Preparing Students For 21st Century Practice: Enhancing Social Justice Teaching In Clinical Legal Education

Social justice has always played an important role in clinical legal education (CLE). Clinicians are aware that students need to acquire the necessary legal skills and strategies related to client-centred lawyering, process choice and procedural justice. This paper shows that increasingly, despite clinicians’ recognition of the value of teaching social justice in CLE, those who promote it face various challenges in instilling in students the notion that social justice is important. This paper discusses some of these challenges, including, that as experiential education expands, students are being offered clinical placements in the private sector where clients do not face the barriers in accessing justice similar to those in community settings. It therefore becomes imperative to encourage students to retain the notion that social justice is an important value. This paper makes suggestions for how these challenges can be overcome to enhance students’ awareness of the importance of social justice and ensure that it remains a value they retain as 21st century practitioners

Lessons Learned from Remote Delivery: Supervision and the Student Experience

This article considers the effect of the shift to virtual delivery of clinical legal education (CLE) that was necessitated by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on students and the lessons learned from students’ perspectives, especially regarding supervision, for clinical best practice going forward. Much of the recent scholarship on the effects of the pandemic has focused on the clients of clinical programs and the challenges of responding to heightened client service needs at a time of economic dislocation and widespread movement restrictions. This was a particular issue in the city of Melbourne, Australia, where residents faced some of the longest and most onerous lockdowns in the world. This article focuses on students of clinical programs and the role of supervision practices in facilitating students’ learning during this challenging period

The Law Tech Clinic: Leading the way in Entrepreneurial Law Clinics

Globalisation, economic forces and technological advancements are changing the way law is practised. Clients are seeking innovative solutions to an increasingly broad range of legal challenges. They want greater connectivity and streamlined delivery of legal services. The rate of change has accelerated in response to remote working, with the digital maturity of legal firms advancing more rapidly than ever before, utilising technology such as electronic billing practices, digital mailrooms, e- discovery, digital document signing and workflow automation. Newly developed and deployed legal technology within the sector has increased demand for lawyers with the skills to adapt and thrive in a technological environment. Law firms favour graduates with a ‘technology mindset’ and aptitude to think beyond the traditional professional services model. The Monash University Faculty of Law, one of the leading law schools in Australia with a pioneering clinical program, has established a Law Tech Clinic (LTC). The LTC provides a unique opportunity for students to work on real client matters and receive end-to-end industry input to develop client-ready applications. This paper describes the LTC’s structure and how the clinic is designed to educate students on the changing demands of the legal industry, providing practical knowledge on legal technology usage to advance legal services. This paper outlines how the LTC enables students to develop professional and practical legal skills that will help them become successful entrepreneurial lawyers, adept at integrating technology with innovative legal services. Further, this paper demonstrates how the Monash Clinical Program, with a strong focus on best practice in clinical legal education, provides a perfect forum to run such a clinic. We demonstrate how students work with technological systems to assist industry partners, law firms and other organisations and provide accessible legal services to their clients.2 Finally, this paper highlights how the LTC educates students on technological advances in legal practice, equipping them with frameworks for the knowledge, skills and attributes to be technologically proficient future legal practitioners. Although this discussion is in the Australian context, it can also apply to other jurisdictions as the associated issues with legal technology and its effects on legal practice are occurring globally

SNPs associated with testosterone levels influence human facial morphology

Many factors influence human facial morphology, including genetics, age, nutrition, biomechanical forces, and endocrine factors. Moreover, facial features clearly differ between males and females, and these differences are driven primarily by the influence of sex hormones during growth and development. Specific genetic variants are known to influence circulating sex hormone levels in humans, which we hypothesize, in turn, affect facial features. In this study, we investigated the effects of testosterone-related genetic variants on facial morphology. We tested 32 genetic variants across 22 candidate genes related to levels of testosterone, sex hormone-binding globulin (SHGB) and dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS) in three cohorts of healthy individuals for which 3D facial surface images were available (Pittsburgh 3DFN, Penn State and ALSPAC cohorts; total n = 7418). Facial shape was described using a recently developed extension of the dense-surface correspondence approach, in which the 3D facial surface was partitioned into a set of 63 hierarchically organized modules. Each variant was tested against each of the facial surface modules in a multivariate genetic association-testing framework and meta-analyzed. Additionally, the association between these candidate SNPs and five facial ratios was investigated in the Pittsburgh 3DFN cohort. Two significant associations involving intronic variants of SHBG were found: both rs12150660 (p = 1.07E-07) and rs1799941 (p = 6.15E-06) showed an effect on mandible shape. Rs8023580 (an intronic variant of NR2F2-AS1) showed an association with the total and upper facial width to height ratios (p = 9.61E-04 and p = 7.35E-04, respectively). These results indicate that testosterone-related genetic variants affect normal-range facial morphology, and in particular, facial features known to exhibit strong sexual dimorphism in humans

Dental anomaly detection using intraoral photos via deep learning

Children with orofacial clefting (OFC) present with a wide range of dental anomalies. Identifying these anomalies is vital to understand their etiology and to discern the complex phenotypic spectrum of OFC. Such anomalies are currently identified using intra-oral exams by dentists, a costly and time-consuming process. We claim that automating the process of anomaly detection using deep neural networks (DNNs) could increase efficiency and provide reliable anomaly detection while potentially increasing the speed of research discovery. This study characterizes the use of` DNNs to identify dental anomalies by training a DNN model using intraoral photographs from the largest international cohort to date of children with nonsyndromic OFC and controls (OFC1). In this project, the intraoral images were submitted to a Convolutional Neural Network model to perform multi-label multi-class classification of 10 dental anomalies. The network predicts whether an individual exhibits any of the 10 anomalies and can do so significantly faster than a human rater can. For all but three anomalies, F1 scores suggest that our model performs competitively at anomaly detection when compared to a dentist with 8 years of clinical experience. In addition, we use saliency maps to provide a post-hoc interpretation for our model’s predictions. This enables dentists to examine and verify our model’s predictions.Fil: Ragodos, Ronilo. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Wang, Tong. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Padilla, Carmencita. University of the Philippines; FilipinasFil: Hecht, Jacqueline T.. University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Estados UnidosFil: Poletta, Fernando Adrián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. CEMIC-CONICET. Centro de Educaciones Médicas e Investigaciones Clínicas "Norberto Quirno". CEMIC-CONICET; ArgentinaFil: Orioli, Ieda Maria. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; BrasilFil: Buxó, Carmen J.. Universidad de Puerto Rico; Puerto RicoFil: Butali, Azeez. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Valencia Ramirez, Consuelo. Fundación Clínica Noel; ColombiaFil: Restrepo Muñeton, Claudia. Fundación Clínica Noel; ColombiaFil: Wehby, George. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Weinberg, Seth M.. University of Pittsburgh; Estados Unidos. University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown; Estados UnidosFil: Marazita, Mary L.. University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown; Estados Unidos. University of Pittsburgh; Estados UnidosFil: Moreno Uribe, Lina M.. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Howe, Brian J.. University of Iowa; Estados Unido

Evidence of gene-environment interaction for two genes on chromosome 4 and environmental tobacco smoke in controlling the risk of nonsyndromic cleft palate

Nonsyndromic cleft palate (CP) is one of the most common human birth defects and both genetic and environmental risk factors contribute to its etiology. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) using 550 CP case-parent trios ascertained in an international consortium. Stratified analysis among trios with different ancestries was performed to test for GxE interactions with common maternal exposures using conditional logistic regression models. While no single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) achieved genome-wide significance when considered alone, markers in SLC2A9 and the neighboring WDR1 on chromosome 4p16.1 gave suggestive evidence of gene-environment interaction with environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) among 259 Asian trios when the models included a term for GxE interaction. Multiple SNPs in these two genes were associated with increased risk of nonsyndromic CP if the mother was exposed to ETS during the peri-conceptual period (3 months prior to conception through the first trimester). When maternal ETS was considered, fifteen of 135 SNPs mapping to SLC2A9 and 9 of 59 SNPs in WDR1 gave P values approaching genome-wide significance (10-6<P<10-4) in a test for GxETS interaction. SNPs rs3733585 and rs12508991 in SLC2A9 yielded P = 2.26×10-7 in a test for GxETS interaction. SNPs rs6820756 and rs7699512 in WDR1 also yielded P = 1.79×10-7 and P = 1.98×10-7 in a 1 df test for GxE interaction. Although further replication studies are critical to confirming these findings, these results illustrate how genetic associations for nonsyndromic CP can be missed if potential GxE interaction is not taken into account, and this study suggest SLC2A9 and WDR1 should be considered as candidate genes for CP. © 2014 Wu et al

The Seventeenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: Complete Release of MaNGA, MaStar and APOGEE-2 Data

This paper documents the seventeenth data release (DR17) from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys; the fifth and final release from the fourth phase (SDSS-IV). DR17 contains the complete release of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, which reached its goal of surveying over 10,000 nearby galaxies. The complete release of the MaNGA Stellar Library (MaStar) accompanies this data, providing observations of almost 30,000 stars through the MaNGA instrument during bright time. DR17 also contains the complete release of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment 2 (APOGEE-2) survey which publicly releases infra-red spectra of over 650,000 stars. The main sample from the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), as well as the sub-survey Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) data were fully released in DR16. New single-fiber optical spectroscopy released in DR17 is from the SPectroscipic IDentification of ERosita Survey (SPIDERS) sub-survey and the eBOSS-RM program. Along with the primary data sets, DR17 includes 25 new or updated Value Added Catalogs (VACs). This paper concludes the release of SDSS-IV survey data. SDSS continues into its fifth phase with observations already underway for the Milky Way Mapper (MWM), Local Volume Mapper (LVM) and Black Hole Mapper (BHM) surveys