Don\u27t Count Them Out Just Yet: Toward the Plausible Use of Race-Preference Student Assignment Plans

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Supreme Court\u27s recent decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 11 could serve to broaden the permissible use of race beyond the boundaries presently permitted by the Court. In this highly fractionalized decision, five justices ultimately agreed that the race-based student assignment plans before their review could not withstand judicial scrutiny. One of these justices, Justice Kennedy, agreed with the plurality\u27s conclusion, but rejected the plurality\u27s assessment that it is never permissible to use race-preference student assignment plans absent evidence of de jure segregation. His concurrence, when read together with the reasoning of the Court\u27s four dissenting justices, offers a plausible scenario under which future courts could find precedential support to uphold challenged race-preference student assignment plans as constitutionally permissible

Finding Success in the Cauldron of Competition: The Effectiveness of Academic Support Programs

This article provides an in-depth analysis of our comprehensive study of the Pace Academic Support Program. Section II of the article discusses the purpose and design of ASPs generally, and Pace Law School\u27s program specifically. Section III describes the research design, methodology, and procedures used for this study. Section IV evaluates and analyzes the findings, with an in-depth analysis of the impact each service yields to ASP students, as well as the statistical significance of such benefits. Section V evaluates the importance of background criteria and the impact that such variables have on ASP participants and non-participants. Section V also discusses whether any of these background variables allow some students to derive a greater benefit from the program than other students participating in the same service. Section VI elaborates on the benefits of participation in an ASP, while Section VII elaborates on the impact of background variables on the performance of students

Word count of teacher's and children's directions in first grade reading workbooks

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Tracing scientific influence

Scientometrics is the field of quantitative studies of scholarly activity. It has been used for systematic studies of the fundamentals of scholarly practice as well as for evaluation purposes. Although advocated from the very beginning the use of scientometrics as an additional method for science history is still under explored. In this paper we show how a scientometric analysis can be used to shed light on the reception history of certain outstanding scholars. As a case, we look into citation patterns of a specific paper by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.Comment: 25 pages LaTe

Social Media, Venue and the Right to a Fair Trial

Judicial failure to recognize social media\u27s influence on juror decision making has identifiable constitutional implications. The Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial demands that courts grant a defendant\u27s change of venue motion when media-generated pretrial publicity invades the unbiased sensibility of those who are asked to sit in judgment. Courts limit publicity suitable for granting a defendant\u27s motion to information culled from newspapers, radio, and television reports. Since about 2014, however, a handful of defendants have introduced social media posts to support their claims of unconstitutional bias in the community. Despite defendants\u27 introduction of negative social media in support of their claims, these same courts have yet to include social media in their evaluation of pretrial publicity bias. But social media is media, and as this article demonstrates, trial court judges faced with deciding change of venue motions have a constitutional obligation to include social media in their evaluations. The collective refusal to treat social media the same as biased television, radio, or print media, suggests an erroneous assumption on the part of lower courts that social media is somehow different. This article identifies three reasons as justification for dismissing social media: social media is too recent a medium to fully understand and analyze, social media is not a legitimate news source, and social media is opinion based. Application of pretrial social media publicity to long-standing Supreme Court change of venue doctrine, coupled with its exploration of scientific and social research on social media influence, debunk these lower court rationalizations. This article demonstrates that the reluctance of courts to consider social media evidence when deciding whether to grant a motion for a change of venue is a violation of any defendant\u27s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. On a larger scale, the article demands that courts embrace our new reality. Social media intersects with criminal justice, and our daily lives, in ways that demand judicial recognition

Toward understanding of the whole developing economic situation

Economic forecasting ; Economics - Study and teaching

Cycles and cyclical imbalances in a changing world

Business cycles

Economic change and economic analysis

Economic conditions - United States ; Economic development

Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists

Recently, the abundance of digital data enabled the implementation of graph based ranking algorithms that provide system level analysis for ranking publications and authors. Here we take advantage of the entire Physical Review publication archive (1893-2006) to construct authors' networks where weighted edges, as measured from opportunely normalized citation counts, define a proxy for the mechanism of scientific credit transfer. On this network we define a ranking method based on a diffusion algorithm that mimics the spreading of scientific credits on the network. We compare the results obtained with our algorithm with those obtained by local measures such as the citation count and provide a statistical analysis of the assignment of major career awards in the area of Physics. A web site where the algorithm is made available to perform customized rank analysis can be found at the address http://www.physauthorsrank.orgComment: Revised version. 11 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. The portal to compute the rankings of scientists is at http://www.physauthorsrank.or