Person to Person in France

While still in the midst of their study abroad experiences, students at Linfield College write reflective essays. Their essays address issues of cultural similarity and difference, compare lifestyles, mores, norms, and habits between their host countries and home, and examine changes in perceptions about their host countries and the United States. In this essay, Katherine Thomas describes her observations during her study abroad program at the American University Center of Provence in Marseilles, France

Low-Income Subsidies for the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit: The Impact of the Asset Test

Assesses the impact of the requirement that low-income individuals with Medicare meet an asset test in order to receive additional help paying premiums and cost sharing under the new Medicare drug benefit. Raises questions about the equity of the test

Nurturing Compassion Development Among College Students: A Longitudinal Study

Little research exists on the development of compassion among college undergraduates. This study tracks changes in compassion and identifies factors associated with these changes over the course of undergraduate students’ college careers, from the time of admittance to the time of graduation. Compassion levels assessed at the point of college entrance accounted for 25% of the variance in compassion at the time of graduation. These findings provided evidence for the notion that compassion can continue to be cultivated once in college. Predictors such as diversity training, the frequency of religious service attendance, participation in community-based service-learning, political identification, and feeling valued as a member of the university community accounted for an additional 10% of the variance in compassion scores at the time of graduation. Results suggest that compassion development in college students may increase through the use of particular intentional educational experiences

Authority and Esteem Effects of Enhancing Remote Indigenous Teacher-Assistants' Mathematics-Education Knowledge and Skills

The interaction between Australia's Eurocentric education and the complex culture of remote Indigenous communities often results in Indigenous disempowerment and educational underperformance. This paper reports on a mathematics-education research project in a remote community to support Indigenous teacher assistants (ITAs) in mathematics and mathematics tutoring in an attempt to reverse Indigenous mathematics underperformance. It discusses teachers' and ITAs' power and authority within school and community, describes the project's design, and summarises the project's results in terms of affects and knowledge. It draws implications on the relation between ITA professional development (PD), affect, esteem, knowledge, authority, teacher-ITA partnerships, and enhanced Indigenous mathematics outcomes

"Pricing the major hub airports"

Implementing congestion pricing at twenty-seven major US airports would reduce delays by thirteen passenger-years and one thousand aircraft-hours every day, saving three to five million dollars. Chicago and Atlanta would save about one thousand dollars per aircraft. Airport revenues would increase about eleven million dollars daily. A bottleneck model with stochastic queues estimates substantial welfare gains whether or not airlines internalize self-imposed delays. Erroneously imposing fees from the non-internalizing specification on internalizing airlines, however, would be a costly mistake. The model calculates equilibrium traffic rates, queuing delays, layover times, connection times, and congestion fee schedules by minute of the day.airport congestion pricing, stochastic queuing, bottleneck model.

Empowering statistical methods for cellular and molecular biologists.

We provide guidelines for using statistical methods to analyze the types of experiments reported in cellular and molecular biology journals such as Molecular Biology of the Cell. Our aim is to help experimentalists use these methods skillfully, avoid mistakes, and extract the maximum amount of information from their laboratory work. We focus on comparing the average values of control and experimental samples. A Supplemental Tutorial provides examples of how to analyze experimental data using R software