Data protection, safeguarding and the protection of children's privacy: exploring local authority guidance on parental photography at school events

Should parents be allowed to take photographs at school events? Media reports suggest that increasingly schools are answering no to this question, either prohibiting or imposing stringent restrictions upon such photography. The legal justifications for such restrictions are, however, unclear. Accordingly, in 2013 freedom of information requests were sent to local education authorities across England, Scotland and Wales, the aim being to determine what advice local education authorities provide to schools in relation to parental photography at school events, and to identify how education authorities’ understandings of the law influence the advice they offer. That research reveals that local education authorities’ understandings of the law vary significantly and that where authorities do not fully appreciate the extent of the legal obligations arising this may have significant repercussions for the children concerned

Collective Action Clauses as a Solution to Holdouts in Puerto Rico’s Unique Debt Crisis: Lessons Learned from Argentina

On June 30, 2016, in a controversial and bipartisan effort, the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) was signed into law to address the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis. At the time, Puerto Rico’s government and its agencies had $72 billion in debt. However, Puerto Rico’s status as a U.S. territory disqualified the island from filing for court-arranged bankruptcy under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code and from seeking emergency assistance from the International Monetary Fund. As a result, PROMESA was enacted to create a structure for exercising federal oversight over the fiscal affairs of the territory by establishing an Oversight Board, a process for restructuring debt, and expedited procedures for approving critical infrastructure projects. This Note focuses on PROMESA’s Title VI retroactive inclusion of collective action clauses (CACs). Following the landmark decision in NML Capital Ltd. v. Republic of Argentina, CACs gained widespread appeal because they effectively safeguard against a perverse holdout incentive in the restructuring process. CACs expedite the restructuring process by allowing a supermajority of bondholders to agree to a debt restructuring that is legally binding on all bondholders. This Note concludes that Title VI’s inclusion of CACs is a normatively desirable result. When applied to the Puerto Rican debt crisis, CACs will likely mitigate the risk of holdouts and incentivize vulture funds to come to the bargaining table

Cross-modal investigation of event component omissions in language development: A comparison of signing and speaking children

Language development research suggests a universal tendency for children to be under- informative in narrating motion events by omitting components such as Path, Manner or Ground. However, this assumption has not been tested for children acquiring sign language. Due to the affordances of the visual-spatial modality of sign languages for iconic expression, signing children might omit event components less frequently than speaking children. Here we analysed motion event descriptions elicited from deaf children (4–10 years) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) and their Turkish-speaking peers. While children omitted all types of event components more often than adults, signing children and adults encoded more Path and Manner in TİD than their peers in Turkish. These results provide more evidence for a general universal tendency for children to omit event components as well as a modality bias for sign languages to encode both Manner and Path more frequently than spoken languages

Late sign language exposure does not modulate the relation between spatial language and spatial memory in deaf children and adults

Prior work with hearing children acquiring a spoken language as their first language shows that spatial language and cognition are related systems and spatial language use predicts spatial memory. Here, we further investigate the extent of this relationship in signing deaf children and adults and ask if late sign language exposure, as well as the frequency and the type of spatial language use that might be affected by late exposure, modulate subsequent memory for spatial relations. To do so, we compared spatial language and memory of 8-year-old late-signing children (after 2 years of exposure to a sign language at the school for the deaf) and late-signing adults to their native-signing counterparts. We elicited picture descriptions of Left-Right relations in Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili) and measured the subsequent recognition memory accuracy of the described pictures. Results showed that late-signing adults and children were similar to their native-signing counterparts in how often they encoded the spatial relation. However, late-signing adults but not children differed from their native-signing counterparts in the type of spatial language they used. However, neither late sign language exposure nor the frequency and type of spatial language use modulated spatial memory accuracy. Therefore, even though late language exposure seems to influence the type of spatial language use, this does not predict subsequent memory for spatial relations. We discuss the implications of these findings based on the theories concerning the correspondence between spatial language and cognition as related or rather independent systems