Digital Commons Network^™

On The Exactitude Of Big Data: La Bêtise And Artificial Intelligence, Noel Fitzpatrick, John D. Kelleher

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This article revisits the question of ‘la bêtise’ or stupidity in the era of Artificial Intelligence driven by Big Data, it extends on the questions posed by Gille Deleuze and more recently by Bernard Stiegler. However, the framework for revisiting the question of la bêtise will be through the lens of contemporary computer science, in particular the development of data science as a mode of analysis, sometimes, misinterpreted as a mode of intelligence. In particular, this article will argue that with the advent of forms of hype (sometimes referred to as the hype cycle) in relation to big data and …

Compelled Subsidies And The First Amendment, William Baude, Eugene Volokh

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No abstract provided.

Arguing With Friends, William Baude, Ryan D. Doerfler

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No abstract provided.

Divine Justice And The Library Of Babel: Or, Was Al Capone Really Punished For Tax Evasion?, Gabriel Mendlow

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A criminal defendant enjoys an array of legal rights. These include the right not to be punished for an offense unless charged, tried, and proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; the right not to be punished disproportionately; and the right not to be punished for the same offense more than once. I contend that the design of our criminal legal system imperils these rights in ways few observers appreciate. Because criminal codes describe misconduct imprecisely and prohibit more misconduct than any legislature actually aspires to punish, prosecutors decide which violations of the code merit punishment, and judges decide how much …

The Rule Of Three, Patrick Barry

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Judges use the Rule of Three. Practitioners use the Rule of Three. And so do all manner of legal academics. Yet although many people seem to have an intuitive feel for how useful this rhetorical move is, no extended explanation of its mechanics and variety of forms exists. This essay offers that explanation. It begins with an introduction to the more straightforward form of the rule of three, which simply involves arranging information not in twos or fours or any other set of numbers-but rather in the trusty, melodic structure of threes. It then moves on to a closer look …

A New Approach To Executory Contracts, John A.E. Pottow

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This Article will proceed as follows. First, it will offer an abbreviated explanation of the treatment of executory contracts under the Code, chronicling the development of the concept of executoriness and the subsequent challenges of its effects. Second, it will explain a new approach that embraces and makes its peace with executoriness by focusing on the proper treatment of non-executory contracts. Third, it will address some of the anticipated counterarguments to the new approach. Finally, it will offer a quick road test to demonstrate how the new approach would have more easily resolved a major litigated precedent in this field.

Implicit Bias's Failure, Samuel Bagenstos

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The 2016 presidential election was a coming-out party of sorts for the concept of implicit bias-and not necessarily in a good way. In answering a question about race relations and the police during the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence introduced the topic. Offering his explanation for why the Fraternal Order of Police had endorsed the Trump-Pence ticket, Pence said:

The Self And Other: Portraying Israeli And Palestinian Identities On Twitter, Jason Deegan, John Hogan, Sharon Feeney, Brendan Orourke

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The conflict between Israel and Palestine has lasted over half a century, with both sides enduring military and political turmoil. This paper explores how Twitter is being used as a medium to portray identities in the conflict. We examine the tweets contained in the @IDFspokesperson and @ISMPalestine Twitter accounts between late 2015 and early 2016. Using textual analysis, we gain an insight into how these Twitter accounts, defined by the conflict, are used in portraying the self and the other.

Towards A Digital Earth: Using Archetypes To Enable Knowledge Interoperability Within Geo-Observational Sensor Systems Design, Paul Stacey, Damon Berry

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Earth System Science (ESS) observational data are often inadequately semantically enriched by geo-observational information systems in order to capture the true meaning of the associated data sets. Data models underpinning these information systems are often too rigid in their data representation to allow for the ever-changing and evolving nature of ESS domain concepts. This impoverished approach to observational data representation reduces the ability of multi-disciplinary practitioners to share information in a computable way.

Object oriented techniques typically employed to model data in a complex domain (with evolving domain concepts) can unnecessarily exclude domain specialists from the design process, invariably leading …

Panel On Rules Versus Standards In Constitutional And Statutory Interpretation, Akhil Reed Amar, Frank H. Easterbrook, John C. Harrison, William Francis Kuntz Ii

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No abstract provided.

Legal Or Political Checks On Apex Criminality: An Essay On Constitutional Design, Aziz Huq

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No abstract provided.

Country Specific Investments And The Rights Of Non-Citizens, Adam S. Chilton, Eric A. Posner

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No abstract provided.

Treaty Exit In The United States: Insights From The United Kingdom Or South Africa?, Curtis A. Bradley, Laurence R. Helfer

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Courts in the United Kingdom and South Africa have recently issued important rulings that have constrained the executive’s authority to withdraw from treaties in those countries. This essay considers whether these rulings might offer insights for treaty exit issues in the United States. We first provide an overview of U.S. law and practice regarding the termination of international agreements. We next summarize the U.K. and South African decisions, which required parliamentary approval for pulling out of treaties establishing the European Union and the International Criminal Court (ICC), respectively. Finally, we consider the relevance of these rulings for treaty withdrawals in …

Contesting Early Childhood Professional Identities: A Cross-National Discussion, Sonja Arndt, Mathias Urban, Colette Murray, Kylie Smith, Beth Swadener, Tomas Ellegaard

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In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, …

The People Against The Constitution, Aziz Huq

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No abstract provided.

The Pragmatist Tradition: Lessons For Legal Theorists, Susan Haack

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No abstract provided.

Becoming A Decolonial Feminist Ethnographer: Addressing The Complexities Of Positionality And Representation, Jennifer Manning

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Abstract Organisation and management scholars are often preoccupied with developing, refining and advancing knowledge, and in so doing, the empirical process through which knowledge is advanced can be ignored together with the impact this process can have on participants and scholars. This article draws attention to how management scholars might negotiate the complexities of positionality and representation through an illustrative case: my experience of becoming a decolonial feminist ethnographer. Drawing upon my doctoral research, I share the experience of my ethnographic journey to become a decolonial feminist ethnographer. Developing a decolonial feminist approach to ethnography enabled me to identify positionality …

Nurturing ‘Buds Of Development’: From Outcomes To Opportunities In Early Childhood Practice, Noirin Hayes, Katarina Filipovic

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The current future-focused, outcomes driven early childhood policy climate presents a danger that early years pedagogy will lose sight of the ‘present’ child. Increasingly policy support for early childhood education is built around an emphasis on preparing children for school and positioning it as a key element in enhancing society through preparing future citizens to become productive members of society. The measurable outcomes discourse, in emphasising product, renders invisible the critical contribution of the processes of everyday practice to children’s development. To challenge and counteract the strong outcome discourse early years professionals must have confidence in their pedagogy. However, research …

The Kitchen Light Of Ntid, Miriam Lerner

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It is often noted that great events are a concurrence of great people, great ideas, and the right time and place for the perfect fusion of energy to explode into a super nova of enlightenment. It can be difficult to find specific times and locations when great changes and shifts in attitude occur, as they usually follow a more geologic model of slow and almost imperceptible change over time. However, when considering ASL poetry and lit erature, the importance of NTID and specifically the Panara Theatre housed in LBJ Hall cannot be overstated. The right people, and—of paramount importance—the right …

Exiting Congressional-Executive Agreements, Curtis A. Bradley

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Commentators have argued that, even if the president has the unilateral authority to terminate Article II treaties concluded with the Senate’s advice and consent, the president lacks the unilateral authority to terminate “congressional-executive agreements” concluded with majority congressional approval, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This Article challenges that claim. If one accepts a presidential authority to terminate Article II treaties, this Article contends, there is no persuasive reason to conclude differently with respect to congressional-executive agreements. Congressional-executive agreements have become largely interchangeable with Article II treaties as a matter of domestic law and practice. For example, …

A Common Law For The First Amendment, Richard A. Epstein

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No abstract provided.

The Central Claiming Renaissance, Andres Sawicki

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The Supreme Court has recently reinvigorated the law of patentable subject matter. But beneath the headlines proclaiming the return of limits to patent eligibility, a more profound shift has taken place: central claiming is reborn.

The Court's eligibility cases are significant outliers compared to today's run-of-the-mill patent law because claim language plays little role in their analyses. In our modern peripheral claiming system, the claim language is the near exclusive guide to the patent's boundaries. But in its earliest days, our patent system pursued a central claiming approach, in which the inventor's actual work determined the patent's scope. The Court's …

Female Students View The Knowledge Of Foreign Languages As More Important For Careers In Tourism Than Male Students?, Nikolina Božinović, Joško Sindik

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The proficiency in multiple foreign languages is a basic assumption for successful communication in tourism. Tourism and mobility have a significant and important role, where intercultural contacts contribute to the development of intercultural dialogue. This paper attempts to explore gender differences in the perceptions of students from the Rochester Institute of Technology, RIT Croatia regarding the importance of knowing various foreign languages in tourism. The results obtained could help in raising the awareness of the importance of the role of learning and teaching foreign languages, with potential effects in developing and promoting tourism in Croatia. The key research finding is …

Freedom In Structure: Helping Foreign-Trained And International Graduate Students Develop Thesis Statements By Component, Elizabeth R. Baldwin

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This article explains how foreign-trained and international graduate students can use a thesis development template to find and articulate narrow, novel, non-obvious, and useful claims for their final, academic papers in law. These students, in particular, are in need of clear direction and methods for crafting well-developed claims (or thesis statements), given that many are non-native speakers of English who trained in different legal and educational systems with different expectations about what constitutes good academic writing—in any genre, let alone law. Through the use of a thesis development template (adapted from writing advice by Joseph M. Williams and Eugene Volokh), …

Muddy Waters: Refining The Way Forward For The “Sustainability Science” Of Socio-Hydrogeology, Paul Hynds, Shane Regan, Luisa Andrade, Simon Mooney, Kevin O'Malley, Stephanie Dipelino, Jean O'Dwyer

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The trouble with groundwater is that despite its critical importance to global water supplies, it frequently attracts insufficient management attention relative to more visible surface water sources, irrespective of regional climate, socioeconomic profile, and regulatory environment. To this end, the recently defined sub-discipline of "socio-hydrogeology", an extension of socio-hydrology, seeks to translate and exchange knowledge with and between non-expert end-users, in addition to involving non-expert opinion and experience in hydrogeological investigations, thus emphasising a "bottom-up" methodology. It is widely acknowledged that issues pertaining to groundwater quality, groundwater quantity, climate change, and a poor general awareness and understanding of groundwater occurrence …

Interculturalism In Higher Education In Ireland: An Analysis From A Strategy, Policy And Practice Perspective, Brid Ni Chonaill

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Education is instrumental in preparing students to participate in increasingly diverse Irish, European and global societies, with higher education having a part to play in the process. Issues around migration and cultural diversity have gained less attention in the higher education sector in Ireland than at primary and post primary level with a few notable exceptions. Higher education is regarded as having a “critical role” to play in terms of “enriching Ireland’s cultural life, nurturing our understanding of our own national identity and that of other cultures and belief systems” [1]. Influenced by developments at European Union level, the approach …

Interactions For Language Learning In And Around Virtual World, Ciara R. Wigham, Luisa Panichi, Susanna Nocchi, Randall Sandler

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“… the new forms of interaction made possible by virtual worlds remain, to a significant degree, unexplored.” (Peterson, 2011: 78) “… immersion and interaction are necessary conditions of worldhood. Without them, virtual worlds would not be worlds at all.” (Zabel, 2014: 417) Since the mid-1990s, the pedagogical opportunities offered by three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds (VWs) have generated a considerable amount of interest and dialogue among educators and educational researchers across a variety of disciplines. The potential of VWs for language learning and teaching did not go unnoticed by the CALL community: language educators and researchers began to explore and to …

Stranger Than Fiction: How Lawyers Can Accurately And Realistically Tell A True Story By Using Fiction Writers’ Techniques That Make Fiction Seem More Realistic Than Reality, Cathren Page

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This Article differs from other articles on related topics in that it focuses broadly on including specific details to establish an overall sense of reality. In contrast, in his article, This is Not the Whole Truth, Professor Steve Johansen discusses those details that can ethically be omitted; this Article, however, is about which select details to include rather than to omit. Although some articles have focused on details regarding specific objects, such as an obtuse object or an endowed object, this Article covers a wider category of details that applies throughout the narrative as opposed to details that surface only …

Consociationalism Vs. Incentivism In Divided Societies: A Question Of Threshold Design Or Of Sequencing?, Clark B. Lombardi, Pasarlay Shamshad

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Scholarship on constitutional design for post-conflict or divided societies focuses a great deal of attention on two issues: (1) the processes and timing by which constitutional rules should be established and (2) whether constitutions should reflect a consociationalist or incentivist approach to governance. Scholars are increasingly willing to entertain the possibility that constitutions drafted during period of transition from civil war or authoritarianism need not, and often should not, answer immediately all questions that constitutions tend to answer; however, they tend to assume that the question of whether constitutions should be consociationalist or incentivist is one that should not be …

Happy Birthday Siri! Dialing In Legal Ethics For Artificial Intelligence, Smartphones, And Real Time Lawyers, Jan L. Jacobowitz, Justin Ortiz

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No abstract provided.