In another article in this issue, Black et al. discuss their preferred approach to estimating Supreme Court justices’ Big Five personality traits from written text and provide several critiques of the approach of Hall et al. In this rejoinder, we show that Black et al.’s critiques are substantially without merit, their preferred approach suffers from many of the same drawbacks that they project onto our approach, their specific method of implementing their preferred approach runs afoul of many contemporary social scientific norms, our use of concurrences to estimate personality traits is far more justifiable than they suggest (especially in contrast to their use of lower court opinions), and their substantive critiques reflect a potential misunderstanding of the nature of conscientiousness. Nonetheless, we also acknowledge their broader point regarding the state-of-the-art textual analysis methodology vis-à-vis the estimation of personality traits, and we provide some constructive suggestions for the path forward.

The legal brief is a primary vehicle by which lawyers seek to persuade appellate judges. Despite wide acceptance that briefs are important, empirical scholarship has yet to establish their influence on the Supreme Court or fully explore justices’ preferences regarding them. We argue that emotional language conveys a lack of credibility to justices and thereby diminishes the party’s likelihood of garnering justices’ votes. The data concur. Using an automated textual analysis program, we find that parties who employ less emotional language in their briefs are more likely to win a justice’s vote, a result that holds even after controlling for other features correlated with success, such as case quality. These findings suggest that advocates seeking to influence judges can enhance their credibility and attract justices’ votes by employing measured, objective language.

Models of behavior on the US Supreme Court almost universally assume that justices’ behavior depends, at least in part, on the characteristics of individual justices. However, few prior studies have attempted to assess these characteristics beyond ideological preferences. In contrast, we apply recent advances in machine learning to develop and validate measures of the Big Five personality traits for Supreme Court justices serving during the 1946 through 2015 terms based on the language in their written opinions. We then conduct an empirical application to demonstrate the importance of these Supreme Court Individual Personality Estimates and discuss their proper use.

There are numerous examples of translational science innovations addressing challenges in the translational process, accelerating progress along the translational spectrum, and generating solutions relevant to a wide range of human health needs. Examining these successes through an education lens can identify core principles and effective practices that lead to successful translational outcomes. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is identifying and teaching these core principles and practices to a broad audience via online courses in translational science which teach from case studies of NCATS-led or supported research initiatives. In this paper, we share our approach to the design of these courses and offer a detailed description of our initial course, which focused on a preclinical drug discovery and development project spanning academic and government settings. Course participants were from a variety of career stages and institutions. Participants rated the course high in overall value to them and in providing a unique window into the translational science process. We share our model for course development as well as initial findings from the course evaluation with the goal of continuing to stimulate development of novel education activities teaching foundational principles in translational science to a broad audience.

New occurrences of flask-shaped and envelope-bearing microfossils, including the predominantly Cambrian taxon Granomarginata, are reported from new localities, as well as from earlier in time (Ediacaran) than previously known. The stratigraphic range of Granomarginata extends into the Cambrian System, where it had a cosmopolitan distribution. This newly reported Ediacaran record includes areas from Norway (Baltica), Newfoundland (Avalonia) and Namibia (adjacent to the Kalahari Craton), and puts the oldest global occurrence of Granomarginata in the Indreelva Member (< 563 Ma) of the Stáhpogieddi Formation on the Digermulen Peninsula, Arctic Norway. Although Granomarginata is rare within the assemblage, these new occurrences together with previously reported occurrences from India and Poland, suggest a potentially widespread palaeogeographic distribution of Granomarginata through the middle–late Ediacaran interval. A new flask-shaped microfossil Lagoenaforma collaris gen. et sp. nov. is also reported in horizons containing Granomarginata from the Stáhpogieddi Formation in Norway and the Dabis Formation in Namibia, and flask-shaped fossils are also found in the Gibbett Hill Formation in Newfoundland. The Granomarginata–Lagoenaforma association, in addition to a low-diversity organic-walled microfossil assemblage, occurs in the strata postdating the Shuram carbon isotope excursion, and may eventually be of use in terminal Ediacaran biostratigraphy. These older occurrences of Granomarginata add to a growing record of body fossil taxa spanning the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary.

Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges' preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall's (2000, Measuring preferences of state supreme court judges, Journal of Politics 62(2):387–413) Party-Adjusted Judge Ideology and Bonica and Woodruff's (2014, A common-space measure of state supreme court ideology, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, doi: 10.1093/jleo/ewu016) judicial CFscores. Here, we introduce a third measurement strategy that combines CFscores with item response (IRT) estimates of judicial voting behavior in all fifty-two state courts of last resort from 1995 to 2010. We show that leveraging two distinct sources of information (votes and CFscores) yields a superior estimation strategy. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of the combined measure: (1) it is estimated dynamically, allowing for the possibility that judges' ideological leanings change over time and (2) it maps judges into a common space. In a comparison against existing measurement strategies, we find that our measure offers superior performance in predicting judges' votes. We conclude that it is a valuable tool for advancing the study of judicial politics.

This conference-festival at Cornell University was a highlight among the many events held worldwide in connection with C. P. E. Bach's tercentenary. In addition to an international line-up of visiting scholars who descended upon Ithaca (only then, it might be added, to ascend the formidable hill atop which Cornell is perched), the occasion drew together from within the university the Department of Music, the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and the Atkinson Forum in American Studies. The conference was conceived around Christopher Hogwood's appointment at Cornell as A. D. White Professor-at-Large. Hogwood had been expected to attend and preside over the conference as honorary chair, but in the wake of his death on 24 September 2014 the proceedings were instead dedicated to him. Performances of C. P. E. Bach's music were interwoven with paper sessions and other events throughout each day: in all, two keynote lectures, four paper sessions, four solo keyboard recitals, two vocal-instrumental concerts, a standing exhibition, a clavichord masterclass and even a glass harmonica demonstration filled out the whirlwind, three-day schedule.

Digital signal processing is one of many valuable tools for suppressing unwanted signals or inter-ference. Building hardware processing engines seems to be the way to best implement some classes of interference suppression but is, unfortunately, expensive and time-consuming, especially if several miti-gation techniques need to be compared. Simulations can be useful, but are not a substitute for real data. CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility has recently commenced a ‘software radio telescope’ project designed to fill the gap between dedicated hardware processors and pure simulation. In this approach, real telescope data are recorded coherently, then processed offline. This paper summarises the current contents of a freely available database of base band recorded data that can be used to experiment with signal processing solutions. It includes data from the following systems: single dish, multi-feed receiver; single dish with reference antenna; and an array of six 22 m antennas with and without a reference antenna. Astronomical sources such as OH masers, pulsars and continuum sources subject to interfering signals were recorded. The interfering signals include signals from the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and its Russian equivalent (GLONASS), television, microwave links, a low-Earth-orbit satellite, various other transmitters, and signals leaking from local telescope systems with fast clocks. The data are available on compact disk, allowing use in general purpose computers or as input to laboratory hardware prototypes.