Data visualisation and statistical analysis within the decision making process

Large amounts of data are collected and stored within universities, but little is done to reuse this data to support decision making processes. This paper discusses the use of data visualisation and statistical analysis as methods of making sense of the collected data, analysing it to assess the effects of historical institutional decisions and discusses the use of such techniques to aid decision making processes

The enforcement of child custody orders by contempt remedies

Family law statutes in every state govern the child-related issues that arise at the time of divorce. As a general rule, these statutes require the divorce courts to enter coercive orders that will govern the residential and decisionmaking aspects of post-divorce parent-child relationships. The laws in many states also set out the remedies, including civil and criminal contempt, available to enforce court-ordered parenting plans in the event of parental noncompliance. This area of statutory regulation, which touches the lives of millions of families every year, is in many ways sui generis. At the same time, the coercive nature of the court-ordered terms of post-divorce parenting plans, and the availability of enforcement by civil or criminal contempt remedies, place custody and visitation orders in a larger doctrinal context. This Article analyzed child custody and visitation laws against this backdrop of the law of injunctions and the law of contempt. The family law system assigns priority to the maintenance of established relationships between children and both of their parents following the parents' divorce. This priority leads to certain variations from the general model of injunctive remedies in many child custody cases. For example, divorce courts formulate the initial coercive parenting orders, which become immediately enforceable by contempt remedies upon violation by one parent, without making any determination of prior wrongdoing by either parent. Furthermore, the courts routinely enter coercive orders addressing the residential and decisionmaking aspects of post-divorce parenting, even though the anticipated period of judicial regulation is lengthy (until the children's ages of majority), and despite evidence of likely compliance problems. Finally, in the event of parental noncompliance, judicial enforcement via contempt remedies may involve the entry of orders that vary significantly from the classic contempt model, especially when the contempt remedy is civil rather than criminal in nature. Parenting plan orders typically set out specific responsibilities for both parents, to be performed over a period of years until the children become adults. The nature of these orders, involving recurring patterns of family behavior, and the importance of the interests that they seek to protect have shaped many of the family law doctrines discussed in this Article. These doctrines have molded the general law of injunctions to fit a unique legal context, the creation and enforcement of post-divorce custody orders

Brief Communication: Intertooth and Intrafacet Dental Microwear Variation in an Archaeological Sample of Modern Humans From the Jordan Valley

Dental microwear was recorded in a Bronze-Iron Age (3570–3000 BP) sample of modern humans recovered from Tell es-Sa'idiyeh in the Jordan Valley. Microwear patterns were compared between mandibular molars, and between the upper and lower part of facet 9. The comparison revealed a greater frequency of pits and shorter scratches on the second and third molars, compared to the first. Pit frequency also increased on the lower part of the facet on the first molar, compared to the upper part. These results support previous calls for standardization when selecting a molar type for a diet-microwear study. Otherwise the microwear variations along the tooth row could mask any diet-microwear correlations. The results also suggest that there may be a need to choose a consistent location on a facet in order to enhance comparability among studies

Wedding Cakes and Muslims: Religious Freedom and Politics in contemporary American legal practice

This paper offers a critical examination of two recent American Supreme Court verdicts, Masterpiece Cake Shop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission and Trump v Hawaii. In Masterpiece the Court ruled against the state of Colorado on grounds that religious bias on the part of state officials undermines government’s authority to enforce a policy that might otherwise be constitutional. In Trump the Court ruled in favor of an executive order severely restricting immigration from seven countries, five of which are Muslim majority. Both verdicts raise important issues concerning fairness and religious freedom. After examining some of the central legal issues in these verdicts I offer a critical assessment of the legal arguments, focusing on how political value judgments played a crucial role in determining the legal outcomes

Molecular Investigation of Amphibian Pathogens in Lee County, VA

Undergraduate Basi

"Even as myself, my very own incontrovertible, unexceptional self, I feel I am disguised" : mimicry, masquerade, and the quest for hybridity in the fiction of Salman Rushdie : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

Salman Rushdie's fiction delineates the author's struggle toward an ideal of hybridity that encompasses both individual and nation. The emblematic figure of the migrant plays a large role in Rushdie's oeuvre, demonstrating the process of translation from one medium to another and the way in which Rushdie's combination of disparate elements leads to heterogeneity. Rushdie uses Bakhtin's discourses of the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and masquerade, and Bhabha's discourse of mimicry to undermine notions of fixity and purity, notions which reify difference and lead to destructive conflict and negation rather than to negotiation and productive change. Focussing on The Satanic Verses, but also using material from Midnight's Children Shame, and The Moor's last Sigh, the thesis applies the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha to the fiction of Salman Rushdie in order to show the possibilities for resistance and the production of new subjectivities. The discourses Rushdie uses have traditionally called into question issues of power and are all ambiguous, able to be used by those in possession of power to reinforce their positions, as well as by oppressed people to undermine that power. The discourses demonstrate these ambiguities particularly when used in situations of colonialism and racism, undermining divisions between colonizer and colonized and between races at the same time they reinforce those divisions. Rushdie focuses on setting up and then undermining binary oppositions, moving toward a liminal space of hybridity where terms in opposition merge into something new

Algorithmic and Statistical Perspectives on Large-Scale Data Analysis

In recent years, ideas from statistics and scientific computing have begun to interact in increasingly sophisticated and fruitful ways with ideas from computer science and the theory of algorithms to aid in the development of improved worst-case algorithms that are useful for large-scale scientific and Internet data analysis problems. In this chapter, I will describe two recent examples---one having to do with selecting good columns or features from a (DNA Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) data matrix, and the other having to do with selecting good clusters or communities from a data graph (representing a social or information network)---that drew on ideas from both areas and that may serve as a model for exploiting complementary algorithmic and statistical perspectives in order to solve applied large-scale data analysis problems.Comment: 33 pages. To appear in Uwe Naumann and Olaf Schenk, editors, "Combinatorial Scientific Computing," Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, 201