MS-176: Hoadley George Hosford, 44th New York Papers

This collection consists of diary entries spanning three years of Hoadley G. Hosford’s enlistment in the 44th New York and a brief time in the 146th New York and the 1st Division Sharpshooters during the Civil War. The entries give details about what camp life was like, the experience of battle, and the distance a Union soldier would march in the Eastern Theater during the war.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/findingaidsall/1154/thumbnail.jp

The Give and Take of Tutoring on Location

Curriculum- or classroom-based writing tutoring (CBT) programs are wellestablished writing across the curriculum components in some of the most prestigious colleges across the country. The 2005 collection On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring highlights various theoretical and practical issues involved in CBT, and Margot Soven’s 2006 What the Writing Tutor Needs to Know is the first book to combine information on training tutors for work in either writing centers or CBT programs. But just as all writing centers are not alike, CBT programs differ from institution to institution. There is much flexibility in and between models. This flexibility is due to the various needs and desires of the students, tutors, instructors, and program administrators: some programs do not ask tutors to comment on student papers; some programs make visits to tutors optional, while others make them mandatory; and some programs offer hybrids of both approaches. Behind all these methodological and practical choices also lie complex theoretical issues of power/authority, collaborative control/flexibility, and process/product. For example, Jean Marie Lutes argues that “the [writing fellows] program complicates the peer relationship between fellows and students; when fellows comment on drafts, they inevitably write not only for their immediate audience (the student writers), but also for their future audience (the professor)” (239). Issues like these and others brought up in CBT research and practice led me to begin investigating some of the differences between various models.University Writing Cente

VIEWPOINT: Fight or Flight: Thomas Merton and the Bhagavad Gītā\u3csup\u3e1\u3c/sup\u3e

Two commemorative events of landmark stature inspired the essay you are about to read: First, the year 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s abrupt departure from our material vision. Second, 2018 is also the semicentennial celebration of a consequential publication: It was in 1968 that His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedānta Swami Prabhupāda released his unprecedentedly influential Bhagavad-gītā As It Is. As we shall see, the trailblazing Western visionary, Merton, and this particular edition of the Gītā engaged in productive conversation with each other

Lower order terms in the 1-level density for families of holomorphic cuspidal newforms

The Katz-Sarnak density conjecture states that, in the limit as the conductors tend to infinity, the behavior of normalized zeros near the central point of families of L-functions agree with the N -> oo scaling limits of eigenvalues near 1 of subgroups of U(N). Evidence for this has been found for many families by studying the n-level densities; for suitably restricted test functions the main terms agree with random matrix theory. In particular, all one-parameter families of elliptic curves with rank r over Q(T) and the same distribution of signs of functional equations have the same limiting behavior. We break this universality and find family dependent lower order correction terms in many cases; these lower order terms have applications ranging from excess rank to modeling the behavior of zeros near the central point, and depend on the arithmetic of the family. We derive an alternate form of the explicit formula for GL(2) L-functions which simplifies comparisons, replacing sums over powers of Satake parameters by sums of the moments of the Fourier coefficients lambda_f(p). Our formula highlights the differences that we expect to exist from families whose Fourier coefficients obey different laws (for example, we expect Sato-Tate to hold only for non-CM families of elliptic curves). Further, by the work of Rosen and Silverman we expect lower order biases to the Fourier coefficients in families of elliptic curves with rank over Q(T); these biases can be seen in our expansions. We analyze several families of elliptic curves and see different lower order corrections, depending on whether or not the family has complex multiplication, a forced torsion point, or non-zero rank over Q(T).Comment: 38 pages, version 2.2: fixed some typos, included some comments from Steven Finch which give more rapidly converging expressions for the constants gamma_{PNT}, gamma_{PNT,1,3} and gamma_{PNT,1,4}, updated reference

[Review of] Usha Welaratna. Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America

Although approximately 150,000 Cambodians now reside in the United States, very little information has been published on this group. When available at all, descriptive and statistical data about Cambodians is generally lumped together with that of Laotians and Vietnamese in the category “Southeast Asian Refugees.” This is a grave shortcoming: first, because the Cambodians’ culture is quite different from that of other Southeast Asians -- making aggregate accounts of their experience inaccurate; and second, and perhaps even more important, is the fact that the Cambodian people have experienced one of the most horrible holocausts in modern history, making their ordeal one which should be well-documented such that humanity might prevent its repetition. However, with the publication of Beyond the Killing Fields, a valuable new source of information about Cambodians in the United States has become available

Compelled Disclosure of Scholarly Research: Some Comments on “High Stakes Litigation”

Resisting compelled disclosure in court will continue to be at best a tenuous and uncertain journey for researchers who have been subpoenaed