Why the Federal Marriage Amendment is Necessary

The Federal Marriage Amendment seeks to confine marriage to one man and one woman. This article supports the Federal Marriage Amendment because the Amendment reinforces the original design of the Constitution in the face of unchecked judicial review power and the expansion of sexual autonomy. The Federal Marriage Amendment reinforces the idea that the people of the states, not the judiciary, resolve social policy. Also, the Amendment supports a presumption in favor of state legislation on marriage. Although conservatives, such as Yoo and Vulchev, state that the Federal Marriage Amendment opposes federalism, this author contends that the Amendment would preserve federalism by prohibiting federal and state governments from changing the traditional institution of marriage. Marriage is already fragile and weakened by no-fault divorce, promiscuity, and cohabitation. The recognition of same-sex marriage endangers marriage as an institution. The political community has a right and duty to regulate the traditional institution of marriage. Genuine marriage stability through gender complimentarity ensures the well-being of couples and children. Same-sex marriage lacks this essential and necessary quality present in traditional marriages. Thus, the author concludes that the preservation of traditional marriage requires an amendment that establishes substantive principles on the nature of marriage and reinforces traditional marriage against the efforts of those who wish to change it

Church and State: The Current Constitutional Debate in the USA

"Where do we stand today in the constitutional debate regarding Church and State? We are certainly not in the era during which the original understanding of the First Amendment religion clauses was dominant. In the Establishment Clause area, we are still in the Everson era, which began in 1947 and ushered in a new and quite different understanding of establishment. In the Free Exercise area, we are no longer in the Sherbert era, since the Smith case in 1990 – though I will discuss below the “accidental” character of that (partial) return to the original understanding."(...

Motor Control and Reading Fluency: Contributions beyond Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in Children with Reading Disabilities.

Multiple domains of deficit have been proposed to account for the apparent reading failure of children with a reading disability. Deficits in both phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming are consistently linked with the development of a reading disability in young school age children. Less research, however, has sought to connect these two reading related processes to global theories of deficit, such as temporal processing deficits, in the explanation of reading fluency difficulties. This study sought to explore the relationship between aspects of temporal processing, as indexed through measures of motor fluency and control, and measures of reading related processes, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, to word reading fluency. Using structural equation modeling, measures of patterned motor movement were found to be negatively and significantly related to measures of phonological awareness. Measures of oral and repetitive movement were found to be positively and significantly related to measures of patterned movement. Finally, phonological awareness was found to be a significant predictor of word reading fluency both independently and through rapid automatized naming. No direct relationship between measures of motor control and fluency and word reading fluency was found. These findings suggest that temporal processing, as indexed by measures of motor fluency and control, are moderately predictive of the facility with which a child with a reading disability can access, manipulate, and reproduce phonetically based information. Implications for the inclusion of motor based measures in the assessment of children with reading disabilities and future directions for research are discussed

Borehole Stability in Shale

This thesis is concerned with the stability of inclined boreholes. It addresses the mechanical stability of a wellbore as a function of time while also considering the impacts of chemical osmosis, temperature differences between the drilling mud and formation, and the introduction of an impermeable filter cake on the state-of-stress near the wellbore. The stress and pore pressure expressions are derived for the general case of an arbitrarily inclined wellbore subjected to three, unequal, in-situ stresses. It is assumed that the material is the linearly poroelastic and the stress and pore pressure expressions are found by solving the three-dimensional problem using the concept of generalized plane strain. This allows the problem to be decomposed into a poroelastic plane strain, elastic antiplane, and elastic uniaxial problem. There are three sets of equations developed; namely the poroelastic, chemo-poroelastic, and poro-thermoelastic equations. The poroelastic equations are representative of drilling in a fluid-saturated, porous, chemically-inert rock under isothermal conditions. The fully-coupled chemo-poroelastic expressions are also valid under isothermal conditions but take into account the differences in the activities of the water phases of the formation and drilling mud. The poro-thermoelastic expressions are developed by coupling the effects of pore fluid expansion (contraction) to rock deformation. The poro-thermoelastic expressions are applicable when there is a temperature difference between the rock and drilling mud and when the effects of thermal osmosis can be neglected. The stress and pore pressure expressions are derived (for both a permeable and impermeable wall) and are used to develop a wellbore stability design code. The model evaluates for tensile and shear failure by applying either the poroelastic, chemo-poroelastic, or poro-thermoelastic solution (chosen by user) at a specific borehole orientation. The model enables the user to choose either the Mohr-Coulomb or Drucker-Prager shear failure criteria and is capable of analyzing for failure inside the rock. The output generated by the model represents a safe operating zone, which corresponds to the range of mud weights that can be used to avoid shear and tensile failure at a given wellbore trajectory. Several numerical examples are used to examine the effects of time, chemical osmosis, and thermal loading on wellbore failure at the wall and inside the rock. The results indicate that, in general, as time increases the potential for shear and tensile failure also increase. In addition, radial spalling is initiated inside the rock (near the wellbore) at low mud weights that requires a minimum mud weight to overcome. The numerical examples further indicate that chemical osmosis and thermal loading significantly alter the near wellbore pore pressure and stresses which may lead to time-delayed failure. A parametric analysis is also conducted to ascertain the sensitivity of the near wellbore stress and pore pressure to various input coefficients. The parametric study reveals that determining the Poisson’s ratio, undrained Poisson’s ratio, Biot’s constant, Skempton’s pore pressure constant, intrinsic formation permeability, water activity of both the drilling mud and pore fluid, and the thermal diffusivity are critical to determining the mud weight window. The remaining input parameters did not affect the safe operating zone

Predicting Spelling Scores from Math Scores in a Population of Elementary School Students with a Learning Disability

Recent research has begun focusing on the connections between reading and mathematics. Little research, however, has examined connections between mathematics and other reading related skills, such as spelling. Moreover, working memory may a play a significant role in both systems. Results indicated a significant predictive relationship between spelling and mathematics. Furthermore, this relationship was found to be partially mediated by measures of phonological working memory

Beyond a Company of Soldiers: Exploring Phenotypic Integration across the Multivariate Human Growth and Development Phenotype

Traditional studies exploring the interrelationships between growth and development traits have lacked the data necessary to fully describe the multivariate growth and development phenotype and the statistical methodology to quantify the complex interrelationships between varied trait types. Subsequently, human growth and development are often defined by a series of contrasts via the juxtaposition of seemingly disjoint processes in skeletal diaphyseal growth, skeletal ossification and fusion, and development of the dentition. In conjunction with robust data sources from the Subadult Virtual Anthropology Databases (SVAD), this work introduces a Mixed Discrete-Continuous Gaussian copula to explore the multivariate human growth and development phenotype. A copula is a probabilistic function that explicitly models the interrelationships between traits and describes the joint structure of the multivariate relationships.Fifty-four growth traits are collected from the United States sample in SVAD (n = 1,316). These traits include 18 measurements associated with diaphyseal dimensions collected from six long bones, 20 scores of both epiphyseal fusion and primary ossification centers, and 16 scores of dental development across the left-sided mandibular and maxillary dentition. All data are collected from computed tomography (CT) images and includes demographic information such as an individual’s chronological age and biological sex. The joint probability distribution of the 54 growth traits and the underlying dependency structure are fit to a Mixed Discrete-Continuous Gaussian copula using the gradient-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm known as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo within the Stan probabilistic programming environment. Six total copula models are fit: the first model utilizes the full dataset, the next three models use subsets of the full dataset representing the individual developmental stages of infancy, childhood, and juvenile/adolescence, and the last two models use subset of the full dataset representing biological males and females.Results from the full model show that relationships are strongest within each growth module. Further, traits that develop across similar developmental windows show stronger positive correlations as compared to traits that grow and develop during separate periods. These relationships are similar between males and females suggesting that, independent of age, multivariate growth and development processes are the same across the sexes. When considering developmental stages, the results show that the multivariate phenotype presents with different relationships between variables across ontogeny with the strongest relationships between growth and development modules tied to active growth and development periods. Importantly, the skeletal growth, skeletal development, and dental development modules can be further divided into additional units that themselves have various levels of dependence.The copula demonstrates that the relationships between broad growth modules cannot be summarized via a few pairwise correlations taken at one point during ontogeny. Instead, analyses should be conducted with as much trait information as possible and at various points throughout ontogeny. In the future, copulas could also be extended to additional applications in biological anthropology including research in bioarchaeology and paleoanthropology, method formation in forensic anthropology, and the estimation and imputation of missing data. In sum, the Mixed Discrete-Continuous Gaussian copula provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the multivariate human growth and development phenotype and lays the groundwork for future research into the growing, developing, multivariate human

With a Little Help from Our Friends: Social Support as a Source of Well-being and of Coping with Stress

The relationship between one\u27s psycho-emotional and physiological health has long been of interest to social scientists. While many factors have been examined for their impact on causation and prevention, over the past two decades the concepts of social support, stress and well-being have undergone much scrutiny. In this article the authors provide empirical data to enhance our understanding of the interrelatedness of these three concepts. Based on the findings from a study of stress and health in organizations, a model is proposed which elucidates some of the conditions under which social support networks mediate the impact of stress on psychological well-being

Microwave microstrip resonator measurements of Y1Ba2Cu3O(7-x) and Bi2Sr2Ca1Cu2O(8-y) thin films

Radio frequency (RF) surface resistance measurement experiments on high T(sub c) thin films were performed. The method uses a microstrip resonator comprising a top gold conductor strip, an alumina dielectric layer, and a separate superconductivity ground plane. The surface resistance of the superconducting ground plane can be determined, with reference to a gold calibration standard, from the measured quality factor of the half-wave resonator. Initial results near 7 GHz over the temperature range from 25 to 300 K are presented for YBa2Cu3O(7-x) and Bi2Sr2CaCu2O(8-y) thin film samples deposited by an electron beam flash evaporation process. The RF surface resistance at 25 K for both materials in these samples was found to be near 25 milliohms