THE IMPACT OF INDIAN GAMING ON EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT, POVERTY AMONG NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES

What is the impact of Indian gaming on educational attainment among Native American tribes? Is there a correlation between Indian gaming and poverty rates? Utilizing a combination of cross-sectional analysis and longitudinal case studies, I examine whether Indian gaming has an impact on educational attainment. I also explore the economic mechanism of how this effect occurs. I analyze the 1990 and 2000 census data in addition to raw data collected from the National Indian Gaming Commission website, which provided the year selected Native American tribes were approved to pursue the establishment of gaming on their reservations. No significance was recorded in the correlation between Indian gaming and the population of 16 to 19 year olds not enrolled in school and not a high school graduate. The cross-sectional analysis of the 2000 census data, along with the data collected from the National Indian Gaming Commission website, also suggests no link exists between Indian gaming and improvements in educational attainment and enrollment. In all the models testing Indian gamings influence on education, the number of years a tribe has operated Indian gaming establishments under the approval of the National Indian Gaming Commission did not prove to have any statistically significant effect on educational attainment as tested by the population 16 to 19 years old not enrolled in school and not a high school graduate and therefore falsifies my hypothesis. My model did show that the population 16 to 19 years old not enrolled in school and not a high school graduate was significantly affected by families living below the poverty line, household per capita income, percent of 16 years and older employed, married couple families, and female headed households. It also provided evidence that the percentage of families living below the poverty line is decreasing and median/per capita household incomes are increasing for all 205 Native American tribes studied and even more so for those tribes that have Indian gaming establishments. Because of the bias measure of Indian gaming as determined by the approval of tribal gaming ordinances by the National Indian Gaming Commission, the goal of my case study research is to provide some explanation for a possible link between Indian gaming and education in my quantitative analysis. I will compare three control groups as identified by tribal affiliation. The first control group will consist of two tribes selected on the criteria that they do not have any form of Indian gaming before the year 2000. The operation of a less profitable Indian gaming establishment provides the conditions for the second control group. And the third control group is comprised of two tribes selected on the provisions that it operates highly successful and profitable gaming establishments. I will also examine their successes in educational attainment as measured by the population not enrolled in school and not a high school graduate. Therefore, I purposefully selected five tribes for my longitudinal case studies: The Lumbee, Navajo, Paiute, Mescalero Apache and Potawatomi tribes. The Lumbee and Navajo tribes did not have any form of Indian gaming during the 1990s and the percentages of their high school graduates and individuals receiving a bachelor\u27s degree were substantially lower and the percent of their population not enrolled in school and not a high school graduate was higher than the Paiute and Potawatomi tribes who have highly successful Indian gaming establishments. The Mescalero Apache tribe is struggling to make profits through Indian gaming and their education measures fall in between these two control groups. These case studies point to other factors that may contribute to educational attainment and school enrollment. Carol J.Ward offers a different perspective on her case study on the Northern Cheyenne Indian students. She believes the problem is more complex than money and found a connection between drop-out rates and community involvement. The contextual elements of the community and reservation did not match the context of the public school which shed some light on the high drop-out rates. The implications for further research include conducting more in-depth case studies to find the processes that might help explain successes of failures in education and compiling a more complete data set detailing the duration of Indian gaming on Native American reservations and testing its impact on education and economic measures

Acute Stroke Multimodal Imaging: Present and Potential Applications toward Advancing Care.

In the past few decades, the field of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) has experienced significant advances in clinical practice. A core driver of this success has been the utilization of acute stroke imaging with an increasing focus on advanced methods including multimodal imaging. Such imaging techniques not only provide a richer understanding of AIS in vivo, but also, in doing so, provide better informed clinical assessments in management and treatment toward achieving best outcomes. As a result, advanced stroke imaging methods are now a mainstay of routine AIS practice that reflect best practice delivery of care. Furthermore, these imaging methods hold great potential to continue to advance the understanding of AIS and its care in the future. Copyright © 2017 by Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc

Restoring the Presumption of Innocence: Protecting a Defendant’s Right to a Fair Trial by Closing the Door on 404(b) Evidence

Congress enacted the Federal Rules of Evidence to govern evidentiary procedures and “eliminate unjustifiable expense and delay.” In criminal cases, for example, Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) seeks to prevent prosecutors from improperly introducing a defendant’s past misdeeds. Nevertheless, prosecutors often attempt to introduce a defendant’s past misconduct to suggest that a defendant has a propensity to commit crimes, which is improper character evidence. Unsurprisingly, 404(b) is one of the most litigated evidence rules and has generated more published opinions than any other subsections of the Rules. And despite efforts to amend Rule 404(b), the rule has remained virtually untouched. This comment proposes two solutions to limit prosecutors from admitting 404(b) evidence. First, Rule 404(b) must be amended to exclude a defendant’s prior bad acts unless the defendant “opens the door.” The rule should also include a misuse provision, which allows the trial court to render a mistrial if it determines the prosecution improperly introduces 404(b) evidence. Alternatively, Rule 404(b) must strengthen the burden of proof and sharply limit the Government’s ability to use a defendant’s prior acts. Further, courts must enforce current disciplinary measures under the Model Code of Professional Responsibility and prevent prosecutors from injecting prejudicial evidence into the defendant’s trial. Strengthening the burden of proof and limiting the Government from misusing a defendant’s prior bad acts, while enforcing misconduct provisions will solidify the presumption of innocence and protect a defendant’s right to a fair and impartial trial

Safe, Remote-Access Swarm Robotics Research on the Robotarium

This paper describes the development of the Robotarium -- a remotely accessible, multi-robot research facility. The impetus behind the Robotarium is that multi-robot testbeds constitute an integral and essential part of the multi-agent research cycle, yet they are expensive, complex, and time-consuming to develop, operate, and maintain. These resource constraints, in turn, limit access for large groups of researchers and students, which is what the Robotarium is remedying by providing users with remote access to a state-of-the-art multi-robot test facility. This paper details the design and operation of the Robotarium as well as connects these to the particular considerations one must take when making complex hardware remotely accessible. In particular, safety must be built in already at the design phase without overly constraining which coordinated control programs the users can upload and execute, which calls for minimally invasive safety routines with provable performance guarantees.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 3 code samples, 72 reference

The assembly history of the nearest S0 galaxy NGC 3115 from its kinematics out to six half-light radii

Using new and archival data, we study the kinematic properties of the nearest field S0 galaxy, NGC 3115, out to $\sim6.5$ half-light radii ($R_\mathrm{e}$) from its stars (integrated starlight), globular clusters (GCs) and planetary nebulae (PNe). We find evidence of three kinematic regions with an inner transition at $\sim0.2\ R_\mathrm{e}$ from a dispersion-dominated bulge ($V_\mathrm{rot}/\sigma <1$) to a fast-rotating disk ($V_\mathrm{rot}/\sigma >1$), and then an additional transition from the disk to a slowly rotating spheroid at $\sim2-2.5\, R_\mathrm{e}$, as traced by the red GCs and PNe (and possibly by the blue GCs beyond $\sim5\, R_\mathrm{e}$). From comparison with simulations, we propose an assembly history in which the original progenitor spiral galaxy undergoes a gas-rich minor merger that results in the embedded kinematically cold disk that we see today in NGC 3115. At a later stage, dwarf galaxies, in mini mergers (mass-ratio $<$ 1:10), were accreted building-up the outer slowly rotating spheroid, with the central disk kinematics largely unaltered. Additionally, we report new spectroscopic observations of a sample of ultra-compact dwarfs (UCDs) around NGC 3115 with the Keck/KCWI instrument. We find that five UCDs are inconsistent with the general rotation field of the GCs, suggesting an \textit{ex-situ} origin for these objects, i.e. perhaps the remnants of tidally stripped dwarfs. A further seven UCDs follow the GC rotation pattern, suggesting an \textit{in-situ} origin and, possibly a GC-like nature.Comment: 22 pages (including 3 pages of Appendix material), 14 figures, published in MNRA