The Catholic Church and the Paycheck Protection Program: Assessing Nondiscrimination after Trinity Lutheran and Espinoza

This Note argues the inclusion of houses of worship and the subsequent dispersal of PPP funds to the Catholic Church was explicitly constitutional. Applying the lens of the Supreme Court’s recently announced nondiscrimination principle, this Note considers the ramifications of the SBA’s official policy and explores the constitutional justification for the SBA’s ad hoc PPP policy. In fact, under the nondiscrimination principle, this Note concludes that the SBA’s policy shift was not just constitutionally permissible, but probably constitutionally required

What makes petri nets harder to verify : stack or data?, Concurrency, security, and puzzles : Festschrift for A.W. Roscoe on the occasion of his 60th birthday

We show how the yardstick construction of Stockmeyer, also developed as counter bootstrapping by Lipton, can be adapted and extended to obtain new lower bounds for the coverability problem for two prominent classes of systems based on Petri nets: Ackermann-hardness for unordered data Petri nets, and Tower-hardness for pushdown vector addition systems

EMS Use by the Young Adult Population in the Region of Waterloo

Anecdotal evidence suggests that university students are accessing local Emergency Medical Services (EMS) more frequently, usually as a result of alcohol consumption. In doing so, they endanger their personal health and create challenges for EMS and local hospitals. This study examined EMS use by young adults (ages 16-24 years) to identify differences between university students and youth in the Region of Waterloo, and to determine predictors of transport to hospital. This cross-sectional study used retrospective data collected during a six-year period (2006-2011) from a large, mixed urban and rural municipal ambulance service located in southwestern Ontario. Data were extracted from electronic ambulance call reports completed by paramedics responding to 9-1-1 calls. Individuals accessing EMS within the university zone were compared with those outside this area on demographics, patient presentation, pick-up locations, transport status, and 9-1-1 call generation characteristics. Given the large sample size (N = 16,577), and the probability of a type I error, we determined statistical significance based on a 20% change in the odds ratio (i.e., OR of 1.20). Among university students, across years, the number of calls that involved alcohol rose from 29% to 38%. Based on the OR, university students, compared with other young adults, were 2.6 times more likely to call EMS with alcohol as a contributing factor, 1.3 times more likely to be assigned a low priority by paramedics, and 1.4 times more likely to refuse transport. They were 1.9 times more likely to be picked up in a bar and 1.8 times more likely to call 9-1-1 at night. Using logistic regression, significant predictors of transport to the hospital (yes/no) were: a scene time less than 20 minutes; advanced life support (ALS) care provided; pick-up at a school; and day of the week. These findings suggest that there has been an increase in alcohol-related EMS calls by Region of Waterloo university students. EMS services need to be aware of these factors when developing deployment strategies. Further, there is a need to coordinate with university administrators in order to develop strategies to optimize the care of students who have been using alcohol, particularly those who refuse transport to hospital

Data \u27 Information \u27 Knowledge? The Perspective of Media Philosophy on Knowledge and its Management

Within the last decade the notion of knowledge has gained increasing attention in information systems research. Yet despite this development the understanding of ‘knowledge’ is still immature. Recognizing this issue, researchers have turned their attention toward fundamental aspects of the notion of knowledge, drawing on disciplines which are most relevant for the study of knowledge, e.g., philosophy or sociology of knowledge. We draw on the discipline of media-philosophy and show how this can help to develop a sound understanding of knowledge and contribute to the ‘re-discovery’ of important forms of knowledge that so far have been neglected in information systems research

Controlling a Random Population is EXPTIME-hard

Bertrand et al. [1] (LMCS 2019) describe two-player zero-sum games in which one player tries to achieve a reachability objective in $n$ games (on the same finite arena) simultaneously by broadcasting actions, and where the opponent has full control of resolving non-deterministic choices. They show EXPTIME completeness for the question if such games can be won for every number $n$ of games. We consider the almost-sure variant in which the opponent randomizes their actions, and where the player tries to achieve the reachability objective eventually with probability one. The lower bound construction in [1] does not directly carry over to this randomized setting. In this note we show EXPTIME hardness for the almost-sure problem by reduction from Countdown Games