Homeownership is Still Out of Reach for Millions of Households

Homeownership has long been the leading source of household wealth in the U.S. However, the most recent housing crash stripped many Americans of much of their wealth, as home values plummeted and millions of homes went into foreclosure. These losses were especially painful for homeowners of color, who lost a greater share of wealth in the crash and have rebuilt their wealth more slowly in the recovery. Now, as the housing market recovers and interest rates remain low, many Americans find themselves without the savings or access to credit necessary to be able to purchase a home. Although homeownership is not the best option for every household, many Americans who could greatly benefit from it are still excluded

Urban Catholic High Schools and Disadvantaged Females

The purpose of this study was to discover the life experiences of disadvantaged female graduates of urban Catholic high schools and what they say about the capacity of Catholic education to meet their academic, emotional, social, and spiritual needs. Based on narrative inquiry, this study was conducted using a series of in-depth, semistructured interviews to elicit the life experiences of 5 participants. Twelve common personal characteristics emerged directly from the narratives of the participants and provided the backdrop for two patterns: (a) the importance of education, and (b) the importance of relationships. This study found the high school experiences met the academic needs of all participants, but the different school sites varied in their ability to meet the emotional, social, and spiritual needs. This study also found four characteristics interacted in creating the Catholic school culture: (a) building relationships, (b) promoting a sense of community, (c) supporting a caring and nurturing environment, and (d) emphasizing respect for all members of the school community

Creating Network Attack Priority Lists by Analyzing Email Traffic Using Predefined Profiles

Networks can be vast and complicated entities consisting of both servers and workstations that contain information sought by attackers. Searching for specific data in a large network can be a time consuming process. Vast amounts of data either passes through or is stored by various servers on the network. However, intermediate work products are often kept solely on workstations. Potential high value targets can be passively identified by comparing user email traffic against predefined profiles. This method provides a potentially smaller footprint on target systems, less human interaction, and increased efficiency of attackers. Collecting user email traffic and comparing each word in an email to a predefined profile, or a list of key words of interest to the attacker, can provide a prioritized list of systems containing the most relevant information. This research uses two experiments. The functionality experiment uses randomly generated emails and profiles, demonstrating MAPS (Merritt\u27s Adaptive Profiling System)ability to accurately identify matches. The utility experiment uses an email corpus and meaningful profiles, further demonstrating MAPS ability to accurately identify matches with non-random input. A meaningful profile is a list of words bearing a semantic relationship to a topic of interest to the attacker. Results for the functionality experiment show MAPS can parse randomly generated emails and identify matches with an accuracy of 99 percent or above. The utility experiment using an email corpus with meaningful profiles, shows slightly lower accuracies of 95 percent or above. Based upon the match results, network attack priority lists are generated. A network attack priority list is an ordered list of systems, where the potentially highest value systems exhibit the greatest fit to the profile. An attacker then uses the list when searching for target information on the network to prioritize the systems most likely to contain useful data

The challenges of and opportuniies in using a literature-based assignment in a composition class

This thesis explores issues surrounding the question of using a literature-based assignment to teach composition at the college freshman level. Following a review of the critical debate on the use of literature in the composition classroom, spanning the last five decades, a specific work of literature is used as the basis for a writing assignment to be given to a freshman composition class

Temporal distortion of annual modulation at low recoil energies

We show that the main features of the annual modulation of the signal expected in a WIMP direct detection experiment, i.e. its sinusoidal dependence with time, the occurrence of its maxima and minima during the year and (under some circumstances) even the one-year period, may be affected by relaxing the isothermal sphere hypothesis in the description of the WIMP velocity phase space. The most relevant effect is a distortion of the time-behaviour at low recoil energies for anisotropic galactic halos. While some of these effects turn out to be relevant at recoil energies below the current detector thresholds, some others could already be measurable, although some degree of tuning between the WIMP mass and the experimental parameters would be required. Either the observation or non-observation of these effects could provide clues on the phase space distribution of our galactic halo.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, typeset with ReVTeX4. The paper may also be found at http://www.to.infn.it/~fornengo/papers/distortion.ps.g

Protection of Biodiversity in the Agriculture : Endangered Animal Breeds and Plant Varieties in Estonia

REVERSE is an European Interregional Cooperation Programme INTERREG IVC project. The interregional cooperation programme enables the regions of Europe to share knowledge and experience in various areas of life. The objective of REVERSE project is to promote the conservation of biological and landscape diversity in Europe by identifying the relevant successful actions and encouraging their implementation in various European regions. In the course of the project, the project partners related to the conservation of natural and cultivated biodiversity exchange and introduce their experiences. The partners are regional authorities and public establishments, which have for a long time been involved in the protection of biological and landscape diversity. They work on varied and complementary subjects such as in situ conservation of species, gene banks, the preservation of indigenous breeds, old varieties and gene pool, the management of natural and industrial landscapes, the regional strategies for the conservation of biodiversity (ecological corridors, green belts, etc.), the local legislation for the protection of biodiversity, environmental education, etc.The publication has been prepared within the project REgional exchanges and policy making for protecting and valorising biodiVERSity in Europe (Reverse) of EU INTERREG IVC programme and issued with the support of Environmental Investment Centre

Rural Facility Electric Power Quality Analysis

This report gives results of a recently completed data collection and analysis project investigating electric power quality of two isolated utility systems in Alaska. This is the second phase of a similar effort reported in 1984 which provided the first comprehensive power quality data from four small Alaskan communities. In this report, second generation instrumentation is described and comprehensive data and data analyses are presented. These data are important because of the increased use throughout Alaska of electrical and electronic equipment that may be damage by power system disturbances.Abstract - iv 1.0 Introduction - 1 1.1 Site descriptions - 1 1.2 Power quality definitions and disturbance analyzzer outputs - 2 2.0 Second Generation Instrumentation - 4 2.1 Hardware - 4 2.2 Software development and utilization - 8 3.0 Power System Disturbance Data - 9 3.1 Kotzebue site - 10 Figure Descriptions - 10 3.1.1 808: - 10 3.1.2 626: - 13 3.1.2.1 Impulse - 13 3.1.2.2 Sag - 16 3.1.2.3 Surge - 18 3.1.2.4 Frequency Disturbances - 21 3.1.2.5 Voltages - 23 Figures K1-K85 - 24-66 3.2 Tazlina site - 67 Figure Descriptions - 67 3.2.1 808: - 67 3.2.2 626: - 71 3.2.2.1 Impulse - 1 3.2.2.2 Sag - 74 3.2.2.3 Surge - 77 3.2.2.4 Frequency Disturbances - 81 3.2.2.5 Voltages - 83 Figures T1 - T102 - 85-135 3.3 Power system disturbance data summary - 136 3.3.1 Kotzebue site - 136 3.3.2 Tazlina site - 142 4.0 Conclusions - 147 5.0 Acknowledgements - 154 6.0 References - 154 7.0 Selected Bibliography - 155 8.0 Appendix