...The state of Louisiana ran by Bobby Jindal administration decided to change the insurance of Louisiana state employees and retirees to help build the reserve back up that dwindled due to miss management. Louisiana’s Office of Group Benefits, which provides health care coverage to 230,000 state employees, retirees and teachers, had $500 million in reserves in 2011. By lowering health premiums for employees and retirees, state agencies also paid less for benefits—and used the money on other budget needs instead, according to analysis by the public Affairs Research Council. But with reserves dwindling rapidly, premiums were increased in July, prescription drug benefits were cut in August and the Jindal administration announced dramatic changes for 2015. All of Louisiana state employees now have to suffer because of mismanagement by state officials. Is it the fault of all 230,000 people covered that the reserves are dwindling? Why do the people have to pay for some narcissist individual that cannot manage money? As a state employee for the past 10 years I have seen my health care coverage decrease. In 2008 the state employees were insured by Humana, which was a great insurance company. Humana had low premiums, great prescription coverage, and good out of pocket cost. Then around 2011 we had to switch to Blue Cross Blue Shield and some huge changes were made in the prescription coverage. Deductibles went up and prescription medicines are no longer covered if there is a generic brand...
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...Debating Citizenship Speech This bill I am presenting to you today was sponsored by Senior Senator of Louisiana, David Vitter. Bill S.60 wants to take away the education of the children of illegal immigrants. Stating right from the summary “prohibit unlawful aliens from being eligible for any postsecondary education benefit unless every citizen and national of this country is eligible to receive that benefit in no less of an amount, duration, or scope.” This bill should not be passed. Of course, the concern is understandable. This time of the century, the height for seeking equality has skyrocketed. However, using the “equality” card in these type of situations is not fair at all. What ways would a regular citizen be unable to attend postsecondary education? The most popular reason is because of money. Yet, the prices continue to go up every year. If a family of illegal immigrants can afford these ridiculously high tuitions fees for their children, or their children are working hard and getting good enough grades on their own accord then they definitely should be able to attend the school they wish to go to. Most unauthorized immigrants have a hard time finding jobs as most companies require paperwork with proof of residency. To think most of these immigrants can afford to send a child to college or university easily is almost ridiculous. So most of these children work hard at school and excel in their studies to get the scholarships they deserve. To take that all away because...
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...education benefits that are not available to all citizens and nationals of the United States. Bill S.60 was first proposed by David Sen Vitter in Louisiana. The bill would prevent illegal immigrants from being able to go to an American college with financial aid. The people that are affected are children that didn’t ask to be born in a country and never receive proper verification. It’s meant to keep immigrants out by limiting our notion of the land of opportunity. It may affect the government by initially saving money because they wouldn’t need it for extra funding. Lowers the job market competition. Many Americans argue that since the parents of illegal aliens don’t pay taxes, their children do not deserve the equal opportunity of higher education and financial aid. They also believe that illegal immigrants are lazy and taking advantage of America’s “generosity”. Many also believe illegal immigrants are criminals and that giving a criminal ‘free money’ is foolish and unethical. What’s unethical is denying children born in the United States a chance to even become someone able to pay the dues of being an American citizen. Getting a necessary higher education is a pathway to citizenship. America was built by immigrants, we are the land of opportunity, let’s not forget where we all came from. "Bill Summary & Status 114th Congress (2015 - 2016) S.60." Bill Summary & Status. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2015. "Should Illegal Immigrants Be Allowed to Get an Education in the U.S.?" Should...
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...Martin Neil Baily Douglas J. Elliott The Brookings Institution July 11, 2013 The Role of Finance in the Economy: Implications for Structural Reform of the Financial Sector Executive Summary The U.S. financial system is critical to the functioning of the economy as a whole and banks are central to the financial system. In addition to providing substantial employment, finance serves three main purposes: Credit provision. Credit fuels economic activity by allowing businesses to invest beyond their cash on hand, households to purchase homes without saving the entire cost in advance, and governments to smooth out their spending by mitigating the cyclical pattern of tax revenues and to invest in infrastructure projects. Banks directly provide a substantial amount of credit in the U.S., but, unlike in almost any other economy, financial markets are the ultimate providers of most credit. Liquidity provision. Businesses and households need to have protection against unexpected needs for cash. Banks are the main direct providers of liquidity, both through offering demand deposits that can be withdrawn any time and by offering lines of credit. Further, banks and their affiliates are at the core of the financial markets, offering to buy and sell securities and related products at need, in large volumes, with relatively modest transaction costs. This latter role is particularly important in the U.S., given the dominance of markets, but is often under-appreciated. Risk...
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...THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING ISSUES IN PHYSICAL XML DATABASE DESIGN Damien Fisher (3065680) Bachelor of Computer Science (Honours) Supervisor: Dr. Raymond Wong Submission Date: October 29, 2003 Abstract Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of XML, a markup language for representing semistructured data. Some of this popularity can be attributed to the success that the semi-structured data model has had in environments where the relational data model has been insufficiently expressive. It is thus natural to consider native XML databases, which are designed from the ground up to support XML data. Developing a native XML database introduces many challenges, some of which we consider here. The first major problem is that XML data is ordered, whereas relational databases operate on set-based data. We examine the ordering problem in great detail in this thesis, and show that while it imposes an unavoidable performance penalty on the database, this penalty can be reduced to an acceptable level in practice. We do this by making use of type information, which is often present in XML data, and by improving existing results in the literature. XML data is frequently queried using XPath, a de facto standard query language. The importance of XPath is increasing, due to its use as a primitive in the more powerful emerging query language, XQuery. It is widely believed that the one of the most promising approaches to evaluating...
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...www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Praise “A must-read resource for anyone who is serious about embracing the opportunity of big data.” — Craig Vaughan Global Vice President at SAP “This timely book says out loud what has finally become apparent: in the modern world, Data is Business, and you can no longer think business without thinking data. Read this book and you will understand the Science behind thinking data.” — Ron Bekkerman Chief Data Officer at Carmel Ventures “A great book for business managers who lead or interact with data scientists, who wish to better understand the principals and algorithms available without the technical details of single-disciplinary books.” — Ronny Kohavi Partner Architect at Microsoft Online Services Division “Provost and Fawcett have distilled their mastery of both the art and science of real-world data analysis into an unrivalled introduction to the field.” —Geoff Webb Editor-in-Chief of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal “I would love it if everyone I had to work with had read this book.” — Claudia Perlich Chief Scientist of M6D (Media6Degrees) and Advertising Research Foundation Innovation Award Grand Winner (2013) www.it-ebooks.info “A foundational piece in the fast developing world of Data Science. A must read for anyone interested in the Big Data revolution." —Justin Gapper Business Unit Analytics Manager at Teledyne Scientific and Imaging “The authors, both renowned experts in data science before it had a name, have...
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...Western Michigan University ScholarWorks at WMU Dissertations Graduate College 8-1-2012 Deepwater, Deep Ties, Deep Trouble: A StateCorporate Environmental Crime Analysis of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Elizabeth A. Bradshaw Western Michigan University, brads2ea@cmich.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Bradshaw, Elizabeth A., "Deepwater, Deep Ties, Deep Trouble: A State-Corporate Environmental Crime Analysis of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill" (2012). Dissertations. Paper 53. This Dissertation-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact maira.bundza@wmich.edu. DEEPWATER, DEEP TIES, DEEP TROUBLE: A STATE-CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME ANALYSIS OF THE 2010 GULF OF MEXICO OIL SPILL by Elizabeth A. Bradshaw A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology Advisor: Ronald C. Kramer, Ph.D. Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan August 2012 THE GRADUATE COLLEGE WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN June 29, 2012 Date WE HEREBY APPROVE THE DISSERTATION SUBMITTED BY Elizabeth A. Bradshaw ENTITLED Deepwater, Deep Ties, Deep Trouble: A State-Corporate Environmental...
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...Data Mining Third Edition This page intentionally left blank Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques Third Edition Ian H. Witten Eibe Frank Mark A. Hall AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON NEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is an imprint of Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann Publishers is an imprint of Elsevier 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA This book is printed on acid-free paper. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions. This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein). Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers must...
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