Rocketdyne's advanced coal slurry pumping program

The Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International Corporation is conducting a program for the engineering, fabrication, and testing of an experimental/prototype high-capacity, high-pressure centrifugal slurry feed pump for coal liquefaction purposes. The abrasion problems in a centrifugal slurry pump are primarily due to the manner in which the hard, solid particles contained in the slurry are transported through the hydraulic flow passages within the pump. The abrasive particles can create scraping, grinding, cutting, and sandblasting effects on the various exposed parts of the pump. These critical areas involving abrasion and impact erosion wear problems in a centrifugal pump are being addressed by Rocketdyne. The mechanisms of abrasion and erosion are being studied through hydrodynamic analysis, materials evaluation, and advanced design concepts

Seabird Bycatch in Pelagic Longline Fisheries Is Grossly Underestimated when Using Only Haul Data

Hundreds of thousands of seabirds are killed each year as bycatch in longline fisheries. Seabirds are predominantly caught during line setting but bycatch is generally recorded during line hauling, many hours after birds are caught. Bird loss during this interval may lead to inaccurate bycatch information. In this 15 year study, seabird bycatch was recorded during both line setting and line hauling from four fishing regions: Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, Coral Sea and central Pacific Ocean. Over 43,000 albatrosses, petrels and skuas representing over 25 species were counted during line setting of which almost 6,000 seabirds attempted to take the bait. Bait-taking interactions were placed into one of four categories. (i) The majority (57%) of bait-taking attempts were “unsuccessful” involving seabirds that did not take the bait nor get caught or hooked. (ii) One-third of attempts were “successful” with seabirds removing the bait while not getting caught. (iii) One-hundred and seventy-six seabirds (3% of attempts) were observed being “caught” during line setting, with three albatross species – Laysan (Phoebastria immutabilis), black-footed (P. nigripes) and black-browed (Thalassarche melanophrys)– dominating this category. However, of these, only 85 (48%) seabird carcasses were retrieved during line hauling. Most caught seabirds were hooked through the bill. (iv) The remainder of seabird-bait interactions (7%) was not clearly observed, but likely involved more “caught” seabirds. Bait taking attempts and percentage outcome (e.g. successful, caught) varied between seabird species and was not always related to species abundance around fishing vessels. Using only haul data to calculate seabird bycatch grossly underestimates actual bycatch levels, with the level of seabird bycatch from pelagic longline fishing possibly double what was previously thought

POVERTY LAWGORITHMS A Poverty Lawyer’s Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities

Automated decision-making systems make decisions about our lives, and those with low-socioeconomic status often bear the brunt of the harms these systems cause. Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyers Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities is a guide by Data & Society Faculty Fellow Michele Gilman to familiarize fellow poverty and civil legal services lawyers with the ins and outs of data-centric and automated-decision making systems, so that they can clearly understand the sources of the problems their clients are facing and effectively advocate on their behalf

The Return of the Welfare Queen

After welfare reform was passed in 1996, there was every reason to hope that the welfare queen was dead. The “welfare queen” was shorthand for a lazy woman of color, with numerous children she cannot support, who is cheating taxpayers by abusing the system to collect government assistance. For years, this long-standing racist and gendered stereotype was used to attack the poor and the cash assistance programs that support them. In 1996, TANF capped welfare receipt to five years and required work as a condition of eligibility, thus stripping the welfare queen of her throne of dependency. Nevertheless, during the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney resurrected the welfare queen. In a barrage of television campaign ads, Romney inaccurately accused President Obama of gutting TANF work requirements, while President Obama responded by touting his own tough-on-welfare credentials. In the subsequent battle over which candidate was toughest on the poor, there was no mention that TANF is largely a failure. While TANF enrollment has plunged since 1996, it has not reduced poverty. Instead, it pushed many poor mothers into the low-wage workforce, where they struggle to survive on meager wages. In addition, many families have slipped out of the safety net altogether, sanctioned by TANF caseworkers or discouraged by TANF\u27s onerous application requirements, privacy-stripping processes, and stingy grants. As a result, only 4.5 million people receive cash assistance through TANF, amounting to 0.47% of the federal 2012 budget. In other words, the political salience of the welfare queen far outstrips her numbers. The good news is that Romney\u27s dependency rhetoric did not work and may have backfired. The bad news is that the welfare queen still lurks behind repeated calls to cut government benefits and to criminalize poverty. This article explores the legacy of the welfare queen, her return in the 2012 presidential campaign, and the current inadequacies of TANF. The article concludes with suggestions to reform TANF in the hopes of burying the welfare queen once and for all

The Future of Clinical Legal Scholarship

The legal academy is questioning the future of legal scholarship given its costs and perceived disconnect from law practice. However, the future of clinical legal scholarship is typically left out of these debates, although it offers a powerful rejoinder to these recurring critiques – it is deeply engaged with real-world problems, and it has demonstrable impacts. In addition, clinical scholars are an overlooked conduit for disseminating scholarship outside the ivory tower. Doctrinal faculty are unaware how much clinical faculty can ensure their work has an impact beyond SSRN citation counts. As law schools consider how to implement the new accreditation requirement that students take at least six credits of experiential education, scholarship should be part of the calculus. This Essay argues that at this inflection point for legal education, choosing to promote, rather than to further degrade, structures to support clinical scholarship allows the academy to not only ensure quality legal education that graduates practice ready lawyers, but also to support engaged scholarship and enhance the scholarly mission of law schools. In short, the future of legal scholarship and the goals of experiential education are intertwined and hinge on a robust commitment to clinical faculty with security of position who write pursuant to an expansive definition of scholarship

The Class Differential in Privacy Law

This article analyzes how privacy law fails the poor. Due to advanced technologies, all Americans are facing corporate and governmental surveillance. However, privacy law is focused on middle-class concerns about limiting the disclosure of personal data so that it is not misused. By contrast, along the welfare-to-work continuum, poor people face privacy intrusions at the time that the state or their employers gather data. This data collection tends to be stigmatizing and humiliating, and it thus not only compounds the harmful effects of living in poverty, but also dampens democratic participation by the poor. The poor interact with the government and low-wage employers in ways that are on-going and interpersonal, and as a result, the right to be left alone embodied in current privacy law does not protect their interests in dignity and autonomy. This article argues that poor Americans experience privacy differently than persons with greater economic resources and that the law, in its constitutional, statutory and common law dimensions, reinforces this differential. This class differential in privacy law has costs not only for the poor, but for all citizens

The President as Scientist-in-Chief

During the Bush Administration, many scientists, both inside and outside of government, asserted that the President was distorting scientific knowledge to achieve political ends. In controlling the scientific output of government agencies, President Bush acted consistently with unitary executive theory. Under this theory, the President can direct the output and discretion of government agencies. This article examines the tension between a unitary executive and government agencies engaged in scientific research and policy making. In particular, the article assesses the legality of two high profile instances in which President Bush allegedly distorted scientific data to achieve his policy objectives: global climate change and human embryonic stem cell research. The article assesses whether a Scientist-in-Chief model of executive control fosters the values of accountability and efficiency that underpin unitary executive theory. The article also explores various checks on the Scientist-in-Chief, including Congress, the courts, the states, and the media. The article concludes that a Scientist-in-Chief model of executive authority undermines democratic accountability and scientific deliberation. Notably, President Obama has expressly disavowed the Scientist-in-Chief model of his predecessor

Presidents, Preemption, and the States

Early in his administration, President Obama issued a memorandum about preemption that ordered federal agencies to fully consider state interests before preempting state laws. The Obama memorandum was a rebuke to the Bush Administration, which had regularly inserted preemption provisions into federal regulations in areas affecting health, consumer safety, and the environment. As a result of preemption, state laws could not be more protective than federal standards, and corporations were spared state tort lawsuits and state regulatory regimes. Preemption not only tends to pit corporate interests against the public welfare, but it can also undermine federalism. There is currently a lively debate as to whether the best institutional actor to foster federalism is the judiciary, Congress, or agencies. Yet despite the centrality of modern Presidents to preemption policy, the role of the President is all but ignored in preemption scholarship. Accordingly, this Article adds the President to the mix. In general, congressional lawmaking about preemption is preferable to presidential preemption because states have more opportunities to influence Congress. Nevertheless, there are many situations in which Congress cannot or will not consider the preemption implications of legislation. Accordingly, this Article explores ways in which the President can effectively ensure a vibrant role for the states in federalism regimes by using his Article II powers to push federal agencies to do a better job of considering state interests when they regulate

Poverty and Communitarianism: Toward a Community Based Welfare System

This Article analyzes how communitarian political theory addresses poverty and impacts American social welfare programs. For several decades, communitarian and liberal philosophers have debated how best to achieve justice through their competing notions of personhood. Whereas liberal theorists stress the values of individual autonomy and state neutrality, communitarians assert that people are socially constituted and that liberalism therefore pays too little attention to the value of community. Yet despite their attempts to articulate a superior form of justice, communitarian theorists either ignore or misunderstand issues related to poverty, as this Article explains. Nevertheless, their insights are helpful in thinking about combating inequity. Not only does communitarian theory support collective responsibility for alleviating economic injustice, but it also provides a framework for moving away from individual blame as an explanation for poverty. Current welfare law is based on the idea that individual behavior and choices cause poverty. As a result, welfare recipients are required to work without adequate social and economic supports to enable self-sufficiency, and most remain mired in poverty. By contrast, this Article describes an alternative, pragmatic vision for welfare that builds upon the social capital that exists within distressed urban communities as a way to improve individual outcomes