Celebrate citation: flipping the pedagogy of plagiarism in Qatar

Educators and administrators at American branch campuses in Qatar continually find themselves distraught by the number of academic integrity violations each semester. Despite dire warnings and life-changing sanctions, students continue to breach the honour codes at their respective institutions. This article offers one possible solution by transforming the pedagogy of plagiarism into a positive teaching opportunity in the classroom

Introduction : Brexit and Scots law

Leaving the European Union will be the most significant systemic change to Scots law since the creation of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. The essays in this special Analysis section survey some (though by no means all) of the key aspects of the legal system likely to be affected by Brexit. In some of these areas, such as agriculture and fisheries, EU law has been the central source of legal regulation since we joined what was then the EEC in 1973. In other areas, EU law has played a role alongside domestic regulation, in greater or lesser degrees. At the time of writing (October 2017) – some 16 months after the EU referendum and seven months after formal notification of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the EU was given under Article 50 TEU – it is surprising just how much uncertainty there still is about the likely effects of Brexit. The articles in this section identify three key sources of uncertainty

Legislative quality and the Scottish Parliament

Writing in The Scotsman in July 2016, Alistair Bonnington made the startling claim that the Scottish Parliament produces “the lowest quality legislation in Europe”.1 Such hyperbole is easy to dismiss; given the linguistic challenges, and the varying roles and styles of legislation in different legal systems, how would one even begin to make such a comparative assessment? Nevertheless, complaints about the rigour of Holyrood's legislative process and the quality of its legislative output, usually by comparison with Westminster, have dogged the Parliament since its earliest days, though criticisms are more often based on assertion and anecdote than detailed analysis. This is perhaps unsurprising given that measuring the quality of legislation and the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny are more complex tasks than might be thought.2 This note aims to shed some light on the debate by considering the different things we might mean when talking about “good” or “bad” legislation and by identifying what we know – and, more importantly, what we do not know – about Holyrood's performance measured against these criteria

High-speed observation of sprite streamers

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.Sprites are optical emissions in the mesosphere mainly at altitudes 50–90 km. They are caused by the sudden re-distribution of charge due to lightning in the troposphere which can produce electric fields in the mesosphere in excess of the local breakdown field. The resulting optical displays can be spectacular and this has led to research into the physics and chemistry involved. Imaging at faster than 5,000 frames per second has revealed streamer discharges to be an important and very dynamic part of sprites, and this paper will review high-speed observations of sprite streamers. Streamers are initiated in the 65–85 km altitude range and observed to propagate both down and up at velocities normally in the 106–5 9 107 m/s range. Sprite streamer heads are small, typically less than a few hundreds of meters, but very bright and appear in images much like stars with signals up to that expected of a magnitude -6 star. Many details of streamer formation have been modeled and successfully compared with observations. Streamers frequently split into multiple sub-streamers. The splitting is very fast. To resolve details will require framing rates higher than the maximum 32,000 fps used so far. Sprite streamers are similar to streamers observed in the laboratory and, although many features appear to obey simple scaling laws, recent work indicates that there are limits to the scaling.Research funding has been provided by the US National Science Foundation grants to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the US Air Force Academy, and by DARPA through a grant to the University of Florida

The constitutional implications of the rise of the SNP

The UK Constitutional Law Association blog has asked constitutional lawyers to review the main party manifestos ahead of the May elections, drawing out key constitutional proposals. Below Aileen McHarg discussed the constitutional implications of the rise of the SNP

Constitutional law

The impact of EU membership on the UK constitution has been profound. In the Miller (Article 50) case, the Supreme Court described the effect of the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA) – the means by which EU membership was given effect within the UK – as being unprecedented in constitutional terms. Not only did it provide for a new source of law, and a new constitutional process for making law in the UK, it also fundamentally changed the UK’s system of government and the way in which we think about the location and exercise of public power

Energy

The Scottish Government has strong energy policy ambitions, particularly regarding the promotion of low carbon energy, but relatively weak energy policy competence, making it vulnerable to decisions taken at UK level which conflict with its policy objectives. This was illustrated in 2015, when the newly-elected Conservative Government withdrew subsidies from onshore windfarms, cancelled funding for carbon capture and storage demonstration projects, and ended energy efficiency programmes

Crown Estate devolution

One of the Smith Commission's more significant recommendations was that responsibility for managing the Crown Estate in Scotland, and the revenue generated from it, should be transferred to the Scottish Parliament.1 The Crown Estate is currently managed on a UK-wide basis by the Crown Estate Commissioners under the Crown Estate Act 1961 (“CEA”). Its origins date back to 1760, when George III surrendered the revenues from Crown lands to parliament in return for support via the civil list, an arrangement confirmed by each subsequent monarch. Today the Crown Estate consists of a mixture of hereditary Crown property rights, more recent rights vested in the Crown by statute, and modern property acquisitions. It does not comprise the entirety of Crown property rights, nor is it the personal property of the sovereign. It is, in effect, a publicly-owned property business, the revenues from which accrue to the UK Treasury