Whose Forum Is It Anyway: Individual Government Officials and Their Authority to Create Public Forums on Social Media

Modern technology and the internet have radically transformed the ways in which individuals interact and communicate. At the forefront of this digital-speech movement are social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which the Supreme Court has identified as among “the most important places . . . for the exchange of views” in our modern culture. But these platforms are not just for private citizens; government officials also use social media sites as a way to connect with their constituents. However, First Amendment questions have arisen as these officials have sought to regulate their pages by “blocking” individual users. To date, three cases have held that individual government officials at several levels of federal, state, and municipal government violated the “public forum doctrine” by blocking individuals from their social media pages. This Note posits that the public forum analyses employed in these cases fail to address a fundamental question, however: When is it appropriate to apply the public forum doctrine to individual government officials’ conduct? Through a survey of applicable public forum precedent, this Note suggests an amendment to the doctrine that effectively establishes when individual government officials act with the requisite authority such that they can be considered government entities capable of creating a public forum

Whose Forum Is It Anyway: Individual Government Officials and Their Authority to Create Public Forums on Social Media

Modern technology and the internet have radically transformed the ways in which individuals interact and communicate. At the forefront of this digital-speech movement are social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, which the Supreme Court has identified as among “the most important places . . . for the exchange of views” in our modern culture. But these platforms are not just for private citizens; government officials also use social media sites as a way to connect with their constituents. However, First Amendment questions have arisen as these officials have sought to regulate their pages by “blocking” individual users. To date, three cases have held that individual government officials at several levels of federal, state, and municipal government violated the “public forum doctrine” by blocking individuals from their social media pages. This Note posits that the public forum analyses employed in these cases fail to address a fundamental question, however: When is it appropriate to apply the public forum doctrine to individual government officials’ conduct? Through a survey of applicable public forum precedent, this Note suggests an amendment to the doctrine that effectively establishes when individual government officials act with the requisite authority such that they can be considered government entities capable of creating a public forum

Managing Medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae) on Rangeland: A Meta-Analysis of Control Effects and Assessment of Stakeholder Needs

Invasive plant response to control efforts is strongly modified by site-specific factors, treatment timing, and environmental conditions following treatment, making management outcomes challenging to predict. Systematic reviews, which involve quantitative synthesis of data, can address this challenge by identifying general patterns of treatment effects across studies and quantifying the degree to which these effects vary. We conducted a systematic review of medusahead (Taeniatherum caput-medusae [L.] Nevski) control treatments that couples a meta-analysis on control data with an assessment of stakeholder needs to identify critical medusahead management knowledge gaps. With the meta-analysis we generated effect size estimates of how combinations of herbicide, burning, seeding, and grazing impacted medusahead on rangeland dominated by either annual or perennial vegetation. All combinations of treatments in both rangeland systems provided significant short-term control of medusahead, although treatment effects were highly transient on perennial rangeland, particularly for seeding treatments. Stakeholders listed grazing as a preferred management tool, and on annual rangeland an almost twofold reduction in medusahead abundance was achieved by timing high stocking rates to match phenological stages when medusahead was most susceptible to defoliation. Insufficient data were available to evaluate effects of grazing on medusahead on perennial rangeland. On the basis of these data and our stakeholder survey, four major information needs emerged, including the need to better understand 1) seedbank response to burning and herbicide treatments, 2) how to optimize grazing animal impacts on medusahead given ranch enterprise constraints, 3) costs and benefits of control and risk of practice failure, and 4) impacts of adaptive management treatments conducted on larger scales and at longer time intervals. Addressing these knowledge gaps should help overcome key ecological and economic barriers inhibiting implementation of medusahead and other invasive plant management programs on rangeland and provide a positive step toward conserving the critical ecosystem services these systems provide. © 2015 Society for Range Management. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.The Rangeland Ecology & Management archives are made available by the Society for Range Management and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] for further information

Metabolic and anatomic characteristics of benign and malignant adrenal masses on positron emission tomography/computed tomography: a review of literature

PET/CT with (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) or using different radiocompounds has proven accuracy for detection of adrenal metastases in patients undergoing cancer staging. It can assist the diagnostic work-up in oncology patients by identifying distant metastases to the adrenal(s) and defining oligometastatic disease that may benefit from targeted intervention. In patients with incidentally discovered adrenal nodules, so-called adrenal "incidentaloma" FDG PET/CT is emerging as a useful test to distinguish benign from malignant etiology. Current published evidence suggests a role for FDG PET/CT in assessing the malignant potential of an adrenal lesion that has been 'indeterminately' categorized with unenhanced CT, adrenal protocol contrast-enhanced CT, or chemical-shift MRI. FDG PET/CT could be used to stratify patients with higher risk of malignancy for surgical intervention, while recommending surveillance for adrenal masses with low malignant potential. There are caveats for interpretation of the metabolic activity of an adrenal nodule on PET/CT that may lead to false-positive and false-negative interpretation. Adrenal lesions represent a wide spectrum of etiologies, and the typical appearances on PET/CT are still being described, therefore our goal was to summarize the current diagnostic strategies for evaluation of adrenal lesions and present metabolic and anatomic appearances of common and uncommon adrenal lesions. In spite of the emerging role of PET/CT to differentiate benign from malignant adrenal mass, especially in difficult cases, it should be emphasized that PET/CT is not needed for most patients and that many diagnostic problems can be resolved by CT and/or MR imaging