Out of the Night

I did not graduate. After four years of college, waiting for the day I could shake President Riggs’ hand, receive my diploma, and depart our campus with pride and honor, that day never came. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was watch from the back row of the audience as everyone I had attended school with for the last four years, my classmates, my friends, all received their diplomas and moved on without me. The stares from teachers I knew, the surprised looks from underclassmen, the careful tact with which everyone avoided the subject of not graduating in my presence, like I had died and they just didn’t want to tell me. [excerpt

Redressing the Silent Interim: Precautionary Action & Short Term Tests in Toxicological Risk Assessment

The author recommends that a stronger emphasis be placed on creating and implementing short-term tests that use iterative, conservative-based, tiered procedures in conjunction with a precautionary attitude during the interim phase of toxicological risk assessments

A personal account of the discovery of hyperbolic structures on some knot complements

I give my view of the early history of the discovery of hyperbolic structures on knot complements from my early work on representations of knot groups into matrix groups to my meeting with William Thurston in 1976. (This article was written by Robert Riley about ten years before his death in 2000 and never submitted for publication. An explanation of why it is being published now and some information about Riley and this article is given in the article by Brin, Jones and Singerman which accompanies this article in this issue of the [journal | arxiv].)Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Valentine v. State of Nevada, 135 Nev. Adv. Op. 62 (Dec. 19, 2019)

The Court held that evidentiary hearings are appropriate on fair-cross-section challenges when the defendant makes specific allegations that, if true, would be sufficient to constitute a prima facie violation of the state’s fair-cross-section requirement. The Court also briefly discussed appellant’s claims of insufficient evidence and prosecutorial misconduct regarding DNA evidence. The Court found that neither claim warranted a new trial

Educational innovation, learning technologies and Virtual culture potential’

Learning technologies are regularly associated with innovative teaching but will they contribute to profound innovations in education itself? This paper addresses the question by building upon Merlin Donald's co‐evolutionary theory of mind, cognition and culture. He claimed that the invention of technologies for storing and sharing external symbol systems, such as writing, gave rise to a ‘theoretic culture’ with rich symbolic representations and a resultant need for formal education. More recently, Shaffer and Kaput have claimed that the development of external and shared symbol‐processing technologies is giving rise to an emerging ‘virtual culture’. They argue that mathematics curricula are grounded in theoretic culture and should change to meet the novel demands of ‘virtual culture’ for symbol‐processing and representational fluency. The generic character of their cultural claim is noted in this paper and it is suggested that equivalent pedagogic arguments are applicable across the educational spectrum. Hence, four general characteristics of virtual culture are proposed, against which applications of learning technologies can be evaluated for their innovative potential. Two illustrative uses of learning technologies are evaluated in terms of their ‘virtual culture potential’ and some anticipated questions about this approach are discussed towards the end of the paper