Your Money or Your Speech: The Children’s Internet Protection Act and the Congressional Assault on the First Amendment in Public Libraries

CIPA is, in fact, one of the most sweeping restrictions on constitutionally protected speech ever invoked by the United States government disingenuously presented as an uncontroversial funding decision. By mandating the use of technology that cannot effectively eliminate obscenity and child pornography without compromising a great deal of protected speech, and by attempting to achieve indirectly content restrictions that the courts have held Congress cannot accomplish through direct statutory proscriptions, CIPA offends the First Amendment as surely as any prior failed attempt by the legislature to restrict Internet speech

Economic Feasibility of Controlling Big Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) on State and Private Rangelands in Utah

Spraying with the chemical herbicide 2,4-D is the most widely used method of controlling big sagebrush. Spraying is very effective in increasing forage production and generally is not poisonous to either man or animals. Two procedures can be used to calculate the internal rate of return to big sagebrush control: standard and modified discounting. Standard discounting assumes all nonuse costs are incurred in the year of treatment, and the annual income stream is constant throughout the effective life of treatment. Modified discounting correctly assumes the nonuse cost is incurred in the period of deferment, and the income stream does not reach its full potential until after deferment. Thus, modified discounting yields a lower internal rate of return. Three big sagebrush control methods (spraying, burning, and chaining) offer internal rates of return which are greater than 8 percent (cost of obtaining capital for range improvement). The most important factors in determining the internal rate of return are the site vigor index and the amount of forage present before treatment. A larger pre-treatment forage yield will give a larger internal rate of return, assuming the vigor index is sufficiently high. If state and private rangelands infested with big sagebrush are not improved by spraying or other big sagebrush control methods, certain benefits, called opportunity costs, will be foregone. For spraying alone, the expected annual opportunity costs would be $3,048,102. The economic feasibility of controlling nearly 2 1/2 million acres of state and private rangelands infested with big sagebrush are excellent. The expected annual increase in carrying capacity of 1,830,000 acres of sagebrush rangeland meriting improvement by spraying is 765,855 AUMs. The remaining 623,000 acres meriting control other than by spraying could possibly increase the total number of additional AUMs to over 1 million

Redefining Academic Law Library Excellence in a Technological Age: From Evolution to Revolution

This article focuses on the rapidly changing standards of academic law library excellence as the ready availability and diversity of information technologies and digital collections supplant traditional print collections as the determinative measurement of library quality. The author challenges the legal and law library professions to discard traditional qualitative standards (e.g., print volume and title holdings) and to embrace standards that recognize the importance of meaningful access to information that is not tied to physical ownership or location

Redefining Academic Law Library Excellence in a Technological Age: From Evolution to Revolution

This article focuses on the rapidly changing standards of academic law library excellence as the ready availability and diversity of information technologies and digital collections supplant traditional print collections as the determinative measurement of library quality. The author challenges the legal and law library professions to discard traditional qualitative standards (e.g., print volume and title holdings) and to embrace standards that recognize the importance of meaningful access to information that is not tied to physical ownership or location

Your Money or Your Speech: The Children\u27s Internet Protection Act and the Congressional Assault on the First Amendment in Public Libraries

This article examines the inherent conflict between This article examines the inherent conflict between two Congressional approaches to public access to the Internet - the provision of federal funding support to schools and public libraries to ensure broad access to online information regardless of financial means, and federal restrictions on children\u27s use of school and public library computers to access content that the government feels could be harmful to them. It analyzes the efficacy and constitutionality of the Children\u27s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), Congress\u27s attempt to use its powers of the purse to control objectionable online content in the very institutions it has used to promote equality of Internet access, particularly for children. The article looks first at Congress\u27s early attempts to directly control categories of online speech through the passage of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), two statutes that proved to be so insensitive to classic First Amendment principles that they were essentially dead on arrival at the courthouse. The article then focuses on Congress\u27s strategic shift away from direct proscriptions of online content and toward control of Internet speech indirectly through the use of its spending power. CIPA attempts to regulate online content by making the distribution of Universal Service Fund (E-Rate) and related federal school and library technology funds contingent upon the recipient institution\u27s agreement to place filtering software on all Internet-accessible computers. The article examines the history of Congress\u27s use of its spending power as a regulatory tool, and takes issue with Congress\u27s description of CIPA\u27s funding conditions as a routine use of that power immune from First Amendment constraints. Arguing that public libraries are limited public forums subsidized by the government for the express purpose of facilitating broad private expression, the article recommends judicial review of CIPA based on the same strict scrutiny principles used by the Supreme Court in Rosenberger and Velazquez to invalidate similar government funding decisions that forced viewpoint and content-based regulation of private speech. The article contends that Congress has not met its burden under strict scrutiny of showing that Internet filtering in public libraries is constitutionally necessary to achieve the government\u27s interests in protecting children, and argues that software filters cannot possibly be applied without compromising a great deal of library patrons\u27 constitutionally protected online speech. The article concludes that, stripped of the facade of an innocent use of Congress\u27s spending power, the Children\u27s Internet Protection Act is merely the Computer Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act in disguise - yet another clumsy congressional attempt to censor Internet content without sufficient concern for the damage it will do to the First Amendment rights of library patrons, many of whom use libraries as the only place where they can gain access to the incredible wealth of diverse information available on the Internet

Bounds and Beyond: A Need to Reevaluate the Right of Prisoner Access to the Courts

There is little doubt that a prisoner\u27s most important right is access to the courts. Without access, prisoners have neither a forum in which to question the conditions and constitutionality of their confinement, nor an arena in which to seek vindication of other alleged rights violations. Therefore, the right of access is the foundation upon which other prisoners\u27 rights are built

Learning 3D Navigation Protocols on Touch Interfaces with Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Using touch devices to navigate in virtual 3D environments such as computer assisted design (CAD) models or geographical information systems (GIS) is inherently difficult for humans, as the 3D operations have to be performed by the user on a 2D touch surface. This ill-posed problem is classically solved with a fixed and handcrafted interaction protocol, which must be learned by the user. We propose to automatically learn a new interaction protocol allowing to map a 2D user input to 3D actions in virtual environments using reinforcement learning (RL). A fundamental problem of RL methods is the vast amount of interactions often required, which are difficult to come by when humans are involved. To overcome this limitation, we make use of two collaborative agents. The first agent models the human by learning to perform the 2D finger trajectories. The second agent acts as the interaction protocol, interpreting and translating to 3D operations the 2D finger trajectories from the first agent. We restrict the learned 2D trajectories to be similar to a training set of collected human gestures by first performing state representation learning, prior to reinforcement learning. This state representation learning is addressed by projecting the gestures into a latent space learned by a variational auto encoder (VAE).Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures. Accepted at The European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases 2019 (ECMLPKDD 2019

Handbook on Virginia Civil Procedure, A Guide to Legal Research in Virginia

Professor Bryson\u27s Handbook on Virginia Civil Procedure ( Handbook ) which is now out in an expanded second edition, was written as an introduction to Virginia civil procedure for the students who study with him at the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond. However, it will find an appreciative audience among two other distinct and occasionally overlapping groups of readers: active litigators who seek a ready reference on Virginia\u27s civil-law procedures and practices, and legal history buffs who enjoy an excursus on the Anglo-American antecedents of Virginia\u27s sometimes unique approach to civil litigation

Soil-water dynamics and unsaturated storage during snowmelt following wildfire

Many forested watersheds with a substantial fraction of precipitation delivered as snow have the potential for landscape disturbance by wildfire. Little is known about the immediate effects of wildfire on snowmelt and near-surface hydrologic responses, including soil-water storage. Montane systems at the rain-snow transition have soil-water dynamics that are further complicated during the snowmelt period by strong aspect controls on snowmelt and soil thawing. Here we present data from field measurements of snow hydrology and subsurface hydrologic and temperature responses during the first winter and spring after the September 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire in Colorado, USA. Our observations of soil-water content and soil temperature show sharp contrasts in hydrologic and thermal conditions between north- and south-facing slopes. South-facing burned soils were ∼1–2 °C warmer on average than north-facing burned soils and ∼1.5 °C warmer than south-facing unburned soils, which affected soil thawing during the snowmelt period. Soil-water dynamics also differed by aspect: in response to soil thawing, soil-water content increased approximately one month earlier on south-facing burned slopes than on north-facing burned slopes. While aspect and wildfire affect soil-water dynamics during snowmelt, soil-water storage at the end of the snowmelt period reached the value at field capacity for each plot, suggesting that post-snowmelt unsaturated storage was not substantially influenced by aspect in wildfire-affected areas. Our data and analysis indicate that the amount of snowmelt-driven groundwater recharge may be larger in wildfire-impacted areas, especially on south-facing slopes, because of earlier soil thaw and longer durations of soil-water contents above field capacity in those areas