Preparing Ethical Lawyers: A Prescription and a Practical Proposal

This report proposes a method of making progress in developing the ethics project in legal education. It presents the findings of research into how ethics is currently taught in a number of different jurisdictions and then considers ways in which an effective community of practice might be developed. This involves establishing effective methods of dissemination and collaboration amongst all those interested in developing ethical legal professionals. The report explores ways of using Web 2.0 technologies to achieve these goals. Finally, it presents a new website designed to enable educators, practitioners, regulators and judges to contribute to a developing resource bank and to engage in collaboration and discussion in improving our efforts at developing ethical lawyers

Ethical Practice and Clinical Legal Education

This article is designed to explore a variety of ways in which clinical methods can achieve the goals of educators and the professions in the preparation of student lawyers. In particular I intend to show how clinical methods assist in the development of: • a deeper understanding of the law, and the law in context;• general transferable skills;• legal professional skills;• a sound values basis for ethical practice.In addition, I hope to show that there are ways of using clinical methods which may also assist us to meet other social concerns such as the extension of legal services and individual knowledge of rights, throughout the community.

Semantic Integration Portal

The Semantic Integration Portal is a demonstration of the potential capabilities of Semantic Web applications in a knowledge-rich context. Source data is taken from different online terrorist incident aggregators and marked up according to ontologies specific to those domains. Unlike other semantic web techniques, which scrape the internet for raw data and then mark-up against a standard ontology, the approach here is to allow each data source to have its own domain-specific ontology. This allows the data producers the opportunity to mark up their data in their own way, producing RDF data according to their own ontologies without the need to conform to a standard. A variety of semantic integration techniques can then be applied to these ontologies, both automatic and interactive, allowing data from both sets to be viewed in a suitable application, in this case the mspace browser. Future iterations of the semantic integration portal aim to introduce more automated ontology-mapping techniques, aligning data from a variety of diverse sources with less need for human intervention

Personal, Family, and Peer Correlates of General and Sport Physical Activity among African American, Latino, and White Girls

This study examined associations between personal, family, and peer variables on objectively measured physical activity (PA), and sports participation, of African American, Latino, and white girls. Specific variables included barriers efficacy, parent PA, parent support of PA, the home exercise environment, friends’ PA, and friends’ support of PA. The sample comprised 372 girls (mean age = 12.03 years; SD = 1.81; n = 128 African American, n = 120 Latino, and n = 124 white). Data were analyzed using multiple-sample structural equation models (by ethnicity), controlling for age, household income, body mass index, and physical development. Girls’ moderate to vigorous PA (MVPA) was positively related to friends’ support for all groups, and to parent PA only for African American girls. For sports, greater parental support related to more participation across ethnic/racial groups, whereas friends’ support was important only for African American girls. Age and physical development were negatively related to MVPA, and higher income was associated with greater sports participation. Numerous significant correlations emerged between the independent variables, with some differences across racial/ethnic groups. Findings highlight the role of parent and friends’ support for both MVPA and sports participation of early adolescent girls, as well as the importance of determining PA correlates among different ethnic/racial subgroups

Reliability of pedometer data in samples of youth and older women

BACKGROUND: Pedometers offer researchers a convenient and inexpensive tool for objective measurement of physical activity. However, many unanswered questions remain about expected values for steps/day for different populations, sources of variation in the data, and reliability of pedometer measurements. METHODS: This study documented and compared mean steps/day, demographic predictors of steps/day, and pedometer reliability in two longitudinal investigations, one involving a population-based youth sample (N = 367) and the other targeting postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes (N = 270). Individuals were asked to wear pedometers (Yamax model SW-701) at the waist for 7 days and record steps/per day. They were also asked to record daily physical activities, duration, and perceived intensity (1 = low/light, 2 = medium/moderate, 3 = high/hard) for the same 7 days. In addition, survey data regarding usual physical activity was collected. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) were conducted to determine whether there were significant differences in pedometer results according to sex, age, and body mass index. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to examine potential differences in results among differing numbers of days. RESULTS: Mean steps/day were 10,365 steps in the youth sample and 4,352 steps in the sample of older women. Girls took significantly fewer steps than boys, older women took fewer steps than younger women, and both youth and women with greater body mass took fewer steps than those with lower body mass. Reliability coefficients of .80 or greater were obtained with 5 or more days of data collection in the youth sample and 2 or more days in the sample of older women. Youth and older women were more active on weekdays than on weekends. Low but significant associations were found between step counts and self-report measures of physical activity in both samples. CONCLUSION: Mean steps/day and reliability estimates in the two samples were generally consistent with previously published studies of pedometer use. Based on these two studies, unsealed pedometers were found to offer an easy-to-use and cost-effective objective measure of physical activity in both youth and older adult populations