Environmental Aesthetics and Free Speech: Toward a Consistent Content Neutrality Standard for Outdoor Sign Regulation

First Amendment challenges by billboard companies and other sign owners to local sign regulations have become a frequent occurrence in the past thirty years. The stakes are high for both commercial sign owners and local governments. Sign control has emerged as an important front in the environmental protection movement, as it focuses on the visual or scenic quality of the environment. Courts have begun to recognize and accept local governments’ interest in controlling the proliferation of signage as part of their efforts to improve environmental quality, but courts have applied First Amendment doctrine in an inconsistent manner. The courts’ inconsistent treatment of the constitutional requirement of content neutrality has undermined state and local efforts to maintain aesthetic environments free from noxious signage. One of the consequences of this inconsistency is a false sense of security among sign regulators that their content-based regulations are somehow consistent with the First Amendment. This Note argues in favor of a strict approach to content neutrality, placing a greater burden on sign regulators to develop the most content-neutral ordinances possible. The proposed approach would beat billboard companies and sign owners at their own litigation game, limiting governments’ exposure to litigation and lessening the risk of sign regulations being invalidated, which in turn denigrates aesthetic quality. Furthermore, the recommended approach would reaffirm the First Amendment rights of sign owners while ensuring that regulatory bodies have sufficient guidance and encounter less risk in ensuring aesthetic environmental protection

Environmental Aesthetics and Free Speech: Toward a Consistent Content Neutrality Standard for Outdoor Sign Regulation

First Amendment challenges by billboard companies and other sign owners to local sign regulations have become a frequent occurrence in the past thirty years. The stakes are high for both commercial sign owners and local governments. Sign control has emerged as an important front in the environmental protection movement, as it focuses on the visual or scenic quality of the environment. Courts have begun to recognize and accept local governments’ interest in controlling the proliferation of signage as part of their efforts to improve environmental quality, but courts have applied First Amendment doctrine in an inconsistent manner. The courts’ inconsistent treatment of the constitutional requirement of content neutrality has undermined state and local efforts to maintain aesthetic environments free from noxious signage. One of the consequences of this inconsistency is a false sense of security among sign regulators that their content-based regulations are somehow consistent with the First Amendment. This Note argues in favor of a strict approach to content neutrality, placing a greater burden on sign regulators to develop the most content-neutral ordinances possible. The proposed approach would beat billboard companies and sign owners at their own litigation game, limiting governments’ exposure to litigation and lessening the risk of sign regulations being invalidated, which in turn denigrates aesthetic quality. Furthermore, the recommended approach would reaffirm the First Amendment rights of sign owners while ensuring that regulatory bodies have sufficient guidance and encounter less risk in ensuring aesthetic environmental protection

A plasmid-based lacZα gene assay for DNA polymerase fidelity measurement

A significantly improved DNA polymerase fidelity assay, based on a gapped plasmid containing the lacZα reporter gene in a single-stranded region, is described. Nicking at two sites flanking lacZα, and removing the excised strand by thermocycling in the presence of complementary competitor DNA, is used to generate the gap. Simple methods are presented for preparing the single-stranded competitor. The gapped plasmid can be purified, in high amounts and in a very pure state, using benzoylated-naphthoylated DEAE-cellulose, resulting in a low background mutation frequency (~1 × 10(-4)). Two key parameters, the number of detectable sites and the expression frequency, necessary for measuring polymerase error rates have been determined. DNA polymerase fidelity is measured by gap filling in vitro, followed by transformation into Escherichia coli and scoring of blue/white colonies and converting the ratio to error rate. Several DNA polymerases have been used to fully validate this straightforward and highly sensitive system

Embedding Service Logic into Business Model Design: The Case of Predictive Maintenance for Industry 4.0

Diffusion of new technology can be approached as a good marriage between business model innovation and technological innovation. With maturing and converging technological innovations ranging from Internet-of-Things, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain to digital platforms comes a fundamental shift in how companies can do business and what can be offered. They enable greenfield services (i.e. services not pre-existing), including servitization of existing products to compete. Whilst businesses are experimenting with services for emerging domains like industry 4.0, research embedding service logic in business model design for delivering and diffusing greenfield services is nascent. Using a Design Science approach, this paper contributes a method (SL-BMD) for designing service logic embedded business models that forefronts how to incorporate the customer’s perspective. We instantiate and evaluate SL-BMD by charting the experimental journey of a Predictive Maintenance offering for manufacturing settings, and highlight implementation considerations for SL-BMD and the experimental case chosen

A Quantitative Genetic Analysis of the Associations Among Language Skills, Peer Interactions, and Behavioral Problems in Childhood: Results From a Sample of Twins

A body of empirical research has revealed that there are associations among language skills, peer interactions, and behavioral problems in childhood. At the same time, however, there has been comparatively less research devoted to exploring the mutual unfolding of these factors over the first few years of life. The current study is designed to partially address this gap in the literature by examining how language skills, negative peer interactions, and behavioral problems are interrelated in a sample of twins drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). Employing a quantitative genetic framework, the results of the current study revealed that variance in language skills, negative peer interactions, and externalizing behavioral problems were all due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Bivariate Cholesky models indicated that most of the covariance among language skills, negative peer interactions, and externalizing behavioral problems was due to common genetic factors. Additional analyses using a modified DeFries–Fulker approach nested within a path model revealed a bidirectional association between negative peer interactions and externalizing behavioral problems, wherein there appeared to be feedback loops between the two. Implications of the results are discussed and avenues for future research are offered

Unwinding of primer-templates by archaeal family-B DNA polymerases in response to template-strand uracil

Archaeal family-B DNA polymerases bind tightly to deaminated bases and stall replication on encountering uracil in template strands, four bases ahead of the primer-template junction. Should the polymerase progress further towards the uracil, for example, to position uracil only two bases in front of the junction, 3′–5′ proof-reading exonuclease activity becomes stimulated, trimming the primer and re-setting uracil to the +4 position. Uracil sensing prevents copying of the deaminated base and permanent mutation in 50% of the progeny. This publication uses both steady-state and time-resolved 2-aminopurine fluorescence to show pronounced unwinding of primer-templates with Pyrococcus furiosus (Pfu) polymerase–DNA complexes containing uracil at +2; much less strand separation is seen with uracil at +4. DNA unwinding has long been recognized as necessary for proof-reading exonuclease activity. The roles of M247 and Y261, amino acids suggested by structural studies to play a role in primer-template unwinding, have been probed. M247 appears to be unimportant, but 2-aminopurine fluorescence measurements show that Y261 plays a role in primer-template strand separation. Y261 is also required for full exonuclease activity and contributes to the fidelity of the polymerase

The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: Spectral classification of galaxies at z~1

We present a Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based spectral classification, eta, for the first 5600 galaxies observed in the DEEP2 Redshift Survey. This parameter provides a very pronounced separation between absorption and emission dominated galaxy spectra - corresponding to passively evolving and actively star-forming galaxies in the survey respectively. In addition it is shown that despite the high resolution of the observed spectra, this parameter alone can be used to quite accurately reconstruct any given galaxy spectrum, suggesting there are not many `degrees of freedom' in the observed spectra of this galaxy population. It is argued that this form of classification, eta, will be particularly valuable in making future comparisons between high and low-redshift galaxy surveys for which very large spectroscopic samples are now readily available, particularly when used in conjunction with high-resolution spectral synthesis models which will be made public in the near future. We also discuss the relative advantages of this approach to distant galaxy classification compared to other methods such as colors and morphologies. Finally, we compare the classification derived here with that adopted for the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and in so doing show that the two systems are very similar. This will be particularly useful in subsequent analyses when making comparisons between results from each of these surveys to study evolution in the galaxy populations and large-scale structure.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in Ap