State Power to Regulate Alcohol Under the Twenty-First Amendment: The Constitutional Implications of the Twenty-First Amendment Enforcement Act

Over forty states have direct shipment laws prohibiting, or severely limiting, an individual\u27s ability to purchase wine from outside of the state and have it shipped home via a common carrier Congress recently proposed a bill entitled the Twenty first Amendment Enforcement Act (Enforcement Act ) that would authorize State Attorneys General to bypass the state courts and bring action in the federal courts to enforce direct shipment laws. This Note argues that direct shipment laws are unconstitutional, and that the proposed Enforcement Act cannot enable states to enforce these unconstitutional state laws

When Helping Hurts: An Ideographic Critique of Faith-Based Organizations in International Aid and Development

Using ideographic critique as a subset of rhetorical analysis, this paper critically examines the efficacy and ethicality of American Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) in international aid and development. Through tracking case studies both domestically and abroad, this thesis evaluates the very real impacts that development efforts imprint on vulnerable populations by exploring questions of coercion and constitutive rhetoric. This thesis begins by providing a robust overview of ideographs and constitutive rhetoric as defined by scholars McGee, Cloud, Conduit, Luciates, and Charland then pairs this methodology with coded data taken from a sample group of some of the most prominent FBOs in the world. Highlighting ideographs like “development,” “stewardship,” and “family values” I follow three distinct narratives to trace the root cause of structural violence enacted against the LQBTQIA community in Uganda and negative side effects of unexamined “voluntourism.” My findings build on recent mentalities in development literature (referencing cycles of dependency and neo-colonialism), trace the identity creation of the Religious Right in American politics, document the rapid rise of state-funded FBOs, and deconstruct the rhetorical myth that “Homosexuality is un-African.” Ultimately, I argue that the terms “FBO,” “Religious Right,” and “Christian” have become ideographs unbeknownst to the American public. As a result of this, these groups which ironically possess the best intentions to “help” and “save” others have inadvertently done more harm than good by adopting damning rhetoric

Tuberculosis: Illegal Immigrants and Deadly Spread

Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It most commonly affects the lungs, but it can develop elsewhere in the body. Untreated, tuberculosis usually leads to death. If tuberculosis is treated but consumption of the proper medicine is terminated prematurely, the bacteria can mutate into multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). In the United States, the largest percentage of people with tuberculosis are foreign-born individuals. This is due to a number of factors, including cultural stigmas associated with tuberculosis and a hesitancy to get treatment. This is an especially prevalent issue in the case of illegal immigrants. First of all, these illegal immigrants probably were not screened for tuberculosis before arriving in the US, and therefore may not even know when they are infected. Second of all, even if they are aware that they are sick, most of them will avoid treatment because they fear being deported. The situation is only worsened by laws such as California’s Proposition 187, introduced in 1994, which denies healthcare to illegal immigrants and requires doctors to report them to the immigration authorities. This law removes both the motivation and the resources for illegal immigrants to get treated for tuberculosis. Instead of fixing the problem of immigration, laws like Prop 187 make the tuberculosis situation in the United States worse, because they increase the likelihood that untreated immigrants will spread the disease to those around them

Measuring arts integration teacher effectiveness in non-arts classrooms through student growth

John Dewey is known as the father of American experiential education. His views on building understanding in children through experiences in a correlated curriculum continue to influence educational practice to this day. His writings and experiments with experiential education also influenced music and arts education, most recently through the formation and implementation of arts integration programs. Several well-known arts integration program leaders cite Dewey as a foundational figure in the existence of their initiatives. While influenced by Dewey, programs such as the Kennedy Center Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA) and the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE) also are directly connected to the modern testing movement, and often gauge program success through reporting on a comparative analysis of standardized test scores. Current teacher evaluation models also measure student growth, along with teacher effectiveness, through the use of student test scores. Several arts education figures make an argument against measuring success in the arts through the use of test scores, stating that the true impact of study in the arts cannot be measured in this way. This study piloted a model of measuring growth in arts integration classrooms through the use of the Tennessee Fine Arts Student Growth Measures (TFASGM) system, a portfolio-based teacher evaluation and student growth measurement model. Teachers worked in control and treatment groups to implement the TFASGM in general education classrooms. Along with using the model, a teacher treatment group received targeted arts integration training, and through the model’s results, the impact of the training through teacher effect scores was also measured. Results showed teachers receiving arts integration training produced more significant student growth, and had a greater effect on student performance. Higher levels of arts integration that are more closely aligned with Dewey’s experiential education philosophy, such as process-based learning and the exploration of concepts common to arts and non-arts subjects, were also observed. More study, including a wider-scale implementation of the TFASGM in arts integration classrooms, is needed to make more substantial conclusions. However, this study demonstrates the viability of a growth-based arts teacher evaluation model in arts integration classrooms, and a new way of reporting on the success of arts integration programs that is in line with Dewey’s experiential, growth-based philosophy

NMDA Receptor Inhibition on Rodent Optimal Decision-Making in the Diminishing Returns Task

There has been growing interest in using N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists as treatments for mood disorders, but there is still much to learn about their cognitive effects. Research shows NMDA receptors can affect decision-making, and the antagonist MK-801 has had varying effects in rodents. Specifically, some have reported impairments in working memory while foraging behaviors remained intact, while others have demonstrated changes in choice behavior related to delay or risk in behavior tasks. We investigated the role of NMDA receptors in the specific paradigm of optimal decision-making to further confirm MK-801’s effects and to explore whether inhibiting NMDA receptors alters optimal decision-making processes. To accomplish this, we used the Diminishing Returns task, in which rats were placed in a chamber containing two levers that returned rewards after delays. One lever had a fixed delay (FD) returning a reward after 10 s. The other lever had a progressive delay (PD) that increased by 1 s after each press. The task included two conditions allowing rats to change the delay schedule: no-reset and reset. In both conditions, there was an optimal response rate that returned the most rewards at the least amount of delay. A total of 24 male and female Sprague-Dawley rats were injected with doses of MK-801 (0.06 mg/kg, 0.1 mg/kg, 0.2 mg/kg) and saline as the control before testing in the task. We hypothesized MK-801 would diminish the ability to make optimal decisions. In the no-reset condition, rats on the 0.2 mg/kg dose made significantly more choices for the PD lever compared to the other treatments (56.9% ± 4.8%). In the reset condition, females made significantly more PD lever presses than males after receiving saline (females: 93.8% ± 1.1%, males: 88.7% ± 1.8%). Also, males and females on the 0.2 mg/kg dose made more optimal sequences of choices (females: 3.38 ± 0.87, males: 6.48 ± 1.67). These results reveal complex effects of sex and NMDA receptors on optimal foraging behaviors and overall task responsiveness. Therefore, the findings suggest inhibiting NMDA receptors may not detrimentally affect the cognitive mechanisms involved in optimal decision-making as it is measured in this task

Payment Schemes and Moral Hazard

In a principal-agent relationship, the principal offers a take-it-or-leave-it contract to the agent, who decides to either accept it or not. In game theory terminology, the principal agent relationship is a Stackelberg game in which the principal is the leader, proposing the contract, and the agent is the follower, choosing to accept or reject the proposal. Examples of such relationships are plentiful, such as a principal bank manager hiring an agent employee to work as a teller, a principal land-owner acting hiring an agent farmer to grow crops on her land, or an insurance company offering a home insurance plan to a homeowner. The principal-agent problem concerns how the principal should structure the proposed contract to best incentivize the agent to perform in the way the principal would prefer, taking into account that there are informational asymmetries between the principal and the agent due to the agent having some kind of private information. Information asymmetries between principal and agent fall into two categories: the agent might have private information about their own characteristics, which gives rise to adverse selection problems; or the agent might have private information about what actions he takes after agreeing to the contract, which gives rise to moral hazard problems. In this paper, I focus on a model with moral hazard. The texts by Kreps [3] and Salanié [5] both offer good expositions of canonical adverse selection and moral hazard problems, which I used as a starting point for this paper. The survey of different extensions of the principal-agent model by Sappington [6] provided a high-level guide to different sub-problems and primary sources. To motivate the model analyzed in this paper, suppose you own several tracts of land that are suitable for agriculture. You want to set up farms on these tracts of land, but you lack the time or expertise to farm the land yourself. You decide, then, to hire several farmers to set up and manage farms on your land. The farmers work year-round and, come harvest time, you pay each of them a sum of money based on their total production. Your challenge is to decide how much money to pay each farmer. Ideally, you would like to be able to pay each worker for the amount of effort that they put in. Unfortunately, you are only able to observe each farmer\u27s output, and there are factors other than the farmer\u27s effort level that affect output. For instance, the amount of rainfall is a random variable that affects all farmers\u27 output equally, but which you are unable to observe. There are also idiosyncratic random variables unique to each farmer that represent the effects of soil condition, pests, and other similar concerns on the tract of land that farmer is working. All else equal, each farmer would prefer to work as little as possible, because they find working displeasurable. As the principal, however, you want the farmers to work as hard as is necessary to maximize your profits. The problem you face is how to structure the farmers\u27 payment scheme so as to align their incentives with your own. The following analysis will compare individual contracts, in which each agent\u27s payment is based only on the realized magnitude of their output, and tournament payment schemes, in which each agent\u27s payment is based only on the ordinal ranking of their realized output relative to that of all other agents\u27. Much of the model notation as well as the results from Section 5 are an expanded exposition of results from a paper by Green and Stokey [1]. Lazear and Rosen [4] provided helpful intuition for the comparison of contracts and tournaments, and some of the results from earlier sections of the paper are due to Grossman and Hart [2]