Blackness as Delinquency

This is one of the first law review article to analyze both the role of ―blackness‖ in shaping the first juvenile court and the black community’s response to the court’s jurisprudence. This Article breaks new ground on two fronts. First, it considers the first juvenile court’s treatment of black youth within the context of the heightened racial oppression immediately following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Second, this Article recovers the lost story of the black women’s club movement’s response to race issues within the juvenile court movement. In doing so, this Article reconsiders the history of the national black women’s club movement within a new framework—that of black women as advocates for juvenile and criminal justice reform. Furthermore, a major issue that these child savers faced remains one that scholars of the juvenile court’s early history have not fully explored: race. Thus, this Article makes two main arguments. First, from its inception, the juvenile court perpetuated existing racial stereotypes about blackness and delinquency and enforced societal notions of race, gender and class stratification. Second, the National Association of Colored Women (―NACW‖) responded by placing criminal and juvenile justice issues as a major component of its civil rights agenda. From 1899 to 1930, the NACW’s efforts to challenge stereotypes about black delinquency impacted the development of the juvenile court system and its jurisprudence. NACW’s particular interest in juvenile justice sheds new light on how black female activists shaped the national discourse on race and crime and formulated their own strategies for juvenile justice reform

Sex Slavery in the Lone Star State: Does the Texas Human Trafficking Legislation of 2011 Protect Minors?

This Article argues that, while Texas has made great strides in its movement to combat child trafficking, there are three major areas in which further reform is needed. First, Texas should provide stronger protections for not only minors trafficked for sex, but also those trafficked for labor. Second, Texas law must shift its emphasis from prosecution of traffickers to a more balanced approach that also prioritizes the protection of minors and the prevention of future trafficking crimes against them. Third, Texas should adopt safe harbor provisions that reflect a child welfare response toward prostituted minor

Establishing the Impact that Gamified Homework Portals Can Have on Students\u27 Academic Motivation

This research paper describes the investigation of the impact a gamified learning environment has on students’ motivation to complete course homework within a second semester freshman year design course. There are many benefits to including a gamified learning environment within a classroom including that it allows for students to learn through failure, and provides many different paths for student success.(1) Previous studies on gamified learning environments have shown improvement in student’s engagement in classrooms, as well as learning gains (2,3) although there has been little work done on the effect gamified learning environments can have on student motivation. In this study, two classes of freshman engineering students completed their homework through the use of a gamified homework platform. The gamified homework portal was designed around quests (or individual activities) allowing for students to select the quests that interested them the most in the pursuit of achieving a final point score. Quests were scaffolded to ensure that students were meeting the minimum learning objectives for the course and progressively being exposed to content of higher difficulty. Students were also not penalized for failure and given unlimited opportunities to resubmit quests to achieve the benchmarks set for the course. As additional incentive, students could earn badges, awards and achievements based off of the quality of their work, and the quests they selected to complete. To determine the impact that the gamified homework platform had on students’ motivation, students were asked to complete the Jones MUSIC Inventory (4,5) and participate in an end of semester focus group. The Jones MUSIC Inventory measures academic motivation and provides a perspective on students’ motivation towards completing course objectives. 4,5 Focus group results were analyzed using a grounded emergent qualitative analysis approach by two analysts. The categories were then cross-referenced with the Jones MUSIC model (4,5) to determine alignment of the categories observed with students’ academic motivation. Overall, the results have shown that the gamified learning environment had relatively neutral impact on students’ academic motivation towards homework

A Task Analysis of Static Binary Reverse Engineering for Security

Software is ubiquitous in society, but understanding it, especially without access to source code, is both non-trivial and critical to security. A specialized group of cyber defenders conducts reverse engineering (RE) to analyze software. The expertise-driven process of software RE is not well understood, especially from the perspective of workflows and automated tools. We conducted a task analysis to explore the cognitive processes that analysts follow when using static techniques on binary code. Experienced analysts were asked to statically find a vulnerability in a small binary that could allow for unverified access to root privileges. Results show a highly iterative process with commonly used cognitive states across participants of varying expertise, but little standardization in process order and structure. A goal-centered analysis offers a different perspective about dominant RE states. We discuss implications about the nature of RE expertise and opportunities for new automation to assist analysts using static techniques