Safe Routes to School: Steps to a Greener Future

This report indicates how Safe Routes to School is reducing carbon emissions and air pollutants. The report profiles five communities that have made strides in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and harmful pollutants around schools through the implementation of Safe Routes to School programs. The five case studies documented in this report demonstrate initial promising successes, and show how one school's effort often spreads to additional nearby schools, furthering the environmental impact. Columbia, MO; Las Cruces, NM; Longmont, CO; Marin County, CA; and Windsor, VT are featured

Rape Beyond Crime

Public health experts agree that sexual violence constitutes a significant public health issue. Yet criminal law dominates rape law almost completely, with public health law playing at best a small supporting role. Recent civil law developments, such as university disciplinary proceedings, similarly fixate on how best to find and penalize perpetrators. As a result, rape law continues to spin its wheels in the same arguments and obstacles. This Article argues that, without broader cultural changes, criminal law faces a double bind: rape laws will either be ineffective or neglect the importance of individual culpability. Public health law provides more promising terrain for rape prevention because it is a strong legal framework that can engage the complex causes of rape, including the social norms that promote sexual aggression. While criminal law can only punish bad behavior, public health interventions can use the more effective prevention strategy of promoting positive behaviors and relationships. They can also address the myriad sexual behaviors and social determinants that increase the risk of rape but are outside the scope of criminal law. Perhaps most importantly, public health law relies on evidence-based interventions and the expertise of public health authorities to ensure that laws and policies are effective. Transforming rape law in this way provides a framework for legal feminism to undertake the unmet challenge of “theorizing yes,” that is, moving beyond how to protect women’s right to refuse sex and toward promoting and exploring positive models of sex. Criminal law is simply incapable of meeting this challenge because it concerns only what sex should not be. A public health framework can give the law a richer role in addressing the full spectrum of sexual attitudes and behaviors

Safe Routes to School 2009 Policy Report: Moving to the Future: Building on Early Achievements

This report gives background information on Safe Routes to School and details challenges and opportunities in program implementation. The 2009 Policy Report also discusses a number of "big-picture" policies and practices that affect -- positively or negatively -- the ability of children to walk and bicycle to school or that can help institutionalize SRTS programs in a larger context. Some of these policies include school siting, complete streets, and school bus route cuts

When a Fad Ends: An Agent-Based Model of Imitative Behavior

agent-based modeling, fads, purchasing patterns

From subprime mortgages to subprime credit cards

Since the 2005 changes to bankruptcy law made subprime products safer for credit card companies, they are promoting more cards to consumers with poor credit. High up-front fees and penalties may call for consumer caution.Credit cards

First-year interest groups and 1st semester BME design class exposure to improve engineering student outcomes

First year Biomedical Engineering (BME) students at The University of Texas at Austin have the option of joining a First-year Interest Group (FIG). FIGs can increase student interest and retention in the major by allowing groups of 15-20 students to attend a weekly seminar and their first engineering classes together. [1] BME 303L Introduction to BME Engineering Design is a required course for first year BME students; students who join a FIG facilitated by the BME advising office enroll in BME 303L together during their first semester (fall) on campus. Approximately 80% of fall semester BME 303L enrollment is FIG students, while the other 20% are not part of a BME FIG. The same course taught by the same instructor is also offered during the following spring semester, and spring enrollment is exclusively made up of first year students who did not participate in a fall FIG. While FIGs have been shown to increase retention[1] and we have observed a positive impact on attitudes toward engineering, we have not yet been able to correlate these successes to engineering student outcomes as defined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). In order to better understand if the FIG success is correlated to engineering student outcomes, the authors surveyed all first year BME students at the end of the fall 2017 semester to measure their own perception of teamwork, communication skills, lifelong learning, and ability to use engineering tools. This paper presents initial results of the survey comparing engineering student outcome perceptions from students who just completed a FIG and BME 303L in the fall semester, and students who did not participate in FIG and are enrolled in BME 303L in the spring semester. These data will be used to optimize advising and curriculum for first year students and improve engineering outcomes for all students. Future surveys are planned for sophomore and junior years as well.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Change it Now: eBay v. MercExchange-Business Method Patent Litigation Reaches Critical Juncture Concerning Remedies for Infringement

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) as field has been researched for ten years, but with recent advances in mobile performance visual SLAM is entering the consumer market in a completely new way. A visual SLAM system will however be sensitive to non cautious use that may result in severe motion, occlusion or poor surroundings in terms of visual features that will cause the system to temporarily fail. The procedure of recovering from such a fail is called relocalization. Together with two similar problems localization, to find your position in an existing SLAM session, and loop closing, the online reparation and perfection of the map in an active SLAM session, these can be grouped as visual location recognition (VLR). This thesis presents novel results by combining the scalability of FabMap and the precision of 13th Lab's tracking yielding high-precision VLR, +/- 10 cm, while maintaining above 99 % precision and 60 % recall for sessions containing thousands of images. Everything functional purely on a normal mobile phone. The applications of VLR are many. Indoors, where GPS is not functioning, VLR can still provide positional information and navigate you through big complexes like airports and museums. Outdoors, VLR can improve the precision of GPS tenfold yielding a new level of navigational experience. Virtual and augmented reality applications are other areas that benefit from improved positioning and localization

Safe Routes to School State Network Project Final Report 2007-2009: Making Change through Partners and Policies

The Safe Routes to School National Partnership launched the State Network Project in 2007 to influence state-level Safe Routes to School implementation and to leverage additional resources and build a supportive environment through other state-level policies. The 2007 -- 2009 Report describes the approach and structure of the Partnership's State Network and Local School Projects in 10 jurisdictions (CA, DC, GA, IL, KY, LA, NY, OK, TX and VA). The networks were selected primarily based on high levels of childhood obesity, diversity and low income communities. The report highlights the progress achieved at state and local levels over three years, including major accomplishments, lessons learned, and next steps

Recovering the student voice: retention and achievement on foundation degrees.

The first year student experience has a very high profile as a topic in contemporary higher education but how much do we know about what our students really think about their first learning experiences on their Foundation degrees? Recovery of the student voice is an area that Foundation degree practitioners need to consider as part of our strategy to improve the quality of student learning. Our research is located within a form of the interpretivist tradition. Although we would not wish to deny the importance of structural factors in society, we regard knowledge as being constructed through an understanding that different people and groups, in different power relationships, experience the world in different ways. As we argue later, it is important to give voice to the experience of the least powerful