Traditional Athabascan Law Ways and Their Relationship to Contemporary Problems of "Bush Justice": Some Preliminary Observations on Structure and Function.

This paper is directed toward helping achieve a better understanding of traditional law ways among Alaska's Athabascan Indians and of the present state of the administration of law in the "bush"-village Alaska. An outgrowth of the 1970 Bush Justice Conference sponsored by the Alaska Judicial Council, the paper's primary purpose is to help facilitate establishment of more appropriate delivery and administration of legal services for ethnically distinct populations of Alaska.Introduction / Traditional Athabascan Culture / Social Organization and Leadership / Values and Their Relationship to Law Ways / Athabascan Law Ways — The Philosophical Basis / The Pragmatic Structure and Operation of Athabascan Law Ways / Major Offenses and Their Resolution (Adultery, Theft, Murder) / Summary of Athabascan Law Ways / Law Ways and Culture Change / Past and Present Law Ways: Some Disjunctions / Reference

Northern Eskimo Law Ways and Their Relationship to Contemporary Problems of "Bush Justice": Some Preliminary Observations on Structure and Function

This paper describes the how the basic values, personality, and culture of Northern (Inupiat) Eskimos contribute to attitudes toward conflict and their society’s capacity to resolve conflict. The paper analyzes the influence of Anglo-American agents of change on that capacity and, especially, the legal system and procedures that developed in the post-contact use of the village council to resolve disputes. It discusses the formal intervention of state law through the magisterial system and its interaction with Eskimo law ways that the village council encouraged. A comparison of village councils and magistrate courts points out the apparent success of the councils due to their unique fit with Eskimo values and expectations. Finally, shortcomings of .the current magistrate system are analyzed with recommendations for policy adaptations.Introduction / The Genesis of Eskimo Law Ways in Aboriginal Conflict Resolution / Aboriginal Eskimo Conflict Resolution: An Overview / American Intervention and Eskimo Law Ways / The Village Council / The Contemporary Period: The Magistrate System / Implications for Bush Justice / Conclusion / Bibliograph

Exploring High Level Synthesis to Improve the Design of Turbo Code Error Correction in a Software Defined Radio Context

With the ever improving progress of technology, Software Defined Radio (SDR) has become a more widely available technique for implementing radio communication. SDRs are sought after for their advantages over traditional radio communication mostly in flexibility, and hardware simplification. The greatest challenges SDRs face are often with their real time performance requirements. Forward error correction is an example of an SDR block that can exemplify these challenges as the error correction can be very computationally intensive. Due to these constraints, SDR implementations are commonly found in or alongside Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to enable performance that general purpose processors alone cannot achieve. The main challenge with FPGAs however, is in Register Transfer Level (RTL) development. High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools are a method of creating hardware descriptions from high level code, in an effort to ease this development process. In this work a turbo code decoder, a form of computationally intensive error correction codes, was accelerated with the help of FPGAs, using HLS tools. This accelerator was implemented on a Xilinx Zynq platform, which integrates a hard core ARM processor alongside programmable logic on a single chip. Important aspects of the design process using HLS were identified and explained. The design process emphasizes the idea that for the best results the high level code should be created with a hardware mindset, and written in an attempt to describe a hardware design. The power of the HLS tools was demonstrated in its flexibility by providing a method of tailoring the hardware parameters through simply changing values in a macro file, and by exploration the design space through different data types and three different designs, each one improving from what was learned in the previous implementation. Ultimately, the best hardware implementation was over 56 times faster than the optimized software implementation. Comparing the HLS to a manually optimized design shows that the HLS implementation was able to achieve over a 19% throughput, with many areas for further improvement identified, demonstrating the competitiveness of the HLS tools

Occurrence and fate of trace organic contaminants in onsite wastewater treatment systems and implications for water quality management

March 2009.Includes bibliographical references

Notes on Representation of Native Clients

Native people, whether influenced by traditional approaches to dispute resolution or by their pragmatic experience with local courts and dispute resolution or by their pragmatic experience with local courts and law enforcement, do not see justice as being done within the forum offered by the state. In search of an authoritative locale for rational dispute resolution, they find arbitrary and apparently irrational treatment in magistrate courts. Conversely, they have found in conciliation before the village council a forum where misconduct is measured against the world that the defendant immediately affects. They find a comprehensible forum in the village to solve their problems or no forum at all. Can participation in a functioning advocacy and adversary system be taught and utilized along with continued functioning of a sub-legal conciliatory system that handles de minimus matters effectively? This paper offers guidance to public defenders and legal services attorneys in representing Alaska Native clients.Alaska Public Defender AgencyThe Problem / Public Defenders with Native Clients – Some Approaches / The Authority of Law and the Meaning of Guilt / Appendi

Staff Paper on Village Councils

Excerpted from: Hippler, Arthur E.; & Conn, Stephen. (1975). "The Village Council and Its Offspring: A Reform for Bush Justice." UCLA-Alaska Law Review 5(1): 22–57 (Fall 1975). (https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/uclaak5&i=28).This excerpt from the forthcoming UCLA-Alaska Law Review article "The Village Council and Its Offspring: A Reform for Bush Justice" describes techniques used historically by Alaska Native village councils to resolve disputes. All of these techniques were observed in 1975 in villages where councils still aid in dispute adjustment.Rule Making, Rule Enforcing, and Conciliation / Council Techniques – Scolding and Probation / Village Councils and the Modern Legal System / The Council as a Forum for Dispute Resolutio

A study to explore the use of orbital remote sensing to determine native arid plant distribution

The author has identified the following significant results. It is possible to determine, from ERTS imagery, native arid plant distribution. Using techniques of multispectral masking and extensive fieldwork, three native vegetation communities were defined and mapped in the Avra Valley study area. A map was made of the Yuma area with the aid of ground truth correlations between areas of desert pavement visible on ERTS images and unique vegetation types. With the exception of the Yuma soil-vegetation correlation phenomena, only very gross differentiations of desert vegetation communities can be made from ERTS data. Vegetation communities with obvious vegetation density differences such as saguaro-paloverde, creosote bush, and riparian vegetation can be separated on the Avra Valley imagery while more similar communities such as creosote bush and saltbush could not be differentiated. It is suggested that large differences in vegetation density are needed before the signatures of two different vegetation types can be differentiated on ERTS imagery. This is due to the relatively insignificant contribution of vegetation to the total radiometric signature of a given desert scene. Where more detailed information concerning the vegetation of arid regions is required, large scale imagery is appropriate