An Overview of the Legal Rights of Culturally Deaf Criminal Suspects

The majority of culturally deaf individuals who become suspects in a criminal investigation are persons who have limited understanding of legal terminology and procedures. Despite legal safeguards such as the Miranda Warnings and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Mirandizing these individuals continues to present unique challenges to law enforcement due to the diverse educational and communication abilities of the deaf population. This discussion will focus on legally established civil rights of signing deaf suspects in relation to the administration of the Miranda Warnings and other legal proceedings

Characterizing octagonal and rectangular fibers for MAROON-X

We report on the scrambling performance and focal-ratio-degradation (FRD) of various octagonal and rectangular fibers considered for MAROON-X. Our measurements demonstrate the detrimental effect of thin claddings on the FRD of octagonal and rectangular fibers and that stress induced at the connectors can further increase the FRD. We find that fibers with a thick, round cladding show low FRD. We further demonstrate that the scrambling behavior of non-circular fibers is often complex and introduce a new metric to fully capture non-linear scrambling performance, leading to much lower scrambling gain values than are typically reported in the literature (<1000 compared to 10,000 or more). We find that scrambling gain measurements for small-core, non-circular fibers are often speckle dominated if the fiber is not agitated.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, submitted to SPIE Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016 (9912-185

Etiological Histories of 35 Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Residential School Students with Delinquent Behavior

This paper reviews the etiological histories of deaf and hard-of-hearing juveniles with delinquent behaviors. The etiologies of hearing loss and incidence of secondary or multiple disabilities in students with delinquent behaviors is examined through a review of existing school records for thirty- five (35) students born between the years of 1939-1986. Case studies, percentages, IQ scores, and reading grade level scores are used to provide a description of the neurological and behavioral issues of deaf and hard-of- hearing residential school youth who have experienced criminal legal problems. The purpose is to improve awareness among educators and juvenile Justice professionals of some potential effects of multiple disabilities on delinquency in signing deaf and hard of-hearing youth

Tie strength in question answer on social network sites

Asking friends, colleagues, or other trusted people to help answer a question or find information is a familiar and tried-and-true concept. Widespread use of online social networks has made social information seeking easier, and has provided researchers with opportunities to better observe this process. In this paper, we relate question answering to tie strength, a metric drawn from sociology describing how close a friendship is. We present a study evaluating the role of tie strength in question answers. We used previous research on tie strength in social media to generate tie strength information between participants and their answering friends, and asked them for feedback about the value of answers across several dimensions. While sociological studies have indicated that weak ties are able to provide better information, our findings are significant in that weak ties do not have this effect, and stronger ties (close friends) provide a subtle increase in information that contributes more to participants' overall knowledge, and is less likely to have been seen before

Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside

This paper introduces architectural and interaction patterns for integrating crowdsourced human contributions directly into user interfaces. We focus on writing and editing, com-plex endeavors that span many levels of conceptual and pragmatic activity. Authoring tools offer help with prag-matics, but for higher-level help, writers commonly turn to other people. We thus present Soylent, a word processing interface that enables writers to call on Mechanical Turk workers to shorten, proofread, and otherwise edit parts of their documents on demand. To improve worker quality, we introduce the Find-Fix-Verify crowd programming pat-tern, which splits tasks into a series of generation and re-view stages. Evaluation studies demonstrate the feasibility of crowdsourced editing and investigate questions of relia-bility, cost, wait time, and work time for edits.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant No. IIS-0712793

An association study of DRD2 and COMT polymorphisms with novelty seeking and harm avoidance scores, in two independent samples of depressed patients

BACKGROUND: It was recently reported that an interaction of the dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) and catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) influences the behavioural approach system – as measured using Carver and White's Behavioural Inhibition and Behavioural Approach System (BIS/BAS) scales – in a sample of healthy German subjects. The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), in particular the novelty seeking (NS) and harm avoidance (HA) scales, correlates moderately with the BIS/BAS measure. This study aimed to examine support for an association of DRD2 and COMT with behavioural activation, using the TCI within two independent samples of depressed outpatients (for both samples n = 146). METHODS: Two clinical samples of depressed patients were ascertained to assess the efficacy of two different pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy treatments. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyse NS and HA scale and subscale scores with respect to gene loci within each clinical sample. Analysis of covariance were undertaken to examine the association of age and gender with NS and HA scores. An association of age group or gender with gene loci were explored using chi-squared tests, in each sample. RESULTS: No significant effect of DRD2 or COMT, either independently or as an interaction, on NS or HA scores was observed, within either sample. Whilst age was significantly negatively associated with NS scores, including age in the two- and three-way interactions did not affect the significance of the association of personality with gene loci. CONCLUSION: This study suggests that the COMT-DRD2 Equilibrium Model of Positive Emotionality recently proposed by Reuter and his colleagues is not applicable amongst currently depressed individuals, whose behavioural approach and inhibition tendencies have been assessed using the TCI

Factors affecting consistency and accuracy in identifying modern macroperforate planktonic foraminifera

Planktonic foraminifera are widely used in biostratigraphic, palaeoceanographic and evolutionary studies, but the strength of many study conclusions could be weakened if taxonomic identifications are not reproducible by different workers. In this study, to assess the relative importance of a range of possible reasons for among-worker disagreement in identification, 100 specimens of 26 species of macroperforate planktonic foraminifera were selected from a core-top site in the subtropical Pacific Ocean. Twenty-three scientists at different career stages – including some with only a few days experience of planktonic foraminifera – were asked to identify each specimen to species level, and to indicate their confidence in each identification. The participants were provided with a species list and had access to additional reference materials. We use generalised linear mixed-effects models to test the relevance of three sets of factors in identification accuracy: participant-level characteristics (including experience), species-level characteristics (including a participant’s knowledge of the species) and specimen-level characteristics (size, confidence in identification). The 19 less experienced scientists achieve a median accuracy of 57 %, which rises to 75 % for specimens they are confident in. For the 4 most experienced participants, overall accuracy is 79 %, rising to 93 % when they are confident. To obtain maximum comparability and ease of analysis, everyone used a standard microscope with only 35× magnification, and each specimen was studied in isolation. Consequently, these data provide a lower limit for an estimate of consistency. Importantly, participants could largely predict whether their identifications were correct or incorrect: their own assessments of specimen-level confidence and of their previous knowledge of species concepts were the strongest predictors of accuracy

Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge

A group of environmental law professors formed the Environmental Law Collaborative with the goal of engaging environmental law scholars in the thorny issues of the day. The members of the Collaborative gathered in the summer of 2012 to produce an intensive and collective assessment of sustainability in the age of climate change. Their writings examine the process of adapting the principles and application of sustainability to the demands of climate change, including framing the term sustainability in climate change discussions; coordinating sustainable practices across disciplines such as law, economics, ethics, and the hard sciences; and conceptualizing the role of sustainability in formulating adaptation and resiliency strategies. Their work also contemplates the role of law and legal systems in crafting effective climate change adaptation strategies and considers feasible strategies in the context of specific examples

The association of health literacy and blood pressure reduction in a cohort of patients with hypertension: The heart healthy lenoir trial

Lower health literacy is associated with poorer health outcomes. Few interventions poised to mitigate the impact of health literacy in hypertensive patients have been published. We tested if a multilevel quality improvement intervention could differentially improve Systolic Blood Pressure (SBP) more so in patients with low vs. higher health literacy