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Vanishing Or Increasing Trials In The Netherlands, Carolien Klein Haarhuis, Bert Niemeijer

Journal of Dispute Resolution

In this article, we will address the question of whether something like vanishing trials exists in the Netherlands. This could be the case, as some of the causes of the decline in the number of trials advanced by Galanter are also observed in the Netherlands. ADR is gaining popularity, the costs of court procedures are on the rise, and there clearly exists a development toward "managerial justice."

Vanishing Trial, Vanishing Community - The Potential Effect Of The Vanishing Trial On America's Social Capital, Robert M. Ackerman

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This essay considers the communitarian implications of the vanishing trial phenomenon. Its language is tentative, because while we now have-thanks to Marc Galanter and his associates-a great deal of useful data on the vanishing trial, we have only some hints regarding its causes, and an even less concrete notion of its likely consequences.' The empirical data unearthed by Professor Galanter and others has debunked a number of myths regarding the litigiousness of our society and the extent to which the courts are employed to resolve disputes. Given the care that has been invested in this research, it would be reckless …

The Bender Ii And Its Relationship With Executive Functioning And Academics, Katharine A. Warsinske

Theses

The Bender-Gestalt Test and tests of executive functioning have been linked to academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine the validity of the Bender II as compared to Koppitz's Developmental Scoring System (DSS), as well as to determine the relationship between the Bender II and executive functioning. A total of 82 children participated in this study. A significant correlation was found between the DSS and the Bender II, with the Bender II mean approximately 10 standard score points higher than the DSS. The Bender II was also significantly correlated with more scales on the BRIEF than the …

Streak Detection In Mottled And Noisy Images, Hector Santos

Theses

This thesis describes an algorithm for detecting streaks in printed images using adaptive window-based image projections and maximization of mutual information. To this effect, projections are computed across the entire image at different window sizes. The traces collected from the projections are correlated using maximization of mutual information to pinpoint streak locations and widths using a peak detection algorithm. Finally, for a given peak, the window size is changed adaptively to identify and locate the intensity and length of the corresponding streak while maximizing signal to noise ratio. Results on synthetic and real-life images are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness …

Optimal Design Of Ink Spectra For Multiple-Ink Color Reproduction, Yongda Chen

Theses

Conventional four-color printing systems are limited by a relative small color gamut, poor color constancy, and a high degree metamerism. In this dissertation, these problems were addressed by increasing the ink number, optimizing the spectral ink curves, and the lookup tables for multiple-ink printing. First, a computer simulation was performed to investigate the optimum combinations of different ink number to maximize the color gamut for halftoning printing. By analyzing the color gamuts achieved by real ink sets and virtual ink sets, the conclusions were drawn that the color gamut can be improved by increasing ink number and optimizing spectral ink …

Successful Digital Asset Management And Variable Data Printing - An Approach Based On Mindsets And Skill Sets, Henrik Holm Christensen

Theses

The implementation and operation of services based on digital asset management (DAM) and variable data printing (VDP) technologies in the graphic communication industry call for new skill sets among the employees. This study examines how successful providers of DAM and VDP are obtaining their employee skills and clarifies the importance of these skill sets in relation to business success.

The research data was hypothesized and analyzed out from two major groups of respondents. One group consists of 33 companies that have hired employees within their IT administration, DAM, and/or VDP functional areas within the past two years, the "hired" group. …

Recovery From Crisis: Jordan Tourism Facing Political Instability, Rasha Hani Saoudi

Theses

This study outlines tourism crises facing international tourism to Jordan. The study also examines major efforts taken by the public and private sectors to recover from the loss of international tourism arrivals to the country caused mainly by the ongoing political crisis in the Middle East. A number of internal and external tourism challenges are identified based on the opinions of key stakeholders in the Jordanian tourism industry. Different approaches to crisis management, drawn from an overview of recovery marketing literature and studies, are also presented. The study concludes that the continuous cooperation and coordination of tourism stakeholders before, during, …

Preparation For Radiological Disasters: A Radiation Effects Epidemiological Database, Martha S. Raj

Theses

Not Included

Plane Elasticity Using Airy Stress Functions, Matthew David Roman

Theses

Given a three dimensional solid element in a state of plane stress or plane strain with conservative body forces, the stress components are equal to the appropriate second order partial derivatives of a bi-harmonic function, ϕ , called an Airy Stress Function. It follows that the stress components automatically satisfy the equilibrium conditions.

The function ϕ depends on both the geometry of the body and the loading, which leaves infinite possible stress functions to be developed. As thesis work, I have researched and collected currently existing Airy Stress Functions, made plots of thier stress fields in order to gain a …

Computational Fluid Dynamics And Experimental Studies Of An Energy-Efficient Uv Disinfection System For Water Treatment, Nancy Goenawan

Theses

In typical commercial UV treatment system, water is flushed through a reactor vessel, where a UV lamp irradiates the flowing water. The distribution of the UV dose is extremely non-uniform. At distances away from the light, the dosage will be too low to kill the microorganism. As a result more power is needed in such a system for an effective treatment. A new energy-efficient UV disinfection system, named "Off Center", was designed, developed, and tested. This "Off Center" system consists of a UV bulb that has been relocated from its traditional central location to a location closer to the 4-in …

Health Monitoring Of Lav Planet Gear Bushings Using Signature Analysis Techniques, Victoria L. Parnell

Theses

The Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies (CIMS) is studying the improvement of military Light Armored Vehicles (LAVs) for the United States Department of Defense. A focus of this study is the Marine Corps LAVs that are experiencing failures in the planetary assembly which serves as the vehicle's final drive system. The primary failure source is the bushings that provide the interface between the planet gears and their respective pins.

Currently, to detect a bushing failure, vehicle occupants must exit the LAV and place their hand on the wheel hub cover to check for excessive heat. If the hub "feels too …

Development Of A Universal Mosfet Gate Impedance Model, Sripriya Das

Theses

Scaling of CMOS technology to 100 nm & below and the endless pursuit of higher operating frequencies drive the need to accurately model effects that dominate at those feature sizes and frequencies. Current modeling techniques are frequency limited and require different models for different frequency ranges in order to achieve accuracy goals. In the foundry world, high frequency models are typically empirical in nature and significantly lag their low frequency counterparts in terms of availability. This tends to slow the adoption of new foundry technologies for high performance applications such as extremely high data rate serializer/deserializer transceiver cores. However, design …

Rochester Institute Of Technology's Laser Safety Manual, Joseph Whitney

Theses

Rochester Institute of Technology's Laser Safety Manual and Training Guide have been created as a recommended safety manual and training guide to help laser users work with lasers and laser systems in a safe manner. Standard operating procedures and protocols have been provided in order to assist the laser user in complying with Local, State, and Federal regulations.

The immense number and variation of lasers that are available makes laser safety a necessity. This manual contains guidelines that enable the laser user to identify areas of concern and apply corrective actions as needed. This manual addresses a wide array of …

Dynamics And Control Of Tethered Satellite System, Royce L. Abel

Theses

Tethered Satellite Systems (TSS) has been an ongoing project around the world for many decades. This study examined the dynamics an dcontrols of tethered satellites. The equations of motion were developed and simulated with no control and small eccentric orbits. A control law was derived by associating the Hamiltonian of the system to a Lyapunov Function. This control law was then simulated to demonstrate ability and robustness. The tethered system can be retrieved and deployed in a small number of orbits, and return from a perturbation quickly. Examination of a non thruster controlled system resulted in asymptotic convergence in retrieval …

Implications Of Implementing Hdtv Over Digital Subscriber Line Networks, Thomas J. Lantier

Theses

This thesis addresses the different challenges a telecommunications company would face when trying to implement an HDTV video service over a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connection. Each challenge is discussed in detail and a technology, protocol, or method is suggested to overcome that particular challenge.

One of the biggest challenges is creating a network architecture that can provide enough bandwidth to support video over a network that was originally designed for voice traffic. The majority of the network connections to a customer premises in a telephony network consists of a copper pair. This type of connection is not optimal for …

Tilling The Cram Down Landscape: Using Securitization Data To Expose The Fundamental Fallacies Of "Till", Matthew H. O'Brien

Vanderbilt Law Review

It is almost universally recognized that the Bankruptcy Code's protection for consumers is justifiable under the theory that an ''entrepreneurial economy prospers when honest but unfortunate debtors are given a fresh opportunity to swim back into the productive mainstream rather than being forced down to drown." The amount of protection the Bankruptcy Code (hereinafter, the "Code") should afford consumers, on the other hand, is a source of much disagreement. Long-standing debate over this issue was, in fact, the basis for the controversy surrounding the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act ("the Act") that the President signed into law in …

Gaussian Mixture Approach To Detect Drift, Mamidi Sree Kalyan Chakravorty

Theses

Historically it has been difficult to measure the deviation in the notion of a concept. Several schemes have been proposed to attack this challenging problem [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. The central notion of all these efforts is to detect the change point where the data mining model deviates significantly with respect to the data characteristics that it was trained or built on. The process of detecting such change points is often termed as concept drift. Current state of algorithms assume attribute independence, view the problem as a supervised learning problem and also need …

Cultivation Of Methanogens From Shallow Marine Sediments At Hydrate Ridge, Orego, Melissa Kendall, David R. Boone

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Little is known about the methanogenic degradation of acetate, the fate of molecular hydrogen and formate or the ability of methanogens to grow and produce methane in cold, anoxic marine sediments. The microbes that produce methane were examined in permanently cold, anoxic marine sediments at Hydrate Ridge (44°35' N, 125°10' W, depth 800 m). Sediment samples (15 to 35 cm deep) were collected from areas of active methane ebullition or areas where methane hydrates occurred. The samples were diluted into enrichment medium with formate, acetate or trimethylamine as catabolic substrate. After 2 years of incubation at 4 °C to 15 …

Intelligent Judging: Evolution In The Classroom And The Courtroom, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Religious arguments have permeated debates on the role of the law in medical practice at the beginning and the end of life. But nowhere has religion played so prominent a role as in the century-old quest to banish or marginalize the teaching of evolution in science classes. Nor has new genetics research that supports evolutionary theory at the molecular level dampened antievolution sentiment. Requiring public-school science teachers to teach specific religion-based alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution is just as bad, in the words of political comedian Bill Maher, as requiring obstetricians to teach medical students the alternative theory that …

Congress, Controlled Substances, And Physician-Assisted Suicide: Elephants In Mouseholes, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Gonzales v. Oregon to reject the U.S. attorney general's authority to prohibit physicians in Oregon from prescribing Schedule II drugs for their terminally ill patients to commit suicide can seem paradoxical and confusing. How is it that California cannot permit the patients of physicians who recommend marijuana, a Schedule I drug, to possess legally and use marijuana that they may need to survive, but Oregon can legally permit physicians to prescribe Schedule II drugs and patients to possess and use such drugs to end their lives?

Hunger Strikes At Guantanamo: Medical Ethics And Human Rights In A “Legal Black Hole”, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Being Human, a collection of readings assembled by President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, contains a powerful description of the force-feeding of Soviet political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, who was on a hunger strike to protest the refusal of prison authorities to provide a lawyer for a fellow inmate who was awaiting trial:

They started feeding me forcibly through the nostril. By a rather thick rubber tube with a metal end on it. . . . The procedure will be that four or five KGB guys will come to my cell, take me to a medical unit, put a straitjacket …

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Bioterror And “Bioart”: A Plague O' Both Your Houses, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Since September 11, 2001, the threat of bioterrorism has caused Congress and the President to dramatically increase research funding for countermeasures, including funding for new biosecurity laboratories. The new kind of war against non-state actors who use terror to intimidate populations has also made the creation of new ethical and legal rules for researchers seem critical. New laws have been passed, and there have been proposals for new codes of ethics for bioterrorism-related research. Almost five years after September 11, however, the outcome of the development of new research rules remains uncertain.

The Patient's Right To Safety: Improving The Quality Of Care Through Litigation Against Hospitals, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

It is the consensus of experts in the patient-safety field that little has changed to improve the safety of hospital care since the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report, To Err Is Human. The report noted that in order to be successful, “safety must be an explicit organizational goal that is demonstrated by clear organizational leadership. . . . This process begins when boards of directors demonstrate their commitment to this objective by regular, close oversight of the safety of the institutions they shepherd.” Leape and Berwick agree, noting that safety cannot become an institutional priority “without more sustained and …

Patent Buy-Outs For Global Disease Innovations For Low- And Middle-Income Countries, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

Drug prices are uniquely susceptible to radical price reductions through generic competition. Patented pharmaceuticals may be priced at more than 30 times the marginal cost of production; the excess is the patent rent collected by the drug company while the patent and exclusive marketing periods remain. Patent rents are significant. AIDS drugs which sell for US$10,000 per person per year in the US are sold generically for less than US$200. If patented drugs could be sold at the marginal cost of production, cost effective treatments would become even more attractive, and other interventions would become affordable.

This Article proposes marginal …

Development Lending And The Community Reinvestment Act, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

In a series of articles on community-development lending published in the late 1990s, I criticized the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).⁴ Criticizing the CRA, however, was not the sole focus of these articles. I offered a theoretical framework for analyzing the statute that I hoped would be useful to scholars who attempted either to justify or to condemn the statute. I also offered alternatives to the current approach, pointing especially toward the subsidization of economic-development efforts.

Looking back, it appears that I underestimated the degree to which the political controversy surrounding the CRA would color the treatment some later scholars …

A Restatement (Third) Of Intentional Torts?, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

Some intentional tort doctrines have developed in intriguing ways since the Restatement Second was published, and other doctrines remain contentious or obscure. For example, disagreement persists about whether the tort of battery requires merely the (single) intent to make a nonconsensual contact, or the (dual) intent both (1) to contact and (2) either to harm or to offend. The single intent view is much more plausible; the dual intent view cannot make much sense of the liability of well-intentioned doctors for battery if they exceed the patient's consent, or the liability of pranksters, or the well-accepted doctrine of apparent consent. …

Torts And Choice Of Law: Searching For Principles, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

If a tortious act (e.g., negligently firing a rifle) occurs in state X and the harm (e.g., killing a bystander) occurs in state Y, which state's law should apply? This is a simple example of the choice of law problem in torts. The problem arises between states or provinces with different laws within one nation and between different nations. In this article I discuss this problem largely in terms of incentive effects and also consider where this topic might be addressed in a torts course.

Property Rules And Liability Rules, Once Again, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, new articles presenting rigorous analyses of bargaining incentives have overturned some of the fundamental claims made by Calabresi and Melamed in their seminal article on property rules and liability rules published in 1972. In particular, the proposition that property rules are socially preferable to liability rules when transaction costs are low appears to be either no longer valid or severely weakened under the new analyses. This paper reexamines the property rule versus liability rule question in light of the contributions of the recent bargaining theory literature. In contrast to this literature, I find that the fundamental propositions …

The Jeffersonian Treaty Clause, Gary S. Lawson, Guy Seidman

Faculty Scholarship

The Treaty Clause of the federal Constitution declares that the President "shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur." The consensus of doctrine, history, and scholarship, exemplified by the holding in Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), is that the Treaty Clause affirmatively grants to the President and Senate a free-standing, quasi-legislative power that contains no internal constitutional limitations. Thomas Jefferson notably disagreed. Jefferson viewed the treaty power as a purely implementational power that could only be used to effectuate other federal powers. …

"God's Created Order", Gender Complementarity, And The Federal Marriage Amendment, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Does marriage, in the United States, need the protection of an amendment to the federal constitution, which would enshrine marriage as only the union of a man and a woman? In answering "yes" to this question, sponsors and supporters of the Federal Marriage Protection Amendment (FMPA), in the House of Representatives and the Senate, have made various appeals to the gender complementarity of marriage: (1) opposite-sex marriage is part of "God's created order;" (2) procreation is the purpose of marriage and has a tight nexus with optimal mother/father parenting; (3) marriage bridges the "gender divide" by properly ordering heterosexual desire …