The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment

The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, drafted by a group of academic law library directors, was promulgated in February 2009. It calls for two things: (1) open access publication of law school–published journals; and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions available in “stable, open, digital formats.” The two years since the Statement was issued have seen increased publication of law journals in openly available electronic formats, but little movement toward all-electronic publication. This article discusses the issues raised by the Durham Statement, the current state of law journal publishing, and directions forward

Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy to Improve School Performance of High School Students

This study explored the effect of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) on the school functioning of high school students with trauma histories. The lifelong impact of trauma exposure across multiple domains of functioning is well documented. However, there is a gap between research and practice in school environments. Teachers in this study were taught trauma-sensitive teaching practices and DBT strategies to improve their ability to understand student emotional dysregulation, reduce challenging classroom behaviors, and improve academic performance. Students were taught DBT strategies in mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal relations designed to reduce disciplinary referrals, increase use of positive coping skills, and improve measures of resiliency. Results indicate teachers typically receive no training on the causes and impact of trauma prior to beginning their teaching career and feel ill-equipped to teach students with trauma histories. Teachers were more likely to identify challenging student behavior as a deliberate action or due to systemic issues such as school policy and procedures, rather than due to trauma exposure. Upon completion of the intervention, the number of disciplinary referrals students received for inappropriate language and defiance significantly increased, and the percentage of assignments completed by students participating in the DBT sessions significantly improved. Students reported increased use of positive coping skills, combined with a decrease in negative coping skills. Preresiliency and postresiliency measures found increased levels of adaptability, trust, tolerance, relatedness, and comfort, whereas emotional reactivity and impairment decreased. No change was found in levels of support, self-efficacy, optimism, or support

Proceed with Caution. The Pitfalls and Potential of AI and Education

The arguments for the integration of AI into education are multiple and multifaceted. AI has permeated everyday life, and there is a growing number of AI-assisted educational technologies that are now being implemented in classrooms worldwide. Like any tool, AI can be used to better society but this is not a given. From a humanistic perspective, citizens need to understand their roles and rights with respect to AI, recognize when they are unfairly disadvantaged by AI, know the avenues of recourse, and above all become conscientious users of AI products—particularly AI products designed for education. This chapter argues that what we need is to identify the right kind of AI and apply it in the right way (in particular, with an eye to human rights) if we are to leverage technology for the common good. A robust debate over the content of AI curricula and the role of AI-assisted applications in classrooms is critical. On the curriculum side, stakeholders should be consulted to ensure human, social and economic needs are met, and that the technological and humanistic dimensions are equally valued. In classrooms, rather than starting from the technologies, we should start with a genuine education for grand challenges, which educators are usually best placed to identify

Relating satellite imagery with grain protein content

Satellite images, captured during the growing seasons of barley, sorghum and wheat were analysed to establish a relationship between the spectral response and the harvested grain protein content. This study was conducted near Jimbour (approx. 151°10’E and 27°05’S) in southern Queensland. Grain protein contents of the geo-referenced samples, collected manually during the harvest, were determined using a laboratory-based near-infrared spectrophotometer. Grain protein contents in grain varied between 7.4–15.2% in barley, 6.2– 10.6% in sorghum and 13.1–15.6% in wheat. The Landsat images of 18 September 1999 (a week after barley flowering), 5 March 2000 (three weeks before sorghum harvest), and 15 August 2001 (two weeks before wheat flowering) were analysed. Additionally, an ASTER image of 24 September 2001 (three weeks after wheat flowering) was also examined. Digital numbers, extracted from raw image bands and derived indices, were correlated with grain protein contents. The grain protein content in barley was correlated strongly (r>0.80) with bands 2, 4 and 5 of the Landsat scene, first principal component, and the tasselled cap brightness and greenness indices. Similarly, wheat protein content was well correlated (r>0.75) with the near infrared band (band 4) of the Landsat scene, first principal component, and the tasselled cap brightness, greenness and wetness indices. The band 3 (near infrared band) of the ASTER image, captured well after flowering, was moderately correlated (r<0.5) with the protein content of the wheat. However, the grain protein content in sorghum was found poorly correlated (r<0.20) with Landsat image bands and indices. Results indicate that it may be possible to use certain bands and indices of the satellite images, captured around the time of flowering, to predict grain protein content of barley and wheat crops

Case Report: Thyrotoxic Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis

Thyrotoxic crisis, or thyroid storm, is an acute, life threatening event caused by hyperthyroidism with mortality up to 8-25% that can present with multi-system organ involvement. It is a rare, but well studied complication in the emergency department but can lead to further, less common complications. In this study we will discuss a case of thyrotoxic hypokalemic periodic paralysis. Thyrotoxic hypokalemic periodic paralysis (TPP) most commonly affects Asian men. The key features of the syndrome include acute onset of hypokalemia and paralysis. The hypokalemic aspect of the disorder is secondary to the shift intracellularly by thyroid hormones’ sensitization of Na+/K+-ATPase as opposed to body\u27s depletion of potassium. TPP has an incidence of 2% in patients with thyrotoxicosis of any cause. The paralysis occurs because a large majority of the body’s potassium is located in skeletal muscle. When the potassium moves intracellularly the muscles are unable to contract in their normal fashion

Fog and Edge Oriented Embedded Enterprise Systems Patterns: Towards Distributed Enterprise Systems That Run on Edge and Fog Nodes

Enterprise software systems enable enterprises to enhance business and management reporting tasks in enterprise settings. Internet of Things (IoT) focuses on making interactions possible between a number of network-connected physical devices. Prominence of IoT sensors and multiple business drivers have created a contemporary need for enterprise software systems to interact with IoT devices. Business process implementations, business logic and microservices have traditionally been centralized in enterprise systems. Constraints like privacy, latency, bandwidth, connectivity and security have posed a new set of architectural challenges that can be resolved by designing enterprise systems differently so that parts of business logic and processes can run on fog and edge devices to improve privacy, minimize communication bandwidth and promote low-latency business process execution. This paper aims to propose a set of patterns for the expansion of previously-centralized enterprise systems to the edge of the network. Patterns are supported by a case study for contextualization and analysis

The Newsman\u27s Privilege: Protection of Confidential Associations and Private Communications

The purpose of this comment is to determine whether the confidential associations and-or private communications of a newsman are privileged

Optimization within a Unified Transformation Framework

Programmers typically want to write scientific programs in a high level language with semantics based on a sequential execution model. To execute efficiently on a parallel machine, however, a program typically needs to contain explicit parallelism and possibly explicit communication and synchronization. So, we need compilers to convert programs from the first of these forms to the second. There are two basic choices to be made when parallelizing a program. First, the computations of the program need to be distributed amongst the set of available processors. Second, the computations on each processor need to be ordered. My contribution has been the development of simple mathematical abstractions for representing these choices and the development of new algorithms for making these choices. I have developed a new framework that achieves good performance by minimizing communication between processors, minimizing the time processors spend waiting for messages from other processors, and ordering data accesses so as to exploit the memory hierarchy. This framework can be used by optimizing compilers, as well as by interactive transformation tools. The state of the art for vectorizing compilers is already quite good, but much work remains to bring parallelizing compilers up to the same standard. The main contribution of my work can be summarized as improving this situation by replacing existing ad hoc parallelization techniques with a sound underlying foundation on which future work can be built. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-96-93