131,887 research outputs found
Of Pandas, People, and the First Amendment: The Constitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design in the Public Schools
No full textDespite the Supreme Court\u27s 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, striking down Arkansas\u27 statute requiring equal time for the teaching of creationism and evolution, the debate over whether some form of creationism should be taught in public schools has recently enjoyed a resurgence. In this note, Jay Wexler applies the Supreme Court\u27s Establishment Clause to a new variant of creationism that posits the existence of an intelligent designer as an alternative to evolution. Wexler argues that teaching intelligent design theory in the public schools violates the Establishment Clause. After explaining that the Supreme Court has always applied the Establishment Clause with extra vigilance in the public school context, Wexler argues that intelligent design, because it posits a being who created life and seeks to answer fundamental questions about human existence, constitutes a religious belief that cannot be constitutionally taught in public schools. Wexler rejects the argument that intelligent design teaches science and not religion on the grounds that whether or not intelligent design teaches a nominally scientific theory, it still violates the Establishment Clause by sending a forbidden message of exclusion to atheists and non-Christians. Finally, Wexler suggests that creationists and evolutionists should recognize the divisiveness caused by disputes over religion and take steps to reduce this divisiveness both inside and outside the classroom
The distribution of inositol rhizopine genes in Rhizobium populations
No full textM. Wexler, D. Gordon and P. J. Murph
Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars
No full textPrayer in schools? Animal sacrifices in public? Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn? Jay Wexler has seen it all . . . After ten years spent riddling over the intricacies of church/state law from the ivory tower, law professor Jay Wexler decided it was high time to hit the road to learn what really happened in some of the most controversial Supreme Court cases involving this hot-button issue. In Holy Hullabaloos, he takes us along for the ride, crossing the country to meet the people and visit the places responsible for landmark decisions in recent judicial history, from a high school football field where fans once recited prayers before kickoff to a Santeria church notorious for animal sacrifice, from a publicly funded Muslim school to a creationist museum. Wexler’s no-holds-barred approach to investigating famous church/state brouhahas is as funny as it is informative.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1042/thumbnail.jp
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Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars
No full textPrayer in schools? Animal sacrifices in public? Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn? Jay Wexler has seen it all . . . After ten years spent riddling over the intricacies of church/state law from the ivory tower, law professor Jay Wexler decided it was high time to hit the road to learn what really happened in some of the most controversial Supreme Court cases involving this hot-button issue. In Holy Hullabaloos, he takes us along for the ride, crossing the country to meet the people and visit the places responsible for landmark decisions in recent judicial history, from a high school football field where fans once recited prayers before kickoff to a Santeria church notorious for animal sacrifice, from a publicly funded Muslim school to a creationist museum. Wexler’s no-holds-barred approach to investigating famous church/state brouhahas is as funny as it is informative.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1042/thumbnail.jp
The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions
No full textFor a variety of reasons, many of the Constitution’s more obscure passages never make it to any court and therefore never make headlines or even law school classrooms, which teach from judicial decisions. In this captivating and witty book, Jay Wexler draws on his extensive professional and educational backgrounds in constitutional law to demonstrate how these “odd clauses” have incredible relevance to our lives, our government’s structure, and the integrity of our democracy.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1043/thumbnail.jp
Recommended from our members
The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions
No full textFor a variety of reasons, many of the Constitution’s more obscure passages never make it to any court and therefore never make headlines or even law school classrooms, which teach from judicial decisions. In this captivating and witty book, Jay Wexler draws on his extensive professional and educational backgrounds in constitutional law to demonstrate how these “odd clauses” have incredible relevance to our lives, our government’s structure, and the integrity of our democracy.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1043/thumbnail.jp
MeSH term explosion and author rank improve expert recommendations
No full textInformation overload is an often-cited phenomenon that reduces the productivity, efficiency and efficacy of scientists. One challenge for scientists is to find appropriate collaborators in their research. The literature describes various solutions to the problem of expertise location, but most current approaches do not appear to be very suitable for expert recommendations in biomedical research. In this study, we present the development and initial evaluation of a vector space model-based algorithm to calculate researcher similarity using four inputs: 1) MeSH terms of publications; 2) MeSH terms and author rank; 3) exploded MeSH terms; and 4) exploded MeSH terms and author rank. We developed and evaluated the algorithm using a data set of 17,525 authors and their 22,542 papers. On average, our algorithms correctly predicted 2.5 of the top 5/10 coauthors of individual scientists. Exploded MeSH and author rank outperformed all other algorithms in accuracy, followed closely by MeSH and author rank. Our results show that the accuracy of MeSH term-based matching can be enhanced with other metadata such as author rank
Our Non-Christian Nation: How Wiccans, Satanists, Atheists, and Other Non-Christians are Demanding Their Rightful Place in American Public Life
No full textLess and less Christian demographically, America is now home to an ever-larger number of people who say they identify with no religion at all. These non-Christians have increasingly been demanding their full participation in public life, bringing their arguments all the way to the Supreme Court. The law is on their side, but that doesn\u27t mean that their attempts are not met with suspicion or outright hostility. In Our Non-Christian Nation, Jay Wexler travels the country to engage the non-Christians who have called on us to maintain our ideals of inclusivity and diversity. With his characteristic sympathy and humor, he introduces us to the Summum and their Seven Aphorisms, a Wiccan priestess who would deck her City Hall with a pagan holiday wreath, and other determined champions of free religious expression. As Wexler reminds us, anyone who cares about pluralism, equality, and fairness should support a public square filled with a variety of religious and nonreligious voices. The stakes are nothing short of long-term social peace.https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/books/1035/thumbnail.jp
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
DaDaFest Ensemble: Leadership, Voice, and Collaboration in the Arts
No full textThe Disability Arts movement in the UK has a long history of community-based collaborative arts practice (Cameron 2009). It is activist in nature, aiming to challenge and change social attitudes towards disability with and through arts practice. Disability arts are political in contesting individual and tragedy-based models of disability, promoting a greater understanding through and with arts and culture, informing our understanding of what disability, arts, and culture can be. Group identity and activism are central to a range of arts practice that offer direct forms of action in promoting disability as a positive identity (Cameron 2007; Taylor 2006). The disability arts movement in England is well established and confident in continuing to question its own role and purpose in advancing arts and culture. A significant part of recent developments in the international field of disability arts, concerns initiatives to advance the participation and practice of disabled young people as the next generation of artists. This chapter explores the aims of DaDaFest, an internationally recognised disability and D/deaf arts organisation based in Liverpool, England to champion the development of disabled young artists through a music initiative, Ensemble, which promotes collaborative learning between young people and professional adult musicians. The chapter starts from the premise that such collaborations offer positive conditions for the development of arts practice. However, it is acknowledged here that moral questions can emerge when diverse groups, which include disabled young people and disabled and non-disabled adult musicians, come together. The chapter draws specifically on the moral philosophy of Judith Butler (2005, 2012) as a framework for exploring the ethics and politics of collaboration for Ensemble. Although centered on a music initiative, the chapter offers insights into collaboration that extend to the wider domain of disability arts
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