Undergraduate Education Abroad in Community Settings: Pedagogical Opportunities for Librarians

As undergraduate possibilities for study and service abroad increase and develop strategically to address local community needs in settings in the Global South, there is greater opportunity for academic librarians to contribute expertise in supporting and facilitating student learning and engagement with research and information concepts and processes. Education abroad experiences are considered high-impact educational practices and, as such, provide excellent vantage points from which to consider contextualizing engagement with the expanded construct of information literacy as described in ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Utilizing a case study of a pilot project, this chapter focuses on initial work to incorporate critical information literacy concepts into international applied learning settings. The setting for this case study is the Monteverde Institute (MVI) in Costa Rica, a Costa Rican non-profit organization that provides a teaching and learning setting and essential infrastructure for North American education abroad programs

Continuous-Time Random Walk with multi-step memory: An application to market dynamics

A novel version of the Continuous-Time Random Walk (CTRW) model with memory is developed. This memory means the dependence between arbitrary number of successive jumps of the process, while waiting times between jumps are considered as i.i.d. random variables. The dependence was found by analysis of empirical histograms for the stochastic process of a single share price on a market within the high frequency time scale, and justified theoretically by considering bid-ask bounce mechanism containing some delay characteristic for any double-auction market. Our model turns out to be exactly analytically solvable, which enables a direct comparison of its predictions with their empirical counterparts, for instance, with empirical velocity autocorrelation function. Thus this paper significantly extends the capabilities of the CTRW formalism

Seek Ways to Minimize the Mushrooming Alternative Minimum Tax

The alternative minimum tax (AMT) is reaching a broader segment of individuals. Yet, many of these taxpayers are not aware of the implications of this tax. Even worse, some of their tax advisors are not as informed as they should be. By identifying items that trigger the individual AMT, taxpayers and their advisors have greater opportunities to develop strategies to avoid the special tax. The AMT is essentially a parallel tax system that involves a separate tax calculation from the regular income tax. The AMT calculation is then compared to the income tax figured under the normal manner. The taxpayer pays the higher of the two amounts. With proper planning, many individuals can avoid or at least reduce their AMT liability. For best results, these individuals should enlist the aid of a tax professional to perform pro forma calculations throughout the year and identify the AMT potential of transactions sufficiently in advance for the taxpayer to plan accordingly. In instances where the AMT-producing transaction is still worthwhile, the taxpayer can take steps to raise the necessary cash to pay the tax