Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Wrong Turn On The Ex Post Facto Clause, Paul D. Reingold, Kimberly Thomas

Articles

The Ex Post Facto Clause bars any increase in punishment after the commission of a crime. But deciding what constitutes an increase in punishment can be tricky. At the front end of a criminal case, where new or amended criminal laws might lengthen prisoners’ sentences if applied retroactively, courts have routinely struck down such changes under the Ex Post Facto Clause. At the back end, however, where new or amended parole laws or policies might lengthen prisoners’ sentences in exactly the same way if applied retroactively, courts have used a different standard and upheld the changes under the Ex Post …

Investigating The Role Of Gold Nanoparticle Shape And Size In Their Toxicities To Fungi, Kangze Liu, Zhonglei He, Hugh Byrne, James Curtin, Furong Tian Technological University Dublin

Articles

Gold nanoparticles (GNPs) are increasingly being used in a wide range of applications, and such they are being released in greater quantities into the environment. Consequently, the environmental effects of GNPs, especially toxicities to living organisms, have drawn great attention. However, their toxicological characteristics still remain unclear. Fungi, as the decomposers of the ecosystem, interact directly with the environment and critically control the overall health of the biosphere. Thus, their sensitivity to GNP toxicity is particularly important. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of GNP shape and size in their toxicities to fungi, which could help …

Multicomponent Analysis Using A Confocal Raman Microscope, Zhengyuan Tang, Sinead J. Barton, Thomas E. Ward, John P. Lowry, Michelle M. Doran, Hugh Byrne, Bryan M. Hennelly

Articles

Measuring the concentration of multiple chemical components in a low volume aqueous mixture by Raman spectroscopy has received significant interest in the literature. All of the contributions to date focus on the design of optical systems that facilitate the recording of spectra with high signal-to-noise ratio, by collecting as many Raman scattered photons as possible. In this study, the confocal Raman microscope set-up is investigated for multicomponent analysis. Partial Least Squares Regression is used to quantify physiologically relevant aqueous mixtures of glucose, lactic acid, and urea. The predicted error is 17.81 mg/dL for glucose, 10.6 mg/dL for lactic acid and …

Advancing Raman Microspectroscopy For Cellular And Subcellular Analysis: Towards In Vitro High Content Spectralomic Analysis, Hugh Byrne, Franck Bonnier, Alan Casey, Marcus Maher, Jennifer Mcintyre, Esen Efeoglu, Zeineb Farhane

Articles

In the confocal mode, Raman microspectroscopy can profile the biochemical content of biological cells at a subcellular level, and any changes to it by exogenous agents, such as therapeutic drugs or toxicants. As an exploration of the potential of the technique as a high content, label free analysis technique, this report reviews work to monitor the spectroscopic signatures associated with the uptake and response pathways of commercial chemotherapeutic agents and polymeric nanoparticles by human lung cells. It is demonstrated that the signatures are reproducible and characteristic of the cellular event, and can be used, for example, to identify the mode …

Implicit Bias's Failure, Samuel Bagenstos

Articles

The 2016 presidential election was a coming-out party of sorts for the concept of implicit bias-and not necessarily in a good way. In answering a question about race relations and the police during the vice-presidential debate, Mike Pence introduced the topic. Offering his explanation for why the Fraternal Order of Police had endorsed the Trump-Pence ticket, Pence said:

Perils Of Tax Reform, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

Tax reforms dangle possibilities of improving the tax system, but are fraught with perils that are evident from the 2017 U.S. experience and caution against frequent reforms of its ilk. The first peril is that reforms containing tax provisions selected simply on the basis of their projected revenue contributions will produce less tax revenue than anticipated, illustrative calculations suggesting shortfalls of roughly 8–16 percent. The second peril is that reforms will not advance the objectives of efficiency and tax equity to the extent that they include provisions intended to influence future tax legislation or government spending. The third peril is …

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 …

Legal Innocence And Federal Habeas, Leah Litman

Articles

Although it has long been thought that innocence should matter in federal habeas corpus proceedings, innocence scholarship has focused almost exclusively on claims of factual innocence-the kind of innocence that occurs when new evidence reveals that the defendant did not commit the offense for which he was convicted. The literature has largely overlooked cases where a defendant was convicted or sentenced under a statute that is unconstitutional, or a statute that does not apply to the defendant. The Supreme Court, however, has recently begun to recognize these cases as kinds of innocence and it has grounded its concern for them …

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 …

Reform At Risk — Mandating Participation In Alternative Payment Plans, Scott Levy, Nicholas Bagley, Rahul Rajkumar

Articles

In an ambitious effort to slow the growth of health care costs, the Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and armed it with broad authority to test new approaches to reimbursement for health care (payment models) and delivery-system reforms. CMMI was meant to be the government’s innovation laboratory for health care: an entity with the independence to break with past practices and the power to experiment with bold new approaches. Over the past year, however, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has quietly hobbled CMMI, imperiling its ability to generate meaningful data …

Picketing In The New Economy, Hiba Hafiz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Errors In Misdemeanor Adjudication, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Millions of defendants are convicted of misdemeanors in the United States each year but almost none obtain exonerations, primarily because ordinarily exoneration is far too costly and time consuming to pursue for anything less than years of imprisonment. The National Registry of Exonerations lists all known exonerations in the United States since 1989 — 2,145 cases, as of the end of 2017; only 85 are misdemeanors, 4%. In all but one of these misdemeanor exonerations the defendants were convicted of crimes that never happened; by comparison, more than three-quarters of felony exonerees were convicted of actual crimes that other people …

Qualified Immunity At Trial, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

Qualified immunity doctrine is complex and important, and for many years it was assumed to have an outsize impact on civil rights cases by imposing significant barriers to success for plaintiffs. Recent empirical work has cast that assumption into doubt, at least as to the impact qualified immunity has at pretrial stages of litigation. This Essay adds to this empirical work by evaluating the impact of qualified immunity at trial, a subject that to date has not been empirically tested. The results reported here suggest that juries are rarely asked to answer questions that bear on the qualified immunity defense. …

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 …

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 …

Raman Spectral Analysis For Rapid Screening Of Dengue Infection, Tahir Mahmood, Haq Nawaz, A. Ditta, M.I. Majeed, M.A. Hanif, N. Rashid, H.N. Bhatti, H.F. Nargis, M. Saleem, Franck Bonnier, Hugh Byrne

Articles

Infection with the dengue virus is currently clinically detected according to different biomarkers in human blood plasma, commonly measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assays, including non-structural proteins (Ns1), immunoglobulin M (IgM) and immunoglobulin G (IgG). However, there is little or no mutual correlation between the biomarkers, as demonstrated in this study by a comparison of their levels in samples from 17 patients. As an alternative, the label free, rapid screening technique, Raman spectroscopy has been used for the characterisation/diagnosis of healthy and dengue infected human blood plasma samples. In dengue positive samples, changes in specific Raman spectral bands associated with …

Clinical Applications Of Infrared And Raman Spectroscopy: State Of Play And Future Challenges, Matthew Baker, Hugh Byrne, John Chalmers, Peter Gardner, Royston Goodacre, Alex Henderson, Sergei Kazarian, Francis Martin, Julian Moger, Nick Stone, Josep Sule-Suso

Articles

Vibrational spectroscopies, based on Infrared absorption and/or Raman scattering provide a detailed fingerprint of a material, based on the chemical content. Diagnostic and prognostic tools based on these technologies have the potential to revolutionise our clinical systems leading to improved patient outcome, more efficient public services and significant economic savings. However, despite these strong drivers, there are many fundamental scientific and technological challenges which have limited the implementation of this technology in the clinical arena, although recent years have seen significant progress in addressing these challenges. This review examines (i) the state of the art of clinical applications of infrared …

Controlling The Jury-Teaching Function, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

When evidence with a scientific basis is offered, two fundamental questions arise. First, should it be admitted? Second, if so, how should it be assessed? There are numerous participants who might play a role in deciding these questions—the jury (on the second question only), the parties (through counsel), expert witnesses on each side, the trial court, the forces controlling the judicial system (which include, but are not limited to, the appellate courts), and the scientific establishment. In this Article, I will suggest that together, the last two—the forces controlling the judicial system and the scientific establishment—have a large role to …

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. …

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 …

Importance Of Emulsification In Calibrating Infrared Spectroscopes For Analyzing Water Contamination In Used Or In-Service Engine Oil, Torrey Holland, Ali Mazin Abdul-Munaim, Dennis G. Watson, Poopalasingam Sivakumar

Articles

Using Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy we investigated the water content of SAE 15W–40 diesel engine lubricating oil at various levels of contamination to establish instrument calibration standards for measuring water contamination in used or in-service engine oil by the standards of ASTM International. Since some known additives in consumer grade engine oil possess slightly hydrophilic properties, this experiment avoided changing the sample matrix with supplemental additives, such as adding surfactants, to achieve homogeneity of the original sample. The impact of sampling time after contamination on the spectral absorption signature was examined in an attempt to improve the accuracy of …

Enzymatic Extraction Of Fucoxanthin From Brown Seaweeds, Emer Shannon, Nissreen Abu-Ghannam

Articles

Brown seaweeds contain a number of bioactive compounds. The xanthophyll, fucoxanthin, has in vivo efficacy against disorders such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and cancer. Organic solvents are traditionally employed to extract fucoxanthin, but carry a toxic chemical and environmental burden. The aim of this study was to optimise a fucoxanthin extraction method using enzymes, water, low-temperature dehydration and mechanical blending, to produce yields comparable to those achieved with an organic solvent (acetone). Response surface methodology was applied, using Fucus vesiculosus as a model species. A fucoxanthin yield of 0.657 mg g^-1 (dry mass) was obtained from F. …

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 …

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.

Dueling Denominators And The Demise Of Lucas, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

In Murr v. Wisconsin, the Supreme Court outlined a process for ascertaining the denominator in takings cases – an issue that arises both with respect to Penn Central takings claims and Lucas takings claims. The underpinnings of Penn Central claims and Lucas claims are not identical; Penn Central’s primary concern is assuring fairness to landowners, while the focus of Lucas is on restricting government efforts to bypass the condemnation process. Although this difference in focus might suggest a difference in appropriate denominator, the Court’s multi-factor balancing approach apparently applies to all takings claims. Although the Court’s approach is consistent with …

Toll-Like Receptor 3 L412f Polymorphism Promotes A Persistent Clinical Phenotype In Pulmonary Sarcoidosis, Gordon Cooke, Ijaz Kamal, Monika Strengert, Emily Hams, Leona Mawhinney, Aisling Tynan, Ciaran O’ Reilly, David N. O’ Dwyer, Steven L. Kunkel, Ulla G. Knaus, Denis C. Shields, David R. Moller, Andrew G. Bowie, Padraic G. Fallon, Cory M. Hogaboam, Michelle E. Armstrong, Seamas C. Donnelly

Articles

Background: Sarcoidosis is a multisystemic disorder of unknown etiology, characterised by the

presence of non-caseating granulomas in target organs. In ninety percent of cases, there is

thoracic involvement. Fifty to seventy percent of pulmonary sarcoidosis patients will experience

acute, self-limiting disease. For the subgroup of patients who develop persistent disease, no

targeted therapy is currently available.

Aim: To investigate the potential of the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), Toll-like

receptor 3 Leu412Phe (TLR3 L412F; rs3775291), as a causative factor in the development of,

and in disease persistence in pulmonary sarcoidosis. To investigate the functionality of TLR3

L412F in vitro in …

Why Wikipedia Often Overlooks Stories Of Women In History, Lara Nicosia, Tamar Carroll

Articles

Wikipedia's reliance on a volunteer editing base has resulted in a gender bias both in the quantity and quality of content around women. With less than 20% of Wikipedia's editors identifying as women, only 30% of biographical entries have been written about women and entries on women tend to be shorter and more focused on relationships and family roles than entries on men. This article explores the causes of Wikipedia's gender bias and offers ways that both individuals and institutions can help improve Wikipedia's content around women.

The Living Anti-Injunction Act, Daniel Hemel

Articles

No abstract provided.