Digital Commons Network^™

Supporting Children's Participation In Second Language Stories In An Irish Language Preschool, Maire Mhic Mhathuna

Articles

This paper considers how children learning a second language were supported as active participants during storytelling sessions in an Irish-language immersion preschool in Dublin. Audio-recordings and observations were made of the story sessions once a fortnight over a period of six months. The resulting transcripts were analysed from an interactionist perspective, recognising both the cognitive and social aspects of the process. The staff were also interviewed and a questionnaire was completed by the parents. The analysis showed that the practitioners provided support for the children through dynamic repeated readings of target books, scaffolded interactions, sufficient experience of storybook reading and …

Discourse Analysis As An Approach To Intercultural Competence In The Advanced Efl Classroom, Sue Norton

Articles

In 1991 Michael McCarthy wrote in his Preface to Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers that discourse analysis is ‘not a method of teaching languages; it is a way of describing and understanding how language is used’. By 1994 he had reformulated his position and, with Ronald Carter, published Language as Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching, which argued in favour of providing students with a metalanguage by which to analyse the language they were learning. These days, owing to the work of McCarthy, Carter, and others, the basics of discourse analysis can indeed comprise an appropriate subject matter for the advanced …

Towards Arabic To English Machine Translation, Yasser Salem, Arnold Hensman, Brian Nolan

Articles

This paper explores how the characteristics of the Arabic language will effect the development of a Machine Translation (MT) tool from Arabic to English. Several distinguishing features of Arabic pertinent to MT will be explored in detail with reference to some potential difficulties that they might present. The paper will conclude with a proposed model incorporating the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) technique to achieve this end.

Studying The Exclusionary Rule: An Empirical Classic, Albert Alschuler

Articles

No abstract provided.

Demystifying The Right To Exclude: Of Property, Inviolability, And Automatic Injunctions, Shyam Balganesh

Articles

The right to exclude has long been considered a central component of property. In focusing on the element of exclusion, courts and scholars have paid little attention to what an owner's right to exclude means and the forms in which this right might manifest itself in actual property practice. For some time now, the right to exclude has come to be understood as nothing but an entitlement to injunctive relief- that whenever an owner successfully establishes title and an interference with the same, an injunction will automatically follow. Such a view attributes to the right a distinctively consequentialist meaning, which …

Chinese American Librarians In The 21st Century: Profile Update, Ruan Lian, Jian Anna Xiong

Articles

There is an increasing need to understand the role of Chinese American librarians as one of the largest ethnic librarian groups in American library communities and a renewed interest to demonstrate and prove a critical role they play in the Library and Information Science profession. With first-hand insights, this study reports the current status of Chinese American librarians. It helps develop our knowledge about the Chinese American librarians in the 21st Century. A sequel study in a separate paper reports the findings of career development of Chinese American librarians and documents strategies they adapted to meet challenges and barriers facing …

Commentary: The Trajectory Of Complex Business Contracting In Latin America, Claire Hill

Articles

By some accounts, Latin American contract documentation increas- ingly resembles U.S. contract documentation.1 This is puzzling, given that the U.S. documentation has developed in a broader institutional context particular to the U.S. The context includes a particular type of legal train- ing, particular types of law firms, particular legal institutions, and so on. Why is this occurring, and what effect will it have on contracting practice in Latin America? This commentary briefly considers these issues; it con- siders as well some broader implications of international convergence in contracting practices.

Hearts, Minds, Hands: A Dream Team For Mental Health, Julianne Gold Brunson, Judy Molner, Miriam Nathan Lerner

Articles

Interpreting in a mental health setting with hearing staff members and deaf clientele, the ethical situations fly fast and furious, providing the interpreter with a wealth of war stories with which to regale neophyte students of this dynamic profession. Much has been written to improve the many and varied mental health services being extended to deaf populations. The most commonly described dyads are that of hearing therapist and deaf patient. However, consider the case of a deaf psychologist treating hearing clients. In this instance, the interpreter becomes the liaison between the deaf professional and the hearing patient. When an interpreter …

Originalism And Pragmatism: Pragmatism's Role In Interpretation, Frank H. Easterbrook

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No abstract provided.

The Many Faces Of Fault In Contract Law: Or How To Do Economics Right, Without Really Trying, Richard A. Epstein

Articles

Modern law often rests on the assumption that a uniform cost-benefit formula is the proper way to determine fault in ordinary contract disputes. This Article disputes that vision by defending the view that different standards of fault are appropriate in different contexts. The central distinction is one that holds parties in gratuitous transactions only to the standard of care that they bring to their own affairs, while insisting on the higher objective standard of ordinary care in commercial transactions. That bifurcation leads to efficient searches. Persons who hold themselves out in particular lines of business in effect warrant their ability …

When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.

An Object-Oriented Natural Language Expert System, Kenneth Staffan, Henry Etlinger

Articles

This paper highlights the design and implementation of a prototype object-oriented Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). There were two main goals for the prototype. One was to create a small tutoring system which fit into the niche of current commercially available systems, while exhibiting some of the more intelligent features found in larger custom systems. The other was to experiment with an object-oriented model, design approach, and implementation for such a system. A masking technique for pattern matching is one of the key paradigms driving the intelligent diagnosis. The prototype provides a means for practicing sentence construction, by checking a student's …

Latinos And The Law Symposium Symposium: Latinos And Latinas At The Epicenter Of Contemporary Legal Discourses: Forword, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic

Articles

No abstract provided.

Object Detection And Classification With Applications To Skin Cancer Screening, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitryi Dubovitskiy

Articles

This paper discusses a new approach to the processes of object detection, recognition and classification in a digital image. The classification method is based on the application of a set of features which include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. Thus, the approach used, incorporates the characterisation of an object in terms of its texture.

The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented which includes two novel fast segmentation algorithms for which C++ code is provided. The self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory is also presented and …

Reasonableness And Objectivity: A Feminist Discourse Of The Fourth Amendment, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

This article suggests that a critical reexamination of the Fourth Amendment and its jurisprudence through feminist lenses can shed new light and add to our understanding of it. These insights, in turn, can and should generate a positive feminist Fourth Amendment jurisprudence—a distinctive feminist voice to be integrated systematically into the law of search and seizure, leading to a transformation of the Fourth Amendment itself. Applying feminist theories to particular issues and normative layers of current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence may help guide us through the more difficult task of imagining a feminist jurisprudence of search and seizure law.

Sudoku: A Little Lesson In Oop, Axel-Tobias Schreiner, James Heliotis

Articles

Paying only lip service to the principles of object-oriented programming rarely results in the expected benefits. This paper presents a series of designs for a Sudoku application that will lead introductory students through the allimportant process of trial and error. They will see examples of design analysis, criticism, and improvement. The paper concludes with some general pointers why and how the initial mistakes could have been avoided.

A Theory Of Adjudication: Law As Magic, Jessie Allen

Articles

This article takes a new approach to the problem of legal rationality. In the 1920s and 1930s the Legal Realists criticized judicial decisions as "magic solving words" and "word ritual." Though the Realist critique continues to shape American jurisprudence, the legal magic they observed has never been seriously explored. Here, drawing on anthropological studies of magic and ritual, I reconsider the irrational legal techniques the Realists exposed. My thesis is that the Realists were right that law works like magic, but wrong about how magic works. That is, they were right that adjudication makes use of a particular combination of …

Intercultural Books In Practice, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Una Hill

Articles

This paper examines the practical use of intercultural and multicultural books in Early Years settings in the Irish context. Questionnaires were sent to seventy early years’ settings in the Dublin region, focusing on the criteria they used for selecting such books. These responses indicated that staff viewed inclusion, the story, age appropriateness, illustrations and the language of the books as being important. The practitioners’ responses are compared with the views of authors on diversity issues and similarities and differences identified. Overall there was a greater emphasis on children in the practitioners’ survey while the authors focused on issues. A list …

Writing To Learn Law And Writing In Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on teaching intellectual property law, describes a method of combining substantive law teaching with a species of what is commonly called "skills" training. The method involves assessing students not via traditional final exams but instead via research memos patterned after assignments that junior lawyers might encounter in actual legal practice. The essay grounds the method in the theoretical disposition known generally as "writing to learn." It argues that students are likely to learn intellectual property law effectively if they learn to practice as intellectual property lawyers, and specifically to write as intellectual …

Public Rights, Social Equality, And The Conceptual Roots Of The Plessy Challenge, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This Article argues that the test case that gave rise to the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson is best understood as part of a wellestablished, cosmopolitan tradition of anticaste activism in Louisiana rather than as a quixotic effort that contradicted nineteenth-century ideas of the boundaries of citizens' rights. By drawing a dividing line between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social rights, on the other, the Supreme Court construed challenges to segregation as claims to a "social equality" that was beyond the scope of judicially cognizable rights. The Louisiana constitutional convention of 1867-68, however, had defined …

Establishing Relations Between Law And Other Forms Of Thought And Language, James Boyd White

Articles

The law does not, and could not, exist in an intellectual or linguistic vacuum. No one believes that the law is or should be impervious to other languages, other bodies of knowledge. In this sense the argument about the 'autonomy' of law is an empty one: law cannot be, should not be, perfectly autonomous, unconnected with any other system of thought and expression; yet it plainly has it own identity as a discourse, it own intellectual and linguistic habits, which it is our task as lawyers to understand and develop. It follows that an essential topic of legal thought is …