Bostonia

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs

Employer Defamation: Reasons and Remedies for Declining References and Chilled Communications in the Workplace

Fear of liability has caused many employers to refrain from giving references or reasons for terminating employees. Inadequate protection for employers under constitutional and tort law, unrestricted punitive awards, and the lack of a declaratory relief alternative threaten free expression in the workplace. This Note proposes that such inadequacies may be remedied by applying an enhanced definition of negligence and eliminating the conditional privilege in employer defamation cases. The enhanced negligence standard would reduce employer fear of strict liability, create a uniform standard of communication for employers to follow, and insure that liability clearly was established by the higher degree of proof and independent review procedures. Replacing the conditional privilege system with the enhanced negligence standard also would benefit employees by eliminating the more stringent malice requirement and simplifying defamation law. This Note further proposes eliminating punitive damage awards and adopting declaratory relief statutes to provide an efficient, less costly method of resolving defamation disputes. Declaratory relief would resolve the inequities of a negligence standard by providing relief for employees who cannot prove the requisite fault

Cinemática de las galaxias barradas de baja masa

En este trabajo, tratamos de describir los movimientos de las galaxias de baja masa. Aunque en un principio el trabajo estaba enfocado en galaxias barradas, debido a la baja estadística de este tipo de sistemas en la muestra decidimos ampliar el trabajo al estudio global de galaxias de baja masa. Este tipo de estudio sobre la cinemática de las galaxias ya se ha realizado muchas veces en galaxias más masivas, pero rara vez en galaxias de baja masa. Con tal fin, trabajamos sobre cinco galaxias, de diferentes tipos, y estudiamos sus movimientos rotacionales y no rotacionales gracias a técnicas de análisis espectroscópico. Nuestras conclusiones son que las galaxias de baja masa presentan un disco soportado por una rotación similar a la de las galaxias mas masivas. Una vez modelada dicha rotación, la distribución residual de velocidades nos permite analizar los movimientos no circulares y ´estos presentan dos tipos principales de patrones: patrones relacionados con efectos a gran escala como pueden ser alabeos del disco (warps) y patrones estocásticos relacionados a escalas locales con formación estelar.In this work, we try to describe the motions of low-mass galaxies. Although at first the work was focused on barred galaxies, due to the low statistics of this type of system in the sample, we decided to extend the work to the global study of low-mass galaxies. This type of study on the kinematics of galaxies has already been carried out many times in more massive galaxies, but rarely in low-mass galaxies. To this end, we work on five galaxies, of different types, and study their rotational and non-rotational motions using spectroscopic analysis techniques. Our conclusions are that low-mass galaxies have a disk supported by rotation similarly to more massive galaxies. Once said rotation has been modeled, the residual distribution of velocities allows us to analyze non-circular movements and these present two main types of patterns: patterns related to large-scale effects such as warps of the disk and stochastic patterns related locally with star formation

Comparing paedophile activity in different P2P systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are widely used to exchange content over the Internet. Knowledge on paedophile activity in such networks remains limited while it has important social consequences. Moreover, though there are different P2P systems in use, previous academic works on this topic focused on one system at a time and their results are not directly comparable. We design a methodology for comparing \kad and \edonkey, two P2P systems among the most prominent ones and with different anonymity levels. We monitor two \edonkey servers and the \kad network during several days and record hundreds of thousands of keyword-based queries. We detect paedophile-related queries with a previously validated tool and we propose, for the first time, a large-scale comparison of paedophile activity in two different P2P systems. We conclude that there are significantly fewer paedophile queries in \kad than in \edonkey (approximately 0.09% \vs 0.25%).Comment: Submitte

Bostonia

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs

Sjømonstrene langs våre strender. Undervisning for bærekraftig utvikling med fokus på marin forsøpling

Masteroppgave i profesjonsretta naturfag - Nord universitet, 201

Endocrine cells share expression of N-CAM with neurones

The reeent explosive interest in eell adhesion molecules (CAMs) is a direet eonsequence of the fundamental roles they are thought to play during early embryogenesis and tissue formation [1,2]. The most weIl known of them, studied independently under the names of N-CAM [3] (neural-CAM), 02 protein [4] and BSP-2 [5], has been shown to consist in brain of a family of three glyeoproteins of Mr 180000, 140000 and 120000 [6,7] which are implicated in neurone-neurone adhesion by a homophilie binding meehanism [8,9]. While N-CAM was originally considered to be limited to neurones in adult tissues, ultrastruetural immunoeytochemical studies have sinee provided unequivocal evidenee that glial cells, both astrocytes [6,10] and Schwann cells [11], also express N-CAM (see also [12,13]). Apart from a very limited expression by skeletal muscle at the neuromuscular junetion [14], its expression in the adult Correspondence address: O.K. Langley, Unite 44 de I'INSERM, and Centre de Neurochirnie du CNRS, 5 rue Blaise Pascal, 67084 Strasbourg Cedex, France has been largely though not exclusively considered to be limited to nervous tissues. N-CAM has been found in eertain eells outside the nervous system (e.g. chromaffin eells in the adrenal medulla [11]) but such eells are derived from the neural crest. Here we extend our previous observations on endocrine eells in the adrenal gland and investigate the possible expression of N-CAM by other endoerine eells whieh have a non-neural origin. The present results indieate a mueh wider distribution of N-CAM in adult tissues than has previously been supposed. N-CAM is shown by immunoeytoehemistry to be expressed by several endoerine eells of non-neural origin. Immunoehemieal data eonfirm the presenee of N-CAM determinants typical of brain in endoerine eells although the relative proportions differ markedly. In addition, in two of the tissues examined a lower molecular mass NCAM positive polypeptide was also detected