Digital Commons Network^™

Non-Apoptotic Roles Of Caspase-8 And Caspase-2, Brooke M. Helfer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Caspases are proteolytic enzymes involved in committing apoptosis, but through the studies of knockout phenotypes in mice and Drosophila , it has been speculated that caspases might possess additional non-apoptotic functions.;We have found non-apoptotic functions for caspase-8 in both normal and tumor cell lines. Specifically, we found that caspase-8 promotes cell migration, adhesion, and Rac activation. Subsequently, we also found that caspase-8 interacts with the p85 subunit of PI3K. Accompanying stimulation of motility with epidermal growth factor the phosphorylation of caspase-8 on tyrosine-380 is induced and this phosphorylation allows for p85 interaction, cell migration, adhesion, and Rac activation. Caspase-8 also …

Flame Retardants For Abs And Abs-Matrix Wood-Plastic Composites, Tze-Wei Liu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The goal of this study was to recycle acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) into wood plastic composites (WPCs). One major concern in this application is flammability. Thus, halogenated and non-halogenated flame retardants (FRs) were investigated. FRs were mixed with ABS using an internal mixer or an extruder, and samples were molded using a hot press or an injection molding machine. Mechanical properties were assessed by flexural tests, and flammability was measured by UL-94 type tests and limiting oxygen index. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and FTIR were also performed in order to understand the decomposition behavior of ABS-based WPCs.;Mechanical results showed that adding wood flour …

Application Of Multi-Agents To Power Distribution Systems, Koushaly Nareshkumar

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The electric power system has become a very complicated network at present because of re-structuring and the penetration of distributed energy resources. In addition, due to increasing demand for power, issues such as transmission congestion have made the power system stressed. A single fault can lead to massive cascading effects, affecting the power supply and power quality. An overall solution for these issues can be obtained by a new artificial intelligent mechanism called the multi-agent system. A multi-agent system is a collection of agents, which senses the environmental changes and acts diligently on the environment in order to achieve its …

The Foundation, Education, And Practice Of Osteopathic Medicine, Anthony P. Salvador

Honors Theses

Osteopathic medicine has quickly grown into a successful and respectable branch of medical practice. It was created out of a necessity for change in the late 1800s, and continues to be a credible form of alternative medicine. After reviewing literary material, journal articles, and numerous osteopathic college sources it was seen that osteopathic medicine can be practiced in numerous settings and will become integral in the near future due to the shortage of physicians in the United States. Today, osteopaths work closely with all types of medical personal including medical doctors.

Marriage And Finance, Jeffrey P. Dew

Faculty Publications

This chapter reviews interdisciplinary research concerning the association between marriage and personal finances. The first section of the chapter discusses financial practices within marriage and the financial differences between married couples and other family types. The second section reviews the research on the ability of financial factors to predict marital formation, satisfaction/conflict, and dissolution. The chapter also suggests future research avenues.

Does Marriage And Relationship Education Work? A Meta-Analytic Study, Alan J. Hawkins, Victoria L. Blanchard, Scott A. Baldwin, Elizabeth B. Fawcett

Faculty Publications

In this meta-analytic study, the authors examined the efficacy of marriage and relationship education (MRE) on 2 common outcomes: relationship quality and communication skills. A thorough search produced 86 codable reports that yielded 117 studies and more than 500 effect sizes. The effect sizes for relationship quality for experimental studies ranged from d = .30 to .36, while the communication skills effect sizes ranged from d = .43 to .45. Quasi-experimental studies generated smaller effect sizes, but these appeared to be due to pretest group differences. Moderate-dosage programs produced larger effect sizes than did lows-dosage programs. For communication skills, published …

Tennessee Farm Bureau News - January 2008, Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation

Tennessee Farm Bureau News

No abstract provided.

Children, Kin, And Court: Designing Third Party Custody Policy To Protect Children, Third Parties And Parents, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

Millions of American children are raised primarily by people other than their parents, mostly by grandparents and other kin, and millions more are raised by third parties for some period of their childhood. In most such situations, informal arrangements negotiated by family members and kinship networks effectively provide care for these children. Many cases, however, require some formal legal arrangement; third party custody orders are needed to obtain necessary services and benefits for children whose parents are absent, and to protect children in the rare but still significant instances in which a parent is abusive or neglectful.

States currently have …

Haas V. Lockheed Martin Corp.: Making The Case For Incorporation Of The Discovery Rule Into The Limitations Statute Governing Discriminatory Discharge Claims, Kerry T. Cooperman

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Darden V. Peters: Giving Deference Where Deference May Not Be Due, Raisa L. Michalek

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Suicidal Ideation In College Students Varies Across Semesters: The Mediating Role Of Belongingness, Scott R. Braithwaite, Kimberly Van Orden, Tracy K. Witte, Lisa M. James, Yessenia Castro, Kathryn H. Gordon, Daniel L. Hollar, Thomas E. Joiner Jr.

Faculty Publications

The interpersonal–psychological theory of suicidal behavior (Joiner, 2005)proposes that the need to belong is fundamental; when met it can prevent suicide and when thwarted it can substantially increase the risk for suicide. We investigate one source of group-wide variation in belongingness among college students—changes in the social composition of college campuses across academic semesters—as an explanation for variation in suicidal ideation across the academic year.Our results indicate that in a sample of college students at a large southern state university (n=309), suicidal ideation varied across academic semesters, with high-est levels in summer compared to both spring and fall. Differences in …

Global Climate Change Offers Hot Career Opportunities, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Michael Gerrard, editor of Global Climate Change and U.S. Law, is passionate about global warming and the role lawyers can play in improving the environment. Student Lawyer's Donna Gerson talks to Gerrard about his career path and how law students can make a difference combating climate change.

Missing Parents, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In an effort to protect children from abuse and neglect, the child welfare system focuses on parents, both as potential wrongdoers and as the locus for rehabilitation. This attention informs the discourse surrounding state intervention: parents' rights are balanced against children's rights, and family autonomy is understood as an overriding value. But the child welfare system centers parents in the wrong way, leading to academic debates that miss the mark and methods of intervention that are often counterproductive.

An effective child welfare system would be built upon the understanding that, in general, the state can best support children by supporting …

Courts, Constitutions, And Public Finance: Some Recent Experiences From The States, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Unlike the federal Constitution, virtually all state constitutions give detailed attention to questions of public finance. State constitutions limit spending, mandate certain types of spending, constrain taxation and debt, and require special procedures for enacting a budget. One consequence of the constitutionalization of the state fisc is its judicialization, as these measures trigger litigation. Fiscal and political conflicts turn into legal disputes, with courts joining governors and legislatures in shaping state budgets and making state fiscal policy.

This chapter provides an early-21st-century snapshot of the state constitutional law of state finance through a survey of six recent state supreme court …

A House Still Divided, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

In response to Adam B. Cox, Immigration Law's Organizing Principles, 157 U. PA. L. REv. 341 (2008).

Adam Cox's Immigration Law's Organizing Principles contests the traditional view that immigration law and alienage law – in his terms, "selection rules" and "regulation rules" – are distinct categories with legal and moral salience. Building upon prior scholarship that also called the distinction into question, Cox offers important insights into why this dividing line does not have the sharp conceptual edges that the jurisprudence would suggest exist. Despite the analytical persuasiveness of Cox's argument, I am not convinced that it will destabilize the …

Repairing Family Law, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars in the burgeoning field of law and emotion have paid surprisingly little attention to family law. This gap is unfortunate because law and emotion has the potential to bring great insights to family law. This Article begins to fill this void — and inaugurate a larger debate about the central role of emotion in family law — by exploring the intriguing and significant consequences for the regulation of families that flow from a theory of intimacy first articulated by psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein. According to Klein, individuals love others, inevitably transgress against those they love out of hate and …

The Cultural Defense: Reflections In Light Of The Model Penal Code And The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

Much of this essay is an inquiry into just how cultural factors might figure in claims about elements of offenses, justifications, excuses, and mitigations under the Model Penal Code – still the most comprehensive and systematic code of criminal law in the United States. That exploration gives us a sense of how culture may matter for criminal liability absent a specifically labeled "cultural defense"; it also provides an idea of how much could be accomplished by expansions of the standard defenses.

In the latter part of the essay, I think about cultural practices as a potential justification or generalized exemption …

Legitmacy And Criminal Justice, Jeffrey A. Fagan

Faculty Scholarship

Surveys of public opinion over four decades consistently show that Americans have little confidence in the fairness or effectiveness of the criminal justice system and criminal law more generally. This crisis of confidence is most acute among racial minorities: surveys show that more than one in three Whites have little confidence in the police, compared to more than half of Black respondents. Both the lack of confidence and the racial breach in perceptions of the law and legal actors have persisted for nearly four decades, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

But we might reasonably ask whether and …

Vocal Tremor And Vibrato In The Same Person: Acoustic And Electromyographic Differences, Christopher Dromey, Marshall E. Smith

Faculty Publications

Objectives: The goal of this study was to measure and describe differences between vocal vibrato and essential tremor of the voice in one individual who exhibited both types of modulation.
Study Design: Case study.
Methods: Recordings of spoken and sung vowels produced by the same individual at three effort levels were examined via analysis of acoustic and laryngeal electromyographic (LEMG) signals.
Results: Modulation rate, periodicity and spectral measures of both audio and muscle activation signals revealed generally slower, more prominent and more regular patterns in sung than spoken conditions.
Conditions: There was not always a clear correspondence between LEMG and …

Nasser And Qutb: The Lives And Legacies Of Two Controversial Egyptians, Rachel Leonard

Honors Theses

The problems of the Middle East are complex, in-depth issues that cannot be solved easily. The matters of oil, Islam and very limited participation of the people In government mix to create problems that defy solutions from those within or outside the region. Historians and political scientists have come to examine these issues more closely, especially because of the serious political, religious and military conflicts centered in the area. There has been an upsurge in political Islamist movements, radical, fundamental and otherwise, that tend to frighten policy makers in the West. These movements arose alongside and often in opposition to …

The Mysteriously Reappearing Cause Of Action: The Court’S Expanded Concept Of Intentional Gender And Race Discrimination In Federally Funded Programs, Derek W. Black

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Requiem For Sam's Bank, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This paper situates Wal-Mart's failed application to form a banking subsidiary in the context of payments policy. Generally, I argue that permitting Wal-Mart to have a bank would have a salutary effect on the relatively uncompetitive market for payment networks. The dominant position of Visa and MasterCard, in which payments are priced above cost to subsidize credit, inevitably will give way to a world in which payment services are priced at cost, or even below cost as a loss-leader to attract customers to other goods and services. Entry into this market by Wal-Mart would be likely to spur more robust …

The President’S Question Time: Power, Information, And The Executive Credibility Gap, Sudha Setty

Faculty Scholarship

The rule of law depends on a working separation of powers and transparency and accountability in government. If information is power, the ability of one branch of government to control information represents the ability to control federal legislation, policy, and decision-making. The Framers of the United States Constitution developed the Madisonian model of separated powers and functions, and a system of checks and balances to maintain those separations, with this in mind. History has shown a progressive shift of the power to control information toward the executive branch and away from the Legislature. Particularly when unified, one-party government precludes effective …

Misapplying Equity Theories: Dress Codes At Work, Jennifer L. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

This Article provides a new perspective on Title VII caselaw concerning employer-mandated, sex-specific dress codes. With few exceptions, courts have held that employer dress codes do not constitute sex discrimination even when they expressly differentiate based solely on an employee's sex. In other contexts, courts readily acknowledge that facially sex-based practices and policies are presumptively unlawful under Title VII. When it comes to dress codes, however, nearly the opposite is true. Courts generally presume a sex-based dress code to be permissible, and the burden falls heavily on the employee to show, beyond the mere fact of differential treatment, some additional …

A Prescription For Racial Equality In Medicine, Barbara A. Noah

Faculty Scholarship

A significant body of evidence suggests that minority race adversely affects the quantity and quality of health care provided to minority patients. Although no one has documented systemic overt racism among health care providers, persistent inequities in the delivery of health care services pose serious problems for patients of color. Ultimately, the medical establishment must confront the reality that African Americans and other racial minorities often do not receive equal treatment in the health care system.

The continued implementation of affirmative action programs as part of the medical school admissions process plays a key role in improving health care delivery …

Impossible, Infinite Illustrations, Michael Dango

Neureuther Book Collection Essay Competition

Undergraduate Winner: 2nd Place, 2008. 21st Annual Carl Neureuther Student Book Collection Competition.

Looking Down The Road Less Traveled: Challenges To Persuading The Legal Profession To Define Problems More Humanistically, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

This essay will focus on three factors that may help to explain why it seems to be so difficult for many lawyers to escape the confines of a narrow, legalistic framing of issues-or more poetically, why they may be predisposed against looking down "the road less traveled by." These factors should be taken into account as challenges to the widespread adoption of innovative, more humanistic approaches to lawyering. First, the essay will turn to research regarding the psyches and psychological needs of the people who choose to attend law school and become lawyers. Second, the essay will consider what is …

Race-Specific Drugs: Regulatory Trends And Public Policy, Osagie K. Obasogie, David E. Winikoff

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond Best Practices: Strict Scrutiny As A Regulatory Model For Race-Specific Medicines, Osagie K. Obasogie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Learning From Difference: The New Architecture Of Experimentalist Governance In The Eu, Charles F. Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that current widespread characterisations of EU governance as multi-level and networked overlook the emergent architecture of the EU's public rule making. In this architecture, framework goals (such as full employment, social inclusion, good water status, a unified energy grid) and measures for gauging their achievement are established by joint action of the Member States and EU institutions. Lower-level units (such as national ministries or regulatory authorities and the actors with whom they collaborate) are given the freedom to advance these ends as they see fit. But in return for this autonomy, they must report regularly on their …