Digital Commons Network^™

Stealing Organs?, Benjamin J. Mcmichael

Articles

Every nine minutes, a new person joins a waitlist for an organ transplant, and every day, seventeen people die waiting for an organ that will never come. Because the need for organ transplants far outstrips the number of available organs, the policies and rules governing organ allocation in the United States are critically important and highly contentious. Recently, proponents of a new allocation system one focused more on sharing organs across the nation instead of allocating organs primarily to local transplant candidates have gained ground. Bolstered by two separate lawsuits in the past five years, advocates of greater national sharing …

What War Did To The Academy, What The Academy Did To War: A 20-Year Retrospective On The Effects Of The Post-9/11 Wars, Deborah Pearlstein

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The history of the legal academy’s impact on the way states fight wars is hardly one of unmixed glory. It was a law professor moonlighting for President Lincoln who authored “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field” during the Civil War, a code still recognized worldwide today for having laid critical groundwork for the modern law of war. It was likewise a law professor whose work came to serve as both theoretical and practical justification for the sweeping powers of the Nazi state. So it should perhaps be unsurprising that, two decades of engagement …

Pandemic Rules: Covid-19 And The Prison Litigation Reform Act’S Exhaustion Requirement, Betsy Ginsberg, Margo Schlanger

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For over twenty-five years, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) has undermined the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. For people behind bars and their allies, the PLRA makes civil rights cases harder to bring and harder to win—regardless of merit. We have seen the result in the wave of litigation relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning March 2020, incarcerated people facing a high risk of infection because of their incarceration, and a high risk of harm because of their medical status, began to bring lawsuits seeking changes to the policies and practices augmenting the danger to them. Time and again, …

Remote Justice & Domestic Violence: Process Pluralism Lessons From The Pandemic, Andrea K. Schneider, Heather Hlavka, Sameena Mulla, Erin Schubert, Aleksandra J. Snowden

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Domestic violence procedures, like so many court processes around the world, were forced to go online and remote during the pandemic. The impact was dramatic—there were fewer restraining order petitions filed in the first place and an even lower amount granted. In short, domestic violence survivors, among the most vulnerable in our court system, were even more challenged in the last two years. Like many court systems, Milwaukee will never go back to being fully in-person for all procedures in conjunction with domestic violence. The evolving hybrid choices could provide additional access to justice, or these processes could create additional …

Dynamic Pricing Algorithms, Consumer Harm, And Regulatory Response, Alexander Mackay, Samuel Weinstein

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Pricing algorithms are rapidly transforming markets, from ride-sharing, to air travel, to online retail. Regulators and scholars have watched this development with a wary eye. Their focus so far has been on the potential for pricing algorithms to facilitate explicit and tacit collusion. This Article argues that the policy challenges pricing algorithms pose are far broader than collusive conduct. It demonstrates that algorithmic pricing can lead to higher prices for consumers in competitive markets and even in the absence of collusion. This consumer harm can be initiated by a single firm employing a superior pricing algorithm. Higher prices arise from …

Tax Harmony: The Promise And Pitfalls Of The Global Minimum Tax, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim

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The rise of globalization has become a double-edged sword for countries seeking to implement a beneficial tax policy. On one hand, there are increased opportunities for attracting foreign capital and the benefits that increased jobs and tax revenue brings to a society. However, there is also much more tax competition among countries to attract foreign capital and investment. As tax competition has grown, effective corporate tax rates have continued to be cut, creating a “race-to-the-bottom” issue.

In 2021, 137 countries forming the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS passed a major milestone in reforming international tax by successfully introducing the framework …

“A Force Created”: The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce And The Politics Of Corporate Immunity, Myriam E. Gilles

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Upon its founding in 1912, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was conceived as a “force created” to exert “a beneficent influence upon our national life” by integrating the views of the business community into governmental policies and regulations. That a force was created is beyond question. Beneficence is a separate issue.

Steering Loan Modifications Post-Pandemic, Pamela Foohey, Dalie Jimenez, Christopher K. Odinet

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As part of federal and state relief programs created during the COVID-19 pandemic, many American households received pauses on their largest debts, particularly on mortgages and student loans. Others may have come to agreements with their lenders, likewise pausing or altering payment on other debts, such as auto loans and credit cards. This relief allowed households to allocate their savings and income to necessary expenses, like groceries, utilities, and medicine. But forbearance does not equal forgiveness. At the end of the various relief periods and moratoria, people will have to resume paying all their debts, the amounts of which may …

Role Of Courts In Ensuring Water Justice In India: Brasilia Declaration On Water Justice And Beyond, Gayathri D. Naik

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Water being a scarce resource, questions of its allocation and distribution, coupled with concerns of its depletion have troubled policy makers, legislators, and judges alike. While, over the years there has been significant development on the discussion surrounding the rights-duty paradigm of water resources, by establishing the obligation of states, discussion surrounding a certain value-based approach to guide the minds of important stakeholders in creating and enforcing policy has gained far less traction comparatively. It is in this context that this paper explores an alternative justice-based approach to water, drawing from the works of Amartya Sen on capabilities and more …

Post-Grant Adjudication Of Drug Patents: Agency And/Or Court?, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Jorge Lemus, Erik Hovenkamp

Articles

The America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA) created a robust administrative system-the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)-that provides a route for challenging the validity of granted patents outside of district courts. Congress determined that administrative adjudication of the validity of initial patent grants could be cheaper and more scientifically accurate than district court adjudication of such validity.

For private economic value per patent, few areas of technology can match the biopharmaceutical industry. This is particularly true for small-molecule drugs. A billion-dollar drug monopoly may be protected from competition by a relatively small number of patents. Accordingly, the social cost …

Financial Uncertainty From A Dual Shock At Global Level–Insights From Kuwait, Talal A.N.M.S. Alotaibi, Lucia Morales

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Global stock markets experienced a dual shock in 2020 due to the impact of the global health crisis, parallel to a simultaneous shock derived from the Saudi Arabia and Russia oil price war. The dual shock fueled oil market volatility with lasting effects as the global economy is immersed in an energy crisis combined with high inflationary pressures exacerbated by heightened energy costs. This research paper implemented GARCH and FIGARCH models on daily returns from 31 December 2015, to 9 December 2021, to examine volatility persistence and long memory processes. The world’s most prominent economies are represented by the G7, …

Re: Safety, Tolerability, And Efficacy Of Liris 400 Mg In Women With Interstitial Cystitis/Bladder Pain Syndrome With Or Without Hunner Lesions, R Evans, A Kohan, R Moldwin, D Radecki, T Geib, K M. Peters

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Editorial Comment: The lidocaine-releasing intravesical system (LiRIS) is a passive, nonresorbable intravesical system inserted cystoscopically and designed to provide continuous, controlled release of lidocaine into the bladder over a 2-week period, after which it is removed. There was a positive anticipation that this treatment system might provide symptomatic relief for at least a segment of patients with interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome (IC/BPS), based on the logic of the rationale and from results in 2 small studies, 1 of which was presented at the American Urological Association annual meeting in 2016,1 showing positive results in patients with Hunner lesions (HL). This …

The Impact Of Nutrition And Gastrointestinal Symptoms On Health-Related Quality Of Life In Survivorship After Oesophageal Cancer Surgery, Sarah Bennett, Conor F. Murphy, Michelle Fanning, John V. Reynolds, Suzanne Doyle, Claire L. Donohoe

Articles

Summary

Background and Aims Oesophagectomy is the primary curative treatment for oesophageal cancer but is associated with considerable postoperative morbidity and mortality. To better understand the aetiology of impaired health-related quality of life (HRQL) in oesophageal cancer survivors (OCS), this study sought to determine the longitudinal changes in nutritional status, nutrition-impact symptoms (NIS), and HRQL in this cohort, and to determine which variables have the greatest impact on postoperative HRQL decline.

Methods Data, derived from St. James' Hospital, Dublin, included patients who underwent oesophagectomy from October 2017 to May 2019 and attended clinic preoperatively and 6 months postoperatively. A subset …

Potential Interactions Between Metal-Based Phenanthroline Drugs And The Unfolded Protein Response Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Pathway, Tadhg O'Leary, Pauraic Mccarron, Michael Devereux, Steve Meaney

Articles

The unfolded protein response has recently been implicated as a mechanism by which 1,10-phenanthrolinecontaining coordination compounds trigger cell death. We explored the interaction of two such compounds —one containing copper and one containing manganese—with endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. Pretreatment with anisomycin significantly enhanced the cytotoxic activity of both metal-based compounds in A2780, but only the copper-based compound in A549 cells. The effects of pretreatment with tunicamycin were dependent on the nature of the metal center in the compounds. In A2780 cells, the cytotoxic action of the copper compound was reduced by tunicamycin only at high concentration. In contrast, in A549 …

Efficacy Of Plasma Activated Saline In A Co‑Culture Infection Control Model, Evanthia Tsoukou, Paula Bourke, Daniela Boehm

Articles

Plasma activated liquids have demonstrated antimicrobial effects and receive increasing attention due to the potential to strengthen the armoury of novel approaches against antibiotic resistant bacteria. However, the antibacterial activity and cytotoxic effects of these solutions need to be understood and balanced before exposure to humans. In this study, the antibacterial effects of plasma activated saline (PAS) were tested against Gram negative and positive bacteria, and HaCaT keratinocytes were used for cytotoxicity studies. For the first time, a co-culture model between these bacteria and eukaryotic cells under the influence of PAS has been described. Exposure of saline to plasma resulted …

Hyperbranched Poly(Β-Amino Ester)S (Hpaes) Structure Optimisation For Enhanced Gene Delivery: Non-Ideal Termination Elimination, Yinghao Li, Zhonglei He, Jing Lyu, Xianqing Wang, Bei Qiu, Irene Lara-Saez, Jing Zhang, Ming Zeng, Qian Xu, Sigen Sigen A., James Curtin, Wenxin Wang

Articles

Growing at an impressive pace, gene therapy has emerged as a prospective segment in the biotechnology field and presents a bright outlook, given the increasing investments in R&D and the mounting incidence of genetic disorders [1]. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the global market for gene therapy, estimated at 1.2 billion dollars in the year 2022, is projected to reach a revised size of 2.7 billion dollars by 2026, according to the Cision PR Newswire. However, the lack of efficient gene delivery vectors still hinders the large-scale manufacturing of gene therapy agents. Viral vectors, such as the adeno-associated virus, lentivirus, retrovirus, …

Advancing Disability Rights-Based Refugee And Asylum Claims, Janet E. Lord, Elizabeth Heideman, Michael Ashley Stein

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No abstract provided.

Marijuana And Patents: The Complicated Relationship Between Patent Rights And The Federal Criminalization Of Marijuana, Reza Roghani Esfahani, Howard Bromberg

Articles

Difficult questions arise in the context of marijuana-related inventions, patent procurement, and patent enforcement. These questions are a subset of the contradictions in the law of marijuana, where the federal government prohibits marijuana use and yet many of the states legalize, regulate, and tax it. This federal prohibition could discourage research into the health effects of marijuana and makes it difficult for marijuana-related innovations to satisfy statutory patentability requirements. It also renders enforcement of marijuana patents questionable, making marijuana businesses and patent owners vulnerable to nonpracticing patent entities, sometimes called "patent trolls."

International Consensus On Lung Function Testing During Covid-19 Pandemic And Beyond, Aisling Mcgowan, Pierantonio Laveneziana, Sam Bayat, Nicole Beydon, P.W. Boros, Felip Burgos, Matjaž Fležar, Monika Franczuk, Maria-Alejandra Galarza, Adrian H. Kendrick, Enrico Lombardi, Jellien Makonga-Braaksma, Meredith C. Mccormack, Laurent Plantier, Sanja Stanojevic, Irene Steenbruggen, Bruce Thompson, Allan L. Coates, Jack Wanger, Donald W. Cockcroft, Bruce Culver, Karl Sylvester, Frans De Jongh

Articles

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has negatively affected the delivery of respiratory diagnostic services across the world due to the potential risk of disease transmission during lung function testing. Community prevalence, reoccurrence of COVID-19 surges and the emergence of different variants of SARS-CoV-2 have impeded attempts to restore services. Finding consensus on how to deliver safe lung function services for both patients attending and for staff performing the tests are of paramount importance. This international statement presents the consensus opinion of 23 experts in the field of lung function and respiratory physiology balanced with evidence from the reviewed literature. It describes …

Bias Impedes Progress In Physical Biology, Consciousness Studies And Quantum Gravity, Maurice Goodman

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If scientists hope to make progress in consciousness studies they needs to accept that biased judgments have a major influence on the sciences, how we divide them up, how they are funded and this, in turn, has a profound impact on progress. The imbalance in funding, resulting from bias, in favour of the life and health sciences needs to be addressed as does why perversely little of this funding is devoted to a physics explanation of self-organisation and life on the mesoscopic scale? While life (the cell) is an outstanding example of self-organisation on the mesoscopic scale we need to …

On The Dimensionality And Utility Of Convolutional Autoencoder’S Latent Space Trained With Topology-Preserving Spectral Eeg Head-Maps, Arjun Vinayak Chikkankod, Luca Longo

Articles

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals can be analyzed in the temporal, spatial, or frequency domains. Noise and artifacts during the data acquisition phase contaminate these signals adding difficulties in their analysis. Techniques such as Independent Component Analysis (ICA) require human intervention to remove noise and artifacts. Autoencoders have automatized artifact detection and removal by representing inputs in a lower dimensional latent space. However, little research is devoted to understanding the minimum dimension of such latent space that allows meaningful input reconstruction. Person-specific convolutional autoencoders are designed by manipulating the size of their latent space. A sliding window technique with overlapping is employed …

Examining The Size Of The Latent Space Of Convolutional Variational Autoencoders Trained With Spectral Topographic Maps Of Eeg Frequency Bands, Taufique Ahmed, Luca Longo

Articles

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a technique of recording brain electrical potentials using electrodes placed on the scalp [1]. It is well known that EEG signals contain essential information in the frequency, temporal and spatial domains. For example, some studies have converted EEG signals into topographic power head maps to preserve spatial information [2]. Others have produced spectral topographic head maps of different EEG bands to both preserve information in The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Ludovico Minati . the spatial domain and take advantage of the information in the frequency domain [3]. …

Towards An Inclusive Co-Design Toolkit: Perceptions And Experiences Of Co-Design Stakeholders, Eamon Aswad, Emma Murphy, Claudia Fernandez-Rivera, Sarah Boland

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Participatory design holds great potential for the creation of inclusive technology but existing toolkits and resources to support co-design are not always accessible to designers and co-designers with disabilities. In this paper we present two studies to assist in facilitating the creation of a sustainable, accessible, inclusive co-design toolkit for individuals with intellectual disabilities i) exploration of the perceptions and experiences of lecturers (n =5) and students (n= 5) involved in co-design activities via individual interviews and ii) a protocol and initial findings from focus groups with men and women with intellectual disabilities to inform on best co-design practices (n=15). …

The Association Between Ambient Uvb Dose And Anca‑Associated Vasculitis Relapse And Onset, Jennifer Scott, Enock Havyarimana, Albert Navarro-Gallinad, Arthur White, Jason Wyse, Jos Van Geffen, Michiel Van Weele, Antonia Buettner, Tamara Wanigasekera, Cathal Walsh, Louis Aslett, John Kelleher, Julie Power, James Ng, Declan O’Sullivan, Lucy Hederman, Neil Basu, Mark A. Little, Lina Zgaga

Articles

The aetiology of ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) and triggers of relapse are poorly understood. Vitamin D (vitD) is an important immunomodulator, potentially responsible for the observed latitudinal differences between granulomatous and non-granulomatous AAV phenotypes. A narrow ultraviolet B spectrum induces vitD synthesis (vitD-UVB) via the skin. We hypothesised that prolonged periods of low ambient UVB (and by extension vitD deficiency) are associated with the granulomatous form of the disease and an increased risk of AAV relapse.

Viscoelastic And Electromagnetic Materials With Nonlinear Memory, Claudio Giorgi, John Murrough Golden

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A method is presented for generating free energies relating to nonlinear constitutive equations with memory from known free energies associated with hereditary linear theories. Some applications to viscoelastic solids and hereditary electrical conductors are presented. These new free energies are then used to obtain estimates for nonlinear integro-differential evolution problems describing the behavior of nonlinear plasmas with memory.

Free Energies For Nonlinear Materials With Memory, John Murrough Golden

Articles

An exploration of representations of free energies and associated rates of dissipation for a broad class of nonlinear viscoelastic materials is presented in this work. Also included are expressions for the stress functions and work functions derivable from such free energies. For simplicity, only the scalar case is considered. Certain standard formulae are generalized to include higher power terms.

It is shown that the correct initial procedure in this context is to specify the rate of dissipation as a positive semi-definite functional and then to determine the free energy from this, rather than the other way around, which would be …

Attentional Influences On Neural Processing Of Biological Motion In Typically Developing Children And Those On The Autism Spectrum, Emily J. Knight, Aaron I. Krakowski, Edward G. Freedman, John Butler, Sophie Molholm, John J. Foxe

Articles

Biological motion imparts rich information related to the movement, actions, intentions and affective state of others, which can provide foundational support for various aspects of social cognition and behavior. Given that atypical social communication and cognition are hallmark symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), many have theorized that a potential source of this deficit may lie in dysfunctional neural mechanisms of biological motion processing. Synthesis of existing literature provides some support for biological motion processing deficits in autism spectrum disorder, although high study heterogeneity and inconsistent findings complicate interpretation. Here, we attempted to reconcile some of this residual controversy by …

Supercritical Fluids And Fluid Mixtures To Obtain High-Value Compounds From Capsicum Peppers, Ana Carolina De Aguiar, Juliane Viganó, Ana Gabriela Da Silva Anthero, Arthur Luiz Baião Dias, Miriam Dupas Hubinger, Julian Martínez

Articles

Peppers of the Capsicum genus have a rich nutritional composition and are widely consumed worldwide. Thus, they find numerous applications in the food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. One commercial application is oleoresin production, a nonpolar fraction rich in bioactive compounds, including capsaicinoids and carotenoids. Among the technologies for pepper processing, special attention is given to supercritical fluid technologies, such as supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) with pure solvents and CO2 plus modifiers, and SFE assisted by ultrasound. Supercritical fluid-based processes present advantages over the classical extraction techniques like using less solvents, short extraction times, specificity and scalability. In this review, we …

An Examination Of The Impact Of Covid-19 On Assessment Practices In Higher Education, Ziene Mottiar, Greg Byrne, Geraldine Gorham, Emma Robinson

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The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid pivot to online learning across many higher education institutions globally. This paper investigates to what extent assessment strategies changed as a result of this pivot. It explores the case of Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) in Ireland and finds that 95% of respondents altered their assessment practices in some way. Beyond identifying changing practice, the paper also develops a TARC (Typology of Assessment Responses to COVID-19) model which shows four categories of responses. Reactors are those academics who simply moved their assessments online. Adaptive Responders modified assessments slightly for the online environment. While …

Effects Of Pretreatment And Drying On The Volatile Compounds Of Sliced Solar-Dried Ginger (Zingiber Officinale Roscoe) Rhizome, Roseline Esi Amoah, Faustina Dufie Wireko-Manu, Ibok Oduro, Firibu Kwesi Saalia, William Otoo Ellis, Alexander Dodoo, Charles Dermont, Maame Ekua Manful

Articles

Ginger (Zingiber officinale Roscoe) rhizomes are mostly used as spice and medicine due to their high aroma intensity and medicinal bioactive compounds. However, the volatile compounds of ginger, partly responsible for its aroma and medicinal properties, can be affected by the pretreatment, drying method, and extraction processes employed. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of pretreatment and drying on the volatile compounds of yellow ginger variety at nine months of maturation. The effect of potassium metabisulfite (KMBS) and blanching pretreatment and drying on the volatile compounds of ginger using head space solid-phase microextraction with GCMS/MS …