Refocusing and Redefining Hip Hop: An Analysis of Lecrae\u27s Contribution to Hip Hop

Hip Hop scholarship has overlooked and separated emcees who publicly identify themselves as Christians who exist to make God famous. This deficiency contributes to an inadequate understanding of Hip Hop and places Hip Hop in a dangerous position of alienating ostracized voices. This paper aims to draw attention to these shortcomings by analyzing Lecrae\u27s contribution to Hip Hop. Influenced by his worldview, Lecrae leads a socially conscious movement and helps to bridge the sacred and secular gap. Lecrae redirects Hip Hop back to its roots. I will examine Lecrae\u27s lyrics, websites, social media and interviews. Interviews of Lecrae will come from several mainstream Hip Hop websites and videos found on YouTube. The combination of all these areas of inquiry will present a holistic view of Lecrae. The goal of this paper is to provide one article about Christians in Hip Hop with the hopes of spurring more discussion around such a vast field of study

The Economic Impact of Failing Infrastructure in the New York Metropolitan Area

Infrastructure in the New York Metropolitan Area has been seriously underfunded due to a failure of public investment on the local, state and federal level. Prior research has presented concrete reasoning that the now crumbling infrastructure will seriously affect economic growth and worker productivity. This research seeks to quantify the economic effects as a result of this failing infrastructure. My research asks: what are the concrete, additional economic expenditures, due to failing infrastructure, that drivers spend each year? How much do these economic costs decrease our economic productivity, and how do the economic costs compare with proposed infrastructure improvements? From the research, it is evident drivers in the New York-Newark NY-NJ Metropolitan Statistical Area experience some of the highest of these costs than other areas in the Combined Statistical Area. It is projected the 2018 economic cost to these drivers will be $2,045 based on the value of one’s time lost spend in traffic. With a continued lack of investment, these costs are expected to grow due to continued infrastructure failure and a growing population. Various programs have been proposed to alleviate specific bottlenecks in the region, but a coordinated source of investment from local, state and federal levels remains a major issue in securing funding for these projects

Highly symmetric 2-plane fields on 5-manifolds and 5-dimensional Heisenberg group holonomy

Nurowski showed that any generic 2-plane field $D$ on a 5-manifold $M$ determines a natural conformal structure $c_D$ on $M$; these conformal structures are exactly those (on oriented $M$) whose normal conformal holonomy is contained in the (split, real) simple Lie group $G_2$. Graham and Willse showed that for real-analytic $D$ the same holds for the holonomy of the real-analytic Fefferman-Graham ambient metric of $c_D$, and that both holonomy groups are equal to $G_2$ for almost all $D$. We investigate here independently interesting plane fields for which the associated holonomy groups are a proper subset of $G_2$. Cartan solved the local equivalence problem for $2$-plane fields $D$ and constructed the fundamental curvature tensor $A$ for these objects. He furthermore claimed to describe locally all $D$ whose infinitesimal symmetry algebra has rank at least $6$ and gave a local quasi-normal form, depending on a single function of one variable, for those that furthermore satisfy a natural degeneracy condition on $A$, but Doubrov and Govorov recently rediscovered a counterexample to Cartan's claim. We show that for all $D$ given by Cartan's alleged quasi-normal form, the conformal structures $c_D$ induced via Nurowski's construction are almost Einstein, that we can write their ambient metrics explicitly, and that the holonomy groups associated to $c_D$ are always the $5$-dimensional Heisenberg group, which here acts indecomposably but not irreducibly. (Not all of these properties hold, however, for Doubrov and Govorov's counterexample.) We also show that the similar results hold for the related class of $2$-plane fields defined on suitable jet spaces by ordinary differential equations $z'(x) = F(y''(x))$ satisfying a simple genericity condition.Comment: 34 pages. Revised to accommodate a counterexample to a cited classification of Cartan found by Doubrov and Govorov; fixed some minor error

A pH Dependant Switch in DHP Oxidation Mechanism

Dehaloperoxidase (DHP) is a multifunctional enzyme found in Amphitrite ornata, a sediment-dwelling marine worm. This enzyme possess the structure of a traditional hemoglobin enzyme and serves as the primary oxygen carrier in A. ornata; however, it also possesses peroxidase and peroxygenase capabilities. These secondary oxidative functions provide a remarkable ability for A. ornata to resist the effects of toxic metabolites secreted by other organisms that cohabit its benthic ecosystem. This study will analyze the novel catalytic switching between peroxygenase and peroxidase oxidation mechanisms employed by DHP in response to pH changes

Trigonometric solutions of the associative Yang-Baxter equation

We classify trigonometric solutions to the associative Yang-Baxter equation (AYBE) for A = Mat_n, the associative algebra of n-by-n matrices. The AYBE was first presented in a 2000 article by Marcelo Aguiar and also independently by Alexandre Polishchuk. Trigonometric AYBE solutions limit to solutions of the classical Yang-Baxter equation. We find that such solutions of the AYBE are equal to special solutions of the quantum Yang-Baxter equation (QYBE) classified by Gerstenhaber, Giaquinto, and Schack (GGS), divided by a factor of q - q^{-1}, where q is the deformation parameter q = exp(h). In other words, when it exists, the associative lift of the classical r-matrix coincides with the quantum lift up to a factor. We give explicit conditions under which the associative lift exists, in terms of the combinatorial classification of classical r-matrices through Belavin-Drinfeld triples. The results of this paper illustrate nontrivial connections between the AYBE and both classical (Lie) and quantum bialgebras.Comment: 20 pages, AMSLaTeX with BibTeX references and the MRL article class. v2 includes minor correction

Religion and Hip Hop

Book review of Religion and Hip Hop, by Monica Miller (2013)

Tropical Theta Functions and Log Calabi-Yau Surfaces

We generalize the standard combinatorial techniques of toric geometry to the study of log Calabi-Yau surfaces. The character and cocharacter lattices are replaced by certain integral linear manifolds described by Gross, Hacking, and Keel, and monomials on toric varieties are replaced with the canonical theta functions which GHK defined using ideas from mirror symmetry. We describe the tropicalizations of theta functions and use them to generalize the dual pairing between the character and cocharacter lattices. We use this to describe generalizations of dual cones, Newton and polar polytopes, Minkowski sums, and finite Fourier series expansions. We hope that these techniques will generalize to higher-rank cluster varieties.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00029-015-0221-y, Selecta Math. (2016