Myspace, Yourspace, But Not Theirspace: The Constitutionality of Banning Sex Offenders From Social Networking Sites

In recent years there has been intense public pressure to enact increasingly restrictive and intrusive sex offender laws. The regulation of sex offenders has now moved online, where a growing amount of protected expression and activity occurs. The latest trend in sex offender policy has been the passage of state laws prohibiting sex offenders from visiting social networking sites, such as Myspace or Facebook. The use of these websites implicates the First Amendment right of expressive association. Broad social-networking-site bans threaten the First Amendment expressive association rights of sex offenders, who do not lose all of their constitutional rights by virtue of their conviction. Although social-networking-site bans are politically attractive on the surface, such prohibitions are fundamentally flawed because they are predicated on a number of widespread misconceptions about sex offenses and sex offender behavior. These misconceptions include the beliefs that all registered sex offenders are violent sexual predators who have extremely high recidivism rates and that Internet predators are increasing the incidence of sex crimes against minors. In fact, there is very little evidence to indicate that this type of legislation will help reduce sexual violence. This Note argues for empirically based and narrowly tailored sex offender policies that will strike the appropriate balance between protecting minors from sexual abuse and respecting sex offenders\u27 constitutional rights. Such an approach is more likely to help rehabilitate offenders and thus protect children and others from sexual predators

Participative leadership: A study of faculty and administrators in a Lutheran liberal arts college

Despite the numerous reference to and importance of the term participative leadership in various leadership and organizational theories and practices, the term itself remains ambiguous. While it is often used synonymously with terms such as collaborative, autonomy, influence, participative decision making, collegiality, and team, many people questioned whether these terms are truly synonymous. Moreover, because those who advocate this approach to leadership have many purposes in mind, the practice of participative leadership manifests itself in different forms. Hence, a need exists to clarify as to what practices are actually participative. This study examines the meaning of the concept in theory and practice. The focus is on clarifying the concept in higher education by eliciting faculty and administrators\u27 understandings of the concept, their rationales for accepting it, and the conditions and ways they desire to see this approach practiced in their organization. This examination involves an intensive review of the literature, an analysis of institutional documents, and a series of in-depth interviews with six faculty and seven administrators at a Lutheran liberal arts college. The literature review indicated that the complexities of the terms leadership and participation contributed to the different understandings of the concepts. The work of different scholars, based on different paradigms, and different leadership and organizational theories, along with an emphasis of different issues revealed that in certain cases certain characteristics of participation are concealed, while in other instances other characteristics are emphasized. By studying participative leadership from the different participants\u27 perspectives a more holistic understanding emerged of the concept and its implications for administrators, faculty, and the college. Although gender, status, position, and the type of issues raised determine how participants understand and intend to apply the concept, every participant gave different labels, rationales, metaphors, and ways of interpreting and evaluating the concept. The findings, in general, confirm that many individuals and groups can have many labels, definitions, rationales, and ideals of participative leadership. The factors such as institutional history, mission, and structure and individual differences with respect to gender, position, status, background, interest, beliefs, and values determine the interpretation and implementation of participative leadership. Theorists and practitioners must consider these factors when they study and attempt to implement participative leadership

Determinants of the Adoption of Climate-Smart Agricultural Practices in Siyadebrina Wayu District, North Shewa, Ethiopia

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is one of the solutions that simultaneously address the issues of food security, climate change and agricultural productivity. Climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices have the potential of its triple potential benefits of improved productivity and high income, reduction or removal of greenhouse gases and improved household food security. The objective of this study was to examine the determinants of adoption of climate smart agricultural practices. The methodology of the study was conducted using mixed methods approaches, in which 368 randomly selected households were surveyed, 10 key informants were interviewed, and 6 focus group discussions participants were held. The analysis was based on survey data and a binary logistic regression model was used. Findings revealed that highly adopted CSA practices in the study area were integrated soil fertility management, conservation agriculture, small scale irrigation, and improved livestock feed. Factors influencing adoption of CSA practices were also explored such as household size, farming system, off-farm income, access to irrigated farm, distance to market, farm size, and access to agricultural credit. The study concludes that a large proportion of respondents were aware of most of the practices, but adoption of CSA practices examined was very low. Therefore, as a recommendation sensitization of farmers on reality of climate change and the need to adopt CSA practices towards reduction of adverse effect of climate change should continue. Policy and support program should focus on dissemination of CSA practices to a larger proportion of smallholder farmers. Keywords: Climate Smart Agriculture, Adoption, Determinants, Food security, Ethiopia DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/68-08 Publication date:September 30th 202

Discrete element modeling of cultivator sweep-to-soil interaction: Worn and hardened edges effects on soil-tool forces and soil flow

Simulation of tool-to-soil interaction provides opportunities to accelerate new equipment design and evaluate performance of tillage tools. Simulation based evaluation of worn tillage tools performance on soil flow has not been done. Discrete Element Modelling (DEM) has a potential to simulate worn tool to soil interaction problems, where worn tools CAD can be generated using 3D scanning. The DEM parameters of Hertz-Mindlin with Parallel Bond model were calibrated to match draft force and soil failure zone measured from a tool bar moving at 0.22 m/s and 38 mm cutting depth. The draft force and soil forward failure zone were predicted at 7% and 24% relative errors compared to measured values, respectively. Using the optimized DEM soil model, the interaction of three 3D reconstructed sweeps (new sweep, carbide treated-worn, untreated-worn) with soil were simulated to compare their geometric wear dimensional loss, performance on soil forces and soil flow. Results showed that the carbide treated-worn sweep had similar soil draft force and soil forward failure distance as the new sweep. The untreated-worn sweep showed lower vertical force (less suction) and its wing induced soil failure zone (front and lateral) showed poor soil tilth quality compared with the carbide treated-worn sweep and the new sweep

Virtual compound screening and SAR analysis: method development and practical applications in the design of new serine and cysteine protease inhibitors

Virtual screening is an important tool in drug discovery that uses different computational methods to screen chemical databases for the identification of possible drug candidates. Most virtual screening methodologies are knowledge driven where the availability of information on either the nature of the target binding pocket or the type of ligand that is expect to bind is essential. In this regard, the information contained in X-ray crystal structures of protein-ligand complexes provides a detailed insight into the interactions between the protein and the ligand and opens the opportunity for further understanding of drug action and structure activity relationships at molecular level. Protein-ligand interaction information can be utilized to introduce target-specific interaction-based constraints in the design of focused combinatorial libraries. It can also be directly transformed into structural interaction fingerprints and can be applied in virtual screening to analyze docking studies or filter compounds. However, the integration of protein-ligand interaction information into two-dimensional compound similarity searching is not fully explored. Therefore, novel methods are still required to efficiently utilize protein-ligand interaction information in two-dimensional ligand similarity searching. Furthermore, application of protein-ligand interaction information in the interpretation of SARs at the ligand level needs further exploration. Thus, utilization of three-dimensional protein ligand interaction information in virtual screening and SAR analysis was the major aim of this thesis. The thesis is presented in two major parts. In the first part, utilization of three-dimensional protein-ligand interaction information for the development of a new hybrid virtual screening method and analysis of the nature of SARs in analog series at molecular level is presented. The second part of the thesis is focused on the application of different virtual screening methods for the identification of new cysteine and membrane-bound serine proteases inhibitors. In addition, molecular modeling studies were also applied to analyze the binding mode of structurally complex cyclic peptide inhibitors

Durability problems of 20th century reinforced concrete heritage structures and their restorations

This paper presents a study on the 20th century reinforced concrete heritage structures, thier durability problems, thier repair and restorations according to the conservation principles of heritage structures and the repair principles of reinforced concrete structures.The common problems on reinforced concrete heritage structures such as reinforcement corrosion, alkali aggregate reaction, freeze thaw and overloading of the structure are identified and thier respective repair methods presented. Even though so many causes exist that contribute for durability problems of reinforced concrete heritage structures, the mentioned ones are the most common appearing in most cases

Advanced Local Binary Patterns for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The standard Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is considered among the most computationally efficient remote sensing (RS) image descriptors in the framework of large-scale content based RS image retrieval (CBIR). However, it has limited discrimination capability for characterizing high dimensional RS images with complex semantic content. There are several LBP variants introduced in computer vision that can be extended to RS CBIR to efficiently overcome the above-mentioned problem. To this end, this paper presents a comparative study in order to analyze and compare advanced LBP variants in RS CBIR domain. We initially introduce a categorization of the LBP variants based on the specific CBIR problems in RS, and analyze the most recent methodological developments associated to each category. All the considered LBP variants are introduced for the first time in the framework of RS image retrieval problems, and have been experimentally compared in terms of their: 1) discrimination capability to model high-level semantic information present in RS images (and thus the retrieval performance); and 2) computational complexities associated to retrieval and feature extraction time.EC/H2020/759764/EU/Accurate and Scalable Processing of Big Data in Earth Observation/BigEart