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Although there has been much writing and speculation on the deliberate use of smallpox as a tool of genocide, this article documents the use of the bluff threat of spreading smallpox as a tool of power and manipulation in the early days of European trade and settlement in the Pacific Northwest. By documenting ten cases when a bluff threat was used, the article argues that it was a common strategy of Europeans when they felt threatened or thwarted. Because it was compatible with existing Indigenous beliefs about the spread of disease, it was highly credible and was occasionally used by Indigenous people to manipulate others. While Europeans in this era did not actually have the power to control smallpox, the fact that outbreaks of the disease often occurred following a threat to spread it gave credence to the threat and to today's widespread belief that some or all of the epidemics were deliberate genocide. Recognizing bluff threat bioterrorism as a tool in the newcomer's arsenal is essential to understanding how the heavily outnumbered and out-gunned newcomers were so often able to manipulate Indigenous people and then establish the settlements that eventually evolved into full scale colonial occupations of Indigenous territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R. Cole Harris, A Bounded Land: Reflections on Settler Colonialism in Canada, UBC Press, Vancouver, 2021, 334 pages. ISBN: 780774864428, $32.95 (paperback) If, as John Smith observed in 1624, geography [...]

We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the US federal courts to examine the role of the US Supreme Court in influencing the direction of legal discourse in the federal courts. We propose two mechanisms for how the Court affects innovation in legal language: a selection mechanism where the Court's influence primarily derives from its discretionary jurisdiction, and an authorship mechanism in which the Court's influence derives directly from its own innovations. To test these alternative hypotheses, we develop a novel influence measure based on a dynamic topic model that separates the Court's own language innovations from those of the lower courts. Applying this measure to the US federal courts, we find that the Supreme Court primarily exercises influence through the selection mechanism, with modest additional influence attributable to the authorship mechanism. This article is part of the theme issue 'A complexity science approach to law and governance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare an introductory statistics course taught using a flipped classroom approach to the same course taught using a traditional lecture based approach. In the lecture course, students listened to lecture, took notes, and completed homework assignments. In the flipped course, students read relatively simple chapters and answered reading quiz questions prior to class and completed workbook activities in class. The workbook activities consisted of questions (multiple choice, short answer, computation) designed to help students understand more complex material. Over one year after taking the course (median = 20 months), students took a standardized test of their knowledge of statistics as well as nine other content areas in psychology. Students in the flipped course outperformed the students in the lecture course on the statistics portion of the test (d - 0.43), but not on non-statistics portions of the test.

QUESTION: Who holds the all-time MLB record for most runs scored by an individual player during a single season? ANSWER: Billy Hamilton of the 1894 Philadelphia Phillies. There is no [...]