Friends are a Church

This subject is presented for consideration in view of the fact that a very general misunderstanding exists as to what Friends are from an organization view-point. This is because there is not a unity of thought among the various groups which use the name Friends, as to what we n.re and what we stand for. The situation is brought prominently into view through the fact that it has, in an unfortunate manner, been introduced in the public press; this has been to our confusion before the public generally. An outstanding instance (though not the first by any means) is of recent occurrence. An article appeared in the Liberty Magazine of October 30, 1943, under the heading, They Call Themselves Friends - And Mean It.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/quakerbooks/1068/thumbnail.jp

Turning classroom environments into centers of writing

Asking a student to write a paper without the opportunity to TALK about the writing beforehand is like asking members of an orchestra to perform a concert without any instruments. Writing Centers exist to TALK to writers. Individualized writing consultations invite students to think critically about their ideas, to become agents of their own writing and to learn what it’s like to have a conversation about their work in progress. But what if your school has no Writing Center? Providing a learning environment in your classroom that engages your students with ideas and gives them opportunities to talk with their peers about their writing not only fosters their desire to succeed buts helps build their confidence. As teachers it is our responsibility to offer our students numerous opportunities to talk about their writing before they write, to practice their writing before being tested, and to move comfortably and confidently through the complex process that is writing. This article aims to share several of the myriad activities, occasions and kinds of writing I invite my students to participate in throughout the semester: low-stakes writing, personal response papers, creative writing exercises, writing workshops, grading and grids, class presentation ideas, collaborative writing activities and writing through revision

Dispersing blackbirds and starlings from objectionable roost sites

Frightening devices and other methods of dispersing roosting blackbirds and starlings are described along with the techniques for their proper application. In a study in the southeastern United States, exploding shotgun shells and noise bombs were used to disperse roosts of up to 1 million birds. Five roosts containing up to 1 million blackbirds and starlings were 96 to 100% dispersed by two to five people during three to eight evenings of harassment. Dispersal cost between $80 and$535 per roost

"The Structure of Class Conflict in a Kaleckian-Keynesian Model"

This paper seeks to explore this issue of the existence and nature of class conflict within a picture of the economy that could be called Kaleckian-Keynesian. Though the particular model we will use owes somewhat more to Kalecki than Keynes, it hopefully does not violate the spirit of Keynes very much, and in fact it relies rather heavily on Keynes's appreciation of the rentier aspect of capitalism, a matter not discussed much by Kalecki. In addition, combining the ideas of Kalecki and Keynes we will find leads us to insights beyond what each saw by himself.

"The Real Wage And The Marginal Product of Labor"

As I see it, the errors in Keynes's analysis in Chapter Two of the General Theorv were his acceptance of diminishing returns in the short-period relation between output and labor employed and of perfect competition in the product market. These "errors," however, are easily corrected and do not alter Keynes's basic and correct ideas--that employment is determined by aggregate demand, that real wages are determined by aggregate demand given the degree of competition and the level of capital utilization and other determinants of the productivity of labor, and that the supply of labor, at least below full employment, has no effect on either employment or real wages. I would like to reiterate that the formulation we have established here is "Ricardian" rather than neoclassical. Basically all we have said is that the mark-up represents a deduction from the product of labor and that since the mark-up is certainly not procyclical and productivity probably is procyclical, as the "margin" of production is extended, real wages rise. Sraffa (1960, pp. v-vi) has argued that such a use of the term "marginal" is spurious, since the true application of the term "requires attention to be focused on change," while this use of the term, as in Ricardo's discussion of the margin of cultivation, need only be a matter of differences in quality among existing productive facilities rather than changes in scale or in input proportions. We have come a long way from the neoclassical idea of a marginal product of labor, but this should not make either us or Keynes embarrassed about Chapter Two of the General Theory, one of the most interesting and important chapters in the book. Lawlor, Darity, and Horn (1987) noted that Sraffa (1926) had pointed out that the determination of prices and quantities by the interaction of supply and demand necessitates an independence between supply and demand which does not obtain except under very restrictive conditions. Sraffa (1960) extends this argument by showing that scarcity, as in scarce factors of production, is not necessary to determine value and in fact cannot determine value independently of income distribution. Keynes's and Kalecki's work shows that when we take effective demand into account, output is determined solely by demand and distribution by the conditions of competition. Kalecki's and Keynes's work can thus be taken as an Hegelian "supersession" of classical and neoclassical economics when we realize that workers cannot bargain in terms of a real wage and that output not saleable will soon no longer be produced.

Lepton Asymmetries in FCNC Decays of {\Lambda}b

Lepton polarization asymmetries for the flavor-changing neutral current (FCNC) dileptonic decays of {\Lambda}b baryons are calculated using single-component analytic (SCA) and multicomponent numerical (MCN) form factors. We show that these polarization asymmetries are insensitive to the transition form factors and, thus, the effects of QCD in the nonperturbative regime. Therefore, these observables can provide somewhat model independent ways of extracting the Wilson coefficients.Comment: 3 pages, 2 tables, 1 figure, To appear in the proceedings for the Eleventh Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics (CIPANP 2012

The lifetime of electrons, holes and excitons before self-trapping

In this paper we discuss the self-trapping of a carrier or exciton in an insulator. The qualitative differences between small self-trapped molecular polarons and dielectric polarons are stressed. We point out that, for the formation of a molecular polaron or selftrapped exciton, a potential barrier must be penetrated or surmounted by the configuration coordinate, leading to a delay in the self-trapping process. This does not exist for dielectric polarons. The observable consequence of the delay time before self-trapping is discussed, and applications are made to alkali halides and to SOz