TO REVEAL OR CONCEAL?—AN ISP’S DILEMMA, Presenting a New “Anonymous Public Concern Test” for Evaluating ISP Subpoenas in Online Defamation Suits

This article proposes a new test called the “Anonymous Public Concern Test” which incorporates public concern analysis in enforcing Internet Service Provider [ISP] subpoenas in online defamation suits. Anonymous speech is an important aspect of First Amendment rights that warrants protection. Current tests used by courts to analyze whether to enforce ISP subpoenas are either too pro-plaintiff or too pro-defendant. The article’s proposed “Anonymous Public Concern Test” is the best approach in dealing with ISP subpoenas because it protects both anonymous speeches and preserves online defamation plaintiffs’ rights

The Reign of Nero: A Delusional Journey to Suicide

This paper follows the life of Emperor Nero from Ancient Rome. When he first became emperor, he hosted lavish celebrations and parties, even participating in performances and was praised by his people and the senate. However, he quickly turned into a tyrannical and murderous emperor, plagued with paranoia and delusion, and began murdering his family and citizens. This paper attempts to sort through Nero’s life and to match his experiences and actions with those of someone undergoing psychosis, a mental disorder where the victim loses sight of reason and the difference between right and wrong, often leading to delusion and hallucination when left untreated. Nero meets many of these qualifications and although it is impossible to diagnose conclusively someone with a mental disorder post mortem, such a diagnosis would explain many of his odd behaviors and criminal behavior. After discussing his psychotic development throughout his life, this paper concludes that in an advanced stage of psychosis, Nero may have devolved into a delusional state where he took on, in real life, the roles of the characters that he played on stage, including their actions and reactions to their crimes, later causing him to advance into a further state of delirium, ending in his suicide

Exchange 4 Change Reading Group

Cayce Wicks\u27s proposal provides another perspective to the Exchange 4 Change Reading Group, which panelist Nick Vagnoni also explores in his presentation for the faculty seminar. The program—a partnership between the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at FIU and Exchange 4 Change— connects eight FIU Writing and Rhetoric instructors with eight incarcerated teachers at Dade Correctional Institution through a reading group and letters exchanges

Presumpscot River 2010-11 Lower Main Stem Monitoring (Presentation)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/cbep-presentations/1071/thumbnail.jp

Efficacy of slide fixative methods for examining sperm

The identification of semen is very important in forensic cases, especially in sexual assault cases. Microscopic examination for spermatozoa is the only confirmatory test for the presence of semen since sperm is unique to semen and because other testing methods for components of semen are still not specific enough to truly be confirmatory. To prepare slides for microscopic examination, the sample is centrifuged to pull the sperm to the bottom of the sample tube to make a pellet. The supernatant is removed and some of the pellet is placed onto a microscopic slide. The slide is then fixed and commonly stained with Kernechtrot Picroindigocarmine Stain (KPIC) prior to examination. The first stain used in the KPIC method is nuclear fast red which is a metallic dye that stains nuclear material, including sperm heads, red. After the nuclear fast red is rinsed off using distilled water, a second stain, picroindigocarmine, is used. Picroindigocarmine is a saturated picric acid and indigocarmine solution that will stain sperm tails and the cytoplasm of epithelial cells a light green color. This second stain is then rinsed off using ethanol. The objective of this research was to determine how much sperm is lost, if any, during the slide preparation process and if one fixative method was better than others at preventing the loss of sperm during the staining process. Three traditional heat fixative methods (hot plate, flame from a Bunsen burner, and oven) were evaluated and five chemical fixatives (100% ethanol, 100% methanol, Carnoy’s solution, 2.5% glutaraldehyde, and 4% paraformaldehyde) as well as without the use of any fixative were also evaluated. This was done by collecting both the distilled water and ethanol washes from the staining process in separate centrifuge tubes and preparing a slide from those to identify any sperm that may have been dislodged from the slide during the staining process. Since there was no sperm loss was detected in any of the fixative methods, all are suitable for use in identifying semen. Due to cost, time, and ease of use, heat fixatives may be preferable. Since the different temperatures of the heat fixatives did not appear to have an effect on sperm loss, the hot plate would be the easiest and quickest method to use. Additionally, hot plates don’t require a gas line into the lab. However, the results also demonstrated how difficult it is to count the same number of sperm on multiple slides made from the same semen dilution. For all slides, 5 µL of a 1:2500 dilution of semen was used, however, the number of sperm observed on the slides varied widely for all fixative methods. Multiple samples from three different tubes of the same dilution of semen were quantified to see if this variability was also observed in DNA quantification. The results showed that even though there was some variation in quantities between samples, the results were not statistically significant. One avenue of future research would be to evaluate other steps of slide preparation that may decrease sperm yield

Santa Maria Antiqua: The Amalgamation of Identity in Early Medieval Rome

The intent of this investigation is to frame an identity for the church of Santa Maria Antiqua and the urban condition of Rome during the sixth through eighth centuries. Coupling topographical and semiotic information with larger geographic issues, this study interrogates the church and specific individuals associated with it as a way of more comprehensively understanding Santa Maria Antiqua as a visual medium of cultural change and political propaganda. Narrating the complex formation of personal and social identity at the site allows us to understand greater physical and social contexts and explore more thoroughly early Christian Rome

Pitstop Confessional

This conceptual project considers the region of the South to be a vibrant historical artifact with a valuable future tense. The Pitstop Confessional positions the cultural lineage of the saloon and roadside diner typologies within their contemporary highway context and critiques the morphology of the Southern dining experience from the one-room house to the asphalt edgescapes of suburbia. Waffle House is designed as a truer version of itself – a roadside sanctuary. An assertion is made through spatial gestures, allusions to religious rituals, and the written word that the Waffle House dining experience – however detached from the presuppositions society has about communal eating – is a spiritual activity that fulfills patrons’ desires for redemption and salvation under a pretense of affordable, transit-oriented happiness. The Fountain of Youth, the Hymnal, and the Call to Prayer are metaphors embedded in Waffle House. Drawing upon the speed and linearity of the automobile, the redemptive aspects of comfort food, and the dynamics between public and private experience at Waffle House, the Pitstop Confessional is a Southern sanctuary for highway pilgrims to find repose along their Westward journey. The project becomes a more real manifestation of what Waffle House means

Continuous Extremes: Architecture of Uncertainty in Poland, 1945—

In this thesis, architecture situates between extremes. The dichotomies of destruction and construction, mobility and fixity, performance and reality, inside and outside, and form and time frame architecture and the processes through which it is made. The context is Poland in the fallout of the year 1945, when Warsaw’s unique, nearly total destruction and the ascendance of a new communist regime raised the political stakes of architecture. The thesis focuses on a cast of characters in architecture and related artistic disciplines—individuals haunted by the traumas of their own pasts, negotiating a Polish state that created oppressive limitations through artistic mandates but also created opportunities by commissioning artists and architects, and participating as agents of a discipline that wielded incredible political power but was also revealed by the war to produce objects that were ephemeral and destroyable. The thesis then moves beyond the predominance of total destruction and totalitarianism, highlighting stories of improvisation, innovation, and self-becoming within a high-pressure political milieu. Just as the extreme conditions of Poland in 1945 preceded multiple spatial and conceptual approaches to form, the thesis itself takes the form of group biography, describing a fluid situation through glimpses of shared yet elusive realities in which architecture and architects try to intervene

Surrogate Infrastructures: Human Consciousness in the Information Age

This project is a study of collective memory in a place and time of intense change, intending to facilitate a conversation about the complexities of remembering and the challenges of humanizing the past in an increasingly fast-paced and consumption-driven world. As it critiques the architectural and anti-spatial precedents of newly suburban Poland, it imagines and exploits alternate narratives for a site that has been heretofore saturated by the singularity of its Holocaust past. Grappling with the absurdities of history and historiography in Kraków and across the globe, the program takes on a series of infrastructures, imbued with temporal potentials, to convey tourists into and out of their vicarious treks through the city and to proselytize an architecture of decision which urges engagement and understanding of the present