Digital Commons Network^™

Doing A Doctorate In Business Administration: The Case For Critical Reflexivity., Catherine Farrell, Sarah Oerton, Eoin Plant

Articles

This paper focuses upon the value of critical reflexivity in illuminating practice-based management inquiry. Drawing upon contributions to debates in the field, the paper demonstrates how critical reflexivity permits interrogation of the dynamic tensions associated with ‘real life’ practice and scholarly research on Doctor in Business Administration (DBA) programmes. It offers clearer understanding of the complex journeys undertaken, greater recognition of the organizational and cultural landscapes inhabited, and broadens concepts of how ‘success’ on DBA programmes may be evaluated. The paper further argues that critical reflexivity plays a key role in highlighting the various processes underlying the design, management and …

Strategic Competences For Pricing Quantity Surveying Consultancy Services, Michael Adesi, De-Graft Owusu-Manu, Róisín Murphy

Articles

Professional quantity surveying (QS) services are critical to successful delivery of construction projects within planned budget, quality, and duration. The supply of QS professional services is largely dependent on the price level of services and the willingness of clients to pay. The pricing of professional QS consultancy services has been confronted with a myriad of pricing challenges due to rapid changes in the business environment; the pervasive influence of information technology; and the complexity of clients’ expectation. It isthereforenecessary for QS consultancy firms to develop strategic competence for the pricing of their services. In addition, numerous studies have not given …

Lipoid Proteinosis: Unfamiliar Skin Findings Delay Diagnosis, S Larkin, Elizabeth K. Blixit

Articles

Lipoid proteinosis (LP) is a rare, inherited condition that progresses gradually with multisystemic manifestations. Histopathologic characteristics can be understated, delaying the diagnosis if a high degree of suspicion is not present.

Informed Trading And Its Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Gabriel V. Rauterberg

Articles

Informed trading--trading on information not yet reflected in a stock's price-- drives the stock market. Such informational advantages can arise from astute analysis of varied pieces of public news, from just released public information, or from confidential information from inside a firm. We argue that these disparate types of trading are all better regulated as part of the broader phenomenon of informed trading. Informed trading makes share prices more accurate, enhancing the allocation of capital, but also makes markets less liquid, which is costly to the efficiency of trade. Informed trading thus poses a fundamental trade-off in how it affects …

An Investigation Of The Benefits And Barriers Of E‐Business Adoption Activities In Yemeni Smes, Ahmed Abdullah, Brychan Thomas, Lyndon Murphy, Eoin Plant

Articles

Yemeni small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are at the early stages of e‐business adoption and their owners and managers need to be supported to gain an understanding of the benefits that their business can achieve from adopting e‐business. Yemeni SMEs are at the early stages of e‐business adoption. The delay in adopting more advanced e‐business solutions are due to factors including the comparatively low level of technology usage within the organization, lack of qualified staff available to develop, implement and support firms’ websites, and limited financial resources. A lack of computer software and hardware resources appears to have a detrimental …

Low Complexity Maximum-Likelihood Detector For Dsttd Architecture Based On The Qrd-M Algorithm, Joaquín Cortez, Miguel Bazdresch, Julio Ramírez, Ramón Palacio, Erica Ruiz

Articles

This paper presents a new decoder algorithm for the double space-time transmit diversity (DSTTD) system. The decoder is based on the QRD-M algorithm, which performs a breadth-first search of possible solutions tree. The search is simplified by skipping unlikely candididates, and it is stopped when no promising candidates are left. Furthermore, the search is divided into three concurrent iterations, making possible a fast, parallel implementation either in hardware or software. After presenting an analysis of the capacity and diversity of DSTTD, we present performance results showing that the proposed decoder is capable of achieving near maximum likelihood performance. We also …

Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto

Articles

Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …

A Community-Building Framework For Collaborative Research Coordination Across The Education And Biology Research Disciplines, Nancy Pelaez, Trevor R. Anderson, Stephanie M. Gardner, Yue Yin, Joel K. Abraham, Edward L. Bartlett, Cara Gormally, Carol A. Hurney, Tammy M. Long, Dina L. Newman, Karen Sirum, Michael T. Stevens

Articles

Since 2009, the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Biological Sciences has funded Research Coordination Networks (RCN) aimed at collaborative efforts to improve participation, learning, and assessment in undergraduate biology education (UBE). RCN-UBE projects focus on coordination and communication among scientists and educators who are fostering improved and innovative approaches to biology education. When faculty members collaborate with the overarching goal of advancing undergraduate biology education, there is a need to optimize collaboration between participants in order to deeply integrate the knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. In this essay we propose a novel guiding framework for bringing colleagues together to advance …

Lessons From My Undergraduate Research Students, Paul A. Craig

Articles

From very early on, my personal/professional life has been shaped by teachers in many different settings. Teaching and learning form a two-way street. In the process of teaching undergraduate students, particularly in the research lab, I have learned some profound lessons about the importance of listening to them, challenging them, giving them autonomy, and allowing them to enjoy success and to risk failure. I am now working with a team of faculty members to implement these lessons in a course-based undergraduate research experience in the biochemistry teaching laboratory. Our goal is to seek answers to the question “How do students …

Parental Attitudes To Myopia: A Key Agent Of Change For Myopia Control?, Saoirse Mccrann, Daniel Ian Flitcroft, Kevin Lalor, John Butler, Aaron Bush, James Loughman

Articles

Purpose

With the increasing prevalence in myopia there is growing interest in active myopia prevention. This study aims to increase our understanding of parental attitudes to myopia development and control, as a means to inform future health planning and policy. It evaluates, for the first time, the attitude of parents to myopia and its associated risks, as well as assessing the exposure of Irish children to environmental factors that may influence their risk profile for myopia development.

Methods

Parents of 8–13 year old children in eight participating schools completed a questionnaire designed to assess their knowledge of and attitudes towards …

What We Still Don't Know About What Persuades Judges – And Some Ways We Might Find Out, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Over 25 years ago, in his foreword to the first volume of Legal Writing, Chris Rideout nailed it: legal writing as actually practiced by lawyers and judges needs to improve, “[b]ut more fundamental inquiry into legal writing...is needed as well.” The intervening decades have seen many laudable efforts on the latter front, as our collective scholarly discipline, then in its infancy, has matured. But one particular question that Rideout identified remains largely unaddressed by our discipline, although recent developments suggest a welcome increase in attention to the topic. Specifically, Rideout explained that our field did not know as much as …

Improving Operator Situation Awareness By Phasor Measurement Unit (Pmu) Data Visualization, Esa M. Rantanen, Ernest Fokoue, Jacob Haut, Chandini Ramesh, Kathleen Gegner, Thomas Overbye, Komal Shetye

Articles

The application of phasor measurement unit (PMU) data in the power industry is currently an area of intense interest. The key driver for PMU technology is to use the precise time sources provided by Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites to accurately measure the relative voltage and current phase angles at buses across an interconnect at a very high sampling rate. Presenting PMU data to power system operators in a format that is truly useful for them and that affords improved situation awareness (SA) and fast and accurate decision making is a particular challenge to display design. This report describes development …

A Falsified Universe Of Love And Desire, Review Of Micheal Farmer's Imagination And Idealism In John Updike's Novels, Sue Norton

Articles

Book Review of Micheal Farmer's Imagination and Idealism in John Updike's Novels

The Dna Triangle And Its Application To Learning Meiosis, Leslie Kate Wright, Christina M. Catavero, Dina L. Newman

Articles

Although instruction on meiosis is repeated many times during the undergraduate curriculum, many students show poor comprehension even as upper-level biology majors. We propose that the difficulty lies in the complexity of understanding DNA, which we explain through a new model, the DNA triangle. The DNA triangle integrates three distinct scales at which one can think about DNA: chromosomal, molecular, and informational. Through analysis of interview and survey data from biology faculty and students through the lens of the DNA triangle, we illustrate important differences in how novices and experts are able to explain the concepts …

Conformational Studies Of Gram-Negative Bacterial Quorum Sensing Acyl Homoserine Lactone (Ahl) Molecules: The Importance Of The N→* Interaction, Fintan Kelleher, Goar Sánchez-Sanz, Darren Crowe, Alan Nicholson, Adrienne Fleming

Articles

A ¹H NMR study shows the presence of intermolecular hydrogen bonds for AHLs in CDCl₃ solution. A detailed computational study of the structure of AHLs and the relative stability between the extended conformations (X) and those showing n→p* interactions (np) have been carried out by means of DFT calculations. Solvent effects have been shown to be very important when stabilising np conformations, particularly with polar solvents. This was shown by the shortening of C···O intramolecular distances and the increase in the relative energies favouring the np conformation with the dielectric constant of the solvent. …

Cdc42-Dependent Modulation Of Rigidity Sensing And Cell Spreading In Tumor Repopulating Cells, Farhan Chowdhury, Sultan Doganay, Benjamin J. Leslie, Rishi Singh, Kshitij Amar, Bhavana Talluri, Seongjin Park, Ning Wang, Taekjip Ha

Articles

Recently, a robust mechanical method has been established to isolate a small subpopulation of highly tumorigenic tumor repopulating cells (TRCs) from parental melanoma cells. In order to characterize the molecular and mechanical properties of TRCs, we utilized the tension gauge tether (TGT) single-molecule platform and investigated force requirements during early cell spreading events. TRCs required the peak single molecular tension of around 40 pN through integrins for initial adhesion like the parental control cells, but unlike the control cells, they did not spread and formed very few mature focal adhesions (FAs). Single molecule resolution RNA quantification of three Rho GTPases …

An Exploratory Study On The Northern Sea Route As An Alternative Shipping Passage, Helene Barenksten Solvang, Stavros Karamperidis, Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos, Dong Wook Song

Articles

This qualitative inductive research explores the potential benefits for the Scandinavian economy and ports through the implementation of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) as an alternative for container shipping to the established Southern route through the Suez Canal. To extract expert’s opinions and address these objectives, we utilised in-depth face-to-face semi-structured interviews through purposive sampling in a single case study setting.

The analysis of the data demonstrates that the commercialisation of NSR can yield benefits for the Scandinavian economy (e.g. GDP increase, jobs creation) and reveals the benefits of Scandinavian ports (e.g. ECA’s, flexibility, hinterland, etc.) compared to other ports …

Events, Social Connections, Place Identities And Extended Families, Bernadette Quinn, Theresa Ryan

Articles

The study reported here investigates the role that planned social gatherings play in shaping social connections, forging group identity and re-affirming connections with significant ‘home’ places within families where relationships extend across space. Empirically, it draws on a study of the Gathering, a 2013 national tourism initiative that encouraged people in Ireland to organise ‘gatherings’ to attract ‘home’ family members scattered across the globe. It reports data generated using mixed methods administered in two Irish counties. The findings demonstrate the profound meanings that the gatherings had for participating family members. The events served to strengthen existing family ties and to …

The Self And Other: Portraying Israeli And Palestinian Identities On Twitter, Jason Deegan, John Hogan, Sharon Feeney, Brendan Orourke

Articles

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has lasted over half a century, with both sides enduring military and political turmoil. This paper explores how Twitter is being used as a medium to portray identities in the conflict. We examine the tweets contained in the @IDFspokesperson and @ISMPalestine Twitter accounts between late 2015 and early 2016. Using textual analysis, we gain an insight into how these Twitter accounts, defined by the conflict, are used in portraying the self and the other.

Holographic Beam-Shaping Diffractive Diffusers Fabricated By Using Controlled Laser Speckle, Kevin Murphy, Vincent Toal, Izabela Naydenova, Suzanne Martin

Articles

A method for fabricating diffractive holographic optical diffusers is reported, allowing a high degree of control of the resulting diffuser characteristics. The method consists of recording a laser speckle pattern using a single carrier beam, with controlled speckle size and shape, in an acrylamide-based volume photopolymer. The multiple interferences that create the speckle pattern form the hologram. Results are presented verifying the diffusers are volume holographic in nature and the speckle pattern is recorded accurately in the photopolymer. Diffusers recorded by this method are analysed to characterise the optical performance of the diffusers and to illustrate their beam-shaping capabilities, particularly …

The Jus Ad Bellum's Regulatory Form, Monica Hakimi

Articles

This article argues that a form of legal regulation is embodied in decisions at the UN Security Council that condone but do not formally authorize specific military operations. Such decisions sometimes inflect or go beyond what the jus ad bellum permits through its general standards—that is, under the prohibition of cross-border force and small handful of exceptions. Recognizing that this form of regulation is both part of the law and different in kind from regulation through the general standards should change how we think about the jus ad bellum.

Toxicological Assessment Of Nanomaterials: The Role Of In Vitro Raman Microspectroscopic Analysis, Esen Efeoglu, Marcus Maher, Alan Casey, Hugh Byrne

Articles

The acceleration of nanomaterials research has brought about increased demands for rapid analysis of their bioactivity, in a multi-parametric fashion, to minimise the gap between potential applications and knowledge of their toxicological properties. The potential of Raman microspectroscopy for the analysis of biological systems with the aid of multivariate analysis techniques has been demonstrated. In this study, an overview of recent efforts towards establishing a ‘label-free high content nanotoxicological assessment technique’ using Raman microspectroscopy is presented. The current state of the art for cellular toxicity assessment and the potential of Raman microspectroscopy are discussed, and the spectral markers of the …

Limited Distribution Networks Stifle Competition In The Generic And Biosimilar Drug Industries, Laura Karas, Kenneth M. Shermock, Celia Proctor, Mariana Socal, Gerard F. Anderson

Articles

A limited distribution network (LDN) restricts the distribution channel for a pharmaceutical drug to 1 or a very small number of distributors. This strategy may allow for more effective allocation of drugs in shortage and is purported to help ensure the safe distribution of high-risk drugs to small patient populations. However, in recent years, some drug companies, including Turing Pharmaceuticals, have used LDNs to prevent generic and biosimilar companies from accessing samples of drug products necessary to perform testing required by the FDA for generic and biosimilar drug applications. LDNs also hamper provider access to pharmaceuticals and facilitate price gouging. …

The Influence Of Government Defenders On Affirmative Civil Rights Enforcement, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

The federal government — in particular the Department of Justice — can be one of the most efficient and powerful vindicators of civil rights, while simultaneously one of the most effective advocates for imposing barriers to affirmative civil rights enforcement. At the same time that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRD) is entering federal court to vindicate important rights, attorneys in the Civil Division (either from Main Justice or in any number of U.S. Attorney’s offices) are appearing in court to prevent the same. No doubt a similar pattern can be observed in certain state governments that have active affirmative …

Dispute System Design Can Help: To Bring About The Future Envisioned By Gpc Participants, We Need To Change The Structure Of What We Do, Lela P. Love, Lisa Blomgren Amsler, Mansi Karol

Articles

No abstract provided.

Angular Lens, Rishabh Sahu, Swati Chaudhary, Kedar Khare, Mishkatul Bhattacharya, Harshawardhan Wanare, Anand K. Jha

Articles

We propose a single phase-only optical element that transforms different orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes into localized spots at separated angular positions on a transverse plane. We refer to this element as an angular lens since it separates out OAM modes in a manner analogous to how a converging lens separates out transverse wave-vector modes at the focal plane. We also simulate the proposed angular lens using a spatial light modulator and experimentally demonstrate its working. Our work can have important implications for OAM-based classical and quantum communication applications.

Interdisciplinary Teaching And Learning Within Molecular Gastronomy Education: Does It Benefit Students?, Roisin Burke, Pauline Danaher

Articles

Since the creation of Molecular Gastronomy (MG) as a scientific discipline in 1988 a variety of higher education modules and programmes in that discipline have developed around the world. At the Technological University Dublin, MG has been taught using an interdisciplinary approach since the academic year 2012/2013. A Culinary Science lecturer and a Culinary Arts lecturer work in synergy and teach an interdisciplinary group of Food Science (FS) and Culinary Arts (CA) students. The students’ work is assessed, in each academic year, using summative methods i.e. written exam and a project assignment. In the academic year 2016/2017 the assignment reports …

Reframing The Mediation Debate In Irish All-Issues Divorce Disputes: From Mediation Vs. Litigation To Mediation And Litigation, Deirdre Mcgowan

Articles

Mediation currently plays a minor role in the Irish family justice system, yet a policy consensus exists that more couples should be encouraged to mediate and that increased rates of mediation will reduce the numbers seeking redress through the courts. The recently published Mediation Act 2017 adopts this position, assuming that the provision of information on mediation will increase uptake and that mediation offers an alternative to litigation for most civil disputes. This article reviews attempts in Ireland, England and Wales to encourage family disputants to mediate, identifying weaknesses in the information strategy. It also examines the legal framework governing …

Using Intellectual Property Law To Promote Human Flourishing For Market Women, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu

Articles

No abstract provided.

Studies Of Geometrical Profiling In Fabricated Tapered Optical Fbers Using Whispering Gallery Modes Spectroscopy, Vishnu Kavungal, Gerald Farrell, Qiang Wu, Arun Kumar Mallik, Yuliya Semenova

Articles

This paper experimentally demonstrates a method for geometrical profiling of asymmetries in fabricated thin microfiber tapers with waist diameters ranging from ∼10 to ∼50µm with submicron accuracy. The method is based on the analysis of whispering gallery mode resonances excited in cylindrical fiber resonators as a result of evanescent coupling of light propagating through the fiber taper. The submicron accuracy of the proposed method has been verified by SEM studies. The method can be applied as a quality control tool in fabrication of microfiber based devices and sensors or for fine-tuning of microfiber fabrication set-ups.