Apprehensions and Possible Misunderstandings

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Nebraska Intellectual Freedom Manual

Much has changed in libraries and society since the publication of the 2004 revision of the Nebraska Library Association Intellectual Freedom Manual. The consensus of the current members of the Nebraska Library Association round table on Intellectual Freedom (NLA IF) was not to just revise the former manual, but to create an entirely new edition. In doing so, the authors have addressed a number of new issues. The intention was to keep it relatively brief but still useful. Readers should be able to read sections independent of one another for quick reference on topics of interest. For readers of the electronic version, there are many hyperlinks included. Though this is a new edition, the introduction to the 2004 revision still applies: As librarians, we are all concerned with the concept of intellectual freedom. It is our professional obligation to provide varied forms of information that meet the varied interests and needs of our community members. It is also our professional obligation to oppose the efforts of those who would attempt to monitor, challenge, change, or remove the materials of choice in our society. This handbook provides access to relevant resources for all librarians who may face a censorship challenge. Included are interpretations from the Library Bill of Rights, policies and procedures, examples of useful forms, and a list of library related organizations that may be contacted for further information. For additional information, readers are encouraged to consult the latest edition of the American Library Association (ALA) Intellectual Freedom Manual, as well as manuals from other U.S. states\u27 library organizations. A companion to the ALA manual is available online at http://www.ifmanual.org/ . For current information about intellectual freedom issues in Nebraska, visit the NLA IF website.https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1044/thumbnail.jp

Nebraska Intellectual Freedom Manual

Much has changed in libraries and society since the publication of the 2004 revision of the Nebraska Library Association Intellectual Freedom Manual. The consensus of the current members of the Nebraska Library Association round table on Intellectual Freedom (NLA IF) was not to just revise the former manual, but to create an entirely new edition. In doing so, the authors have addressed a number of new issues. The intention was to keep it relatively brief but still useful. Readers should be able to read sections independent of one another for quick reference on topics of interest. For readers of the electronic version, there are many hyperlinks included. Though this is a new edition, the introduction to the 2004 revision still applies: As librarians, we are all concerned with the concept of intellectual freedom. It is our professional obligation to provide varied forms of information that meet the varied interests and needs of our community members. It is also our professional obligation to oppose the efforts of those who would attempt to monitor, challenge, change, or remove the materials of choice in our society. This handbook provides access to relevant resources for all librarians who may face a censorship challenge. Included are interpretations from the Library Bill of Rights, policies and procedures, examples of useful forms, and a list of library related organizations that may be contacted for further information. For additional information, readers are encouraged to consult the latest edition of the American Library Association (ALA) Intellectual Freedom Manual, as well as manuals from other U.S. states\u27 library organizations. A companion to the ALA manual is available online at http://www.ifmanual.org/ . For current information about intellectual freedom issues in Nebraska, visit the NLA IF website.https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1044/thumbnail.jp

Report to ALA GODORT - Digitization of Government Information

Report submitted by an American Libraries Association (ALA) Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) ad hoc committee charged to "create a report advising GODORT on the best practices and procedures in the digital library field and advise GODORT on the most effective organizational structure for support of the government information community in pursuing digital library initiatives" (p. 2)

Airborne Microalgae: Insights, Opportunities and Challenges

Airborne dispersal of microalgae has largely been a blind spot in environmental biological studies because of their low concentration in the atmosphere and the technical limitations in investigating microalgae from air samples. Recent studies show that airborne microalgae can survive air transportation and interact with the environment and possibly influence their deposition rates. This minireview presents a summary of these studies and traces the possible route, step-by-step, from established ecosystems to new habitats through air transportation over a variety of geographic scales. Emission, transportation, deposition and adaptation to atmospheric stress are discussed, as well as the consequences of their dispersal on health and environment, and the state-of-the-art techniques to detect and model airborne microalgae dispersal. More detailed studies on microalgae atmospheric-cycle, including for instance ice nucleation activity and transport simulations, are crucial for improving our understanding of microalgae ecology, identifying their interactions with the environment and preventing unwanted sanitary events or invasions

Unfamiliar face matching with photographs of infants and children

Background Infants and children travel using passports that are typically valid for five years (e.g. Canada, United Kingdom, United States and Australia). These individuals may also need to be identified using images taken from videos and other sources in forensic situations including child exploitation cases. However, few researchers have examined how useful these images are as a means of identification. Methods We investigated the effectiveness of photo identification for infants and children using a face matching task, where participants were presented with two images simultaneously and asked whether the images depicted the same child or two different children. In Experiment 1, both images showed an infant (<1 year old), whereas in Experiment 2, one image again showed an infant but the second image of the child was taken at 4–5 years of age. In Experiments 3a and 3b, we asked participants to complete shortened versions of both these tasks (selecting the most difficult trials) as well as the short version Glasgow face matching test. Finally, in Experiment 4, we investigated whether information regarding the sex of the infants and children could be accurately perceived from the images. Results In Experiment 1, we found low levels of performance (72% accuracy) for matching two infant photos. For Experiment 2, performance was lower still (64% accuracy) when infant and child images were presented, given the significant changes in appearance that occur over the first five years of life. In Experiments 3a and 3b, when participants completed both these tasks, as well as a measure of adult face matching ability, we found lowest performance for the two infant tasks, along with mixed evidence of within-person correlations in sensitivities across all three tasks. The use of only same-sex pairings on mismatch trials, in comparison with random pairings, had little effect on performance measures. In Experiment 4, accuracy when judging the sex of infants was at chance levels for one image set and above chance (although still low) for the other set. As expected, participants were able to judge the sex of children (aged 4–5) from their faces. Discussion Identity matching with infant and child images resulted in low levels of performance, which were significantly worse than for an adult face matching task. Taken together, the results of the experiments presented here provide evidence that child facial photographs are ineffective for use in real-world identification

Bacterial competition and quorum-sensing signalling shapes the eco-evolutionary outcomes of model in vitro phage therapy

The rapid rise of antibiotic resistance has renewed interest in phage therapy - the use of bacteria-specific viruses (phages) to treat bacterial infections. Even though phages are often pathogen-specific, little is known about the efficiency and eco-evolutionary outcomes of phage therapy in polymicrobial infections. We studied this experimentally by exposing both quorum-sensing (QS) signalling PAO1 and QS-deficient lasR Pseudomonas aeruginosa genotypes (differing in their ability to signal intraspecifically) to lytic PT7 phage in the presence and absence of two bacterial competitors: Staphylococcus aureus and Stenotrophomonas maltophilia-two bacteria commonly associated with P. aeruginosa in polymicrobial cystic fibrosis lung infections. Both the P. aeruginosa genotype and the presence of competitors had profound effects on bacteria and phage densities and bacterial resistance evolution. In general, competition reduced the P. aeruginosa frequencies leading to a lower rate of resistance evolution. This effect was clearer with QS signalling PAO1 strain due to lower bacteria and phage densities and relatively larger pleiotropic growth cost imposed by both phages and competitors. Unexpectedly, phage selection decreased the total bacterial densities in the QS-deficient lasR pathogen communities, while an increase was observed in the QS signalling PAO1 pathogen communities. Together these results suggest that bacterial competition can shape the eco-evolutionary outcomes of phage therapy

Illness Mapping: A time and cost effective method to estimate healthcare data needed to establish community-based health insurance

Background: Most healthcare spending in developing countries is private out-of-pocket. One explanation for low penetration of health insurance is that poorer individuals doubt their ability to enforce insurance contracts. Community-based health insurance schemes (CBHI) are a solution, but launching CBHI requires obtaining accurate local data on morbidity, healthcare utilization and other details to inform package design and pricing. We developed the "Illness Mapping" method (IM) for data collection (faster and cheaper than household surveys). Methods. IM is a modification of two non-interactive consensus group methods (Delphi and Nominal Group Technique) to operate as interactive methods. We elicited estimates from "Experts" in the target community on morbidity and healthcare utilization. Interaction between facilitator and experts became essential to bridge literacy constraints and to reach consensus.The study was conducted in Gaya District, Bihar (India) during April-June 2010. The intervention included the IM and a household survey (HHS). IM included 18 women's and 17 men's groups. The HHS was conducted in 50 villages with1,000 randomly selected households (6,656 individuals). Results: We found good agreement between the two methods on overall prevalence of illness (IM: 25.9% ±3.6; HHS: 31.4%) and on prevalence of acute (IM: 76.9%; HHS: 69.2%) and chronic illnesses (IM: 20.1%; HHS: 16.6%). We also found good agreement on incidence of deliveries (IM: 3.9% ±0.4; HHS: 3.9%), and on hospital deliveries (IM: 61.0%. ± 5.4; HHS: 51.4%). For hospitalizations, we obtained a lower estimate from the IM (1.1%) than from the HHS (2.6%). The IM required less time and less person-power than a household survey, which translate into reduced costs. Conclusions: We have shown that our Illness Mapping method can be carried out at lower financial and human cost for sourcing essential local data, at acceptably accurate levels. In view of the good fit of results obtained, we assume that the method could work elsewhere as well

Reproducible Research in Vadose Zone Sciences

A significant portion of present-day soil and Earth science research is computational, involving complex data analysis pipelines, advanced mathematical and statistical models, and sophisticated computer codes. Opportunities for scientific progress are greatly diminished if reproducing and building on published research is difficult or impossible due to the complexity of these computational systems. Vadose Zone Journal (VZJ) is launching a Reproducible Research (RR) program in which code and data underlying a research article will be published alongside the article, thereby enabling readers to analyze data in a manner similar to that presented in the article and build on results in future research and applications. In this article, we discuss reproducible research, its background and use across other disciplines, its value to the scientific community, and its implementation in VZJ

Multi-Collision Resistance: A Paradigm for Keyless Hash Functions

We introduce a new notion of multi-collision resistance for keyless hash functions. This is a natural relaxation of collision resistance where it is hard to find multiple inputs with the same hash in the following sense. The number of colliding inputs that a polynomial-time non-uniform adversary can find is not much larger than its advice. We discuss potential candidates for this notion and study its applications. Assuming the existence of such hash functions, we resolve the long-standing question of the round complexity of zero knowledge protocols --- we construct a 3-message zero knowledge argument against arbitrary polynomial-size non-uniform adversaries. We also improve the round complexity in several other central applications, including a 3-message succinct argument of knowledge for NP, a 4-message zero-knowledge proof, and a 5-message public-coin zero-knowledge argument. Our techniques can also be applied in the keyed setting, where we match the round complexity of known protocols while relaxing the underlying assumption from collision-resistance to keyed multi-collision resistance. The core technical contribution behind our results is a domain extension transformation from multi-collision-resistant hash functions for a fixed input length to ones with an arbitrary input length and a local opening property. The transformation is based on a combination of classical domain extension techniques, together with new information-theoretic tools. In particular, we define and construct a new variant of list-recoverable codes, which may be of independent interest