Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed

Outlines best-practice strategies historically black colleges and universities in Texas used in the 1990s to lower student loan default rates and avoid losing federal aid, including campuswide collaboration, partnerships, and teaching financial literacy

The stress transmission universality classes of periodic granular arrays

The transmission of stress is analysed for static periodic arrays of rigid grains, with perfect and zero friction. For minimal coordination number (which is sensitive to friction, sphericity and dimensionality), the stress distribution is soluble without reference to the corresponding displacement fields. In non-degenerate cases, the constitutive equations are found to be simple linear in the stress components. The corresponding coefficients depend crucially upon geometrical disorder of the grain contacts

Complete Positivity for Mixed Unitary Categories

In this article we generalize the \CP^\infty-construction of dagger monoidal categories to mixed unitary categories. Mixed unitary categories provide a setting, which generalizes (compact) dagger monoidal categories and in which one may study quantum processes of arbitrary (infinite) dimensions. We show that the existing results for the \CP^\infty-construction hold in this more general setting. In particular, we generalize the notion of environment structures to mixed unitary categories and show that the \CP^\infty-construction on mixed unitary categories is characterized by this generalized environment structure.Comment: Lots of figure

Responding to the foreclosure crisis - a conference summary

On December 9–10, 2009, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago hosted a conference on mortgage foreclosure policy with the help of the Chicago Community Trust, Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Woodstock Institute.Foreclosure ; Mortgage loans ; Mortgage loans - Law and legislation

Bioassessment of the West Fork of the White River, Northwest Arkansas

The West Fork-White River has been and continues to be an important water resource for northwest Arkansas. It is used recreationally for fishing and swimming, agriculturally as a source of water for livestock and irrigation of crops, it is mined for gravel, used as a receiving stream for municipal wastewater effluent, and contributes to Beaver Lake which provides water for treatment and distribution to most of northwest Arkansas. While these uses have benefited a large segment of the Arkansas population, they have also contributed to the decline in environmental quality of the river. To facilitate the development of appropriate management protocols and assess restoration potential, we provided a biological assessment of the West ForkWhite River to complement studies of its physical and chemical properties. This holistic evaluation can be used presently, and to track changes in the environmental quality of the river in the future

New surveys of UBV photometry and absolute proper motions at intermediate latitude

A photometric and proper motion survey has been obtained in 2 directions at intermediate latitude: ($l=167.5^\circ$, $b=47.4^\circ$; $\alpha_{2000}=9^h41^m26^s$,$\delta_{2000}=+49^\circ53'27''$) and ($l=278^\circ$, $b=47^\circ$; $\alpha_{2000}=11^h42^m56^s$, $\delta_{2000}=-12^\circ31'42''$). The survey covers 7.13 and 20.84 square degrees, respectively. The limiting magnitude is about 18.5 in V for both directions. We have derived the density laws for stars (M$_{V}$ $\ge$ 3.5) as a function of distance from the galactic plane. The density laws for stars follow a sum of two exponentials with scale heights of 240 pc (thin disk) and 790 pc (thick disk), respectively. The local density of thick disk is found to be 6.1$\pm$3 % relative to the thin disk. The kinematical distribution of stars has been probed to distances up to 3.5 kpc above the galactic plane. New estimates of the parameters of velocity ellipsoid have been derived for the thick disk of the Galaxy. A comparison of our data sets with the Besan\c con model star count predictions has been performed, giving a good agreement in the magnitude range V = 13 to 18.Comment: 13 pages, 8 PS figures, To appear in A&