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Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Northwest Clinical Law Conference Bittersweet
The Northwest clinical law community often views itself as one of the most happy and energetic groups in legal education. It is easy to see why they are such a jubilant group. First, they work in a natural setting that rivals some of the most beautiful regions in the world (within a short drive of a rugged forested coastline, the volcanic Cascades, and wine country world-renowned for its pinot noir). Second, the social justice-minded cultural values of the Northwest closely align with core values of clinical legal education, which creates a natural environment for clinical opportunities integrated with the larger community. Third, the region allows room for personhood and pioneering individuality in a way that is well suited to clinical educators trying to inspire their students through transformative professional experiences.
However, not even the breathtaking setting of the Columbia River Gorge could distract the Northwest clinical community from the somber mood that hovered over the group's regional conference this past weekend. From the group's first gathering at Friday's reception, all were mindful and reflective of the recent unexpected decision to close one of the oldest and most respected clinics in the Northwest, the Lewis & Clark Legal Clinic. That closing threatens the continued participation and contributions of three of the most well-respected and valued clinical faculty in the Northwest: Mark Peterson, Richard Slottee, and Terry Wright. Their expected absence in years to come, as well as the planned retirement of Larry Weiser of Gonzaga after 33 years, could mark the end of an era in the Northwest clinical community.
Despite the pall in the air, the conference moved forward with presentations and discussions from a variety of new as well as experienced faculty from Seattle University, University of Washington, Gonzaga, University of Oregon, Lewis & Clark, University of Montana, the University of British Columbia, and Willamette. The community learned about new clinics at the University of Oregon and the University of Washington, examined models of collaborating with volunteer attorneys, externships, legal writing faculty, and law librarians, considered the ethical challenges of representing children in law school clinics, and provided feedback on a book Deborah Maranville is co-editing on legal education. A new organization was even created to support externship directors in the region. All in all, it was a productive conference.
The group has already scheduled the dates for next year's conference: October 2-4, 2015, at Sleeping Lady in Leavenworth, Washington (http://www.sleepinglady.com/). Before they left though, the conference participants did something that this group rarely does. They entered a formal session, discussed the tragedy unfolding at Lewis & Clark, and unanimously agreed to express their deep concern over the decision to close the Lewis & Clark Legal Clinic to the Lewis & Clark administration, the AALS Section on Legal Education, and the ABA Section on Legal Education. When those letters are available, I will post them here. In the meanwhile, I encourage you to contact our colleagues at Lewis & Clark with any suggestions or insights you have that may be helpful to them in these deeply disturbing circumstances.
October 15, 2014 in Clinic News, Current Affairs, New Clinical Faculty, New Clinical Programs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Federal Education Loan Relief and Forgiveness: An Important Resource for Law School Graduates is at Risk
By: Kim Bart, Assistant Dean for Public Interest & Pro Bono at Duke Law School, and Isaac Bowers, Associate Director for Law School Engagement & Advocacy at Equal Justice Works
Class of 2013 law school graduates who took out loans to fund their legal educations accumulated an average debt of $109,756 according to U.S. News & World Report data. In taking on that level of educational debt, many law school students were aware of, and perhaps counting on, long-established federal loan repayment and forgiveness programs. Some of the programs, however, may soon be constricted.
President Obama's proposed budget, released in March 2014, includes a proposal to cap the level of federal loan forgiveness at the aggregate loan limit for independent undergraduate students, which is currently set at $57,500. This may leave graduate and professional students, including law students, out in the cold. Congress is likely to take the issue up next year as part of its ongoing reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
Federal Loan Repayment and Forgiveness Programs
Federal loan repayment and forgiveness programs currently can help high debt borrowers in two main ways: (1) income-driven repayment plans set monthly student loan payments at an affordable percentage of borrowers' incomes and allow cancellation of any remaining debt after 20 or 25 years; (2) Public Service Loan Forgiveness allows borrowers who commit to working in the public interest sector to earn forgiveness after 10 years of loan repayment. Only federal student loans are eligible for these federal programs.
The two most common income-driven repayment plan options are Income-Based Repayment (IBR) and Pay As You Earn (PAYE). IBR has been available to borrowers since 2009. It caps most borrowers' monthly loan payments at 15% of discretionary income, with discharge of the loan balance after 25 years. Borrowers with no federal student loan balance who receive loans on or after July 1, 2014 have a monthly payment cap of 10% of discretionary income and discharge after 20 years.
PAYE, which has been available since 2012, also caps a borrower's monthly loan payment at 10% of discretionary income and allows discharge of the loan balance after 20 years. To qualify for PAYE, borrowers must have received a loan on or after Oct. 1, 2007 and have had no outstanding federal student loans at the time they received it, and must receive a disbursement of a federal loan on or after Oct. 1, 2011.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, the length of repayment is reduced from 20 or 25 years to just 10, in return for the borrower working in qualifying public interest employment. Qualifying employment includes work with federal, state, local or tribal government, or work with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
The prospect of loan forgiveness after 10 years of loan repayment has allowed many high debt recent law school graduates to consider public interest or public service employment, even though starting salaries for the public sector are significantly below those of the private sector. Median entry-level salary for public interest employment hover around $48,000, according to the 2014 NALP Public Sector and Public Interest Attorney Salary Report. This compares unfavorably with a median first-year salary of $125,000 for private firms. PSLF allows high debt law school graduates to realistically consider devoting themselves to long-term public service legal careers. A cap on Federal Loan Forgiveness would have a deleterious effect on the ability of law school grads to successfully manage law school debt, and remove an incentive for lawyers to choose lower-paying, but much-needed, public service work over private law firm employment.
Learn More
To learn more, join the Equal Justice Works free live webinar: "JDs in Debt: What Law Students & Lawyers Need to Know about Managing Student Loans & Earning Public Service Loan Forgiveness," which will be offered on October 8th, November 25th and December 18th, 2014. To register, visit http://equaljusticeworks.org/ed-debt/webinars.
October 1, 2014 in Clinic Students and Graduates, Current Affairs, Jobs | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
Professor Sarah Deer Is a MacArthur Fellow!
I admit that the one email I dread every September is the announcement of the MacArthur Fellows --nothing like feeling totally inadequate three weeks into the new school year by reading about the exceptional accomplishments of this extraordinarily creative and hardworking group of individuals. I personally much prefer the announcement of the Darwin Awards.
But this year when I saw the dreaded email from the MacArthur Foundation, I quickly noted that the clinical community's own Sarah Deer has been selected! Professor Deer is on the faculty of William Mitchell College of Law and is co-director of their Indian Law Clinic. She is a tireless advocate who has been instrumental in developing legal protections for Native American victims of domestic violence. A description of Professor Deer's work can be found here. A full list of this year's MacArthur Fellows can be found here. Congratulations, Professor Deer, on a truly extraordinary and well-earned distinction!
September 16, 2014 in Clinic News, Clinic Profile, Current Affairs, Domestic Violence, Faculty Profile, Family Law, Job Opportunities & Fellowships, Promotions, Honors & Awards | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Generation U
Last week, The Economist published an article called "Generation i." The "i" was not a capital "I"—a reference to self-centeredness, a characteristic we often assign to the next generation coming of age, both out of a reflexive stereotype, as well as with an enduring familiarity with the characteristics of late adolescence. Rather, it was the more humble and humbling lower-case "i," and referred to one of the most ethically confounding components of the law school curriculum today: externships. The Economist article referred to externship by its synonym, "internship," (hence, the "i") and considered the—ideally, educational and professional—experience in the context of a global trend in which internships have become widely required for entry into the most elite professions, such as law, finance, corporate management, journalism, and government.
The Economist article highlighted that with the rise of internships expected prior to hiring, the market has also seen an increasing number of these internships being unpaid, which effectively serves to segregate poor potential interns from wealthier ones. After all, it is far more difficult for a poor student and her family to support her for several months while she works for free. But it gets worse. As legal educators are well aware, many young people not only have to work for free, but they have to pay to do so in today's market. In the case of law school students, some will be paying $15,000 or more to work full-time in law offices off-campus over the course of one semester. Is there a point at which this becomes exploitative?
One generation ago, in the late 1990s, I racked up approximately 3,500 hours of law practice experience between my first day of law school and my graduation day and was paid close to $100,000 in the process. If one were to add in my field experience with human and children's rights, my experiential hours would have approached 4,000. Of those, only approximately 100 were earned through a law school-sponsored externship.
What did my law school do while I was off campus getting thousands of hours of legal experience? It treated me like an adult and tried to support me with flexibility and funding. It granted me a one-year leave to take a paid position working in an international law firm in Tokyo, let me complete my third year in another law school on the other side of the country where I clerked at the law firm where I happily spent the first eight years of my legal career, gave me two grants to support my field work in children's rights, and allowed me to spend a January term researching child labor in Asia. In other words, the school allowed me a significant amount of freedom to design an educational and professional experience that worked for me as an individual. In exchange, I took my law school classes seriously, participated actively in the law school community, paid full tuition for three years, and despite the income I earned, still graduated six figures in debt with a studio apartment overlooking a parking lot and driving a 1987 Volkswagen Jetta. But I had experience and purpose and was positioned to launch, so I was happy.
Can we offer law students similar opportunities to individualize their legal education and professional development today? I think we can. The ABA's recent decision to stop limiting law students' ability to work more than 20 hours a week is a step in the right decision, as is the standard requiring law schools to mandate that students take more experiential courses. But, these changes do not go far enough. In today's market of declining enrollment for law schools, some deans will be tempted to balance the budget on the backs of students and satisfy the experiential course requirements by offering low-quality externship opportunities. Every law school in the country must resist the temptation to allow our students to mortgage their futures with government-backed student loans in exchange for the "opportunity" to work for free off campus without substantial support from the law school.
Instead, law schools should see the new ABA standard requiring six credits of experiential coursework as an opportunity to strengthen and diversify course offerings that have long been neglected in the legal academy. These offerings should include a variety of law practice simulation courses leading into multiple clinical practice opportunities followed by a successful externship placement or paid clerkship that could lead to a permanent job offer, such as those described in last week's article in The Economist. In other words, we need to ensure that our students are competitive to launch in a market very different than you and I entered one or two generations ago.
At every stage of this learning process, law schools should ensure that experiential course offerings are high quality and well-resourced, even when they occur off campus. When a student writes a check for thousands of dollars to a law school to work for free, the law school has a heightened moral obligation to ensure that the student has adequate support and supervision from the law school to help ensure that the experience is truly educational and professional and the student is successful. The student should complete the semester, or at his or her least law school career, feeling that, even in a market that many of us fear is increasingly exploitative, the law school had the student's back. Law schools should not be seen as part of the exploitation and class stratification of "Generation i" being witnessed on a global basis.
Instead, we should transform our approach to "Generation i" into "Generation U," getting to know our students individually, discovering their dreams and aspirations, and then helping to design an educational and professional program that is all about them. Sometimes that will mean providing high levels of support, other times, it will mean just getting out of their way, but always it should include high-quality choices, both academic and experiential. In doing so, let's ensure that internships are all about education with our students at its core—in other words, a capital "U" bringing together us, the University, and You, our students.
September 14, 2014 in Current Affairs, Teaching and Pedagogy | Permalink | Comments (1)
Thursday, July 17, 2014
The Fourth Wave?
The International Journal of Clinical Legal Education just completed its 12th Conference titled "Clinic without Borders," in Olomouc, a town in the Haná region of the Czech Republic dating back to the 10th Century A.D. The conference was co-organized with the European Network for Clinical Legal Education, and was held at Palacký University, which is nearly 450 years old, and is one of the oldest universities in Central Europe.
The conference was attended by nearly 200 law faculty members and social justice advocates from all over the world. Countries represented included Japan, Cambodia, China, Nigeria, Australia, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Brazil, Italy, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Poland, Russia, Georgia, Spain, Canada, Kenya, Hungary, Sumatra, Bali, Finland, Turkey, New Zealand, and more. Approximately ten percent of the delegates were from the United States and included faculty from the Catholic University of America, NYU, American, University of California, Cornell, University of New Mexico, University of Georgia, Columbia, Rutgers, Albany, Georgetown, Washington and Lee, George Washington University, Willamette, and more.
Themes included "Clinic in the Wider Curriculum," "Growing Clinics around the Globe," "Multi-Disciplinary Clinics," "The Growth of Clinics in Europe," and "Virtual Clinics," and the papers presented ranged from "The Path to Clinics in the Middle East" to "Clinic in an Era of 'Crisis' for Legal Education" to "Developing a Cross-Border Clinical Legal Education Project." It was a rich exchange of ideas, resources, and collaborative opportunities that reinvigorated many of those who participated.
One area of disappointment expressed during a debrief of the conference was the dearth of paper proposals submitted in relation to the theme of "Virtual Clinics." According to Johnny Hall of Northumbria University (UK), digital technologies could easily become the "Fourth Wave" in clinical legal education. What caused the lack of interest in presenting on this topic?
One possibility considered is that clinical law faculty members are as uncomfortable with digital technologies as the rest of legal educators. Most of us have not been leaders in integrating education technologies into the law school curriculum, clinical or otherwise. At the same time, we recognized that many clinical faculty and students utilize digital technologies in our law school courses, practices, and lives almost every day in the form of email, course websites, word processing software and files, messaging, social media, digital document storage, internet conferencing, smart phones, tablets, laptops, Internet, scanners, practice management software, social media, clinic websites, digital recordings, and more. We just don't think the use of these technologies converts our face-to-face clinics into "Virtual Clinics." Thus, the issue may simply have been one of terminology in the "Call for Proposals."
After all, we heard stories at the conference of law faculty who were actually operating clinics without a "bricks and mortar" home where students never actually meet their clients in person. Most of us who are integrating these technologies into our law school clinics still rely very heavily on the face-to-face interactions between students and clients and faculty and students that make the clinical experience so rich, especially in certain practice areas such as domestic violence, refugee law, child advocacy, family law, and more.
What would be the consequences both for our students and the populations we serve if we converted a significant number of law school clinics into "virtual" ones? On the one hand, we could better serve rural, disabled, remote, or international clients who normally would not have physical access to our law school clinics, but we also might start to favor certain practice areas such as business law that lend themselves better to remote representation than others. Having a virtual clinic could also exclude those individuals who are too poor to afford the technology needed to access the clinic. These are some of the consequences that we must consider as an educational community in the Digital Age and respond with awareness and intent in designing our courses and curricula within a world of rapidly changing technology and limited resources.
As we met at IJCLE's 12th Conference and considered the technologies that we already have integrated into our clinical courses and practices in whole or in part, we recognized that many of us have not undergone the thoughtful and intentional design and due diligence that is normally so characteristic of clinical pedagogy. Why? What is it about technology that eschews intention, analysis, and reflection in the clinical community?
We may soon find out. The planners of IJCLE's 13th Conference are considering organizing next year's conference around this potential "Fourth Wave" in clinical legal education. The conference will be held July 22-28 in Turkey and will overlap with the meeting of the Global Alliance for Justice Education. Pencil the dates in your calendars now. Regardless of the topic finally selected, if it is anything like this year's conference, it will be well worth the flight.
July 17, 2014 in Conferences and Meetings, Current Affairs, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Funding Opportunity for Law School Clinics
Our nation is currently witnessing headlines about the busing of hundreds of unaccompanied children across the Southwest from Texas to Arizona, where they are being warehoused, but there are tens of thousands more unaccompanied children in our nation who are not making headlines. All need our help. Tomorrow Gannett is publishing an op-ed I wrote about the need to provide legal representation for these children. It can be found here.
Law school clinics interested in this issue should consider applying for the AmeriCorps grants that the Obama administration announced on Friday to provide legal representation for these and other migrant children who are in similar circumstances (see NYT article). Information about the grants can be found at this site. The targeted jurisdictions for the grants are: Arlington, VA; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; Bloomington, MN; Boston, MA; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; El Paso, TX; Hartford, CT; Kansas City, MO; Las Vegas, NV; Memphis, TN; Miami, FL; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Newark, NJ; Omaha, NE; Orlando, FL; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR; San Antonio, TX; San Diego, CA; San Francisco, CA; and Seattle, WA.
If you need background in preparing your application, an excellent study about these children was just published by UC Hastings with the support of the MacArthur Foundation. I recently wrote a brief law review article arguing for the appointment of government-funded attorneys and personal representatives to help unaccompanied children navigate the legal labyrinth they face. If you would like to talk or need help with your application, please don't hesitate to contact me. You will also find tremendous resources among our our colleagues who are immigration law faculty. They are a font of knowledge, passion, and commitment. Good luck!
June 10, 2014 in Current Affairs, Immigration, Job Opportunities & Fellowships, Juvenile Justice, New Clinical Programs, Scholarship, Television | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
One of Inga's "Must See Movies" for the Summer
Below is a trailer for a movie that I am planning on seeing this summer...that is if I can find it within a 300 mile radius of Spokane, Washington. "The Rules of Racism" is the third movie in the series "Hidden Colors" from New York Times bestselling author, Tariq Nasheed. The previous two films in the series are "Hidden Colors: The Untold History of People of Aboriginal, Moor, and African Descent" (2011) and "Hidden Colors 2: The Triumph of Melanin" (2012).
WARNING: If you watch this video on YouTube and glance below the video to the comments section, prepare to be outraged, amused, befuddled, disheartened and a host of other emotions...
May 21, 2014 in Current Affairs, Interdisciplinary Programs, Television | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Please Forget Me in the Morning
A high-impact decision was issued by the European Court of Justice today when it held that Google must adhere to the requests of individuals to erase links to information that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27388289). The case was brought by a Spanish man who did not want an auction notice for a repossessed home he had owned to be retrieved in response to searches of his name. The emerging legal concept, the "right to be forgotten," is largely European and grows from the region's well-established and widely-recognized body of privacy rights.
George Washington University Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen, who is also the Legal Affairs Editor of The New Republic, calls the "right to be forgotten" the "biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade" (http://goo.gl/pq4UHC). A more comprehensive treatment of this right was published by Steven Bennett and can be found here: http://goo.gl/0nY227. Professor Rosen's response to the emergence of the right to be forgotten is hardly surprising in a society like ours whose passion for free speech is only matched by our love of guns and money. But at what price?
Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship praised the ruling as a step out of the "digital stone age." That stone age is one in which our children are often among the most vulnerable. Over ten years ago, Michigan State University Law Professor Kevin Saunders published a book examining the effects of the First Amendment on our nation's children, Saving Our Children from the First Amendment (http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=9489#.U3Jqumjn-1s). Since then, we have witnessed an exploding occurrence of cyberbullying, sextortion, sexting, and exchange of sex abuse images involving our children and youth. While there are clearly exceptions to First Amendment freedoms for some of the challenges our children and youth face in the Digital Age, the fact remains that many of our children will carry a burden that we have never experienced as their youthful impulses, indiscretions, and, in some cases, victimizations, will be forever published and available on the Internet for others to witness again and again, unless the United States begins to more widely recognize a right to privacy.
Who among us isn't thankful that those cellulose acetate images of a certain Spring Break in the Bahamas or that post-college graduation train ride across Europe or the election night victory party are degrading in someone's attic right now? After all, as Scientific American reminded us yesterday, even the brains of mice, Chilean rodents, and guinea pigs know that some things are better forgotten (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-brain-cells-erase-old-memories/?&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20140512).
May 13, 2014 in Children, Current Affairs, Juvenile Justice, Science, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Service-Learning in the Law School Curriculum
In my first post about service-learning, I asked the question: who is serving whom? In this post, I want to reflect on why I think service-learning is important in the law school curriculum, and how it is different from and expands upon the skills and values we teach in law school clinics.
My first experience with service learning was almost twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate student at Saint Mary's College. As part of our exchange with our neighbor, the University of Notre Dame, I participated in several alternative spring break experiences through Notre Dame's Center for Social Concerns. In fact, it was my participation in the Migrant Experiences Seminar as both an undergraduate and as a law student that set me on the path toward immigrant advocacy in my legal career.
Experiential learning generally - and service-learning in particular - has recently gained more traction in the law school curriculum. But what is the specific value of integrating service-learning more fully into the law school experience, and how is it different from other experiential learning opportunities? My UDC-DCSL colleague, Professor Susan Waysdorf - who has written extensively about service-learning in the law school curriculum - describes service-learning as programs that "place primary value on the service contribution and on the humanitarian participation of the students and teachers."
Professor Waysdorf's definition of service-learning resonates with me because it emphasizes the value of service-learning in the law school curriculum not just to our students, but to us as educators, as well. What do we, as teachers, gain by "giving up" our spring break to spend time with our students on these trips? What are we ourselves learning and teaching our students about the skills and values of the legal profession, and how do we distinguish it from what we teach in clinic?
I often describe clinic as a lab - in clinic, our students are able to work on a small number of cases chosen specifically for their pedagogical value, in a controlled environment and under close supervision. In service-learning, the set-up is dramatically different - both students and teachers are taken out of the safety of the clinic environment, and put in a situation where they are required to be vulnerable. Service-learning allows us to learn from those whom we are "serving" in a way that makes the experience powerful and disarming, precisely because of its lack of structure (in comparison to both clinics specifically and the law school curriculum as a whole).
In my final post in this series, I will share some stories of our service-learning experiences on the Arizona/Mexico border, and reflect further on how the addition of such opportunities to the law school curriculum can be profoundly life-changing for both students and teachers.
Recommended Readings:
Teaching the Reflective Approach Within the Service-Learning Model, Laurie Morin and Susan L. Waysdorf, 62 Journal of Legal Education 4 (2013).
Returning to New Orleans: Reflections on the Post-Katrina Recovery, Disaster Relief, and the Struggle for Social Justice, Susan L. Waysdorf, 12 Univ. of the District of Columbia Law Review 3 (2009).
Katrina Disaster Family Law: The Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Families and Family Law, Mc-Carthy-Brown and Waysdorf, 42 Indiana Law Review 721 (2009).
May 8, 2014 in Clinic Students and Graduates, Current Affairs, Immigration, Interdisciplinary Programs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Twittering on the Brink
The day after I published my first blogpost, my 11-year-old daughter persuaded me to buy The Ultimate Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. We pretended it was for her, but I knew better. Shortly after she handed me the text, I noted Chapter Five was titled "Mean Streets: Urban Survival," which included an entry on "How to Clean Up Your Online Reputation." One post and I already felt compelled to do damage control. The fact that the advice could be found somewhere between "How to Cross a Piranha-Infested River" and "How to Outrun a Pack of Zombies" pretty much cinched it for me.
What titles better capture the anxiety of a 40-something law professor venturing into the realm of social media? Don't they know that law professors don't do media? Heck. We don't even do "social." That is why we are professors! Many of us aren't even trustworthy with a "Reply All" email function after a rancorous faculty meeting (http://www.uomatters.com/2014/04/uo-law-school-prof-angry-about-plan-to-use-his-raise-for-scholarships.html), let alone a digital platform that transports our late night ramblings instantly and permanently to 2.5 billion Internet users all over the globe.
But Worst-Case Scenarios can bring out the Indiana Jones in all of us, and right now, legal educators need to dig deep into our "Urban Survival" kits. Moody's recently downgraded several independent law schools (http://www.nationallawjournal.com/home/id=1202651992392/Independent+Law+Schools+Suffer+CreditRatings+Slips%3Fmcode=1202617074964&curindex=2); The New York Times reported this month that five law schools have closed in the past two years (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/business/bold-bid-to-combat-a-crisis-in-legal-education.html?_r=0), although legal educators struggle to identify them (http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/04/five-law-schools-have-closed-in-the-last-two-years.html); and all the while, enrollments continue to plummet (http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/three-year-volume). So we law professors are starting to do something truly radical (at least for us): we are trying new verbs. We are tweeting, blogging, posting, tumbling, linking, and more. But do we know what we are doing or why? Of course not! Thus, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a series of articles in The Digital Campus this week helping all of us to better appreciate and understand the importance of social media in the academy (http://chronicle.com/section/The-Digital-Campus-2014/715/).
If a Luddite like me (who cannot figure out how to turn off iTunes on her iPhone after listening to a little Eddie Vedder) can figure out how to Tweet, so can you! Here are some fast facts about social networking and survival tips for those of us who are Twittering on the brink.
Facing Facts
Ever wonder what your students are doing in class? They are on Facebook posting or reading someone else's posts or messaging, possibly about your suit, but let's hope it is about the class discussion (in a good way, of course). Don't believe me? Sit in the back of a large lecture hall and witness it yourself. Eighty-four percent of 18-29 year-olds and 79 percent of 30-49 year-olds are on Facebook (http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-demographics-2013_b53515#more-53515). Heck. Even my 90-year-old grandma is on Facebook. But my grandma is not why you need to be on Facebook, it is because our students are, as are our alumni, and our competitors…er, colleagues, at other law schools.
Facebook is where our students engage, sometimes even when they are in class. It is the digital town square where people go to socialize and engage, so if you are not in the town square, you are not part of the conversation. But here's the irony: law school social media etiquette is that most professors and students do not become Facebook friends until after they graduate. Why? Professional boundaries. You really don't want to see that picture of your students with their buddies and a pile of empty PBR cans when they are supposed to be studying any more than they wants to see you vacationing at your cabin with your family when you are supposed to be grading.
So why do it? Once our students graduate, there is a little more distance and Facebook provides a wonderful way to keep in touch with our former students. We get to witness weddings, new babies, moves to new cities, travel, and more. It allows our professor-student relationships to be transformed into lifelong friendships, and that is worth learning new tricks, at least for this old dog.
Linking In
So what social media can you use with your students while they are still your students? LinkedIn. Of all the mainstream social media platforms, LinkedIn is consistently the most formal and professional. Currently, LinkedIn is used by 15 percent of 18-29 year-olds and 27 percent of 30-49 year-olds (http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-demographics-2013_b53515#more-53515). It is the only social networking site surveyed that is used more by people in the $75k+ salary range than in any other salary category (http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-demographics-2013_b53515#more-53515). Given that most of our students will enter this demographic shortly after graduation, we need to model for them how to use LinkedIn and so I routinely "link" with potential new law school students whom I meet as well as students enrolled in my courses every semester. It helps them develop a professional profile and network and allows you to become updated quickly on the professional activities and positions of your students and alumni. This is especially important when you are asked to serve as a reference or write a letter of recommendation or simply help your law school compile placement data.
Dare to Tweet
Another social media platform to consider using to engage with your students (and potential students) prior to graduation is Twitter. A 2013 Pew Research center survey found that 31 percent of 18-29 year-olds and 19 percent of 30-49 year-olds use Twitter (http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-demographics-2013_b53515#more-5351). Twitter's use among adults under 40 years of age (law schools' key demographic) has more than doubled since 2010 (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Twitter-Use-Rises-Across-US-Age-Groups/1010119), and the latest data shows that 71 percent of
Twitter users are 29 years of age and younger (https://www.sysomos.com/docs/Inside-Twitter-BySysomos.pdf); in other words, the age of our students and potential students.
The beauty of Twitter is that it is a one-way street (unless you decide to reciprocate). You simply put your ideas and observations out there for any of the 300+ million Twitter users to read, and if you are interesting (at least to some) or a celebrity, you might develop a following. The pain of Twitter, especially for law professors, is that you are limited to 140 characters per Tweet. Some say it makes Tweeters better writers, but others would argue that any communication forum that encourages the dropping of vowels and the use of contractions should be shunned forever.
In any event, Twitter allows you to share links to recommended readings for your students (or other followers), post links to your publications, update your followers on lectures, and more without getting as personal as one might on Facebook, for example. At the same time, The Chronicle published an opinion this week suggesting that getting at least a little personal on Twitter might make you appear more authentic (http://chronicle.com/article/In-Defense-of-Getting-Personal/145945/). And don't worry, as painful as limiting your thoughts to 140 characters might sound, there are plenty of resources (see, e.g., http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387516,00.asp) to teach you how to tweet in a way that won't make you look too much like, well, a law professor Twittering on the brink….
May 1, 2014 in Current Affairs, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Happy 20th Anniversary to Democracy in South Africa!
Twenty years ago today, the first elections were held in a free and democratic Republic of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela was elected the country's first president. For many of us in the clinical community, ending the incredibly racist and violent apartheid regime was our first endeavor into seeking global justice, and was undertaken in our formative years. Although our individual efforts seem relatively immaterial, history documents that the international economic and political pressures imposed on the apartheid government played a decisive role in ending a regime that was built on the oppression, exploitation, and political and economic exclusion of others. Our witness of the ability of humanity to work together on a global basis to end apartheid in South Africa inspired many of us to make optimistic lifelong commitments to work towards global justice and to teach others to do the same. "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," Nelson Mandela taught us. Today, we have the honor of witnessing and supporting so many teachers in the clinical community and beyond who continue to heed the lessons we learned from Nelson Mandela. These heroes of law and democracy use education every day to promote justice and the rule of law, and to end oppression, exclusion, and exploitation all around the world. Happy 20th Anniversary to the Republic of South Africa, and to everyone everywhere who supports and promotes freedom and democracy!
April 27, 2014 in Community Organizing, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Friday, April 25, 2014
Op-Ed on Paroline v. U.S.
Here is an op-ed I wrote for Gannett on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Paroline vs. U.S.: http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/2014/04/25/congress-listen-child-sex-abuse-victims/8172953/. The battle to help restore victims of child pornography will now shift to Capitol Hill. There is a critical role for law school clinics to play and I hope that you will consider joining the effort.
April 25, 2014 in Children, Clinic Victories, Current Affairs, Domestic Violence, Family Law, Juvenile Justice, Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Pepperdine and the New California Bar Rules
Last week at Pepperdine, in advance of the new admissions rules for the California bar, at the urging of our dean, the faculty approved new graduation requirements of 50 hours of pro bono work for students and 15 units of "practice-based, experiential course work." These will be in effect for the incoming class of 2017.
These requirements track the new California bar rules for admission. The California State Bar's Task Force on Admissions Regulation Reform (TFARR) has established working groups to work out the definitions and procedures for implementing the new rules. There is more here.
The Task Force plans to work until September 2014 before issuing final rules. This is the text of the pertinent rules from the site:
Pre-admission: A competency training requirement fulfilled prior to admission to practice. There would be two routes for fulfillment of this pre-admission competency training requirement: (a) at any time in law school, a candidate for admission must have taken at least 15 units of practice-based, experiential course work that is designed to develop law practice competencies, and (b) in lieu of some or all of the 15 units of practice-based, experiential course work, a candidate for admission may opt to participate in a Bar-approved externship, clerkship or apprenticeship at any time during or following completion of law school;
Pre-admission or post-admission: An additional competency training requirement, fulfilled either at the pre- or post- admission stage, where 50 hours of legal services is specifically devoted to pro bono or modest means clients. Credit towards those hours would be available for "in-the-field" experience under the supervision and guidance of a licensed practitioner or a judicial officer. . . .
These are some of the outstanding issues for the implementation committees:
What does "pro bono" include? Will the rule limit pro bono to traditional legal services placements? Will the Bar track ABA Model Rule 6.1? Will be it broader or more narrow? Will it track New York's rule that includes judicial externships, district attorneys and governmental law offices?
Will students be able to earn "dual credit" by taking a clinic or similar course that offers "practice-based, experiential course work" and pro bono services simultaneously?
Who will certify whether a course is practice-based and experiential? Will the Bar approve specific offerings or defer to law schools to determine which courses qualify?
Should a portion of the 15 units include clinics or externships? For instance, the committee is considering whether to require that 3 or 4 of the 15 units be in-house clinics or field placements.
Can substantive, doctrinal classes carve out a portion of the traditional podium course to include experiential components that can count toward the 15 units? For instance, could a contracts class provide .5 units toward the requirement by including a simulated drafting or negotiation component?
Can students satisfy all or part of the apprenticeship option during traditional summer work, and, if so, how will law schools be involved in the quality control and certification of compliance?
In future posts, I will describe the competing positions, my preferences and make some predictions.
April 25, 2014 in Conferences and Meetings, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Law as Vocation
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a vocation as "a strong desire to spend your life doing a certain kind of work." This definition of vocation implies a calling to a particular field of work, a devotion to a cause or occupation that is more than just a job - a vocation is something that is, by definition, imbued with meaning and a higher purpose.
I have always thought of my career in law in its various incarnations as a vocation. As a lawyer, counselor, activist, and teacher, the connection between my daily work and what I see as one of the main purposes of my life (the pursuit of social justice) has been rich. But like anything else, the law is a tool that can be used to accomplish various ends - or, as Charles Hamilton Houston famously reflected, "A lawyer is a either a social engineer or a parasite on society."
One of the reasons I wanted to not just become a law professor, but to become a clinician specifically, is because of my view of law as a vocation. It seems to me that our society, rightly or not, presents the "parasite" model of lawyering much more prominently than the "social engineer" model. While both models of lawyering are extreme, and the truth lies somewhere in the middle, I think this false dichotomy of what it means to be a lawyer causes us to lose something much more subtle and valuable - the notion that law is an honorable profession, and that lawyering can and should be more than just a job.
I am also aware of the temptation in our society to both romanticize (John Grisham) and sensationalize (Law and Order) the practice of law. My reflection of law as vocation is meant to get at something a bit different. At its core, law is a healing profession. If law is a vocation, lawyers are not merely hired guns - we are problem solvers. Lawyers are counselors and advocates - we stand by and walk with our clients not just because the rules of professional conduct require us to, but because our vocation calls us to do so. This is what I have learned from my teachers, colleagues, and students over the course of my career, and is ultimately part of the vision of lawyering and legal education that I hope to contribute to.
April 24, 2014 in Clinic Students and Graduates, Community Organizing, Current Affairs, Religion, Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Via NPR: San Francisco Library Hires Social Worker to Help Homeless Patrons
As a clinician who devotes a substantial amount of her time promoting and working with social workers via interdisciplinary collaborations, it was rewarding to hear that social work efforts are being used in other locales, and for the benefit of those who need services most. San Francisco's library system recently hired a full time social worker who assists homeless patrons by connecting them to services and housing resources. This is not only a great service to those folks, but also a great shout out to the benefits that social work brings to clients. Way to go San Francisco! The entire story may be heard here:
April 23, 2014 in Current Affairs, Interdisciplinary Programs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
SCOTUS Decision Issued in Paroline v. U.S. Today
This morning the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Paroline v. U.S. (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-8561_7758.pdf). The case involved the question of how to determine restitution for victims of child pornography. Although the majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy and joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito, and Kagan, agrees with the victim and the government that restitution is mandatory, it held that courts should determine on an individualized basis each defendant's unique role in the causation of the victim's losses and then be held liable only for that limited amount.
This interpretation renders the mandatory restitution statute (18 U.S.C. §2252) untenable. Child pornography victims are routinely harmed by thousands of perpetrators many of whom are never identified, let alone prosecuted. It places a significant burden on courts, the government, and victims to try to calculate the relative harms caused by each individual perpetrator. Moreover, perpetrators are routinely found to possess or distribute child sex abuse images involving numerous victims. Thus, courts, the government, and victims would have to make this complex determination for each individual victim. The process as described would be highly inefficient, ineffective, and will lead to victims reliving their sexual abuse trauma indefinitely through the court system.
Thus, a legislative solution must be generated. According to the dissent, which was drafted by Chief Justice Roberts and joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas, "Congress set up a restitution system sure to fail in cases like this one." Congress simply imported a generic restitution statute "without accounting for the diffuse harm suffered by victims of child pornography." According to the dissent, the mandatory restitution statute is untenable and Congress should be given the opportunity to fix it.
Justice Sotomayor also dissented, but on entirely different grounds. She, essentially, agrees with the victim in this case, "Amy," that each defendant should be held liable for the full amount of each victim's losses. She, too, invites Congress to recodify the mandatory restitution statute to make clear that its command to award full restitution to victims of child pornography. Congress should accept the invitation.
Here is Amy's response to the decision:
"I am surprised and confused by the Court's decision today. I really don't understand where this leaves me and other victims who now have to live with trying to get restitution probably for the rest of our lives. The Supreme Court said we should keep going back to the district courts over and over again but that's what I have been doing for almost six years now. It's crazy that people keep committing this crime year after year and now victims like me have to keep reliving it year after year. I'm not sure how this decision helps anyone to really know if, when, and how restitution will ever be paid to kids and other victims of this endless crime. I see that the Court said I should get full restitution "someday," I just wonder when that day will be and how long I and Vicky and other victims will have to wait for justice."
Willamette's Child and Family Advocacy Clinic originally filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children in this case (http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/briefs-v3/12-8561_resp_amcu_dnrthbsvc.authcheckdam.pdf) and I previously published a guest opinion on Paroline v. U.S. with Jurist (http://jurist.org/forum/2014/02/warren-binford-paroline-supreme.php).
April 23, 2014 in Children, Criminal Defense, Current Affairs, Domestic Violence, Family Law, Juvenile Justice, Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
On the Eve of Administrative Professionals Day...
Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 23rd is Administrative Professionals Day (in all actuality - it's an entire week). As I would be absolutely lost without the assistance of my program coordinator, who is the glue that holds it all together, I am attempting to write a Haiku expressing my gratitude...
Ordering Chaos (5)
Keeping me sane and steady (7)
Appreciation (5)
I apologize that you all had to suffer through that, but I am more than happy to use my embarrassment as a reminder to thank those wonderful people in our lives who are the underlying force for all that we accomplish.
April 22, 2014 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Assisting Oso Mudslide Victims: The Fundamental Challenges
This Guest Commentary ran in Sunday's Everett Daily Herald (Washington State), the community newspaper of record regarding challenges facing homeowners and survivors of the Oso mudslide. Many lawyers, clinical profs, and students in the Seattle and Western Washington area versed in mortgage, finance, probate and consumer protection issues are lending a hand.
How to lighten slide victims' financial burden
April 22, 2014 in Current Affairs, Housing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Monday, April 21, 2014
Do Women Professors Underperform?
"April is the cruellest month," wrote T.S. Eliot, and he was not even a woman. This April has witnessed an especially heavy torrent of conflicting statistics, studies, articles, and posts on how to be a successful woman. As with parenting, everyone seems to be an expert. Not even women in the academy—the highest concentration of experts in the world—are spared.
Following the signing of President Obama's executive orders highlighting that women in the U.S. continue to be paid just 77 cents for every dollar made by men (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/politics/obama-signs-measures-to-help-close-gender-gap-in-pay.html?_r=0), The Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog post arguing that the gender pay gap for men and women of equal rank at doctoral universities is far more narrow: 90 percent, 93 percent, 91 percent, 88 percent, and 96 percent, for full professors, associate professors, assistant professors, lecturers, and instructors, respectively (http://chronicle.com/blogs/data/2014/04/11/there-is-a-gender-pay-gap-in-academe-but-it-may-not-be-the-gap-that-matters/). Overall, however, academic women are paid an average of 78 cents on the dollar. How could that be?
The problem is representation. According to the analysis in The Chronicle, men outnumber women 3-to-1 at the full professor level, while women outnumber men 3-to-1 at the instructor level. The overrepresentation of women at lower ranks in the academy and underrepresentation of women in the higher ranks skews overall earnings of academics in an almost identical disparity as the national economy (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/the-truth-about-the-pay-gap.html).
Where do these disparities in representation come from? On the one hand, a recent article in The Atlantic reminds us that women today earn more college and graduate degrees than men do, so the issue isn't competence (http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/the-confidence-gap/359815/). Instead, The Atlantic article blames the skewing at least partially on findings that men are more confident than women, and that women's lower self-confidence holds women back professionally.
However, just last month another article, this one in The New York Times, warned that women who are overly confident may alienate others because they are not "sufficiently feminine," and cited the story of an academic who was offered a position as a philosophy professor, but the offer was subsequently rescinded after she tried to negotiate a list of "nice-to-have" items that would "make [her] decision easier" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/your-money/moving-past-gender-barriers-to-negotiate-a-raise.html). Apparently, we have to be more confident, but not too confident.
"We are asking women to juggle while they are on a tightrope," according to Professor Linda Babcock, founder of the gender equity program at Carnegie Mellon University. "The research could not be more clear in that we tolerate more aggressive or assertive behavior by men more than women."
Professor Kelly Ward, who holds a chair in the College of Education at Washington State University and researches academic leadership, attributes the disparities in representation not just to discriminatory workplace practices, but also to women's parenting choices and their focus on teaching and service over scholarship, which in turn can lead to being passed over for promotion to full professor. These "choices," which alternatively or additionally could be framed as biological imperatives coupled with societal expectations, could lead to what The Chronicle identified in 2012 as a gender gap in scholarly publishing (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Hard-Numbers-Behind/135236/).
Women comprised just 24.5 percent of scholarly authors in the field of law from 1991 to 2010. The study concluded overall that "women do not publish scholarly articles at rates equal to their presence in most fields" (http://chronicle.com/article/New-Data-Show-Articles-by/143559/). Subsequent studies document that women's academic articles are cited less frequently than those written primarily by men (http://chronicle.com/article/New-Data-Show-Articles-by/143559/), and men are far more likely to cite their own scholarship than women, which, in turn, leads to lower rates of citation for women scholars (http://chronicle.com/article/New-Gender-Gap-in-Scholarship/145311/).
So what does this labyrinthine of research mean for women professors? Are we less productive scholars than our male colleagues? Is our scholarship less relevant or lower quality? Do we suffer from the "Imposter Syndrome"? Are we paying the "Baby Penalty"? Are these findings a result of external values, biases, or restraints? Is it some combination of the above? Most importantly, now that we know about these disparities, what can we do to ensure that professors of both genders are able to fulfill their potential as scholars?
April 21, 2014 in Current Affairs, Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)


text:
<Celestial Knights> A Bladefist US. CK is actively recruiting members level 70+ to join our ranks. We are a casual raiding guild with interest in all aspects of the game. We currently have 10-person raids farming Naxx, Obsidian Sanctum, and Vault, and are working at getting the team through Eye of Eternity.
We would like to develop a 25-person team to expand our raid base and grow our guild, especially with Ulduar around the corner. CK is a fun but mature guild - we like to have fun, progress through content, but not take things too seriously and understand RL commitments. Most of us work full time, go to school, or have busy family lives, and so our raiding times and other activities revolve around RL schedules. Many of us have been gaming together for a few years, and we like our WoW time to be stress free!
We are interested in all classes and specs, and are especially interested in adding a few hunters, resto-shawmen, tanks, and shadow priests. No gear requirements to join the guild - we prefer people to be a good fit to the guild over gear-checks - but to come on raids we ask that people meet some basic stats for your class.
Raid times are mostly based on CST and EST timezones, although Bladefist is a PST server - and our raid schedule respects people's day-job schedules. Currently we raid:
Wed - 7pm EST/4pm server: 10-person OS or other quick run
Fri- 7pm EST/4pm server - 10 person Naxx - 2 quarters
Sat - 7pm EST/4pm server - 10 person Naxx - completion
Sun - open to tie up any lose ends!
* Raid times are flexible
If you are interested in learning more hit us up in game
Vesanna - GM
Freefaller - GM
Minuette - officer
Bimbax - officer
Tatesmain - officer
And visit our website at celestial-knights.guildportal.com

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Celebrity Central / Top 25 Celebs
Credit: Andre Csillag/Rex USA
Published: Thursday January 31, 2013 11:15 AM EST
More from PEOPLE
See More News
95 of 577
Watch a clip of Justin Timberlake on Star Search Before he won over hearts as a member of 'NSync, Timberlake flexed his vocal muscles (and did a country jig!) as an 11-year-old contestant on Star Search, singing Alan Jackson's "Love's Got A Hold On You." Though he was bested on the program, the "Suit & Tie" crooner proved his signature falsetto was a winning asset at the 2004 Grammy Awards, when his first solo effort, Justified, nabbed him two trophies after 13 losing nominations with 'NSync.
Copyright © 2014 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.


text:
http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/issue/feed electronic Journal of Health Informatics 2014-11-24T07:29:20-06:00 Prof. Evelyn Hovenga firstname.lastname@example.com Open Journal Systems
Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. The journal/publisher is not responsible for subsequent uses of the work, including uses infringing the above license. It is the author's responsibility to bring an infringement action if so desired by the author.

Authors may, of course, use and distribute their published paper as desired and place the published version in repositories of their choice.
 The electronic Journal of Health Informatics is dedicated to the advancement of Health Informatics and information technology in healthcare. eJHI is an international Open Access journal committed to scholarly excellence and has a global readership in all health professions and at all levels.

 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/228 Personal Health Records in Southeast Asia Part 1 – a Way to Computerize Healthcare? 2014-11-24T07:21:29-06:00 Lee Seldon firstname.lastname@example.com Computerization of healthcare systems and health records in southeast (SE) Asia is progressing very slowly, and there are no indications that it will accelerate in the near future. To alleviate the problems we turn to Personally Controlled Health Records (PHRs or PCHRs). Some places in SE Asia already have approximate PHRs in the form of paper booklets. In the past decade Web-based PHR systems have grown, and they are significantly cheaper and faster to install than entire Hospital Information Systems (HISs). One problem with Web-based PHRs is that many regions in SE Asia have little or no Internet access. However, regions throughout SE Asia do have many cellphone users and basic cellphone services. Development of a mobile health record for ownership and use primarily by "normal people" has been largely ignored up to now. Therefore, in this paper we propose a PHR system consisting of individual cellphone records (mobile PHRs) synchronized with Web-based PHRs to provide digital health records with or without Internet access. Such a system would be relatively easy to install and would solve many of the current problems of computerization. The individual components and relationships of such a configuration will be addressed in more detail in subsequent papers: 2 - A Digital Portable Health Record; 3 - Communications with the CCR Standard (about linking to "legacy" systems); 4 – Incorporating Biosensor Data (for self-monitoring); 5 – Incorporating Contextual Information (to allow discovery of external factors in health). 2013-02-19T08:12:12-06:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/229 Personal Health Records in SE Asia Part 2 - A Digital Portable Health Record 2014-11-24T07:23:07-06:00 Lee Seldon email@example.com Hamid Moghaddasi email@example.com Wei Jye Seo firstname.lastname@example.com Shane Wee JoNah email@example.com Electronic health records (EHRs) have existed for some time, yet few of them are applicable to conditions in developing countries of Southeast (SE) Asia. EHRs everywhere face similar problems: 1) availability; 2) ownership; 3) compatibility; 4) cost. The newer field of Web-based "personal" or "personally controlled" health records (PHRs) is evolving, and they partially address these problems. However, in large areas of SE Asia there is no or only very limited Web access. Developing countries do have many cellphone users and cellphone services. Therefore, the PHR concept can be extended to include cellphone records. Mobile health systems up to now have centered on healthcare providers rather than on "normal people", and have often required broadband networks. We describe a minimalist "Portable Personal Health Record" (PPHR) - a simple, portable, digital record to represent the health history of a single person. It is a mobile phone application owned and maintained by the users, and therefore available. The PPHR functionality emphasizes simplicity over medical exactness, so it is not the same as a "medical record." Data entry is via lists derived from the International Classification for Primary Care (ICPC-2e) for compatibility; data is stored on the phone as name-value pairs (ISO 18308), and is transmitted as SMSs via the almost ubiquitous GSM network. The records can be translated to Continuity of Care Record (CCR) format for compatibility and inclusion in standards-compliant, Web-based PHR systems. The application is provided as open-source. User testing in Sarawak, East Malaysia, shows that this application is positively received by "normal people". 2013-02-19T08:15:04-06:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/230 Personal Health Records in Southeast Asia Part 3 - Communications with the CCR Standard 2014-11-24T07:24:26-06:00 Jofry H Sutanto firstname.lastname@example.com Lee Seldon email@example.com Establishment of Personal Health Record (PHR) systems could help solve the problems of computerization of healthcare systems in developing nations in Southeast Asia; if they are Web-based, we call them WWW-PHRs. Such systems allow individuals to own and maintain their personal health records, but they should also allow data collection from healthcare providers and institutions, some of whom maintain their own Hospital Information Systems (HIS). So the problem of data exchange between HISs and WWW-PHRs must be addressed. WWW-PHR systems such as Microsoft Health Vault use the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) format for input (and output), which is correct, as such systems collect snapshots of personal health information. On the other hand, HL7 v2.x standards are the predominant ones used by healthcare institutions; they have been designed to provide a complete set of messages for the organization and provision of healthcare, but without an explicit patient record in the design. We describe a solution to match the functionally-oriented HL7 format with the object-(patient)-oriented CCR format – translation packages which run within a general message gateway; it is in the public domain (http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/hmapper/), so is open for improvements from knowledgeable institutions and individuals. The mapping approach can be extended to include other plain text formats with, for example, name-value pairs of parameters and data. 2013-02-19T08:16:38-06:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/263 Resources for Medication Management in the Aged – What do Health Professionals Want? 2014-03-12T07:56:39-05:00 Paulina Stehlik email@example.com Pēteris Dārziņš firstname.lastname@example.com Jennifer L Marriott firstname.lastname@example.com
Objectives: Many medication management resources aim to improve the quality of prescribing for older people, but simple resources naively do not address potential interactions when there are many diseases and many medications, while complex ones seem impractical to use during consultations. Limited work has explored health professional preferences regarding prescribing resources for aged and/or multi-morbid patients. Therefore the aim of this study was to define the characteristics of an "ideal" medication management resource when caring for complex aged patients.

Methods: Purposive convenience sampling was used to recruit geriatricians, GPs and accredited pharmacists for one hour, individual, semi-structured interviews though August 2011 to April 2012. Recruitment continued until data saturation. Nine geriatricians from Eastern Health, one GP and five accredited pharmacists from the Melbourne metropolitan area were interviewed. Thematic analysis was conducted using NVivo9 software.

Results: Study participants reported current resources do not assist with complex patient prescribing and lack relevance to the Australian setting. Difficulty in timely access to appropriate information and with contextualising vast amounts of new health information were identified hurdles in healthcare delivery, as were incomplete health care records. Key components which make resources useful include clear formatting, simplicity, use of peer-reviewed evidence-based recommendations, and ready electronic access via an easy to use interface.

Conclusion: Current resources do not meet health professionals' needs when they seek practical assistance when prescribing to older people with multiple medical problems. Future resources need to address identified hurdles to providing optimal care and incorporate desired features.
 2013-09-11T03:20:00-05:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/237 Evaluation of Physiotherapists' Documentation: a Retrospective Record Analysis before the Implementation of National Recommendations in the EHR system 2014-11-24T07:26:09-06:00 Kristiina Häyrinen firstname.lastname@example.com Objectives: The purpose of this study was to describe and evaluate how physiotherapists have documented patient care in EHR and especially the use of national headings in this documentation and he applicability of classifications in physiotherapy practice in the neurological care setting before the implementation of national recommendations for standardized structure of EHR. Methods: This retrospective study included 1,364 physiotherapists' notes documented in EHR systems in a central hospital in Finland during the period 2003-2005. This electronic documentation was analyzed using deductive content analysis and statistical methods. Results: Headings were used for the physiotherapy documentation. The use of different headings varied between physiotherapists' notes and the use of headings was inconsistent. Discussion: Physiotherapists' documentation has many shortcomings. Physiotherapists' documentation does not describe whole care process. Use of free text in documentation does not support searching, summarizing, decision support, or statistical analysis. Conclusion: There is a need to use classifications in physiotherapy documentation. The National Classification of Physiotherapy Practice is suitable to document physiotherapists' interventions and the use of ICF in documentation might provide more detailed information about physiotherapy practice. ICF is more applicable classification in physiotherapy documentation than the National Classification of Physiotherapy Practice. 2013-05-07T02:02:41-05:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/221 A Method for Matching Patients to Advanced Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials 2014-11-24T07:27:52-06:00 Amol Wagholikar email@example.com Anthony Nguyen email@example.com Maggie Fung email@example.com Objective: To illustrate a new method for simplifying patient recruitment for advanced prostate cancer clinical trials using natural language processing techniques. Background: The identification of eligible participants for clinical trials is a critical factor to increase patient recruitment rates and an important issue for discovery of new treatment interventions. The current practice of identifying eligible participants is highly constrained due to manual processing of disparate sources of unstructured patient data. Informatics-based approaches can simplify the complex task of evaluating patient's eligibility for clinical trials. We show that an ontology-based approach can address the challenge of matching patients to suitable clinical trials. Methods: The free-text descriptions of clinical trial criteria as well as patient data were analysed. A set of common inclusion and exclusion criteria was identified through consultations with expert clinical trial coordinators. A research prototype was developed using Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) that identified SNOMED CT concepts in the patient data and clinical trial description. The SNOMED CT concepts model the standard clinical terminology that can be used to represent and evaluate patient's inclusion/exclusion criteria for the clinical trial. Results: Our experimental research prototype describes a semi-automated method for filtering patient records using common clinical trial criteria. Our method simplified the patient recruitment process. The discussion with clinical trial coordinators showed that the efficiency in patient recruitment process measured in terms of information processing time could be improved by 25%. Conclusion: An UIMA-based approach can resolve complexities in patient recruitment for advanced prostate cancer clinical trials. 2013-06-04T03:32:52-05:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/232 Uncovering Knowledge that Supports Malaria Prevention and Control Intervention Program in Ethiopia 2014-11-24T07:29:20-06:00 Geletaw Sahle firstname.lastname@example.com Million Meshesha email@example.com Malaria is one of the leading causes of death in Ethiopia. Though there are many efforts to control malaria, the complexity of the problem is still very severe. So there is a need to investigate in detail the synergic effect of risk factors with temperature, altitude, type of visit and malaria type and their causes of death. Hence, in this study an attempt is made to determine the hierarchical importance of different risk factors and their patterns on malaria death occurrence and type of case identification. Knowledge discovery techniques are evaluated to support and uncover knowledge to scale up the malaria prevention and intervention program in Ethiopia. CRISP-DM methodology with classification algorithms such as J48 decision tree, JRip rule induction and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) Neural Network are adopted to uncover knowledge from total datasets of 37, 609 records. An attempt is made to pre-process the data using business and data understanding with detail statistical summary in order to fill missing values and detect noisy once. Essential target dataset attributes have been constructed by integrating WHO malaria databases, National Metrological data and National Mapping data. Classification techniques discover important attributes/factors that determine malaria cases and occurrence of deaths. J48 Decision tree and MLP correctly classify 95.9% and 97.4%, respectively to predict occurrence of death. The findings of this research indicate that rainfall is the significant factor that determines the prevalence of malaria. When the number of malaria cases increases there is a high probability of death occurrences; the risk is relatively high with those less than 5 years of age. In most zones, malaria transmission rate is high from the month of May to January because of favourable climatic conditions for malaria reproduction. 2013-09-03T10:55:52-05:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/255 A Comparison of Intended and Real Use of a Research Web Health Portal and its Implementation 2014-03-12T07:56:39-05:00 Mikael Elf firstname.lastname@example.com Hans Rystedt email@example.com Ingela Skärsäter email@example.com Barbro Krevers email@example.com Participatory design (PD) projects involve prospective users as co-designers in a process where the design object emerges through several iterations. However, the result of such a process can only partly anticipate how the future real users will use the designed object. For this reason, its actual use needs to be investigated. In e-business it is commonplace to use web metrics and utilise the data generated for re-design in order to optimise sales. Web health portals have other aims, such as providing relevant and accurate health information, and giving possibilities for social support. The present study investigated the relationship between intended use and real use in two web-based health support systems in order to explore the conditions for redesign. The dependency between intended use and real use was found to be weak. Rather, the real use was dependent on 1) the context of use and 2) the needs or interest of the users. We conclude that redesign should be based on continuous use of web metrics collected in natural settings and by involving users on a recurring basis. While a web health portal must have an agenda it is important to adapt thing design to use design, why redesign in essence will become an adaptation to user needs. 2013-09-03T10:18:51-05:00 http://www.ejhi.net/ojs/index.php/ejhi/article/view/262 From Web-Based to Mobile: Experiences of Developing a Personally Controlled Health Management System 2014-03-12T07:56:39-05:00 Marleen Biederer firstname.lastname@example.com Amaël Arguel firstname.lastname@example.com Jingbo Liu email@example.com Annie Y.S. Lau email@example.com
Objective/Aims: Personally controlled health management system (PCHMS) in mobile technologies offer a new platform for personal health care. The objective of this study was to develop a mobile version of an existing web-based PCHMS and analyze its usability.

Method: The mobile extension of the PCHMS was iteratively designed from its web-based version and evaluated over a period of 6 months. 17 participants completed a 30-minute five-part usability study incorporating the think aloud protocol, task activities, card sorting exercises, interviews, and a technology acceptance questionnaire measuring the "perceived usefulness" and "perceived ease of use" of the mobile version.

Results: A mobile version of the PCHMS from its original web-based conception was successfully developed. On a scale from 1 to 7 (where 1=strongly agree, and 7=strongly disagree), participants indicated an intention to use the mobile application with a mean of 1.82, perceived usefulness with a mean of 2.24, and ease-of-use with a mean of 2.71, indicating participants found the overall mobile application useful, easy to use, and that there is strong intention to use the mobile application to manage their health.

Conclusion: Providing a PCHMS in both web-based and mobile-based platform that is well accepted by consumers should allow more people to have convenient access to their health information, self-management tools and thus improve their overall day-to-day health management. The user experience on smartphone should be carefully considered when transferring a PCHMS from traditional web-based to mobile application.
 2013-09-03T09:55:57-05:00


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Anarchists go on the rampage through central London frightening shoppers on Oxford Street. Bruce makes sure they are all safe.
Paint your trousers blue? Or trouser coloured paint?
Virgin Atlantic air stewardess and steward training aboard a simulated cabin at The Base training facility, UK.
Living statue Mark Tate prepares his make up before a shift as the Green Man in a quiet place under the iconic Southbank concrete architecture.
Computer seller asleep inside e-plaza digital square shopping mall Zhongguancun.
UK Chocolate Nation sound system, Notting Hill Carnival.
Meat seller having a rest in Siem Reap market, Cambodia.
Health Secretary and architect of the NHS reform bill MP Andrew Lansley is heckled by pensioner June Hautot as he arrived to attend a meeting on the future of the NHS.
Walking to work past police lines in front of the Greek Parliament Building in Athens.
An undead Amy Winehouse at the Stoke Newington Zombie-a-thon protests against Sainsbury's supermarket in the area.
Cliffe bonfire society members carry burning crosses. Bonfire Night celebration in the town of Lewes, East Sussex, UK.
Jesus checks his nails as he walks through police lines at the Occupy London protest.
Strange street scene in Battersea, London.
Hindus do 'the motorbike' during Holi celebrations in Richmond, London.
Funny what you see down the King's Road.
Arguments and scuffles break out between Free Iran demonstrators at Stop The War Coalition rally outside the US Embassy in London.
The 'Flame Proof Moth' performs on the edge of the River Thames.
People covered in pink and white paint, daggering.
Woman sunbathing cross shaped on the South Bank in London.
Chinese wedding couple kiss on the South Bank fairground carousel.


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JJ Abrams Offering Chance To Win Role In New Star Wars – Shows Off Elements From Ep. VII July 21, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Abrams,Sci-Fi,Star Wars , comments closed
Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness director (and 2016 Star Trek movie producer) JJ Abrams is currently helming the next Star Wars movie and just like he did with Star Trek he has a charity promotion going to give someone a chance to win a role in Episode VII. And in a new video he shows off a couple pieces from the movie. watch it below.
Orci Talks 'New Discoveries' For 2016 Star Trek Movie July 18, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Orci/Kurtzman,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
Roberto Orci remains cautious but he had a little more to say about the 2016 Star Trek movie at a recent event – talking about the setting, character arcs and directing the film. Details below.
Quinto: Not Confident Enough (Yet) To Direct Star Trek – Talks About Trek Cast's Future After 2016by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: ST09 Cast,ST: Into Darkness Sequel,Trek Franchise , comments closed
Zachary Quinto has talked much about how he and Leonard Nimoy bonded during the making of the 2009 Star Trek movie, however he doesn't appear ready to follow the original Spock to Trek director's chair. Details below, plus Quinto's comments on the future of the franchise following the third Star Trek for the new crew in 2016.
'Star Trek Live In Concert' With Giacchino This Wkd In Houston + Next Wkd At SDCC + More Cities July 17, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Conventions/Events/Attractions,Music,Star Trek (2009 film),Star Trek Into Darkness , comments closed
This weekend composer Michael Giacchino brings his "Star Trek Live in Concert" screenings of Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness with a full orchestra to the USA, performing with the Houston Symphony. Next weekend he does it again at San Diego Comic Con and then moves on to Philadelphia at the end of the month and more cities after that. More details below.
TrekInk: Preview Star Trek Comics coming October 2014 July 16, 2014by Mark Martinez , Filed under: Comics,Star Trek (2009 film),TOS,Trek Franchise , comments closed
This October, IDW Publishing will release a double helping of John Byrne's Star Trek photo tales, the conclusion of Harlan Ellison's original teleplay for The City on the Edge of Forever, and part four of the ongoing story arc featuring Q and the NuCrew. Read on for the details from the good folks at IDW.
Saldana's Guardians of the Galaxy co-star Chris Pratt Turned Down For Kirk Role + New Saldana Featurette July 15, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Celebrity,Sci-Fi,Star Trek (2009 film) , comments closed
In August Star Trek's Zoe Saldana will be seen in space on the big screen again in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. And it has just been revealed that her Guardians co-star Chris Pratt was rejected for the role of the new Kirk. Details below plus new featurette with Saldana.
Orci Joins Power Rangers Movie Creative Teamby TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Celebrity,Orci/Kurtzman,Sci-Fi , comments closed
Roberto Orci is currently co-writing the script for the 2016 Star Trek movie, but he has other projects going like the new TV series Matador (premiering tonight). And he just added another project to his plate – helping bring The Power Rangers back to the big screen. Details below.
Quinto Ready For 5-Year Mission + Optimistic For Orci Directing Star Trek 2016 July 11, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Celebrity,ST09 Cast,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
Today Zachary Quinto was at the Summer TCA event and spoke a bit about the 2016 Star Trek movie, expressing interest in seeing the characters evolve and showing enthusiasm to see Roberto Orci in the director's chair. Quotes below.
Orci: Currently 'In Middle' Of Writing Star Trek 2016 Script + Directing Deal Not 'Final' Until Script Finished July 10, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Orci/Kurtzman,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
According to Roberto Orci he and his co-writers are in the middle of writing the script for the next Star Trek film, and even though it has been reported in the trades, he hasn't officially signed a deal to direct the next film. More details below.
TrekInk: Review of Star Trek Ongoing #35: The Q Gambit Part 1 + 7-Page Preview July 8, 2014by Fritz Kessler , Filed under: Comics,Review,Star Trek (2009 film),TNG , comments closed
Q is back, and this time he's meddling with the affairs of the JJ-verse in a new six-part story arc in IDW's Star Trek Ongoing series, which hits comic book stores on Wednesday! Get "Q'd" in on the first issue of The Q Gambit with a spoiler-filled review below – plus check out a 7-page preview.
Brannon Braga: Kirk's More Fun Than Picard & Shatner More Fun Than Pine + Kirk v Picard POLL [UPDATED: Shatner Responds] July 5, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Celebrity,Star Trek (2009 film),TNG,TOS , comments closed
One of the biggest debates for fans is Kirk v Picard, but what is unusual is for one of the creative forces behind Star Trek to pick a side – but that is what Brannon Braga did in a recent interview. Find out what he had to say on that, Generations death threats and more – plus watch Braga talking about his latest space adventure – the new Cosmos (now out on Blu-ray).
TrekInk: Review of Star Trek #33 and #34: Lost Apollo July 4, 2014by Mark Martinez , Filed under: Comics,Review,Star Trek (2009 film) , comments closed
Next week IDW kicks off a new arc for their ongoing Star Trek comics and before we get to that review, TrekMovie is catching up on the most recent "Lost Apollo" series. Read the rocketing review below.
New Star Trek Writers: JJ Abrams 'Still Guiding Light' Behind 2016 Movie June 30, 2014by Matt Wright , Filed under: Abrams,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
In a new interview, Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne – co-writers along with Roberto Orci for the upcoming Star Trek film – talk about their background with the franchise, where they see the next movie headed and how much producer J.J. Abrams is involved. Details from the writing team after the break.
Orci Hints At New Setting And Aliens For Next Star Trek + Talks Directing, Kirk Sex, Gay Character & More June 26, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Orci/Kurtzman,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
In a just released podcast interview, Roberto Orci discussed the challenge he faces as a first time director for the next Star Trek movie, dropped some hints for the setting and about new aliens, talked about visiting the set of Star Wars to pick up tips from JJ Abrams, opined on Kirk sex scenes and a gay character and more. See below for highlights and to listen tot he podcast.
Watch: Wil Wheaton Gets Snarky Over JJ Abrams Commitment To Star Trek June 25, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Abrams,Humor,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
On Tuesday night's airing of The Wil Wheaton Project (only his 5th episode), the Star Trek: TNG actor turned sardonic geek culture commentator had a biting take on the recent news announcing the next Star Trek film was coming in 2016, but without JJ Abrams returning to the director's chair. Watch the clip below.
New 'Compendium' Blu-ray Set Compiles Star Trek 2009 + Into Darkness IMAX + New Bonus Features [UPDATE: Available For Pre-order] June 23, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Abrams,DVD/Blu-ray,Star Trek (2009 film),Star Trek Into Darkness , comments closed
Today Paramount announced a new 4-disc Blu-ray set for the two JJ Abrams' Trek features – 2009's Star Trek in HD and the IMAX version of 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness . Also included are digital versions, all the previously released bonus material (including some only available via some retailers) and new bonus material. See box art and full disc by disc details below. [UPDATE: Now Available For pre-order]
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Okudas Talk Orci Directing Trek, Netflix Rumors, Reveal Role In ST09 & More June 22, 2014by Kayla Iacovino , Filed under: Interview,ST: Into Darkness Sequel,Star Trek (2009 film),TNG Remastered,Trek on TV , comments closed
The Trek world has been abuzz since the announcement that Bob Orci will officially take over the director's seat for the next Star Trek film. TrekMovie sat down with Mike and Denise Okuda in an exclusive interview covering Trek's past, present, and future. The Okudas have been involved with Trek in one way or another as early as The Motion Picture with Mike having worked on every live action Star Trek production since The Voyage Home, along with the current project of remastering Star Trek: The Next Generation in HD for Blu-ray. Suffice to say that this pair has a unique perspective on where Trek has been and where it is (or should be) going. Hit the jump for more.
Looper's Rian Johnson To Direct Star Wars Episode VIII June 20, 2014by TrekMovie.com Staff , Filed under: Abrams,Sci-Fi,Star Wars , comments closed
BREAKING: Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness producer/director JJ Abrams is currently shooting the next Star Wars movie, but it appears he will not be shooting the one after that. Reports are coming out today that Looper director Rian Johnson is in talks to helm Star Wars: Episode VIII.
TrekInk: Star Trek Comics Summer 2014 Preview – NewTrek Meets Q & Moreby Mark Martinez , Filed under: Comics,DS9,Star Trek (2009 film),TOS , comments closed
Summer 2014 is shaping up to be a fine time for Star Trek comics from IDW Publishing and elsewhere. In addition to Harlan Ellison's City on the Edge of Forever five-part adaptation, the monthly Star Trek series will begin a six-issue story arc featuring Q, the new crew, time travel, and some niners. We'll also see another John Byrne photocomic and a one-shot special issue featuring the doctors. No, not the Doctors, the other ones, the Starfleet doctors. But what about the Doctor?
Variety says Roberto Orci named director of "Star Trek 3″ May 13, 2014by Brian Drew , Filed under: Orci/Kurtzman,ST: Into Darkness Sequel , comments closed
BREAKING: Variety is reporting that Roberto Orci, co-screenwriter and producer of the previous two Star Trek films, has been tapped to direct the third film in the rebooted franchise.
When approached by Variety to confirm, Paramount, Skydance Productions, and Orci's representatives had no comment.
Orci, who will be making his directorial debut, is collaborating with newcomers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay on the screenplay. He had been lobbying to land the directing assignment, and needed to convince Paramount and it's producing partner, Skydance Productions, that he could handle the demands of directing a major Hollywood blockbuster.
No details about the film are known, but the entire cast is expected to return. J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burke will produce along with Skydance's David Ellison.


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Session: 2013/2014
Date: Thursday, 27 February 2014
There will be an additional Plenary sitting of the Northern Ireland Assembly on Friday, 28 February 2014 after the Speaker received a valid request to recall the Assembly.
Plenary is expected to begin at noon and will discuss the following Motion:
That this Assembly notes with grave concern the detail contained within the judgement of Mr Justice Sweeney in the case of R.v.Downey; expresses disgust at the heretofore deliberately hidden actions of the British Government and Sinn Fein revealed in the judgement of issuing these letters to those described as "on-the -runs" and the detrimental consequence of those acts to justice; further notes the undermining impact such disclosures will have on recent discussions on dealing with the past; and calls on the British Government to urgently and effectively address the gross injustice to the many victims who will suffer further because of these shameful actions and wider damage to the rule of law, and to take swift action to rebuild confidence and trust by conducting a judge-led inquiry.
The Order Papers and Indicative Timings will be available on the Assembly website before Plenary begins.
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18th Nov: We've switched servers and will be updating the old code over the next couple months, meaning that several things might break. Please report issues here.
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"Tom's songs are stronger songs."A type of Functional Magic that works via music: playing a certain song or a magical instrument that causes a spell-like effect to happen. This may have derived from the premise of there being legitimate power within the words one uses, which is somewhat akin to true name magic in this regard. A Wandering Minstrel, Magical Flautist or Music Meister may have this as their main method of fighting. The Musical Assassin uses a particularly nasty variant. Often shows up as a kind of Mind Control, or also commonly it can buff allies in a justified Theme Music Power-Up. Recently, ocarinas have become popular for this, perhaps because of its ancient history, or its simple, yet exotic sound. Or maybe it's because Link used one in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Disco Tech is the tech equivalent. Older Than Feudalism: the earliest mention of Orpheus charming wild beasts and rocks with his music dates to the 5th century BCE. Compare with The Power of Rock and Magic Dance. Also see the Sub-Trope, Mind-Control Music.
— Tom Bombadil, The Lord of the Rings
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Why you have to have it
I love baseball in Cincinnati. To me there's nothing better than an evening at Great American Ball Park with friends enjoying a game and maybe a hotdog and beverage. To that end, I really enjoy watching or keeping up with the Cincinnati Reds no matter if I'm at home, on the road, or just around town. With MLB.com At Bat 2011 I can do that and much, much more! At Bat 2011 is the BEST App available for MLB lovers bar none. Packed with enough content to make even the most stat hungry super fan happy but with an interface simple and streamlined, this App is perfect for any level of fan. If you are reading this review to see if you should get At Bat 2011 for your iPhone or iPad you can stop right here. You should. If you want to know about some of the features that make this App great… read on.
On the surface
On the surface this App is great for showing you your favorite teams, their schedules, latest scores, and current (if playing) scoring info. When you launch the App for the first time you are presented with a screen to choose your favorite teams. For me this was easy. I chose the Cincinnati Reds, our division rivals the St. Louis Cardinals, and the Tampa Bay Rays. From there you select which of your favorite teams that you would like to know about at that time. For me I chose the Cincinnati Reds. You are presented with a screen that shows either the score of the current game (if playing), or the next scheduled game and who they are playing against. Below that you can get your Schedule and results along with many other choices. If you are like me, and don't get too into the stats of each person on the team, this is about as far as you'll go. You can see what is currently going on, when they play next, and what the outcome of the last game was.
If you want to dig a little deeper
If you want to dig a little deeper, they have you covered as well. You can press the little baseball silhouette directly below the current score and stats. This will take you into what's called "Gameday". Gameday is a live showing of what is currently going on at the game. There are icons to show how many men are on base, what the count is, pitcher and batter stats, etc. There is also a a graphical representation of the pitches that are being thrown to the batter that indicate where around the plate the ball was thrown, and also if it was a strike, ball, or foul.
Get it!
There are many, many more features that dive really far into the game of baseball that I never use. One of which is the MLB.com live viewing of the game with a subscription charge. The list just goes on and on. The features that I have mentioned above already make it a "Best App" in my book. Try it for yourself, tell me what you think.
You can get MLB.com At Bat 2011 for your iPhone from the iTunes Store for $14.99 here:
You can get MLB.com At Bat 2011 for your iPad from the iTunes Store for $14.99 here:


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Films By Maryella Hatfield
The mythical abode of bliss and pleasure, or the scene of massive destruction of the landscape for the purposes of the export woodchip industry? ... The film takes us into the primordial beauty of the Australian bush and introduces us to Aboriginal narrator Benjamin Cruse. We're told simply, and ... Read more


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Liverpool Europa League defeat nets five year high
Liverpool came close to the Europa League last-16 in front of a peak audience of nearly 6.6m viewers on ITV.
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