So No Damn Politician Ever Scrap It: The Constitutional Protection of Social Security Benefits

Is the nation’s old-age pension system bankrupt? Each year brings repeated warnings of a need for immediate reform. Yet somehow, reasonable people and even experts dispute both the severity of the crises and the scope of the reforms, if any, that ought to be taken. Completely overlooked in the debate, however, are the legal and even constitutional limits to any reformation plan. President Roosevelt intended to create a program that would withstand political compromise—a program that would create a “legal, moral, and political right” to the receipt of benefits. Nearly seventy years after Social Security’s creation, we must ask: Did Roosevelt succeed

Unless Someone Like You Cares a Whole Awful Lot: Apocalypse as Children’s Entertainment

This article explores an unusual subset of children’s narrative, the apocalyptic environmentalist text, and argues that such texts perform the perverse ideological work of shifting blame for ecological crisis from its perpetrators (the parents’ generation) to its victims (the child who is now called upon to act). These texts transform the drama of innocence and experience that is paradigmatic of children’s narrative by destroying the child’s innocence through their very transmission, by informing them of a dire crisis they then become obliged to repair. The article’s primary examples are Captain Planet, The Lorax, WALL-E and The Butter Battle Book, only the last of which finds a way to clearly articulate crisis without also shifting blame

Designing Engaging Learning Experiences in Programming

In this paper we describe work to investigate the creation of engaging programming learning experiences. Background research informed the design of four fieldwork studies to explore how programming tasks could be framed to motivate learners. Our empirical findings from these four field studies are summarized here, with a particular focus upon one – Whack a Mole – which compared the use of a physical interface with the use of a screen-based equivalent interface to obtain insights into what made for an engaging learning experience. Emotions reported by two sets of participant undergraduate students were analyzed, identifying the links between the emotions experienced during programming and their origin. Evidence was collected of the very positive emotions experienced by learners programming with a physical interface (Arduino) in comparison with a similar program developed using a screen-based equivalent interface. A follow-up study provided further evidence of the motivation of personalized design of programming tangible physical artefacts. Collating all the evidence led to the design of a set of ‘Learning Dimensions’ which may provide educators with insights to support key design decisions for the creation of engaging programming learning experiences

Liberty and Property in the Patent Law

Patents have seldom troubled civil libertarians. A specialized form of property, patents seemed pertinent to the technologies of traditional industry but little else. Patent instruments offered their readers mere technical documentation; patent cases presented no more than the mapping of a text onto an instantiated artifact; patent policy was principally oriented toward economic optimization of the length and scope of protection. Unbound from technology, contemporary patent law now seems a more robust discipline. Modern patent instruments appropriate a diverse array of techniques that span the entire range of human endeavor. Patent claims, cut loose from physical moorings, have grown more abstract and oriented toward human behavior. We have yet to realize fully the consequences of postindustrial patenting, but the potential impact of the patent law upon personal liberties is becoming more apparent and more worthy of concern. Although the principles of the patent canon demonstrate sufficient flexibility to regulate uses of such inventions as software, business methods, and genetic fragments, they persist in bearing little regard for civil rights. The private rule making, made possible through the patent law, holds the potential to impinge upon individual liberties in ways not previously considered possible