Keep Your Friends Close: A Framework for Addressing Rights to Social Media Contacts

A group of entrepreneurial recent college graduates starts a tutoring and test prep company focused on helping promising high school students get an edge on their college applications. Since the cost of print advertising exceeds the group\u27s budget, they each actively promote the business on their personal social media accounts, garnering their first clients. They also create company accounts on Facebook, Linkedln, and Twitter, which clients join for easy, direct communication and quick access to information. Though all the founders contribute occasional posts and encourage their personal social media contacts to join the company accounts, one eventually becomes, in practice if not in name, the primary manager of the company\u27s social media activity. But soon the founders begin to differ over the direction in which their burgeoning business should grow. Eventually the social media manager leaves to start a competing tutoring and test prep company. She immediately changes both the name on the social media accounts to the name of her new company and the passwords of each account to ensure that her former associates cannot access them. Who has the superior rights to the contacts that these social media sites facilitate? All of the original founders cultivated the company\u27s social media contact list by promoting it on their personal accounts. Yet one of them in particular actually maintained the company accounts, engaged with their followers, and actively sought out new contacts. In hindsight, the company should have articulated a clear social media policy, but the founders were preoccupied with more salient concerns about their fledgling business. Though only hypothetical, this scenario is hardly inconceivable, especially given social media\u27s increasing importance to businesses both large and small

The Land of the Free: Human Rights Violations at Immigration Detention Facilities in America

In America today, aliens who commit even minor visa violations can be detained in one of many immigration detention facilities throughout the U.S. These detainees may be transferred to a facility far away from their homes, families, and attorneys. While imprisoned in these detention facilities, some detainees are treated as and housed with criminals. Their substantive and procedural rights are limited and their human rights are violated. The U.S. laws that should protect them are the very laws that strip them of their rights to court proceedings, challenges of decisions regarding detention, and judicial review. By issuing substantial reservations, declarations, and understandings to human rights treaties, the U.S. has created loopholes through which it is able to violate detainees’ human rights, and yet avoid accountability. Instead, however, America should meet its international obligations and regain its position as a global leader in the promotion and protection of human rights

On the Stanley Depth of Squarefree Veronese Ideals

Let $K$ be a field and $S=K[x_1,...,x_n]$. In 1982, Stanley defined what is now called the Stanley depth of an $S$-module $M$, denoted \sdepth(M), and conjectured that \depth(M) \le \sdepth(M) for all finitely generated $S$-modules $M$. This conjecture remains open for most cases. However, Herzog, Vladoiu and Zheng recently proposed a method of attack in the case when $M = I / J$ with $J \subset I$ being monomial $S$-ideals. Specifically, their method associates $M$ with a partially ordered set. In this paper we take advantage of this association by using combinatorial tools to analyze squarefree Veronese ideals in $S$. In particular, if $I_{n,d}$ is the squarefree Veronese ideal generated by all squarefree monomials of degree $d$, we show that if $1\le d\le n < 5d+4$, then \sdepth(I_{n,d})= \floor{\binom{n}{d+1}\Big/\binom{n}{d}}+d, and if $d\geq 1$ and $n\ge 5d+4$, then d+3\le \sdepth(I_{n,d}) \le \floor{\binom{n}{d+1}\Big/\binom{n}{d}}+d.Comment: 10 page

Back to the drawing board : architecture, sculpture, and the digital image

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 19. bis 22. April 2007 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚Die Realität des Imaginären. Architektur und das digitale Bild

Asset Allocation and Location over the Life Cycle with Survival-Contingent Payouts

This paper shows how lifelong survival-contingent payouts can enhance investor wellbeing in the context of a portfolio choice model which integrates uninsurable labor income and asymmetric mortality expectations. Our model generates optimal asset location patterns indicating how much to hold in liquid versus illiquid survival-contingent payouts over the lifetime, and also asset allocation paths, showing how to invest in stocks versus bonds. We conrm that the investor will gradually move money out of her liquid saving into survivalcontingent assets to retirement and beyond, thereby enhancing her welfare by as much as 50 percent. The results are also robust to the introduction of uninsurable consumption shocks in housing expenses, income flows during the worklife and retirement, sudden changes in health status, and medical expenses.

Genuine Progress, Greater Challenges: A Decade of Teacher Effectiveness Reforms

Until recently, teacher quality was largely seen as a constant among education's sea of variables. Policy efforts to increase teacher quality emphasized the field as a whole instead of the individual: for instance, increased regulation, additional credentials, or a profession modeled after medicine and law. Even as research emerged showing how the quality of each classroom teacher was crucial to student achievement, much of the debate in American public education focused on everything except teacher quality. School systems treated one teacher much like any other, as long as they had the right credentials. Policy, too, treated teachers as if they were interchangeable parts, or "widgets." The perception of teachers as widgets began to change in the late 1990s and early aughts as new organizations launched and policymakers and philanthropists began to concentrate on teacher effectiveness. Under the Obama administration, the pace of change quickened. Two ideas, bolstered by research, animated the policy community: 1) Teachers are the single most important in-school factor for student learning. 2) Traditional methods of measuring teacher quality have little to no bearing on actual student learning. Using new data and research, school districts, states, and the federal government sought to change how teachers are trained, hired, staffed in schools, evaluated, and compensated. The result was an unprecedented amount of policy change that has, at once, driven noteworthy progress, revealed new problems to policymakers, and created problems of its own. Between 2009 and 2013, the number of states that require annual evaluations for all teachers increased from 15 to 28. The number of states that require teacher evaluations to include objective measures of student achievement nearly tripled, from 15 to 41; and the number of states that require student growth to be the preponderant criteria increased fivefold, from 4 to 20 This paper takes a look at where the country has been with regards to teacher effectiveness over the last decade, and outlines policy suggestions for the future