What's the deal with GMOs? Follow

I was gonna start a new thread for this but then i looked, I mean really looked, at the front page of the Asylum and was horrified at how many of the threads were started by 'Elinda'. Time to cut back.

I started an Environmental Law class through Coursera last week. This weeks assignment is GMO related....

Here's the scenario:

The other cases mentioned were our first weeks. Here's a very quick summation:
- Albert v. Meadowbrook swimming club - A Country Club has live music nightly all summer long. Due to the morphology of the land the music is amplified out to neighboring homes.
Court finds the Country Club to be a nuisance and orders an injunction.
- Slaird v. Klewers - A family moves into a neighborhood, has a swimming pool, with all the bells and whistles installed. A neighbor complains of the noise of the diving board, the flood lights and chlorinated water splashing onto their bushes.
Court finds insufficient evidence of a nuisance. Case dismissed. The determination was based on the pool and it's use not being out of the ordinary and, at least partly, on the determination that the plaintiffs were not persons of 'ordinary sensibilities' (they were willy whiners).
- Madison v. Ducktown Sulfur - A sulfur company set up shop in a rural area of Tennessee. The production of the sulfur was pretty dirty business requiring open air smelthing. Homesteaders in the area reported illness, breathing difficulty and a layers of soot over over every thing. Also the land was pretty much unusable for farming anymore. The folks of Madison sought an injunction against the sulfur company.
Court finds undeniable evidence of nuisance, but doesn't grant an injunction because the defendants cannot reduce their ores in any other manner, an injunction would deprive their rights. The plaintiffs were given monetary compensation.
- Georgia v Tennessee Copper - Like the last case this is open air mining and smelting however this time it's a state bringing suit against the mining co. located in Tennessee. Georgia claims that sulfur dioxide is crossing over state lines causing crop and forest damage in five Georgia Counties.
Court finds that the mining is a nuisance in Georgia. Also since Georgia is a sovereign body, has a right (and responsibility) to protect it's lands and citizens (more rights than a private citizen) an injunction is issued.
Miss v Ill and Chicago Sanitary District - Chicago tunneled out a channel to the Desplaines River to discharge their sewage away from lake mich and the city. The Desplaines eventually empties into the Mississippi - in Missouri. Missouri claimed that the additional sewage created a greater risk of typhoid fever to residents of St. Louis. Typhoid fever statistics for that area during that time period did not provide any evidence of increased rates contagion.
Court finds insufficient evidence and dismisses the case without prejudice.
- MI vs US ACoE and City of Chicago - this time the culprit is the highly invasive Asian Carp. The carp is in the river, lots of governmental bodies had been responding to the threat of them getting into the great lakes. The channel built from Chicago to the Mississippi is a clear unblocked route for passage of the carp. Michigan sought immediate relief through closing off the channel.
Court finds that the channel does present a nuisance within the context of the problem. However, they deny a preliminary injunction because the defendant is already taking steps to insure the channel doesn't provide a conduit to the great lakes and a court-ordered injunction could hinder that process.

So, decide the case of Superman Farm based on the findings of these other six cases......

(one page done

Tina is soon sued by Shuster and Siegal.

Madison controls, Superman can seek compensatory (likely one time) monetary damages, but will be denied an injunction. Superman may have exhaustion issues to overcome if the USDA permitting process would have allowed comment and they didn't seek remedy at that point in the process.

Okay, most of those cases are completely irrelevant for reasons you seem to understand. Based off your account of Madison, it turns on whether the modified corn can reasonably* be grown in any other manner (closed air greenhouses, for example). If it can, you would expect her to be granted an injunction. If not, then the result would be the same as in that case.

*I assume. If they use, as you do, the criterion of 'possibility' you can get some mileage arguing about what that means if you're very bored. Generally 'reasonable' is taken as implicit, because judges like to think of themselves as reasonable people when they're not pulling off some manner of cowardly dodge.

This is a really boring problem question. I'm not hip to this 'the coursera' business you kids are doing these days, what kind of course is this? I could find out with a google search in a couple of seconds but doing it this way serves to breathe life into the forum. I am a team player.

Rage delete? har.

It's just a free easy course I decided to commit to as I do some environmental policy stuff. This particular class is being held by U of NC Chapel Hill, led by Prof. Don Hornstein

www.coursera.org Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy

They're offering this 'signature track' service now. It's $39.00. This is what it tells me....

The basic credit comes from watching the lectures and taking the weekly quiz. All the certification would do is give some guarantee that it was your computer viewing the lectures and taking the quizzes.

You can get more credit for courses by doing additional work. Papers, projects, forum stuff. Then the certification will verify the work is coming from your computer but also presumably tracks and matches your writing style to some extent. At least that's the claim.

Huh, interesting, the arms race continues it seems.

If you're going to cheat, do it consistently!

Edited, Sep 24th 2013 8:39am by someproteinguy

Since everything is electronic now, it's at least easier to check for plagiarism.

Yes, but not for me writing your paper. More expensive, obviously, but paper databases just prevent wide scale usage of the same text by multiple students, they do nothing to prevent handing in someone else's original work.

How does the cheater know that the paid paper-writing isn't cheating too?

On the cheaters highway all exits lead to mistrust.

I've had college papers that I got a solid "A" on and thought it was a shame they couldn't be used again. My career in academic fraud would be based on hubris rather than cash

Well, except one paper that I did use again myself in another class with another instructor but similar subject matter. Is it cheating if you cheat off of yourself?

Unless you infrequently use them and their writing style is sufficiently different or something?

Listen, if some kid from a wealthy family is paying you $1500 to write a lit review for him, you'd adapt your writing style to his, and obviously insist on him paying in cash up front after that time he burned Piper on those Weezer tickets. I mean, in theory, obviously.