Reflecting on 1 October: Using Research to Inform Public Policy and Heal our Community

On October 1, 2017, Las Vegas joined a growing list of cities in the United States home to a mass shooting, including Blacksburg, Virginia; Newtown, Connecticut; San Bernardino, California; Orlando, Florida; Columbine, Colorado; Fort Hood, Texas; Parkland and Jacksonville, Florida and other locations. In the weeks following the tragedy, the nation and the Las Vegas community, including UNLV, responded with tributes to the victims, short- and long-term memorials to those killed and wounded, and calls to investigate the circumstances that led to this tragic event and to find ways to prevent future atrocities. Following the one-year anniversary of the 1 October tragedy, researchers from UNLV and the Brookings Institution continue to explore the impact of 1 October through a variety of approaches. From quantitative exploration, to qualitative analysis, and from oral histories, to social media data collection, the presentations in this community forum explore Las Vegas’s response and offer scholarly research to contribute to better public policy and understanding. Brookings Mountain West, in partnership with UNLV University Libraries, offered Reflecting on 1 October: Using Research to Inform Public Policy & Heal Our Community, a community forum featuring four research presentations, each centered on the 1 October tragedy in Las Vegas. Following the presentations, featured contributors from UNLV and the Brookings Institution responded to questions posed by the moderator

Housing - Las Vegas and the Middle Class

Brookings Mountain West presents an event focusing on housing as part of “Las Vegas and the Middle Class,” a major project exploring public policy initiatives designed to improve the quality of life of the middle class in Las Vegas and to increase the number of people rising to join its ranks. Through independent, non-partisan analysis and policy development, we seek to advance public understanding of the challenges facing the middle class in Las Vegas, as well as barriers to upward mobility. This event features presentations that examine Las Vegas as a model for understanding issues critical to the growth of the middle class. Following the presentations, a panel discussion will allow the speakers to reflect upon the current state and future of the middle class in Las Vegas

The Intellectual Woman’s Cage: Complicating Ideals of Fanon’s “Native Intellectual” in Nervous Conditions

This paper examines—through a post-colonial lens— Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. In particular, this paper analyzes the characters of Tambu, Nyasha, and Maiguru and how their Western education allows them to fit into their roles as “native intellectuals.” Imposing Franz Fanon’s phases of becoming a “native intellectual” onto these strong, educated female characters greatly complicates his term and process. The idea of the native intellectual is most often applied to men. However, in terms of Dangarembga’s work, it is the female characters that rise to this title. In this acquisition of education the female characters are truly “between two worlds” as they battle both the colonizing culture and the intense patriarchy of their own

Culture and activity in aging

The cumulative effects of illness and disability in older age can lead to individuals being less able to make positive decisions about involvement in activities for pleasure and socialization. This lowered self-efficacy can in turn lead to erosion of confidence and ultimately to social exclusion. Older tenants in sheltered housing schemes are at particular risk of isolation and exclusion as the move to age-specific housing is usually triggered by a sudden or gradual decline in ability and/or personal circumstances. In conjunction with this, assumptions that social networks naturally occur in communal retirement communities and that people will individually or collectively arrange activities can lead to peoples' aspirations for meaningful activities in later life being overlooked. This problem is further compounded as housing staff find their time is taken up building maintenance and ensuring that tenants receive basic housing and environmental services. This chapter reports on the findings from a needs analysis that aimed to identify the activities that older tenants in a sheltered housing scheme had enjoyed during their lifetime, were no longer able to do but wanted to resume, and any new interests they were interested in pursuing. This is followed by a description of a one-year activity and culture program developed out of this needs analysis, underpinned by previous work conducted in Sweden

Are speed enforcement cameras more effective than other speed management measures? The impact of speed management schemes on 30mph roads.

This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the impact of various types of speed management schemes on both traffic speeds and accidents. The study controls for general trends in accidents, regression-to-mean effects and migration, separately estimating the accident changes attributable to the impact of the schemes on traffic speed and on traffic volume. It was found that, when judged in absolute terms, all types of speed management scheme have remarkably similar effects on accidents, with an average fall in personal injury accidents of about 1 accident/km/year. In terms of the percentage accident reduction, however, engineering schemes incorporating vertical deflections (such as speed humps or cushions) offer the largest benefits: at 44%, the average reduction in personal injury accidents attributable to such schemes, is twice that at sites where safety cameras were used to control speeds (22%) and they were the only type of scheme to have a significant impact on fatal and serious accidents. Other types of engineering scheme (with a fall of 29% in personal injury accidents) were on average less effective in reducing accidents than schemes with vertical features but more effective than cameras. All types of scheme were generally effective in reducing speeds, with the largest reductions tending to be obtained with vertical deflections and the smallest with other types of engineering schemes

Commuting charges and symmetric spaces

Every classical sigma-model with target space a compact symmetric space $G/H$ (with $G$ classical) is shown to possess infinitely many local, commuting, conserved charges which can be written in closed form. The spins of these charges run over a characteristic set of values, playing the role of exponents of $G/H$, and repeating modulo an integer $h$ which plays the role of a Coxeter number.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages; v2: footnote adde

Development of a Hybrid Photo-Diode and its Front-End Electronics for the BTEV Experiment

This paper describes the development of a 163-channel Hybrid Photo-Diode (HPD) to be used in the RICH Detector for the BTEV Experiment. This is a joint development project with DEP, Netherlands. It also reports on the development of associated front-end readout electronics based on the va_btev ASIC, undertaken with IDEAS, Norway. Results from bench tests of the first prototypes are presented.Comment: Presented at Fourth International Workshop on RICH Detectors, Pylos Greece, June, 2002; to appear in the proceedings. (5 pages, 4 figures

Nevada Surface Transportation

This fact sheet examines how Federal funding is allocated between Nevada counties, while also comparing to other Mountain West states. Elements of major bridge, freeway, and bypass projects in northern and southern Nevada are also compared to show the discrepancies between major infrastructure project funding within the state

Two monopoles of one type and one of another

The metric on the moduli space of charge (2,1) SU(3) Bogomolny-Prasad-Sommerfield monopoles is calculated and investigated. The hyperKahler quotient construction is used to provide an alternative derivation of the metric. Various properties of the metric are derived using the hyperKahler quotient construction and the correspondence between BPS monopoles and rational maps. Several interesting limits of the metric are also considered.Comment: 48 pages, LaTeX, 2 figures. Typos corrected. Version in JHE