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Universities spend significant time and energy establishing a sense of community for their students. University personnel strive to increase school community ties for commuter students who travel back and forth from home to campus under the assumption that these increased ties will predict academic success. In an effort to understand those variables related to commuter student success, 335 participants responded to questions regarding commuter status, psychological sense of community with one's school, psychological sense of community with one's hometown, and academic self-handicapping. Results indicated that those with a strong sense of community with their hometown were less likely to engage in academic self-handicapping. Moreover, this relationship was moderated by commuting status, such that the effect was stronger for commuter students than for non-commuter students. Implications for commuter student success and future research are discussed.

Talent agents have always been indispensable to writers, actors, and other creative workers in the entertainment industry, providing independent representation to their artist-clients in dealings with sophisticated corporate employers.  But following a historical shift in their revenues from commissioning clients to lucrative television packaging fees, the power and profits of the biggest agencies grew exponentially.  Revenues from packaging fees allowed these agencies to diversify into other businesses and attracted outside investment by private equity firms leading to further vertical integration.  Now, the largest agencies have turned their eye toward a new revenue stream: producing and owning content through agency-affiliate production companies. These innovations have come at the cost of the independent representation agents are supposed to provide their clients.  Packaging and producing by talent agencies and their affiliates breach the well-established fiduciary duties agents owe their clients under the law by aligning the agency’s own interests with the interests of its clients’ employers.  Outside investment in the agencies only exacerbates these conflicts.  These departures from traditional agenting undermine the avowed purpose of the California Talent Agencies Act: to protect vulnerable artists from the conflicted practices of their agents.  While these issues are at the heart of the ongoing industry dispute between the Writers Guild of America and the big agencies, their importance should concern all agency clients and their unions.  The California Legislature should amend the outdated Talent Agencies Act to enumerate and reaffirm the fiduciary duties talent agents owe their clients under common law and prevent the erosion of legal protections for creative workers in one of the state’s largest and most important industries.

An adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) with a supervisory control system (SCS) was used to predict the occurrence of gait events using the electromyographic (EMG) activity of lower extremity muscles in the child with cerebral palsy (CP). This is anticipated to form the basis of a control algorithm for the application of electrical stimulation (ES) to leg or ankle muscles in an attempt to improve walking ability. Either surface or percutaneous intramuscular electrodes were used to record the muscle activity from the quadriceps muscles, with concurrent recording of the gait cycle performed using a VICON motion analysis system for validation of the ANFIS with SCS. Using one EMG signal and its derivative from each leg as its inputs, the ANFIS with SCS was able to predict all gait events in seven out of the eight children, with an average absolute time differential between the VICON recording and the ANFIS prediction of less than 30 ms. Overall accuracy in predicting gait events ranged from 98.6% to 95.3% (root mean-squared error between 0.7 and 1.5). Application of the ANFIS with the SCS to the prediction of gait events using EMG data collected two months after the initial data demonstrated comparable results, with no significant differences between gait event detection times. The accuracy rate and robustness of the ANFIS with SCS with two EMG signals suggests its applicability to ES control. Index Terms--Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), cerebral palsy (CP), electrical stimulation (ES).

The reemployment rate is not accelerated by having more than a high school education, although reemployment rates are slower for those having less than a high school education. Skill and education appear less important for economic reindustrialization than is generally perceived. People with higher educational or vocational attainments are not reemployed more quickly in the new economy, although employers generally require at least a high school education, as this demonstrates minimally acceptable work habits. Women with young children are reemployed the most slowly.