Digital Commons Network^™

Blunted Serum 25(Oh)D Response To Vitamin D3 Supplementation In Children With Autism, Conor Kerley, Basil Elnazir, Peter Greally, David Coghlan

Articles

Introduction: Data suggest a potential role for vitamin D in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevention and treatment. It is likely that the serum response to vitamin D supplementation contributes to its effectiveness. Multiple factors affect serum vitamin D 25(OH)D response to supplementation.

Methods: We conducted post-hoc analysis of two double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials (RCT) of vitamin D3 supplementation, one RCT involving children with ASD and another involving children with asthma. Both trials were conducted in the same geographic location (Dublin, Ireland, 53°N), conducted over Winter season and utilized the same vitamin D3 dose (2000 IU/day).

Results: We …

Patient Experiences Of A Physiotherapy-Led Multidisciplinary Rehabilitative Intervention After Successful Treatment For Oesophago-Gastric Cancer, Annemarie Bennett, L. O'Neill, D. Connolly, E. M. Guinan, L. Boland, Suzanne Doyle, J. O'Sullivan, J. V. Reynolds, J. Hussey

Articles

Purpose To qualitatively explore the perceived impact of a 12-week rehabilitative intervention for oesophago-gastric cancer survivors on their physical, mental and social wellbeing. Methods Of the 21 participants who completed the intervention, 19 took part in a semi-structured focus group interview. Four audio-taped focus groups were held, ranging in size from two to eight participants. Focus groups were transcribed and analysed using a descriptive qualitative approach. Results At recruitment, participants were 23.5 ± 15.2 months post-surgery and all had suboptimal fitness levels. Participants reported improvements in their physical capacity and ability to carry out activities of daily living during the …

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

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This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Introduction: Jewish Gamevironments – Exploring Understanding With Playful Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

The study of Judaism, Jewish civilizationi, and games is currently comprised of projects of a rather small set of game scholars. A sample of our work is included in this issue.

Pari Passu Clauses And The Skeuomorph Problem In Contract Law, Douglas G. Baird

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No abstract provided.

Moving Beyond Lassiter: The Need For A Federal Statutory Right To Counsel For Parents In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek S. Sankaran

Articles

In New York City, an indigent parent can receive the assistance of a multidisciplinary legal team—an attorney, a social worker, and a parent advocate—to defend against the City’s request to temporarily remove a child from her care. But in Mississippi, that same parent can have her rights to her child permanently terminated without ever receiving the assistance of a single lawyer. In Washington State, the Legislature has ensured that parents ensnared in child abuse and neglect proceedings will receive the help of a well-trained and well-compensated attorney with a reasonable caseload. Yet in Tennessee, its Supreme Court has held that …

How Does The Law Put A Historical Analogy To Work?: Defining The Imposition Of "A Condition Analogous To That Of A Slave" In Modern Brazil, Rebecca J. Scott, Leonardo Augusto De Andrade Barbosa, Carlos Henrique Borlido Haddad

Articles

Over the last decades, the Brazilian state has engaged in concerted legal efforts to identify and prosecute cases of what officials refer to as “slave labor” (trabalho escravo). At a conceptual level, the campaign has paired the constitutional protection of human dignity and the “social value of labor” with an expansive interpretation of the offense described in Article 149 of the Criminal Code as “the reduction of a person to a condition analogous to that of a slave.” At the operational level, mobile teams of inspectors and prosecutors have intervened in thousands of work sites, and labor prosecutors …

Moral Commitments In Cost-Benefit Analysis, Eric A. Posner, Cass R. Sunstein

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No abstract provided.

Organizational Decline And Fiscal Distress In Municipal Police Agencies, Matthew Giblin, Jeffrey Nowacki

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In late 2007, the United States entered one of the most significant recessions in recent memory. While the consequences to individuals have been well-documented, less attention has been paid to the effects on state-sponsored organizations such as police agencies. The current study examines fiscal distress (e.g., layoffs, hiring freezes) in a sample of large municipal law enforcement agencies. According to a framework proposed by Levine (1978), departments should be most vulnerable to fiscal distress when the jurisdiction experiences economic shocks (environmental entropy), the demand for police services declines (problem depletion), the political system becomes less supportive of police agencies (political …

Improving Access To Justice In State Courts With Platform Technology, J. J. Prescott

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Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes—often with the government—is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often …

The Value Of Instability: An Investigation Of Intra-Subject Variability In Brain Activity Among Obese Adolescent Girls, Lance O. Bauer, Rebecca J. Houston

Articles

BACKGROUND: The present study investigated the value of intra-subject variability (ISV) as a metric for revealing differences in cognition and brain activation associated with an obese versus lean body mass.

METHODS: Ninety-six adolescents with a lean body mass (BMI %-ile = 5-85), and 92 adolescents with an obese body mass (BMI %-ile >=95), performed two tasks (Stroop and Go/NoGo) challenging response inhibition skills. The standard deviations and averages of their reaction time and P300 electroencephalographic responses to task stimuli were computed across trials.

RESULTS: During the Go/NoGo task, the reaction times of subjects with an obese body mass were more …

The Death Of Rules And Standards, Anthony Casey, Anthony Niblett

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No abstract provided.

The Myth Of Fourth Amendment Circularity, Lior Strahilevitz, Matthew B. Kugler

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No abstract provided.

The Culture Of Misdemeanor Courts, Jessica A. Roth

Articles

The misdemeanor courts that preside over the majority of criminal cases in the United States represent the “front porch” of our criminal justice system. These courts vary in myriad ways, including size, structure, and method of judicial appointment. Each also has its own culture – i.e., a settled way of doing things that reflects deeper assumptions about the court’s mission and its role in the community – which can assist or impede desired policy reforms. This Article, written for a Symposium issue of the Hofstra Law Review, draws upon the insights of organizational culture theory to explore how leaders can …

Jointly Offered Online Course Between Malmö University And Rochester Institute Of Technology On Industrial And Organizational Psychology, Esa M. Rantanen, Rebecca Johnson, Jonas Lundsten, Jean-Charles Languilaire, Andreas Sjöstedt

Articles

The idea of a jointly offered online course between Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and Malmö University (MU) on Industrial and Organizational (I/O) Psychology was first conceived at the 2nd Annual MU-RIT Symposium on Oct 1-3, 2014, in discussions between faculty members of RIT and MU. The symposium, held in Sweden at MU, provided an opportunity for faculty and administrators from RIT and MU to identify potential collaborative research and teaching partnerships between faculty from the two universities.

Two principal collaborators from each university began to develop a jointly offered course shortly after the symposium, based on an existing online …

Design And Planned Obsolescence. Theories And Approaches For Designing Enabling Technologies, Matteo Zallio, Damon Berry

Articles

We are currently living in a decade where smart objects and Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices are becoming part of daily life in different contexts. This research seeks to investigate and verify, by using a formal literature review methodology, the most visible aspects of technological development, within the Industry 4.0 and IoT scenario, in relation to the theories of the so called “Planned Obsolescence”.

This study covers a defined number of works on Design theories and practices on how to face the issue of built-in obsolescence of devices in the era of the Connected Devices. The majority of the works …

Juvenile Lifers And Juveniles In Michigan Prisons: A Population Of Special Concern, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Prisoners serving life without parole for offenses they committed when they were juveniles have received much attention after the United States Supreme Court found in Miller v Alabama that mandatory life without parole for juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment and found that its Miller decision applied retroactively. Courts have begun the process of sentencing and resentencing these individuals, some of whom are still teens and some of whom have served 40 years or more in the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC). All told, not including new cases that come before the court, approximately 370 prisoners will receive individualized sentences under …

Tort Reform Through The Back Door: A Critique Of Law And Apologies, Yonathan A. Arbel, Kaplan, Yotam Kaplan, Yotam

Articles

In this Article, we show how the biggest tort reform of the last decade was passed through the back door with the blessing of its staunchest opponents. We argue that the widely-endorsed "apology law" reform-a change in the national legal landscape that privileged apologies-is, in fact, a mechanism of tort reform, used to limit victims' recovery and shield injurers from liability. While legal scholars overlooked this effect, commercial interests seized the opportunity and are in the process of transforming state and federal law with the unwitting support of the public.

Themes In The Supervision Of Social Care Students In Ireland: Building Resilience, Fiona Mcsweeney

Articles

The field placement is core to the education of social care practitioners and practice teachers’ behaviours influence the learning and development of future practitioners. However the practice teacher role is complex with responsibilities to the agency, clients and the student (Davys & Beddoe, 2000). Twenty practice teachers were interviewed individually about their views of their role, in particular what they saw as most and least important. Inductive thematic analysis resulted in the identification of five themes 1) the nature of the work; 2) acceptance of individuality; 3) commonality and differences from staff; 4) focus on positives and 5) practice involves …

The Words Under The Words, Patrick Barry

Articles

The words lawyers choose can change the decisions people make. Psychologists call the mechanics of this change “framing.” They’ve found, for example, that more people will decide to have a surgery if they are told that the “survival rate is 90%” than if they are told that the “mortality rate is 10%” — even though a survival rate of 90% is exactly the same as a mortality rate of 10%. They’ve also found that having to pay a “surcharge” for using a credit card rankles people (especially people in the credit card lobby) more than if they were simply told …

Student Leadership, Career Development, And Personal Success Profiles, Jasminka Samardzija, Joseph Kevin Walker, Milena Kuznin

Articles

The main goal of this empirical research was to define those predominant leadership characteristics and behaviours found among all four generations of undergraduates at RIT Croatia's Dubrovnik campus. The basic research question was: What is the empirical basis for classifying students into homogeneous groups? The first part of the questionnaire was based on The Big Five Model of Personality characteristics, but the principal research method was the leadership characteristics, career development, and personal success questionnaire created by applying inductive research methodologies to 100 Croatian leaders’ interviews. In order to answer the research question, four cluster analyses were conducted. The null …

The Structural Function Of The Sixth Amendment Right To Counsel Of Choice, John Rappaport

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No abstract provided.

The Consequences Of Disparate Policing: Evaluating Stop And Frisk As A Modality Of Urban Policing, Aziz Huq

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No abstract provided.

Anti-Homosexual Legislation And Hiv-Related Stigma In African Nations: What Has Been The Role Of Pepfar?, Amy Hagopian, Deepa Rao, Aaron Katz, Sallie Sanford, Scott Barnhart

Articles

Background: Gay men and other men who have sex with men are disproportionately burdened by HIV infection. Laws that penalize same-sex intercourse contribute to a cycle of stigma, homonegativity and discrimination. In many African nations, laws criminalizing homosexuality may be fueling the epidemic, as they dissuade key populations from seeking treatment and health care providers from offering it.

Objectives: We analyzed the ways in which policies and practices of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program addressed pervasively harsh anti-homosexuality laws across Africa. Given the aim of the US PEPFAR program to reduce stigma surrounding HIV, we …

Differential Fasting Plasma Glucose And Ketone Body Levels In Ghrko Versus 3xtg-Ad Mice: A Potential Contributor To Aging-Related Cognitive Status?, Chelsea M Griffith, Lauren N Macklin, Andrzej Bartke, Peter R Patrylo

Articles

Cognitive function declines with age and appears to correlate with decreased cerebral metabolic rate (CMR). Caloric restriction, an antiaging manipulation that extends life-span and can preserve cognitive function, is associated with decreased glucose uptake, decreased lactate levels, and increased ketone body (KB) levels in the brain. Since the majority of brain nutrients come from the periphery, this study examined whether the capacity to regulate peripheral glucose levels and KB production differs in animals with successful cognitive aging (growth hormone receptor knockouts, GHRKOs) versus unsuccessful cognitive aging (the 3xTg-AD mouse model of Alzheimer's disease). Animals were fasted for 5 hours with …

Does A Flatter General Gradient Of Visual Attention Explain Peripheral Advantages And Central Deficits In Deaf Adults?, Vincent J. Samar, Lauren Berger

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Individuals deaf from early age often outperform hearing individuals in the visual periphery on attention-dependent dorsal stream tasks (e.g., spatial localization or movement detection), but sometimes show central visual attention deficits, usually on ventral stream object identification tasks. It has been proposed that early deafness adaptively redirects attentional resources from central to peripheral vision to monitor extrapersonal space in the absence of auditory cues, producing a more evenly distributed attention gradient across visual space. However, little direct evidence exists that peripheral advantages are functionally tied to central deficits, rather than determined by independent mechanisms, and previous studies using several attention …

The Concepts Of Law, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Tom Ginsburg

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No abstract provided.

Factors In Fairness And Emotion In Online Case Resolution Systems, Youyang Hou, Cliff Lampe, Maximilian Bulinski, J. J. Prescott

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Courts are increasingly adopting online information and communication technology, creating a need to consider the potential consequences of these tools for the justice system. Using survey responses from 209 litigants who had recently used an online case resolution system, we investigate factors that influenced litigants’ experiences of fairness and emotional feelings toward court officials. Our results show that ease of using the online case resolution system, the outcome of the case, and a litigant’s perceptions of procedural justice are positively associated both with whether the litigant views the process as fair and whether the litigant ultimately feels positive emotions toward …

From Grace To Grids: Rethinking Due Process Protections For Parole., Kimberly A. Thomas, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Current due process law gives little protection to prisoners at the point of parole, even though the parole decision, like sentencing, determines whether or not a person will serve more time or will go free. The doctrine regarding parole, which developed mostly in the late 1970s, was based on a judicial understanding of parole as an experimental, subjective, and largely standardless art—rooted in assessing the individual “character” of the potential parolee. In this Article we examine the foundations of the doctrine, and conclude that the due process inquiry at the point of parole should take into account the stark changes …

The Eeoc, The Ada, And Workplace Wellness Programs, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

It seems that everybody loves workplace wellness programs. The Chamber of Commerce has firmly endorsed those progarms, as have other business groups. So has President Obama, and even liberal firebrands like former Senator Tom Harkin. And why not? After all, what's not to like about programs that encourage people to adopt healthy habits like exercise, nutritious eating, and quitting smoking? The proponents of these programs speak passionately, and with evident good intentions, about reducing the crushing burden that chronic disease places on individuals, families, communities, and the economy as a whole. What's not to like? Plenty. Workplace wellness programs are …