Sharing is Airing: Employee Concerted Activity on Social Media After Hispanics United

Section 7 of the United States’ National Labor Relations Act allows groups of American workers to engage in concerted activity for the purposes of collective bargaining or for “other mutual aid or protection.” This latter protection has been extended in cases such as Lafayette Park Hotel to workers outside the union context. Starting in 2005, the National Labor Relations Board increasingly signaled to employers that concerted activity may take place on social media such as Facebook. However, the Board proper delivered its first written opinion articulating these rules in the 2012 case of Hispanics United of Buffalo, Inc. There, the Board found the employer in question to have committed multiple unfair labor practices when it fired five employees over a series of Facebook posts due to violating the employer’s zero-tolerance no bullying policy. This article argues that the majority opinion of the Board misapplied Lafayette Park Hotel’s test for whether employer conduct “would reasonably tend to chill employees” from legitimate, protected uses of their §7 rights. This article explains the two largest errors in the Board’s decision: (1) a failure to identify a missing, important element for concerted activity protection under §7, the nexus between employee discussion and contemplated group action, and (2) asserting an “inferred group intent” existed that was “implicitly manifest” which linked the employees’ Facebook posts to contemplated group action protected under §7. Members of the entire Board, as well as other legal scholars writing on this topic, have been guilty at different times of simplifying social media to being like a “virtual water cooler” for the 21st century. The facts in Hispanics United show why this analogy does not work: rather than a short face-to-face conversation with a finite, known audience in the space of minutes, it was a series of written messages plopped down in sequential order throughout an entire day, written for an audience of unknown size and make-up that may not even include the co-workers it ostensibly addressed. As Hispanics United helps illustrate, the proper handling of employer retaliation on social media remains the sensible application of the established nexus requirement for finding concerted activity

Discrete and Continuous Optimization for Motion Estimation

The study of motion estimation reaches back decades and has become one of the central topics of research in computer vision. Even so, there are situations where current approaches fail, such as when there are extreme lighting variations, significant occlusions, or very large motions. In this thesis, we propose several approaches to address these issues. First, we propose a novel continuous optimization framework for estimating optical flow based on a decomposition of the image domain into triangular facets. We show how this allows for occlusions to be easily and naturally handled within our optimization framework without any post-processing. We also show that a triangular decomposition enables us to use a direct Cholesky decomposition to solve the resulting linear systems by reducing its memory requirements. Second, we introduce a simple method for incorporating additional temporal information into optical flow using inertial estimates of the flow, which leads to a significant reduction in error. We evaluate our methods on several datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results on MPI-Sintel. Finally, we introduce a discrete optimization framework for optical flow computation. Discrete approaches have generally been avoided in optical flow because of the relatively large label space that makes them computationally expensive. In our approach, we use recent advances in image segmentation to build a tree-structured graphical model that conforms to the image content. We show how the optimal solution to these discrete optical flow problems can be computed efficiently by making use of optimization methods from the object recognition literature, even for large images with hundreds of thousands of labels

Personal Literacy Narrative

With the leadership skills identified in KSU 1101, and a childhood book selected for a literacy essay in English 1101, my fellow KSU student-athletes and I made a trip to Big Shanty Elementary School in Kennesaw, Georgia. Over the course of our visit, we read our favorite children\u27s books to the students and spoke with them about the importance of literacy and leadership. Afterwards, we joined them for lunch in the cafeteria. Through a grant from the KSU Learning Communities Program, we were able to donate more than $350 worth of children’s books to the school, including the books we read to the children. Many thanks to Big Shanty Principal, Ms. Kelly Luscre, for allowing us to visit and read to her students! This project won the Campus and Community Connections Award at the Fall 2017 Learning Communities Academic Extravaganza. The KSU Scholar-Leader-Athlete Learning Community, Prof. Constance Briggs and Prof. Jason Flower

The Effectiveness of Sell Discipline Strategies in Institutional Portfolios

Prospect theory predicts that individuals will be risk seeking when faced with a potential loss. An implication is that investors may be reluctant to sell losing stocks, leading to potentially greater losses. This study explores whether institutional portfolio performance is significantly related to the manager’s stated sell discipline strategy. Six distinct sell discipline approaches are compared using four performance metrics. As predicted by prospect theory, this study finds sell discipline to be a statistically significant factor in performance for all performance metrics. The results also show that the best sell discipline strategy is dependent on which performance metric is used

A Study on the effects of insulation on the glass distillation column of Goddard Hall Lab

The purpose of this project was to improve upon the existing experiment of the distillation column for use in the ChE 2012 and 2014 courses. Based on poor results in previous years of experimentation, the glass column was insulated and operated at various conditions to analyze performance. The results of the experiment showed the insulation setup had little effect on heat loss from the column. This proved to also have little impact on the proper use of the fundamental equations. However, some limiting parameters were established such as: initial ethanol still composition and steam pressure. While specific goals were not met, a better understanding of the column was achieved. Insulation of the column is a step in the right direction, and needs to be researched and improved upon

Drunk And Disorderly: The Origins And Consequences Of Alcoholism At Old Fort Hays

The purpose of this study is to discover the causes and consequences of alcoholism at old Fort Hays. Unlikely to encounter Indians, soldiers longed for entertainment to fill the void of boredom in their lives. Serving as a regional supply center and railroad subsidy, Fort Hays deployed the majority of its soldiers as laborers, serving nearby Hays City, the railroad, and the fort itself. The tedious, routine-driven lifestyle enforced by Fort Hays commanders, in combination with feelings of frontier isolation, often led to resistance in the form of alcohol usage. Utilizing court-martial records, Post Orders, and soldier journals, this thesis argues that the barren circumstances at Fort Hays created an atmosphere ripe for alcohol abuse. Additionally, this study outlines the history of alcohol usage within American culture, the consequences of alcohol abuse in the frontier military, and the effects of excessive alcoholism on both military and Kansas temperance policies

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition: Can We Roast the Pig Without Burning Down the House in Regulating Virtual Child Pornography?

This Note will explore the struggle in the area of child pornography between the state’s legitimate interest in the protection of children and the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Part II provides a brief history of the free speech doctrine as related to the area of child pornography prevention. Part III discusses the circuit split, as well as the facts, procedural history, and the holding of the Supreme Court. Finally, Part IV will examine the effect of the Court’s interpretation of the statute as unconstitutional, explain why the decision was correct, and look at Congress’ recent efforts at new legislation to replace the CPPA

Risk evaluations and condom use decisions of homeless youth: a multi-level qualitative investigation.

BackgroundHomeless youth are at higher risk for sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy than non-homeless youth. However, little is known about how they evaluate risk within the context of their sexual relationships. It is important to understand homeless youths' condom use decisions in light of their sexual relationships because condom use decisions are influenced by relationship dynamics in addition to individual attitudes and event circumstances. It is also important to understand how relationship level factors, sexual event circumstances, and individual characteristics compare and intersect.MethodsTo explore these issues, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 homeless youth in Los Angeles County in 2011 concerning their recent sexual relationships and analyzed the data using systematic methods of team-based qualitative data analysis.ResultsWe identified themes of risk-related evaluations and decisions at the relationship/partner, event, and individual level. We also identified three different risk profiles that emerged from analyzing how different levels of risk intersected across individual respondents. The three profiles included 1) Risk Takers, who consistently engage in risk and have low concern about consequences of risk behavior, 2) Risk Avoiders, who consistently show high concern about protection and consistently avoid risk, and 3) Risk Reactors, those who are inconsistent in their concerns about risk and protection and mainly take risks in reaction to relationship and event circumstances.ConclusionsInterventions targeting homeless youth should reflect multiple levels of risk behavior and evaluation in order to address the diversity of risk profiles. Relationship/partner-, event-, and individual-level factors are all important but have different levels of importance for different homeless youth. Interventions should be tailored to address the most important factor contributing to homeless youth reproductive needs