Safeguarding the ADA’s Antidiscrimination Mandate: Subjecting Arrests to Title II Coverage

The news has been peppered with tragic stories of individuals with disabilities who have been killed or injured following police encounters. In the aftermath of these incidents, as injured parties seek accountability, a question looms: Can arrest proceedings violate the Americans with Disabilities Act? The ADA was enacted to prohibit disability discrimination. The law had an ambitious agenda, supported by broad statutory authority, to ensure equality in all areas of public life for individuals with disabilities. But while the ADA has fostered integration into many aspects of modern life, one area remains deeply contested: arrests. If Congress envisioned that Americans with disabilities would enjoy lives free from discrimination, excluding arrests from ADA coverage undermines the law’s broad promise of protection. In 2015, a Supreme Court opinion raised but failed to resolve this very issue, leaving an important question unanswered. This Note examines whether arrest proceedings must comply with the ADA and argues that they should. It then proposes comprehensive disability training as a tool to aid ADA compliance and avoid discriminatory arrest proceedings

Performance Analysis for Mesh and Mesh-Spectral Archetype Applications

This document outlines a simple method for benchmarking a parallel communication library and for using the results to model the performance of applications developed with that communication library. We use compositional performance analysis - decomposing a parallel program into its modular parts and analyzing their respective performances - to gain perspective on the performance of the whole program. This model is useful for predicting parallel program execution times for different types of program archetypes, (e.g., mesh and mesh-spectral) using communication libraries built with different message-passing schemes (e.g., Fortran M and Fortran with MPI) running on different architectures (e.g., IBM SP2 and a network of Pentium personal computers)

Systematic composition of distributed objects: Processes and sessions

We consider a system with the infrastructure for the creation and interconnection of large numbers of distributed persistent objects. This system is exemplified by the Internet: potentially, every appliance and document on the Internet has both persistent state and the ability to interact with large numbers of other appliances and documents on the Internet. This paper elucidates the characteristics of such a system, and proposes the compositional requirements of its corresponding infrastructure. We explore the problems of specifying, composing, reasoning about and implementing applications in such a system. A specific concern of our research is developing the infrastructure to support structuring distributed applications by using sequential, choice and parallel composition, in the anarchic environment where application compositions may be unforeseeable and interactions may be unknown prior to actually occurring. The structuring concepts discussed are relevant to a wide range of distributed applications; our implementation is illustrated with collaborative Java processes interacting over the Internet, but the methodology provided can be applied independent of specific platforms

Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends

Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and 'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology

Teaching Archetypal Design with an Electronic Textbook

How can parallel programming be made tractable for students in high schools and community colleges, to programmers in four-year colleges, to commercial and government employees, to interested independent users learning on their own, and as CASE tools for professional software designers? The computer science community must address this question if the ability of programmers to harness the power of parallel systems is to maintain pace with technology advances forthcoming in parallel systems. This paper addresses some of the issues of bringing parallel programming to the people, ranging from newly developing programmers with little experience on any computer to seasoned programmers of single-processor machines. We aim not only to enable people to use more powerful computers, but also to enable people to use computers more powerfully, by nurturing the techniques that enable them to develop efficient, correct code with relative ease. This paper briefly presents the concept of an Archetype, a software engineering methodology developed at the Caltech for patterns of problem solving, and for providing media for quick reference and natural software reuse. We then describe eText, an interactive multimedia electronic textbook that facilitates the teaching of, navigating through, and referring to Archetypes. Initial experience with Archetypes and the electronic textbook suggests that this approach to teaching parallel programming can aid computer users in the immediate future

Application Development using Compositional Performance Analysis

A parallel programming archetype [Cha94, CMMM95] is an abstraction that captures the common features of a class of problems with a similar computational structure and combines them with a parallelization strategy to produce a pattern of dataflow and communication. Such abstractions are useful in application development, both as a conceptual framework and as a basis for tools and techniques. The efficiency of a parallel program can depend a great deal on how its data and tasks are decomposed and distributed. This thesis describes a simple performance evaluation methodology that includes an analytic model for predicting the performance of parallel and distributed computations developed for multicomputer machines and networked personal computers. This analytic model can be supplemented by a simulation infrastructure for application writers to use when developing parallel programs using archetypes. These performance evaluation tools were developed with the following restricted goal in mind: We require accuracy of the analytic model and simulation infrastructure only to the extent that they suggest directions for the programmer to make the appropriate optimizations. This restricted goal sacrifices some accuracy, but makes the tools simpler and easier to use. A programmer can use these tools to design programs with decomposition and distribution specialized to a given machine configuration. By instantiating a few architecture-based parameters, the model can be employed in the performance analysis of data-parallel applications, guiding process generation, communication, and mapping decisions. The model is language-independent and machine-independent; it can be applied to help programmers make decisions about performance-affecting parameters as programs are ported across architectures and languages. Furthermore, the model incorporates both platform-specific and application-specific aspects, and it allows programmers to experiment with tradeoffs better than either strictly simulation-based or purely theoretical models. In addition, the model was designed to be simple. In summary, this thesis outlines a simple method for benchmarking a parallel communication library and for using the results to model the performance of applications developed with that communication library. We use compositional performance analysis - decomposing a parallel program into its modular parts and analyzing their respective performances - to gain perspective on the performance of the whole program. This model is useful for predicting parallel program execution times for different types of program archetypes (e.g., mesh and mesh-spectral), using communication libraries built with different message-passing schemes (e.g., Fortran M and Fortran with MPI) running on different architectures (e.g., IBM SP2 and a network of Pentium personal computers)

Oral Hypoglycemic Agents

In conclusion, comment is made on the findings of the University Group Diabetes Program (UGDP). The purpose of the UGDP was to determine whether or not control of blood glucose levels would help to prevent or delay vascular disease in non-insulin-requiring diabetics. After 8 1/2 years of follow-up at 12 university-affiliated treatment centers, The findings of the study indicate that the combination of diet and tolbutamide therapy is no more effective than diet alone in prolonging life. Moreover, the findings suggest that tolbutamide and diet may be less effective than diet alone or diet and insulin, at least insofar as cardiovascular mortality is concerned. The debate on the validity of this study still rages. A number of the criticisms leveled against the study by diabetologists, other clinicians, epidemiologists, and statisticians are discussed. These include inappropriate patient selection and randomization, higher risk factors at the outset of the study, manipulation of electrocardiographic data, risk factors such as smoking and hypertension not measured or monitored, use of fixed dosage of drug, clinic preponderance regarding mortality (it has been alleged that the bulk of tolbutamide mortality occurred in four clinics, Birmingham, Boston, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis), use of patient data against computerized data, neglect of appropriate vascular history, neglect of co-morbidity, contradictory clinical studies here and abroad, and the danger of extrapolation of the UGDP findings to other sulfonylurea agents

Why Control Diabetes?

The definition of diabetes control varies widely among specialists of the disease. Proponents of good control believe that the goals of appropriate therapy for diabetes should include an all-out effort to obtain levels of fasting and postprandial blood glucose as close to those in the non-diabetic as possible. Certainly, good control has been proven to accomplish the following: 1. prevention of ketoacidosis; 2. prevention of severe hypoglycemia; 3. decrease in perinatal mortality and morbidity; 4. promotion of normal growth and development of the juvenile diabetic; 5. prevention of, or inhibition of, infection. The evidence that hyperglycemia is responsible for vascular complications, particularly micro-vascular disease, and that good control will prevent or inhibit the rapidity of the development of this pathologic process, or even reverse it, is the basis of this presentation

The associations of adipokines with selected markers of the renin-angiotensinogen-aldosterone system: the multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis.

Among obese individuals, increased sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity results in increased renin and aldosterone production, as well as renal tubular sodium reabsorption. This study determined the associations between adipokines and selected measures of the renin-angiotensinogen-aldosterone system (RAAS). The sample consisted of 1970 men and women from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis who were free of clinical cardiovascular disease at baseline and had blood assayed for adiponectin, leptin, plasma renin activity (PRA) and aldosterone. The mean age was 64.7 years and 50% were female. The mean (s.d.) PRA and aldosterone were 1.45 (0.56) ng ml(-1) and 150.1 (130.5) pg ml(-1), respectively. After multivariable adjustment, a 1-s.d. increment of leptin was associated with a 0.55 ng ml(-1) higher PRA and 8.4 pg ml(-1) higher aldosterone (P<0.01 for both). Although adiponectin was not significantly associated with PRA levels, the same increment in this adipokine was associated with lower aldosterone levels (-5.5 pg ml(-1), P=0.01). Notably, the associations between aldosterone and both leptin and adiponectin were not materially changed with additional adjustment for PRA. Exclusion of those taking antihypertensive medications modestly attenuated the associations. The associations between leptin and both PRA and aldosterone were not different by gender but were significantly stronger among non-Hispanic Whites and Chinese Americans than African and Hispanic Americans (P<0.01). The findings suggest that both adiponectin and leptin may be relevant to blood pressure regulation via the RAAS, in that the associations appear to be robust to antihypertension medication use and that the associations are likely different by ethnicity

Review of \u3ci\u3eArt as Performance, Story as Criticism: Reflections on Native Literary Aesthetics\u3c/i\u3e by Craig S. Womack

Art as Performance, Story as Criticism is a grand experiment. In it, Womack plays with the possibilities of critical form as well as analytic content. One of the commonplaces of Native literary studies is that knowledge is made through story, so artistic production should count as a means of studying the world. Following this line of thought, Womack here blends story with more conventional scholarship, creating a multilayered counterpoint that conveys more the sense of an opening to a conversation than the self-enclosure that can emanate from thesis-driven arguments. In this vein, the pieces collected here-ranging from new short stories and a play to extended engagements with still under-examined writers like E. Pauline Johnson, Alexander Posey, Lynn Riggs, Durango Mendoza, and Beth Brant-prove more evocative than conclusive, raising questions and tracing errancies rather than following a single conceptual through line. Both the book\u27s greatest strength and its weakness, this organizational strategy presents a series of linked, open-ended challenges to critical conventions in the field, while also potentially leaving the reader feeling a bit disoriented as to where to go from here