The First Amendment and Military Justice: Threats to Political Neutrality

This backdrop illustrates a throughline that runs throughout, and creates tension within, the Military Justice system. On the one hand, there is a need to protect the individual rights of servicemembers. This concern is driven (in part) by the intuition reflected in Judge O’Connor’s opening sentences—those sworn to protect constitutional liberties should surely enjoy the benefits of that which they protect. On the other, individual rights protections must yield, to some degree, to the needs of military life and military exigency. Of course, to some degree is the space in which debate and maneuverability resides. But while discretionary space certainly exists (resting first and foremost with Congress), from World War I onward reform efforts have moved decidedly toward greater individual rights protections. Generally, and given that decided trend, staking out a position arguing for limitations on the constitutional rights of American citizens is not a likely landing spot—nor is it a drop zone into which I thought I would ever fall. Moreover, the suggestion that servicemembers\u27 constitutional protections (those they work tiredly to protect) should be curtailed may seem like a perversion of the normal American course. But in the context of freedom of speech and expression, that is precisely what this Note seeks to accomplish. This is not an argument for increased curtailment. Rather, in the face of frequent criticism, it offers a defense of a doctrine as currently constituted, and a call for heightened awareness and enforcement given modern challenges. By way of comparison, before turning to its application to Military Justice, Part I provides an overview of freedom of speech jurisprudence in the civilian context. Part II delineates the constitutional tradition of a politically neutral military. In a world in which these lines are increasingly blurred, this foundational principle—inherent in a military speech doctrine that is grounded in text, history, structure, and precedent—bears reemphasis in the modern First Amendment context. Part III closes with a recent case study, representing an instance in which a servicemember was exposed to penalties for conduct and speech that would be fully protected had he been a civilian. This Part demonstrates the modern (pragmatic) need for Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) speech restrictions, backed by a doctrine already well-grounded in constitutional principles. The Note concludes with a nod toward the many vitally important legal protections that servicemembers do enjoy, but it calls for military leadership to police the boundaries of UCMJ violations given modern challenges. Freedom of speech rightly occupies a cherished place in any democracy; in the U.S. it represents a fixed star in our constitutional constellation. But as throughout history, in modern Military Justice that star does—and should—lose some of its shine

Independent contribution of individual white matter pathways to language function in pediatric epilepsy patients

Background and purpose Patients with epilepsy and malformations of cortical development (MCDs) are at high risk for language and other cognitive impairment. Specific impairments, however, are not well correlated with the extent and locale of dysplastic cortex; such findings highlight the relevance of aberrant cortico-cortical interactions, or connectivity, to the clinical phenotype. The goal of this study was to determine the independent contribution of well-described white matter pathways to language function in a cohort of pediatric patients with epilepsy. Materials and methods Patients were retrospectively identified from an existing database of pediatric epilepsy patients with the following inclusion criteria: 1. diagnosis of MCDs, 2. DTI performed at 3 T, and 3. language characterized by a pediatric neurologist. Diffusion Toolkit and Trackvis (http://www.trackvis.org) were used for segmentation and analysis of the following tracts: corpus callosum, corticospinal tracts, inferior longitudinal fasciculi (ILFs), inferior fronto-occipital fasciculi (IFOFs), uncinate fasciculi (UFs), and arcuate fasciculi (AFs). Mean diffusivity (MD) and fractional anisotropy (FA) were calculated for each tract. Wilcoxon rank sum test (corrected for multiple comparisons) was used to assess potential differences in tract parameters between language-impaired and language-intact patients. In a separate analysis, a machine learning algorithm (random forest approach) was applied to measure the independent contribution of the measured diffusion parameters for each tract to the clinical phenotype (language impairment). In other words, the importance of each tract parameter was measured after adjusting for the contribution of all other tracts. Results: Thirty-three MCD patients were included (age range: 3–18 years). Twenty-one patients had intact language, twelve had language impairment. All tracts were identified bilaterally in all patients except for the AF, which was not identified on the right in 10 subjects and not identified on the left in 11 subjects. MD and/or FA within the left AF, UF, ILF, and IFOF differed between language-intact and language-impaired groups. However, only parameters related to the left uncinate, inferior fronto-occipital, and arcuate fasciculi were independently associated with the clinical phenotype. Conclusions: Scalar metrics derived from the left uncinate, inferior fronto-occipital, and arcuate fasciculi were independently associated with language function. These results support the importance of these pathways in human language function in patients with MCDs

Dystonia: sparse synapses for D2 receptors in striatum of a DYT1 knock-out mouse model

Dystonia pathophysiology has been partly linked to downregulation and dysfunction of dopamine D2 receptors in striatum. We aimed to investigate the possible morpho-structural correlates of D2 receptor downregulation in the striatum of a DYT1 Tor1a mouse model. Adult control Tor1a+/+ and mutant Tor1a+/− mice were used. The brains were perfused and free-floating sections of basal ganglia were incubated with polyclonal anti-D2 antibody, followed by secondary immune-fluorescent antibody. Confocal microscopy was used to detect immune-fluorescent signals. The same primary antibody was used to evaluate D2 receptor expression by western blot. The D2 receptor immune-fluorescence appeared circumscribed in small disks (~0.3–0.5 μm diameter), likely representing D2 synapse aggregates, densely distributed in the striatum of Tor1a+/+ mice. In the Tor1a+/− mice the D2 aggregates were significantly smaller (μm2 2.4 ± SE 0.16, compared to μm2 6.73 ± SE 3.41 in Tor1a+/+) and sparse, with ~30% less number per microscopic field, value correspondent to the amount of reduced D2 expression in western blotting analysis. In DYT1 mutant mice the sparse and small D2 synapses in the striatum may be insufficient to “gate” the amount of presynaptic dopamine release diffusing in peri-synaptic space, and this consequently may result in a timing and spatially larger nonselective sphere of influence of dopamine action

Uncovering Urban Temporal Patterns from Geo-Tagged Photography

We live in a world where digital trails of different forms of human activities compose big urban data, allowing us to detect many aspects of how people experience the city in which they live or come to visit. In this study we propose to enhance urban planning by taking into a consideration individual preferences using information from an unconventional big data source: dataset of geo-tagged photographs that people take in cities which we then use as a measure of urban attractiveness. We discover and compare a temporal behavior of residents and visitors in ten most photographed cities in the world. Looking at the periodicity in urban attractiveness, the results show that the strongest periodic patterns for visitors are usually weekly or monthly. Moreover, by dividing cities into two groups based on which continent they belong to (i.e., North America or Europe), it can be concluded that unlike European cities, behavior of visitors in the US cities in general is similar to the behavior of their residents. Finally, we apply two indices, called “dilatation attractiveness index” and “dilatation index”, to our dataset which tell us the spatial and temporal attractiveness pulsations in the city. The proposed methodology is not only important for urban planning, but also does support various business and public stakeholder decision processes, concentrated for example around the question how to attract more visitors to the city or estimate the impact of special events organized there.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART)Center for Complex Engineering Systems (CCES) at KACST and MITCoca-Cola CompanyAccenture (Firm

Cardiology of the future: xenotransplantation with porcine heart

The reduced availability of human donor hearts compared with the needs of patients with advanced heart failure refractory to medical therapy has promoted the search for therapeutic alternatives to cardiac allografts. Porcine heart xenotransplantation represents one of the most promising frontiers in this field today. From the first researches in the 1960s to today, the numerous advances achieved in the field of surgical techniques, genetic engineering and immunosuppression have made it possible at the beginning of 2022 to carry out the first swine-to-human heart transplant, attaining a survival of 2 months after surgery. The main intellectual and experimental stages that have marked the history of xenotransplantation, the latest acquisitions in terms of genetic editing, as well as the improvement of immunosuppressive therapy are discussed analytically in this article in order to illustrate the underlying complexity of this therapeutic model

Incremental learning strategies for credit cards fraud detection.

very second, thousands of credit or debit card transactions are processed in financial institutions. This extensive amount of data and its sequential nature make the problem of fraud detection particularly challenging. Most analytical strategies used in production are still based on batch learning, which is inadequate for two reasons: Models quickly become outdated and require sensitive data storage. The evolving nature of bank fraud enshrines the importance of having up-to-date models, and sensitive data retention makes companies vulnerable to infringements of the European General Data Protection Regulation. For these reasons, evaluating incremental learning strategies is recommended. This paper designs and evaluates incremental learning solutions for real-world fraud detection systems. The aim is to demonstrate the competitiveness of incremental learning over conventional batch approaches and, consequently, improve its accuracy employing ensemble learning, diversity and transfer learning. An experimental analysis is conducted on a full-scale case study including five months of e-commerce transactions and made available by our industry partner, Worldline

PLoS One

Mature HIV-1 viral particles assemble as a fullerene configuration comprising p24 capsid hexamers, pentamers and dimers. In this paper, we report the X-ray crystal structures of the p24 protein from natural HIV-1 strain (BMJ4) in complex with Fab A10F9, which recognizes a conserved epitope in the C-terminal domain of the BMJ4 p24 protein. Our structures reveal a novel shoulder-to-shoulder p24 dimerization mode that is mediated by an S-S bridge at C177. Consistent with these structures, the shoulder-to-shoulder dimer that was obtained from the BMJ4 strain was also observed in p24 proteins from other strains by the introduction of a cysteine residue at position 177. The potential biological significance was further validated by the introduction of a C177A mutation in the BMJ4 strain, which then displays a low infectivity. Our data suggest that this novel shoulder-to-shoulder dimer interface trapped by this unique S-S bridge could represent a physiologically relevant mode of HIV-1 capsid assembly during virus maturation, although Cys residue itself may not be critical for HIV-I replication