Protecting the Viability of the Small Donor in Modern Elections

Campaign finance reform stands as one of the most important issues in today’s modern elections. From national to municipal contests, the influx of large donations places wealthy individuals—and interests—at odds with the average voter. Over the years, volumes of academic and legislative reforms have been proposed that encompass a wide range of electoral subject matter. From Citizens United to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) control mechanisms, solutions on how to change our campaign finance regulatory regime cover a large and diverse area of law and policy. However, the central theme throughout these reforms is maximizing transparency and curbing the undue influence of candidates through large donations

The Case for Federal Higher Education Affordability Standards: Lessons from Other Sectors

Federal higher education benefits are crucial investments for securing the country's future economic competitiveness. But for far too many students, the financial aid programs fail to meet their goal of making college more affordable. An in-depth review of other federal benefit programs in health care and housing provides valuable lessons for rethinking higher education benefits. These programs are structured in a way that guarantees that money provided to individuals will be enough to meet costs. But they also hold other parties accountable to ensure recipients are not being charged more than they can actually afford.As detailed in this report, there are several options policymakers could take to ensure that investments guarantee affordability, simplicity, and certainty for students and families. To accomplish this goal, an affordability guarantee must create clear expectations that financial aid dollars will cover the cost of college, that states cannot continue to pull money away from public colleges, and that institutions will be held accountable for high tuition and burdening students with too much debt. In order to achieve their true aim and full potential, it is time for federal higher education benefits to not just be denominated in dollars but instead guarantee affordability and access for the most vulnerable individuals.

Introduction

The introduction (about 6,000 words) to _The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism_, in three sections: utilitarianism’s place in recent and contemporary moral philosophy (including the opinions of critics such as Rawls and Scanlon), a brief history of the view (again, including the opinions of critics, such as Marx and Nietzsche), and an overview of the chapters of the book

A Probabilistic Approach to Generalized Zeckendorf Decompositions

Generalized Zeckendorf decompositions are expansions of integers as sums of elements of solutions to recurrence relations. The simplest cases are base-$b$ expansions, and the standard Zeckendorf decomposition uses the Fibonacci sequence. The expansions are finite sequences of nonnegative integer coefficients (satisfying certain technical conditions to guarantee uniqueness of the decomposition) and which can be viewed as analogs of sequences of variable-length words made from some fixed alphabet. In this paper we present a new approach and construction for uniform measures on expansions, identifying them as the distribution of a Markov chain conditioned not to hit a set. This gives a unified approach that allows us to easily recover results on the expansions from analogous results for Markov chains, and in this paper we focus on laws of large numbers, central limit theorems for sums of digits, and statements on gaps (zeros) in expansions. We expect the approach to prove useful in other similar contexts.Comment: Version 1.0, 25 pages. Keywords: Zeckendorf decompositions, positive linear recurrence relations, distribution of gaps, longest gap, Markov processe

Marshall University Music Department Presents the Marshall University Symphonic Band Fall Concert, Ben Miller, Conductor, Greg Richmond, Graduate Conductor

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1545/thumbnail.jp

Man without a country: how character complexity primes racial stereotypes

This study examined the role character complexity plays in racial attitudes of television viewers. Previous research suggests that stereotypes and counter-stereotypes play vastly different roles in how people process information. Stereotypes act as automatic cues that call up pre-made judgments upon exposure to them. Meanwhile, counter-stereotypes actually work on a conscious processing level, forcing viewers to think more deeply about individuals when presented with them, skipping the automatic recall mechanism all together. By layering counter-stereotypes and stereotypes together in the same stimulus, this study examined whether the existence of there would be an appreciable difference between viewers exposed to solely stereotypes or both using both implicit and explicit measures. To investigate the relationships between character complexity and racial attitudes, this study used a 2 x 2 factorial experimental design featuring 99 students and the data was analyzed using factorial ANOVAs. In addition to the character complexity variable, an additional exposure variable measured differences between single or repeated exposures of the stimulus videos. This experiment used an Implicit Association Test, a Positive Attitudes Towards Blacks scale and a Black Stereotypes scale to measure racial attitudes. Findings show there was no difference in positive, negative or implicit attitudes between the two complexity conditions. And furthermore, there was also no demonstrated difference between the single- and repeated-exposure conditions

Book Review: American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know

N/