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Just Say Gay: An Exploration of Authenticity and Connection; Queer Identified Therapists’ Lived Experiences of Identity-Based Self-Disclosure
Get PDFThe current sociopolitical climate in the United States continues to reinforce the complexities and nuances that mental health providers face when facilitating therapy. Over the past few years, anti-DEI legislation has aimed to control the narrative in educational and therapeutic settings regarding what therapists and educators are permitted to teach and share about themselves (Flannery, 2024). At the same time, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric continues to dominate the media and further marginalizes individuals whom are in the queer community. In turn, LGBTQ+ individuals continue to face an increased risk for homelessness, substance use disorders, and suicide, which particularly has impacted LGBTQ+ youth (Meyer, 2003). Thus, it is crucial for mental health practitioners to understand the specific needs of the queer community to inform the therapeutic interventions that are utilized during therapy sessions with queer individuals. This study used a phenomenological qualitative inquiry to explore therapist self-disclosure of a queer identity to a queer identified client. Eight queer identified therapists participated in a semi-structured interview about their experiences with disclosing a queer identity to a queer client during therapy
Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Person-Following in Constrained Environments
Get PDFMaintaining visibility of a person requires effective systems. Security cameras or ground robots might be ideal, but they often fail in uncontrolled or unknown environments. A single ground robot struggles to navigate and track an agent at the same time. This work addresses the challenge by developing a multi-robot system with a slow ground robot and an agile aerial robot. Three methods are evaluated: FORWARD-PF, RL-Person Following (RL), and a baseline closed-loop method. FORWARD-PF proved the most reliable, completing all nine paths and reaching targets nearly twice as fast as RL. Despite completing seven paths, RL faltered on complex tasks. The closed-loop method succeeded only 33% of the time, managing just the easiest paths. These findings underscore FORWARD-PF’s efficiency and reveal both the potential and limitations of RL, demonstrating the promise of heterogeneous multi-robot systems for person-following in unpredictable settings
Computationally Efficient Machine Learning Techniques for TKR Assessment
No full textThis dissertation introduces innovative machine learning methodologies for the evaluation of total knee replacements (TKRs). A validated lower limb simulator was used to generate a set of boundary conditions for telemetrically implanted set of patients. The boundary conditions of these nine patients was expanded through the application of principal component analysis. Combining these boundary conditions with surgical alignment parameters a comprehensive dataset of knee joint mechanics was developed. This dataset was crucial for the development of predictive models. Linear regression, multi-layer perceptron, bi-directional long short term (biLSTM), convolutional neural network, and transformer-based approaches were explored to forecast the outputs of the validated lower limb model. Ultimately the biLSTM was found to have the best accuracy prediction of the models. Exploration of the variable inputs necessary for accurate prediction as well as generalization of linear regression, biLSTM and transformer-based models showed that it may be possible to accurately predict joint biomechanics give only surgical inputs to the models. The linear regression model showed that it was able to generalize the database the best while the biLSTM still retained the best prediction once all input variables were used. These results underscore the importance of a diverse and comprehensive dataset, as well as the need for ongoing data collection to enhance the models\u27 predictive capabilities. The implications of this research are far-reaching, offering the potential to revolutionize the field of orthopedics. The ability to predict TKR mechanics in real-time holds promise for improving intraoperative decision-making, optimizing postoperative rehabilitation protocols, and informing the design of next-generation prosthetic components. This work not only contributes to academic discourse but also has practical applications that could improve patient outcomes and quality of life
Tenth anniversary celebratory essays: The Rocky Mountain Collective on race, place & law: Editor\u27s note
No full textFrom a RPL in the classroom to a wave in the world: coursework focused on race, place & law
No full textHow traditional legal rhetoric\u27s myth of neutrality sustains capitalism
No full textThrough the lens of critical and comparative rhetoric, this Article examines how traditional legal rhetoric—the dominant analytical framework employed in the United States legal system—sustains capitalism and preserves inequities, such as financial precarity. This Article identifies the features that traditional legal rhetoric shares with the free capitalist market and then uses those features as an analytical framework to examine two cases that align with the theme of this Symposium on financial precarity and late capitalism: Bank of America v. Caulkett and Citizens United v. FEC. Comparing these two cases, the Court uses the same analytical tools of traditional legal rhetoric, albeit in contradictory ways, to reach outcomes that align with market values at the expense of the individual. More importantly, in both cases, the Court presents traditional legal reasoning as an objective, rational, unbiased, and neutral analytical framework, even though it is not actually objective, rational, unbiased, or neutral. This myth that traditional legal reasoning is objective, rational, unbiased, and neutral aligns with the near-identical myth that the market is an objective, rational, unbiased, and neutral place where transactions occur between individuals and entities who share similar bargaining power and play on a level field. Through these aligned myths, traditional legal rhetoric is essential to sustaining the free-market capitalism experiment. More importantly, traditional legal rhetoric cannot ever satisfactorily address the inequities of the marketplace like financial precarity because traditional legal rhetoric was never intended to be egalitarian. Thus, in order to truly begin solving the problems of capitalism, advocates must understand how traditional legal rhetoric creates inequities and challenge the form and substance of traditional legal rhetoric using other rhetorics, such as African Diasporic, Asian Diasporic, Indigenous, and Latine rhetorics. These insurrectionary rhetorics establish frameworks for challenging dominant imperialist/colonialist power, centering community, and solving the real problems of inequity created by traditional legal rhetoric
Monopoly capital, militarism, and environmental degradation
No full textResearch within the natural and social sciences increasingly concludes that business as usual—economic growth—is leading to significant ecological disruption. Additionally, scholars have identified militaries as a significant driver of environmental degradation. Typically, these two social institutions are understood as being separate, but operating in relation, to each other. In this article, we focus on the interrelation and integration of the military and the economy through the rise of the military-industrial complex in order to illuminate the underlying logic that amplifies the environmental impacts of these institutions. More specifically, we assess how monopoly capital’s dynamics influence the development of military weapons systems, leading to increased environmental change. Our analysis highlights the growing significance of private contractors in developing weapons systems and how this has institutionalized capitalist market dynamics and creative destruction within weapons systems innovation. As a result, planned obsolescence has become a central component increasing the demands on the environment and the overall production of social and ecological waste in relation to the military-industrial complex
How the Supreme Court Ghosted the PHOSITA: Amgen and Legal Constructs in Patent Law
No full textThis essay is an invited response to The Ghost in the Patent System: An Empirical Study of Patent Law’s Elusive “Skilled Artisan,” by Professors Laura Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen. In their piece, Pedraza-Fariña and Ryan Whalen offer an empirical study and use it to argue for a new conception of the Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA), patent law’s nod to the “reasonable person” construct.
As Professors Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen suggest, the PHOSITA should be understood as a crucial concept in patent law, warranting more scholarly attention. Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen provide that attention. They assert, based on an original empirical analysis, that greater judicial engagement with the PHOSITA concept has not occurred—courts have instead continued to treat the PHOSITA construct superficially, and as a monolith. They offer two bases for this failure: (1) the lack of reconciliation between the empirical PHOSITA construct versus a set of normative aspirations that could be attributed to it; and (2) and the failure of the courts to deploy the PHOSITA with a coherent set of normative commitments in mind. The antidote, say Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen, is to subdivide the monolithic PHOSITA into a set of doctrine-specific PHOSITAs, each formulated according to a blend of empirical and normative aspects tuned to the particular doctrine at issue. They summarize their prescriptions in a table that maps out the empirical and normative dimensions to these respective doctrine-specific PHOSITAs.
In this response essay, we offer two primary observations. First, in its most recent opinion on patent law—released after Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen’s piece was published—the Supreme Court in Amgen v. Sanofi displayed no interest in engaging with the PHOSITA construct and its subtleties. To the contrary, it utterly “ghosted” the ghost of the patent system (if we may), resolving a complex biotechnology enablement case about antibodies by wallowing about in nineteenth century patent opinions dealing with nineteenth century inventions (of course) such as the telegraph, the incandescent light, and starch glue for wood veneer. Instead of taking the opportunity to refine the PHOSITA construct along empirical and normative lines, as Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen advocate, the Court treated the PHOSITA as a vaporous non-entity barely meriting mention. If there ever was a trend toward elucidating the PHOSITA’s technical capacities and using them to drive case outcomes, the Supreme Court’s Amgen decision has brought that trend to a crashing halt—perhaps unwittingly and sub silentio, but a crashing halt nonetheless.
Second, while we align with Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen’s plea for acknowledging that normative aspirations undergird the PHOSITA construct, and we agree that those aspirations may supply a template for explaining and weighing empirical aspects of the construct, we part company with them when it comes to prescriptions. In particular, we are not convinced that dismembering the PHOSITA and reconstituting it as three separate constructs will improve decision making in patent cases. We contend that the enablement and obviousness PHOSITAs are the same construct and ought to stay that way. This is both a descriptive and normative argument, and it underscores that Pedraza-Fariña and Whalen’s proposals are not normatively neutral, even though the authors profess not to be espousing any “specific normative baseline” for critical doctrines such as obviousness
Remembering Dr. Dmitry Karshtedt as a Scholar and Friend
No full textProfessor Dmitry Karshtedt was one of the preeminent patent law scholars of the past decade. Professor Karshtedt’s scholarship influenced the way that the Supreme Court thinks about patent law’s enablement doctrine. His work exploring the boundaries between patent law and tort law led to significant change in various areas of patent law. His work on nonobviousness changed the conversation about patent law’s most important doctrinal area. This article pays homage to Professor Karshtedt’s influential scholarship, illuminating his profound impact on the field while offering a glimpse into the enduring friendship shared by the authors and Professor Karshtedt