Digital Commons Network^™

Moving Ahead In Lean Times: Nebraska Ag Relations Council, John Owens

John Owens: Speeches and Appearances

One day a rancher's prize bull was missing from the section of his land the railroad passed through. He filed suit against the railroad, wanting only to be paid a fair-price of the bull. A big-city lawyer arrived in the rancher's small town to represent the railroad in the case and quickly cornered the rancher, pressuring him to settle out of court.

Splinter Dedication, John Owens

John Owens: Speeches and Appearances

This man who grew up on an irrigated farm near North Platte was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1984 for invention and development of aerial-spray systems and harvesting systems, the only Nebraskan elected to that esteemed academy. Six patents are based on his research.

Cracks In The Foundation: The New Internet Legislation's Hidden Threat To Privacy And Commerce, Joshua Fairfield

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Scholarship to date has focused on the legal significance of the novelty of the Internet. This scholarship does not describe or predict actual Internet legislation. Instead of asking whether the Internet is so new as to merit new law, legislators and academics should re-evaluate the role of government in orchestrating collective action and change the relative weight of enforcement, deterrence, and incentives in Internet regulations.

A perfect example of the need for this new approach is the recent CANSPAM Act of 2003, which was intended to protect personal privacy and legitimate businesses. However, the law threatens both of these interests, …

Human, Social, And Now Positive Psychological Capital Management: Investing In People For Competitive Advantage, Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

There is growing evidence that human resources are crucial to organizational success, and may offer the best return on investment for sustainable competitive advantage. Jeffery Pfeffer’s extensive work, summarized in his book The Human Equation, discusses substantially supported but unfortunate findings that only about half of today’s organizations and their managers believe that human resources really do matter. Moreover, only half of those organizations act upon their beliefs beyond paying lip service to this vital resource. Few organizations have adopted high performance work practices, such as 360-degree feedback, pay-for-performance, self-managed teams, employee empowerment, and other human-oriented initiatives. Furthermore, Pfeffer shows …

Recognition And Development Of Hope For South African Organizational Leaders, Fred Luthans, René Van Wyk, Fred Walumbwa

Department of Management: Faculty Publications

The significant challenges faced by South Africa at present are well known. How to deal with the problems from a political and economic perspective abound, but taking a psychological approach has been neglected. This paper proposes a positive approach to South African organizational leadership based on the psychological capacity of hope. After giving a brief background on the context surrounding South African organizations, the theory, research, and application of hope relevant to organizational leadership in the “Rainbow Nation” are presented and analyzed. Such an overlooked positive approach represented by hopeful organizational leaders seems needed at this juncture of South Africa’s …

Biotechnology Law: A Tale Of Peptides And Lasers: Is Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd. V. Kgaa The End Of The Experimental Use Defense For Biomedical Innovation, Or Does § 271(E)(1) Of The Patent Act Save The Day, Melissa J. Alcorn Ph.D.

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fighting The Axis Of Illness: Hiv/Aids, Human Rights, And U.S. Foreign Policy, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Outlines Of Public Health's "New World Order", David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Caught Between Paradise And Power: Public Health, Pathogenic Threats, And The Axis Of Illness, David P. Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Reforming Patent Validity Litigation: The "Dubious Preponderance", Mark D. Janis

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Attorney Fees: Attorney Fees, Prevailing Parties, And Judicial Discretion In Oklahoma Practice: How It Is, How It Should Be, Jami Rhoades Antonisse

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Computer Programs For Temperature In Fins And Slab Bodies With The Method Of Green’S Functions, Kevin D. Cole

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Faculty Publications

Heat conduction in fins and slab bodies, a traditional undergraduate topic, is treated with the Green’s function (GF) method. A variety of boundary conditions and heating conditions are included. Computer programs are described which are designed to improve student learning of the GF method. The programs are available from the author.

After Grutter V. Bollinger-- Revisiting The Desegregation Era From The Perspective Of The Post-Desegregation Era, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

In Defense Of Deference, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel E. Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Contemplating Failure And Creating Alternatives In The Balkans: Bosnia's Peoples, Democracy And The Shape Of Self-Determination, Timothy W. Waters

Articles by Maurer Faculty

A decade after Dayton, Bosnia is a fictive, failed state held together by outsiders' weapons and outsiders' will. All parties recognize that Bosnia's current constitutional dispensation is dysfunctional and are calling for change, but how should the international community respond? In deciding, we should recognize that we may owe Bosnians much, but we owe Bosnia nothing.

This Article argues that traditional self-determination doctrine is unable to justify either further claims for secession from Bosnia or Bosnia's own original secession. It examines the processes used by the international community to frame the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the recognition process for Bosnia, …

American Bioethics And Human Rights: The End Of All Our Exploring, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

In his compelling novel Blindness, José Saramago tells us about victims stricken by a contagious form of blindness who were quarantined and came to see themselves as pigs, dogs, and “lame crabs.” Of course, they were all human beings - although unable to perceive themselves, or others, as members of the human community. The disciplines of bioethics, health law, and human rights are likewise all members of the broad human rights community, although at times none of them may be able to see the homologies, even when responding to a specific health challenge.

The boundaries between bioethics, health law, and …

Render Copyright Unto Caesar: On Taking Incentives Seriously, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay suggests we bifurcate our thinking. Conventional copyright rules by money, so let it rule the money-bound. Let a different set of rules evolve for more complex uses, particularly when the users have a personal relationship with the utilized text. Much recent scholarship contains dramatic suggestions to secure a freedom to be creative, rewrite, and be imaginative. My work has long sought to defend such freedoms, but I believe we understand imagination and its conditions too little to employ it as a starting point. I suggest instead that we acquire a better conceptual map of the generative process and …

Trademarks And Consumer Search Costs On The Internet, Stacey Dogan, Mark A. Lemley

Faculty Scholarship

In theory, trademarks serve as information tools, by conveying product information through convenient, identifiable symbols. In practice, however, trademarks have increasingly been used to obstruct the flow of information about competing products and services. In the online context, in particular, some courts have recently allowed trademark holders to block uses of their marks that would never have raised an eyebrow in a brick-and-mortar setting - uses that increase, rather than diminish, the flow of truthful, relevant information to consumers. These courts have stretched trademark doctrine on more than one dimension, both by expanding the concept of actionable "confusion" and by …

Special Section On The Algorithmics Of Software Model Checking — Introductory Paper, Matthew Dwyer, Stefan Leue

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

The term “software model checking” has recently been coined to refer to a flourishing area of research in software verification – the formal, automated analysis of program source code. Software model checking is considered an important application of classical model checking, where the model of a software system is analyzed in an automated fashion for compliance with a property specification. While classical model checking assumes the existence of an abstract model of the software system to be analyzed, in software model checking the emphasis is on directly analyzing program code given in a standard programming language, such as Java or …

Survivable Virtual Topology Routing Under Shared Risk Link Groups In Wdm Networks, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Network survivability is one of the most important issues in the design of optical WDM networks. In this work we study the problem of survivable routing of a virtual topology on a physical topology with Shared Risk Link Groups (SRLG). The survivable virtual topology routing problem against single-link failures in the physical topology is proved to be NP-complete in [1]. We prove that survivable virtual topology routing problem against SRLG/node failures is also NP-complete. We present an improved integer linear programming (ILP) formulation (in comparison to [1]) for computing the survivable routing under SRLG/node failures. Using an ILP solver, we …

Imsh: An Iterative Heuristic For Srlg Diverse Routing In Wdm Mesh Networks, Ajay Todimala, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Survivable routing of a connection involves computation of a pair of diverse routes such that at most one mute fails when failures occur in the network topology. A subset of links in the network that share the risk of failure at the same time are said to belong to a Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG) [3]. A network with shared risk link groups defined over its links is an SRLG network. A failure of an SRLG is equivalent to the failure of all the links in the SRLG. For a connection to he survivable in an SRLG network its working …

An Analysis Of Mcmc Sampling Methods For Estimating Weighted Sums In Winnow, Qingping Tao, Stephen Scott

School of Computing: Technical Reports

Chawla et al. introduced a way to use the Markov chain Monte Carlo method to estimate weighted sums in multiplicative weight update algorithms when the number of inputs is exponential. But their algorithm still required extensive simulation of the Markov chain in order to get accurate estimates of the weighted sums. We propose an optimized version of Chawla et al.’s algorithm, which produces exactly the same classifications while often using fewer Markov chain simulations. We also apply three other sampling techniques and empirically compare them with Chawla et al.’sMetropolis sampler to determine how effective each is in drawing good samples …

Rerouting Schemes For Dynamic Traffic Grooming In Optical Wdm Mesh Networks, Wang Yao, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Traffic grooming in optical WDM mesh networks is a two-layer routing problem to effectively pack low-rate connections onto high-rate lightpaths, which, in turn, are established on wavelength links. In this work, we employ the rerouting approach to improve the network throughput under the dynamic traffic model. We propose two rerouting schemes, rerouting at lightpath level (RRAL) and rerouting at connection level (RRAC). A qualitative comparison is made between RRAL and RRAC. We also propose the critical-wavelength-avoiding one-lightpath-limited (CWA-1L) and critical-lightpath-avoiding one-connection-limited (CLA-1C) rerouting heuristics, which are based on the two rerouting schemes respectively. Simulation results show that rerouting reduces the …

Survivable Traffic Grooming With Path Protection At The Connection Level In Wdm Mesh Networks, Wang Yao, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Survivable traffic grooming (STG) is a promising approach to provide reliable and resource-efficient multigranularity connection services in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. In this paper, we study the STG problem in WDM mesh optical networks employing path protection at the connection level. Both dedicated protection and shared protection schemes are considered. Given the network resources, the objective of the STG problem is to maximize network throughput. To enable survivability under various kinds of single failures such as fiber cut and duct cut, we consider the general shared risk link group (SRLG) diverse routing constraints. We first resort to the …

Survivable Traffic Grooming With Differentiated End-To-End Availability Guarantees In Wdm Mesh Networks, Wang Yao, Byrav Ramamurthy

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Traffic grooming is critical in WDM optical metropolitan area networks (MANS), where low-rate connections are packed onto high-rate wavelength paths (lightpaths). Various applications in the MAN demand different levels of reliability. Therefore, it is necessary to provision connections with differentiated reliability guarantees in the MAN. In this paper, we first present an analytical model to calculate the availability of connections using different protection schemes in WDM optical MANs with general mesh topologies. Then we propose and simulate two grooming algorithms which can provision availability guaranteed connections based on per-connection requirements.

Using Source-Code Analysis To Help End-User Programmers Create Dependable Software, Gregg Rothermel

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Not long ago, most software was written by professional programmers, who could be presumed to have an interest in software engineering methodologies and in tools and techniques for improving software dependability. Today, however, a great deal of software is written not by professionals but by end-users, who create applications such as multimedia simulations, dynamic web pages, and spreadsheets. Applications such as these are often used to guide important decisions or aid in important tasks, and it is important that they be sufficiently dependable, but evidence shows that they frequently are not. For example, studies have shown that a large percentage …

Empirical Studies Of Test Case Prioritization In A Junit Testing Environment, Hyunsook Do, Gregg Rothermel, Alex Kinneer

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Test case prioritization provides a way to run test cases with the highest priority earliest. Numerous empirical studies have shown that prioritization can improve a test suite’s rate of fault detection, but the extent to which these results generalize is an open question because the studies have all focused on a single procedural language, C, and a few specific types of test suites. In particular, Java and the JUnit testing framework are being used extensively in practice, and the effectiveness of prioritization techniques on Java systems tested under JUnit has not been investigated. We have therefore designed and performed a …

Evaluating Consistency Algorithms For Temporal Metric Constraints, Yang Shi, Anagh Lal, Berthe Y. Choueiry

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

We study the performance of some known algorithms for solving the Simple Temporal Problem (STP) and the Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problem (TCSP). In particular, we empirically compare the Bellman-Ford (BF) algorithm and its incremental version (incBF) by (Cesta & Oddi 1996) to the ΔSTP of (Xu & Choueiry 2003a). Among the tested algorithms, we show that ΔSTP is the most efficient for determining the consistency of an STP, and that incBF combined with the heuristics of (Xu & Choueiry 2003b) is the most efficient for solving the TCSP. We plan to improve ΔSTP by exploiting incrementality as in incBF and …

Evaluating Consistency Algorithms For Temporal Metric Constraints, Yang Shi, Anagh Lal, Berthe Y. Choueiry

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Focus: Networks of temporal metric constraints

Task: Evaluating the performance of algorithms for:

·Determining the consistency of the Simple Temporal Problem (STP)

·Finding the minimal network of the Temporal Constraint Satisfaction Problem (TCSP)

Future: Enhance triangulation-based algorithms with incrementality

The Software Patent Experiment, Robert M. Hunt, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past two decades, the scope of technologies that can be patented has been expanded to include many items previously thought unsuitable for patenting, for example, computer software. Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants 20,000 or more software patents a year. Conventional wisdom holds that extending patent protection to computer programs will stimulate research and development and, thus, increase the rate of innovation. In this article, Bob Hunt and Jim Bessen investigate whether this has, in fact, happened. They describe the spectacular growth in software patenting, who obtains patents, and the relationship between a sharp focus on …