Public and Private Speech: Toward a Practice of Pluralistic Convergence in Free-Speech Values

The article takes the distinction between public and private speech in the areas of public employment and defamation, where the leading cases are Connick v. Myers and Dun & Bradstreet v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc., respectively, and shows the difficulty which the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have had in defining public and private speech in First Amendment cases. The thrust of the article is to formulate a clearer definition suitable for use by jurists and lawyers in First Amendment free-speech cases by resorting to three writers of philosophical bent who have addressed the question of what consitutes the public : John Dewey, in The Public and Its Problems; Hannah Arendt, in the chapter The Public and the Private Realm in her book The Human Condition; and Walter Lippmann in The Public Philosophy. The article further relates the views of Dewey, Arendt, and Lippmann to conventional judicial and scholarly rationales for freedom of speech like the instrumental rationale of political governance and the intrinsic rationale of self-expression, especially as developed in the early formative period of freespeech values by Justices Holmes and Brandeis. In the course of the argument, the metaphilosophical ideas and methods of Richard P. McKeon are used, in connection with the writers\u27 views of what constitutes the public, to develop a model of convergence. This model of convergence is then used to achieve the major goal of the article, philosophical clarification of the standards for identifying public and private speech in constitutional litigation. To this end the model of convergence, employing a plurality of meanings for the public, is applied to the mass of confusing case law in the lower federal courts, offering practical solutions to problems of conflict and ambiguity in particular concrete cases

Farmer Responses to Resistance Issues in Corn Rootworm to Bt Corn: Qualitative Analysis of Focus Groups

Western corn rootworm is an important corn pest in the U.S. Some farmers noted unexpected corn rootworm injury of transgenic hybrids as early as 2008; however, the full extent of product performance is still not fully understood. We conducted telephone focus groups with farmers in 2013 to gain their perspective of current and future issues for corn rootworm. Respondents were surprised how quickly corn rootworm injury escalated in their fields and were disappointed with incorrect diagnoses from consultants and seed companies. Most participating farmers saw university Extension as an unbiased source of information

Integrated Geophysical Investigation of the St. James Fault Complex: A Case Study

We noninvasively detected the characteristics and location of a regional fault in an area of poor bedrock exposure complicated by karst weathering features in the subsurface. Because this regional fault is associated with sinkhole formation, its location is important for hazard avoidance. The bedrock lithologies on either side of the fault trace are similar; hence, we chose an approach that capitalized on the complementary strengths of very low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic, resistivity, and gravity methods. VLF proved most useful as a first-order reconnaissance tool, allowing us to define a narrow target area for further geophysical exploration. Fault-related epikarst was delineated using resistivity. Ultimately, a high-resolution gravity survey and subsequent inverse modeling using the results of the resistivity survey helped to further constrain the location and approximate orientation of the fault. The combined results indicated that the location of the fault trace needed to be adjusted 53 m south of the current published location and was consistent with a north-dipping thrust fault. Additionally, a gravity low south of the fault trace agreed with the location of conductive material from the resistivity and VLF surveys. We interpreted these anomalies to represent enhanced epikarst in the fault footwall. We clearly found that a staged approach involving a progression of methods beginning with a reconnaissance VLF survey, followed by high-resolution gravity and electrical resistivity surveys, can be used to characterize a fault and fault-related karst in an area of poor bedrock surface exposure

Classification cards applied to team and individual learning.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Statistical Computations with AstroGrid and the Grid

We outline our first steps towards marrying two new and emerging technologies; the Virtual Observatory (e.g, AstroGrid) and the computational grid. We discuss the construction of VOTechBroker, which is a modular software tool designed to abstract the tasks of submission and management of a large number of computational jobs to a distributed computer system. The broker will also interact with the AstroGrid workflow and MySpace environments. We present our planned usage of the VOTechBroker in computing a huge number of n-point correlation functions from the SDSS, as well as fitting over a million CMBfast models to the WMAP data.Comment: Invited talk to appear in "Proceedings of PHYSTAT05: Statistical Problems in Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology