Digital Commons Network^™

Public International Law And The Wto: A Reckoning Of Legal Positivism And Neoliberalism, S. G. Sreejith

San Diego International Law Journal

This Article proceeds in five parts. In part one, I review the scholarly skepticism as to how far international law is law in the "hard" sense and show that this skepticism has always permeated the discipline. In part two, I go on to examine what has prompted contemporary scholarship to credit the WTO with helping international law grow out of the "thin" normativity often attributed to it. The analysis suggests that certain features of legal positivism customarily associated with law in its strict sense, which were alleged to be lacking in international law, are found in the institutional apparatus of …

Japanese Prefectural Scapegoats In The Constitutional Landscape: Protecting Children From Violent Video Games In The Name Of Public Welfare, Susan Minamizono

San Diego International Law Journal

Part I of this comment will examine the history and application of freedom of expression in Japanese case law and the evolution of the public welfare concept and its circumscribing effect on individual freedoms. Part II will explore the recent local regulatory efforts and the historical underpinnings for these laws that place restrictions on materials to children. Part III will compare the Japanese legislative endeavors with their American counterparts and highlight the reasons why United States laws will continue to be struck down by courts. Part IV will analyze the response of the video game industry to the onslaught of …

Seeking The Final Court Of Justice: The European Court Of Human Rights And Accountability For State Violence In Northern Ireland, Christopher K. Connolly

San Diego International Law Journal

This article examines the impact of the European Court's right to life jurisprudence on the issue of accountability for state violence in Northern Ireland. To date, the initiatives undertaken by the United Kingdom to comply with the European Court's rulings are largely unsatisfactory. Piecemeal institutional reforms aimed at preventing future breaches of Article 2 have failed to fully address the underlying concerns identified by the Court, and domestic right to life jurisprudence has placed significant limitations on the extent to which past violations of the right to life can be dealt with effectively in British courts. The United Kingdom's response …

Federal Campaign Finance Reform Based On Virginia Election Law, Rhodes B. Ritenour

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Gis-Based Approach To Evaluating Changes In Wetland Areal Extent And Structure Between 1926 And 1999 For Selected Hydrological Sub-Basins In Pinellas County, Florida, Pamela J. Fetterman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A GIS-based study was undertaken comparing wetland coverages in 1926 and 1999 in selected sub-basins within Pinellas County, Florida, one of the most highly urbanized counties in south-central Florida with almost 50% of the existing land area developed into industrial, commercial or residential land uses (Pinellas County Planning Department, 2002). Wetlands were digitized from rectified 1926 aerials and classified according to the FLUCCS classification system. Wetland coverage for the 1999 data set was extracted from FLUCCS 1999 land use coverage provided by the SWFWMD, and topology for both the 1926 and 1999 wetland and surface waters were created. Statistical and …

Curriculum Subcommittee Minutes, November 1, 2007, Utah State University

Educational Policies Committee

College of Education and Human Services

• New Course

Department of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education

• Add Dual List, Credit Hour Change
• Title Change, Credit Hour Change, Course Description Change, Add Dual List
• Credit Hour Change

Interior Design Program

• Course Number Change, Remove University Studies Designation

Department of Journalism and Communication

• Prerequisite Change

Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

• Corequisite Change
• Corequisite Change, Repeatable for credit

Department of Music

• Prerequisite Change

Department of Political Science

• New Course

Other

• Suspending the Certificate Program in Natural Resource and Environmental Policy
• Proposed Curriculum Handbook Changes

Connecting With One Another: A Step By Step Approach To Guest And New Member Assimilation, Kevin Ray Milburn

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This project was born out of frustrating experiences at assimilating new members into church life, and disheartening statistics proving this is a common problem in Kentucky Southern Baptist churches. After reviewing literature pertaining to the topic, it became apparent there was a need for a simple, workable program for churches to use in assimilation. This project highlights the CONNECT strategy, a small group Sunday School program, which this author created to put into place at a model church. After gathering statistics from this model church since the program’s inception, it is evident that this CONNECT strategy does work for assimilation.

Audit Of An Acute Pain Service In A Tertiary Care Hospital In A Developing Country, Muhammad Qamarul Hoda, Mohammad Hamid, Fauzia Anis Khan

Department of Anaesthesia

The first anaesthesia based acute pain service (APS) was introduced in Pakistan at the Aga Khan University Hospital in July 2001, with the aim of patient safety and satisfaction. The American Society of Anesthesiologist task force guidelines were used for the introduction of APS. APS has managed 6810 patients during four and half years period. Common analgesic techniques used, were intravenous infusion (50%), patient controlled intravenous analgesia (18%) and epidural infusions (30%). Common reported side effects were nausea and vomiting with intravenous infusion (10%) and PCIA (10%) while motor block was noticed with epidural infusion (29%). This article aims to …

Brazilians In The U.S. And Massachusetts: A Demographic And Economic Profile, Alvaro Lima, Carlos Eduardo Siqueira

Gastón Institute Publications

Brazil has long seen itself as a destination for immigrants from across the globe, welcoming the likes of Portuguese, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, and many other nationalities throughout the twentieth century. Migration out of Brazil is a relatively new phenomenon. It was catalyzed in part by the military coup of 1964, when thousands of Brazilians went into exile (though many of them returned following the amnesty of 1979). Over the last few decades, the search for better economic opportunities has led more and more Brazilians to leave their homeland. Five of Brazils’ twenty-six states – Minas Gerais, Espírito …

Factors Influencing Cancer Screening Practices Of Underserved Women, Kelly Ackerson, Kimberlee A. Gretebeck

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose: This integrated review was conducted to evaluate the factors that inhibit or promote decisions by African American and Hispanic women to obtain cervical cancer screening.

Data sources: Research articles were identified using MEDLINE, PubMed, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health literature, published between 1999 and 2005.

Conclusions: Cervical cancer screening practices of African American and Hispanic women were influenced by extrinsic motivators including lack of insurance, no usual source of health care, acculturation, and socioeconomic factors. Intrinsic motivators were related to beliefs and perceptions of vulnerability, such as ignoring cervical cancer screening when no symptoms were present; …

Corrales Mainstreet: Community Economic Assessment, Jeffrey Mitchell, Molly J. Bleecker, Joshua M. Akers

BBER Publications

An analysis of Corrales, New Mexicos MainStreet business district and local market area. Demographic, housing, and economic characteristics of both areas are described. Pull factors and location quotients are used to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the MainStreet district. Data for the MainStreet district and the village of Corrales are compared to Sandoval County and the state. Concludes with a discussion of local opportunities and challenges. Illustrated with charts, data tables, and maps.'

Decency, Dignity, And Desert: Restoring Ideals Of Humane Punishment To Constitutional Discourse, Eva Nilsen

Faculty Scholarship

American punishment today is degrading, indecent, and harsher than deserved despite a Constitution designed to protect people from cruel and unusual punishment. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court’s response to the increasing inhumanity of contemporary punishment has been to reduce its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence to tidy categories, legal fictions, and hollow phrases. Absent from the discourse is any acknowledgement of the actual day-to-day experience facing the convicted person, or any suggestion that, although punishments can be degrading, they need not be. The case for treating a convicted person with respect for his human dignity, and for constitutional scrutiny of punishment as …

November 1, 2007, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

It's Just Not Cricket: Is The Principle Of Reciprocity Being Honored In The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty?, Richard Goldberger

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Scholarship @ Rit Fall 2007, Rit Libraries Publishing And Scholarship Support Center

RIT Digital Archives

For all the world is a stage; Watch the language; It's not just academics! Understanding student retention; Storytelling as a human resource tool; Robotic platforms go underwater; Examining the work of philosopher Agnes Heller; Sustainability through servicizing; Scientific salami slicing; Students on campus; Developing a brand; Can we teach creativity?; Mathematical symmetry in reflections; An active learning model; Outcomes for graduates of baccalaureate interpreter preparation programs specializing in interpreting in k-12th grade settings; Creating an online community of scholars

The Singapore Academy Of Law Annual Lecture 2007: Australia’S Contribution To The Development Of The Common Law, Delivered By The Honourable Murray Gleeson Ac, Chief Justice Of Australia, Yihan Goh, Nathaniel Khng

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

No abstract provided.

Ereview, Print Industry Center

RIT Digital Archives

No abstract provided.

The Origins Of Article Iii “Arising Under” Jurisdiction, Anthony J. Bellia Jr.

Duke Law Journal

Article III of the Constitution provides that the "judicial Power" of the United States extends to all cases "arising under" the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. What the phrase "arising under" imports in Article III has long confounded courts and scholars. This Article examines the historical origins of Article III "arising under" jurisdiction. First, it describes English legal principles that governed the jurisdiction of courts of general and limited jurisdiction-principles that animated early American jurisprudence regarding the scope of "arising under" jurisdiction. Second, it explains how participants in the framing and ratification of the Constitution understood "arising …

Corporate Governance Reform As Institutional Innovation: The Case Of Japan, Toru Yoshikawa, Lai Si Tsui-Auch, Jean Mcguire

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

To address the convergence-divergence debate in corporate governance, we conduct a multiple-case, multiple-level study to analyze the diffusion of governance innovation in Japan. We argue that Japanese systems of corporate governance neither fully converge to, nor completely diverge from, the Anglo-American model. Rather, Sony-the pioneer of corporate governance reforms-and its followers selectively adopted features from this model, decoupled them from the original context, and tailored them to fit to their own situations to generate governance innovation. However, we find that the spread of innovation across firms and institutional levels is far from linear and straightforward, and that other well-regarded firms …

Designing The Market Game For A Commodity Trading Simulation, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose to design a market game that (a) can be used in modeling and studying commodity trading scenarios, and (b) can be used in capturing human traders' behaviors. Specifically, we demonstrate the usefulness of this commodity trading game in a single-commodity futures trading scenario. A pilot experiment was run with a mixture of human traders and an autonomous agent that emulates the aggregatedmarket condition, with the assumption that this autonomous agent would hint each of its action through a public announcement. We show that the information collected from this simulation can be used to extract the …

Multi-Period Combinatorial Auction Mechanism For Distributed Resource Allocation And Scheduling, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng, Thin Yin Leong, Jong Han Park, Zhengyi Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider the problem of resource allocation and scheduling where information and decisions are decentralized, and our goal is to propose a market mechanism that allows resources from a central resource pool to be allocated to distributed decision makers (agents) that seek to optimize their respective scheduling goals. We propose a generic combinatorial auction mechanism that allows agents to competitively bid for the resources needed in a multi-period setting, regardless of the respective scheduling problem faced by the agent, and show how agents can design optimal bidding strategies to respond to price adjustment strategies from the auctioneer. We apply our …

The Price Of Stability In Selfish Scheduling Games, Lucas Agussurja, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Game theory has gained popularity as an approach to analysing and understanding distributed systems with selfinterested agents. Central to game theory is the concept of Nash equilibrium as a stable state (solution) of the system, which comes with a price - the loss in efficiency. The quantification of the efficiency loss is one of the main research concerns. In this paper, we study the quality and computational characteristic of the best Nash equilibrium in two selfish scheduling models: the congestion model and the sequencing model. In particular, we present the following results: (1) In the congestion model: first, the best …

Light-Weight Encryption Schemes For Multimedia Data, Feng Bao, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the pervasiveness of high-speed networks and multimedia communications and storage, the demand for highspeed cryptosystems is ever increasing. It is widely believed that there is a tradeoff between speed and security in cryptosystem design. No existing encryption algorithms are both fast enough for high-speed operation and sufficiently secure to withstand powerful cryptanalysis. In this paper, we propose and analyze a generic construction of high-speed encryption schemes. Our solution is based on the fact that there exist secure but relatively slow block ciphers, e. g. AES, and super-fast but relatively weaker stream ciphers. We then combine a secure block …

Advances And Challenges With Data Broadcasting In Wireless Mesh Networks, Chun Tung Chou, Junaid Qadir, Joo Ghee Lim, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wireless mesh networks have become a promising means to provide low-cost broadband access. Many WMN applications require broadcasting data (IPTV etc.) over the WMN. This article studies how efficient data broadcast, measured in terms of broadcast latency, can be realized by exploiting two features of WMNs: the use of multiple transmission rates at the link layer and the use of multiple radio interfaces on each node. We demonstrate that by exploiting these features, broadcast latency can be reduced severalfold compared to the current default practice in wireless LANs of using the lowest transmission rate for broadcast traffic. We also discuss …

Detecting And Segmenting Un-Occluded Items By Actively Casting Shadows, Tze K Koh, Amit Agrawal, Ramesh Raskar, Steve Morgan, Nicholas Miles, Barrie Hayes-Gill

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We present a simple and practical approach for segmenting un-occluded items in a scene by actively casting shadows. By ‘items’, we refer to objects (or part of objects) enclosed by depth edges. Our approach utilizes the fact that under varying illumination, un-occluded items will cast shadows on occluded items or background, but will not be shadowed themselves.We employ an active illumination approach by taking multiple images under different illumination directions, with illumination source close to the camera. Our approach ignores the texture edges in the scene and uses only the shadow and silhouette information to determine the occlusions. We show …

Sloque: Slot-Based Query Expansion For Complex Questions, Maggy Anastasia Suryanto, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searching answers to complex questions is a challenging IR task. In this paper, we examine the use of query templates with semantic slots to formulate slot-based queries. These queries have query terms assigned to entity and relationship slots. We develop several query expansion methods for slot-based queries so as to improve their retrieval effectiveness on a document collection. Each method consists of a combination of term scoring scheme, term scoring formula, and term assignment scheme. Our preliminary experiments evaluate these different slot-based query expansion methods on a collection of news documents,and conclude that:(1) slot-based queries yield better retrieval accuracy compared …

On Improving Wikipedia Search Using Article Quality, Meiqun Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Hady Wirawan Lauw, Ba-Quy Vuong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikipedia is presently the largest free-and-open online encyclopedia collaboratively edited and maintained by volunteers. While Wikipedia offers full-text search to its users, the accuracy of its relevance-based search can be compromised by poor quality articles edited by non-experts and inexperienced contributors. In this paper, we propose a framework that re-ranks Wikipedia search results considering article quality. We develop two quality measurement models, namely Basic and PeerReview, to derive article quality based on co-authoring data gathered from articles' edit history. Compared with Wikipedia's full-text search engine, Google and Wikiseek, our experimental results showed that (i) quality-only ranking produced by PeerReview gives …

Comment-Oriented Blog Summarization By Sentence Extraction, Meishan Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Much existing research on blogs focused on posts only, ignoring their comments. Our user study conducted on summarizing blog posts, however, showed that reading comments does change one's understanding about blog posts. In this research, we aim to extract representative sentences from a blog post that best represent the topics discussed among its comments. The proposed solution first derives representative words from comments and then selects sentences containing representative words. The representativeness of words is measured using ReQuT (i.e., Reader, Quotation, and Topic). Evaluated on human labeled sentences, ReQuT together with summation-based sentence selection showed promising results.

Model Checking In The Absence Of Code, Model And Properties, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking is a major approach in ensuring software correctness. It verifies a model converted from code against some formal properties. However, difficulties and programmers ’ reluctance to formalize formal properties have been some hurdles to its widespread industrial adoption. Also, with the advent of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components provided by third party vendors, model checking is further challenged as often only a binary version of the code is provided by vendors. Interestingly, latest instrumentation tools like PIN and Valgrind have enable execution traces to be collected dynamically from a running program. In this preliminary study, we investigate what can …

Measuring Article Quality In Wikipedia: Models And Evaluation, Meiqun Hu, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Hady W. Lauw, Ba-Quy Vuong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikipedia has grown to be the world largest and busiest free encyclopedia, in which articles are collaboratively written and maintained by volunteers online. Despite its success as a means of knowledge sharing and collaboration, the public has never stopped criticizing the quality of Wikipedia articles edited by non-experts and inexperienced contributors. In this paper, we investigate the problem of assessing the quality of articles in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. We propose three article quality measurement models that make use of the interaction data between articles and their contributors derived from the article edit history. Our Basic model is designed based …