The Association of Transnational Law Schools’ Agora: An Experiment in Graduate Legal Pedagogy

The Association of Transnational Law Schools [ATLAS] is a consortium of law schools from around the world that launched an annual academic summer program, called the Agora, for doctoral students in July of 2008. The authors outline the history of the creation of the program, describe it, and consider its significance as it relates to the changing landscape of legal practice and pedagogy. The Agora both reflects and furthers a trend in legal scholarship, and as a consequence legal education, toward a focus on a set of interrelated concerns, which include globalization, international governance, transnational law, comparative legal studies, legal transplantation and the apparent conceptual challenges that these pose. In important respects these new conceptual challenges have a long pedigree in questions about the scope of legal pedagogy and theory. The pedagogical controversy is rooted in questions about the purpose of legal education, namely, whether it is trade training and should focus on practical legal skills, or whether it should be conceived of as broader than this. Intimately connected to this pedagogical controversy is a legal-theoretical controversy about the scope of legal theory (and thus the nature of law and its investigation). Does the word “law” designate the organizational instruments of state power, or should we think of “law” as referring to a more diverse set of socialorganizational systems that may have greater or less affinity and connection with state law

Group Dynamics of Commercial Scale Wind Turbines

The recent rapid development in wind turbine technology and renewable energy policies around the world has led to an influx in large industrial scale wind farms. As both the size and number of turbines in a power plant increase the interactions between these machines is increasingly prioritized for the purpose of optimization. This work includes three publications discussing the group dynamics of wind turbines based on current literature as well as interactions with a Southern Ontario wind farm. A progression is made from the necessity of considering wind farm dynamic effects to the specific area of wind turbine wake as a beneficial topic of study for optimization. The first publication consists of a literature review of the primary topics relating to wind farm dynamics and is followed by a publication describing a specific focus on the yaw behaviour of turbines within a group. The final included publication details a global sensitivity analysis performed to establish areas for optimization

Surficial Geology of the Osage 7.5\u27 Quadrangle, Mitchell County, Iowa

https://ir.uiowa.edu/igs_ofm/1116/thumbnail.jp

Bi-directional online transfer learning : a framework

Transfer learning uses knowledge learnt in source domains to aid predictions in a target domain. When source and target domains are online, they are susceptible to concept drift, which may alter the mapping of knowledge between them. Drifts in online environments can make additional information available in each domain, necessitating continuing knowledge transfer both from source to target and vice versa. To address this, we introduce the Bi-directional Online Transfer Learning (BOTL) framework, which uses knowledge learnt in each online domain to aid predictions in others. We introduce two variants of BOTL that incorporate model culling to minimise negative transfer in frameworks with high volumes of model transfer. We consider the theoretical loss of BOTL, which indicates that BOTL achieves a loss no worse than the underlying concept drift detection algorithm. We evaluate BOTL using two existing concept drift detection algorithms: RePro and ADWIN. Additionally, we present a concept drift detection algorithm, Adaptive Windowing with Proactive drift detection (AWPro), which reduces the computation and communication demands of BOTL. Empirical results are presented using two data stream generators: the drifting hyperplane emulator and the smart home heating simulator, and real-world data predicting Time To Collision (TTC) from vehicle telemetry. The evaluation shows BOTL and its variants outperform the concept drift detection strategies and the existing state-of-the-art online transfer learning technique

Phosphorus‒bismuth peri-substituted acenaphthenes : a synthetic, structural and computational study

This work was financially supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). This included PhD studentship to TEC (Centre for Doctoral Training in Critical Resource Catalysis (CRITICAT), Grant code: EP/L016419/1) and to PN (Grant code EP/L505079/1). The authors would like to thank COST action SM1302 SIPs; the EPSRC UK National Mass Spectrometry Facility at Swansea University for the acquisition and processing of Mass Spectrometry Data and to EaStCHEM and the School of Chemistry for support.A series of acenaphthene species with a diisopropylphosphino group and a variety of bismuth functionalities in the peri-positions were synthesised and fully characterised, including single crystal X–ray diffraction. The majority of the reported species feature a relatively rare interpnictogen P−Bi bond. The series includes the phosphine¬−bismuthine, Acenap(PiPr2)(BiPh2) 2 (Acenap = acenaphthene-5,6-diyl), which was subjected to a fluorodearylation reaction to produce Acenap(PiPr2)(BiPhX) 5−8 and 10 (X = BF4-, Cl, Br, I, SPh), displaying varying degrees of ionicity. The geminally bis(acenaphthyl) substituted [Acenap(PiPr2)2]BiPh 3 shows a large through-space coupling of 17.8 Hz, formally 8TSJPP. Coupling deformation density (CDD) calculations confirm the double through-space coupling pathway, in which the P and Bi lone pairs mediate communication between the two 31P nuclei. Several synthetic routes towards the phosphine−diiodobismuthine Acenap(PiPr2)(BiI2) 9 have been investigated, however the purity of this, surprisingly thermally stable potential synthon, remains poor.PostprintPostprintPeer reviewe

CoCrFeNi High-Entropy Alloy as an Enhanced Hydrogen Evolution Catalyst in an Acidic Solution

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) have intriguing material properties, but their potential as catalysts has not been widely explored. Based on a concise theoretical model, we predict that the surface of a quaternary HEA of base metals, CoCrFeNi, should go from being nearly fully oxidized except for pure Ni sites when exposed to O2 to being partially oxidized in an acidic solution under cathodic bias, and that such a partially oxidized surface should be more active for the electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in acidic solutions than all the component metals. These predictions are confirmed by electrochemical and surface science experiments: the Ni in the HEA is found to be most resistant to oxidation, and when deployed in 0.5 M H2SO4, the HEA exhibits an overpotential of only 60 mV relative to Pt for the HER at a current density of 1 mA/cm2

Birthweight and risk markers for type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease in childhood: the Child Heart and Health Study in England (CHASE).

AIMS/HYPOTHESIS: Lower birthweight (a marker of fetal undernutrition) is associated with higher risks of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and could explain ethnic differences in these diseases. We examined associations between birthweight and risk markers for diabetes and CVD in UK-resident white European, South Asian and black African-Caribbean children. METHODS: In a cross-sectional study of risk markers for diabetes and CVD in 9- to 10-year-old children of different ethnic origins, birthweight was obtained from health records and/or parental recall. Associations between birthweight and risk markers were estimated using multilevel linear regression to account for clustering in children from the same school. RESULTS: Key data were available for 3,744 (66%) singleton study participants. In analyses adjusted for age, sex and ethnicity, birthweight was inversely associated with serum urate and positively associated with systolic BP. After additional height adjustment, lower birthweight (per 100 g) was associated with higher serum urate (0.52%; 95% CI 0.38, 0.66), fasting serum insulin (0.41%; 95% CI 0.08, 0.74), HbA1c (0.04%; 95% CI 0.00, 0.08), plasma glucose (0.06%; 95% CI 0.02, 0.10) and serum triacylglycerol (0.30%; 95% CI 0.09, 0.51) but not with BP or blood cholesterol. Birthweight was lower among children of South Asian (231 g lower; 95% CI 183, 280) and black African-Caribbean origin (81 g lower; 95% CI 30, 132). However, adjustment for birthweight had no effect on ethnic differences in risk markers. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATION: Birthweight was inversely associated with urate and with insulin and glycaemia after adjustment for current height. Lower birthweight does not appear to explain emerging ethnic difference in risk markers for diabetes

Improving Together: A National Framework for Quality and GP Clusters in Scotland

Improving together will complement the development of the Scottish national GP contract that sets out the role of GPs and their important contribution as clinical leaders and expert medical generalists working in a community setting. This framework will be reviewed by the Scottish Government and the Scottish General Practitioners Committee of the BMA on a periodic basis, attentive to feedback from those involved in delivering its intent. As such, it is a framework that will develop to its full potential over time, as elements of the transformation of primary care in Scotland create the capacity to do so