Be All You Can Be (Without the Protection of the Constitution)

[Excerpt] “Despite the generous inclusion by President Reagan of the many soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in the concept of the people of this republic, it is not altogether dear whether one whose status has changed from ordinary citizen to a member of the armed forces can legitimately claim any of the constitutional protections of citizenship until he or she is no longer a member of the armed forces. In the course of this nation\u27s history the Supreme Court has denied some or all of the protection of the Constitution to many groups of people, including African-Americans, 2 women,3 Native Americans, 4 Americans of Japanese ancestry,5 aliens, 6 and more recently to members of the armed forces. Just six months after President Reagan spoke the words quoted above, the Court overturned a precedent of nearly twenty years and held, in Solorio v. United States,7 that a member of the armed forces could be tried by a court-martial for virtually any offense without regard to the impact the alleged offense may, or may not, have had on the military or the ability of that service member to function in the military. While the decision may seem fairly innocuous at first blush, this article will demonstrate that the judicial mindset demonstrated by the Solorio holding is ill-conceived from the point of view of the soldier8 who is the accused at a court-martial. Moreover, the Supreme Court has demonstrated a judicial myopia which threatens the very form of government conceived by the framers of the Constitution. The decision perpetuates legal class distinctions which should not play a part in a democracy or in the administration of criminal justice and it paves the way for the creation of a warrior class with fewer rights in criminal proceedings.

The Tenth Circuit: Playing by the Rules

[Excerpt] In 1994, the Tenth Circuit published more than four dozen opinions construing the guidelines and joined the majority of circuits in adopting the One- Book rule. The Court continued to refrain from interfering with the exercise of discretion by district judges, but made clear that it does not give district courts carte blanche. Four issues in decisions covered in this review are the retroactive application of amendments to the guidelines; the standards used in characterizing a defendant as a major or minor player for purposes of increasing or decreasing the sentence; the impact of post-arrest efforts at rehabilitation on sentencing-at least in drug cases; and the elements of obstruction of justice for purposes of increasing a sentence

Law, Order, and the Consent Defense

[Excerpt] Among the benefits that we gain on leaving the state of nature and joining together in a civilized society is some amount of added protection of our individual possessions and person. Among our losses is the ability to plunder, at will, the possessions and bodies of those who are weaker than we are. These two statements are generally, but not absolutely, true. I propose that one hallmark of civilization is the security of everyone who lives under its authority that they are free from the unwanted interferences of others with their personal integrity and property rights.\u27 One way to gauge the proximity of my two opening statements to absolute truth, and thereby any society\u27s proximity to absolute civilization, is to examine the use of the consent defense in the criminal law. In this essay I will give a framework for examining the consent defense for this purpose. When we consider the consent defense, we typically think of it as occupying the border between individual liberty and governmental control. In the customary way that the criminal law is discussed and taught, as a control on individual conduct, this is a perfectly acceptable way to think of the consent defense. However, the criminal law can also be used as a means of controlling and oppressing groups. It is this type of control that makes a society more tribalistic and less democratic. And it is this type of control that is revealed on close examination of the consent defense

Environmental capacity in the East Midlands: an evidence base fit for purpose

This report relates to the initial study into the measurement of Environmental Capacity within the East Midlands Region considering what indicators/measures of Environmental Capacity can be put into place in the near future within the region and what are the aspirations regarding longer term indicators / measures of Environmental Capacity in the region. The study involved in depth interviews with relevant employees from local authorities and other key agencies within the region covering the current data collected/used in monitoring and the possible link to the monitoring of Environmental Capacity as well as the interviewees' awareness of and attitudes towards Environmental Capacity as a monitoring tool

Development and implementation of educational programs in selected history museums and suggested practices for future programming.

History museums included in the study are making positive contributions to the expansion of opportunities for education of the public through museum facilities, holdings, and educational programs. However, extensive undeveloped potential for such educational opportunity remains.Recommendations. Further research was recommended concerning: Ways in which museum educational programs might better serve the schools, especially on the secondary level; ways to promote more interaction among the museums and the schools in general in order to generate better, more organized programs; methods for getting museum support groups to become self-motivating and self-perpetuating; the feasibility and need for establishing a national level museums department, which would be responsible solely for museums and which would promote nationwide use of the educational potential of the country's museums by supplying aid for museum educational program development and implementation in the form of advice, consultants, and information on where and how to obtain additional funding; innovative ways to present educational programs in a museum setting rather than merely using public school teaching methods and techniques in the museum; the potential and feasibility of using individually guided, in-house produced educational packets; the potential role in the museum in Community Educational/Life-long Learning educational programs; the effectiveness, in terms of cost and academic potential, of educational programs being carried out through the use of mobile facilities; and ways to establish and maintain a new, formal, statewide plan for financing museums in the state.Major obstacles to educational program development and implementation as designated by the museum respondents were: insufficient funding, lack of quality personnel, and too few volunteers.Procedures. In this study twelve history museum directors or the individuals responsible for educational programs were asked to respond to a questionnaire concerning the methods and activities used when developing and implementing educational programs. Only ten museums were included in the study because two did not meet the established criteria. In addition, a follow-up interview was made with the respondent of each museum included in the study in order to supplement and substantiate the data obtained by the questionnaire. The data received from the questionnaire and follow-up interview were tallied and analyzed, resulting in the following conclusions and recommendations.Through more complete and systematic planning, more extensive and thorough use of human resources in the community, through heightened public awareness of the role museums can play in the education process and the consequent generation of better funding, museums can more nearly come to realize their educational potential.Purpose. The purpose of this study was to acquire information concerning the methods and activities used by selected history museums in Oklahoma when developing and Implementing educational programs and to formulate from those methods and activities suggestions for future programming in history museums.No published printed guidelines were reported being used to aid in program development and delivery, and museum respondents considered some practices used to be more useful than others.In all the sample museums, the director or the officer in charge of educational programs was responsible for carrying out development activities. Museum personnel were those most often involved in the development and delivery of programs, generally for people of all ages, and most often using in-house facilities.Conclusions. The majority of the museums in the study employed a director and had personnel with college degrees. More of the museums had annual educational program budgets below $3,000 than above, with funds coming primarily from state sources

Curing the Isolation: The Student-Athlete Empowerment Project (S.A.E.P.)

This new project, begun in the fall of 1995, allows current and former student-athletes to make a smoother transition from sport to society

Effects of grasshoppers on soil animal communities in the Shortgrass Steppe of northern Colorado, The

Includes bibliographical references.2015 Summer.A burgeoning area of research in ecology is on the linkages between aboveground and belowground components of terrestrial systems. Leaf-feeding insects can affect soil communities directly via frass deposition or indirectly through alterations in the quantity or composition of plant roots or the amount of labile carbon exuded belowground. These pathways can affect the three soil energy channels (i.e., root, soil bacterial, and soil fungal) by altering the absolute and/or relative amounts of their source materials and, in turn, impact soil microbial community composition and higher trophic levels, including soil nematodes and microarthropods. This aboveground-belowground interaction is important to fully understanding the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, especially in the context of global climate change. This study investigated the effects of short-term grasshopper exclusion in the shortgrass steppe of northern Colorado on plant abundance and temporal changes in trophic groups of soil animals. Above- and belowground plant biomass, soil nematode, and soil microarthropod responses to altered grasshopper abundances were determined using grasshopper exclosures and caged controls from late summer–early fall 2014. Plant community composition during the study was drastically different than long-term data. Bouteloua gracilis, a co-dominant grass, was reduced to an average of 5.75% of total aboveground biomass, whereas the typically rare, annual grass Vulpia octoflora exploded to over 93%. Total above- and belowground plant biomass and aboveground biomass from V. octoflora and other grasses (mainly B. gracilis) were unaffected by grasshopper exclusion. Grasshopper feeding enhanced the ratio of bacterivorous to fungivorous nematodes, which remained similar through time in exclosures. Proportions of bacterial-feeding nematodes increased in caged controls but decreased in exclosures, while there was a trend for the opposite pattern for plant parasitic nematodes. Temporal changes in the densities of soil microarthropods, mites, and mite trophic groups were similar between cage types. Results indicate that grasshoppers enhanced the relative dominance of the soil bacterial energy channel, likely through greater frass deposition. Apparent exclosure effects on plant parasitic nematodes suggest a possible belowground plant response to altered grasshopper populations, which could have been weak because these effects were specific to the then-rare B. gracilis, which was about to enter senescence. Implications of this research in the context of global climate change, particularly droughts in the shortgrass steppe, are discussed

An Empirical Study of a Software Maintenance Process

This paper describes how a process support tool is used to collect metrics about a major upgrade to our own electronic retail system. An incremental prototyping lifecycle is adopted in which each increment is categorised by an effort type and a project component. Effort types are Acquire, Build, Comprehend and Design and span all phases of development. Project components include data models and process models expressed in an OO modelling language and process algebra respectively as well as C++ classes and function templates and build components including source files and data files. This categorisation is independent of incremental prototyping and equally applicable to other software lifecycles. The process support tool (PWI) is responsible for ensuring the consistency between the models and the C++ source. It also supports the interaction between multiple developers and multiple metric-collectors. The first two releases of the retailing software are available for ftp from oracle.ecs.soton.ac.uk in directory pub/peter. Readers are invited to use the software and apply their own metrics as appropriate. We would be interested to correspond with anyone who does so