Armed and Dangerous: How the Gun Lobby Enshrines Guns as Tools of the Extreme Right

Having tracked the gun lobby, in particular the NRA, for years, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (Everytown), in this report, examines the role of the gun lobby in exposing broader audiences to the potentially radicalizing messaging of the far right, fanning the flames of anger and fear in those already radicalized, and advocating for lax gun laws that enable violent extremists to arm themselves. The report further discusses what the dangerous confluence of reckless rhetoric, gun lobby influence, and armed extremism means for our democracy, in particular the prospect for extreme-right violence around the upcoming election.  Unfortunately, there are several examples of extreme-right violence in the recent past in which these conditions resulted in tragedy

The Correlates of Right-wing Extremism

Research into the correlates of right-wing extremism has been focused on the group level, mainly ignoring the individual right-wing extremist behaviors, characteristics, and traits. Although group milieu strongly affects the ideology of individuals, personal decisions making often comes from a combination of unique experiences, cognitive abilities and biases, and differences in individual traits. This biographical study aimed to examine the life course events of twenty-five individual right-wing extremists identifying common biological and circumstantial correlates among and between the subjects. By analyzing the different correlates, this study created a matrix that identifies the correlates for significance. The results of the analysis created an individual right-wing extremist profile able to assist the United States law enforcement agencies, the intelligence community, and the criminal justice system by making a list of factors that can be used to identify individuals that are predisposed to the use of violence in the furtherance of their political, religious, and social ideologies. The data collected in this study suggests that a right-wing extremist who utilizes violence is a white male, radicalized under the age of 30, from a suburban or rural environment, has a high school education, has peers involved in right-wing extremist movements, having previously been exposed to traditional religion, married at least one time, and adhere to multiple right-wing extremist ideologies. Additionally, the right-wing extremist profile created in this study suggests that the individual is highly likely to be a military veteran with combat experience

A preliminary study of software trace ability reference model using feature modeling

Traceability, a key aspect of any engineering discipline, enables engineers to understand the relations and dependencies among various artifacts in a system. It is a well-known fact that even in organizations and projects with mature software development processes, software artifacts created as part of these processes end up to be disconnected from each other. From a software engineer’s perspective, it therefore becomes essential to establish and maintain the semantic connections among these artifacts. The missing traceability among software artifacts becomes a major challenge for many software engineering activities. As a result, during the comprehension of existing software systems, software engineers have to spend a large amount of effort on synthesizing and integrating information from various sources to establish links among these artifacts. Existing research in software traceability focuses on reducing the cost associated with this manual effort by developing automatic assistance in establishing and maintaining traceability links among software artifacts. This research is based on the premise that a more effective and unified solution to manage traceability semantic link information can be achieved by considering a feature model as the traceability reference model. The aim of this research is to propose a software traceability reference model that can store traceability links information using the concept of feature modeling. It identifies the traces of software components of various software artifacts such as design and requirements and stores them in hierarchical form

A Reference Framework for Variability Management of Software Product Lines

Variability management (VM) in software product line engineering (SPLE) is introduced as an abstraction that enables the reuse and customization of assets. VM is a complex task involving the identification, representation, and instantiation of variability for specific products, as well as the evolution of variability itself. This work presents a comparison and contrast between existing VM approaches using qualitative meta-synthesis to determine the underlying perspectives, metaphors, and concepts of existing methods. A common frame of reference for the VM was proposed as the result of this analysis. Putting metaphors in the context of the dimensions in which variability occurs and identifying its key concepts provides a better understanding of its management and enables several analyses and evaluation opportunities. Finally, the proposed framework was evaluated using a qualitative study approach. The results of the evaluation phase suggest that the organizations in practice only focus on one dimension. The presented frame of reference will help the organization to cover this gap in practice.Comment: 24 page

Model driven product line engineering : core asset and process implications

Reuse is at the heart of major improvements in productivity and quality in Software Engineering. Both Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) are software development paradigms that promote reuse. Specifically, they promote systematic reuse and a departure from craftsmanship towards an industrialization of the software development process. MDE and SPLE have established their benefits separately. Their combination, here called Model Driven Product Line Engineering (MDPLE), gathers together the advantages of both. Nevertheless, this blending requires MDE to be recasted in SPLE terms. This has implications on both the core assets and the software development process. The challenges are twofold: (i) models become central core assets from which products are obtained and (ii) the software development process needs to cater for the changes that SPLE and MDE introduce. This dissertation proposes a solution to the first challenge following a feature oriented approach, with an emphasis on reuse and early detection of inconsistencies. The second part is dedicated to assembly processes, a clear example of the complexity MDPLE introduces in software development processes. This work advocates for a new discipline inside the general software development process, i.e., the Assembly Plan Management, which raises the abstraction level and increases reuse in such processes. Different case studies illustrate the presented ideas.This work was hosted by the University of the Basque Country (Faculty of Computer Sciences). The author enjoyed a doctoral grant from the Basque Goverment under the “Researchers Training Program” during the years 2005 to 2009. The work was was co-supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the European Social Fund under contracts WAPO (TIN2005-05610) and MODELINE (TIN2008-06507-C02-01)

Supporting the grow-and-prune model for evolving software product lines

207 p.Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim at supporting the development of a whole family of software products through a systematic reuse of shared assets. To this end, SPL development is separated into two interrelated processes: (1) domain engineering (DE), where the scope and variability of the system is defined and reusable core-assets are developed; and (2) application engineering (AE), where products are derived by selecting core assets and resolving variability. Evolution in SPLs is considered to be more challenging than in traditional systems, as both core-assets and products need to co-evolve. The so-called grow-and-prune model has proven great flexibility to incrementally evolve an SPL by letting the products grow, and later prune the product functionalities deemed useful by refactoring and merging them back to the reusable SPL core-asset base. This Thesis aims at supporting the grow-and-prune model as for initiating and enacting the pruning. Initiating the pruning requires SPL engineers to conduct customization analysis, i.e. analyzing how products have changed the core-assets. Customization analysis aims at identifying interesting product customizations to be ported to the core-asset base. However, existing tools do not fulfill engineers needs to conduct this practice. To address this issue, this Thesis elaborates on the SPL engineers' needs when conducting customization analysis, and proposes a data-warehouse approach to help SPL engineers on the analysis. Once the interesting customizations have been identified, the pruning needs to be enacted. This means that product code needs to be ported to the core-asset realm, while products are upgraded with newer functionalities and bug-fixes available in newer core-asset releases. Herein, synchronizing both parties through sync paths is required. However, the state of-the-art tools are not tailored to SPL sync paths, and this hinders synchronizing core-assets and products. To address this issue, this Thesis proposes to leverage existing Version Control Systems (i.e. git/Github) to provide sync operations as first-class construct

Applying Software Product Lines to Build Autonomic Pervasive Systems

In this Master Thesis, we have proposed a model-driven Software Product Line (SPL) for developing autonomic pervasive systems. The work focusses on reusing the Variability knowledge from the SPL design to the SPL products. This Variability knowledge enables SPL products to deal with adaptation scenarios (evolution and involution) in an autonomic way.Cetina Englada, C. (2008). Applying Software Product Lines to Build Autonomic Pervasive Systems. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12447Archivo delegad

In the Crosshairs: Second Amendment Lawyers and Cases in State and Federal Appellate Courts

Judicial behavior, the types of activities and behaviors judges become involved with in their capacity on the bench, has a profound and lasting impact on the types of decisions rendered by judges across all courts that comprise the American judiciary (Baum 2000; Baum 2006; Maveety 2002). There is a growing realization that judicial behavior encompasses more than just the making of good laws and public policy decisions (Baum, 2000; Baum 2006; Hammond, Bonneau, & Sheehan 2005; Comparato 2003). For example, Songer & Haire (1992) explore integrated approaches to the study of judicial voting through obscenity cases in the U.S. Courts of Appeals. Creating an integrated multivariate model that combines five approaches to judicial voting, the authors find that this new model correctly predicts about 80% of the judges\u27 votes on obscenity cases with an error reduction rate of almost 46%. My dissertation focuses on the judicial behavior of state Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals judges through the lens of Second Amendment claims and issues, a polarizing American political issue over the last fifty years.;Through a descriptive and logistic regression analysis of the extent of 488 Second Amendment court rulings made in state courts of last resort and U.S. Courts of Appeals rendered between 1960 and 2009, I theorize that state Supreme Court selection methods, the presences of a state intermediate appellate courts, U.S. Courts of Appeals majority presidential party nomination panel, along with state and federal appellate circuit political ideology, urban/rural dynamics, gun ownership percentage, and homicide rates will have an impact on the outcome of Second Amendment decisions at these various judicial levels. For instance, an elected state Supreme Court system is more likely to produce a gun rights ruling, while an appellate panel with a majority of judges appointed by Democratic Presidents would be more likely to produce a gun control ruling. The results indicate state and appellate circuit political ideology (conservative→liberal spectrum) and gun ownership percentages affect the outcome of Second Amendment decisions in state Supreme Courts and the U.S. Courts of Appeals, while homicide rates affect these decisions in state courts of last resort. As such, a conservative political ideology and high gun ownership percentage in a state or appellate circuit means that it is more likely for their judges to produce a gun rights ruling, while a liberal political ideology and low gun ownership percentage means that the state or appellate circuit is more likely to produce a gun control ruling. One chapter explores these dynamics at the state Supreme Court level, while a second chapter does the same in the U.S. Courts of Appeals.;A third substantive dissertation chapter considers the impact of legal participation, litigation strategies, venue-shopping, along with interest group coordination, networking, and organization, in planned telephone interviews with pro-gun and gun control Second Amendment interest group lawyers who have litigated cases in these two levels of the state and federal judiciary between 1960 and 2009. In this chapter, it is theorized that there will be clear differences between gun rights and gun control interest groups, and heavily funded and lesser funded interest groups, with regard to the five major interview issues listed above. Twenty-one interviews with interest group lawyers will be conducted between 24 August and 15 October 2010