Sustaining Lawyers

Many lawyers are drawn to a career in social justice, in part, to help others and, in part, to fulfill their own path to wellness. Advocacy that sustains personal well-being, however, also poses considerable obstacles to well-being. Some of these obstacles are inherent to social justice work but some are embedded within organizational culture. These cultural norms impair the health of advocates, harm the communities with whom they work, and portend far-reaching consequences for the future of progressive struggles for freedom. Drawing on the author\u27s personal experience, this Essay identifies three cultural norms, described as pathologies, that are rarely discussed in social justice circles. Qualitative studies and accounts by social justice advocates suggest that these pathologies discount attention to well-being in the field, compromise the sustainability of organizations working for social change, divert attention from the complexities of the issues that social justice movements seek to address, and narrow the perspectives within social justice organizations for how best to approach the problems they seek to solve. This Essay argues that sustainable advocacy requires a considerable cultural reorientation that treats collective well-being as an institutional concern

Development of an improved mirror facet for space applications

A fabrication technique was successfully developed for a metallic aluminum honeycomb, high-accuracy, lightweight, and long-life solar concentrator (mirror) for Advanced Solar Dynamic Space Power Systems. The program scope was limited to the development, fabrication, evaluation, and delivery of a solar concentrator facet (petal) that was sized for a 2-meter deployable solar concentrator. A surface accuracy of 1.0 mrad was achieved. The development incorporated tooling design, material selection, facet forming, adhesive selection, testing, and analysis. Techniques for applying levelizing, reflective, and protective optical coatings were also developed

Penumbras, Privacy, and the Death of Morals-Based Legislation: Comparing U.S. Constitutional Law with the Inherent Right of Privacy in Islamic Jurisprudence

In an effort to separate the Islamic regulatory scheme with respect to the criminalization of consensual sexual conduct from the caricature espoused by many Western thinkers, this Note provides a comparative analysis of the criminalization of private consensual sexual conduct in Islamic law and U.S. constitutional jurisprudence on the right of privacy. Part I provides a brief background of Islamic and U.S. criminal regulations on consensual sex and outlines the evolution of constitutional privacy jurisprudence in the U.S. Supreme Court. Part II first examines the evidentiary and procedural requirements pertaining to the criminalization of consensual sexual intercourse in Islamic law, explores the consequences of transgressing these evidentiary requirements, and analyzes the theological and privacy-related constraints on initiating suits for engaging in such private conduct. Part II then applies these regulations to the recent case of Amina Lawal in northern Nigeria, and analyzes Islamic regulations governing sexual activity not amounting to intercourse. Finally, Part II examines an alternative reading of the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s current analysis of privacy as articulated in Lawrence v. Texas. Finally, Part III argues that Islamic evidence law and consequences of evidentiary transgression act as a de jure restriction to prosecuting individuals who engage in private consensual sex. Combined with theological and privacy-related regulations, which act as deterrents to such prosecutions, these evidentiary requirements create a zone of privacy that protects private consensual sex from State regulation. Part III then argues that the U.S. Supreme Court has subtly shifted away from recognizing privacy-related rights towards asserting a stance against all morals legislation, and concludes that it is the Court\u27s anti-morals legislation rhetoric, and not the constitutional right of privacy, that determines the holding in Lawrence. Moreover, Part III draws a distinction between the Islamic and American approaches to privacy jurisprudence by examining the significantly distinct consequences of the Islamic guarantee of privacy and the American criticism of morals-based legislation. Exploring the ramifications of the Court\u27s anti-morals legislation posture, Part III concludes that, despite the caricature embraced by the Western world, the real right of privacy resides in Islamic jurisprudence

Decarceration\u27s Inside Partners

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important, sometimes extraordinary, strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policymakers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed the legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls that were once considered impossible. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of decarceration. Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside the walls, this Article points the way to an alternative approach to decarceration: thinking alongside people banished from the polity. Criminal law scholars routinely recount their stories but rarely do we consider people held in prison as thought leaders, let alone equal partners, to progress toward a noncarceral state. Despite conducting extensive research on prisons and those held inside them, legal scholars know—and wonder—tremendously little about the decarceral work, decarceral ideas and “think tanks” that surge behind bars. The absence of our curiosity reflects and reproduces the ideological work of carceral punishment. This Article demonstrates that an alternative vision of decarceration that resists this ideological work opens up more promising paths to create the legal and social change that our current moment demands. It calls on law scholars and all those committed to large-scale decarceration to find ways to discover, ignite and emancipate more decarceral visions on the inside. And it argues that, unless we make this challenging shift, we suppress innovative, effective and more conceivable possibilities to radically transform our carceral state

VR-Viz: Visualization system for data visualization in VR

Recent years have seen fast growth in big data. The datasets are not only exponentially larger, but also more complex (multi-dimensional). Because of the scale and complexity of these datasets, their visualization poses significant challenges. As a solution, this thesis explores how virtual reality (VR) and 3D visualization can be used to visualize complex and large datasets, and proposes a visualization system for designing visualizations in VR. First, this thesis examines concepts of information visualization, VR, and 3D information visualization. Next, it explores visualization systems for 3D visualization and three examples of information visualization in VR and discusses their successes and short comings. Finally, in order to make VR information visualization accessible to a wider audience, a tool is introduced to simplify the process of designing information visualization in VR for beginners. The tool can also be used as a quick prototyping tool by more advanced users

EVALUATING DISTRIBUTED WORD REPRESENTATIONS FOR PREDICTING MISSING WORDS IN SENTENCES

In recent years, the distributed representation of words in vector space or word embeddings have become very popular as they have shown significant improvements in many statistical natural language processing (NLP) tasks as compared to traditional language models like Ngram. In this thesis, we explored various state-of-the-art methods like Latent Semantic Analysis, word2vec, and GloVe to learn the distributed representation of words. Their performance was compared based on the accuracy achieved when tasked with selecting the right missing word in the sentence, given five possible options. For this NLP task we trained each of these methods using a training corpus that contained texts of around five hundred 19th century novels from Project Gutenberg. The test set contained 1040 sentences where one word was missing from each sentence. The training and test set were part of the Microsoft Research Sentence Completion Challenge data set. In this work, word vectors obtained by training skip-gram model of word2vec showed the highest accuracy in finding the missing word in the sentences among all the methods tested. We also found that tuning hyperparameters of the models helped in capturing greater syntactic and semantic regularities among words

Decarceration\u27s Inside Partners

This Article examines a hidden phenomenon in criminal punishment. People in prison, during their incarceration, have made important—and sometimes extraordinary—strides toward reducing prison populations. In fact, stakeholders in many corners, from policy makers to researchers to abolitionists, have harnessed legal and conceptual strategies generated inside the walls to pursue decarceral strategies outside the walls. Despite this outside use of inside moves, legal scholarship has directed little attention to theorizing the potential of looking to people on the inside as partners in the long-term project of meaningfully reducing prison populations, or “decarceration.” Building on the change-making agency and revolutionary ideation inside the walls, this Article points the way to an alternative approach to decarceration: thinking alongside people banished from the polity. Criminal law scholars routinely recount their stories, but rarely do we consider people held in prison to be thought leaders, let alone equal partners, in progressing toward a decarceral future. Despite conducting extensive research on prisons and those held inside them, legal scholars know—and wonder—tremendously little about the decarceral work, decarceral ideas, and “think tanks” that surge behind bars. The absence of our curiosity reflects and reproduces the ideological work of carceral punishment. This Article demonstrates that an alternative vision of decarceration that resists this ideological work opens up more promising paths to create the legal and social change that our current moment demands. It calls on legal scholars and all those committed to large-scale decarceration to find ways to discover, ignite, and emancipate more decarceral visions on the inside. And it argues that, unless we make this challenging shift, we suppress innovative, effective, and more conceivable possibilities to radically transform our carceral state

The clinical spectrum and pathophysiology of neuropathic tremor

This thesis describes a series of studies involving patients with neuropathies and healthy controls. In the studies of disease, two groups were recruited: patients with inflammatory neuropathies and those with hereditary neuropathies. Each group was separated into those with and those without tremor and compared with healthy controls. Clinical assessments and neurophysiological tests were employed to correlate cerebellar function with tremor. The final study of healthy participants investigated the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) on the cerebellum during finger tapping. 1) Tremor was most common in IgM paraproteinaemic neuropathies, also occurring in 58% of those with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy and 56% of those with multifocal motor neuropathy with conduction block (MMNCB). Tremor was generally refractory to treatment and contributed to disability in some patients. Although tremor severity correlated with F wave latency, it was insufficient to distinguish those with, from those without tremor. 2) Impaired eyeblink classical conditioning and paired associative stimulation in patients with inflammatory neuropathy and tremor differentiated them from neuropathy patients without tremor and healthy controls, strongly suggesting impairment of cerebellar function is linked to the production of tremor in these patients. 3) The prevalence study in CMT1A patients revealed tremor in 21% and in 42% of those it caused impairment. Eyeblink conditioning, visuomotor adaptation and electro-oculography were no different between tremulous and non-tremulous patients and healthy controls. This argues against a prominent role for an abnormal cerebellum in tremor generation in the patients studied. Rather, they suggest an enhancement of the central neurogenic component of physiological tremor as a possible mechanism. 4) TDCS of the lateral cerebellum and its effect on paced finger tapping was examined. There was no effect on accuracy or variability of the intertap interval, providing no support for a direct role of the cerebellum in event based timing

Risk Factors Predicting Loss to Follow-Up, Medication Noncompliance, and Poor Visual Outcomes Among Patients With Infectious Keratitis at a Public County Hospital

PurposeInfectious keratitis is a vision-threatening condition requiring close follow-up and disciplined eye drop administration to achieve resolution. Although patients presenting to county hospitals often have more severe presentations, there is a paucity of risk and outcomes data in this setting. This study investigates risk factors predicting loss to follow-up (LTFU), medication noncompliance, and poor outcomes for infectious keratitis in the county hospital setting.MethodsThis was a retrospective case-control study at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Inclusion criteria were patients who had corneal cultures for suspected infectious bacterial or fungal keratitis between 2010 and 2021. Exclusion criteria were patients with viral keratitis only. Multivariable logistic regression was used to analyze the relationship of social and medical risk factors with LTFU, medication noncompliance, worsened visual acuity (VA), and delayed resolution time.ResultsOf 174 patients with infectious keratitis in this analysis, 69 (40.0%) had LTFU. Unemployment was associated with increased risk of LTFU (odds ratio 2.58, P = 0.049) and worse final VA ( P = 0.001). Noncompliance trended toward an association with homelessness (odds ratio 3.48, P = 0.095). Increasing age correlated with longer resolution time, with each 1-year increase associated with delayed resolution by 0.549 days ( P = 0.042).ConclusionsPatients experiencing unemployment, homelessness, or increased age demonstrate higher risk for treatment barriers including loss to follow-up and medication noncompliance, resulting in worse VA and delayed time to resolution. These risk factors should be considered when determining the need for more deliberate follow-up measures in patients with infectious keratitis

A Pilot Study of Botulinum Toxin for Jerky, Position-Specific, Upper Limb Action Tremor

Background: We aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of botulinum toxin (BT) injections for jerky action tremor of the upper limb. Methods: We performed an uncontrolled, prospective study of electromyography (EMG)-guided BT injections for jerky, position-specific, upper limb action tremor. The primary outcome was clinical global impression at 3–6 weeks after baseline. Results: Eight patients with jerky, position-specific action tremor involving the upper limb were consecutively recruited. After a median follow-up of 4.4 weeks (interquartile range [IQR] 3.6–6 weeks), four of them rated themselves as “improved” and two as “much improved.” Five of these six subjects reported improvements in specific activities of daily living (bringing liquids to mouth, feeding, shaving, and dressing). Upper limb subscore of the Fahn–Tolosa–Marin Tremor Rating Scale (FTM) significantly decreased from 4.5 (4–6) to 3 (2–5) (p = 0.01). Discussion: This pilot, prospective cohort study suggests that EMG-guided BT injections may improve jerky, position-specific, upper limb action tremor. Placebo-controlled studies evaluating larger samples of patients are warranted to confirm these findings