in the United States Constitution. While that document imposes certain uniform requirements and certain uniform prohibitions and lays the groundwork for additional uniform requirements to be promulgated by the national legislature, executive, and judiciary in fulfillment of their respective constitutional objectives and obligations, the state governments are no mere creatures of the central government as is the case in a unitary system

Racial Disparities in College Students’ Scholastic Adjustment Amidst COVID-19: The Protective Function of Campus Resources and Supports

Scientific investigations are needed to understand the extent to which COVID-19 has affected, and exacerbated racial disparities in, college students’ scholastic adjustment. We propose a study based on two waves of data collected as part of a large-scale, longitudinal study on college students’ well-being amidst COVID-19. More specifically, we will evaluate a model of risk and protective factors for college students’ scholastic adjustment across three time points within the 2020-21 academic year. The first aim is to evaluate contextual risk factors for college students’ scholastic difficulties during COVID-19 and whether contextual risk is more pronounced for minoritized students. The second aim is to examine whether campus supports and resources buffer risk for scholastic difficulties for all students, and especially minoritized students, during COVID-19. College students (N=522) from two, residential liberal arts colleges participated in the first wave of data in the fall and will be invited to participate in two waves of data collection in the spring. Developmental researchers conduct large-scale longitudinal studies in collaborative teams because such studies are extremely labor- and time-intensive. Examples of tasks that necessitate teamwork include recruiting and compensating participants; managing data; and conducting analyses. See below for details about methods and analyse

Circular motion of neutral test particles in Reissner-Nordstr\"om spacetime

We investigate the motion of neutral test particles in the gravitational field of a mass $M$ with charge $Q$ described by the Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN) spacetime. We focus on the study of circular stable and unstable orbits around configurations describing either black holes or naked singularities. We show that at the classical radius, defined as $Q^2/M$, there exist orbits with zero angular momentum due to the presence of repulsive gravity. The analysis of the stability of circular orbits indicates that black holes are characterized by a continuous region of stability. In the case of naked singularities, the region of stability can split into two non-connected regions inside which test particles move along stable circular orbits.Comment: 23 pages, 22 figures. To be published Phys. Rev.

The Sensoria Approach Applied to the Finance Case Study

This chapter provides an effective implementation of (part of) the Sensoria approach, specifically modelling and formal analysis of service-oriented software based on mathematically founded techniques. The ‘Finance case study’ is used as a test bed for demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the use of the process calculus COWS and some of its related analysis techniques and tools. In particular, we report the results of an application of a temporal logic and its model checker for expressing and checking functional properties of services and a type system for guaranteeing confidentiality properties of services

Assessing banks’ resilience: A complementary approach to stress testing using fair values from banks’ financial statements

For more than a decade, supervisory banking authorities in Europe and the United States have sought to assess the resilience of banks to adverse economic episodes to safeguard the financial system's stability. They rely on regulatory capital measures like Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) relative to risk-weighted assets in the aftermath of potential economic crises. We propose a new measure of banks' resilience based on financial statements. The fair value margin (FVM) is estimated as the difference between the fair value of assets and the book value of liabilities, scaled by the book value of equity. We find that FVM is positively associated with the surplus or shortfall of CET1 resulting from the stress testing results from 2014, 2016 and 2018. To corroborate the relevance of FVM for supervisory authorities, we compare the ability of the loan component of FVM to predict future credit losses with the capital surplus/shortfall metric derived from the stress test. The findings indicate that the fair value of loans predicts net charge-offs better than stress test outcomes. Therefore, we suggest that FVM could be used as a readily available and relatively low-cost tool to assess bank resilience, thus complementing the stress test exercises

Modelling of integrated-light spectra from the optical to the near-infrared: the globular cluster G280 in M31

In previous papers, we introduced our method for measuring chemical abundances from integrated-light spectra of globular clusters and applied it to a variety of extragalactic star clusters. Here we extend our analysis technique to the infrared. We simultaneously analyse an optical spectrum of the massive globular cluster G280 in M31, obtained with the HIRES spectrograph on the Keck I telescope, and an H-band spectrum obtained with NIRSPEC on Keck II. We discuss the sensitivity of our results to various modifications of the input assumptions, such as different line lists and isochrones and the possible presence of a metallicity spread in G280. When using the most recent version of the Kurucz line list, we measure iron abundances of [Fe/H]=-0.68+/-0.02 from the optical spectrum and [Fe/H]=-0.60+/-0.07 from the infrared spectrum. These values agree well with previous spectroscopic determinations of the metallicity of G280. While the small difference between the optical and infrared measurements is insignificant given the uncertainties, it is also consistent with a metallicity spread similar to that observed in massive GCs such as Omega Cen and G1, and also hinted at by the colour-magnitude diagram of G280. The optical and infrared spectra both indicate an alpha-enhancement of about 0.3-0.4 dex relative to solar-scaled abundances, as typically also observed in Milky Way GCs. It appears that our integrated-light analysis technique also performs well in the H-band. However, complications due to the presence of molecular bands and telluric contamination are more severe in the infrared, and accurate modelling of the coolest giants is more critical.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Random copying in space

Random copying is a simple model for population dynamics in the absence of selection, and has been applied to both biological and cultural evolution. In this work, we investigate the effect that spatial structure has on the dynamics. We focus in particular on how a measure of the diversity in the population changes over time. We show that even when the vast majority of a population's history may be well-described by a spatially-unstructured model, spatial structure may nevertheless affect the expected level of diversity seen at a local scale. We demonstrate this phenomenon explicitly by examining the random copying process on small-world networks, and use our results to comment on the use of simple random-copying models in an empirical context.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures. Based on invited talk at AHRC CECD Conference on "Cultural Evolution in Spatially Structured Populations" at UCL, September 2010. To appear in ACS - Advances in Complex System