To Waive or Not to Waive? Filing Deadlines and Hearing Requests in Administrative Adjudications

In Part II of this Article, I provide an overview of subject matter jurisdiction in relation to filing timeframes. I review the distinction between original and appellate jurisdiction using Maryland case law and a sample survey of other state case law to provide background to the question of filing deadlines and hearing requests in administrative adjudications. In Part III of this Article, I elaborate upon Supreme Court precedent on administrative filing deadlines. In Part IV of this Article, I analyze the nature of filing deadlines for hearing requests before various state agencies, with an emphasis on Maryland’s scheme. The case law among the states is limited and contradictory, which raises the question in Part V of how to proceed with an untimely filing. What emerges from my review of time limitations in state and Supreme Court cases is that whether a jurisdictional bar exists is often a question of legislative intent. Because of the harshness of jurisdictional deadlines, I recommend that the relevant agency statute and regulations be carefully parsed to determine if there is any flexibility in the filing deadline

Pwning Level Bosses in MATLAB: Student Reactions to a Game-Inspired Computational Physics Course

We investigated student reactions to two computational physics courses incorporating several videogame-like aspects. These included use of gaming terminology such as "levels," "weapons," and "bosses"; a game-style point system linked to course grades; a self-paced schedule with no deadlines; a mastery design in which only entirely correct attempts earn credit, but students can retry until they succeed; immediate feedback via self-test code; an assignment progression from "minions" (small, focused tasks) to "level bosses" (integrative tasks); and believable, authentic assignment scenarios. Through semi-structured interviews and course evaluations, we found that a majority of students considered the courses effective and the game-like aspects beneficial. In particular, many claimed that the point system increased their motivation; the self-paced nature caused them to reflect on their self-discipline; the possibility and necessity of repeating assignments until perfect aided learning; and the authentic tasks helped them envision using course skills in their professional futures.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2014 Physics Education Research Conference (PERC

Arbitration: Time Limits and Continuing Violations

Time limits in a collective bargaining agreement, particularly as they apply to the grievance procedure, are very important. Filing or processing deadlines are taken as seriously in the context of these private documents and negotiated time limits as they are in the world of standard litigation, with deadlines that are imposed statutorily or otherwise. Management advocates often view the time limitation provisions as virtually the only thing employers gain, as opposed to give, in the bargaining relationship. Deadlines have been strictly, if reluctantly, construed by most arbitrators. The continuing violation provides a meaningful exception to the otherwise immutable time bar. As the violation continues, so does the window of opportunity to protest it. The most important element in recognizing a new violation is the fact that the arbitrator will not consider the failure to grieve prior breaches fatal to the claim of one protesting the current actions. But defining what the continuing violation does is easier than understanding what it is. It is apparent that the term itself - continuing violation - is both a misnomer and a source of some confusion among the parties and in the minds of arbitrators as well, and that leads, on occasion, to conceptual dilemmas and errant results. The purpose of this discussion is to highlight the true nature of this very important concept

A few what-ifs on using statistical analysis of stochastic simulation runs to extract timeliness properties

Modern real-time systems, with a more flexible and adaptive nature, demand approaches for timeliness evaluation based on probabilistic measures of meeting deadlines. In this context, simulation can emerge as an adequate solution to understand and analyze the timing behaviour of actual systems. However, care must be taken with the obtained outputs under the penalty of obtaining results with lack of credibility. Particularly important is to consider that we are more interested in values from the tail of a probability distribution (near worst-case probabilities), instead of deriving confidence on mean values. We approach this subject by considering the random nature of simulation output data. We will start by discussing well known approaches for estimating distributions out of simulation output, and the confidence which can be applied to its mean values. This is the basis for a discussion on the applicability of such approaches to derive confidence on the tail of distributions, where the worst-case is expected to be

A World Apart: How Distance Education Can Effectively Reach Around the Globe

Distance education has revolutionized the field of education by giving faculty the ability to reach students anywhere on Earth. In many cases, the distances between faculty and students can be rather large with associated opportunities and challenges. An obvious challenge is the need for timely communications between faculty and students as well as among the students themselves. This can be compounded if the nature of the course requires widely dispersed students to work together as a group with the transfer of documents and frequent communications driven by deadlines as well as the desire to produce a complete document that adheres to all requirements