Privacy Enforcement in Action: EU Regulators and US Attorneys General Take on Big Tech

In the twenty first century, it is impossible to avoid using internet capable devices and programs in our everyday lives. As a result, significant amounts of personal data have become more accessible than ever before, putting the privacy of countless people at risk. To protect user privacy, companies providing services must limit the accessibility of personal data and comply with existing data privacy and protection laws. If they fail to do so, regulators and law enforcement agencies must ensure proper compliance. This post was originally published on the Cardozo International & Comparative Law Review on March 22, 2023. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

The Merry Death Collector

Documentary filmmaking puts life on lens and who knows what the outcome will be. The creative team chose Arnie Meredith to be the subject of the short documentary The Merry Death Collector. The oddball LaFollette, Tennessee resident collects and sells antique items from estate sales and recently purchased two buildings to house and run his business. The story follows Arnie’s struggle to open and maintain a small-town business. He attends a convention in Knoxville, Tennessee to raise funds, and even attempts to hang a biplane in one of his buildings. With his projected opening date around the corner, an exhausted Arnie finds himself two weeks behind schedule. The journey to his opening was a late one but one of true community support. The Merry Death Collector will make its official World Premiere at the Nashville Film Festival in late April. This Academy-Award qualifying film festival is the oldest running festival in the South and accepts only 6% of its over 3500 entrees

Treasure in Heaven: Economics and Christian Monasticism in Late Antiquity

In the 3rd century CE a new variety of Christian practice emerged to popularity that took a marked turn from traditional practice. It was an ascetic movement that led many people to deny themselves bodily pleasures, and even some to self-inflict pain. There were some who chose to live a solitary life in the desert or in caves, and others lived in monasteries or isolated on top of stone pillars. This movement encouraged individuals to sell all of their belongings and rely on others\u27 charity, or even God\u27s grace, to survive. While asceticism had previously existed in other cultures and religions, it did not exist on any large scale in Christianity for the first 200 years. But once it arrived on the scene, it developed rapidly and became uncontrollably popular. It was formalized as monastic practice and the practitioners were called monks

What has Athens to do with Mormonism?

In his lecture, Terryl Givens presents one with a new way to approach the prophecy of Enoch that was received by Joseph Smith. Contained in this short narrative is a new, innovative conception about God that differs greatly from traditional Christianity. This notion is that of a passible deity, a God that is susceptible to feeling and emotion. It is a God who weeps, a God who is vulnerable and suffers emotional pain. God, as defined by the Christian creeds, is one who lacks passions.1 Givens, in drawing attention to the passible deity, is illuminating just a small portion of a much larger tension that exists between Mormonism and traditional Christianity. The God of Mormonism is not just a slight modification of the God of the creeds. Traditionally Christians, who now will be referred to as orthodox, have endorsed a view of deity that is more or less in line with the God of Classical Theism, or the God of the philosophers. However, the difference between these two conceptions of God is much greater than this one attribute. The God of Mormonism has undergone such a vast transformation from the God of Classical Theism that it no longer resembles its predecessor. In this essay, I’m arguing that the God of Mormonism is not only different than the God of orthodox Christianity in terms of passibility, but is different in every other major characteristic

Continuous Gravitational Waves from Isolated Galactic Neutron Stars in the Advanced Detector Era

We consider a simulated population of isolated Galactic neutron stars. The rotational frequency of each neutron star evolves through a combination of electromagnetic and gravitational wave emission. The magnetic field strength dictates the dipolar emission, and the ellipticity (a measure of a neutron star's deformation) dictates the gravitational wave emission. Through both analytic and numerical means, we assess the detectability of the Galactic neutron star population and bound the magnetic field strength and ellipticity parameter space of Galactic neutron stars with or without a direct gravitational wave detection. While our simulated population is primitive, this work establishes a framework by which future efforts can be conducted.Comment: Accepted for publication by Physical Review D, 8 pages, 5 figure

Did Javal measure eye movements during reading?

Louis-Émile Javal is widely credited as the first person to record eye movements in read-ing. This is so despite the fact that Javal himself never made that claim but it is perpetu-ated in contemporary text books, scientific articles and on the internet. Javal did coin the term ‘saccades’ in the context of eye movements during reading but he did not measure them. In this article we suggest that a misreading of Huey’s (1908) book on reading led to the misattribution and we attempt to dispel this myth by explaining Javal’s contribution and also clarifying who did initially describe discontinuous eye movements during reading

Finally a Case for Collaborative VR?: The Need to Design for Remote Multi-Party Conversations

Amid current social distancing measures requiring people to work from home, there has been renewed interest on how to effectively converse and collaborate remotely utilizing currently available technologies. On the surface, VR provides a perfect platform for effective remote communication. It can transfer contextual and environmental cues and facilitate a shared perspective while also allowing people to be virtually co-located. Yet we argue that currently VR is not adequately designed for such a communicative purpose. In this paper, we outline three key barriers to using VR for conversational activity : (1) variability of social immersion, (2) unclear user roles, and (3) the need for effective shared visual reference. Based on this outline, key design topics are discussed through a user experience design perspective for considerations in a future collaborative design framework