Digital Commons Network^™

Credit Derivatives Market Design, Creating Fairness And Sustainability, Janis P. Sarra

All Faculty Publications

Now that the first wave of the financial crisis has been resolved through the coordinated efforts of regulators and banks, it is important to address some of the systematic weaknesses of the current financial system. One such weakness is the inappropriate incentive effects of the market for credit derivatives, and in particular, for credit default swaps. As a risk management tool, credit derivatives were originally an effective means of diversifying lending risk. Credit derivatives have worked to cover exposures where there have been credit events of the underlying reference entities. To date, the global market for derivatives has operated largely …

The Legacy Of Uk Tax Concepts In Canadian Income Tax Law, Benjamin Alarie, David G. Duff

All Faculty Publications

This article examines a specific category of legal transfers between the United Kingdom and Canada, considering the legacy of UK tax concepts in Canadian income tax law. Two main areas are considered where, in our view, this influence has been most profound: (i) the concept of income deployed for Canadian tax purposes; and (ii) judicial approaches to statutory interpretation and tax avoidance. Although the rules and concepts that Canadian courts and legislatures have adopted in each of these areas have necessarily evolved over time, the path of this evolution as well as current approaches reflect the enduring influence of UK …

Neuman And Beyond: Income Splitting, Tax Avoidance, And Statutory Interpretation In The Supreme Court Of Canada, David G. Duff

All Faculty Publications

This comment examines the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Neuman, considering the grounds of the decision itself as well as its implications for income splitting, tax avoidance, and the manner in which the Supreme Court of Canada interprets the Income Tax Act. Part II reviews the facts of the case, its judicial history, and the decision reached by the Supreme Court of Canada. Part ill evaluates this decision in light of the text of s. 56(2), the purpose of this provision, and the practical consequences of the court's interpretation. Part IV considers the implications of the decision and subsequent …

The Boundaries Of The Criminal Law: The Criminalization Of The Non-Disclosure Of Hiv, Isabel Grant

All Faculty Publications

In this paper, the author examines the trend toward the increased criminalization and punishment of persons with HIV who fail to inform their sexual partners of their HIV-positive status. Since the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Cuerrier, such behaviour may constitute aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault, the latter offence carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The paper surveys the Canadian case law and highlights the trend towards the imposition of increasingly harsh sentences. After reviewing public-health and criminal law options for dealing with non-disclosure of one's HIV status, the author concludes that criminal law should …

Japanese Students' Autonomy In Learning English As A Foreign Language In Out-Of-School Settings, Kimiyoshi Inomata

Doctoral Dissertations

unavailable

Educating For Justice: A History Of John Jay College Of Criminal Justice. [Third Edition]., Gerald Markowitz

Publications and Research

Revision of the previously updated edition Educating for justice. 2004. Includes an interview with Jeremy Travis, the fourth President of John Jay College of Criminal Justice conducted June 5, 2008.

TOC: Introduction. The making of John Jay College; 1965-1970. The era of open admissions: 1970-1976. The crisis: 1976. The development of criminal justice: 1976-1989. The student takeovers of 1989-1991. The quest for equity. John Jay comes of age. Epilogue. Index.

Digitizing Criminals: Web Delivery Of A Century On The Cheap., Ellen A. Sexton, Ellen Belcher Dr.

Publications and Research

This article presents the process, challenges and lessons learned from carrying out a small digital project to create a web resource of unique historic materials related to crime in New York City. All aspects of digital project management are discussed including selection, infrastructure, budgeting, workflow and delivery. Experiences from project administration, including management of a combination in-house and outsourced digitization and metadata are discussed. Formation and management of the resulting web resource is explained, which is the product of a creative amalgamation of commercial and open source software. Challenges encountered are presented with suggestions for practical solutions and considerations …

The Effects Of Religious Contextual Norms, Structural Constraints, And Personal Religiosity For Abortion Decisions, Amy Adamczyk

Publications and Research

Researchers have established that individual religiosity influences abortion attitudes, and that abortion attitudes, in turn, shape abortion restrictions and access. Less clear is whether religion and abortion structural constraints influence abortion decisions. This study examines the several individual, contextual, and structural factors that could shape the abortion decisions of women who conceive before marriage. Special attention is given to the importance of academic aspirations and structural constraints, in contrast to religious beliefs and county religious context, for making an abortion decision. Hierarchical modeling techniques and two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) are …

Fetal Positions: Unraveling The Influence Of Religion On Premarital Pregnancy Resolution, Amy Adamczyk, Jacob Felson

Publications and Research

This study illustrates the ways religiosity and denominational affiliation influence the probability that a young woman will have an abortion.

Religion And Initiation Into Marijuana Use: The Deterring Role Of Religious Friends, Amy Adamczyk, Ian Palmer

Publications and Research

Over the last two decades researchers have begun to look at how personal religious beliefs and behaviors influence substance use, finding that more religious teens are less likely to drink, smoke, and use illegal drugs. This study builds on this previous research, combining it with work on religious contextual effects to develop a theoretical model that explains why friends’ religion would influence teens’ marijuana use, even if teens are not personally religious. Using two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines whether individual and friends’ religiosity (e.g., religious participation and importance) or born-again …

A Truism With Attitude: The Tenth Amendment In Constitutional Context, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

The Tenth Amendment is caught in a crossfire hurricane. From one direction, it is dismissed as "but a truism"' with no significant constitutional function. From another direction, its unassuming language- "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" 2-has inspired Byzantine doctrines concerning such matters as federal commandeering of state institutions,3 conditions on federal spending programs implemented by states,4 and federal regulation of state governmental institutions. 5 The Tenth Amendment thus appears to be either the constitutional equivalent of a …

Dirty Dancing: The Fda Stumbles On The Chevron Two-Step, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Lars Noah deserves much credit for exposing some of the myriad ways in which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has consistently sought to expand its authority through questionable, and perhaps in some cases abusive, legal practices.' As Professor Noah observes, there are signs that the federal courts' century-long honeymoon with the FDA may be ending 2 -and perhaps the FDA never deserved the solicitude that it has traditionally received from both the judiciary and Congress. 3 If Professor Noah can hasten the onset of a more realistic legal and public attitude toward the FDA, he will have performed …

Investigation On The Performance Of Upqc-Q For Voltage Sag Mitigation And Pq Improvement At A Critical Load Point, Malabika Basu, S. P. Das, Gopal Dubey

Articles

The unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) is one of the major custom power solutions, which is capable of mitigating the effect of supply voltage sag at the load end or at the point of common coupling (PCC) in a distributed network. It also prevents the propagation of the load current harmonics to the utility and improves the input power factor of the load. The control of series compensator (SERC) of the UPQC is such that it injects voltage in quadrature advance to the supply current. Thus, the SERC consumes no active power at steady state. The other advantage of the …

Covert Encryption And Document Authentication Using Texture Coding, Jonathan Blackledge, Mary Hallot

Articles

With the improvements in the quality of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) printing and scanning devices, the ability to counterfeit documents has become a widespread problem. Consequently, there has been an increasing demand to develop digital watermarking techniques which can be applied to both electronic and printed images (and documents) that can be authenticated, prevent unauthorized copying and withstand abuse and degradation. In this paper , a new approach to digital watermarking is presented and a range of possible applications are considered. The process is defined by using concepts and techniques borrowed from Cryptography. It is based on computing a 'scramble image' by …

Multi-Algorithmic Cryptography Using Deterministic Chaos With Applications To Mobile Communications, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

In this extended paper, we present an overview of the principal issues associated with cryptography, providing historically significant examples for illustrative purposes as part of a short tutorial for readers that are not familiar with the subject matter. This is used to introduce the role that nonlinear dynamics and chaos play in the design of encryption engines which utilize different types of Iteration Function Systems (IFS). The design of such encryption engines requires that they conform to the principles associated with diffusion and confusion for generating ciphers that are of a maximum entropy type. For this reason, the role of …

A Surface Inspection Machine Vision System That Includes Fractal Texture Analysis, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitry Dubovitskiy

Articles

The detection, recognition and classification of features in a digital image is an important component of quality control systems in production and process engineering and industrial systems monitoring, in general. In this paper, a new pattern recognition system is presented that has been designed for the specific task of monitoring the quality of sheet-steel production in a rolling mill. The system is based on using both the Euclidean and Fractal geometric properties of an imaged object to develop training data that is used in conjunction with a supervised learning procedure based on the application of a fuzzy inference engine. Thus, …

Audio Data Verification And Authentication Using Frequency Modulation Based Watermarking, Jonathan Blackledge, Omar Farooq

Articles

An approach to watermarking digital signals using frequency modulation - ‘Chirp Coding’ - is considered. The principles underlying this approach are based on the use of a matched filter to reconstruct a ‘chirp stream’ code that is uniquely robust. The method is generic in the sense that it can, in principle, be used for a variety of different signal (the authentication of speech and biomedical signals, for example). Further, by generating a bit stream that is signal dependent, chirp coding provides a method of self-authentication, which has a wide range of applications including copyright protection and digital rights management. However, …

Object Detection And Classification With Applications To Skin Cancer Screening, Jonathan Blackledge, Dmitryi Dubovitskiy

Articles

This paper discusses a new approach to the processes of object detection, recognition and classification in a digital image. The classification method is based on the application of a set of features which include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. Thus, the approach used, incorporates the characterisation of an object in terms of its texture.

The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented which includes two novel fast segmentation algorithms for which C++ code is provided. The self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory is also presented and …

Extended Nonnegative Tensor Factorisation Models For Musical Sound Source Separation, Derry Fitzgerald, Matt Cranitch, Eugene Coyle

Articles

Recently, shift-invariant tensor factorisation algorithms have been proposed for the purposes of sound source separation of pitched musical instruments. However, in practice, existing algorithms require the use of log-frequency spectrograms to allow shift invariance in frequency which causes problems when attempting to resynthesise the separated sources. Further, it is difficult to impose harmonicity constraints on the recovered basis functions. This paper proposes a new additive synthesis-based approach which allows the use of linear-frequency spectrograms as well as imposing strict harmonic constraints, resulting in an improved model. Further, these additional constraints allow the addition of a source filter model to the …

Analysis Of Financial Data Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Ruairí De Fréin, Konstantinos Drakakis, Scott Rickard, Andrzej Cichocki

Articles

We apply Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to the prob-lem of identifying underlying trends in stock market data. NMF is arecent and very successful tool for data analysis including image andaudio processing; we use it here to decompose a mixture a data, thedaily closing prices of the 30 stocks which make up the Dow Jones In-dustrial Average, into its constitute parts, the underlying trends which govern the financial marketplace. We demonstrate how to impose ap-propriate sparsity and smoothness constraints on the components of thedecomposition. Also, we describe how the method clusters stocks to-gether in performance-based groupings which can be used for …

Hermione Granger As Young Girl Sleuth In The Harry Potter Series, Glenna Andrade

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Reappearing in the long tradition of girl sleuths such as Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew, Hermione Granger interrupts the centrality of the male-fantasy-adventure in the Harry Potter series. Throughout the novels, Hermione asserts her own subjecthood and participates in a shared agency to change from a scared girl into a woman battling for justice. Clearly, the Harry Potter series can affect readers differently. Some may perceive the comparisons to the Nancy Drew role of Era Three when Hermione uses her wits to detect clues, solve mysteries, and uncover suspects and their motives. Although others may stereotype Hermione as the conventional female …

August Wilson’S The Piano Lesson And The Limits Of Law, Emilie Benoit, James Tackach

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson features a debate between an African American brother and sister over the ownership of a richly symbolic piano, a family heirloom that represents the Charles family’s slave heritage and its endurance through Reconstruction. Ownership questions like the one presented in The Piano Lesson can usually be resolved in the courts, but Wilson’s play suggests that the law might be unable to resolve property disputes so problematically entangled with the legacy of slavery. Wilson offers, instead, a non-legal resolution to the piano debate presented in his play.

A Photometric Redshift Of Z = 1.8+0.4 -.3 For The Agile Grb 080514b, A. Rossi, A. De Ugarte Postigo, P. Ferrero, D. A. Kann, S. Klose, S. Schulze, J. Greiner, P. Schady, R. Filgas, E. E. Gonsalves, A. Küpcü Yolda¸S, T. Krühler, G. Szokoly, A. Yolda¸S, P. M.J. Afonso, C. Clemens, J. S. Bloom, D. A. Perley, J. P.U. Fynbo, A. J. Castro-Tirado, J. Gorosabel, P. Kubánek, Adria Updike, D. H. Hartmann, A. Giuliani, S. T. Holland, L. Hanlon, M. Bremer, J. French, G. Melady, D. A. García-Hernández

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

The AGILE gamma-ray burst GRB 080514B is the first detected to have emission above 30 MeV and an optical afterglow. However, no spectroscopic redshift for this burst is known.We report on our ground-based optical/NIR and millimeter follow-up observations of this event at several observatories, including the multi-channel imager GROND on La Silla, supplemented by Swift UVOT and Swift XRT data. The spectral energy distribution (SED) of the optical/NIR afterglow is found to decline sharply bluewards to the UV bands, which can be utilized in estimating the redshift. Fitting the SED from the Swift UVOT uvw2 band to the H band, …

The Impact Of The Blackberry On Couple Relationships, Jurgen Dieter Czechowsky

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This research focused on the BlackBerry developed by Research In Motion and its impact on couple relationships. The areas examined were couple communication, time spent together, and martial satisfaction using grounded theory, a demographic survey, the ENRICH Marital Satisfaction Scale and interviews. Ten couples participated and reported that the BlackBerry offered many practical applications for their relationship. The research showed that communication via the BlackBerry resulted in fewer face-to-face interactions. There was no increase in time together and for some time decreased. Martial satisfaction had increased for two couples, decreased for two couples with no influence for the rest of …

Intra-Urban Analysis Of Commercial Locations: A Gis-Based Approach, Christopher D. Storie

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The urban landscape is an interspersed mixing of residences, shops, theaters, parks, natural areas, and a multitude of other uses. From the early days of the central markets, to the planned downtown, to the heavily planned super-regional shopping complexes, commercial landscapes evolve. There has been considerable research conducted on analyzing the commercial structure of urban environments in an attempt to better understanding the nature of retailing and its resultant impacts on the geography of the city.

This research has three broad goals: a) to develop a technique that makes operational, in a systematized and objective manner, an approach to analyzing …

The Story Of South African Child Welfare: A History Of The Present, Jeanette Elizabeth Schmid

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Though significant transformation has occurred in post-apartheid South Africa, extensive poverty, AIDS and violence present major challenges. The capacity of families and local networks, undermined by apartheid policies, continue to be depleted, leaving children vulnerable. During the apartheid era, the child welfare sector, despite its intention of supporting children and families, utilized interventions that failed to address the needs of the majority and weakened family life. Post-apartheid, government has presented Developmental Social Welfare—with its family-centered, rights-oriented, community-based, participatory, generalist and intersectoral approach—as an indigenous correction to the previous expert-driven, pathologizing, individualistic, discriminatory and costly approaches.

Employing a Foucauldian genealogy or …

The Rapidly Flaring Afterglow Of The Very Bright And Energetic Grb 070125, Adria Updike, Josh B. Haislip, Melissa C. Nysewander, Andrew S. Fruchter, D. Alexander Kann, Sylvio Klose, Peter A. Milne, G. Grant Williams, Weikang Zheng, Carl W. Hergenrother, Jason X. Prochaska, Jules P. Halpern, Nestor Mirabal, John R. Thorstensen, Alexander J. Van Der Horst, Rhaana L.C. Starling, Judith L. Racusin, David N. Burrows, N. P.M. Kuin, Peter W.A. Roming, Eric Bellm, Kevin Hurley, Weidong Li, Alexei V. Filippenko, Cullen Blake, Dan Starr, Emilio E. Falco, Warren R. Brown, Xinyu Dai, Jinsong Deng, Liping Xin, Yulei Qiu, Jianyan Wei, Yuji Urata, Domenico Nanni, Elisabetta Maiorano, Eliana Palazzi, Guiseppe Greco, Corrado Bartolini, Adriano Guarnieri, Adalberto Piccioni, Graziella Pizzichini, Federica Terra, Kuntal Misra, B. C. Bhatt, G. C. Anupama, X. Fan, L. Jiang, Ralph A.M.J. Wijers, Daniel E. Reichart, Hala A. Eid, Ginger Bryngelson, Jason Puls, R. C. Goldthwaite, Dieter H. Hartmann

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Multiwavelength Analysis Of The Intriguing Grb 061126: The Reverse Shock Scenario And Magnetization, A. Gomboc, S. Kobayashi, C. Guidorzi, A. Melandri, V. Mangano, B. Sbarufatti, C. G. Mundell, P. Schady, R. J. Smith, Adria Updike, D. A. Kann, K. Misra, E. Rol, A. Pozanenko, A. J. Castro-Tirado, G. C. Anupama, D. Bersier, M. F. Bode, D. Carter, P. Curran, A. Fruchter, J. Graham, D. H. Hartmann, M. Ibrahimov, A. Levan, A. Monfardini, C. J. Mottram, P. T. O’Brien, P. Prema, D. K. Sahu, I. A. Steele, N. R. Tanvir, K. Wiersema

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Physical Modeling Of Railroad Ballast Using The Parallel Gradation Scaling Technique Within The Cyclical Triaxial Framework, Adam F. Sevi

Doctoral Dissertations

"Due to the difficulties involved with testing large particle granular materials such as rockfill and railroad ballast, several methods of testing scaled down model specimens have been introduced. Of these techniques, the parallel gradation model has been found to be most useful. The parallel gradation model states that a smaller grainsize distribution model granular material, of the same composition as the prototype material, can be used in triaxial testing at a scaled down grainsize, if the model materials grainsize is exactly parallel to the prototype material. Therefore, a model granular material composed of a smaller, but parallel, grainsize distribution can …

Harding University Graduate Catalog 2008-2009, Harding University

Harding Academic Catalogs

Academic catalog for the graduate programs at Harding University.