Section 230’s Liability Shield in the Age of Online Terrorist

In recent years, “home grown” terrorists—individuals inspired to violence after watching terrorist videos online—have been responsible for devastating attacks in the United States and across Europe. Such terrorist propaganda falls outside the realm of the First Amendment’s protection because it has been proven to indoctrinate attackers, thus inciting imminent lawless action. Seizing on this, victims’ families have brought suits alleging that social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Google, provided material support to terrorists in violation of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA). The Communications Decency Act (CDA), however, has served as an impenetrable shield against these claims, protecting social media companies from any liability when they are acting as mere “hosts” of third-party content. Congress should amend the CDA to prevent its immunity shield from applying in cases arising under the ATA because failure to do so frustrates the ATA’s intention of providing terror victims’ families with an avenue of legal redress against parties whose have provided material support to terrorists. Social media companies are aware that terrorist propaganda is being disseminated over their platforms, they are aware that people are being indoctrinated through their platforms, and they are profiting by running targeted advertising alongside the propaganda. Safely behind the CDA’s shield, however, they have no incentive to develop tools to mitigate the dire impact of online terrorist recruiting. The proposed amendment to the CDA would encourage companies to combat online terrorist propaganda while also ensuring that suits brought under the ATA will move past the motion to dismiss stage

K-12 School Shootings in Context: New Findings from The American School Shooting Study (TASSS)

The American School Shooting Study (TASSS) is an ongoing mixed-method project funded by the National Institute of Justice to catalog US school shootings. It has amassed data based on open sources and other public materials dating back to 1990. This brief presents new insights from TASSS, diving deeper into the database's potential to examine the locations, timing, and student involvement of youth-perpetrated gun violence

Competitiveness and sustainability: can ‘smart city regionalism’ square the circle?

Increasingly, the widely established, globalisation-driven agenda of economic competitiveness meets a growing concern with sustainability. Yet, the practical and conceptual co-existence—or fusion—of these two agendas is not always easy. This includes finding and operationalising the ‘right’ scale of governance, an important question for the pursuit of the distinctly transscalar nature of these two policy fields. ‘New regionalism’ has increasingly been discussed as a pragmatic way of tackling the variable spatialities associated with these policy fields and their changing articulation. This paper introduces ‘smart (new) city-regionalism’, derived from the principles of smart growth and new regionalism, as a policy-shaping mechanism and analytical framework. It brings together the rationales, agreed principles and legitimacies of publicly negotiated polity with collaborative, network-based and policy-driven spatiality. The notion of ‘smartness’, as suggested here as central feature, goes beyond the implicit meaning of ‘smart’ as in ‘smart growth’. When introduced in the later 1990s the term embraced a focus on planning and transport. Since then, the adjective ‘smart’ has become used ever more widely, advocating innovativeness, participation, collaboration and co-ordination. The resulting ‘smart city regionalism’ is circumscribed by the interface between the sectorality and territoriality of policy-making processes. Using the examples of Vancouver and Seattle, the paper looks at the effects of the resulting specific local conditions on adopting ‘smartness’ in the scalar positioning of policy-making

Relating tissue specialization to the differentiation of expression of singleton and duplicate mouse proteins

BACKGROUND: Gene duplications have been hypothesized to be a major factor in enabling the evolution of tissue differentiation. Analyses of the expression profiles of duplicate genes in mammalian tissues have indicated that, with time, the expression patterns of duplicate genes diverge and become more tissue specific. We explored the relationship between duplication events, the time at which they took place, and both the expression breadth of the duplicated genes and the cumulative expression breadth of the gene family to which they belong. RESULTS: We show that only duplicates that arose through post-multicellularity duplication events show a tendency to become more specifically expressed, whereas such a tendency is not observed for duplicates that arose in a unicellular ancestor. Unlike the narrow expression profile of the duplicated genes, the overall expression of gene families tends to maintain a global expression pattern. CONCLUSION: The work presented here supports the view suggested by the subfunctionalization model, namely that expression divergence in different tissues, following gene duplication, promotes the retention of a gene in the genome of multicellular species. The global expression profile of the gene families suggests division of expression between family members, whose expression becomes specialized. Because specialization of expression is coupled with an increased rate of sequence divergence, it can facilitate the evolution of new, tissue-specific functions

Effects of MCNP Model Resolution on Predicting Water Equivalent Thickness of Nanocomposite Materials in High-Energy Proton Fields

Manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit present tremendous, multifaceted radiological challenges. The deep space radiation environment contains high-energy protons and heavy ions, which are not sufficiently shielded by the aluminum alloys that have historically been used in spacecraft. To address these shielding concerns, polymer-based nanocomposites have been proposed. Radiation transport simulations of these nanocomposite materials could reduce the lead time for materials development, however, the level of detail necessary in a model to accurately predict the water equivalent thickness (WET) of a nanoscale material is unknown. In this work, MCNP6.2 is used to simulate the transport of high-energy protons through several models, varying three parameters (experimental setup geometry, particle tracking physics, and nanocomposite geometry), and the results are compared to available experimental measurements. The MCNP results indicate that the inclusion of δ-ray production in the particle tracking physics alters both the magnitude of the Bragg peak and the simulated proton range. Altering the other two parameters showed less than a 1% change in proton range, which is within the statistical error. The simulated WET of the nanocomposite, modeled as a bulk homogeneous material, was comparable to the published experimental results, with a WET of 44.70 mm in a 105 MeV proton beam and 22.61 mm in a 63MeV proton beam, and computed/experimental ratios of 0.9572 and 1.025, respectively

Enhancing e-Infrastructures with Advanced Technical Computing: Parallel MATLAB® on the Grid

MATLAB® is widely used within the engineering and scientific fields as the language and environment for technical computing, while collaborative Grid computing on e-Infrastructures is used by scientific communities to deliver a faster time to solution. MATLAB allows users to express parallelism in their applications, and then execute code on multiprocessor environments such as large-scale e-Infrastructures. This paper demonstrates the integration of MATLAB and Grid technology with a representative implementation that uses gLite middleware to run parallel programs. Experimental results highlight the increases in productivity and performance that users obtain with MATLAB parallel computing on Grids

A Mixed-Method Analysis of Fatal Attacks on Police by Far-Right Extremists

Several recent high-profile homicides of police officers have brought increased attention to issues of far-right extremist violence in the United States. We still, however, know very little about why (and how) certain encounters between far-right extremists and police result in violence. To fill this research gap, we conduct a mixed-method analysis of far-right antipolice homicides based on quantitative and qualitative data from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database. We begin by categorizing cases based on key aspects of homicide storylines. We then comparatively analyze attributes of event precursor, transaction, and aftermath stages across four storyline categories. Finally, a case study is purposively selected to follow-up on each storyline category to better capture the nuances of fluid homicide processes. Our findings have important implications for identifying triggering events, escalation factors, and other situated sets of conditions and circumstances that contribute to deadly outcomes for police officers

Freshwater in the Bay of Bengal : its fate and role in air-sea heat exchange

Author Posting. © The Oceanography Society, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of The Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 29, no. 2 (2016): 72–81, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2016.40.The strong salinity stratification in the upper 50–80 m of the Bay of Bengal affects the response of the upper ocean to surface heat fluxes. Using observations from November to December 2013, we examine the effect of surface cooling on the temperature structure of the ocean in a one-dimensional framework. The presence of freshwater adds gravitational stability to the density stratification and prevents convective overturning, even when the surface becomes cooler than the subsurface. This stable salinity stratification traps heat within subsurface layers. The ocean’s reluctance to release the heat trapped within these subsurface warm layers can contribute to delayed rise in surface temperature and heat loss from the ocean as winter progresses. Understanding the dispersal of freshwater throughout the bay can help scientists assess its potential for generating the anomalous temperature response. We use the Aquarius along-track surface salinity and satellite-derived surface velocities to trace the evolution and modification of salinity in the Lagrangian frame of water parcels as they move through the bay with the mesoscale circulation. This advective tracking of surface salinities provides a Lagrangian interpolation of the monthly salinity fields in 2013 and shows the evolution of the freshwater distribution. The along-trajectory rate of salinification of water as it leaves the northern bay is estimated and interpreted to result from mixing processes that are likely related to the host of submesoscale signatures observed during our field campaigns.This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research (grant N000141310451)

Reconstructing genetic histories and social organisation in Neolithic and Bronze Age Croatia

Ancient DNA studies have revealed how human migrations from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age transformed the social and genetic structure of European societies. Present-day Croatia lies at the heart of ancient migration routes through Europe, yet our knowledge about social and genetic processes here remains sparse. To shed light on these questions, we report new whole-genome data for 28 individuals dated to between ~ 4700 BCE–400 CE from two sites in present-day eastern Croatia. In the Middle Neolithic we evidence first cousin mating practices and strong genetic continuity from the Early Neolithic. In the Middle Bronze Age community that we studied, we find multiple closely related males suggesting a patrilocal social organisation. We also find in that community an unexpected genetic ancestry profile distinct from individuals found at contemporaneous sites in the region, due to the addition of hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. These findings support archaeological evidence for contacts with communities further north in the Carpathian Basin. Finally, an individual dated to Roman times exhibits an ancestry profile that is broadly present in the region today, adding an important data point to the substantial shift in ancestry that occurred in the region between the Bronze Age and today

Relationship between the tissue-specificity of mouse gene expression and the evolutionary origin and function of the proteins

BACKGROUND: The combination of complete genome sequence information with expression data enables us to characterize the relationship between a protein's evolutionary origin or functional category and its expression pattern. In this study, mouse proteins were assigned into functional and phyletic groups and the gene expression patterns of the different protein groupings were examined by microarray analysis in various mouse tissues. RESULTS: Our results suggest that the proteins that are universally distributed in all tissues are predominantly enzymes and transporters. In contrast, the tissue-specific set is dominated by regulatory proteins (signal transduction and transcription factors). An increased tendency to tissue-specificity is observed for metazoan-specific proteins. As the composition of the phyletic groups highly correlates with that of the functional groups, the data were tested in order to determine which of the two factors - function or phyletic age - is dominant in shaping the expression profile of a protein. The observed differences in expression patterns of genes between functional groups were found mainly to reflect their different phyletic origin. The connection between tissue specificity and phyletic age cannot be explained by the recent rate of evolution. Finally, although metazoan-specific proteins tend to be tissue-specific compared with phyletically conserved proteins present in all domains of life, many such 'universal' proteins are also tissue-specific. CONCLUSION: The minimal cellular transcriptome of the metazoan cell differs from that of the ancestral unicellular eukaryote: new functions were added (metazoan-specific proteins), whilst other functions became specialized and no longer took place in all cells (tissue-specific pre-metazoan proteins)