The Police-Prosecutor Relationship and the No-Contact Rule: Conflicting Incentives after Montejo v. Louisiana and Maryland v. Shatzer

In this paper, I examine the consequences of the divergence of ethical and constitutional rules, with particular attention to the institutional dynamics of criminal investigation and specifically the relationship between police and prosecutors. This relationship is of crucial importance because Montejo and Shatzer create a legal regime in which non-lawyer agents and officers may initiate investigative contact with represented defendants in circumstances in which prosecutors are absolutely forbidden to do so. This situation undermines the ability of prosecutors to effectively supervise the investigation of their cases and puts them in an untenable position when advising agents on the law

Faith, Harm, and Neutrality: Some Complexities of Free Exercise Law

This essay reviews Professor Marci Hamilton\u27s God vs. the Gavel (2005). The essay surveys several areas of recent free exercise controversy in light of Hamilton\u27s defense of a robust harm principle as the proper analytical framework for free exercise analysis. It then takes the example of religiously based insanity defenses as an illustration of the theoretical difficulties that arise at the intersection of religious belief and criminal law

Assessing Barriers to Health Care Access for New Americans

Introduction. Healthcare within the United States has been at the forefront of public discussion and political representation in recent years, particularly as it relates to healthcare access and barriers to said access. Focus has been placed on low-income groups that most generally represent the face of the average American, but this leaves the question: How are new Americans faring, and do their struggles match those faced by the rest of the country? The new Americans of Burlington, Vermont serve as a small window into a unique refugee population’s experiences with healthcare in the United States. Methods. A focus group consisting of 8 women was hosted on-site at the Burlington Housing Authority Franklin Square apartments. Questions were designed to determine demographic data as well facilitate subjective discussion on participants’ healthcare experiences. Translation services were provided by the resident manager. Results. Languages spoken were Mai Mai, Swahili, and English. Five major themes for healthcare access barriers were identified: language barriers, having children, transportation barriers, financial barriers, and a lack of preventative care. Sub- themes were also identified, which formed a taxonomy of barriers to healthcare access among the representative population. Discussion/Conclusions. The difficulties faced by new Americans are numerous and interrelated, leading to a perpetual cycle of insufficient healthcare. Throughout the discussion, the financial burden of healthcare was regularly raised as one of the most prominent issues faced. This concern matches with those found in similar, previous studies, that have analyzed the difficulties faced by the rest of America.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1254/thumbnail.jp

Gamifying the EV Driving Experience: A virtual electric vehicle to change public attitudes

Although significant advances have been achieved in the range and performance of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in recent years, the rate of uptake of these vehicles is relatively slow, meaning that they will not become a significant component of national vehicle fleets for some time to come. This slow adoption can be attributed in part (price is of course a major factor) to misunderstandings, misinformation, and an absence of experience with such vehicles. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a virtual electric vehicle – effectively a game-like application on a smartphone – which mimics an individual’s real use of a conventional fossil fuel powered vehicle with the equivalent experience in a BEV. The smartphone “knows” when it is in the user’s conventional car, and keeps track of its travels, simulating the battery charging and usage of the virtual BEV in real time, and reporting situations such as driving range exceeded. It also provides summaries of running costs, and for long term users, indicates the need for battery replacement. In this way, it enables a user to gain some experience of what it would be like to use a BEV on a daily basis. A preliminary evaluation of the virtual BEV concept has shown excellent results, with a significant increase in positive attitudes to BEVs after only one week’s use of the smartphone app

Sagittarius A* Small Satellite Mission: Capabilities and Commissioning Preview

SSCI is leading a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded team launching a mission in June 2021, dubbed Sagittarius A*, to demonstrate key hardware and software technologies for on-orbit autonomy, to provide a software testbed for on-orbit developmental test & autonomous mission operations, and to reduce risk for future constellation-level mission autonomy and operations. In this paper, we present the system CONOPs and capabilities, system architectures, flight and ground software development status, and initial commissioning status. The system will fly on Loft Orbital’s YAM-3 shared LEO satellite mission, and includes SSCI’s onboard autonomy software suite running on an Innoflight CFC-400 processor with onboard Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). The autonomy payload has attitude control authority over the spacecraft bus and command authority of the imaging payload, and performs fully-autonomous onboard request handling, resource & task allocation, collection execution, ATR, and detection downlinking. The system is capable of machine-to -machine tip-and-cue from offboard cueing sources via cloud-based integrations. Requests for mission data are submitted to the satellite throughout its orbit from a tactical user level via a smartphone application, and ISR data products are downlinked and displayed at the tactical level on an Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) smartphone. Follow-on software updates can be sent to the autonomy suite as over-the-air updates for on-orbit testing at any time during the on-orbit life of the satellite. Communications include GlobalStar inter-satellite communications for low rate task and status monitoring, and ground station links for payload data downloads. Planned demonstrations and opportunities will be discussed

Development of novel membrane disrupting lipoguanidine compounds sensitizing Gram-negative bacteria to antibiotics

A new class of amphiphilic molecules, the lipoguanidines, designed as hybrids of guanidine and fatty acid compounds, has been synthesized and developed. The new molecules present both a guanidine polar head and a lipophilic tail that allow them to disrupt bacterial membranes and to sensitize Gram-negative bacteria to the action of the narrow-spectrum antibiotics rifampicin and novobiocin. The lipoguanidine 5g sensitizes Klebsiella pneumonia, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Escherichia coli to rifampicin, thereby reducing the antibiotic minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) up to 256-fold. Similarly, 5g is able to potentiate novobiocin up to 64-fold, thereby showing a broad spectrum of antibiotic potentiating activity. Toxicity and mechanism studies revealed the potential of 5g to work synergistically with rifampicin through the disruption18 of bacterial membranes without affecting eukaryotic cells

Genomic analysis of estrogen cascade reveals histone variant H2A.Z associated with breast cancer progression

We demonstrate an integrated approach to the study of a transcriptional regulatory cascade involved in the progression of breast cancer and we identify a protein associated with disease progression. Using chromatin immunoprecipitation and genome tiling arrays, whole genome mapping of transcription factor-binding sites was combined with gene expression profiling to identify genes involved in the proliferative response to estrogen (E2). Using RNA interference, selected ERα and c-MYC gene targets were knocked down to identify mediators of E2-stimulated cell proliferation. Tissue microarray screening revealed that high expression of an epigenetic factor, the E2-inducible histone variant H2A.Z, is significantly associated with lymph node metastasis and decreased breast cancer survival. Detection of H2A.Z levels independently increased the prognostic power of biomarkers currently in clinical use. This integrated approach has accelerated the identification of a molecule linked to breast cancer progression, has implications for diagnostic and therapeutic interventions, and can be applied to a wide range of cancers

Multiplex qPCR Discriminates Variants of Concern to Enhance Global Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2

With the emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants that may increase transmissibility and/or cause escape from immune responses, there is an urgent need for the targeted surveillance of circulating lineages. It was found that the B.1.1.7 (also 501Y.V1) variant, first detected in the United Kingdom, could be serendipitously detected by the Thermo Fisher TaqPath COVID-19 PCR assay because a key deletion in these viruses, spike Δ69-70, would cause a spike gene target failure (SGTF) result. However, a SGTF result is not definitive for B.1.1.7, and this assay cannot detect other variants of concern (VOC) that lack spike Δ69-70, such as B.1.351 (also 501Y.V2), detected in South Africa, and P.1 (also 501Y.V3), recently detected in Brazil. We identified a deletion in the ORF1a gene (ORF1a Δ3675-3677) in all 3 variants, which has not yet been widely detected in other SARS-CoV-2 lineages. Using ORF1a Δ3675-3677 as the primary target and spike Δ69-70 to differentiate, we designed and validated an open-source PCR assay to detect SARS-CoV-2 VOC. Our assay can be rapidly deployed in laboratories around the world to enhance surveillance for the local emergence and spread of B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1