Thinking beyond the Sticker Price

Over the last 20 years, the average published sticker price for tuition and fees, and room and board at private, non-profit colleges like Linfield increased by 59 percent while U.S. per capita personal disposable income grew by 32 percent. Since the tuition sticker price rose by more than income, you might conclude that a private college education has become less affordable. But that conclusion could be wrong. To gauge affordability, we must think beyond the sticker price by properly measuring the cost students actually pay and compare that to the benefits of a college education. In economic terms, a college education is more affordable the larger are its benefits relative to its cost

Search for Rare Charm Meson Decays at FNAL E791

We report the results of a blind search for flavor-changing neutral current (FCNC), lepton-flavor violating, and lepton-number violating decays of D+, Ds+, and D0 mesons (and their antiparticles) into 2-, 3-, and 4-body states including a lepton pair. Such decays may involve Flavor-Changing Neutral Currents, Leptoquarks, Horizontal Gauge Bosons, or Majorana Neutrinos. No evidence for any of these decays is found. Therefore, we present 90% confidence level branching fraction upper limits, typically at the 0.0001 level. A total of 51 decay channels have been examined; 26 have not been previously reported and 18 are significant improvements over previous results.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, LaTex, Fermilab E791 Collaboration, References added in revised version, 2nd Frontiers in Contemporary Physics: The Inner Space Outer Space Connection (FCP01), 5-10 Mar 2001, Nashville, Tennessee, US

Formation of Power-law Energy Spectra in Space Plasmas by Stochastic Acceleration due to Whistler-Mode Waves

A non-relativistic Fokker-Planck equation for the electron distribution function is formulated incorporating the effects of stochastic acceleration by whistler-mode waves and Coulomb collisions. The stationary solution $f$ to the equation, subject to a zero-flux boundary condition, is found to be a generalized Lorentzian (or kappa) distribution, which satisfies $f\propto v^{-2(\kappa+1)}$ for large velocity $v$, where $\kappa$ is the spectral index. The parameter $\kappa$ depends strongly on the relative wave intensity $R$. Taking into account the critical energy required for resonance of electrons with whistlers, we calculate a range of values of $R$ for each of a number of different space plasmas for which kappa distributions can be expected to be formed. This study is one of the first in the literature to provide a theoretical justification for the formation of generalized Lorentzian (or kappa) particle distribution functions in space plasmas.Comment: 14 page-Latex, 1 ps-figure, agums.st