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Research & Action Report, Fall/Winter 2006, Wellesley Centers For Women, Rangita De Silva-De Alwis

Research & Action Report

In this issue:

WCW International Programs Reach East

New Staff Examine Risks, Change, Resilience in Relationships

Critical Mass on Corporate Boards: Why Three or More Women Enhance Governance

Afterschool Matters Occasional Paper Fall 2006, National Institute On Out-Of-School Time

Afterschool Matters

The Art of Democracy / Democracy as Art: Creative Learning in Afterschool Comic Book Clubs
By Michael Bitz
Over the past three years, hundreds of community-based afterschool comic book clubs have been launched in cities across the United States. These clubs have drawn in thousands of underserved youths in grades 1–12. In these clubs, children plan, write, sketch, design, and produce original comic books and then publish and distribute their works for other children in the community to use as learning and motivational tools. This synthetic and analytic research project explores the dynamics, outcomes, and impacts of afterschool comic book …

Labor Market Shocks And Retirement: Do Government Programs Matter?, Courtney C. Coile, Phillip B. Levine

Economics Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines how unemployment affects retirement and whether the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and Social Security (SS) system affect how older workers respond to labor market shocks. To do so, we use pooled cross-sectional data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) as well as March CPS files matched between one year and the next and longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS). We find that downturns in the labor market increase retirement transitions. The magnitude of this effect is comparable to that associated with moderate changes in financial incentives to retire and to the threat of …

Wellesley Bulletin [2006-2007], Wellesley College

The Wellesley College Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Research & Action Report, Spring/Summer 2006, Wellesley Centers For Women, Allison Tracey

Research & Action Report

In this issue:

How Legalization of Same-Sex Marriage Has Influenced Massachusetts Couples

The Methods Behind Passionate Science

Open Circle: Making a Difference
Open Circle

WCW Sponsors Violence against Women Conference

Assessing The Impact Of Job Loss On Workers And Firms, Kristin F. Butcher, Kevin F. Hallock

Faculty Research and Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Afterschool Matters Occasional Paper Spring 2006, National Institute On Out-Of-School Time

Afterschool Matters

Many Versions of Masculine: An Exploration of Boys’ Identity Formation through Digital Storytelling in an Afterschool Program
By Glynda A. Hull, Nora L. Kenney, Stacy Marple, & Ali Forsman-Schneider
Both scholarly literature and popular media often depict predominantly negative and one-dimensional images of boys, especially African-American boys. Predictions of these boys’ anticipated difficulties in school and adulthood are equally prevalent. This paper reports qualitative research that features case studies of nine urban boys of color, aged nine to eleven, who participated in an afterschool program where they learned to create digital multimedia texts. Drawing on an analysis of the children’s …

Bulls, Bears, And Retirement Behavior, Courtney C. Coile, Phillip B. Levine

Economics Faculty Scholarship

The authors examine the relationship between stock market performance and retirement behavior. They first present a descriptive analysis of the wealth holdings of older households and simulate the labor supply response among stockholders necessary to generate observed retirement patterns. Few house holds, they find, have substantial stock holdings, and these holdings would have to be extremely responsive to market fluctuations to explain observed labor force patterns. The authors then exploit stock market fluctuations since the early 1980s (particularly the boom and bust between 1995 and 2002), along with variation in stock exposure, to generate a double quasi-experiment, comparing the retirement …

Crater Gradation In Gusev Crater And Meridiani Planum, Mars, J. A. Grant, Raymond E. Arvidson, L. S. Crumpler, Matt P. Golombek, B. Hahn, A. F.C. Haldemann, Rongxing Li, L. A. Soderblom, Steven W. Squyres, S. P. Wright, Wesley Andres Watters

Faculty Research and Scholarship

The Mars Exploration Rovers investigated numerous craters in Gusev crater and Meridiani Planum during the first ∼400 sols of their missions. Craters vary in size and preservation state but are mostly due to secondary impacts at Gusev and primary impacts at Meridiani. Craters at both locations are modified primarily by eolian erosion and infilling and lack evidence for modification by aqueous processes. Effects of gradation on crater form are dependent on size, local lithology, slopes, and availability of mobile sediments. At Gusev, impacts into basaltic rubble create shallow craters and ejecta composed of resistant rocks. Ejecta initially experience eolian stripping, …

Spatial Grain Size Sorting In Eolian Ripples And Estimation Of Wind Conditions On Planetary Surfaces: Application To Meridiani Planum, Mars, Douglas J. Jerolmack, David Mohrig, John P. Grotzinger, David A. Fike, Wesley Andres Watters

Faculty Research and Scholarship

The landscape seen by the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity at Meridiani Planum is dominated by eolian (wind-blown) ripples with concentrated surface lags of hematitic spherules and fragments. These ripples exhibit profound spatial grain size sorting, with well-sorted coarse-grained crests and poorly sorted, generally finer-grained troughs. These ripples were the most common bed form encountered by Opportunity in its traverse from Eagle Crater to Endurance Crater. Field measurements from White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, show that such coarse-grained ripples form by the different transport modes of coarse- and fine-grain fractions. On the basis of our field study, and simple …

Range Of The Fractional Weak Discrepancy Function, Alan Shuchat, Randy Shull, Ann N. Trenk

Faculty Research and Scholarship

In this paper we describe the range of values that can be taken by the fractional weak discrepancy of a poset and characterize semiorders in terms of these values. In [6], we defined the fractional weak discrepancy wdF (P) of a poset P=(V,≺) to be the minimum nonnegative k for which there exists a function f:V→R satisfying (1) if a≺b then f(a)+1≤f(b) and (2) if a∥b then |f(a)−f(b)|≤k. This notion builds on previous work on weak discrepancy in [3, 7, 8]. We prove here that the range of values of the function wdF is the set of rational numbers …

Uncollected Short Stories: Lettre Du Cimetière, René Galand

French Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.