Forbidden Friending: A Framework for Assessing the Reasonableness of Nonsolicitation Agreements and Determining What Constitutes a Breach on Social Media

Social media has changed the way people conduct their day-to-day lives, both socially and professionally. Prior to the proliferation of social media, it was easier for people to keep their work lives and social lives separate if they so wished. What social media has caused people to do in recent years is to blend their personal and professional personas into one. People can choose to fill their LinkedIn connections with both their clients and their college classmates, they can be Facebook friends with their coworkers right along with their neighbors, and they can utilize social media sites to market themselves or their businesses to a wide audience. Finding a job, filling a position, or building a customer base has never been easier. What lurks behind the convenience of combining these worlds into one online persona is the potential to violate certain restrictive covenants that bind many employees beyond the end of an employment relationship. Nonsolicitation agreements have become a popular choice for employers who wish to restrict their former employees from soliciting their former clients or coworkers, as these agreements are less restrictive and more likely to be upheld in court than noncompetition clauses. What has come up in recent litigation over these agreements is their enforceability with respect to social media activity and what exactly constitutes a solicitation via social media. This Note proposes a flexible standard for assessing the reasonableness and enforceability of nonsolicitation agreements that aim to cover employees’ social media activity

Non-local two-photon correlations using interferometers physically separated by 35 meters

An experimental demonstration of quantum correlations is presented. Energy and time entangled photons at wavelengths of 704 and 1310 nm are produced by parametric downconversion in KNbO3 and are sent through optical fibers into a bulk-optical (704 nm) and an all-fiber Michelson-interferometer (1310 nm), respectively. The two interferometers are located 35 meters aside from one another. Using Faraday-mirrors in the fiber-interferometer, all birefringence effects in the fibers are automatically compensated. We obtained two-photon fringe visibilities of up to 95 % from which one can project a violation of Bell's inequality by 8 standard deviations. The good performance and the auto-aligning feature of Faraday-mirror interferometers show their potential for a future test of Bell's inequalities in order to examine quantum-correlations over long distances.Comment: 9 pages including 3 postscript figures, to be published in Europhys. Let

The effects of delayed and frequency shifted feedback on speakers with Parkinson disease

Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) has been assessed as a rate reduction and intelligibility enhancing tool in patients with Parkinson disease (PD) for some time. However, there are contradictory results in the literature regarding the success of this device. Also, little is known about the effects of DAF on speech other than influences on speech rate and intelligibility. Frequency shifted feedback (FSF) is known to produce more natural sounding speech than DAF and to improve the fluency of persons who stutter. However, there are currently no studies reporting how PD speakers perform under FSF. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of both types of altered feedback on the speech of PD and control participants on a broad range of measures. The performance of 16 PD speakers and 11 control speakers in a reading task under DAF, FSF, and no altered feedback (NAF) are reported here. The results showed that all groups responded to altered feedback in a similar way and showed a prominent reduction of speech rate. The conditions evoked changes in pause frequency (increases), loudness levels (increases), pitch variation (increases), and intelligibility and naturalness (decreases) for all or some of the groups. Few effects could be observed on articulation/pause time ratio, pause duration, pitch range, and speech rhythm. Previous reports on differences in susceptibility of PD speaker to altered feedback were confirmed, and some speakers benefited from the system despite the negative group results for intelligibility and naturalness. In general, FSF resulted in performance closer to the NAF state than to DAF on all variables, and for those PD speakers who benefited from altered feedback, the FSF condition evoked the greatest improvement

Cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease : is it a unified phenomenon?

Parkinson's disease (PD) has long been associated with dementia. This has been found to correlate with participant age, age at onset of PD and severity of PD. In addition, a large corpus of research points to the fact that participants with, as well as without, dementia can be impaired in a variety of cognitive tasks. Among these, set-shifting and dual-tasking skills have received particular focus. Most studies report that a reduction in attentional resources can lead to problems with these tasks. However, none have been able to determine exactly which systems are involved in these skills and which neurological impairments underlie the observed cognitive deficits. The current study set out to investigate how performance on tasks requiring set-shifting and dual tasking related to each other, as well as overall measures of cognition gained across a variety of tasks. Fifteen participants with PD and 12 control participants underwent screening tests for dementia, as well as specific tests to assess attention, set-shifting and dual tasking. The results indicate that set-shifting ability correlated well with other measures of cognitive performance, whereas dualtasking skills did not. This could suggest that set-shifting and dual tasking are not necessarily controlled by the same process, or that a particular process is involved to different degrees. In addition, many participants showed individual performance variations and dissociations between tasks that were not necessarily evident from the statistical analysis. This indicates that it can be difficult to make assumptions on overall cognitive performance from specific tasks and vice versa. This observation has implications for clinical practice as well as research methodology