Recent Developments: The Right to a Fair Cross-Section of the Community and the Black Box of Jury Pool Selection in Arkansas

A Washington County, Arkansas court conducted a hearing on October 15, 2018 on a criminal defendant’s motion to compel discovery to assure a fair and accurate cross-section of the community for the jury as guaranteed by the United States and Arkansas Constitutions. At the hearing, the jury coordinator for the Circuit Clerk’s office testified that counties may elect to use a state-sponsored jury selection computer program, or they may use proprietary programs. Washington County uses a proprietary computer program to select the jury pool from a list of registered voters. The clerk described how her office takes an extra step to follow up with property owners, thus making them more likely to be summoned for jury duty. When discussing individuals who cannot afford phone service or who do not have voice mail, she stated, “You can’t talk to them. So I don’t reach that person.” She did not know how individuals with criminal records are excluded from the pool so that individuals with duplicate names – which is common, for example, in the Hispanic community – are not excluded. When asked about her system of calling and leaving messages, she stated she does not have a translator because “I’ve never had anyone talk to me that I couldn’t understand.” Although the United States Supreme Court has noted that “without inspection, a party almost invariably would be unable to determine whether he has a potentially meritorious jury challenge,” the Washington County judge concluded that the details of the process and software used for creating the venire are “not discoverable in this case because. . .you have not presented any evidence you would find anything.

Protecting Australia against Cyberterrorism

We talk about how to best protect Australia against cyberterrorist attacks of the type in which the offenders use a computer to attack or in which the offenders attack computers. Our concern is phenomena like Stuxnet and Ransomware, but also any attack that has not yet happened, as for our official records, so say hacking of satellite and use of its allowances to burn people alive to death. We talk about the basics, which could be the advice of FireEye, and we talk about the sophisticated, which could be what is not yet printed. We worry about actions that could be considered part of the intelligence system, so things that demand detailed study of the past and systemic plus organised collection of data in the present. We do not talk about how to deal with Acts of War: Only about how to protect our systems to best so that we do not get those happening via computer or from a computer

The Digital Musing of a History Buff

Perhaps the best part of studying Computer Science (CS) is that it is not an isolated discipline; CS exists to produce systems and applications that support the business and interests of nearly every person in the world. Any area of inquiry is open to fanciful and meaningful exploration by computer scientists. In a very real sense, the world is the oyster of those who can use digital tools developed by CS. In his talk, Dr. Kann will explore how he uses those digital tools to advance his enthusiasm for history. The talk will highlight some of the work he has done with students on digital representations of interest to both CS students and others who are history buffs. While the range of applications he has worked on is much more extensive, here he will largely focus on map applications. Dr. Kann will also talk about basic digital tools, such as image maps, that can be used by people without a CS background. For example, he\u27ll share how easy it is to create tools such as http://270towin.com , and show how they could be applied to areas such as political science (polling maps), health science (epidemiology), sociology (networks), etc. By giving this talk, Professor Kann hopes to excite those students who might be interested in doing a research topic in digital applications. While mainly geared towards CS students, hopefully students or faculty from other disciplines will see a connection and pair with CS students to develop applications of mutual interest. [event description

Brief Online Training Enhances Competitive Performance: Findings of the BBC Lab UK Psychological Skills Intervention Study

In conjunction with BBC Lab UK, the present study developed 12 brief psychological skill interventions for online delivery. A protocol was designed that captured data via self-report measures, used video recordings to deliver interventions, involved a competitive concentration task against an individually matched computer opponent, and provided feedback on the effects of the interventions. Three psychological skills were used; imagery, self-talk, and if-then planning, with each skill directed to one of four different foci: outcome goal, process goal, instruction, or arousal-control. This resulted in 12 different intervention participant groups (randomly assigned) with a 13th group acting as a control. Participants (n = 44,742) completed a competitive task four times—practice, baseline, following an intervention, and again after repeating the intervention. Results revealed performance improved following practice with incremental effects for imagery-outcome, imagery-process, and self-talk-outcome and self-talk-process over the control group, with the same interventions increasing the intensity of effort invested, arousal and pleasant emotion. Arousal-control interventions associated with pleasant emotions, low arousal, and low effort invested in performance. Instructional interventions were not effective. Results offer support for the utility of online interventions in teaching psychological skills and suggest brief interventions that focus on increasing motivation, increased arousal, effort invested, and pleasant emotions were the most effective