Alaska’s Explicit Right to Privacy Warrants Greater Protection of Alaskans’ Personal Data

Alaska’s legislature should pass a comprehensive data privacy law to prevent companies’ exploitation of citizens’ personal data. The Alaska Constitution explicitly provides Alaskans with the right to privacy and calls upon the legislature to protect that right. Despite this explicit right, Alaskans’ privacy rights are vulnerable to exploitation by private companies. Proposed legislation to address this vulnerability should ensure data privacy protection, but the legislature should remain cognizant of concerns regarding innovation and business. To best achieve this balance, the legislation should be founded in generally accepted data privacy principles and should establish strong financial penalties for companies that violate the law. The legislation should also be flexible enough to avoid stifling innovation and unreasonably increasing compliance costs. More specifically, the law should allow companies to provide financial incentives to consumers in exchange for permission to collect, use, and share their data. Privacy legislation that meets these goals will effectively protect data privacy, while simultaneously enabling companies to innovate and turn a profit

Alaska’s Explicit Right to Privacy Warrants Greater Protection of Alaskans’ Personal Data

Alaska’s legislature should pass a comprehensive data privacy law to prevent companies’ exploitation of citizens’ personal data. The Alaska Constitution explicitly provides Alaskans with the right to privacy and calls upon the legislature to protect that right. Despite this explicit right, Alaskans’ privacy rights are vulnerable to exploitation by private companies. Proposed legislation to address this vulnerability should ensure data privacy protection, but the legislature should remain cognizant of concerns regarding innovation and business. To best achieve this balance, the legislation should be founded in generally accepted data privacy principles and should establish strong financial penalties for companies that violate the law. The legislation should also be flexible enough to avoid stifling innovation and unreasonably increasing compliance costs. More specifically, the law should allow companies to provide financial incentives to consumers in exchange for permission to collect, use, and share their data. Privacy legislation that meets these goals will effectively protect data privacy, while simultaneously enabling companies to innovate and turn a profit

Petition for a Writ of Certiorari. Debord v. Mercy Health System of Kansas, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2664 (2014) (No. 13-1118), 2014 U.S. S. Ct. Briefs LEXIS 1120

QUESTION PRESENTED Section 704(a) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids an employer to retaliate against any employee because that worker opposed unlawful discrimination. The question presented is: Does section 704(a) prohibit retaliation against a worker because of the worker\u27s statements: (1) only when the statements are made to the worker\u27s own employer or to federal or state anti-discrimination agencies (the rule in the Tenth and Fourth Circuits), or (2) also when the worker\u27s statements are made to any other person (the rule in the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth and Ninth Circuits)

The Role of Molecular Packing In Singlet Fission

Over a decade ago, the process of singlet fission (SF) was shown to be able to increase the efficiency of solar cells. In that time, much work has been done in the field, yet there are still few known materials which undergo fast SF and are also suitable for use in a photovoltaic device. In addition, there is little guidance as to how the material should be arranged in the solid. This thesis investigates how molecular packing affects SF. It begins with a review of the work that has been done in the field on this subject. A simple frontier orbital model for SF is then described which is has been incorporated into a program, SIMPLE, which first searches the 6-dimensional space of possible arrangements of a pair of chromophores to identify all significant, physically accessible local maxima of the square of the electronic matrix coupling element for SF (|T*|) on a grid of 108 to 109 pair geometries. The effects of intermolecular interaction on the energy balance of SF and therefore the rate constant of SF are approximated by Marcus theory and disqualify many of the maxima. The program then optimizes the selected pair geometries for maximum rate of singlet fission. The model and program are first applied to the pair geometry optimization of the common SF chromophore tetracene followed by optimization of a 1,3-diphenylisobenzofuran pair. Next, in a different application, two crystal polymorphs of 1,3-diphenylisobenzofuran and crystals structures of 11 fluorinated derivatives are analyzed with the model to explain why some perform fast SF while others do not. Finally, possible methods for expanding the simple model are explored.</p

Access to Recovery and Recidivism Among Former Prison Inmates

Access to Recovery (ATR) is a SAMHSA-funded initiative that offers a mix of clinical and supportive services for substance abuse. ATR clients choose which services will help to overcome barriers in their road to recovery, and a recovery consultant provides vouchers and helps link the client to these community resources. One of ATR’s goals was to provide services to those involved in the criminal justice system in the hopes that addressing substance abuse issues could reduce subsequent criminal behaviors. This study examines this goal by looking at recidivism among a sample of clients in one state’s ATR program who returned to the community after incarceration. Results suggest there were few differential effects of service selections on subsequent recidivism. However, there are significant differences in recidivism rates among the agencies that provided ATR services. Agencies with more resources and a focus on prisoner reentry had better recidivism outcomes than those that focus only on substance abuse services

Limiting the effects of earthquakes on gravitational-wave interferometers

Ground-based gravitational wave interferometers such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) are susceptible to high-magnitude teleseismic events, which can interrupt their operation in science mode and significantly reduce the duty cycle. It can take several hours for a detector to stabilize enough to return to its nominal state for scientific observations. The down time can be reduced if advance warning of impending shaking is received and the impact is suppressed in the isolation system with the goal of maintaining stable operation even at the expense of increased instrumental noise. Here we describe an early warning system for modern gravitational-wave observatories. The system relies on near real-time earthquake alerts provided by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Hypocenter and magnitude information is generally available in 5 to 20 minutes of a significant earthquake depending on its magnitude and location. The alerts are used to estimate arrival times and ground velocities at the gravitational-wave detectors. In general, 90\% of the predictions for ground-motion amplitude are within a factor of 5 of measured values. The error in both arrival time and ground-motion prediction introduced by using preliminary, rather than final, hypocenter and magnitude information is minimal. By using a machine learning algorithm, we develop a prediction model that calculates the probability that a given earthquake will prevent a detector from taking data. Our initial results indicate that by using detector control configuration changes, we could prevent interruption of operation from 40-100 earthquake events in a 6-month time-period

Evolving toward a human-cell based and multiscale approach to drug discovery for CNS disorders

A disruptive approach to therapeutic discovery and development is required in order to significantly improve the success rate of drug discovery for central nervous system (CNS) disorders. In this review, we first assess the key factors contributing to the frequent clinical failures for novel drugs. Second, we discuss cancer translational research paradigms that addressed key issues in drug discovery and development and have resulted in delivering drugs with significantly improved outcomes for patients. Finally, we discuss two emerging technologies that could improve the success rate of CNS therapies: human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-based studies and multiscale biology models. Coincident with advances in cellular technologies that enable the generation of hiPSCs directly from patient blood or skin cells, together with methods to differentiate these hiPSC lines into specific neural cell types relevant to neurological disease, it is also now possible to combine data from large-scale forward genetics and post-mortem global epigenetic and expression studies in order to generate novel predictive models. The application of systems biology approaches to account for the multiscale nature of different data types, from genetic to molecular and cellular to clinical, can lead to new insights into human diseases that are emergent properties of biological networks, not the result of changes to single genes. Such studies have demonstrated the heterogeneity in etiological pathways and the need for studies on model systems that are patient-derived and thereby recapitulate neurological disease pathways with higher fidelity. In the context of two common and presumably representative neurological diseases, the neurodegenerative disease Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and the psychiatric disorder schizophrenia (SZ), we propose the need for, and exemplify the impact of, a multiscale biology approach that can integrate panomic, clinical, imaging, and literature data in order to c

W283 Should Tennessee Tobacco Growers Invest in Irrigation, Fertigation or Plastic Mulch?

Version 2.

Mission Simulation Toolkit

The Mission Simulation Toolkit (MST) is a flexible software system for autonomy research. It was developed as part of the Mission Simulation Facility (MSF) project that was started in 2001 to facilitate the development of autonomous planetary robotic missions. Autonomy is a key enabling factor for robotic exploration. There has been a large gap between autonomy software (at the research level), and software that is ready for insertion into near-term space missions. The MST bridges this gap by providing a simulation framework and a suite of tools for supporting research and maturation of autonomy. MST uses a distributed framework based on the High Level Architecture (HLA) standard. A key feature of the MST framework is the ability to plug in new models to replace existing ones with the same services. This enables significant simulation flexibility, particularly the mixing and control of fidelity level. In addition, the MST provides automatic code generation from robot interfaces defined with the Unified Modeling Language (UML), methods for maintaining synchronization across distributed simulation systems, XML-based robot description, and an environment server. Finally, the MSF supports a number of third-party products including dynamic models and terrain databases. Although the communication objects and some of the simulation components that are provided with this toolkit are specifically designed for terrestrial surface rovers, the MST can be applied to any other domain, such as aerial, aquatic, or space