Digital Commons Network^™

I Chopped Down This House For You, Simeon Mills

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Deliberate Extinction: Whether To Destroy The Last Smallpox Virus, David A. Koplow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The target problem to be examined is smallpox. Specifically, what should we (the United States and the entire world) now do with the last known residual samples of the virus that causes this uniquely horrific disease? The illness itself has virtually disappeared from the catalogue of human afflictions: due to a stunningly imaginative, concerted, and resolute campaign of the World Health Organization (WHO) through the 1970s, no one has contracted this deadly impairment for twenty-five years. Yet the causative element, an insidious scourge known as the variola virus, still remains, housed for now in high-security freezers at the U.S. Centers …

Judging Environmental Law, Richard J. Lazarus

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The title of this Essay, "Judging Environmental Law," evokes several different themes. On the one hand, the title presents an occasion to discuss the role of judges in environmental law. On the other hand, it offers an opportunity to judge environmental law itself: whether environmental law is guilty, as charged by some in industry, of overreaching in its regulatory requirements; or, whether environmental law is instead guilty, as charged by some environmentalists, of underreaching, by failing to address pressing pollution control and natural resource management concerns. Finally, the title of the Essay possibly presents an occasion for a more theoretical …

Washington, D.C. Movable Feast: The Odds On Leviathan - Dispute Resolution And Washington D.C.'S Culture, Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The field of dispute resolution has benefited enormously from a great wave of enthusiasm during its first two decades. But "youth's a stuff will not endure," and the first flush of ardor is an uncertain basis for confidence in the long term. Now, there is reason to believe that our field, like its predecessor professional fields, is vulnerable to the incentive structures built in to both academic and practice careers. At the same time, what we think of as a national (or larger) movement may be increasingly affected by local cultures.

Left Out, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My thesis is that the left's problem regarding criminal justice is at least partially of its own making. Specifically, the problem stems from deep contradictions in the left's positions. Progressives have not one position on crime, but at least seven different ones, and these positions cannot be reconciled. Most of this essay consists of a taxonomy of conflicting progressive views on criminal justice. Before I begin, however, I need to qualify my thesis in three important ways. First, as will become obvious, what I present below amounts to no more than brief descriptions - really evocations - of attitudes, arguments, …

Geodatabase Use In Fire Sciences Research| The Development Lifecycle, Lee T. Macholz

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Interpreting Constitutions Comparatively: Some Cautionary Notes, With Reference To Affirmative Action, Mark V. Tushnet

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It has now become the conventional wisdom that many justices on the United States Supreme Court are thinking about the relevance of comparative constitutional law to the interpretation of the United States Constitution. An emerging conservative critique of doing so questions the democratic legitimacy of the practice. I believe that those questions are badly formed, but that other questions are worth raising about the (perhaps) emerging practice. In this comment I identify some reasons for caution about the use of transnational comparative law in interpreting domestic constitutions. Some reasons are institutional, others arise from the doctrinal context within which particular …

Ergodic Capacity Of Mimo Triply Selective Rayleigh Fading Channels, Chengshan Xiao, Y. Rosa Zheng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

New results are presented for the ergodic capacity of spatially-correlated, time-varying and frequency-selective (i.e., triply selective) MIMO Rayleigh fading channels. Simplified capacity formulas are also derived for special cases such as SIMO and MISO triply selective fading channels. A closed form formula is proposed that quantifies the effect of the frequency-selective fading on the ergodic capacity into an intersymbol interference (ISI) degradation factor. It is discovered that, in general frequency-selective MIMO channels, the ISI inter-tap correlations reduce the ergodic capacity compared to the frequency flat fading channel. Only in the special case when the fading does not have ISI inter-tap …

Experimental Evaluation Of A Nested Microphone Array With Adaptive Noise Cancellers, Y. Rosa Zheng, M. El-Tanany, R. A. Goubran

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes a near-field broadband adaptive beamforming scheme for intelligent computer telephony and teleconferencing applications, namely the nested microphone array with adaptive noise canceller (NMA-ANC). The NMA-ANC scheme incorporates an harmonically nested array with a nonuniformly subbanded multirate filter bank. Each subband array employs several near-field delay-filter-and-sum beamformers and an adaptive noise canceller (ANC). The proposed NMA-ANC is evaluated via a noise rejection experiment and dereverberation experiment performed in an anechoic chamber and a real conference room, respectively. The experiment data are recorded by a multichannel digital recording system developed using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipments. A perceptual analysis/measurement system …

A Unique Fault-Tolerant Design For Flying Capacitor Multilevel Inverter, Xiaomin Kou, Keith Corzine, Yakov L. Familiant

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a unique design for flying capacitor type multilevel inverters with fault-tolerant features. When a single-switch fault per phase occurs, the new design can still provide the same number of converting levels by shorting the fault power semiconductors and reconfiguring the gate controls. The most attractive point of the proposed design is that it can undertake the single-switch fault per phase without sacrificing power converting quality. Future more, if multiple faults occur in different phases and each phase have only one fault switch, the proposed design can still conditionally provide consistent voltage converting levels. This paper will also …

Crow, The Kids And My Life, Polly Rhodes

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

"Genius Of Stone" And Other Stories, Lyn Mccarter

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of Artifacts From Avon Valley, Montana, Leslie M. Riley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Cautery| [Poems], Addie K. Palin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Comparison Of Remotely Sensed Land Surface Processes In Northern Hemisphere During The 1988-89 La Nina And The 1997-98 El Nino Events, Divya K. Tipparaju

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Automated External Defibrillators In Collegiate Athletic Training Programs, Starr Junelyn Wharton

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Atmospheric Deposition On Water Quality In High Alpine Lakes Of Grand Teton National Park Wyoming, Jennifer Ann Corbin

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Ties That Bind: The Traditional Irrigation Systems Of Uzbekistan Social Capital And Implications For Current Successful Management, Patrick James Conti

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Balance In The Taxation Of Derivative Securities: An Agenda For Reform, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

It is well understood that aggressive tax planning with derivatives threatens the U.S. income tax system. The conventional solution to this threat has been consistency, meaning that the same tax treatment should apply to all economically comparable bets, regardless of the form used. Yet familiar political and administrative barriers stand in the way of achieving this lofty goal.

This Article develops a reform agenda to eliminate tax planning without requiring consistency. Policymakers should strive instead for a new goal, which this Article calls "balance": For each risky position, the treatment of gains should match the treatment of losses. For example, …

Forecasting Series-Based Stock Price Data Using Direct Reinforcement Learning, H. Li, Cihan H. Dagli, David Lee Enke

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A significant amount of work has been done in the area of price series forecasting using soft computing techniques, most of which are based upon supervised learning. Unfortunately, there has been evidence that such models suffer from fundamental drawbacks. Given that the short-term performance of the financial forecasting architecture can be immediately measured, it is possible to integrate reinforcement learning into such applications. In this paper, we present the novel hybrid view for a financial series and critic adaptation stock price forecasting architecture using direct reinforcement. A new utility function called policies-matching ratio is also proposed. The need for the …

Embedded Options In The Case Against Compensation In Contract Law, Robert E. Scott, George G. Triantis

Faculty Scholarship

Although compensation is the governing principle in contract law remedies, it has tenuous historical, economic, and empirical support. A promisor's right to breach and pay damages is only a subset of a larger family of termination rights that do not purport to compensate the promisee for losses suffered when the promisor walks away from the contemplated exchange. These termination rights can be characterized as embedded options that serve important risk management functions. We show that sellers often sell insurance to their buyers in the form of these embedded call options, and that termination fees, including damages, are in essence option …

Cost Allocation For Transmission Investment Using Agent-Based Game Theory, Jakapun Mepokee, David Lee Enke, Badrul H. Chowdhury

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Due to electrical power restructuring, a dramatic change has been made to the generation and transmission sectors of the power industry. Rules and legislation are continuously changing. To promote more competition, transmission has to be expanded or upgraded to remove congestion and market power. The cost allocation of new investment in transmission has to be recalculated. The socialization methods of the past have been shown to be unfair to some market and network participants. The decentralization of cost allocation must be considered. The proposed paper provides a comparison between traditional cost allocation methods and a new cost allocation method based …

Influences On Backcountry Recreationists' Risk Of Exposure To Snow Avalanche Hazards, Jessica E. Tase

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Attitudes Of Professors Toward Instructional Technology In American Colleges Of Education Offering Graduate Degrees Via Distance Education, James L. Mowery

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation was designed to determine the attitudes of professors teaching advanced degrees via distance education towards the technology tools used for distance education. Today many courses taught via distance education are little more than correspondence courses that use e-mail to send and receive instruction, coursework, and tests. Should distance education attempt to replicate the face-to-face classroom or are simple chat rooms and discussion boards enough? This study provides a heretofore unresearched view of how selected professors feel about the technology.

A survey was conducted among a group of distance education professors from various colleges of education throughout the …

Improving High School Mathematics Instruction: Using Constructivist Pedagogy, Kimberly L. Neal

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation was designed to enable 11th and 12th grade students to perform at the state-mandated levels of proficiency in basic skills in mathematics on the state exit exam. Students who were repeating the test did not meet standards on the mathematics subtest after multiple attempts, did not meet the predetermined passing score on an in class achievement test in mathematics, and obtained classroom grades, in mathematics, below the 75% mark. In addition, based on teacher observation, high school students did not demonstrate sufficient motivation to master grade-level basic skills concepts in mathematics.

The writer developed a program using …

Experiential Learning In Communication Courses: Development And Evaluation Of Learning Activities With Development Of A Resource Manual For Experiential Learning At Olivet Nazarene University, Elizabeth J. Patrick-Trippel

Abraham S. Fischler College of Education ETD Archive

This applied dissertation addressed the relative lack of experiential learning activities in communication courses at Olivet Nazarene University. Though there had been changes in the curriculum, degrees, and identity of the department over the past 5 years, there had been no attempt to understand the pedagogical implications of these changes.

The objective of this applied dissertation was threefold: first, to develop original experiential activities for use in 3 different communication courses that were content/lecture-based courses; second, to evaluate the newly developed educational activities; and third, based on the evaluation information, to compile a resource manual for interactive learning for professors …

Discrete-Time Neural Network Output Feedback Control Of Nonlinear Systems In Non-Strict Feedback Form, P. He, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An adaptive neural network (NN) -Based output feedback controller is proposed to deliver a desired tracking performance for a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems, which is represented in non-strict feedback form. the NN backstepping approach is utilized to design the adaptive output feedback controller consisting of 1) a NN observer to estimate the system states with the input-output data, and 2) two NNs to generate the virtual and actual control inputs, respectively. the non-causal problem in the discrete time backstepping design is avoided by using the universal NN approximator. the persistence excitation (PE) condition is relaxed both in the NN …

Position Sensorless Control, Babak Fahimi, Ali Emadi, Raymond B. Sepe

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The switched reluctance machines (SRM) drives applications are studied. the introduction of SRM drives in mission critical applications calls for high levels of survivability and fault tolerance. the various methods are proposed for the sensor less control of SRM drives. the best version of the sensor less technique is selected by continuous monitoring of the back-EMF. the results show that four-quadrant sensor less control of the SRM drive is a feasible technique and can be considered as a technology ready for application.

Prediction Of Rotor Position At Standstill And Flying Shaft Conditions In Switched Reluctance Machines, M. Krishnamurthy, C. S. Edrington, Babak Fahimi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Development of a reliable, smooth, and precise position sensor less startup routine is an integral part of the Switched Reluctance Machine (SRM) control. the proposed sensor less startup method presented in this paper represents high grade performance and does not require additional hardware or memory. Further, the proposed sensor less technique is extended to flying shaft conditions. These capabilities are highly demanded by automotive applications such as starter/alternator and electric power steering systems. an assessment of the impact of motor parameters and diagnostic signal measurement on the quality of the sensor less startup method is also included. This will help …

Reinforcement Learning-Based Output Feedback Control Of Nonlinear Systems With Input Constraints, P. He, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel neural network (NN) -Based output feedback controller with magnitude constraints is designed to deliver a desired tracking performance for a class of multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) discrete-time strict feedback nonlinear systems. Reinforcement learning in discrete time is proposed for the output feedback controller, which uses three NNs: 1) a NN observer to estimate the system states with the input-output data; 2) a critic NN to approximate certain strategic utility function; and 3) an action NN to minimize both the strategic utility function and the unknown dynamics estimation errors. the magnitude constraints are manifested as saturation nonlinearities in the output feedback …