Improving low-income policies in tight fiscal times

Iris Lav and John Springer of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities provide information to help groups concerned with low-income families understand how they might best participate in state policy debates.Poverty ; State finance - New England ; New England

US and foreign alloy cross-reference database

Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA installations have a continuing requirement for materials data from other countries involved with the development of joint international Spacelab experiments and other hardware. This need includes collecting data for common alloys to ascertain composition, physical properties, specifications, and designations. This data is scattered throughout a large number of specification statements, standards, handbooks, and other technical literature which make a manual search both tedious and often limited in extent. In recognition of this problem, a computerized database of information on alloys was developed along with the software necessary to provide the desired functions to access this data. The intention was to produce an initial database covering aluminum alloys, along with the program to provide a user-interface to the data, and then later to extend and refine the database to include other nonferrous and ferrous alloys

GEORGE WHITEFIELD CHADWICK AND ROBERT AYRES BARNET’S TABASCO

Until recently George Whitefield Chadwick’s burlesque opera Tabasco (1894) had been largely forgotten. In 2018, however, conductor Paul Mauffray completed a reconstruction of Tabasco that has brought renewed attention to this seldom heard work. Set to a libretto by Robert Ayres Barnet, Tabasco was commissioned as the third in a series of comic operas by the Boston Men’s Army Cadets as fundraiser for the construction of a new armory. This thesis explores the history of Tabasco from its inception through the national tour produced by Thomas Q. Seabrooke’s Comic Opera Company, which would eventually lead to the withdrawal of the work by its creators. As a result of the multiple changes the work has undergone, it is often difficult to establish authorship with respect not only to the presence of added material, but also in terms of what Chadwick and Barnet approved. During the initial production of the work, additional musical numbers were added at the behest of the producer, Thomas Q. Seabrooke. These numbers mentioned in programs from the professional tour attribute “Lola’s Song” to composer Ludwig Engländer. Although, an examination of the source material provides overwhelming evidence to suggest it was composed by Chadwick with lyrics by Barnet. While the work was popular with audiences, Seabrooke failed to pay the required royalties which led to Chadwick and Barnet threatening legal action. Seabrooke revised and opened the show as The Grand Vizier (1895), making few changes in the music and script, leading to his incarceration. Although short lived, Tabasco has a compelling history and might have become the cornerstone of an American musical repertoire had it survived. Although Barnet was no William S. Gilbert, the libretto speaks to the influence of Barnet’s Victorian predecessor

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

Property Tax Lids and the Effect on Kansas

Cross sectional time series data in a partial adjustment model examine local government behavior under an aggregate property tax levy limit and under Truth in Taxation in Kansas. Results indicate that the aggregate levy limit would have continued to restrict property tax revenue and spending had it not been replaced.Public Economics,

Golden age of Hollywood "B" movies : lobby cards from the Bob Burke Film and Autograph Collection

This program was produced by the Chambers Library, Archives and Special Collections to commemorate the Exhibit Opening and lecture, The Golden Age of Hollywood B Movies: Lobby Cards from the Bob Burke Film and Autograph Collection, held at 2:30 p.m. on the first floor in the Max Chambers Library, April 13, 2017 in Edmond, Oklahoma

Identifying and Using Driver Nodes in Temporal Networks

In many approaches developed for defining complex networks, the main assumption is that the network is in a relatively stable state that can be approximated with a fixed topology. However, in several applications, this approximation is not adequate because a) the system modeled is dynamic by nature, and b) the changes are an essential characteristic that cannot be approximated. Temporal networks capture changes in the topology of networks by including the temporal information associated with their structural connections, i.e., links or edges. We focus here on controllability of temporal networks, that is, the study of steering the state of a network to any desired state at deadline tf within Δt=tf−t0 steps through stimulating key nodes called driver nodes. Recent studies provided analytical approaches to find a maximum controllable subspace for an arbitrary set of driver nodes. However, finding the minimum number of driver nodes Nc required to reach full control is computationally prohibitive. In this work, we propose a heuristic algorithm that quickly finds a suboptimal set of driver nodes with size Ns \u3e Nc . We conduct experiments on synthetic and real-world temporal networks induced from ant colonies and e-mail communications of a manufacturing company. The empirical results in both cases show the heuristic algorithm efficiently identifies a small set of driver nodes that can fully control the networks. Also, as shown in the case of ants’ interactions networks, the driver nodes tend to have a large degree in temporal networks. Furthermore, we analyze the behavior of driver nodes within the context of their datasets, through which, we observe that queen ants tend to avoid becoming a driver node