Belmont Criminal Law Journal Symposium 2017: Judicial Panel

Transcript of the Judicial Panel given during the 2017 Symposium featuring Chief Justice Jeffrey S. Bivins, Judge Joseph A. Woodruff, Judge Timothy L. Easter, and Judge Angelita B. Dalton

A Greater Means to the Greater Good: Ethical Guidelines to Meet Social Movement Organization Advocacy Challenges

Existing public relations ethics literature often proves inadequate when applied to social movement campaigns, considering the special communication challenges activists face as marginalized moral visionaries in a commercial public sphere. The communications of counter-hegemonic movements is distinct enough from corporate, nonprofit, and governmental organizations to warrant its own ethical guidelines. The unique communication guidelines most relevant to social movement organizations include promoting asymmetrical advocacy to a greater extent than is required for more powerful organizations and building flexibility into the TARES principles to privilege social responsibility over respect for audience values in activist campaigns serving as ideological critique

Wastewater-Based Epidemiology: Global Collaborative to Maximize Contributions in the Fight against COVID-19

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2), a novel member of the Coronaviridae family, has been identified as the etiologic agent of an ongoing pandemic of severe pneumonia known as COVID-19. To date there have been millions of cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in 184 countries with case fatality rates ranging from 1.8% in Germany to 12.5% in Italy. Limited diagnostic testing capacity and asymptomatic and oligosymptomatic infections result in significant uncertainty in the estimated extent of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Recent reports have documented that infection with SARS-CoV-2 is accompanied by persistent shedding of virus RNA in feces in 27% to 89% of patients at densities from 0.8 to 7.5 log10 gene copies per gram. The presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in feces raises the potential to survey sewage for virus RNA to inform epidemiological monitoring of COVID-19, which we refer to as wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), but is also known as environmental surveillance

Minimizing errors in RT-PCR detection and quantification of SARS-CoV-2 RNA for wastewater surveillance

Wastewater surveillance for pathogens using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is an effective and resource-efficient tool for gathering community-level public health information, including the incidence of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Surveillance of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) in wastewater can potentially provide an early warning signal of COVID-19 infections in a community. The capacity of the world's environmental microbiology and virology laboratories for SARS-CoV-2 RNA characterization in wastewater is increasing rapidly. However, there are no standardized protocols or harmonized quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) procedures for SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance. This paper is a technical review of factors that can cause false-positive and false-negative errors in the surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater, culminating in recommended strategies that can be implemented to identify and mitigate some of these errors. Recommendations include stringent QA/QC measures, representative sampling approaches, effective virus concentration and efficient RNA extraction, PCR inhibition assessment, inclusion of sample processing controls, and considerations for RT-PCR assay selection and data interpretation. Clear data interpretation guidelines (e.g., determination of positive and negative samples) are critical, particularly when the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater is low. Corrective and confirmatory actions must be in place for inconclusive results or results diverging from current trends (e.g., initial onset or reemergence of COVID-19 in a community). It is also prudent to perform interlaboratory comparisons to ensure results' reliability and interpretability for prospective and retrospective analyses. The strategies that are recommended in this review aim to improve SARS-CoV-2 characterization and detection for wastewater surveillance applications. A silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the efficacy of wastewater surveillance continues to be demonstrated during this global crisis. In the future, wastewater should also play an important role in the surveillance of a range of other communicable diseases

Internalised Values and Fairness Perception: Ethics in Knowledge Management

This chapter argues for ethical consideration in knowledge management (KM). It explores the effect that internalised values and fairness perception have on individuals’ participation in KM practices. Knowledge is power, and organisations seek to manage knowledge through KM practices. For knowledge to be processed, individual employees—the source of all knowledge—need to be willing to participate in KM practices. As knowledge is power and a key constituent part of knowledge is ethics, individuals’ internalised values and fairness perception affect knowledge-processing. Where an organisation claims ownership over knowledge, an individual may perceive being treated unfairly, which may obstruct knowledge-processing. Through adopting ethical KM practices, individual needs are respected, enabling knowledge-processing. Implications point towards an ethical agenda in KM theory and practice

Glass Furnace Combustion and Melting Research Facility.

The need for a Combustion and Melting Research Facility focused on the solution of glass manufacturing problems common to all segments of the glass industry was given high priority in the earliest version of the Glass Industry Technology Roadmap (Eisenhauer et al., 1997). Visteon Glass Systems and, later, PPG Industries proposed to meet this requirement, in partnership with the DOE/OIT Glass Program and Sandia National Laboratories, by designing and building a research furnace equipped with state-of-the-art diagnostics in the DOE Combustion Research Facility located at the Sandia site in Livermore, CA. Input on the configuration and objectives of the facility was sought from the entire industry by a variety of routes: (1) through a survey distributed to industry leaders by GMIC, (2) by conducting an open workshop following the OIT Glass Industry Project Review in September 1999, (3) from discussions with numerous glass engineers, scientists, and executives, and (4) during visits to glass manufacturing plants and research centers. The recommendations from industry were that the melting tank be made large enough to reproduce the essential processes and features of industrial furnaces yet flexible enough to be operated in as many as possible of the configurations found in industry as well as in ways never before attempted in practice. Realization of these objectives, while still providing access to the glass bath and combustion space for optical diagnostics and measurements using conventional probes, was the principal challenge in the development of the tank furnace design. The present report describes a facility having the requirements identified as important by members of the glass industry and equipped to do the work that the industry recommended should be the focus of research. The intent is that the laboratory would be available to U.S. glass manufacturers for collaboration with Sandia scientists and engineers on both precompetitive basic research and the solution of proprietary glass production problems. As a consequence of the substantial increase in scale and scope of the initial furnace concept in response to industry recommendations, constraints on funding of industrial programs by DOE, and reorientation of the Department's priorities, the OIT Glass Program is unable to provide the support for construction of such a facility. However, it is the present investigators' hope that a group of industry partners will emerge to carry the project forward, taking advantage of the detailed furnace design presented in this report. The engineering, including complete construction drawings, bill of materials, and equipment specifications, is complete. The project is ready to begin construction as soon as the quotations are updated. The design of the research melter closely follows the most advanced industrial practice, firing by natural gas with oxygen. The melting area is 13 ft x 6 ft, with a glass depth of 3 ft and an average height in the combustion space of 3 ft. The maximum pull rate is 25 tons/day, ranging from 100% batch to 100% cullet, continuously fed, with variable batch composition, particle size distribution, and raft configuration. The tank is equipped with bubblers to control glass circulation. The furnace can be fired in three modes: (1) using a single large burner mounted on the front wall, (2) by six burners in a staggered/opposed arrangement, three in each breast wall, and (3) by down-fired burners mounted in the crown in any combination with the front wall or breast-wall-mounted burners. Horizontal slots are provided between the tank blocks and tuck stones and between the breast wall and skewback blocks, running the entire length of the furnace on both sides, to permit access to the combustion space and the surface of the glass for optical measurements and sampling probes. Vertical slots in the breast walls provide additional access for measurements and sampling. The furnace and tank are to be fully instrumented with standard measuring equipment, such as flow meters, thermocouples, continuous gas composition analyzers, optical pyrometers, and a video camera. The output from the instruments is to be continuously recorded and simultaneously made available to other researchers via the Internet. A unique aspect of the research facility would be its access to the expertise in optical measurements in flames and high temperature reacting flows residing in the Sandia Combustion Research Facility. Development of new techniques for monitoring and control of glass melting would be a major focus of the work. The lab would be equipped with conventional and laser light sources and detectors for optical measurements of gas temperature, velocity, and gaseous species and, using new techniques to be developed in the Research Facility itself, glass temperature and glass composition

Abnormal plasma polyunsaturated fatty acid pattern in non-active inflammatory bowel disease

An abnormal plasma polyunsaturated fatty acid pattern (PUFA) (increased n3 and decreased n6 PUFA) has been reported in active inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The possibility of a primary defect in the PUFA metabolism in IBD was hypothesised. The aim of this study was to assess plasma PUFA pattern in inactive inflammatory bowel disease and to ascertain whether patients who had had a colectomy and who were suffering from ulcerative colitis have a similar PUFA pattern than those patients with non-active ulcerative colitis and who had not had a colectomy. Plasma fatty acids were analysed by semi-capillary column gas-liquid chromatography in three groups of patients with inactive IBD (24 patients with inactive ulcerative colitis who had not had a colectomy, 15 patients with ulcerative colitis who had had a colectomy, and 27 patients with Crohn's disease). Plasma concentration and percentage of C22:6n3 and unsaturation index were significantly higher in patients with inactive ulcerative colitis without a colectomy and the Crohn's disease group (p < 0.0001) than in controls. Plasma concentration and percentage of C22:6n3 and the unsaturation index remained significantly higher, in both the operated and non-operated ulcerative colitis patients when compared with controls (p < 0.0001). These results suggest that in inactive IBD, an increased PUFA biosynthesis might be the cause of the high values of n3 compounds. These findings although seen in active disease, are more noticeable in remission because of the lack of artefactual factors (malnutrition, steroids, inflammation). In addition, persistence of high values in both groups of ulcerative colitis patients--that is, those who had had a colectomy and those who had not suggests the existence of a primary abnormality in the PUFA metabolism in IBD