Internet Justice: Reconceptualizing the Legal Rights of Persons with Disabilities to Promote Equal Access in the Age of Rapid Technological Change

Although a range of laws and regulations have been created in the United States to promote online accessibility for persons with disabilities, tremendous disparities persist in access to Internet technologies and content. Such inaccessibility is an enormous barrier to equality and participation in society for persons with disabilities. The current legal approaches to online accessibility have not proven successful, focusing on specific technologies and technical solutions to accessibility. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of the approach to promoting legal guarantees of online access for persons with disabilities, focusing on information and communication goals, the processes of accessing information, and new approaches to monitoring, guidance, and enforcement. Without a broader conception of accessibility under the law, persons with disabilities risk being increasingly excluded from the technologies and content of the Internet that are coming to define social, educational, employment, and government interactions

Public Libraries and the Internet 2006

Examines the capability of public libraries to provide and sustain public access Internet services and resources that meet community needs, including serving as the first choice for content, resources, services, and technology infrastructure

All Librarianship is Political: Educate Accordingly

After participating in a multi-year project considering the future directions for library and information science (LIS) education, the authors of this paper realized an essential aspect of the nature of libraries and librarianship was continually overlooked or sidestepped in the events and discussions. That is, libraries as institutions and many of the actions of library professionals are inherently political, yet LIS education has not traditionally prepared students for them. Confronting this aspect of LIS education and the profession in general and creating curriculum that emphasizes the politics of librarianship will better prepare students to serve their patrons, their communities, and their institutions. Such an educational approach would emphasize preparing future library professionals in areas such as leadership, education, activism and advocacy, community service and engagement, policy and law, rights and justice, and marketing and evaluation, resulting in the politically-savvy librarians ready to be activists for their institutions and communities. This paper explores the design of library education, criticism of library education, and the actual environment of contemporary librarians as the context for suggesting this significant change in the focus of library education. We live in a political world, and it’s time we prepare our students for this world

A privilege, a gift, and a reason for gratitude: appreciating the human dimension of peer review

The shortcomings of the peer review process are well-documented, with it being variously described as too slow, conservative, and even unkind. But amidst fevered discussion of its logistical merits, the inherent humanistic value of peer review is often overlooked. Keren Dali and Paul T. Jaeger encourage reviewers to remember that each peer review opportunity offers an incredible human experience of learning and sharing. At its best, the peer review process brings together authors, editors, and reviewers through an inspiring and resourceful environment which fosters creativity, authorial confidence, and scientific progress

A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Failure Detection in Image Classification

Reliable application of machine learning-based decision systems in the wild is one of the major challenges currently investigated by the field. A large portion of established approaches aims to detect erroneous predictions by means of assigning confidence scores. This confidence may be obtained by either quantifying the model's predictive uncertainty, learning explicit scoring functions, or assessing whether the input is in line with the training distribution. Curiously, while these approaches all state to address the same eventual goal of detecting failures of a classifier upon real-life application, they currently constitute largely separated research fields with individual evaluation protocols, which either exclude a substantial part of relevant methods or ignore large parts of relevant failure sources. In this work, we systematically reveal current pitfalls caused by these inconsistencies and derive requirements for a holistic and realistic evaluation of failure detection. To demonstrate the relevance of this unified perspective, we present a large-scale empirical study for the first time enabling benchmarking confidence scoring functions w.r.t all relevant methods and failure sources. The revelation of a simple softmax response baseline as the overall best performing method underlines the drastic shortcomings of current evaluation in the abundance of publicized research on confidence scoring. Code and trained models are at https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/fd-shifts

The Internet and the Evolution of Library Research: the Perspective of One Longitudinal Study

The article discusses the impact of the Internet on library research, public libraries, and public library research. It examines the methods of the Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study. The authors assert that the Internet has allowed libraries to add capacity to library research. The article briefly discusses the technological environment prior to the Internet and studies sponsored by the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) and the American Library Association (ALA)

The Disability Tax and the Accessibility Tax : The Extra Intellectual, Emotional, and Technological Labor and Financial Expenditures Required of Disabled People in a World Gone Wrong…and Mostly Online

This paper navigates the impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) on the disability community. In particular, how shifting resources within workplaces and educational institutions change the expectations imposed on disabled employees and students

Validation of full-wave simulations for mode conversion of waves in the ion cyclotron range of frequencies with phase contrast imaging in Alcator C-Mod

Mode conversion of fast waves in the ion cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF) is known to result in current drive and flow drive under optimised conditions, which may be utilized to control plasma profiles and improve fusion plasma performance. To describe these processes accurately in a realistic toroidal geometry, numerical simulations are essential. Quantitative comparison of these simulations and the actual experimental measurements is important to validate their predictions and to evaluate their limitations. The phase contrast imaging (PCI) diagnostic has been used to directly detect the ICRF waves in the Alcator C-Mod tokamak. The measurements have been compared with full-wave simulations through a synthetic diagnostic technique. Recently, the frequency response of the PCI detector array on Alcator C-Mod was recalibrated, which greatly improved the comparison between the measurements and the simulations. In this study, mode converted waves for D-{superscript 3]He and D-H plasmas with various ion species compositions were re-analyzed with the new calibration. For the minority heating cases, self-consistent electric fields and a minority ion distribution function were simulated by iterating a full-wave code and a Fokker-Planck code. The simulated mode converted wave intensity was in quite reasonable agreement with the measurements close to the antenna, but discrepancies remain for comparison at larger distances.United States. Department of Energy (Grant DE-FG02- 94ER54235

Design and Development of a Deep Acoustic Lining for the 40-by 80-Foot Wind Tunnel Test Section

The work described in this report has made effective use of design teams to build a state-of-the-art anechoic wind-tunnel facility. Many potential design solutions were evaluated using engineering analysis, and computational tools. Design alternatives were then evaluated using specially developed testing techniques, Large-scale coupon testing was then performed to develop confidence that the preferred design would meet the acoustic, aerodynamic, and structural objectives of the project. Finally, designs were frozen and the final product was installed in the wind tunnel. The result of this technically ambitious project has been the creation of a unique acoustic wind tunnel. Its large test section (39 ft x 79 ft x SO ft), potentially near-anechoic environment, and medium subsonic speed capability (M = 0.45) will support a full range of aeroacoustic testing-from rotorcraft and other vertical takeoff and landing aircraft to the take-off/landing configurations of both subsonic and supersonic transports