Lois Whaley Highsmith

After originally studying chemical engineering at Penn State, Lois Highsmith decided to instead pursue nursing. At Jefferson she found a passion for community health nursing, specifically related to obstetrics, gynecology, and maternal child health. Ms. Highsmith graduated in 1986 and over the years worked mostly in maternal care but also in psychology. Among other positions, she worked for ten years at Pennsylvania Hospital where she founded STEPS, Strategies to Encourage Parental Self-Sufficiency, a teen pregnancy clinic, and worked as a home visitor for Mercy Home Health educating new moms about postpartum care. Since 2002 she has worked for Nurse Family Partnership, a home visiting program for first-time pregnant women that teaches women about child development, pregnancy, women’s health, and community resources.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/nursing_oral_histories/1014/thumbnail.jp

A Little Common Sense is a Dangerous Thing: The Inherent Inconsistency Between KSR and Current Official Notice Policy

[Excerpt] “The question of whether an invention is an obvious variation of existing technology is one that has troubled courts for decades. From its roots in nineteenth century case law to the recent Supreme Court decision KSR v. Teleflex, Inc., the doctrine of obviousness has waxed and waned—moving through a variety of judicially-created tests to a current state that is still far from perspicuous. This paper will examine obviousness through a particular lens: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO,” “PTO”) tool known as “official notice”—the practice of declaring a patent application’s claims unpatentable as obvious based on undocumented reasoning, such as the common sense or common knowledge of a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the application pertains. After KSR, using unsubstantiated common sense-based rationales for rejecting patent claims is considered a completely valid practice. However, a line of obviousness cases, including one from the United States Supreme Court, stands for the polar opposite position—that declaring a patent invalid as obvious without underlying prior art support does not comport with the standards of the Administrative Procedure Act. Unfortunately, this contradiction leaves patent practitioners and the federal district courts to reconcile diametrically opposed holdings, especially when a case involves official notice. Part II of this paper will give a brief history of general obviousness jurisprudence up to the Supreme Court’s KSR decision in 2007. Next, Part III will introduce the reader to the obviousness inquiry through the eyes of a USPTO examiner by presenting a hypothetical patent application scenario and defining various terms of art. Part IV will introduce the concept of formal official notice at the USPTO, including an examination of the official agency guidelines for the practice, and will present a judicial history of official notice. Part V will return to KSR, presenting more recent Federal Circuit obviousness cases and introducing the problems that the current jurisprudence brings about. Finally, Part VI will conclude with potential solutions to the issue, arguing that the judiciary should hold the USPTO to task in providing evidence that an invention is in fact obvious.

Transcript of keynote speech, "Don't Lecture Me"

Keynote speech given by Donald Clark at “Into something rich and strange” – making sense of the sea-change, the 2010 Association for Learning Technology Conference in Nottingham, England. In the chair, Vanessa Pittard, Bect

Salvage: Gendered Violence in Activist Communities

How to best deal with sexual violence in radical social movements is a contentious issue in the UK Left. The persistence of and inability to deal with sexual violence contradicts the core values of equality and social justice at the heart of radical social movements. A legacy of being marginalised and subjected to state repression and scrutiny has led radical activist communities to develop important self-protective strategies to establish trust and belonging. Safer spaces policies, transformative justice and community accountability processes have been attempted to address gendered violence without recourse to the state. Debate has focused on the effectiveness and negative impacts of these interventions often at the expense of survivors and anti-violence activists. However, safer spaces policies and accountability processes are set up to fail without a critical exploration of wider power relations and self-protective cultural practices that already frame activist communities. We chose to develop knowledge and understanding about gendered violence in activist communities from the perspectives and experiences of survivors. Our project has a particular focus on exploring the experiences of women, transgender and non-binary individuals. August 2015 and January 2016 we interviewed 10 survivors who had experienced sexual violence within a range of different activist groups and communities across the UK. These accounts map out how layers of silence and denial can work in activist groups and communities to allow and maintain violence, abuse and harm. There was little evidence of a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Instead there is a need to better recognise how intersections of cissexism, homophobia, classism, racism, sexism and ableism shape survivors’ experiences and meanings of harm, available resources and solutions, and impacts of harm on individuals and communities. Understanding what can produce a ‘conducive context’ for sexual violence against women, transgender and non-binary individuals in activism offers crucial clues in how we can undo these harms. Progressive change requires no less than a reconceptualisation of culture that recognises violence as embedded in an ongoing struggle for power and control of activist arenas

Philosophy for Children in China:: A Late Preliminary Anti-Report

At the very least, even though Chinese schools do not look very different from those in the West, China offers an opportunity for Philosophy for Children to question its basis, its methodology, its aims. It seems to be expressing a different cultural voice, and to be disposed to the kind of dialogue we are more used to claiming than practicing. Both Kunming and Shanghai provide, in their own ways, formidable contexts: the deep, strong and disciplined educators of Railway Station School of Kunming and the scholarly, sophisticated and committed members of the Shanghai institute for Research in the Human Sciences seem determined to take Philosophy for Children, not just beyond their own limits as Chinese, but beyond the limits Philosophy for Children has already established for itself in the West. Philosophy for Children in China, then, looks like a wonderful opportunity to think ourselves--what we are as educators engaged in the practice of philosophy--again. An invitation to think ourselves again. Is this not what dialogue and philosophy are about? It’s up to us to accept the invitation

Eventualities and different things : a reply

“Comments are very welcome!” This basic attitude and the many ways of implementing it contribute immensely to the fascination of engaging in scientific research. I am grateful to Theoretical Linguistics for providing a public platform for this kind of scholarly exchange and I thank all commentators for their thoughtful, stimulating, and often challenging contributions to my target article. My response will address two main issues that are raised by the commentaries. The first issue is shaped by a cluster of questions relating to ontology. The second issue concerns questions of methodology pertaining in particular to the problem of judging data

"I Ain't No Tea Lady": Identifying and addressing barriers to non-traditional employment, training and education from a female perspective, SOVA

The aim of this research was to examine perceptions and experiences of accessing non-traditional Education Training and Employment (ETE) from the vantage point of disadvantaged women using innovative sampling and research techniques. The research design and strategy sought to access the participant’s views and valuable experience. Many of the women whose opinions the research was trying to elicit had never considered non-traditional ETE, in their own words it simply was 'not on their radar'. We decided to adopt a 'workshop' approach. A workshop format was designed which used fun and thought provoking exercises to promote discussion. These interactive and dynamic workshops proved successful in generating some excellent data. In total 80 women from a range of areas of disadvantage participated in the research