Digital Commons Network^™

An Image Processing Based Classifier To Support Safe Dropping For Delivery-By-Drone, Assem A. Abdelhak, Alan Hicks, Dan Moss, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Autonomous delivery-by-drone of packages is an active area of research and commercial development. However, the assessment of safe dropping/ delivery zones has received limited attention. Ensuring that the dropping zone is a safe area for dropping, and continues to stay safe during the dropping process is key to safe delivery. This paper proposes a simple and fast classifier to assess the safety of a designated dropping zone before and during the dropping operation, using a single onboard camera. This classifier is, as far as we can tell, the first to address the problem of safety assessment at the point of …

Hamiltonian Approach To Modelling Interfacial Internal Waves Over Variable Bottom, Rossen Ivanov, Calin Martin, Michail Todorov

Articles

We study the effects of an uneven bottom on the internal wave propagation in the presence of stratification and underlying non-uniform currents. Thus, the presented models incorporate vorticity (wave–current interactions), geophysical effects (Coriolis force) and a variable bathymetry. An example of the physical situation described above is well illustrated by the equatorial internal waves in the presence of the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). We find that the interface (physically coinciding with the thermocline and the pycnocline) satisfies in the long wave approximation a KdV–mKdV type equation with variable coefficients. The soliton propagation over variable depth leads to effects such as soliton …

Demand Side Management Of Electric Vehicles In Smart Grids: A Survey On Strategies, Challenges, Modeling, And Optimization, Sarthak Mohanty, Subhasis Panda, Shubhranshu Mohan Parida, Pravat Kumar Rout, Binod Kumar Sahu, Mohit Bajaj, Hossam Zawbaa, Nallapaneni Manoj Kumar, Salah Kamel

Articles

The shift of transportation technology from internal combustion engine (ICE) based vehicles to electricvehicles (EVs) in recent times due to their lower emissions, fuel costs, and greater efficiency hasbrought EV technology to the forefront of the electric power distribution systems due to theirability to interact with the grid through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) infrastructure. The greater adoptionof EVs presents an ideal use-case scenario of EVs acting as power dispatch, storage, and ancillaryservice-providing units. This EV aspect can be utilized more in the current smart grid (SG) scenarioby incorporating demand-side management (DSM) through EV integration. The integration of EVswith DSM techniques is hurdled …

Overarching Preventive Sympathetic Tripping Approach In Active Distribution Networks Without Telecommunication Platforms And Additional Protective Devices, Tahereh Dehghani Firouzabadi, Davoud Abootorabi Zarchi, Mohammadreza Mazid, Hadi Safdarkhani, Hamed Nafisi

Articles

Nowadays, distributed generation (DG) has made it possible to generate electricity close to the consumption site, resulting in improved efficiency, less environmental pollution, and higher economic profit. These advantages have led to increased penetration of DGs in the distribution system. Protective devices in a distribution system are set by considering the main substation as the only source for feeding short circuit current. However, with the increased influence of DGs as the second main source of short circuit current in distribution systems the short circuit level changes, which leads to false tripping of protective devices, including overcurrent relays. A sympathetic trip, …

Psychological Resilience And Cognitive Function Among Older Military Veterans., Justin T Mcdaniel, Erin R Hascup, Kevin N Hascup, Mehul Trivedi, Harvey Henson, Robert Rados, Mary York, David L Albright, Taryn Weatherly, Kaitlyn Frick

Articles

The purpose of this study was to explore the association between psychological resilience and cognitive function in military veterans. We obtained public-use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) for this cross-sectional study of military veterans aged 52 to 101 years (n = 150). We estimated a multivariable linear regression model in which cognitive function served as the dependent variable and psychological resilience served as the independent variable. After controlling for demographics, health conditions, and health behaviors, veterans who had higher psychological resilience scores had better cognitive function (b = 0.22, p = 0.03). Our findings suggest that psychological …

#Fintok And Financial Regulation, Nikita Aggarwal, Kaye D. Bondy Valdovinos, Christopher Odinet

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Social media platforms are becoming an increasingly important site for consumer finance. This phenomenon is referred to as "FinTok, " a reference to the "#fintok" hashtag that often identifies financial content on TikTok, a popular social media platform. This Essay examines the new methodological possibilities for consumer financial regulation due to FinTok. It argues that FinTok content offers a novel and valuable source of data for identifying emerging fintech trends and associated consumer risks. As such, financial regulators should use FinTok content analysis and social media content analysis more broadly as an additional method for the supervision and regulation of …

A Congressional Review Act For The Major Questions Doctrine, Christopher J. Walker

Articles

Last Term, the Supreme Court recognized a new major questions doctrine, which requires Congress to provide clear statutory authorization for an agency to regulate on a question of great economic or political significance. This new substantive canon of statutory interpretation will be invoked in court challenges to federal agency actions across the country, and it will no doubt spark considerable scholarly attention. This Essay does not wade into those doctrinal or theoretical debates. Instead, it suggests one way Congress could respond: by enacting a Congressional Review Act for the major questions doctrine. In other words, Congress could establish a fast-track …

The Parallel March Of The Ginis: How Does Taxation Relate To Inequality, And What Can Be Done About It?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The United States currently has one of the highest levels of inequality among industrialized economies. In addition, numerous scholars have shown that social mobility in the United States is significantly lower than it was in the period between 1945 and 1970, when inequality was declining. The combination of these trends is dangerous because it risks transforming the United States into a society where small elites capture most of the gains, a pattern in which growth cannot be sustained over time. The level of inequality in the United States after taxes and transfers are taken into account is much lower, but …

Comment: Without Effective Lawyers, Do More Determinate Legal Standards Really Matter?, Vivek S. Sankaran

Articles

In Confronting Indeterminacy and Bias in Child Protection Law, Professor Josh Gupta-Kagan wisely proposes that the child protection system needs more precise legal standards, not just to limit unnecessary state intrusion in the lives of families, but to also define the scope of that intrusion if it must occur. But as I read his piece, a question repeatedly ran through my mind - will the changes he proposes have any impact if parents in the child protection system continue to have ineffective lawyers representing them?

Preemption, Commandeering, And The Indian Child Welfare Act, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Randall F. Khalil

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This year (2022), the Supreme Court agreed to review wide-ranging constitutional challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) brought by the State of Texas and three non-Indian foster families in the October 2022 Term. The Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, held that certain provisions of ICWA violated the anti-commandeering principle implied in the Tenth Amendment and the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

We argue that the anti-commandeering challenges against ICWA are unfounded because all provisions of ICWA provide a set of legal standards to be applied in states which validly and expressly preempt state …

The Orkney Slew And Central Bank Digital Currencies, Jeffery Y. Zhang, Gary B. Gordon

Articles

This Article on central bank digital currencies is motivated by a parable, The Orkney Slew, which is set in an archipelago. Based on the parable, we point out a significant economic market failure that exists in the cross-border payments realm. The analysis then focuses on real-world examples and the national security concerns, including for Anti-Money Laundering/Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) and the continued efficacy of U.S. sanctions, associated with the rapidly evolving digital payments landscape.

Many central banks around the world are now cooperatively experimenting with cross-border interoperability of digital currencies. These efforts are driven by the idea of …

Corporate Taxes And Union Wages In The United States, Alison R. Felix, James R. Hines Jr.

Articles

This paper evaluates the effect of U.S. state corporate income taxes on union wage premiums. American workers who belong to unions are paid more than their non-union counterparts, and this difference is greater in low-tax locations, possibly reflecting that unions and employers share tax savings associated with low tax rates. In 2000 the difference between average union and non-union hourly wages was $1.88 greater in states with corporate tax rates below four percent than in states with tax rates of nine percent and above. Controlling for observable worker characteristics, a one percent lower state tax rate was associated with a …

A New Framework For Digital Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Karen Sam

Articles

The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a global tax deal was reached to tackle these …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

The Dubious Constitutional Origins Of Treaty Overrides: A Response To Rosenbloom And Shaheen, Reuven Avi-Yonah

Articles

In 1888, the Supreme Court decided a case called Whitney v. Robert- son, which is generally considered to be the source of the proposition that, under the Constitution, later-in-time statutes can override earlier treaties (the Rule). The Rule is highly controversial because it violates articles 26 and 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), which the United States has accepted as binding on it as cus- tomary international law (CIL). Despite that, the United States has since Whitney routinely engaged in treaty overrides, and the Court has repeatedly endorsed the Rule even while narrowing its application …

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."

The Beat And The Bits: Can The United States Be Sued Over The Beat?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

On December 21, 2020, the government of India announced that it will appeal an arbitration award of $5.6 billion issued in favor of Vodafone PLC by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague. The award resulted from the decision of India to impose capital gains tax on Vodafone (as withholding agent) for its acquisition of a Cayman Islands subsidiary from Hutchison, which held the Indian telecommunication assets of the Hong Kong-based Hutchison group. The Indian Supreme Court had decided that no tax was due, but the Indian government passed legislation to overturn that decision retroactively. This, the PCA …

The Elastic Corporate Form In International Law, Julian Arato

Articles

The corporate form is being distorted by international law. Surprisingly, this is occurring in the law of foreign investment, where one would expect the stability and efficiency of corporate formalities to matter most. The main driver is a highly enforceable mode of treaty-based arbitration known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which affords foreign investors a private right of action to sue sovereign states. Questions of corporate law come up regularly in ISDS. But when addressing them, tribunals have varied widely in their respect for core formalities. This is undermining the basic relationships among all corporate stakeholders—including shareholders, management, creditors, governments, …

Legal Writing Mechanics: A Bibliography, Margaret Hannon

Articles

Great legal writing is about more than mechanics. But careful attention to legal writing mechanics is nevertheless critical for effective, clear, and persuasive writing. Proper grammar, usage, and correct punctuation makes analysis clearer and therefore more effective. It also shows the reader that the writer has paid close attention to detail, which makes the reader more likely to find the writer credible. Relatedly, communicating in plain language is critical to making sure that “readers can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.” And proper citation—or even better, stylish citation—helps the reader easily understand what …

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

Articles

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, …

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

Articles

No abstract provided.

Automated Extraction Of Genes Associated With Antibiotic Resistance From The Biomedical Literature, Andre Brincat, Markus Hofmann

Articles

The detection of bacterial antibiotic resistance phenotypes is important when carrying out clinical decisions for patient treatment. Conventional phenotypic testing involves culturing bacteria which requires a significant amount of time and work. Whole-genome sequencing is emerging as a fast alternative to resistance prediction, by considering the presence/absence of certain genes. A lot of research has focused on determining which bacterial genes cause antibiotic resistance and efforts are being made to consolidate these facts in knowledge bases (KBs). KBs are usually manually curated by domain experts to be of the highest quality. However, this limits the pace at which new facts …

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 …

Legal Fiction: Reading Lolita As A Sentencing Memorandum, Christina Frohock

Articles

No abstract provided.

Dominant Frequency Component Tracking Of Noisy Time-Varying Signals Using The Linear Predictive Coding Pole Processing Method, Jin Xu, Mark Davis, Ruairí De Fréin

Articles

The linear predictive coding pole processing (LPCPP) method proposed in our previous work overcomes the shortcomings of the LPC method, especially its sensitivity to noise and the filter order. The LPCPP method is a parameterised method that involves processing the LPC poles to produce a series of reduced-order filter transfer functions to estimate the dominant frequency components of a signal. This paper analyses the ability of the LPCPP method to track the frequency changes of noisy, time-varying signals in real-time. Linear chirped frequency modulation signals are used in a series of experiments to simulate signals with different rates of frequency …

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

Articles

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 …

Using Feature Selection With Machine Learning For Generation Of Insurance Insights, Ayman Taha, Bernard Cosgrave, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Insurance is a data-rich sector, hosting large volumes of customer data that is analysed to evaluate risk. Machine learning techniques are increasingly used in the effective management of insurance risk. Insurance datasets by their nature, however, are often of poor quality with noisy subsets of data (or features). Choosing the right features of data is a significant pre-processing step in the creation of machine learning models. The inclusion of irrelevant and redundant features has been demonstrated to affect the performance of learning models. In this article, we propose a framework for improving predictive machine learning techniques in the insurance sector …

Human Mental Workload: A Survey And A Novel Inclusive Definition, Luca Longo, Christopher D. Wickens, Gabriella Hancock, P.A. Hancock

Articles

Human mental workload is arguably the most invoked multidimensional construct in Human Factors and Ergonomics, getting momentum also in Neuroscience and Neuroergonomics. Uncertainties exist in its characterization, motivating the design and development of computational models, thus recently and actively receiving support from the discipline of Computer Science. However, its role in human performance prediction is assured. This work is aimed at providing a synthesis of the current state of the art in human mental workload assessment through considerations, definitions, measurement techniques as well as applications, Findings suggest that, despite an increasing number of associated research works, a single, reliable and …

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

Articles

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). …

Why Govern Broken Tools?, Ryan Calo

Articles

In Assessing the Governance of Digital Contact Tracing in Response to COVID-19: Results of a Multi-National Study, Brian Hutler et al. ably compare two approaches to the governance of digital contract tracing (DCT). In this brief essay, I want to examine to what extent governance actually played a meaningful role in the failure of DCT. If DCT failed primarily for other reasons, then the authors’ normative suggestion to pursue “a new governance approach … for designing and implementing DCT technology going forward” may be misplaced.