Digital Commons Network^™

A New Adaptive Frame Aggregation Method For Downlink Wlan Mu-Mimo Channels, Lem Lem Kassa, Mark Davis, Jingye Cai, Jianhua Deng

Articles

Accommodating the heterogeneous traffic demand among streams in the downlink MU-MIMO channel is among the challenges that affect the transmission efficiency since users in the channel do not always have the same traffic demand. Consequently, it is feasible to adjust the frame size to maximize the system throughput. The existing adaptive aggregation solutions do not consider the effects of different traffic scenarios and they use a Poison traffic model which is inadequate to represent the real network traffic scenarios, thus leading to suboptimal solutions. In this study, we propose some adaptive aggregation strategies which employ a novel dynamic adaptive aggregation …

Chefs’ Perspectives Of Failures In Foodservice Kitchens, Part 1: A Phenomenological Exploration Of The Concepts, Types, And Causes Of Food Production Failure, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Jj Healy, Mohamed Fawzi Afiffi

Articles

Customers visit restaurants for varying reasons ranging from utilitarian – to satisfy hunger – to hedonistic – displaying cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) more recently theorized as culinary capital (Naccarato & Lebesco, 2012). Restaurants are even more significant in the new ‘experience economy’ (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) where lunch or dinner are conceptualized as ‘meal experiences.’ There is widespread acceptance of the pivotal role (about 33% of tourist spend) that food now plays in the tourism product of any country (Quigley et al., 2019).

From Protecting Water Quality To Protecting States’ Rights: Fifty Years Of Supreme Court Clean Water Act Statutory Interpretation, Stephen M. Johnson

Articles

In 1972, a bipartisan Congress enacted the Clean Water Act “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Almost fifty years have passed since Congress enacted the law, and during that time, the Supreme Court has played a significant role in the administration and evolution of the law. Since the dawn of the environmental era in the 1970s, the Supreme Court has heard more cases involving the Clean Water Act than any other environmental law. However, the manner in which the Court has analyzed the law has changed substantially over the last half century. …

Thoughts On The Retirement Of Jim Stewart, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

At the end of April 2021, Jim Stewart - my friend and colleague of almost 40 years - retired from the practice of law. He will now be spending his time trying to win rounds of golf instead of cases and trying to win arguments with his three daughters instead of opposing counsel. I know Jim will enjoy retirement, but I'm skeptical that his win-loss record is about to improve.

Electrohydrodynamic Printing Of A Dielectric Elastomer Actuator And Its Application In Tunable Lenses, Liang Jiang, Yuhao Wang, Xueqin Wang, Fanggang Ning, Shipeng Wen, Yanfen Zhou, Shaojuan Chen, Tony Betts, Stephen Jerrams, Fenglei Zhou

Articles

Optical lenses driven by dielectric elastomer (DE) actuators with tunable focal lengths are presented here. They are inspired by the architecture of the crystalline lens and the ciliary muscle of the human eye and have prompted a growing interest. The most commonly used DEs in tunable lenses have often required highly transparent films and also the need to encapsulate clear liquid silicone to act as the lens. There is a restriction on the properties of the tunable lens imposed by materials limitations. Here, the fabrication of a fully 3D printed tunable lens with an inhomogeneous structure is described. It exhibited …

A System For Resilience Learning: Developing A Community-Driven, Multi-Sector Research Approach For Greater Preparedness And Resilience To Long-Term Climate Stressors And Extreme Events In The Miami Metropolitan Region, Abigail L. Fleming, Tiffany G. Troxer, Amy C. Clement, Yoca Arditi-Rocha, Gretchen Beesing, Mahadev Bhat, Jessica Bolson, Carissa Cabán-Alemán, Karina Castillo, Olivia Collins, Mayra Cruz, Alan Dodd, Scotney D. Evans, Carlos Genatios, Jane Gilbert, Alyssa Hernandez, Cheryl Holder, Maria Ilcheva, Elizabeth Kelly, Arturo Leon, Joanna Lombard, Katharine J. March, Diana Moanga, James F. Murley, Amy Knowles, Jayantha Obeysekera, Loren Parra, Jennifer Posner, Arif Sarwat, Rachel Silverstein, John A. Stuart, Michael C. Sukop, Shimon Wdowinski, Elizabeth Wheaton

Articles

There is a growing need for integrated approaches that align community priorities with strategies that build resilience to climate hazards, societal shocks, and economic crises to ensure more equitable and sustainable outcomes. We anticipate that adaptive management and resilience learning are central elements for these approaches. In this paper, we describe an approach to build and test a Resilience Learning System to support research and implementation of a resilience strategy developed for the Greater Miami and the Beaches or the Resilient305 Strategy. Elements foundational to the design of this integrated research strategy and replicable Resilience Learning System are: (1) strong …

The Virtual Law School, 2.0, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

Just over twenty years ago I gave a talk to the AALS called The Virtual Law School? Or, How the Internet Will De-skill the Professoriate, and Turn Your Law School Into a Conference Center. I came to the subject because I had been working on internet law, learning about virtual worlds and e-commerce, and about the power of one-to-many communications, and it struck me that a lot of what I had learned applied to education in general and to legal education in particular.
It didn't happen. Or at least, it has not happened yet. In this essay I want …

The Paris Agreement Compliance Mechanism: Beyond Cop 26, Jessica Owley, Imad Antoined Ibrahim, Sandrine Maljean-Dubois

Articles

Without an international tribunal or tools like trade sanctions, there is little to coerce or encourage adherence with environmental treaties. The Paris Agreement, the governing global agreement to address climate change, relies on voluntary global cooperation. Countries determine their own commitments by setting nationally determined contributions of greenhouse gases emissions. The main mandatory elements of the agreement are reporting requirements. The success of the agreement turns on whether countries comply with these requirements. Article 15 of the Paris Agreement establishes a Compliance Committee and sets forth the mechanisms to ensure and facilitate compliance with the agreement. Yet, as with the …

The Perpetuation Of Stereotypes In Croatian Public Discourse: “Autistic” As A Pejorative, Jakob Patekar

Articles

The way people are spoken or written about has a critical role in how they are perceived, and this in turn influences how they are positioned within a society – belonging to its core, the majority, or being relegated to the margins, the minority. Various authors have reflected on the role of language in dehumanizing, oppressing, and discriminating certain groups, be it the Jewish citizens during the Nazi regime in Germany, the Tutsi in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, black people in the United States since 1619, women throughout history, or gay and disabled people today, to name a few …

Democracy, Distrust, And Presidential Immunities, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

This Essay sketches how Ely's representation-reinforcement theory of judicial interpretation might frame presidential immunity doctrines and compares that frame to the Court's current approach. To what extent might various forms of presidential immunity, or exceptions thereto, be grounded in principles of democratic accountability rather than presidential efficacy? I conclude that a plausibly constructed Elyan paradigm provides an argument for immunity in many settings but also for exceptions to that immunity in narrow but important circumstances. More specifically: immunity can protect the President's ability to focus on serving her view of the national interest, without being unduly chilled or sidetracked by …

Race And The First Amendment: A Compendium Of Resources, Solomon F. Worlds, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

This article provides summaries of law review articles and books that consider the complex relationship between racial justice and free speech. It seeks to assist law students, legal scholars, judges, and practitioners to think more deeply about the intersection between these critically important values. It describes scholarship that views these values as complementary, but also scholarship that views them as conflicting.

Bayesian Dynamic Network Actor Models With Application To South Korean Covid-19 Patient Movement Data, Antonio Arrizza, Alberto Caimo

Articles

Motivated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this article intro- duces Bayesian dynamic network actor models for the analysis of infected individuals’ movements in South Korea during the first three months of 2020. The relational event data modelling framework makes use of network statistics capturing the structure of movement events from and to several country’s municipalities. The fully probabilistic Bayesian approach allows to quantify the uncertainty associated to the relational tendencies explaining where and when movement events are established and where they are directed. The observed patient movements’ patterns at an early stage of the pandemic can provide interesting insights about …

Government Speech And First Amendment Capture, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

Alarm regarding government speech is not new. In earlier decades, scholars worried that the government's speech might monopolize a marketplace and drown out opposing viewpoints. But today, using a move I term "First Amendment capture," the government need not be the loudest speaker because it can become the only speaker. First Amendment capture has been made possible by the Supreme Court's developing government speech doctrine, which holds that government speech is not subject to the Free Speech Clause. Consequently, once speech is declared governmental, the government may censor viewpoints it does not like. First Amendment capture categorizing contested speech as …

Restorative Approaches To Intimate Partner Violence And Sexual Harm, Donna Coker (Ed.)

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Donna Coker, Thalia Gonzalez

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No abstract provided.

Substance Use Disorder Discrimination And The Cares Act: Using Disability Law To Inform Part 2 Rulemaking, Kelly K. Dineen, Elizabeth Pendo

Articles

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a chronic health condition—like people with other chronic health conditions, people with SUDs experience periods of remission and periods of exacerbation or recurrence. Unlike people with most other chronic conditions, people with SUDs may be more likely to garner law enforcement attention than medical attention during a recurrence. They are also chronically disadvantaged by pervasive social stigma, discrimination, and structural inequities. The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating consequences for people with SUDs, who are at higher risk for both contracting the SARS-CoV-19 virus and experiencing poorer outcomes. Meanwhile, there are early indications that pandemic conditions …

The New Eugenics, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

During the first third of the Twentieth Century, the eugenics movement played a powerful role in the politics, law, and culture of the United States. The fear of “the menace of the feebleminded,” the notion that those with supposedly poor genes “sap the strength of the State,” and other similar ideas drove the enthusiastic implementation of the practices of excluding disabled individuals from the country, incarcerating them in ostensibly beneficent institutions, and sterilizing them. By the 1930s, with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, eugenic ideas had begun to be discredited in American public discourse. And after the Holocaust, …

Opioid Settlement Funds: Do Not Neglect Patients With Pain, Mark C. Bicket, Barbara Mcquade, Chad M. Brummett

Articles

The opioid crisis has escalated in the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic to new extremes and has claimed more than half a million lives in the US since 2000. Lawsuits to address the civil and criminal liability of drug companies and other groups have originated from federal, state, local, and tribal jurisdictions. When successful, there will likely be billions of dollars and significant discretion as to how these funds are spent. Several groups have produced reports with principles to address the toll of addiction using settlement funds. However, they lack actionable strategies to address the needs of patients with pain, …

Management Development In Small And Medium Sized Firms In The Republic Of Ireland: An Investigation Of Contingency Factors And Management Development Activities, Deirdre Mcquillan, Thomas Garavan, Wael Rashwan, Lorraine Sweeney, Ciara Nolan, Osa Godwin Osaghae

Articles

Purpose The development of managerial skills is an important priority for small and medium sized firm globally yet we have few insights about the predictors and types of management development (MD) activities in SMEs. To date studies of MD have not sufficiently differentiated between small and medium sized firms. In this paper we investigate the impact of three sets of predictors (contextual, technology and innovation activities, behavioural and skill) on six dimensions of MD (formal internal development, formal internal with an external expert, formal external development, one-to-one MD activities, budget for MD and experiential focused MD).

Design/methodology/approach Survey of 360 …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Do You Want Some Sauce On That? Factors Influencing Dietary Habits Among The Irish Construction Workforce, Aileen Kennedy, Colm O'Gorman, Kenneth Lee

Articles

This paper presents an explanatory logic and an empirical illustration of how Stones’s strong structuration theory, specifically the methodological brackets of agent’s conduct and agent’s context analysis can be applied within case study research. The value of strong structuration theory, and the methodological bracketing tool, is its proximity to empirical research and the provision of robust guidelines which enable researchers to resolve the methodological challenges of combining structure and agency within research designs. We demonstrate the application of methodological bracketing as a tool for analysing structure and agency interactions within management research. The contribution of the paper is its explication …

Presidential Control Of Elections, Lisa Marshall Manheim

Articles

In recent decades, presidents of both political parties have asserted increasingly aggressive forms of influence over the administrative state. During this same period, Congress has expanded the role that the federal government plays in election administration. The convergence of these two trends leads to a troubling but underexamined phenomenon: presidential control of elections. Relying on their official powers, presidents have the ability to affect the rules that govern elections, including elections meant to check and legitimize presidential powers in the first place. This self-serving arrangement heightens the risk of harms from political entrenchment and subordination of expertise. These harms, in …

Promoting Corporate Irresponsibility? Delaware As The Intellectual Property Holding State, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

This article is about Delaware corporate irresponsibility. Delaware has stealthily become the center of all things intellectual property. As the leader of onshore tax havens since the early 1980s, Delaware attracts multistate corporations to engage in aggressive tax avoidance schemes. Specifically, Delaware has legislatively and methodically attracted the creation of Intellectual Property Holding Companies (IPHCs), enabling companies to avoid paying their share of taxes to sister states on the income generated from the use of Intellectual Property assets. This article traces the rise of Delaware as the intellectual property state and concludes that the benefits Delaware enjoys promote corporate irresponsibility …

From Bench To Worktop: Rapid Evaluation Of Nutritional Parameters In Liquid Foodstuffs By Ir Spectroscopy, David Perezguaita

Articles

We evaluated the use of attenuated total reflectance infrared spectroscopy for simultaneous in situ quantification of the nutritional composition of liquid food stuffs in the industrial kitchen context. Different methodologies were compared, including dry and wet acquisition along with instrument parameters and measurement times of 4 and 60 s. The most effective technique was 1-minute measurement, with prediction errors of 2.6, 0.7, 1.0, 2.2, 0.8, 2.4 g/100 mL and 150 Kcal, for carbohydrates, proteins, fat, sugars, saturated fat, water and energy values, respectively.The 4-second method resulted in larger errors but was more applicable for inline measurements. Dry measurements successfully predicted …

Ice-Breaking Fleets Of The United States And Canada : Assessing The Current State Of Affairs And Future Plans, Megan Drewniak, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Anastasia Christodoulou, Rebecca Sheehan

Articles

In recent years, a continuous decline of ice-coverage in the Arctic has been recorded, but these high latitudes are still dominated by earth’s polar ice cap. Therefore, safe and sustainable shipping operations in this still frozen region have as a precondition the availability of ice-breaking support. The analysis in hand provides an assessment of the United States’ and Canada’s polar ice-breaking program with the purpose of examining to what extent these countries’ relevant resources are able to meet the facilitated growth of industrial interests in the High North. This assessment will specifically focus on the maritime transportation sector along the …

Perspectives On Cyber Security For Offshore Oil And Gas Assets, Iosif Progoulakis, Nikitas Nikitakos, Paul Rohmeyer, Barry Bunin, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Stavros Karamperidis

Articles

In an ever-evolving technological industry, the oil and gas sector is already moving forward through the adaptation of Industry 4.0 and the adaptation of advanced cyber technologies through Oil and Gas 4.0. As IT/OT (information technology/operational technology) systems are evolving technologically, so are the cyber security threats faced by the offshore oil and gas assets. This paper aims to raise the awareness of cyber security threats and the organizational and technical measures that need to be adopted by the oil and gas industry for remote and complex assets in the upstream sector. A comprehensive literature review covering the areas of …

Perspectives On Cyber Security For Offshore Oil And Gas Assets, Iosif Progoulakis, Nikitas Nikitakos, Paul Rohmeyer, Barry Bunin, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Stavros Karamperidis

Articles

In an ever-evolving technological industry, the oil and gas sector is already moving forward through the adaptation of Industry 4.0 and the adaptation of advanced cyber technologies through Oil and Gas 4.0. As IT/OT (information technology/operational technology) systems are evolving technologically, so are the cyber security threats faced by the offshore oil and gas assets. This paper aims to raise the awareness of cyber security threats and the organizational and technical measures that need to be adopted by the oil and gas industry for remote and complex assets in the upstream sector. A comprehensive literature review covering the areas of …

The Northwest Passage In The Arctic : A Brief Assessment Of The Relevant Marine Transportation System And Current Availability Of Search And Rescue Services, Rebecca Sheehan, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Anastasia Christodoulou, Megan Drewniak, Peter Raneri, Angelos Dalaklis

Articles

No abstract provided.

Can Market-Based Measures Stimulate Investments In Green Technologies For The Abatement Of Ghg Emissions From Shipping? A Review Of Proposed Market-Based Measures, Anastasia Christodoulou, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Aykut Ölcer, Fabio Ballini

Articles

In order for the maritime sector to align itself with the targets set by the Paris Agreement, it should reduce its GHG emissions by at least 50% by 2050 compared to 2008 with the ultimate aim to phase them out entirely. It is along these lines that in April 2018 the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) developed a strategy, consisting of a range of potential technical and operational measures to reduce GHG emissions from international shipping, ranking from improvements on ship design to the employment of alternative fuels. In order to stimulate the adoption of these policies, the IMO also considers …

Cr Cybermar As A Solution Path Towards Cybersecurity Soundness In Maritime Logistics Domain, Monica Canepa, Fabio Ballini, Dimitrios Dalaklis, Seyedvahid Vakili, Luis Miguel Colmenares Hernandez

Articles

Cybersecurity is now considered as one of the main challenges for the maritime sector. At the same time, the maritime transport industry remains one of the most relevant and driving sectors for the global economy in terms of both the number and operations of active companies, and infrastructure and investments, thanks to the policies pushed to attract the latter. Maritime information systems, whether on board ships or in ports, are numerous, built with standard components available on the market and in many cases designed without factoring in well the ever-growing cyber risk. Digital infrastructure has become essential in operating and …