Divided Families: New Legislative Proposals Would Needlessly Restrict Family-Based Immigration

New legislative proposals to drastically restrict family-based immigration practically ignore the social and economic benefits of the family-based admissions system for both immigrants and the native-born

Government accounting in the Global South: the design, implementation and use of global solutions for local needs

This chapter examines the impact of globalized accounting and economic reforms on the public sectors of the Global South, focusing particularly on the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Over the last three decades, people living in these countries have experienced debt crises, civil wars, coups and, on top of all that, externally imposed neoliberal economic reforms. Accounting has been an integral part of those imposed 'reforms'

Power relations, ethnicity and privatisation: A tale of a telecommunications company

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the confluence of political and economic interests of the Fijian elite in transforming state assets into private property and financial gain. Drawing on a Habermasian theoretical framework applied to a privatised state monopoly (Telecom Fiji), it is demonstrated how an implementation of privatisation concealed social and political interests. Thus privatisation provided a convenient rhetoric and tool of implementation for social and political gain by a ruling elite. For those inside the Telecom company, the ethos of public service could not withstand the messengers of capitalism with their rhetoric of the need for greater efficiency, effectiveness and consumer awareness. However, as for many other privatisation programmes around the world, the results are not reflected in the improved organisational performance or wellbeing of the ordinary citizen when state monopolies are privatised

Food and Drug Administration Regulation of Food Safety

Food-borne illness remains a major public health challenge in the United States, causing an estimated 48 million illness episodes and 3000 deaths annually. The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), enacted in 2011, gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new tools to regulate food safety. The act emphasizes prevention, enhanced recall authority, and oversight of imported food. The FSMA brings the FDA’s food safety regulation in line with core tenets of public health by focusing on preventing outbreaks, rather than reacting to them, and differentiating between foods and food producers based on the degree of risk they pose. The FSMA also recognizes the increasing importance of imported food and enhances the ability of the FDA to safeguard the U.S. food supply from hazards originating abroad. The act achieves its prevention objectives through requiring food production facilities to establish preventive control plans and by increasing inspection frequency—a shortcoming of the FDA in recent years. The act also enhances the FDA’s ability to respond to food safety problems when they occur. Through pilot projects on food tracing systems and an enhanced surveillance system, the FDA will be have better tools to determine the source of outbreaks. Additionally, the act gives the FDA new mandatory recall authority—a badly needed addition to its enforcement capabilities. In an increasingly globalized food environment, the FSMA gives the FDA new authority to regulate imported food. Among other provisions, the act allows FDA to inspect foreign facilities and to partner with foreign food regulatory agencies to help build capacity. Through new tools and increased enforcement, the FSMA holds great promise for public health. The act, however, leaves several regulatory gaps, including keeping the food safety functions of the USDA and FDA separate. Additionally, the potential of the act to improve food safety may be thwarted by inadequate funding in the current budget environment. The act includes numerous programs for building the capacity of domestic and foreign regulators and food producers. Such programs are essential to an improved food safety system, but require adequate funding from Congress to be fully implemented. In addition to national capacity building, FDA and Congress should fully engage partners in government and industry to improve global food safety at the international level

Efficient tilings of de Bruijn and Kautz graphs

Kautz and de Bruijn graphs have a high degree of connectivity which makes them ideal candidates for massively parallel computer network topologies. In order to realize a practical computer architecture based on these graphs, it is useful to have a means of constructing a large-scale system from smaller, simpler modules. In this paper we consider the mathematical problem of uniformly tiling a de Bruijn or Kautz graph. This can be viewed as a generalization of the graph bisection problem. We focus on the problem of graph tilings by a set of identical subgraphs. Tiles should contain a maximal number of internal edges so as to minimize the number of edges connecting distinct tiles. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the construction of tilings. We derive a simple lower bound on the number of edges which must leave each tile, and construct a class of tilings whose number of edges leaving each tile agrees asymptotically in form with the lower bound to within a constant factor. These tilings make possible the construction of large-scale computing systems based on de Bruijn and Kautz graph topologies.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figure

"On the Beat": New Roles and Challenges for Immigrant Police and Firefighters

The mainstream media, conservative politicians, and even some police organizations continue to promote stereotypes of immigrants as insufficiently "loyal" to America to serve in law-enforcement jobs. Ironically, similar fears were expressed about earlier generations of Irish and Italian immigrants whose dedicated public service helped usher in the modern urban police department. Today, immigrants are once again a vital part of law enforcement as patrol officers and detectives, and in a wide range of police auxiliary roles. Immigrants are also making important contributions to local communities as municipal firefighters and seasonal workers contracted by the federal government to fight deadly and destructive wild fires. America's streets are unquestionably safer and our neighborhoods more peaceful thanks to the growing number of immigrants available to serve and protect. There were about 46,000 foreign-born police officers and detectives and 9,700 foreign-born firefighters on the job as of 2006. Roughly 6 percent of police patrol officers and detectives, and 5 percent of firefighters, were foreign-born. Police are four times more likely to be foreign-born and firefighters are twice as likely to be foreign-born than they were in 1995. Although the foreign-born as a percent of all police and fire department personnel has risen steadily over the past 10 years, it remains well below the foreign-born percent of the total U.S. population. Moreover, it is dwarfed by the percentage of foreign-born workers in "immigrant-heavy" industries like agriculture, construction, and food service. A mong the police, a higher share of the foreign-born are employed as detectives (7.6 percent) than as patrol officers (5.1 percent). This is largely due to the nature of undercover police work, which can involve international crime syndicates as well as global terrorist organizations. Police detectives require special skills to operate in this milieu, including foreign-language fluency and, on occasion, an ability to literally "blend in" with foreign nationals or foreign-born residents of the United States. In New York, which is a major target and arena for global drug and terrorism activities, one-third of the state's police detective force is foreign-born. By contrast, California does not have a disproportionately high proportion of foreign-born police detectives, but 10 percent of the state's patrol officers are foreign-born. Relaxing current U.S.-citizenship requirements for police officers would allow state and local governments to recruit a much larger number of foreign-born applicants to perform vital community-policing roles. In addition, renewed funding for the highly successful COPS community-policing program would enable financially strapped police forces to retain more foreign-born personnel

A comparison of three basketball skill tests with two innate capacity tests.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Letter, 1966 March 31, from Lawrence D. Stewart to Eva Jessye

1 page, Lawrence was the secretary to Ira Gershwin. Porgy and Bess is mentioned. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Willaim Perlberg, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Mr. and Mrs. Louis Calhern are mentioned. Ira Gershwin wrote a small note at the end of the page