JLFT 007 James T Strickland 11-18-1996

Acc #: 328; JLFT 007 In this recording, Judge James T. Strickland is interviewed by John Beebee to discuss John LeFlore and the Civil Rights Movement in Mobile, Alabama. The interview begins with Judge Strickland discussing how he became a judge in 1965, and how his career advanced from there. He describes John LeFlore’s leadership qualities and his work with the Non-Partisan Voters League, and contrasts him with other civil rights leaders. Judge Strickland offers his own reflections on the legacy of John LeFlore, and the things that people should remember about him

High-Performance Transactional Event Processing

Abstract. This paper presents a transactional framework for low-latency, high-performance, concurrent event processing in Java. At the heart of our framework lies Reflexes, a restricted programming model for highly responsive systems. A Reflex task is an event processor that can run at a higher priority and preempt any other Java thread, including the garbage collector. It runs in an obstruction-free manner with time-oblivious code. We extend Reflexes with a publish/subscribe communication system, itself based on an optimistic transactional event processing scheme, that provides efficient coordination between time-critical, low-latency tasks.We report on the comparison with a commercial JVM, and show that it is possible for tasks to achieve 50 µs response times with way less than 1% of the executions failing to meet their deadlines.

Assessment of habitat and survey criteria for the great crested newt (Triturus cristatus) in Scotland: a case study on a translocated population

The great crested newt Triturus cristatus has declined across its range due to habitat loss, motivating research into biotic and abiotic species determinants. However, research has focused on populations in England and mainland Europe. We examined habitat and survey criteria for great crested newts in Scotland, with focus on a large, translocated population. Adult counts throughout the breeding season were obtained annually using torchlight surveys, and Habitat Suitability Index (HSI) assessed at created ponds (N = 24) in 2006 (immediately post-translocation) and 2015 (9 years post-translocation). In 2006, ‘best case’ HSI scores were calculated to predict habitat suitability should great crested newts have unrestricted access to terrestrial habitat. Abiotic criteria included in and omitted from current great crested newt survey guidelines were assessed using data recorded in 2015. Some ponds had improved HSI scores in 2015, but overall failure to meet predicted scores suggests management is needed to improve habitat suitability. Great crested newt activity was positively associated with moon visibility and phase, air temperature, and pH, but negatively correlated with water clarity. Importantly, our results indicate there are abiotic determinants specific to Scottish great crested newts. Principally, survey temperature thresholds should be lowered to enable accurate census of Scottish populations

Restrictive Interventions in Inpatient Intellectual Disability Services: How to Record, Monitor and Regulate

This report is concerned with the standards of recording, monitoring, and regulation of restrictive interventions involving people with intellectual disabilities with mental health and/or behaviour that challenges within inpatient services. Restrictive interventions, a central concern for all stakeholders of intellectual disability services, has come under increased scrutiny following the abuse scandal at Winterbourne View. Current efforts to monitor them rely almost exclusively on the numbers of such incidents. This approach is fundamentally flawed because numbers alone do not assess the quality of a services’ overall restrictive interventions practice and cannot be used to infer good or poor standards of practice and abuse. Further, there are problems with the variable use of definitions, the failure to distinguish between various degrees of physical restraint, the impact of outliers, the failure to capture individual patient progress and the absence of meaningful benchmarking. Service providers and regulators must therefore rely on other methods to evaluate the use of restrictive interventions and move from basing their conclusions on just the total number of restrictive interventions to one of examining a wider range of quality parameters. With representative examples, this document makes recommendations on how restrictive interventions should be recorded, monitored, regulated and published

Universals, Laws, and Governance

Proponents of the dispositional theory of properties typically claim that their view is not one that offers a realist, governing conception of laws. My first aim is to show that, contrary to this claim, if one commits to dispositionalism then one does not automatically give up on a robust, realist theory of laws. This is because dispositionalism can readily be developed within a Platonic framework of universals. Second, I argue that there are good reasons for realist dispositionalists to favour a Platonic view. This is because the alternative Aristotelian version of dispositionalism, on which universals are immanent entities, is unstable for various reasons. My final aim is to address a common criticism facing Platonic theories of laws, which is the problem of how external entities can play an explanatory role where the world’s law-like patterns of behaviour are concerned. I argue that the Platonists’ response to the one over many problem can help to shed light on this matter, and a possible solution is sketched, one which makes use of the notions of essence, constitution and ontological dependence

Dietary complexity and hidden costs of prey switching in a generalist top predator

Variation in predator diet is a critical aspect of food web stability, health, and population dynamics of predator/ prey communities. Quantifying diet, particularly among cryptic species, is extremely challenging, however, and differentiation between demographic subsets of populations is often overlooked. We used prey remains and data taken postmortem from otter Lutra lutra to determine the extent to which dietary variation in a top predator was associated with biotic, spatial, and temporal factors. Biotic data (e.g., sex, weight, and length) and stomach contents were taken from 610 otters found dead across England and Wales between 1994 and 2010. Prey remains were identified to species where possible, using published keys and reference materials. Multi‐model inference followed by model prediction was applied to test for and visualize the nature of associations. Evidence for widespread decline in the consumption of eels (Anguilla anguilla ) reflected known eel population declines. An association between eel consumption and otter body condition suggested negative consequences for otter nutrition. Consumption of Cottus gobio and stickleback spp. increased, but was unlikely to compensate (there was no association with body condition). More otters with empty stomachs were found over time. Otter sex, body length, and age‐class were important biotic predictors of the prey species found, and season, region, and distance from the coast were important abiotic predictors. Our study is unique in its multivariate nature, broad spatial scale, and long‐term dataset. Inclusion of biotic data allowed us to reveal important differences in costs and benefits of different prey types, and differences between demographic subsets of the population, overlaid on spatial and temporal variation. Such complexities in otter diet are likely to be paralleled in other predators, and detailed characterization of diet should not be overlooked in efforts to conserve wild populations

Depression and Motivation

Among the characteristic features of depression is a diminishment in or lack of action and motivation. In this paper, I consider a dominant philosophical account which purports to explain this lack of action or motivation. This approach comes in different versions but a common theme is, I argue, an over reliance on psychologistic assumptions about action–explanation and the nature of motivation. As a corrective I consider an alternative view that gives a prominent place to the body in motivation. Central to the experience of depression are changes to how a person is motivated to act and, also as central, are changes to bodily feelings and capacities. I argue that broadly characterizing motivation in terms of bodily capacities can, in particular, provide a more compelling account of depressive motivational pathology