Character and Community: Rispetto as a Virtue in the Tradition of Italian-American Lawyers

Our project is to contemplate a discrete piece of applied ethics in the American legal profession, a piece of what one might call Italian-American legal ethics. We propose to describe a moral value for which we will use the Italian word rispetto. Our understanding of rispetto is that it is a virtue, a good habit, through which the person learns, practices, teaches, and remembers his place within the family. We will argue here that the practice of this virtue will allow a modern lawyer to be in and of his or her civic and professional community without loss of dignity and a sense of self

Toward a Jurisprudence for the Law Office

Brown is the founder and foremost exponent of preventive law jurisprudence. Shaffer has dwelt in recent books and essays on the parallels between humanistic psychology and the fife of lawyers. In this dialogue they focus their somewhat diverse insights on law as living; on their agreement that lawyer-client decisions are law in any functional sense of the word; and on the premise that an explicable jurisprudence is implicit in the process of law office decision making

iPads, iBooks, Apps! What\u27s all the iFuss about?

The iVolution is here. It is iThis and iThat every way you turn. Is this just another iFad, or is it truly revolutionizing education? In a recent survey conducted by EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research on undergraduates and technology, 31% of students reported owning tablet technology a 15% increase from the previous year and 76% of students reported owning smart phones. This finding was a 14% increase from the previous year. Students also reported using smart devices in class to access material, participate in activities, look up information and photograph material as learning strategies. Thomas Jefferson University is riding the iWave and taking strides to better integrate technology at all levels of medical training; leading the forefront of the iVolution, syllabi, course materials, and textbooks are now delivered in some of our courses via iPads. In the past few years, the Jefferson Health Mentors Program has embraced the use of new technologies, including Wikis, online discussion boards, Google docs, and Skype platforms to facilitate asynchronous IPE interactions. These platforms have helped to promote IPE by easing scheduling logistics and by allowing students to collaborate electronically on team-based assignments. Over the past summer, JCIPE, the Jefferson Health Mentors Program (JHMP), faculty from Jefferson Medical College and the School of Health Professions, Academic & Instructional Support & Resources (AISR) and Jeff Information Technology (IT) assembled a working group and developed yet another innovative tool to better integrate technology into our IPE efforts – the product was a new iBook, entitled “Assessing Patient Safety.

Mesenteric lymphatic malformation mimicking an adnexal source in a teenager

Mesenteric lymphatic malformations are rare benign tumors that are usually found in children and very rarely are they found in the abdomen. We present a rare case in which a mesenteric lymphatic malformation mimics an adnexal source. This is an important contribution to obstetrics and gynecology literature to show the importance of keeping this rare diagnosis on the differential, as well as the value of multi-disciplinary care

Modeling effects of crop production, energy development and conservation-grassland loss on avian habitat

Birds are essential components of most ecosystems and provide many services valued by society. However, many populations have undergone striking declines as their habitats have been lost or degraded by human activities. Terrestrial grasslands are vital habitat for birds in the North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), but grassland conversion and fragmentation from agriculture and energy-production activities have destroyed or degraded millions of hectares. Conservation grasslands can provide alternate habitat. In the United States, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest program maintaining conservation grasslands on agricultural lands, but conservation grasslands in the PPR have declined by over 1 million ha since the program’s zenith in 2007. We used an ecosystemservices model (InVEST) parameterized for the PPR to quantify grassland-bird habitat remaining in 2014 and to assess the degradation status of the remaining grassland-bird habitat as influenced by crop and energy (i.e., oil, natural gas, and wind) production. We compared our resultant habitat-quality ratings to grassland-bird abundance data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey to confirm that ratings were related to grassland-bird abundance. Of the grassland-bird habitat remaining in 2014, about 19% was degraded by crop production that occurred within 0.1 km of grassland habitats, whereas energy production degraded an additional 16%. We further quantified the changes in availability of grasslandbird habitat under various land-cover scenarios representing incremental losses (10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) of CRP grasslands from 2014 levels. Our model identified 1 million ha (9%) of remaining grassland-bird habitat in the PPR that would be lost or degraded if all CRP conservation grasslands were returned to crop production. Grassland regions world-wide face similar challenges in maintaining avian habitat in the face of increasing commodity and energy production to sate the food and energy needs of a growing world population. Identifying ways to model the impacts of the tradeoff between food and energy production and wildlife production is an important step in creating solutions

Improving Case Plans and Interventions for Adolescents on Probation: The Implementation of the SAVRY and a Structured Case Planning Form

Even when probation officers use risk assessment tools, many of their clients’ needs remain unaddressed. As such, we examined whether the implementation of the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) and a structured case planning form resulted in better case plans as compared to prior practices (i.e., a non-validated local tool and an unstructured plan). Our sample comprised 216 adolescents on probation who were matched via propensity scores. Adolescents in the SAVRY/Structured Plan condition had significantly better case plans than those in the pre-implementation condition. Specifically, following implementation, adolescents’ high need domains were more likely to be targeted in plans. Plans also scored higher on other quality indicators (e.g., level of detail). These improvements appeared to be due primarily to the structured plan rather than the SAVRY. Overall, our findings highlight that, just as structure can improve risk assessments, so too might structure improve case plans

Market-Oriented Strategies to Improve Household Access to Food: Experience from Sub-Saharan Africa

The objectives of this report are to identify market-oriented strategies to alleviate both chronic and transitory food insecurity, and to examine the interactions between short-run targeting mechanisms and longer-run strategies designed to alleviate the chronic causes of inadequate access to food. The main premise of the report is that sustained improvements in household access to food in Sub-Saharan Africa require the development of more reliable food and input markets that (a) create incentives to adopt cost-reducing investments at various stages in the food system; and (b) offer incentives for rural households to shift from a subsistence-oriented pattern of production and consumption to more productive systems based on specialization and gains from exchange. Sustained productivity growth in most parts of the world has typically entailed some form of structural transformation, which, in the historical development processes of other regions, has been a prerequisite for broad-based and sustained growth in productivity, real incomes and purchasing power throughout society. Structural transformation involves a movement away from subsistence-oriented, household-level production toward an integrated economy based on specialization and exchange. But specialization makes households dependent on the performance of exchange systems. The ability to capture the productivity gains from new technology and specialization thus depends on reducing the risks and uncertainty of market-based exchange, thereby facilitating greater participation in the types of specialized production and consumption patterns involved in the process of structural transformation. Section 3 presents empirical evidence from research conducted in Africa to draw conclusions about how the design of agricultural policies and transfer programs have affected household access to food in both rural and urban areas. Based on the foregoing, section 4 presents the following guidelines for the design of strategies to promote access to food in Africa: (1.) Focus on achieving productivity gains in the food system. (2.) Focus on how food and income transfer programs can be designed to promote the long-run development of the food system- the basis for providing food for most people over the long run in addition to providing food to people in the short run. (3.) Focus on reducing consumer food costs by expanding the range of products available to produce and consume. (4.) Focus on the cost and reliability of food supplies to rural areas as a component of non-farm, livestock, and other income diversification strategies designed to promote access to food over the longer run. (5.) Focus on developing local analytical expertise to help guide food system development.Food Security and Poverty, Downloads July 2008-June 2009: 12,