The states, the Supreme Court, and social change : an analysis of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges

Advisors: J. Mitch Pickerill.Committee members: Scot Schraufnagel; Artemus Ward.Includes bibliographical references.This study analyzes when and under what conditions the Supreme Court can produce lasting social change. By re-examine Gerald Rosenberg's theory and finding that the Court is too constitutionally constrained to produce change, I argue that the Supreme Court can establish lasting social change. Lasting social change is established through landmark rulings on substantive rights when those issues first have the time to percolate in the states and build the public support necessary to implement the Court's ruling. To test this theory, I analyze two landmark Court rulings. First, I examine the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973) where the Supreme Court lead the constitutional debate, and second the right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) as a counterfactual, as the Supreme Court ruling followed the constitutional debate. These cases are analyzed in conjunction with public opinion trends to understand how state constitutional debate contributes to public approval of the right at issue. Based on the analysis, the Supreme Court can establish lasting social change when handing down landmark rulings after the constitutional and political debate has already occurred at the state level.M.A. (Master of Arts

Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency: Prototyping counterveillance

This paper discusses how an interactive artwork, the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA), can contribute to discussions of Big Data intelligence analytics. The CSIA is a publicly accessible Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) system that was constructed using information gathered from technical manuals, research reports, academic papers, leaked documents, and Freedom of Information Act files. Using a visceral heuristic, the CSIA demonstrates how the statistical correlations made by automated classification systems are different from human judgment and can produce false-positives, as well as how the display of information through an interface can affect the judgment of an intelligence agent. The public has the right to ask questions about how a computer program determines if they are a threat to national security and to question the practicality of using statistical pattern recognition algorithms in place of human judgment. Currently, the public’s lack of access to both Big Data and the actual datasets intelligence agencies use to train their classification algorithms keeps the possibility of performing effective sous-dataveillance out of reach. Without this data, the results returned by the CSIA will not be identical to those of intelligence agencies. Because we have replicated how OSINT is processed, however, our results will resemble the type of results and mistakes made by OSINT systems. The CSIA takes some initial steps toward contributing to an informed public debate about large-scale monitoring of open source, social media data and provides a prototype for counterveillance and sousveillance tools for citizens

Crevasse splay deposits from the Miocene of central Poland near Konin

The paper presents results of a study of crevasse splay deposits from the Miocene of central Poland near Konin. These mineral deposits occur within the 1st Middle-Polish lignite seam of Middle Miocene age, which is exploited from the Tomislawice lignite opencast mine. They consist of fine-grained sands with an admixture of plant detritus at the top and bottom layers, where the muddy-sandy clasts are present. The investigated crevasse splay deposits are predominantly massive or horizontally stratified, and they occasionally reveal small- to large-scale (planar, trough and ripple) cross-stratification. Thus, they are interpreted as representing dense gravity flows, sheet flows, and channelized flows of variable energy. The crevasse splay was formed subaerially during sudden flood conditions on the floodplain covered by a low-lying mire with predominant herbaceous vegetation. The description of the crevasse splay deposits from the Miocene of central Poland can be helpful in better understanding the sedimentation conditions of relatively thick lignite seams

Weaving Business Processes and Rules: a Petri Net Approach

The emerging service-oriented computing paradigm advocates building distributed information systems by chaining reusable services instead of by programming from scratch. To do so, not only business processes, but also business rules, policies and constraints need to be encoded in a process language such as Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL). Unfortunately, the intermixing of business processes and rules in a single process weakens the modularity and adaptability of the systems. In this paper, we propose a formal approach to model the weaving of business processes and rules, following the aspect-oriented principle. In particular, we use Predicate/Transition (PrT) nets to model business processes and business rules, and then weave them into a coherent PrT net. The resulting woven nets are ready for analysing system properties and simulating system behaviour