Building the Access to Justice Movement

There are innumerable individual problems of access to civil justice. Civil justice, or its absence, will often determine whether people can keep their homes, their family relationships, their health and well-being, their actual safety, their jobs, and their opportunity for a fair resolution of so many more of the challenges that life presents. There are presently many important efforts that enable people to obtain justice, both through the direct provision of legal services and through the broader pursuit of systemic reforms, such as securing and expanding civil rights to counsel, expanding roles for non-lawyers to empower individuals and communities, making the civil justice system work better for people without legal assistance, and ending excessive court-imposed fines and fees. Is it possible to identify common themes and threads running through the access to justice problems, the direct efforts to help individuals, and the pursuit of a broader reform agenda? Can there be an access to justice “movement” capable of galvanizing public outrage and energy, as the racial justice, criminal justice, immigrants’ rights, Me Too, and other modern movements are doing in their attacks on inequality, poverty, and other manifestations of injustice

A2J Summit Collection Contributors

A compilation of biographies for the authors and participants in this Collection

A survey of the reformulation of Australian child-oriented food products

© 2013 Savio et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background Childhood obesity is one of the most pressing public health challenges of the 21st century. Reformulating commonly eaten food products is a key emerging strategy to improve the food supply and help address rising rates of obesity and chronic disease. This study aimed to monitor reformulation of Australian child-oriented food products (products marketed specifically to children) from 2009–2011. Methods In 2009, all child-oriented food products in a large supermarket in metropolitan Adelaide were identified. These baseline products were followed up in 2011 to identify products still available for sale. Nutrient content data were collected from Nutrient Information Panels in 2009 and 2011. Absolute and percentage change in nutrient content were calculated for energy, total fat, saturated fat, sugars, sodium and fibre. Data were descriptively analysed to examine reformulation in individual products, in key nutrients, within product categories and across all products. Two methods were used to assess the extent of reformulation; the first involved assessing percentage change in single nutrients over time, while the second involved a set of nutrient criteria to assess changes in overall healthiness of products over time. Results Of 120 products, 40 remained unchanged in nutrient composition from 2009–2011 and 80 underwent change. The proportions of positively and negatively reformulated products were similar for most nutrients surveyed, with the exception of sodium. Eighteen products (15%) were simultaneously positively and negatively reformulated for different nutrients. Using percentage change in nutrient content to assess extent of reformulation, nearly half (n = 53) of all products were at least moderately reformulated and just over one third (n = 42) were substantially reformulated. The nutrient criteria method revealed 5 products (6%) that were positively reformulated and none that had undergone negative reformulation. Conclusion Positive and negative reformulation was observed to a similar extent within the sample indicating little overall improvement in healthiness of the child-oriented food supply from 2009–2011. In the absence of agreed reformulation standards, the extent of reformulation was assessed against criteria developed specifically for this project. While arbitrary in nature, these criteria were based on reasonable assessment of the meaningfulness of reformulation and change in nutrient composition. As well as highlighting nutrient composition changes in a number of food products directed to children, this study emphasises the need to develop comprehensive, targeted and standardised reformulation benchmarks to assess the extent of reformulation occurring in the food supply

Animal pointing: changing trends and findings from 30 years of research

The past 30 years have witnessed a continued and growing interest in the production and comprehension of manual pointing gestures in nonhuman animals. Captive primates with diverse rearing histories have shown evidence of both pointing production and comprehension, though there certainly are individual and species differences, as well as substantive critiques of how to interpret pointing or “pointing-like” gestures in animals. Early literature primarily addressed basic questions about whether captive apes point, understand pointing, and use the gesture in a way that communicates intent (declarative) rather than motivational states (imperative). Interest in these questions continues, but more recently there has been a dramatic increase in the number of papers examining pointing in a diverse array of species, with an especially large literature on canids. This proliferation of research on pointing and the diversification of species studied has brought new and exciting questions about the evolution of social cognition, and the effects of rearing history and domestication on pointing production and, more prolifically, comprehension. A review of this work is in order. In this paper we examine trends in the literature on pointing in nonhumans. Specifically, we examine publication frequencies of different study species from 1987 to 2016. We also review data on the form and function of pointing, and evidence either supporting or refuting the conclusion that various nonhuman species comprehend the meaning of pointing gestures

Activation Addition: Steering Language Models Without Optimization

Reliably controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is a pressing open problem. Existing methods include supervised finetuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), prompt engineering and guided decoding. We instead investigate activation engineering: modifying activations at inference time to predictably alter model behavior. In particular, we bias the forward pass with an added 'steering vector' implicitly specified through natural language. Unlike past work which learned these steering vectors (Subramani, Suresh, and Peters 2022; Hernandez, Li, and Andreas 2023), our Activation Addition (ActAdd) method computes them by taking the activation differences that result from pairs of prompts. We demonstrate ActAdd on GPT-2 on OpenWebText and ConceptNet. Our inference-time approach yields control over high-level properties of output and preserves off-target model performance. It involves far less compute and implementation effort compared to finetuning or RLHF, allows users to provide natural language specifications, and its overhead scales naturally with model size

Convex Optimization in Julia

This paper describes Convex, a convex optimization modeling framework in Julia. Convex translates problems from a user-friendly functional language into an abstract syntax tree describing the problem. This concise representation of the global structure of the problem allows Convex to infer whether the problem complies with the rules of disciplined convex programming (DCP), and to pass the problem to a suitable solver. These operations are carried out in Julia using multiple dispatch, which dramatically reduces the time required to verify DCP compliance and to parse a problem into conic form. Convex then automatically chooses an appropriate backend solver to solve the conic form problem.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on High Performance Technical Computing in Dynamic Languages (HPTCDL) 201