Reforming Public School Systems Through Sustained Union-Management Collaboration

Presents case studies of sustained collaboration between teachers' unions and management in school reform; common elements in initiating events, strategic priorities, supportive system infrastructure, and sustaining factors; and lessons learned

Extending Copyright Misuse to an Affirmative Cause of Action

This Comment will discuss the copyright misuse doctrine. Part I will introduce Redbox, explain how its business model functions, and describe the history between Redbox and the movie studios involved in the recent litigation. Part II will provide a history and background of the copyright misuse doctrine and how it has been applied in the various circuit courts that have adopted the doctrine. Part II will also touch upon the first sale doctrine, which will be applied to the litigation between Redbox and the studios. Part III will present a proposal for extending the copyright misuse doctrine into an affirmative cause of action in certain, limited circumstances. Finally, in Part IV, this Comment will conclude that Congress needs to clarify the parameters of the misuse doctrine in light of the confusion the different circuits have evidenced in recent years applying the doctrine

Civil Rights and the Charter School Choice: How Stricter Standards for Charter Schools Can Aid Educational Equity

This paper analyzes the way variations in charter-enabling legislation may exacerbate segregation and how federal and state reforms could better utilize the charter system to further integration. Part I discusses the history of school choice and the social science underlying its potential as a vehicle for integration as well as further segregation. Part II reviews research on charter school demographics and the effectiveness of relevant civil rights statutes. Part III analyzes themes in local charter legislation that can influence charter school segregation by limiting accessibility for low income families and students with disabilities. Finally, Part IV offers recommendations for policy changes at the federal and local levels. While legislation and litigation can still influence diversity and protect civil rights in education, this paper explains why we should be wary of the risk that may come with expanding private management of an essential public good

The Mean-Field Limit for Solid Particles in a Navier-Stokes Flow

We propose a mathematical derivation of Brinkman's force for a cloud of particles immersed in an incompressible fluid. Our starting point is the Stokes or steady Navier-Stokes equations set in a bounded domain with the disjoint union of N balls of radius 1/N removed, and with a no-slip boundary condition for the fluid at the surface of each ball. The large N limit of the fluid velocity field is governed by the same (Navier-)Stokes equations in the whole domain, with an additional term (Brinkman's force) that is (minus) the total drag force exerted by the fluid on the particle system. This can be seen as a generalization of Allaire's result in [Arch. Rational Mech. Analysis 113 (1991), 209-259] who treated the case of motionless, periodically distributed balls. Our proof is based on slightly simpler, though similar homogenization techniques, except that we avoid the periodicity assumption and use instead the phase-space empirical measure for the particle system. Similar equations are used for describing the fluid phase in various models for sprays

Learning Incoherent Subspaces: Classification via Incoherent Dictionary Learning

In this article we present the supervised iterative projections and rotations (s-ipr) algorithm, a method for learning discriminative incoherent subspaces from data. We derive s-ipr as a supervised extension of our previously proposed iterative projections and rotations (ipr) algorithm for incoherent dictionary learning, and we employ it to learn incoherent sub-spaces that model signals belonging to different classes. We test our method as a feature transform for supervised classification, first by visualising transformed features from a synthetic dataset and from the ‘iris’ dataset, then by using the resulting features in a classification experiment

Sliding friction between an elastomer network and a grafted polymer layer: the role of cooperative effects

We study the friction between a flat solid surface where polymer chains have been end-grafted and a cross-linked elastomer at low sliding velocity. The contribution of isolated grafted chains' penetration in the sliding elastomer has been early identified as a weakly velocity dependent pull-out force. Recent experiments have shown that the interactions between the grafted chains at high grafting density modify the friction force by grafted chain. We develop here a simple model that takes into account those interactions and gives a limit grafting density beyond which the friction no longer increases with the grafting density, in good agreement with the experimental dataComment: Submitted to Europhys. Letter

Evaluation of Bacillus anthracis extractable antigen for testing anthrax immunity

ABSTRACTThree extractable Bacillus anthracis cell-wall-associated antigens were evaluated for potential use as skin testing agents, and as possible candidates for in-vitro diagnosis of anthrax immunity. Anthraxin and a partially purified extractable antigen (EAP) were produced from avirulent B. anthracis strain 34F2 (Sterne). The thermoextractable antigen used for the Ascoli reaction was obtained commercially. Guineapigs were immunised and boosted several times subcutaneously with the Sterne live veterinary anthrax vaccine. Four weeks after the last booster dose, animals were skin-tested with the three antigens. Serum antibody levels were also determined by ELISA, and the in-vitro T-cell response was evaluated by [3H]-thymidine incorporation. EAP was the most active antigen in both the serological and cellular reactions. EAP also elicited a distinct positive skin reaction in animals immunised with B. anthracis. The data obtained in this preliminary study indicated that extractable cell-wall antigens obtained from the vegetative form of B. anthracis may be used for skin tests and in-vitro testing of specific humoral and cell-mediated anthrax immunity