Enactments Altering or Reallocating Elected Officials\u27 Powers Do Not Directly Relate to or Affect Voting and Are Therefore Not Subject to Judicial or Administrative Preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In Presley v. Etowah County Comm’n, the Court held enactments altering or reallocating elected officials’ powers do not directly relate to or affect voting. Therefore, not subject to judicial or administrative preclearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, the Court’s holding in Presley, that the changes at issue must directly relate to voting, contradicts the Court’s earlier holdings that indirect or minor changes affecting voting must meet Section 5 preclearance requirements. In Presley, the Court limited the coverage of Section 5 by holding that enactments reallocating elected officials’ decision-making authority do not require judicial or administrative preclearance because these enactments do not bear a direct relation to or have a definite impact upon voting itself. The Court held that Section 5 unambiguously applies only to modifications of voting rules, concluding that changes in elected officials’ decision-making authority are routine matters of governance outside the scope of Section 5 operations. The Court stated that expanding the scope of Section 5 to include enactments transferring elected officials’ authority over their respective budgets would expand Section 5 coverage far beyond the Act’s statutory language and congressional intent. By refusing to recognize reallocations of elected officials’ decision-making authority as changes “with respect to voting,” the Court has established a standard upon which state and local governments can constitutionally diminish the political effectiveness of officials representing minorities. If the Court had followed its twenty-year practice of deferring to the Attorney General’s interpretation of the Act and allowing Section 5 the “broadest possible scope” of coverage, the Court could easily have avoided the inevitable confusion which will result from Presley as to which voting changes require preclearance

Re-evaluation of cosmic ray cutoff terminology

The study of cosmic ray access to locations inside the geomagnetic field has evolved in a manner that has led to some misunderstanding and misapplication of the terminology originally developed to describe particle access. This paper presents what is believed to be a useful set of definitions for cosmic ray cutoff terminology for use in theoretical and experimental cosmic ray studies

Migrating to Cloud-Native Architectures Using Microservices: An Experience Report

Migration to the cloud has been a popular topic in industry and academia in recent years. Despite many benefits that the cloud presents, such as high availability and scalability, most of the on-premise application architectures are not ready to fully exploit the benefits of this environment, and adapting them to this environment is a non-trivial task. Microservices have appeared recently as novel architectural styles that are native to the cloud. These cloud-native architectures can facilitate migrating on-premise architectures to fully benefit from the cloud environments because non-functional attributes, like scalability, are inherent in this style. The existing approaches on cloud migration does not mostly consider cloud-native architectures as their first-class citizens. As a result, the final product may not meet its primary drivers for migration. In this paper, we intend to report our experience and lessons learned in an ongoing project on migrating a monolithic on-premise software architecture to microservices. We concluded that microservices is not a one-fit-all solution as it introduces new complexities to the system, and many factors, such as distribution complexities, should be considered before adopting this style. However, if adopted in a context that needs high flexibility in terms of scalability and availability, it can deliver its promised benefits

Mental Health First Aid USA: The Implementation of a Mental Health First Aid Training Program in a Rural Healthcare Setting

Nearly one-quarter of adults in the United States suffer from a documented mental disorder. Consequently, anyone could encounter a person with symptoms of mental illness at some point as they carry out their daily life activities. Although laypersons may accurately identify physical illnesses, they may lack necessary skills to identify symptoms of mental disorders, or know how to adequately respond to persons in a mental health crisis. Mental Health First Aid USA is an evidence-based certification program designed to teach lay citizens to recognize certain symptoms of common mental illnesses, offer and provide first aid assistance, and guide a person toward appropriate services and other support. The program targets a broad audience, from teachers, police officers, clergy members, and healthcare professionals to the average citizen volunteer. This practice note describes a pilot implementation of Mental Health First Aid USA by a social worker at a rural hospital in Central California. The process and results of program implementation are discussed as well as implications for social work practice in rural healthcare settings

Cosmic ray short burst observed with the Global Muon Detector Network (GMDN) on June 22, 2015

We analyze the short cosmic ray intensity increase ("cosmic ray burst": CRB) on June 22, 2015 utilizing a global network of muon detectors and derive the global anisotropy of cosmic ray intensity and the density (i.e. the omnidirectional intensity) with 10-minute time resolution. We find that the CRB was caused by a local density maximum and an enhanced anisotropy of cosmic rays both of which appeared in association with Earth's crossing of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS). This enhanced anisotropy was normal to the HCS and consistent with a diamagnetic drift arising from the spatial gradient of cosmic ray density, which indicates that cosmic rays were drifting along the HCS from the north of Earth. We also find a significant anisotropy along the HCS, lasting a few hours after the HCS crossing, indicating that cosmic rays penetrated into the inner heliosphere along the HCS. Based on the latest geomagnetic field model, we quantitatively evaluate the reduction of the geomagnetic cut-off rigidity and the variation of the asymptotic viewing direction of cosmic rays due to a major geomagnetic storm which occurred during the CRB and conclude that the CRB is not caused by the geomagnetic storm, but by a rapid change in the cosmic ray anisotropy and density outside the magnetosphere.Comment: accepted for the publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Time-to-response toxicity analysis as a method for drug susceptibility assessment in salmon lice

The salmon louse Lepeophtheirus salmonis (Krøyer, 1837) is an ectoparasite causing infections ofwild and farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) in the Northern hemisphere.While L. salmonis control at commercial mariculture sites increasingly employs non-medicinal approaches, such as cage designs reducing infection rates and biological control through cleaner fish, anti-parasitic drugs are still a requirement for effective fish health care. With only a limited range of salmon delousing agents available, all of which have been in use for more than a decade, drug resistance formation has been reported for different products. Successful resistance management requires reliable susceptibility assessment, which is usually achieved through L. salmonis bioassays. These tests involve the exposure of parasites to different drug concentrations and require significant numbers of suitable L. salmonis stages. The present study reports an alternative bioassay that is based on time-to-response toxicity analyses and can be carried outwith limited parasite numbers. The assay determines the median effective time (ET50), i.e., the time required until impaired swimming and/or attachment behaviour becomes apparent in 50% of parasites, by conducting repeated examinations of test animals starting at the timepointwhere exposure to a set drug concentration commences. This experimental approach further allows the estimation of the apparent drug susceptibility of individual L. salmonis by determining their time to response, which may prove useful in experiments designed to elucidate associations between genetic factors and the drug susceptibility phenotype of parasites. Three laboratory strains of L. salmonis differing in susceptibility to emamectin benzoate were characterised using standard 24 h bioassays and time-to-response toxicity assays. While both the median effective concentration (EC50) and the ET50 showed variability between experimental repeats, both types of bioassay consistently discriminated susceptible and drug-resistant L. salmonis laboratory strains. Statement of relevance: Infections by sea lice cause significant costs to the global salmon farming industry, which have been estimated to exceed €300 million per year worldwide. Control of sea lice still relies to a significant extent on chemical delousing; however, chemical control is threatened by resistance formation. Resistance can be combated by rotation between different drugs and strategic implementation of non-medicinal strategies. However, resistance management requires reliable and feasible methods of susceptibility assessment. The present study is a technical note introducing a novel approach to susceptibility assessments in sea lice. The method can be applied in susceptibility assessments on farms,where it offers the advantage of a reduced requirement of parasites for testing. In addition, the novel method allows deriving the times of parasite require to showa response after drug treatment has started, thus providing a variable characterizing the drug susceptibility phenotype of individual parasites. Accordingly, the bioassay approach presented here will be useful for studies aiming at unravelling the genetic determinants of drug resistance

Optimal and Automated Deployment for Microservices

Microservices are highly modular and scalable Service Oriented Architectures. They underpin automated deployment practices like Continuous Deployment and Autoscaling. In this paper, we formalize these practices and show that automated deployment - proven undecidable in the general case - is algorithmically treatable for microservices. Our key assumption is that the configuration life-cycle of a microservice is split into two phases: (i) creation, which entails establishing initial connections with already available microservices, and (ii) subsequent binding/unbinding with other microservices. To illustrate the applicability of our approach, we implement an automatic optimal deployment tool and compute deployment plans for a realistic microservice architecture, modeled in the Abstract Behavioral Specification (ABS) language

Mental Distress Under Occupation: The Journal of Madeleine Blaess

Madeleine Blaess a British doctoral student studying at the Sorbonne was trapped in Paris unable to return home to York for the duration of the Occupation. In October 1940 she began a diary which she kept diligently until September 1944. This unique testimony written from the perspective of a British student at liberty to roam wartime Paris, focuses more on the civilian struggle through the everyday than on the political and military situation which Blaess, vulnerable to arrest, thinks wise to mention as little as possible. This exhaustively documented, voluminous record of the minutiae of a daily struggle with material hardship discloses a struggle with mental illness articulated and managed through the writing of the diary. That diaries can have a therapeutic purpose for writers under mental strain is axiomatic and this article examines a variety of palliative strategies both deliberate and involuntary invoked through the writing process. In so doing, the article will survey the incidence and causes of civilian mental distress on the home front over the period; an area of inquiry which, other than recent work into the psychological impact of Allied bombing of civilians, has been largely neglected in recent work foregrounding and valorising the historical importance of life-writing sources in the field of Occupation studies

AVERAGE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF COSMIC RAYS BEHIND THE INTERPLANETARY SHOCK-GLOBAL MUON DETECTOR NETWORK OBSERVATIONS

We analyze the galactic cosmic ray (GCR) density and its spatial gradient in Forbush Decreases (FDs) observed with the Global Muon Detector Network (GMDN) and neutron monitors (NMs). By superposing the GCR density and density gradient observed in FDs following 45 interplanetary shocks (IP-shocks), each associated with an identified eruption on the Sun, we infer the average spatial distribution of GCRs behind IP-shocks. We find two distinct modulations of GCR density in FDs, one in the magnetic sheath and the other in the coronal mass ejection (CME) behind the sheath. The density modulation in the sheath is dominant in the western flank of the shock, while the modulation in the CME ejecta stands out in the eastern flank. This east-west asymmetry is more prominent in GMDN data responding to similar to 60 GV GCRs than in NM data responding to similar to 10 GV GCRs, because of the softer rigidity spectrum of the modulation in the CME ejecta than in the sheath. The geocentric solar ecliptic-y component of the density gradient, G(y), shows a negative (positive) enhancement in FDs caused by the eastern (western) eruptions, while G(z) shows a negative (positive) enhancement in FDs caused by the northern (southern) eruptions. This implies that the GCR density minimum is located behind the central flank of IP-shocks and propagating radially outward from the location of the solar eruption. We also confirmed that the average Gz changes its sign above and below the heliospheric current sheet, in accord with the prediction of the drift model for the large-scale GCR transport in the heliosphere.ArticleASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL. 825(2):100 (2016)journal articl