MELEES - e-support or mayhem?

This paper reports on progress in developing a web-based environment to support non-specialist mathematics students taking University level Mathematics as a compulsory subject in their first and second years. The scale and diversity of the service teaching provision at Nottingham invites the use of a technology-based framework in order to make available the ‘good practice’ features developed both locally and elsewhere. Initially the two year development is focusing on: • establishing a supportive environment; • providing feedback to students, their lecturers and importantly to their home Schools; • identifying and supporting e-learning strategies; • improving student motivation. Current activities have been primarily directed to the first three bullet points

Design investigations on some welded mild steel plate girders

The thesis gives details of a series of design investigations carried out on mild steel, welded, plate girders, having a constant I section and supported laterally and torsionally only at the ends of the span. The main aim is to establish a General Method for expediting the design calculations for obtaining the optimum cross sectional dimensions of such a girder, essentially in accordance with the regulations as laid down in the British Standard Specification (B.S.449, while observing some rules for efficient or economical design. Here Minimum Weight Design has been chosen as the criterion of efficiency, though the methods devised can readily be extended or adapted to deal with other criteria. The moment of resistance, as reduced by lateral buckling, is deemed to be the significant factor in each design, though the various other effects are considered as well. A review of the problem is given, and an empirical investigation is then carried out to obtain the sectional dimensions of girders at Minimum Weight, spanning 100 feet, and resisting various moments. This work is then extended to a wider application by means of a theoretical analysis, and a General Method is obtained. Suggestions are made as to how this Method may be applied, viz: by the construction of charts and tables or by the writing of an all embracing computer programme to give automatic design. Various additional effects are described and finally an outline is given as to how this work can be extended to deal with more complicated practical girders

Is Psychological Research on Self-Control Relevant to Criminal Law?

In recent years scholars have asked whether scientific discoveries - specifically in neuroscience and genetics - should have normative implications for criminal law doctrine and theory, especially with regard to free will and responsibility. This focus on novel and merely potential scientific findings makes Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff’s arguments all the more fascinating: she argues that criminal law scholars have neglected to mine a rich body of social psychological research on the mechanisms of self-control which has developed over the past two decades. She, herself, finds that the psychological research suggests that current criminal law inaccurately circumscribes the scope of situations in which an individual lacked the ability to control her actions. Moreover, she argues that the research permits us to separate issues of self-control from philosophical questions about the existence of free will.This article accepts Hollander-Blumoff’s invitation to mine the self-control research for normatively-relevant insight. It finds, however, that the research has surprisingly little to offer. It does not show that criminal law doctrine excuses too few, and it does not help us draw lines between the responsible and non-responsible independent of broader debates about free will. The article identifies different conceptions of control at work in criminal law doctrine to show the limited scope of law that is relevant to the conception of self-control under psychological study. It further explains why the research’s findings about the “capacity for self-control” are not helpful to discerning whether an individual had the capacity to control his conduct in the sense required for responsibility and blame. Finally, the article counters Hollander-Blumoff’s claim that the research supports the law’s alleged neutrality regarding free will debates. Specifically, the commentary defends Stephen Morse’s view that the law is not philosophically neutral but compatibilist, and in doing so, it responds to recent arguments by Adam Kolber against the compatibilist interpretation of criminal law

Symposium: A New Hope? An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Constitution, Politics, and Polarization in Jack Balkin’s “The Cycles of Constitutional Time”

Politically, we are living in dark times. Political polarization has increased over the past forty years, reaching an extreme and causing real damage to our political system and to our interpersonal lives. Americans are experiencing more hostility and anger towards their neighbors, family members, and fellow citizens with opposing political views. Growing distrust in government and intense polarization causally contributed to the 2016 presidential election of a populist demagogue whose appeals to toxic prejudices, racial resentment, and baseless fears were designed to exacerbate political and civil division. After he lost the 2020 election, a mob of his most ardent supporters attacked the United States Capitol harboring the delusional belief that the vote was somehow rigged and fraudulent

#TwitterCritic: Sentiment Analysis of Tweets to Predict TV Ratings

Twitter has rapidly become one of the most popular sites of the Internet. It functions not just as a microblogging service, but as a crowdsourcing tool for listening, promotion, insight and much more. From the perspective of TV networks, tweets capture the real time reactions of viewers, making them an ideal indicator of a show’s ratings. This paper predicts Internet Movie Database (IMDB) television ratings by text mining Twitter data. Tweets for five television shows were downloaded over a period of several months utilizing a SAS macro. Television show data, such as rating, show title, episode title, and more were retrieved through the Python package IMDBpy. Overall, there were four to seven episodes for each show, with approximately 1,000 to 100,000 tweets per episode. Tweets were cleaned through a series of Perl-derivative regular expressions in SAS and Python. Once the data were cleaned as much as possible, both SAS and Python were used to score each tweet for sentiment analysis based on the AFINN dictionary. PROC SQL was used to join the datasets as the data were transferred from each program. Sentiment analysis was used to determine the attitude or emotion of each tweet in order to properly capture the audiences’ natural reactions. Reviews are written by a select minority of reviewers, while tweets can be written by anyone. The tweets might be more honest than an actual review because users are not writing tweets in the same setting that they would write a review

Non-Beneficial Pediatric Research and the Best Interests Standard: A Legal and Ethical Reconciliation

In 1966, Henry Beecher, a professor at Harvard Medical School, published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine describing twenty-two cases of unethical medical research, some of which involved children. In the infamous Willowbrook study, for example, researchers deliberately exposed children who were wards in a state facility to hepatitis to study preventive measures. Public attention to research tragedies led to the passage of federal regulations governing human subjects research, including special protections for children. The regulations restricted the participation of children in research, and, in that sense, they have protected children. However, this effort to protect children may partly explain the underfunding and understudy of... health issues unique to children that followed. Consequently, the vast majority of medications prescribed to children today have not been adequately studied in pediatric populations. Since the late 1990s, deploying an array of carrots and sticks, the federal government has sought to increase pediatric research, particularly with respect to pharmaceuticals, to address our lack of knowledge regarding the safety and efficacy of pediatric therapies. Its efforts have worked. Between 1990 and 1997, researchers completed eleven pediatric studies of marketed drugs; since 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has requested approximately 800 studies involving 45,000 children in clinical trials. Pediatric research will continue to expand as the President recently signed into law measures to encourage pediatric research regarding medical devices