A 'deleterious' effect? : Australian legal education and the production of the legal identity

A body of critical legal scholarship argues that, by the time they have completed their studies, students who enter legal education holding social ideals and intending to use their legal education to achieve social change, have become cynical about the ability of the law to do so and no longer possess such ideals. This is explained by critical scholars to be the result of a process of ideological indoctrination, aimed at ensuring that graduates uphold the narrow and conservative interests of the legal profession and capitalist society, being exercised by law schools acting as adjuncts of the legal profession, and exercised upon the passive body of the law student. By using Foucault’s work on knowledge, power, and the subject to interrogate the assumptions upon which this narrative is based, this thesis intends to suggest a way of thinking differently to the approach taken by many critical legal scholars. It then uses an analytics of government (based on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’) to consider the construction of the legal identity differently. It examines the ways in which the governance of the legal identity is rationalised, programmed, and implemented, in three Queensland law schools. It also looks at the way that five prescriptive texts to ‘surviving’ law school suggest students establish and practise a relation to themselves in order to construct their own legal identities. Overall, this analysis shows that governance is not simply conducted in the profession’s interests, but occurs due to a complex arrangement of different practices, which can lead to the construction of skilled legal professional identities as well as ethical lawyer-citizens that hold an interest in justice. The implications of such an analytics provide the basis for original ways of understanding legal education, and legal education scholarship

Automated counter-terrorism

We present a holistic systems view of automated intelligence analysis for counter-terrorism with focus on the behavioural attributes of terrorist groups

Power in the 21st century : China's soft power in Latin America and its global rise.

The People's Republic of China pursues soft power in the western hemisphere to support its national interest. Joseph Nye's concept of soft power lacks the necessary detail to be considered mature theory, focuses far too heavily on soft power resource supply, and fails to account for state utility of soft power. As a result, Nye is wrongfully dismissive of China's soft power presence and capabilities. As the case of Latin America demonstrates, China's "utility of scale" soft power approach enables China to exact favorable policy outcomes that serve the national interest by driving its continued economic growth. Chinese soft power in Latin America has peripheral strategic implications, but does not directly impede on the long held Monroe Doctrine; rather, it very deliberately respects it. China's soft power reinforces a key component of PRC grand strategy called "hemispheric hedging," which provides a conceptual construct for understanding comprehensive Chinese smart power

Prospects for Neutron Star Parameter Estimation using Gravitational Waves from f-modes Associated with Magnetar Flares

Magnetar vibrational modes are theorized to be associated with energetic X-ray flares. Regular searches for gravitational waves from these modes have been performed by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, with no detections so far. Presently, search results are given in limits on the root-sum-square of the integrated gravitational-wave strain. However, the increased sensitivity of current detectors and the promise of future detectors invite the consideration of more astrophysically motivated methods. We present a framework for augmenting gravitational wave searches to measure or place direct limits on magnetar astrophysical properties in various search scenarios using a set of phenomenological and analytic models.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

The environmental spending needs of Scotland’s local authorities

Scottish citizens benefit from 19% more public spending per head than English citizens. The ‘Barnett formula’ is slowly reducing the gap, but very little is known about the countries’ relative needs and hence about how far the present gap is defensible: the aim of this paper is to throw some light on the countries’ relative needs. We begin with the complex formulae that the Westminster government uses to assess the spending needs of English local authorities, and we use these English formulae to assess the needs of Scottish local authorities for three major blocks of local services. These formulae suggest that Scotland needs 6.4% more per head than England for environmental, protective and cultural services, 8.1% more for highway maintenance, and between 24.3% and 35.3% more for fire services. We also combine these results with those of two other papers concerned with local education and social services to show that these English formulae put Scotland’s per capita needs for local government services as a whole at about 6% above England’s. However, we then compare the relative needs of Scottish local authorities as assessed by the English formulae with their relative needs as assessed by the Scottish needs formulae that are currently used by Holyrood, and we find major differences. This suggests either that at least one country uses seriously flawed formulae to assess needs, or that the two countries have different conceptions of need

Scotland’s social services spending needs: an English view

Scottish citizens enjoy 25% more spending per head on public services than English citizens, but almost nothing is known about the countries’ relative needs and hence about how far this gap is defensible. We explore their spending needs for local authority services, which cover over half the spending concerned. We first compare needs for local personal social services. To do so, we take the complex formulae with which the Westminster government assesses the needs of English local authorities, and we use these formulae to assess the needs of Scottish local authorities. The formulae suggest that Scotland needs 15.3% more per head than England. We then combine these results with those of two earlier papers that explore other local services to show that the English formulae put Scotland’s per capita needs for local authority services as a whole at about 6% above England’s. However, we also compare the relative needs of Scottish local authorities as assessed by the English formulae with their relative needs as assessed by the Scottish needs formulae currently used by Holyrood, and we find major differences. This suggests either that at least one country assesses needs with seriously flawed formulae, or that the two countries have different conceptions of need

Mariana Valverde (2017) Michel Foucault. Oxon: Routledge.

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DATA VALIDATION CONSTRAINT LANGUAGES

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are becoming increasingly prevalent across the industry. At its heart, an API is a means for transferring data between two systems in an interoperable way. While the data that is passed across an API is generally well structured, that structure can be arbitrarily complex. Determining whether or not a set of data is valid is often not straightforward, as there may be complex dependencies between different data items in a set. Writing custom code to perform such a validation is time consuming and prone to error. To address challenges of these types, techniques are presented herein that support a language for expressing complex constraints on YANG (e.g., see the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 7950) data that is closely tied to the underlying YANG data model such that the evaluation of the constraints is context-aware and has knowledge of the data model. Aspects of the presented techniques offer a number of benefits including, for example, making the writing of constraints much easier, reducing development costs by enabling checking for many more errors at compile time, increasing quality and security (e.g., by automating input validation and thus avoiding the need to write complex and bug-prone manual validation code), etc