Central Falls Welcome Sign Project

Our inspiration for this modern style welcome sign came mostly from the welcome sign for Vancouver, Canada. This approach would give Central Falls a look of it’s own among the more traditional syle signs of surrounding towns. The double paneled structure design of this option would make for the option of having a bilingual sign, showcasing the multi-cultural heritage of the City

Relationship Among Neurogenic Orthostatic Hypotension, Cerebral Hemodynamics, and Cognitive Functioning

Neurogenic orthostatic hypotension (NOH) is characterized by a drop in systolic blood pressure ≥20mmHg or diastolic blood pressure ≥10mmHg within three minutes of upright posture. A large drop in blood pressure can trigger cerebral hypoperfusion, which has been linked to deficits in cognitive function. The current thesis aimed to measure cerebral hemodynamics and cognitive function in 20 NOH patients and 20 controls in the supine and head-up tilt (HUT) positions. Information processing speed (IPS) was assessed using the Symbol-Digit Modalities Test and attention was measured using the Stroop Test. NOH patients had significantly slower IPS in both the supine(

The Criminogenic Effects of Damaging Criminal Law’s Moral Credibility

The criminal justice system’s reputation with the community can have a significant effect on the extent to which people are willing to comply with its demands and internalize its norms. In the context of criminal law, the empirical studies suggest that ordinary people expect the criminal justice system to do justice and avoid injustice, as they perceive it – what has been called “empirical desert” to distinguish it from the “deontological desert” of moral philosophers. The empirical studies and many real-world natural experiments suggest that a criminal justice system that regularly deviates from empirical desert loses moral credibility and thereby loses crime-control effectiveness. These crime-control benefits, together with an analysis of the sometimes-disqualifying weaknesses of alternative distributive principles such as general deterrence and incapacitation of the dangerous, suggest that maximizing the criminal law’s moral credibility is the best distributive principle available. Critics have offered a range of objections to this proposal, which are here considered and answered

Individualizing Criminal Law’s Justice Judgments: Shortcomings in the Doctrines of Culpability, Mitigation, and Excuse

In judging an offender’s culpability, mitigation, or excuse, there seems to be general agreement that it is appropriate for the criminal law to take into account such things as the offender’s youthfulness or her significantly low IQ. There is even support for taking account of their distorted perceptions and reasoning induced by traumatic experiences, as in battered spouse syndrome. On the other hand, there seems to be equally strong opposition to taking account of things such as racism or homophobia that played a role in bringing about the offense. In between these two clear points, however, exists a large collection of individual offender characteristics and circumstances for which there is lack of clarity as to whether the criminal law should take them into account. Should our assessment of an offender’s criminal liability be adjusted for their cultural background? Their religious beliefs? Their past life experiences? The pedophilic tendencies they have always had but usually suppressed? The question of how much to individualize the criminal liability judgment is not peripheral or unusual but rather common in a wide range of formal criminal law doctrines including, for example, the culpability requirements of recklessness and negligence, the mitigation of provocation and its more modern form of extreme emotional disturbance, and the excuse defenses of mistake as to a justification, duress, and involuntary intoxication. indeed, it turns out that the problem of individualizing factors is present, if often obscured, in all criminal law doctrines of culpability, mitigation, and excuse. The Article reviews the appeal of criminal law adhering to a purely objective standard, where the problem of the individualizing factors is sought to be avoided altogether. But the resulting stream of injustices has forced most jurisdictions to adopt a partially individualized standard in some cases involving some doctrines. But this leaves the jurisdiction’s criminal law in an awkward and unstable state. Without a guiding principle for determining which individualizing factors are to be taken into account under what circumstances, the law is inevitably unprincipled and internally inconsistent. And without guidance, different decision-makers inevitably come to different conclusions in similar cases. The Article proposes a solution to the individualizing factors puzzle and a statutory codification that would provide guidance in the adjudication of the many cases in which the issue arises

“Part of the University Lexicon”: Marketing and Ontario Universities, 1990-2013

The authors examine the emergence and consolidation of marketing practices at five Ontario universities, beginning in the early 1990s, with a focus on student recruitment and the articulation and promotion of institutional identity. The five schools represent a cross-section of the university landscape in Ontario. Interviews were conducted with personnel performing communications and marketing-related functions. Institutional records, when available, were consulted, as were internal publications, trade publications, and print media accounts. The authors situate their treatment of this topic within the field of Critical Management Studies (Alvesson & Willmott, 2003) and related works dealing specifically with marketing. Most notably, they draw on Skålén, Fellesson, and Fougère (2008), who marshal critical theory and Foucault’s works on discourse and knowledge/power to demonstrate how marketing functions as a form of disciplinary power. Les auteurs examinent l’émergence et la consolidation du marketing à partir du début des années 1990 dans cinq universités ontariennes, avec pour objectifs les processus de recrutement d’étudiants et l’articulation et la promotion de l’identité institutionnelle. Les cinq institutions représentent un éventail d’approches contrastantes en Ontario. Pour cet article, les auteurs ont mené des entrevues avec les responsables de la communication et du marketing oeuvrant au sein de ces universités. En outre, ils ont consulté des documents institutionnels quand ceux-ci étaient disponibles, ainsi que des publications internes et commerciales et des comptes rendus provenant de la presse écrite. Les auteurs explorent ce sujet en ayant recours aux études critiques en management et à des écrits en marketing pertinents. Plus particulièrement, les auteurs s’appuient sur Skålén, Fellesson et Fougère pour leur théorie critique et sur Foucault pour ses écrits sur le discours et le pouvoir-savoir afin de démontrer comment le marketing fonctionne en tant que pouvoir disciplinaire

Indoctrination and Social Influence as a Defense to Crime: Are We Responsible for Who We Are?

A patriotic POW is brainwashed by his North Korean captors into refusing repatriation and undertaking treasonous anti-American propaganda for the communist regime. Despite the general abhorrence of treason in time of war, the American public opposes criminal liability for such indoctrinated soldiers, yet existing criminal law provides no defense or mitigation because, at the time of the offense, the indoctrinated offender suffers no cognitive or control dysfunction, no mental or emotional impairment, and no external or internal compulsion. Rather, he was acting purely in the exercise of free of will, albeit based upon beliefs and values that he had not previously held.Retributivists committed to blameworthiness proportionality might support the community’s view of reduced blameworthiness, perhaps on some version of the argument that the offense was not committed by the offender’s authentic self. And a crime-control utilitarian might support revision of the criminal law to recognize a defense because such a serious conflict between community views and criminal law reduces the law’s moral credibility with the community and thereby undermines its ability to gain deference, compliance, assistance, and the internalization of the criminal law’s norms.On the other hand, to recognize a defense or significant mitigation for indoctrination-induced offenses would produce a tectonic shift in criminal law foundations. The indoctrination dynamic at work in the brainwashed POW case is not limited to such unique circumstances but rather is a common occurrence in the modern world, where governments, religions, political groups, and a host of other organizations, and indeed individuals, consciously manipulate others toward criminal conduct through a variety of indoctrinating mechanisms. Are people no longer to be held responsible for who they are? Is the criminal law now to investigate how an offender came to have any beliefs and values that contributed to the offense conduct?We argue that a close analysis of why some indoctrination cases are seen as blameless while others not suggests an articulable analytic framework based upon five key questions. We use a wide variety of real-world indoctrination cases to illustrate the operation of this framework and propose a specific statutory defense formulation that embodies it

Conceptualising and Measuring Mental Fitness: A Delphi Study

Despite the increased use of the term mental fitness in the popular and psychological literature, there is little consensus in relation to theory, definition and measurement. The concept of mental fitness could be used to parsimoniously engage, educate and promote proactive, positive mental health activities to the wider community, without stigma and within a language that is easily understood.  This Delphi study engaged an international expert panel (n = 25) to evaluate a definition and four guiding principles of mental fitness. Expert consensus was achieved supporting the definition and four guiding principles with suggested modifications.The final definition of mental fitness is “the modifiable capacity to utilise resources and skills to flexibly adapt to challenges or advantages, enabling thriving”. The final four guiding principles are (1) fitness is a positive term without connotations of illness implied by mental health or mental illness; (b) mental fitness could be understood by the wider community in a similar way to physical fitness; (c) mental fitness is measurable; and (d) mental fitness can be improved, in a similar way to physical fitness.  The panel also offered valuable recommendations for future research and practice.

Robustly detecting differential expression in RNA sequencing data using observation weights

A popular approach for comparing gene expression levels between (replicated) conditions of RNA sequencing data relies on counting reads that map to features of interest. Within such count-based methods, many flexible and advanced statistical approaches now exist and offer the ability to adjust for covariates (e.g. batch effects). Often, these methods include some sort of ‘sharing of information' across features to improve inferences in small samples. It is important to achieve an appropriate tradeoff between statistical power and protection against outliers. Here, we study the robustness of existing approaches for count-based differential expression analysis and propose a new strategy based on observation weights that can be used within existing frameworks. The results suggest that outliers can have a global effect on differential analyses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approach with real data and simulated data that reflects properties of real datasets (e.g. dispersion-mean trend) and develop an extensible framework for comprehensive testing of current and future methods. In addition, we explore the origin of such outliers, in some cases highlighting additional biological or technical factors within the experiment. Further details can be downloaded from the project website: http://imlspenticton.uzh.ch/robinson_lab/edgeR_robus