Learning from the Dead: How Burial Practices in Roman Britain Reflect Changes in Belief and Society

This paper begins by examining the burial traditions of the Iron age Britons and Classical Romans to see how these practices reflect their societal values and belief systems. The funerary methods of both the Britons and Romans are then analyzed following the Roman occupation of Britain in 43 AD to see how these practices changed once the two groups came into contact with each other. The findings show that rather than Romanization, there is a hybridization of burial practices which incorporated and reflect both Roman and British beliefs and values

The ethics of access: Towards an equal slice of the pie

Ethics is a system of moral principles and of values relating to the Tightness and wrongness of certain actions. When two diametrically opposed obligations conflict with one another, an ethical dilemma occurs. It is settled only by weighing and evaluating the importance of the conflicting obligations. The moral conviction of a democratic society supportive of freedom of information versus the welfare of that public might well be an example of two opposing obligations. Equal access to information by the people versus the provision of relevant and friendly information is another wordset of potentially opposing obligations. The free library for the good of the public versus quality library services is also a contender. It is not so opposing if one considers the statement of Alphonse Trezza (1986) during his tenure with the National Commission on Library and Information Services (NCLIS): "The commitment to public good requires the library to constantly improve quality of services, the effective use of technology, and the efficiency of the operation" (p. 52). Providing access and fulfilling the needs of the majority versus providing access and fulfilling the needs of the minority is yet another opposing set. If one adds the words "equal opportunity" then the impact of this statement upon the library is significant.published or submitted for publicatio

A Patent Reformist Supreme Court and Its Unearthed Precedent

How is it that the Supreme Court, a generalist court, is leading a project of innovation reform in our times while the court of appeals established to encourage innovation is having its precedent stricken down time and again? This decade the Supreme Court has issued far more patent law decisions than in any decade since the passage of the Patent Act of 1952. In doing so, the Supreme Court has overruled the Federal Circuit in roughly threequarters of the patent cases in which the Supreme Court has issued opinions. In most of these cases, the Supreme Court has established rules that favor accused infringers over patent holders, and the result has been an era of patent litigation reform far more impactful than anything Congress has achieved. Scholars have observed that the Supreme Court tends to overrule Federal Circuit decisions that (1) impose rigid legal rules as opposed to flexible standards; (2) adopt special rules for patent law cases rather than applying general principles of law and equity applicable to all federal cases; and/or (3) fail to grant sufficient discretion to the district courts. This paper examines the twenty-eight Supreme Court opinions overruling the Federal Circuit since 2000 and quantifies their rationales to discover that, while these reasons are often invoked, the Supreme Court’s most common rationale is that the Federal Circuit has disregarded or cabined its older precedent from before the 1982 creation of the Federal Circuit, from before the 1952 Patent Act, and even from before the 20th Century. The Court has relied on this rationale in twenty-one of the twenty-eight cases. The paper then seeks to probe beneath the surface level patterns to discover the deeper roots of the discord between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit. Constitutional law scholars have observed that the Supreme Court’s policy preferences are the primary, unstated motivation behind its decisions. The Court writes opinions that rely on the flexible tools of precedent and stare decisis in order to implement its policy choices while maintaining its institutional reputation for neutrality. The Court does this by influencing precedent vitality; the Court selects which of its precedent to rely upon and augment and which of its precedent to distinguish and narrow. This process runs in direct conflict with the Federal Circuit, a court that was originally conceived and viewed by some of its members as a court intended to bring uniformity to patent law in a way that would reinvigorate patent rights. The Federal Circuit would implement the 1952 Patent Act in a way that would draw patent law out of the nineteenth century. But for the Supreme Court, the 1952 Act was a mere codification of patent law as developed by the courts for over a hundred years. Hence, the Federal Circuit seeks to influence precedent vitality at direct cross-purposes with the Supreme Court. The result of the Supreme Court’s project has been a new era of common law patent reform in favor of accused infringers, which is gaining momentum as the Supreme Court decides far more patent cases than it has since the passage of the Patent Act of 1952

AJAE Appendix: The Profitability of Transitioning to Organic Grain Crops in Indiana

The material contained herein is supplementary to the article named in the title and published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management,

Descriptions of new fishes from Panama

The following preliminary descriptions are of new fishes obtained by the authors during their first season's work on the Biological Survey of the Canal Zone, the ichthyological work of which is being conducted cooperatively by the Field Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution. (2 page document

Newtonian versus relativistic cosmology

We show how the relativistic matter and velocity power spectra behave in different gauges. We construct a new gauge where both spectra coincide with Newtonian theory on all scales. However, in this gauge there are geometric quantities present which do not exist in Newtonian theory, for example the local variation of the Hubble parameter. Comparing this quantity to second order Newtonian quantities, we find that Newtonian theory is inaccurate on scales larger than 10 Mpc. This stresses the importance of relativistic corrections to Newtonian cosmological N-body simulations on these scales.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review D (Sept. 2012