Many university science outreach programs involve presentations of research projects to high school students. These presentations often focus more on exciting scientific content and less on fostering direct relationships between high school students and scientists. Such interactions are important for sustaining student interest in science…

Good research does not mean good policy, but policy or legal conclusions that rely on false assumptions are certain to be bad. When the rights of U.S. students of color are at stake, the Supreme Courts need the best research findings the country can offer. The U.S. Constitution contains sweeping and undefined terms. Reaching a conclusion about the…

In this article, we discuss conflict between law and science relative to the presumption in special education law that multidisciplinary teams and others identify the causes of problems giving rise to special education needs. First, we explain eligibility criteria, highlighting ambiguities therein and why criteria constitute a mandate for causal…

Conservative governors and legislators across America are angry at the third branch of government. Some of these lawmakers are pushing legislation that could throw judges off the bench, while others are pushing to limit judicial authority. In one state, a governor unilaterally removed a justice of the state supreme court. Another Republican…

The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) is a common creativity assessment. According to this technique, the best judges of creativity are qualified experts. Yet what does it mean to be an expert in a domain? What level of expertise is needed to rate creativity? This article reviews the literature on novice, expert, and quasi-expert creativity…

While research has confirmed their role adaptation and importance in reducing recidivism in drug courts, little research has documented the role of the judge in reentry courts. Based on interviews with participants and the workgroup, court observations, and a document analysis, this study revealed that judges in a federal reentry court program…

A measure of "clusterability" serves as the basis of a new methodology designed to preserve cluster structure in a reduced dimensional space. Similar to principal component analysis, which finds the direction of maximal variance in multivariate space, principal cluster axes find the direction of maximum clusterability in multivariate space.…

Practical abilities are important for students from majors including Computer Science and Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. Along with the popularity of ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM/ICPC) and other programming contests, online judge (OJ) websites achieve rapid development, thus providing a new kind of programming…

In the increasingly complex and combative arena of copyright in the digital age, record companies sue college students over peer-to-peer music sharing, YouTube removes home movies because of a song playing in the background, and filmmakers are denied a distribution deal when some permissions "i" proves undottable. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter…

It was late on Election Day 2010 and Vander Plaats, a Sioux City, Iowa, businessman and leader of a campaign to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices, had just gotten word that he and his team had pulled it off. The voters had rejected the three justices up for a retention vote: David Baker, Michael Streit, and Chief Justice Marsha Ternus.…

The purpose of this study was to determine if the 2010 Olympic figure skating judges had trouble scoring Plushenko and the transitions program component, and if the International Skating Union's (ISU) "corridor" method flagged the same judging anomalies as the Rasch analyses. A 3-facet (skater by program component by judge) Rasch rating…

Adaptive Comparative Judgement (ACJ) is a modification of Thurstone's method of comparative judgement that exploits the power of adaptivity, but in scoring rather than testing. Professional judgement by teachers replaces the marking of tests; a judge is asked to compare the work of two students and simply to decide which of them is the better.…

This study reports findings from a controlled experiment evaluating the benefits of structuring design advice as patterns. Over the years, the pattern concept from architecture has become a native within the HCI community and its related discussions on sharing design knowledge. It is argued that the context-rich, and tangible, nature of patterns…

W. A. Wallis studied vacancies in the US Supreme Court over a 96-year period (1837-1932) and found that the distribution of the number of vacancies per year could be characterized by a Poisson model. This note updates this classic study.

The main goal of this study was to examine the effects of authors' name and gender on judges' assessment of product creativity in 4 different domains (art, science, music, and poetry). A total of 119 participants divided into 5 groups assessed products signed with a fictional author's name (unique vs. typical, male vs. female) or in an anonymous…