Digital Commons Network^™

Organizational Responses To Institutional Pressures: Reconfiguration Of Spaces In Nanosciences And Nanotechnologies, Nicolas Battard, Paul Donnelly, Vincent Mangematin

Articles

The literature on organizational responses to institutional pressures describes responses ranging from compliance to resistance via different modes of decoupling. However, although these studies provide a greater understanding of the phenomenon, they tend to be disparate and to consider the different elements separately. Through a comparative case study of six research teams in the area of nanosciences and nanotechnologies, we offer three contributions. Our first is to the decoupling literature by way of a complementary and cohesive framework, which shows that organizations vary in their responses by reconfiguring their physical (policy and materiality), mental (meaning) and social (identity) spaces, and …

Investigating The Impact Of Green Exercise On Population Health And Well-Being In A Small Community In Ireland:A Novel Approach Using A Natural Laboratory Ecosystem., Nollaig O'Sullivan, Aoife Donnelly, Tadhg Macintyre, Giles Warrington

Articles

Green exercise is defined as undertaking physical activity whilst being directly exposed to nature (Pretty et al., 2005; 2007). Pretty et al. (2003) were among the first wave of researchers to investigate the synergistic benefits of incorporating physical activity and exposure to the natural environment to produce positive psychological affect. Over the past decade, investigations into the possible additive effects on well-being of green exercise and how it can be used as an influential tool to help combat the rising rate of both physical inactivity and non –communicable disease has gained prominence in scientific literature. However, there is still a …

Bim Innovation Capability Programme: An Irish Bim Study, Barry Mcauley, Alan Hore, Roger West

Articles

In 2011 the Royal Institute of Architects Ireland (RIAI) conducted a survey which found that BIM adoption within Ireland was quite low at 16%. Over the last five years these figures have risen significantly, with the 2016 Irish Digital Transition Survey reporting that 76% of respondents possess confidence in their organisation’s BIM skills and knowledge. This represents a significant shift of BIM adoption in Ireland over the last five years.

The BIM Innovation Capability Programme (BICP) Irish BIM study, builds on the findings from the BICP Global BIM Study by providing an in depth review of BIM in Ireland with …

Apple State Aid Ruling: A Wrong Way To Enforce The Benefits Principle?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, G. Mazzoni

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After an in-depth investigation, the European Commission concluded Ireland granted tax benefits of up to €13 billion to Apple in violation of the state aid rules. Ireland must now recover the illegal aid. That decision has been criticized by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who believes that only the IRS has the right to tax Apple's foreign income, since most of the company's R&D took place in the U.S. However, that is not how the big EU countries, where sales are made, see things. Who is right?

This article seeks to answer that question by analyzing the impact of the U.S. …

Low Rank And Sparsity Analysis Applied To Speech Enhancement Via Online Estimated Dictionary, Pengfei Sun, Jun Qin

Articles

In this letter, we propose an online estimated local dictionary based single-channel speech enhancement algorithm, which focuses on low-rank and sparse matrix decomposition. In the proposed algorithm, a noisy speech spectrogram can be decomposed into low-rank background noise components and an activation of the online speech dictionary, on which both low-rank and sparsity constraints are imposed. This decomposition takes the advantage of local estimated exemplar’s high expressiveness on speech components and also accommodates nonstationary background noise. The local dictionary can be obtained through estimating the speech presence probability (SPP) by applying expectation–maximal algorithm, in which a generalized Gamma prior for …

Can A Cost Sharing Arrangement Prevent A Tax Shelter Label?, Jeffrey M. Kadet

Articles

In connection with an ongoing effort of the government to examine certain Microsoft documents, the government on October 12, 2016, stated in a filed document that one of the transactions at issue is "unquestionably" a tax shelter for purposes of section 7525. The significance of that is in whether some written communications should be protected from IRS scrutiny by the section 7525 confidentiality privilege that may apply to tax advice between a taxpayer and tax practitioners. Under section 7525(b)(2), written communications will not qualify if they are "in connection with the promotion of the direct or indirect participation of the …

How And Why International Law Binds International Organizations, Kristina Daugirdas

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For decades, controversy has dogged claims about whether and to what extent international law binds international organizations (“IOs”) like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. The question has important consequences for humanitarian law, economic rights, and environmental protection. In this Article, I aim to resolve the controversy by supplying a theory about when and how international law binds IOs. I conclude that international law binds IOs to the same degree that it binds states. That is, IOs are not more extensively or more readily bound; nor are they less extensively or less readily bound. This means that IOs, …

Power-Weighted Divergences For Relative Attenuation And Delay Estimation, Ruairí De Fréin, Scott T. Rickard Prof

Articles

Power-weighted estimators have recently been proposed for relative attenuation and delay estimation in blind source separation. Their provenance lies in the observation that speech is approximately windowed-disjoint orthogonal (WDO) in the time-frequency (TF) domain; it has been reported that using WDO, derived from TF representations of speech, improves mixing parameter estimation. We show that power-weighted relative attenuation and delay estimators can be derived from a particular case of a weighted Bregman divergence. We then propose a wider class of estimators, which we tune to give better parameter estimates for speech.

Unquantified Benefits And The Problem Of Regulation Under Uncertainty, Jonathan Masur, Eric A. Posner

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No abstract provided.

Supervision Of Students In Social Care Education: Practice Teachers' Views Of Their Role, Fiona Mcsweeney

Articles

This paper presents findings from research about how practice

teachers in social care education in Ireland view their role, in

particular what elements they prioritise and what they see as relatively

unimportant. The aim of the research was exploratory, seeking to

discover commonalities and differences in how practice teachers saw

their role in the supervision of social care students. Q methodology

was used to compare the participants’ viewpoints. Twenty practice

teachers, from varying practice backgrounds and levels of experience,

sorted statements outlining aspects of the practice teacher’s role,

during individual interviews. Analysis indicates participants had two

ways of conceptualising the …

Property Rights And Governance Strategies: How Best To Deal With Land, Water, Intellectual Property, And Spectrum, Richard A. Epstein

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No abstract provided.

Setting The Irish State Table, Elaine Mahon

Articles

This year Ireland celebrates the centenary of the Easter rebellion of 1916, the event which is generally regarded as having led to Ireland’s independence six years later. Drawing on Irish government archives, this paper presents the beginnings of Irish state hospitality in the 1920s the emergence of diplomatic dining in the 1930s hosted by the Irish head of state and the first attempts to establish inventories of state owned furniture abroad. The paper then discusses how the Department of External Affairs set out to acquire a dinner service for official entertainment by the Minister of External Affairs as a showcase …

Power Efficient Sram Design With Integrated Bit Line Charge Pump, Xu Wang, Yuanzhi Zhang, Chao Lu, Zhigang Mao

Articles

Bit line toggling of SRAM systems in write operations leads to the largest portion of power dissipation. To reduce this amount of power loss and achieve power efficient memory, we propose a new SRAM design that integrates charge pump circuits to harvest and reuse bit line charge. In this work, a power-efficient charge recycling SRAM is designed and implemented in 180nm CMOS technology. Post-layout simulation demonstrates an 11% of power saving and 3.8% of area overhead, if the bit width of SRAM is chosen as 8. Alternatively, 22% of power reduction is obtained if the bit width of SRAM is …

College Of Law Committed To Native Law Program, Mark Adams

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No abstract provided.

Self-Driving Laws, Anthony Casey, Anthony Niblett

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No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Abner J. Mikva (1926-2016), Douglas G. Baird

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No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Abner J. Mikva (1926-2016), David A. Strauss

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No abstract provided.

In Memoriam: Abner J. Mikva (1926-2016), Geoffrey R. Stone

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No abstract provided.

Digital Self-Ownership: A Publicity-Rights Framework For Determining Employee Social Media Rights, Susan Park, Patricia S. Abril

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No abstract provided.

Structure-Function Relationships Of Archaeal Cbf5 During In Vivo Rna-Guided Pseudouridylation., Mrinmoyee Majumder, Michael S Bosmeny, Ramesh Gupta

Articles

In Eukarya and Archaea, in addition to protein-only pseudouridine (Ψ) synthases, complexes containing one guide RNA and four proteins can also produce Ψ. Cbf5 protein is the Ψ synthase in the complex. Previously, we showed that Ψ's at positions 1940, 1942, and 2605 of Haloferax volcanii 23S rRNA are absent in a cbf5-deleted strain, and a plasmid-borne copy of cbf5 can rescue the synthesis of these Ψ's. Based on published reports of the structure of archaeal Cbf5 complexed with other proteins and RNAs, we identified several potential residues and structures in H. volcanii Cbf5, which were expected to play important …

Technical Standards And Lawsuits Involving Accommodations For Health Professions Students, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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This article will discuss the legal obligations of medical schools to accommodate applicants and students with disabilities. The article begins by describing the problem of denial of medical education to such students, a problem that results from both discrimination in admissions and denial of accommodations to incumbent students with disabilities. The article then discusses the disability rights legislation that prohibits discrimination against—and requires reasonable accommodation of—qualified medical students with disabilities. It concludes by reviewing a number of lawsuits involving requests for accommodation and how disability rights law was applied in those cases.

What’S Wrong With Sentencing Equality?, Richard A. Bierschbach, Stephanos Bibas

Articles

Equality in criminal sentencing often translates into equalizing outcomes and stamping out variations, whether race-based, geographic, or random. This approach conflates the concept of equality with one contestable conception focused on outputs and numbers, not inputs and processes. Racial equality is crucial, but a concern with eliminating racism has hypertrophied well beyond race. Equalizing outcomes seems appealing as a neutral way to dodge contentious substantive policy debates about the purposes of punishment. But it actually privileges deterrence and incapacitation over rehabilitation, subjective elements of retribution, and procedural justice, and it provides little normative guidance for punishment. It also has unintended …

Impediments In The Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr) Space: A Mixed-Method Approach, Tony Kealy

Articles

Despite the potentially positive image and reputation implications of businesses implementing strategies in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), there appears to be a dearth of companies willing to play a leading role in moving CSR activities to upper levels within the consciousness of the organisation. The vast majority of businesses are merely complying with national regulations in their business sustainability efforts. This study investigates the reasons why there are road-blocks in the pursuit of higher levels of sustainable business development. A 17-question on-line survey was administered to a number of global participant businesses in a range of industries. The resulting qualitative …

Pattern Reconfigurable Back-To-Back Microstrip Patch Antenna, Kansheng Yang, Xiulong Bao, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann

Articles

A back-to- back microstrip patch antenna with a switchable pattern is proposed for WLAN applications. The patch elements, printed on FR-4 substrates with a common ground plane, are switched with a single-pole double-throw PIN diode circuit. Switching the feed selects either of two identical radiation patterns in the opposing hemispheres for spatial diversity that would benefit a distributed network.

Are Intrusion Detection Studies Evaluated Consistently? A Systematic Literature Review, Nuthan Munaiah, Andrew Meneely, Ryan Wilson, Benjamin Short

Articles

Cyberinfrastructure is increasingly becoming target of a wide spectrum of attacks from Denial of Service to large-scale defacement of the digital presence of an organization. Intrusion Detection System (IDSs) provide administrators a defensive edge over intruders lodging such malicious attacks. However, with the sheer number of different IDSs available, one has to objectively assess the capabilities of different IDSs to select an IDS that meets specific organizational requirements. A prerequisite to enable such an objective assessment is the implicit comparability of IDS literature. In this study, we review IDS literature to understand the implicit comparability of IDS literature from the …

Day By Day: Finding The Voices Of Deaf Leadership On Stage, Luane Davis Haggerty

Articles

This is an informal case study of Deaf leadership as it evidences itself in a theatrical production setting. I call this approach to leadership Collective Individualism (2007). There is not a single leader; instead, there is often a group—a collective of sorts. The typical rehearsal structure for a theatrical production is a comfortable setting for this type of leadership to emerge, if the director is willing to be open to allowing it to happen. The 2016 production of Godspell produced at the National Technical Institute of The Deaf in their lab theatre, toured to the local LORT Theater here in …

Wavelet Packet Transform Based Speech Enhancement Via Two-Dimensional Spp Estimator With Generalized Gamma Priors, Pengfei Sun, Jun Qin

Articles

Despite various speech enhancement techniques have been developed for different applications, existing methods are limited in noisy environments with high ambient noise levels. Speech presence probability (SPP) estimation is a speech enhancement technique to reduce speech distortions, especially in low signal-to- noise ratios (SNRs) scenario. In this paper, we propose a new two-dimensional (2D) Teager-energy operators (TEOs) improved SPP estimator for speech enhancement in time-frequency (T-F) domain. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) as a multiband decomposition technique is used to concentrate the energy distribution of speech components. A minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimator is obtained based on the generalized gamma distribution …

Wavelet Packet Transform Based Speech Enhancement Via Two-Dimensional Spp Estimator With Generalized Gamma Priors, Pengfei Sun, Jun Qin

Articles

Despite various speech enhancement techniques have been developed for different applications, existing methods are limited in noisy environments with high ambient noise levels. Speech presence probability (SPP) estimation is a speech enhancement technique to reduce speech distortions, especially in low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) scenario. In this paper, we propose a new two-dimensional (2D) Teager-energyoperators (TEOs) improved SPP estimator for speech enhancement in time-frequency (T-F) domain. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) as a multiband decomposition technique is used to concentrate the energy distribution of speech components. A minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimator is obtained based on the generalized gamma distribution speech model …

Developing Cultural Tourism Through Cross-Sector Co-Operation: Evidence From The West Of Ireland, Ziene Mottiar, Bernadette Quinn, Theresa Ryan

Articles

Studies of co-operative activity in the tourism literature focus largely on linkages between tourism firms and little has been done to examine co-operation between tourism firms and those in other sectors. Yet the inter-dependency that exits between tourism and other sectors in product development is clearly apparent. One such example is in the production of cultural tourism where co-operation between the cultural and tourism sectors is a necessity. This paper reports on the findings of a project undertaken in regions in the west of Ireland. The research, identifies that while not without its challenges, there is a strong willingness for …

Incorporating Naturopathic Medicine Into A Hospital Setting: One Institution's Experience, Thomas Lanni, Maureen Anderson, Hallie Armstrong, Gail Elliott Patricolo

Articles

The number of patients seeking complementary health approaches combined with conventional treatments has grown considerably over the past decade. The current authors have previously described how an integrative medicine department was initiated and implemented at Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, Michigan. This article discusses how the integrative medicine department was expanded to include naturopathic medicine. This expansion was implemented because patients were taking herbs and supplements without their doctors' knowledge. This situation can be dangerous, especially for patients with cancer who are receiving chemotherapy, as various herbs and supplements can interact with treatment for these patients. Because the State of Michigan …