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The Forum, Volume 4, Issue 3 (November 2004), University Of South Carolina School Of Law Students

The Forum Student Newspaper

Law School: The Numbers, by Crawford Long

Silence of the Mockingbirds, by Drew Radeker

So the Gauntlet Has Been Thrown, by Chris Majure

Our New Plasma TV, by John Marshall Mosser

Love In the Library, by Tyler Schachte

South Carolina, Meet Tucker Max, by Thomas Jefferson O'Sullivan With Contributions by Drew Radeker

Fortunate Son, by James Rainsford

The Forum Editorial Board and submissions notice

Agricultural Productivity In The Early Ottoman Empire, Metin M. Cosgel

Economics Working Papers

This paper provides standardized estimates of labor productivity in arable farming in selected regions of the early Ottoman Empire, including Jerusalem and neighboring districts in eastern Mediterranean; Bursa and Malatya in Anatolia; and Thessaly, Herzegovina, and Budapest in eastern Europe. I use data from the tax registers of the Ottoman Empire to estimate grain output per worker, standardized (in bushels of wheat equivalent) to allow productivity comparisons within these regions and with other times and places. The results suggest that Ottoman agriculture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had achieved levels of labor productivity that compared favorably even with most …

The Holdout Problem And Urban Sprawl, Thomas J. Miceli, C. F. Sirmans

Economics Working Papers

Developers attempting land assembly often face a potential holdout problem that raises the cost of development. To minimize this extra cost, developers will prefer land whose ownership is less dispersed. This creates a bias toward development at the urban fringe where average lot sizes are larger, resulting in urban sprawl. This paper examines the link between the holdout problem and urban sprawl and discusses possible remedies.

Do Labor Issues Matter In The Determination Of U.S. Trade Policy? An Empirical Reevaluation, Xenia Matschke, Shane M. Sherlund

Economics Working Papers

Some recent empirical studies, motivated by Grossman and Helpman's (1994) "protection for sale" model, suggest that very few factors (none of them labor-related) determine trade protection. This paper reexamines the roles that labor issues play in the determination of trade policy. We introduce collective bargaining, differences in labor mobility across industries, and trade union lobbying into the protection-for-sale model and show that the equilibrium protection rate in our model depends upon these labor market variables. In particular, our model predicts that trade protection is structurally higher than in the original protection-for-sale model if the trade union of a sector lobbies …

A Simple Theory Of Increasing Penalties For Repeat Offenders, Thomas J. Miceli, Catherine Bucci

Economics Working Papers

A feature of many penal codes is that punishments are more severe for repeat offenders, yet economic models have had a hard time providing a theoretical justification for this practice. This paper offers an explanation based on the wage penalty suffered by individuals convicted of crime. While this penalty probably deters some first-timers from committing crimes, it actually hampers deterrence of repeat offenders because of their diminished employments opportunities. We show that in this setting, an escalating penalty scheme is optimal and time consistent.

Brown And The Desegregation Of Virginia Law Schools, Carl W. Tobias

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Virginia's Next Challenge: Economic And Educational Opportunity, Mark R. Warner

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Civil Practice And Procedure, John R. Walk

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Family And Juvenile Law, Robert E. Shepherd Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Labor And Employment Law, Thomas M. Winn Iii, Lindsey H. Dobbs

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Glycine N-Methyltransferases: A Comparison Of The Crystal Structures And Kinetic Properties Of Recombinant Human, Mouse And Rat Enzymes, Svetlana Pakhomova, Zigmund Luka, Steffi Grohmann, Conrad Wagner, Marcia E. Newcomer

Faculty Publications

Glycine N-methyltransferases (GNMTs) from three mammalian sources were compared with respect to their crystal structures and kinetic parameters. The crystal structure for the rat enzyme was published previously. Human and mouse GNMT were expressed in Escherichia coli in order to determine their crystal structures. Mouse GNMT was crystallized in two crystal forms, a monoclinic form and a tetragonal form. Comparison of the three structures reveals subtle differences, which may relate to the different kinetic properties of the enzymes. The flexible character of several loops surrounding the active site, along with an analysis of the active site boundaries, indicates that the …

Monitor Newsletter November 01, 2004, Bowling Green State University

Monitor

Official Publication of Bowling Green State University for Faculty and Staff

The Collegian (2004-11-01), Sonia Mejia

UTB/TSC Archives - The Collegian [Newspaper]

Vol. 57, No. 11

Predicting Electoral College Victory Probabilities From State Probability Data, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A method is proposed in this paper for predicting Electoral College victory probabilities from state probability data. A “ranking” assumption about dependencies across states is made that greatly simplifies the analysis. The method issued to analyze state probability data from the Intrade political betting market. The Intrade prices of various contracts are quite close to what would be expected under the ranking assumption. Under the joint hypothesis that the Intrade price ranking is correct and the ranking assumption is correct, President Bush should not have won any state ranked below a state that he lost. He did not win any …

Fact-Free Learning, Enriqueta Aragones, Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, David Schmeidler

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

People may be surprised by noticing certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We show that, given a database, finding a small set of variables that obtain a certain value of R 2 is computationally hard, in the sense that this term is used in computer science. We discuss some of the implications of this result and of fact-free learning in general.

Editor's Shelf, Robert H. Taylor

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Where Oil Andwater Do Mix: Environmental Scarcity And Future Conflict In The Middle East And North Africa, Jason J. Morrissette, Douglas A. Borer

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Single Chamber Electrolyte Supported Sofc Module, Toshio Suzuki, Piotr Jasinski, Harlan U. Anderson, Fatih Dogan

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

An electrolyte supported single chamber solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) module consisting of two cells has been proposed. The module consists of one Sm-doped CeO₂ (SDC) electrolyte substrate (0.5 mm thick with the size of 5 3 10 mm), two Ni-SDC anodes on one side, and two SDC-(La,Sr)(Co,Fe)O₃ cathodes on the other side. Two modules with different electrode areas were prepared and tested using an air-propane mixture. The electrode area had a strong influence on the performance of the module. It was shown that the two-cell module generated 1.5 V open-circuit voltage and about 17 mW maximum power …

Transitions Into The Negative-Energy Dirac Continuum, P Krekora, Q Su, Rainer Grobe

Faculty publications – Physics

We compare the predictions of the single-particle Dirac equation with quantum field theory for an electron subjected to a space and time dependent field. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that a transition into the negative-energy subspace predicted by the single-particle Dirac equation is directly associated with the degree of suppression of pair-production as described by quantum field theory. We show that the portion of the mathematical wave function that populates the negative-energy states corresponds to the difference between the positron spatial density for systems with and without an electron initially present.

Probabilities As Similarity-Weighted Frequencies, Antoine Billot, Itzhak Gilboa, Dov Samet, David Schmeidler

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity-weighted average of the beliefs induced by each past case.

Rule-Based And Case-Based Reasoning In Housing Prices, Gabrielle Gayer, Itzhak Gilboa, Offer Lieberman

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

People reason about real-estate prices both in terms of general rules and in terms of analogies to similar cases. We propose to empirically test which mode of reasoning fits the data better. To this end, we develop the statistical techniques required for the estimation of the case-based model. It is hypothesized that case-based reasoning will have relatively more explanatory power in databases of rental apartments, whereas rule-based reasoning will have a relative advantage in sales data. We motivate this hypothesis on theoretical grounds, and find empirical support for it by comparing the two statistical techniques (rule-based and case-based) on two …

Retrospective On The Postwar Productivity Slowdown, William D. Nordhaus

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The present study reviews the “productivity slowdown” of the 1970s and 1980s. The study also develops a new data set — industrial data available back to 1948 — as well as a new set of tools for decomposing changes in productivity growth. The major result of this study is that the productivity slowdown of the 1970s has survived three decades of scrutiny, conceptual refinements, and data revisions. The slowdown was primarily centered in those sectors that were most energy-intensive, were hardest hit by the energy shocks of the 1970s, and therefore had large output declines. In a sense, the energy …

Estimated Age Effects In Athletic Events And Chess, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Rates of decline are estimated using record bests by age for chess and for various track and field, road running, and swimming events. Using a fairly flexible functional form, the estimates show linear percent decline between age 35 and about age 70 and then quadratic decline after that. Chess shows much less decline than the physical activities. Rates of decline are generally larger for the longer distances, and for swimming they are larger for women than for men. An advantage of using best-performance records to estimate rates of decline is that the records are generally based on very large samples. …

Checkup, Lehigh Valley Health Network

Checkup

No abstract provided.

Improved Quantification Of Small Objects In Near-Infrared Diffuse Optical Tomography, Subhadra Srinivasan, Brian W. Pogue, Hamid Dehghani, Shudong Jiang, Xiaomei Song, Keith D. Paulsen

Dartmouth Scholarship

Diffuse optical tomography allows quantification of hemoglobin, oxygen saturation, and water in tissue, and the fidelity in this quantification is dependent on the accuracy of optical properties determined during image reconstruction. In this study, a three-step algorithm is proposed and validated that uses the standard Newton minimization with Levenberg-Marquardt regularization as the first step. The second step is a modification to the existing algorithm using a two-parameter regularization to allow lower damping in a region of interest as compared to background. This second stage allows the recovery of the actual size of an inclusion. A region-based reconstruction is the final …

Poem No. 92, November 2004, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Vortex Lattice Inhomogeneity In Spatially Inhomogeneous Superfluids, Daniel E. Sheehy, Leo Radzihovsky

Faculty Publications

The inhomogeneity in vortex density in a highly inhomogeneous rotating superfluid was investigated. The vortex lattice inhomogeneity was found to be driven by the discrete way vortices imparting angular momentum to the superfluid. This effect was found to favor the highest vortex density in regions where the superfluid density is most uniform. The results show that the boson velocity deviates from a rigid-body form exhibiting a radial-shear flow past the vortex lattice.

High-Threshold, Kv3-Like Potassium Currents In Magnocellular Neurosecretory Neurons And Their Role In Spike Repolarization, Talent Shevchenko, Ryoichi Teruyama, William E. Armstrong

Faculty Publications

We identified Kv3-like high-threshold K+ currents in hypothalamic supraoptic neurons using whole cell recordings in hypothalamic slices and in acutely dissociated neurons. Tetraethylammonium (TEA)-sensitive currents (TEA) evoked from -50 I/V were characterized by a large component that inactivated in 10-30 ms, and a smaller, persistent component that inactivated in 1-2 s. UV relations in dissociated neurons revealed TEA-subtracted currents with a slope and voltage dependency consistent with the presence of Kv3-like channels. In slices, tests with 0.01-0.7 mM TEA produced an IC50 of 200-300 nM for both fast and persistent currents. The fast transient current was similar to currents associated …

Real Delay Graphical Probabilistic Switching Model For Vlsi Circuits, Vivekanandan Srinivasan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Power optimization is a crucial issue at all levels of abstractions in VLSI Design. Power estimation has to be performed repeatedly to explore the design space throughout the design process at all levels. Dynamic Power Dissipation due to Switching Activity has been one of the major concerns in Power Estimation. While many Simulation and Statistical Simulation based methods exist to estimate Switching Activity, these methods are input pattern sensitive, hence would require a large input vector set to accurately estimate Power. Probabilistic estimation of switching activity under Zero-Delay conditions, seriously undermines the accuracy of the estimation process, since it fails …

Behavioral Vhdl Implementation Of Coherent Digital Gps Signal Receiver, Viswanath Daita

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Global Positioning System is a technology which is gaining acceptance. Originally developed for military purposes, it is being used in civilian applications such as navigation, emergency services, etc. A system-on-chip application merges different functions and applications on a single substrate. This project models a GPS receiver for a system on chip application. The GPS receiver, developed as a core, is intended to be a part of a navigation tour guide being developed. The scope of this work is the GPS C/A code on the L1 carrier. The digital signal processing back-end in a GPS receiver is modelled in this work. …