Without More, There Is No More: Standing and Racial Gerrymandering in Wittman v. Personhuballah

In drawing election maps, racial gerrymandering separates minority groups, packing them into specific districts to weaken the power of their votes. In Wittman v. Personhuballah, the Supreme Court held that a group of Virginia congressmen that neither lived in, nor represented a district did not have standing to defend gerrymandering in that district. Although the Court had the opportunity to address the substantive issues in the case, it did not, leaving a substantial gap in racial gerrymandering jurisprudence. This commentary explores the consequences of this gap and argues that the Court should not find a legally cognizable right in a politician maintaining the racial makeup of his district, because it would result in non-resident politicians with greater rights than non-resident citizens, and it would further incentivize racial gerrymandering in the drawing of electoral maps

Discovery of Federal Income Tax Returns and the New “Qualified” Privileges

The notion of scale selection refers to methods for estimating characteristic scales in image data and for automatically determining locally appropriate scales in a scale-space representation, so as to adapt subsequent processing to the local image structure and compute scale invariant image features and image descriptors. An essential aspect of the approach is that it allows for a bottom-up determination of inherent scales of features and objects without first recognizing them or delimiting alternatively segmenting them from their surrounding. Scale selection methods have also been developed from other viewpoints of performing noise suppression and exploring top-down information.QC 20130111</p

HLOC: Hints-Based Geolocation Leveraging Multiple Measurement Frameworks

Geographically locating an IP address is of interest for many purposes. There are two major ways to obtain the location of an IP address: querying commercial databases or conducting latency measurements. For structural Internet nodes, such as routers, commercial databases are limited by low accuracy, while current measurement-based approaches overwhelm users with setup overhead and scalability issues. In this work we present our system HLOC, aiming to combine the ease of database use with the accuracy of latency measurements. We evaluate HLOC on a comprehensive router data set of 1.4M IPv4 and 183k IPv6 routers. HLOC first extracts location hints from rDNS names, and then conducts multi-tier latency measurements. Configuration complexity is minimized by using publicly available large-scale measurement frameworks such as RIPE Atlas. Using this measurement, we can confirm or disprove the location hints found in domain names. We publicly release HLOC's ready-to-use source code, enabling researchers to easily increase geolocation accuracy with minimum overhead.Comment: As published in TMA'17 conference: http://tma.ifip.org/main-conference

EFFECTS OF COACHING IN THE DETECTION OF MALINGERED ATTENTION DEFICIT/HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER IN A COLLEGE SAMPLE

College students may feign symptoms of ADHD to gain access to stimulant medications and academic accommodations. Research has shown that it can be difficult to discriminate malingered from genuine symptomatology, especially when evaluations are based only on self-report. The present study investigated whether the average student given no additional information could feign ADHD as successfully as those who were coached on symptoms. Similar to Jasinski, Harp, Berry, Shandera-Ochsner, Mason, & Ranseen (2011) and other research on feigned ADHD, an extensive battery of neuropsychological, symptom validity, and self-report tests was administered. Undergraduates with no history of ADHD or other psychiatric disorders were randomly assigned to one of two simulator groups: a coached group which was given information about ADHD symptoms or a non-coached group which was given no such information. Both simulator groups were asked to feign ADHD. Their performance was compared to a genuine ADHD group and a nonclinical group asked to respond honestly. Self-report, neuropsychological, and effort test performance is discussed in the context of the effect of coaching and regarding its implications for ADHD evaluations

When is an acquisition by a 'trust' for GST purposes?

The Australian GST regime treats trusts as entities separate from trustees. This article deals with the important but deceptively complex matter of when an acquisition is by a trust and when it is by a trustee. There are no cases on the issue and it is submitted that the Commissioners comments do not provide satisfactory guidance. For this reason an attempt is made to develop some guiding principles that are both practical and minimise the conceptual dissonance between the GST regime and the law of trusts

Construction of a modular arsenic resistance operon in <i>E. coli</i> and the production of arsenic nanoparticles.

Arsenic is a widespread contaminant of both land and water around the world. Current methods of decontamination such as phytoremediation and chemical adsorbents can be resource and time intensive, and may not be suitable for some areas such as remote communities where cost and transportation are major issues. Bacterial decontamination, with strict controls preventing environmental release, may offer a cost-effective alternative or provide a financial incentive when used in combination with other remediation techniques. In this study we have produced E. coli strains containing arsenic resistance genes from a number of sources, overexpressing them and testing their effects on arsenic resistance. While the lab E. coli strain JM109 (the wild-type) is resistant up to 20 mM sodium arsenate the strain containing our plasmid pEC20 is resistant up to 80 mM. When combined with our construct pArsRBCC arsenic-containing nanoparticles were observed at the cell surface; the elements of pEC20 and pArsRBCC were therefore combined in a modular construct, pArs, in order to evaluate the roles and synergistic effects of the components of the original plasmids in arsenic resistance and nanoparticle formation. We also investigated the use of introducing the lac operator in order to more tightly control expression from pArs. We demonstrate that our strains are able to reduce toxic forms of arsenic into stable, insoluble metallic As(0), providing one way to remove arsenate contamination, and which may also be of benefit for other heavy metals