Back to the Drawing Board: Revisiting the Supreme Court\u27s Stance on Partisan Gerrymandering

In the United States, state legislatures have drawn voting districts to achieve desired election results for hundreds of years. Dating back to the James Madison presidency, various legislatures and iterations of the U.S. Supreme Court have wrestled with the legal and constitutional issues that stem from the practice known as “gerrymandering.” While courts and legislatures have, at times, been successful in eliminating some of the more sinister uses of the tactic, such as racially motivated district-line drawing, gerrymandering inspired by partisan motives remains. Continual improvements in technology coupled with an increasingly divided political culture mean that partisan gerrymandering is at risk of becoming more effective than ever. As a result, the voices of individuals with political ideologies opposing those of the sitting state legislatures risk being quieted to barely audible whispers. Until this year, however, the Supreme Court had contented itself to stand idly by, firmly refusing to wade into the legal and constitutional muck that is partisan gerrymandering. This Note explores the uses and effects of partisan gerrymandering by modern state legislatures. It then delves into the contentious history of the partisan gerrymandering question at the Supreme Court level, with special focus on a concurring opinion by Justice Kennedy in which he proposed a solution for how to handle future partisan gerrymandering issues. This Note analyzes the validity of Justice Kennedy’s solution and ultimately concludes that his proposal has sound legal and practical support and would allow courts to hold unconstitutional efforts to gerrymander along political lines

A Meta-Analysis of Alternative Water Sources

Roughly one half of the Earth’s population suffers from shortage or lack of clean water. While many innovations and products have been created to address this Global Water Crisis, no comparisons have been done as to which innovations and products are the best overall choice for philanthropic investment. The crisis can be broken down into three specific crises including the transportation crisis, the access crisis, and the sanitation crisis. The study examined fifteen innovations and products, targeted to address the three crises to determine which innovation in each group is the overall smart investment. Pulse tool was used to create reports of data comparing the innovations and products to one another. Findings concluded that the Hippo Roller is the smart investment for transportation of water, the Treadle Pump is the smart investment for gaining access to water, and the Filtron and the Mobile MaxPure are the equally smart investments for sanitizing water. Therefore, for future development of social innovation comparison, it is recommended that an investor look at the overall benefits of an innovation before donating money to that cause

The linear sampling method for the inverse electromagnetic scattering by a partially coated bi-periodic structure

In this paper, we consider the inverse problem of recovering a doubly periodic Lipschitz structure through the measurement of the scattered field above the structure produced by point sources lying above the structure. The medium above the structure is assumed to be homogenous and lossless with a positive dielectric coefficient. Below the structure is a perfect conductor partially coated with a dielectric. A periodic version of the linear sampling method is developed to reconstruct the doubly periodic structure using the near field data. In this case, the far field equation defined on the unit ball of R^3 is replaced by the near field equation which is a linear integral equation of the first kind defined on a plane above the periodic surface.Comment: 16 pages, Submitted for publicatio

Land-use effects on soil-water retention characteristic

Tillage can negatively affect soil physical properties such as bulk density, organic matter content, and soil hydraulic properties, which in turn affect how plants grow. The objective of this study was to evaluate water retention characteristics of a Jay silt loam soil under cultivated agriculture and native tallgrass prairie in northwest Arkansas. Air-dry soil samples collected from 0-10 cm depth were re-wet with varying amounts of distilled water to create a range of water contents. After overnight equilibration, the water potential was measured on the re-wet soil samples using a dewpoint potentiameter. The relationship between water potential (Ψ) and water content (θv) for the cultivated agricultural and undisturbed prairie soil was modeled using the equation Ψ = aθv –b, where a and b are coefficients determined from fitting the data and represent the water retention characteristics for the soil of the two different land uses. The a and b coefficients did not differ significantly due to land use. Therefore, the results of this study did not support our hypothesis that agricultural land use significantly affects water retention characteristics. However, increasing the number of soil samples in which the water potential was measured could have sufficiently decreased the variability in the a and b coefficients so that significant differences in water retention characteristics as a result of land use could have been demonstrated

Red Flour Beetle Response to Traps with Prior Captures

The red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) is a major pest of food facilities such as flour mills and is often monitored using pitfall type traps with a food oil and pheromone attractant. Previous research had indicated that prior captures of beetles could increase beetle behavior captures in a trap. Here we used a more realistic bioassay to evaluate how the number of beetles previously captured include beetle captures in traps. Results showed no significant impact of prior captures on the number of red flour beetles captured in a trap. There were some trends suggested in the results that warrant further study to investigate, perhaps by focusing on individual beetle behavior at traps rather then using groups of beetles

Fast and Compact Regular Expression Matching

We study 4 problems in string matching, namely, regular expression matching, approximate regular expression matching, string edit distance, and subsequence indexing, on a standard word RAM model of computation that allows logarithmic-sized words to be manipulated in constant time. We show how to improve the space and/or remove a dependency on the alphabet size for each problem using either an improved tabulation technique of an existing algorithm or by combining known algorithms in a new way