Bridgr: An iOS Application for Organizing and Discussing Long-Distance Carpooling

Bridgr is an iOS application that facilitates long distance carpooling. This application allows drivers to post destinations on an interactable map so that they can be linked with students that need a ride to a location within close proximity of the posted destination. The riders and driver are linked in a common chat board where they can discuss ride details among themselves. The goal of Bridgr is to allow drivers to utilize extra space in their car in turn for fellowship and/or gas money

Step Right Up: Using Consumer Decision Making Theory to Teach Research Process in the Electronic Age

The legal academy has framed legal research as a professional skill, and much research pedagogy centers around replicating a controlled professional environment to allow students to learn how to do research by simulating legal practice. Although this is a valid way to conceptualize research, it is not the only way. Another way to conceptualize research is as a consumer transaction. Legal information is, in many ways, a product that information providers market to lawyers and students, as the promotions and contests that LexisNexis and Westlaw sponsor demonstrate. Once legal information is understood as a product, the process of research can be seen as a purchase transaction, and research instruction can be seen as a form of consumer education. This article approaches research from a consumer perspective. It sets the stage by explaining why legal information is a consumer product and analyzing changes in the information marketplace that have affected research process. The article then explains consumer decision making theory. It demonstrates why this is an appropriate vehicle for describing the research process and explains the marketing, cultural, psychological, situational, personal, and social influences that affect consumer choice in the research context. The advantages of approaching research from a consumer perspective are addressed next, followed by an exploration of ways to incorporate consumer decision making theory into research pedagogy. The article concludes that making students better consumers of legal information will help them become better professionals

Step Right Up: Using Consumer Decision Making Theory to Teach Research Process in the Electronic Age

The legal academy has framed legal research as a professional skill, and much research pedagogy centers around replicating a controlled professional environment to allow students to learn how to do research by simulating legal practice. Although this is a valid way to conceptualize research, it is not the only way. Another way to conceptualize research is as a consumer transaction. Legal information is, in many ways, a product that information providers market to lawyers and students, as the promotions and contests that LexisNexis and Westlaw sponsor demonstrate. Once legal information is understood as a product, the process of research can be seen as a purchase transaction, and research instruction can be seen as a form of consumer education. This article approaches research from a consumer perspective. It sets the stage by explaining why legal information is a consumer product and analyzing changes in the information marketplace that have affected research process. The article then explains consumer decision making theory. It demonstrates why this is an appropriate vehicle for describing the research process and explains the marketing, cultural, psychological, situational, personal, and social influences that affect consumer choice in the research context. The advantages of approaching research from a consumer perspective are addressed next, followed by an exploration of ways to incorporate consumer decision making theory into research pedagogy. The article concludes that making students better consumers of legal information will help them become better professionals

Securities Issuer Liability for Third Party Misstatements: Refining the Entanglement Standard

Smith, president of E.com, Inc., believes his firm\u27s securities are undervalued Believing that expanded coverage in the financial press will cause E.com\u27s securities to trade at higher prices, Smith begins a public relations program designed to help investment analysts more accurately forecast his firm\u27s future performance. Jones, financial analyst, takes information from the public relations program, drafts an optimistic forecast for E.com, and then asks its executives for their review and comment. Smith and his executives make extensive factual and descriptive edits to the report but refuse to comment on financial earnings projections, citing a longstanding company policy against such. Instead, Smith gives Jones repeated assurances that E.com is well on its way to a great quarter, and that he was incredibly bullish on his firm\u27s future earnings potential. Catching the innuendo, Jones drafts a favorable report on E.com\u27s prospects, causing the financial markets to bid up the company\u27s stock price in reliance on the new information. In reality, Smith and his executives realize that E.com\u27s internal earnings projections are far below those predicted in Jones\u27s market report, but they take no measures to correct their company\u27s inflated stock price. In the meantime, Baker, individual investor, purchases a large stake in E.com, relying on the company\u27s market price as an indication of its fair value. Soon thereafter E.com discloses its low earnings in its mandatory quarterly financial report, its stock price plummets, and Baker loses his life savings. Baker brings a private securities fraud action under federal securities law alleging that E.com intentionally misled analysts-and therefore the market-to inflate its stock price. Is E.com liable to Baker (and other harmed investors) for the analyst\u27s misstatements? Under what circumstances should it be? The prevailing standard for determining issuer liability under the federal securities laws for third party misstatements asks whether the issuer sufficiently entangled itself with the analyst\u27s report to such a degree that the analyst\u27s misstatements can fairly be attributed to the issuer.! If the entanglement threshold is met, a company has a duty to correct material misstatements affecting the market when it subsequently realizes their inaccuracy, else the company be- comes liable for civil and regulatory sanctions under the federal securities fraud laws. Not surprisingly, courts applying the standard have had to grapple with what entanglement means in application.! Although the doctrine is developing with greater clarity, the standard for liability remains too muddled for corporate managers to avoid running afoul of the law with predictive certainty.\u27 This Note cuts a bright-line path through the entanglement thicket. Part II discusses the forecasting methods of investment analysts and the information they use to construct their corporate valuations. Part Ill describes the federal regulatory framework governing corporate disclosure and Rule 10b-5 liability for wrongdoing. Part IV describes the contours of the prevailing entanglement standard and its related theories. Part V refines the problem in light of the analytical framework governing corporate liability for third party misstatements. Part VI discusses the policy interests of the key stakeholders involved, including securities issuers, investors, and society at large. Finally, Part VII recommends that courts adopt a practical bright-line standard for pre-publication entanglement liability premised on explicit corporate agreement with an analyst report\u27s final contents, marshaling current doctrine, policy interests, and the realities of modern financial analysis for support. Part VIII resolves the hypothetical posed above

Coordinating Council. Third Meeting: STI Strategic Plans

The NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program Coordinating Council conducts meetings after which both modified transcripts of presentations and interactive discussions are published. The theme for the November 1990 meeting was 'STI Strategic Plans'. This theme was the focus of recorded discussions by members of the council. The last section of the report presents visuals on strategic goals for the STI Information Division. NASA's vision is to be at the forefront of advancements in aeronautics, space science, and exploration. More specific NASA goals are listed followed by the STI Division mission statement. The Strategic Goals for the STI Division are outlined as follows: Implement effective management strategies, Accomplish rapid deployment of the NASA STI Network, Seek out and develop cooperative partnerships, Establish the STI Program as an integral part of the NASA R&D effort, Enhance the quality of our products and services through a focus on the customer, Build an attitude of quality throughout the enterprise, Expand the existing participant community, Assert a NASA leadership role for STI policy, and Develop a program for information science R&D. The STI division mission statement appears on the document cover as follows 'The mission of the NASA STI Program is to advance aerospace knowledge, contribute to U.S. competitiveness, and become an integral partner in NASA R&D programs to support NASA goals.

A VISUAL CONSISTENCY: Lighting Design of Zaubernacht & Mahagonny Songspiel in a discussion of Style and Aesthetics

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the use of the lighting design and process for Maryland Opera Studio’s double bill of Zaubernacht and Mahagonny Songspiel to better define Style and Aesthetics as they relate to a designer's Visual Identity. This thesis contains the following: concept, research images collected to visually communicate design ideas to the production team; notes on the discussion and evolution of the style and design concept; technical drawings used to translate the designer's intent into a real-world execution of the design, and production photos of the double bill. These production elements will then be used in conjunction with scholarly research to engage in a conversation about a designer’s visual identity

Recollections of My Career, My Colleagues, and My Retirement

Finding Aid for this collection can be found here: http://nwda.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv48889/

Understanding Google: Search Engines and the Changing Nature of Access, Thought and Knowledge within a Global Context

This thesis explores the impact of search engines within contemporary digital culture and, in particular, focuses on the social, cultural, and philosophical influence of Google. Search engines are deeply enmeshed with other recent developments in digital culture; therefore, in addressing their impact these intersections must be recognised, while highlighting the technological and social specificity of search engines. Also important is acknowledging the way that certain institutions, in particular Google, have shaped the web and wider culture around a particular set of economic incentives that have far-reaching consequences for contemporary digital culture. This thesis argues that to understand search engines requires a recognition of its contemporary context, while also acknowledging that Google’s quest to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” is part of a much older and broader discourse. Balancing these two viewpoints is important; Google is shaping public discourse on a global scale with unprecedentedly extensive consequences. However, many of the issues addressed by this thesis would remain centrally important even if Google declared bankruptcy or if search engines were abandoned for a different technology. Search engines are a specific technological response to a particular cultural environment; however, their social function and technical operation are embedded within a historical relationship to enquiry and inscription that stretches back to antiquity. This thesis addresses the following broad research questions, while at each stage specifically addressing the role and influence of search engines: how do individuals interrogate and navigate the world around them? How do technologies and social institutions facilitate how we think and remember? How culturally situated is knowledge; are there epistemological truths that transcend social environments? How does technological expansion fit within wider questions of globalisation? How do technological discourses shape the global flows of information and capital? These five questions map directly onto the five chapters of this thesis. Much of the existing study of search engines has been focused on small-scale evaluation, which either addresses Google’s day-by-day algorithmic changes or poses relatively isolated disciplinary questions. Therefore, not only is the number of academics, technicians, and journalists attending to search engines relatively small, given the centrality of search engines to digital culture, but much of the knowledge that is produced becomes outdated with algorithmic changes or the shifting strategies of companies. This thesis ties these focused concerns to wider issues, with a view to encourage and facilitate further enquiry.This thesis explores the impact of Google’s search engine within contemporary digital culture. Search engines have been studied in various disciplines, for example information retrieval, computer science, law, and new media, yet much of this work remains fixed within disciplinary boundaries. The approach of this thesis is to draw on work from a number of areas in order to link a technical understanding of how search engines function with a wider cultural and philosophical context. In particular, this thesis draws on critical theory in order to attend to the convergence of language, programming, and culture on a global scale. The chapter outline is as follows. Chapter one compares search engine queries to traditional questions. The chapter draws from information retrieval research to provide a technical framework that is brought into contact with philosophy and critical theory, including Plato and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chapter two investigates search engines as memory aids, deploying a history of memory and exploring practices within oral cultures and mnemonic techniques such as the Ars Memoria. This places search engines within a longer historical context, while drawing on contemporary insights from the philosophy and science of cognition. Chapter three addresses Google’s Autocomplete functionality and chapter four explores the contextual nature of results in order to highlight how different characteristics of users are used to personalise access to the web. These chapters address Google’s role within a global context and the implications for identity and community online. Finally, chapter five explores how Google’s method of generating revenue, through advertising, has a social impact on the web as a whole, particularly when considered through the lens of contemporary Post-Fordist accounts of capitalism. Throughout, this thesis develops a framework for attending to algorithmic cultures and outlines the specific influence that Google has had on the web and continues to have at a global scale.Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Medical images in eighteenth-century British art, with special reference to William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson

The objective of this thesis is to show that a study of medical images produced by British artists in the eighteenth century can contribute to the knowledge of the social history of medicine of the period, and to show that, by careful analysis of the medical images portrayed, some insight may be obtained into the meaning of works of art in which such images might otherwise be dismissed as merely irrelevant or gratuitous details. The thesis is cast In two main sections preceded by an introductory chapter which provides some background information with regard to the development of medical services in England and sets the scene from which literary and graphic artists drew their images, Works of the artist William Hogarth form the basis of the first section, The artist made extensive and knowing reference to medical imagery in many of his works, some of which are described and interpreted with due regard to the conventions employed, to the world around him, to literary works of his contemporaries and, where appropriate, to contemporary medical literature, Independent control with regard to the validity of the medical images and practices portrayed is provided where descriptions of such practices and Images correspond with each other. It is contended that such integration of written and visual sources of medical Imagery, in an empirical approach, enhances the information to be gained from either source viewed separately. Although mainly satirical in nature, it is argued that the images must have a foundation of truth and therefore deserve to be examined closely so that the truth of the situation portrayed may be revealed. The second section discusses the use of medical images from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, mainly through the works of Thomas Rowlandson, although works of other artists such as James Gillray and George Cruikshank are included. Through their works information may be gleaned about a range of contemporary medical issues including lay perceptions of disease, pain and death, fashions in disease and treatment and the impact that advancing scientific knowledge had upon medical treatment and upon the practitioners involved. In addition, certain contemporary philosophical ideas are highlighted which have some bearing upon contemporary popular and medical opinion. The nature and function of medical images are discussed throughout the thesis. They are read, not as straightforward documents, but within a framework of recognisable practices. Medical and artistic changes took place throughout the century and the effects of some of these changes are commented upon during the course of the thesis, which concludes by assessing the arguments put forward in both sections and indicates how the two disciplines of the History of Art and the social History of Medicine can be bridged or annexed with benefit to both