Changing the Construct: Promoting Cross-Cultural Conversations in the Law School Classroom

Promoting cross-cultural awareness should be an important aspect of professionalism training in legal education. Cross-cultural awareness is essential to our students as they prepare to practice in an increasingly diverse domestic and international legal marketplace with competence and confidence. At the very least, faculty should help students avoid becoming the next lawyer or judge to be sanctioned for culturally off ensive behavior. More broadly, early and repeated faculty attention to cross-cultural issues can improve the learning environment for all students while they are still in law school. Although such training can be diffi cult and uncomfortable for both the professor and the students, it is far better for our students to make mistakes within the safety of the classroom, where the ramifications of their errors will not be career ending, and better if by learning from mistakes students develop cultural competencies that will serve them and their clients in their future careers. In short, promoting cross-cultural awareness is part of our obligation to educate our students in professionalism. Accordingly, this article provides a blueprint for incorporating these valuable but challenging discussions into the law school classroom. Part II of this article identifies the pedagogical and institutional advantages of infusing legal instruction with discussions designed to promote crosscultural awareness. Part III discusses how to create an effective and safe classroom environment for conducting cross-cultural discussions by assessing the classroom climate, establishing a respectful and approachable relationship with students, and developing the cultural literacy and emotional knowledge to lead cross-cultural conversations with sensitivity and openness. Part IV explores specific techniques and best practices for promoting cross-cultural conversations that raise or implicate diverse cultural assumptions and expectations. Part V suggests techniques for dealing with student resistance and classroom incivility, and Part VI concludes the article

Has a Higgs-flavon with a 750750 GeV mass been detected at the LHC13?

Higgs-flavon fields appear as a part of the Froggatt-Nielsen (FN) mechanism, which attempts to explain the hierarchy of Yukawa couplings. We explore the possibility that the 750 GeV diphoton resonance recently reported at the LHC13, could be identified with a low-scale Higgs-flavon field $H_F$ and find the region of the parameter space consistent with CMS and ATLAS data. It is found that the extra vector-like fermions of the ultraviolet completion of the FN mechanism are necessary in order to reproduce the observed signal. We consider a standard model (SM) extension that contains two Higgs doublets (a standard one and an inert one) and one complex FN singlet. The inert doublet includes a stable neutral boson, which provides a viable dark matter candidate, while the mixing of the standard doublet and the FN singlet induces flavor violation in the Higgs sector at the tree-level. Constraints on the parameters of the model are derived from the LHC Higgs data, which include the search for the lepton flavor violating decay of the SM Higgs boson $h\to \bar{\mu}\tau$. It is also found that in some region of the parameter space the model may give rise to a large branching ratio for the $H_F \to hh$ decay, of the order of 0.1, which could be searched for at the LHC.Comment: 18 pages, 7 Figures, includes updated files to match published versio

Topological defects in lattice models and affine Temperley-Lieb algebra

This paper is the first in a series where we attempt to define defects in critical lattice models that give rise to conformal field theory topological defects in the continuum limit. We focus mostly on models based on the Temperley-Lieb algebra, with future applications to restricted solid-on-solid (also called anyonic chains) models, as well as non-unitary models like percolation or self-avoiding walks. Our approach is essentially algebraic and focusses on the defects from two points of view: the "crossed channel" where the defect is seen as an operator acting on the Hilbert space of the models, and the "direct channel" where it corresponds to a modification of the basic Hamiltonian with some sort of impurity. Algebraic characterizations and constructions are proposed in both points of view. In the crossed channel, this leads us to new results about the center of the affine Temperley-Lieb algebra; in particular we find there a special subalgebra with non-negative integer structure constants that are interpreted as fusion rules of defects. In the direct channel, meanwhile, this leads to the introduction of fusion products and fusion quotients, with interesting mathematical properties that allow to describe representations content of the lattice model with a defect, and to describe its spectrum.Comment: 41

Insufficient voluntary intake of nutrients and energy in hospitalized patients

Aim: The aim of our study was to evaluate the inadequacy of voluntary energy and nutrient intake on the first day of hospital admission. Patients and methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out in two terciary care hospitals, with a probabilistic sample of 50% of in-patients. Dietary intake was evaluated by a 24-hour dietary recall, and undernutrition was screened through the Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 tool. The overall frequency of inadequate energy and nutrient intake was estimated using Dietary Reference Intakes. Results: Energy and nutrient intakes from 258 patients showed very low values for both men and women. No significant differences were found for energy and nutrient intakes across age groups (= 65 years). When the proportion of study subjects with inadequate nutrient intakes was analysed, a high degree of inadequacy was found. The degree of inadequacy was higher for fibre, niacin, folate, vitamin B-12, magnesium and zinc. No significant differences were found for energy and nutrients studied and for intakes below 113 of dietary recommendations from nutritionally-at-risk (n = 89) and well nourished (n = 169) patients. Conclusion: Voluntary nutrient and energy intakes in the first 24 hour of hospital admission are highly inadequate. No differences were found between undernourished and well-nourished patients or patients = 65 years