CONFRONTING SAME-SEX, STUDENT-TO-STUDENT SEXUAL HARASSMENT: RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATORS AND POLICY MAKERS

Student-on-student sexual harassment has been the subject of significant scholarly commentary and numerous court battles. In light of the United States Supreme Court\u27s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, which held that in certain cases students have a cause of action under Title IX against schools for peer sexual harassment, many schools have been advised to consider responses to and ways to prevent student-on-student sexual harassment. When considering corrective and preventative approaches to peer sexual harassment in the schools, educators and policy makers should strongly consider addressing same-sex harassment. Prior to its decision in Davis, a unanimous United States Supreme Court, in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., held that same-sex harassment in the workplace may be actionable under Title VII. Given the judiciary\u27s frequent reliance on Title VII standards in Title IX cases, at least when considering what type of conduct is actionable, Oncale, when read together with Davis, signals the opening of a new avenue for students seeking relief for same-sex peer harassment. This article hopes to offer some insight for educators and policy makers developing responses to same-sex peer harassment. First, it more fully explains the Supreme Court\u27s decisions in Davis and Oncale and their importance to educators. Second, it briefly summarizes recent scholarship concerning the effects of a homophobic school climate on students. Finally, it offers some basic guidance for practice and policy formation

Functionally terminated liquid nitroso fluorocarbon terpolymers

Properties of polymer for conformal coating for electronic circuitry are described. Nitroso fluorocarbon polymers were selected for application. Chemical reactions for production of polymers are discussed. Technique allows regulation of crosslink densities, molecular weight, and viscosity

Mine water outbreak and stability risks : examples and challenges from England and Wales

Abstract Although their frequency of occurrence is rare, the sudden outbreak of mine water from abandoned mines, or collapse of waste rock stores can be environmentally significant and represent significant postclosure legacies. This paper reports on a national survey of abandoned non-coal mine sites where concerns over mine water outbreak or stability are apparent across England and Wales. A range of respondents across environmental regulators and local authorities were consulted to populate a geodatabase. Outbreak risk was highlighted as a documented or suspected concern at 19 mine sites. Typical issues were related to adit blockages and associated perched mine water alongside issues of sudden ingress of surface waters into mines under high flow conditions. The majority of the responses concerning stability issues (72 sites in total) were related to fluvial erosion of riparian waste rock heaps. While successful management of such issues is highlighted in some cases, these are generally isolated examples. In both cases, the fact that stability or outbreak issues are often caused or exacerbated by extreme rainfall events highlights a potential future management issue with the predicted effects of climate change in north west Europe

The Search for a Realistic String Model at LHC

We survey the low-energy supersymmetry phenomenology of a three-family Pati-Salam model constructed from intersecting D6-branes in Type IIA string theory on the T^6/(Z_2 x Z_2) orientifold which possesses many of the phenomenological properties desired in string model-building. In the model, there is no exotic matter in the low-energy spectrum, the correct mass hierarchies for quarks and leptons may be obtained, and the gauge couplings are automatically unified at the string scale. We calculate the supersymmetry breaking soft terms and the corresponding low-energy supersymmetry particle spectra for the model. We find the WMAP constrained dark matter density can be generated in this model in the stau-neutralino and chargino-neutralino coannihilation regions, with expected final states at LHC consisting of low energy leptons and O(GeV) neutrinos. Moreover, we expect final states in the supercritical string cosmology (SSC) scenario to comprise high energy leptons and O(GeV) neutrinos.Comment: 35 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PR

Representation of Dormant and Active Microbial Dynamics for Ecosystem Modeling

Dormancy is an essential strategy for microorganisms to cope with environmental stress. However, global ecosystem models typically ignore microbial dormancy, resulting in major model uncertainties. To facilitate the consideration of dormancy in these large-scale models, we propose a new microbial physiology component that works for a wide range of substrate availabilities. This new model is based on microbial physiological states and is majorly parameterized with the maximum specific growth and maintenance rates of active microbes and the ratio of dormant to active maintenance rates. A major improvement of our model over extant models is that it can explain the low active microbial fractions commonly observed in undisturbed soils. Our new model shows that the exponentially-increasing respiration from substrate-induced respiration experiments can only be used to determine the maximum specific growth rate and initial active microbial biomass, while the respiration data representing both exponentially-increasing and non-exponentially-increasing phases can robustly determine a range of key parameters including the initial total live biomass, initial active fraction, the maximum specific growth and maintenance rates, and the half-saturation constant. Our new model can be incorporated into existing ecosystem models to account for dormancy in microbially-mediated processes and to provide improved estimates of microbial activities.Comment: 38 pages, 2 Tables, 4 Figure

ELF: The electronic learning facilitator

As the world‐wide computer network becomes ubiquitous, new tools have been developed, such as the World Wide Web (WWW), for the delivery of multimedia hypertext‐based documents. Similarly, there has been an explosion in the amount of email, bulletin boards, and Usenet News available. This has led to a major problem of information overload: we are slowly but surely being overwhelmed by the amount of information available to us

Proton Stability and Dark Matter in a Realistic String MSSM

We demonstrate the existence of an extra nonanomalous U(1) gauge symmetry in a three-generation Pati-Salam model constructed with intersecting D6-branes in Type IIA string theory on a T^6/(Z_2 \times Z_2) orientifold. This extra U(1) forbids all dimension-4, 5, and 6 operators which mediate proton decay in the MSSM. Moreover, this results in the effective promotion of baryon and lepton number to local gauge symmetries, which can potentially result in leptophobic and leptophilic $Z'$ bosons observable at the LHC. Furthermore, it is not necessary to invoke R-parity to forbid the dimension-4 operators which allow rapid proton decay. However, R-parity may arise naturally from a spontaneously broken U(1)_{B-L}. Assuming the presence of R-parity, we then study the direct detection cross-sections for neutralino dark matter, including the latest constraints from the XENON100 experiment. We find that these limits are now within required range necessary to begin testing the model.Comment: Expanded discussion of Z' boson phenomenology. Accepted for publication to Physical Review D. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1103.603