The Trouble with Tinker: An Examination of Student Free Speech Rights in the Digital Age

The boundaries of the schoolyard were once clearly delineated by the physical grounds of the school. In those days, it was relatively easy to determine what sort of student behavior fell within an educator’s purview, and what lay beyond the school’s control. Technological developments have all but erased these confines and extended the boundaries of the school environment somewhat infinitely, as the internet and social media allow students to interact seemingly everywhere and at all times. As these physical boundaries of the schoolyard have disappeared, so too has the certainty with which an educator might supervise a student’s behavior. Because smartphones, tablets, and computers abound, the ways in which students are able to communicate have changed dramatically in the new millennium, but the law governing the free speech rights of students in American public schools has not kept pace. Current law allows educators to punish student speakers when their in-school speech disrupts the school environment, or is likely to do so—but it is not clear that this same standard should apply to student speech that is posted online away from school, or whether a school should be able to punish off-campus online student speech at all. Because the Supreme Court of the United States has not yet spoken on the issue, and in the absence of a better standard, the courts that have addressed the issue of problematic off-campus online student speech have applied this standard that bases a school’s ability to punish the speaker on the (potential) disruptiveness of his or her speech. This Note explores that which the First Amendment guarantees to adult citizens and the ways in which these guarantees differ for public school students in school, as governed by four major Supreme Court decisions in the past fifty years. This Note then examines the recent cases in which courts have applied this precedent to off-campus online student speech for which the speakers were punished by their schools, and analyzes the ways in which the application of the same standard in these cases has led to drastically different outcomes. Ultimately, this Note contends that educators must be able to supervise student online activities to some extent, and proposes a new standard by which a public school would be able to punish a student for his or her off-campus online speech only if that speech was actually of concern to the school, and if that speech interfered with the rights of others in the school community

The effect of tetrathionate on the stability and immunological properties of muscle triosephosphate dehydrogenases

Tetrathionate effect on stability and immunological properties of muscle triosephosphate dehydrogenase

Reactive processing of formaldehyde and acetaldehyde in aqueous aerosol mimics: Surface tension depression and secondary organic products

The reactive uptake of carbonyl-containing volatile organic compounds (cVOCs) by aqueous atmospheric aerosols is a likely source of particulate organic material. The aqueous-phase secondary organic products of some cVOCs are surface-active. Therefore, cVOC uptake can lead to organic film formation at the gas-aerosol interface and changes in aerosol surface tension. We examined the chemical reactions of two abundant cVOCs, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, in water and aqueous ammonium sulfate (AS) solutions mimicking tropospheric aerosols. Secondary organic products were identified using Aerosol Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometry (Aerosol-CIMS), and changes in surface tension were monitored using pendant drop tensiometry. Hemiacetal oligomers and aldol condensation products were identified using Aerosol-CIMS. Acetaldehyde depresses surface tension to 65(\pm2) dyn/cm in pure water (a 10% surface tension reduction from that of pure water) and 62(\pm1) dyn/cm in AS solutions (a 20.6% reduction from that of a 3.1 M AS solution). Surface tension depression by formaldehyde in pure water is negligible; in AS solutions, a 9% reduction in surface tension is observed. Mixtures of these species were also studied in combination with methylglyoxal in order to evaluate the influence of cross-reactions on surface tension depression and product formation in these systems. We find that surface tension depression in the solutions containing mixed cVOCs exceeds that predicted by an additive model based on the single-species isotherms.Comment: Published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 22 November 201

Crafting Authenticity

Authenticity is what we want from the world around us, from others, and crucially from ourselves and what we make. As it relates to graphic design, I define authenticity as a perceived match between form and purpose. For the designer, its quality is found in the process of simultaneously developing a concept and crafting the design/object