Prohibiting Barriers to the Booth: The Case for Limited Nationwide Preclearance Under a Modified Voting Rights Act

The right to vote is fundamental to American democracy, yet for hundreds of years American history has been marked by efforts to restrict voting. Often, voting restrictions disproportionately affect minority voters, through both intentional discrimination and facially-neutral voting laws. Since its 1965 implementation, the Voting Rights Act (“VRA”) has been used to fight discriminatory voting laws through affirmative suits and mandatory federal approval of voting changes for states with a history of voter discrimination. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a crucial part of the VRA, eliminating the requirement that jurisdictions with storied pasts of voter discrimination seek federal approval for voting law changes. Despite this holding, discriminatory voting laws persist and are on the rise nationwide. In the wake of the Court’s holding and renewed state efforts to implement restrictive voting laws, this Note argues for a limited, nationwide expansion of federal preclearance under the VRA to confront modern, wide-ranging threats to voting rights

Quality of Agricultural Produce: Consumer Preferences and Perceptions

The purpose of this research was to gain a greater insight into the characteristics and beliefs consumers draw upon while selecting the produce they purchase. Health and environmental risk perceptions of many agricultural inputs and products were also collected as well as demographic information. Nineteen produce characteristics were ranked by consumers. Locally grown produce and the country of origin were among the least important characteristics while freshness, taste/flavor, cleanliness, health value and absence of pesticides were among the most important characteristics. The survey also showed that most consumers made use of nutritional information and labeling while shopping for food and those who did, felt it aided them in making better purchase decisions. Consumers exhibited a clear preference for low-input methods of agricultural production which minimize the use of pesticides. They believed that there were health benefits to organic produce and that they would purchase more organic produce if it were more readily available. Respondents also indicated that they believed pesticides in general, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides all had significant health and environmental risks. Consumers believed on average that the use of pesticides positively contributes to the cosmetic appearance, quality, and supply of produce. Conversely, they believed that a reduction in pesticide usage would increase both the healthfulness and prices of produce. The results show where consensus and discord exist among consumers beliefs. Issues which have been the result of media campaigns and advertising such as oils used in cooking, tobacco products and alcoholic beverages show a greater degree of consensus than issues which are not often in the public spotlight. There were also areas in which consumers believed that there were inadequacies in the current produce market. Participants did not believe government food safeguards were sufficient to 2 protect public health nor did they believe the experts know enough about the long term effects of pesticide residues. The goal of this research was to provide food marketing agents with a better understanding of consumer purchase behavior, preferences and beliefs. The results are especially encouraging to those developing marketing endeavors for low input produce such as organic and IPM produce.Consumer/Household Economics,

Reconstruction of Trees from Jumbled and Weighted Subtrees

Let T be an edge-labeled graph, where the labels are from a finite alphabet Sigma. For a subtree U of T the Parikh vector of U is a vector of length |Sigma| which specifies the multiplicity of each label in U. We ask when T can be reconstructed from the multiset of Parikh vectors of all its subtrees, or all of its paths, or all of its maximal paths. We consider the analogous problems for weighted trees. We show how several well-known reconstruction problems on labeled strings, weighted strings and point sets on a line can be included in this framework. We present reconstruction algorithms and non-reconstructibility results, and extend the polynomial method, previously applied to jumbled strings [Acharya et al., SIAM J. on Discr. Math, 2015] and weighted strings [Bansal et al., CPM 2004], to deal with general trees and special tree classes

The analysis of exponential signals by maximum likelihood estimation

Peer Reviewe

Experimental study of three-nucleon dynamics in proton-deuteron breakup reaction

Proton–deuteron breakup reaction can serve as a tool to test stateof- the-art descriptions of nuclear interactions. At intermediate energies, below the threshold for pion production, comparison of the data with exact theoretical calculations is possible and subtle effects of the dynamics beyond the pairwise nucleon–nucleon interaction, namely the three-nucleon force (3NF), are significant. Beside 3NF, Coulomb interaction or relativistic effects are also important to precisely describe the differential cross section of the breakup reaction. The data analysis and preliminary results of the measurement of proton-induced deuteron breakup at the Cyclotron Center Bronowice, Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków are presented