Digital Commons Network^™

The Extended Picture Group, With Applications To Line Arrangement Complements, Charles Richard Egedy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We obtain the picture group as the quotient with a torsion subgroup, of an extended picture group, which is isomorphic to the kernel of a precrossed module homomorphism. In addition to expanding the notion of a picture group, the new formulation gives a natural way to construct homomorphisms between picture groups by describing deformations of one-vertex subpictures. The extended picture group thus provides a convenient way to describe generators for the second homotopy group of line arrangement complements as well as homomorphisms between these groups. In particular, we show that the homomorphisms relate to a lattice structure corresponding roughly to …

Originalism And The "Challenge Of Change": Abduced-Principle Originalism And Other Mechanisms By Which Originalism Sufficiently Accommodates Changed Social Conditions, Lee J. Strang

UC Law Journal

One of the most persistent criticisms of originalism-and also one of the most powerful-is that originalism is not a viable interpretative methodology because of the tremendous technological, social, cultural, religious, and moral change that has occurred since the Constitution's original meaning was created. The Constitution's original meaning arose in contexts so dramatically different from our own, the criticism goes, that a Constitution whose meaning was limited by those contexts would be unworkable in today's world.

This form of criticism of originalism - the challenge of changeis pervasive. In this Article, I argue that originalism has, within its analytical quiver, six …

Can A Subsequent Change In Law Void A Marriage That Was Valid At Its Inception? Considering The Legal Effect Of Proposition 8 On California's Existing Same-Sex Marriages, Lois A. Weithorn

UC Law Journal

On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court held that California's prohibition of same-sex marriage violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the California Constitution. One month later, pursuant to that court's authority, county clerks throughout California began certifying marriages of same-sex couples. Opponents of same-sex marriage placed a voter initiative- ultimately known as Proposition 8-on the November 4, 2008 ballot. Proposition 8 passed with 52.3% of the vote, thereby placing in the California Constitution the language, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." In response to its passage, California officials …

Passwords And Keys Under The Dmca: A Call For Clarification From The Courts Or Congress, Lindsey M. Shinn

UC Law Journal

While the DMCA was passed to protect copyrighted content in the digital age, the cases interpreting the statutory terms "circumvention" and "authorization" are inconsistent. The courts have staked out two poles on what does and does not constitute circumvention under the DMCA: aftermarket parts that run items like garage doors do not circumvent, but code that allows an unanticipated device to play a CD is a circumvention. This Note explores the surprising consequences of carrying the reasoning of each of these lines of cases to their logical conclusions. The most unsettled area naturally falls in the middle-in the cases of …

Heller, High Water (Mark)? Lower Courts And The New Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Brannon P. Denning, Glenn H. Reynolds

UC Law Journal

In the wake of District of Columbia v. Heller, lower courts have entertained a number of challenges to myriad federal, state, and local gun-control laws. Not surprisingly, given language in Heller seemingly intended to forestall some claims, courts have not, to date, invalidated federal or state gun-control laws that fall short of D.C.'s near-prohibition on private gun ownership. While the lower court cases to date confirm our earlier predictions that lower courts would not run wild with Heller, it is not clear that Heller was a purely symbolic victory either. Governments now find themselves legislating in the shadow of Heller; …

Supply Restrictions At The Margins Of Heller And The Abortion Analogue: Stenberg Principles, Assault Weapons, And The Attitudinalist Critique, Nicholas J. Johnson

UC Law Journal

Through a consideration of the assault weapons question, this Article engages the criticism that District of Columbia v. Heller provides an insufficient standard for resolving many questions that emerge under the newly-clarified Second Amendment. After arguing that assault weapons might enjoy threshold protection under Heller's common-use test, the Article shows how the principles grounding the Supreme Court's abortion jurisprudence are especially suited for resolving aspects of the question that Heller does not explicitly answer. Particularly, this Article shows how constitutional protection of the best methodology for preserving life or health-advanced by the liberal wing of the Court in abortion jurisprudence-is …

Second Amendment Limitations And Criminological Considerations, Don B. Kates, Clayton E. Cramer

UC Law Journal

Criminological studies which identify perpetrator characteristics are unanimous in finding that almost all murderers fall into three categories: (i) the mentally disturbed, and/or (2) adults with criminal records, and/or (3) juveniles with juvenile records. Many murder perpetrators exhibit two or all three characteristics. Thus laws such as the ones Heller invalidated that seek to disarm the general population have minimal value and deprive victims of the means of self-defense.

The Second Amendment does not guarantee: (i) weapons of indiscriminate destructiveness such as cannons, (2) any right of violent felons or of other felons whom legislatures reasonably identify as likely to …

The Good Faith Exception As Applied To Illegal Predicate Searches: A Free Pass To Institutional Ignorance, Andrew Z. Lipson

UC Law Journal

The Supreme Court recently clarified the scope of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule in Herring v. United States. The Court's decision, however, did not address whether the good faith exception should apply to illegal predicate searches. Illegal predicate searches are searches where a police officer misapplies the law and conducts an illegal search that yields evidence later used to obtain a search warrant. There is currently a circuit split on the application of the good faith exception to situations where there has been an illegal predicate search. Some circuits have held that even though the searching officer …

Four Exceptions In Search Of A Theory: District Of Columbia V. Heller And Judicial Ipse Dixit, Carlton F. W. Larson

UC Law Journal

This Symposium Essay examines the Supreme Court's Second Amendment decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. Specifically, the Essay examines four exceptions to the right to bear arms that the Court specifically approved: (i) laws disarming felons, (2) laws disarming the mentally ill, (3) laws prohibiting the possession of firearms in sensitive places, and (4) laws regulating the commercial sale of firearms. The Essay argues that these exceptions cannot be completely justified on originalist grounds, at least under the form of originalism that the Court is likely to employ. The Court's approach seems to require specific historical justifications for the …

Heller And Nonlethal Weapons, Craig S. Lerner, Nelson Lund

UC Law Journal

Two important opinions in the past decade, both written by Justice Antonin Scalia, have sought to apply originalist jurisprudence to constitutional issues raised by technologies that were unknown at the time of the founding. In Kyllo v. United States, the Court held that using sense-enhancing technology to obtain information about the interior of a home, even without a physical intrusion, constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, at least if the technology is not "in general public use." This rule appropriately preserves the privacy that could only have been violated by a trespass in 1791. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the …

Second Amendment Decision Rules, Calvin Massey

UC Law Journal

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court determined that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms for self-defense. That right is a constitutional operative rule: We know it exists but we have little idea of its boundaries. Constitutional decision rules, whether they be tiered scrutiny, multi-factor analytical tests, categorical rules, or something else, function to enable courts, lawyers, and citizens to understand the dimensions of any given right. Because the Court has announced a new constitutional operative rule without providing much guidance concerning the applicable constitutional decision rules, this Essay is an effort to identify …

Closing The Tax Gap: Encouraging Voluntary Compliance Through Mass-Media Publication Of High-Profile Tax Issues, Elizabeth Branham

UC Law Journal

In 2001, the IRS estimated the gross tax gap was approximately $345 billion dollars. Each dollar not collected represents lost revenue for the federal government, the collection of which would be contributed to federally-funded public works. Within the tax gap, underreporting of individual income represented over half of uncollected revenue. Among that group of noncompliant taxpayers, most are generally not subject to third-party reporting and are therefore capable of choosing to file or to evade. This Note discusses the impact of high-profile tax prosecutions on social norms and values as an avenue to address and encourage voluntary compliance.

Why Didn't The Supreme Court Take My Advice In The Heller Case - Some Speculative Responses To An Egocentric Question, Sanford Levinson

UC Law Journal

There were a number of argumentative routes by which the Supreme Court could have reached the same basic result as was announced in the Heller case, i.e., the invalidation of the de facto prohibition of private handgun ownership in the District of Columbia. One of them was adoption of the approach suggested by Solicitor General Paul Clement (though he explicitly suggested remanding the case back to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for consideration in light of a somewhat different standard of review, that could have easily led to the same outcome). The brief that he submitted …

The Hangman's Noose And The Lynch Mob: Hate Speech And The Jena Six, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Taking the hangman's noose hanging in Jena, Louisiana in 2006 as a starting point, this Article begins by placing the hanging of a noose in historical context. The Article then proceeds to explore contemporary manifestations of noose hanging in the workplace, in schools and other settings. The Article examines noose hangings that occurred around the country since the display in Jena to explore the social meaning of a noose. Also examined are media constructions of noose hanging and the perception that some Blacks targeted by noose hanging have had of these incidents. The article concludes with a victim based reasonable …

Rethinking Consideration In The Electronic Age, Robert A. Hillman, Maureen A. O'Rourke

UC Law Journal

Our fast-paced age of electronic agreements that ostensibly govern transactions as diverse as downloading software, ordering goods, and engaging in collaborative development projects raises questions regarding the suitability of contract law as the appropriate legal framework. While this question arises in many settings, we focus here on the free and open source software (FOSS) movement because of the maturity and success of its model and the ubiquity of its software. We explore in particular whether open source licenses are supported by consideration, and argue that they are, and that open source licenses are contracts. We further argue that a contractual …

Function Spaces, Wavelets And Representation Theory, Jens Gerlach Christensen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is concerned with the interplay between the theory of Banach spaces and representations of groups. The wavelet transform has proven to be a useful tool in characterizing and constructing Banach spaces, and we investigate a generalization of an already known technique due to H.G. Feichtinger and K. Gröchenig. This generalization is presented in Chapter 3, and in Chapters 4 and 5 we present examples of spaces which can be described using the theory. The first example clears up a question regarding a wavelet characterization of Bergman spaces related to a non-integrable representation. The second example is a wavelet …

Transparency, 2009, Eugene R. Fidell

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Covenants Not To Sue Provide Less Immunity In A Post-Medimmune World, Edo Royker

UC Law Journal

The primary focus of this Note is to address the impact of the totality of circumstances test, as now adopted by the Federal Circuit, on covenants not to sue. Under the old reasonable apprehension test, promises not to sue were given greater weight than under the new totality of the circumstances test. Part I of this Note will address the new totality of the circumstances test under Medlmmune and SanDisk. Part II of this Note will begin by analyzing the application of promises not to sue prior to the Medlmmune and SanDisk decisions and then compare the weight given to …

The Effects Of Increasing The Risk Perception Of High-Risk Behaviors On Decision Making Among College Daily Smokers And Never-Smokers, Scott Patterson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Participation in high-risk behaviors, such as substance use or dangerous driving practices, is widely reported by young adults and college students. Psychosocial theories explain participation in high-risk behaviors by the effects of risk perception on the outcome of behavior. Physiological researchers assert that biological factors (such as the role of the prefrontal cortex) better account for participation in high-risk behaviors based on impulsive decision-making patterns in substance users. The current study explored the relationship between impulsive decision-making and risk perception by assessing the impact of changes in high-risk perceptions on a measure of impulsive decision-making (delay discounting task). A sample …

Michael Martin And The Moral Argument For God's Existence, Robert Keith Loftin

LSU Master's Theses

Theism, that is, belief in the existence of God, has, over the last forty or so years, been making a quiet comeback. Whereas for several decades the “death of God” was heralded—culminating, perhaps, with Time magazine’s April 8, 1966, title: “Is God Dead?”—philosophers are once again vigorously debating the rationality of theistic belief. Emerging from amid this renaissance is an increasing number of publications treating the various so-called “theistic proofs” or arguments for God’s existence. These arguments are part of the project of natural theology, that is, the project of establishing the rationality of theistic belief apart from appeal to …

Processor Design Space Exploration And Performance Prediction, Balachandran Ramadass

LSU Master's Theses

The use of simulation is well established in processor design research to evaluate architectural design trade-offs. More importantly, Cycle by Cycle accurate simulation is widely used to evaluate the new designs in processor research because of its accurate and detailed processor performance measurement. However, only configuration in a subspace can be simulated in practice due to its long simulation time and limited resources, leading to suboptimal conclusions that might not be applied to the larger design space. In this thesis, we propose a performance prediction approach which employs a state-of-the-art technique from experimental design, machine learning and data mining. Our …

Team Task Interdependence Perceptions: Toward An Integrative Model Of Teamwork, Jared Ledoux

LSU Master's Theses

The present study examines perceptions of task interdependence and workflow at the individual- and team-levels to evaluate the degree to which team perceptions and homogeneity of perceptions predict team communication and performance in a military combat computer simulation. Team members who perceived higher levels of task interdependence and workflow performed better at both the individual and team levels of analysis. These teams also communicated more frequently, although communication was not significantly correlated with performance. The present findings provide support for the examination of task interdependence perceptions as a means to explain team performance and communication.

Slab-On-Girder Prestressed Concrete Bridges: Linear And Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis And Experimental Load Tests, Marcio Costa Araujo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

“A diaphragm is a transverse stiffener, which is placed between girders in order to maintain section geometry”, (AASHTO, 2002). Intermediate diaphragms, usually placed at the midspan or third points of a bridge, are thought to contribute to the overall distribution of live loads in bridges. Cast-in-place concrete intermediate diaphragms were investigated in this study in order to assess their load distribution effectiveness in prestressed concrete I-girder bridges. Finite element packages (Ansys and GT STRUDL) were used to perform the analyses for multiple bridge configurations, including a parametric study of span length, girder spacing, and concrete strength. It was found that …

Global Positioning System In Curved Space-Time And Other Applications Of General Relativity, Argenis Daniel Da Silva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this work, we present some applications of the theory of General Relativity. First, we show a numerical scheme to account for relativistic effects in the Global Positioning System. Then, a couple of applications of astrophysical interest are worked out. These are the study of the gravitational collapse of stars and the dynamical evolution of a three-dimensional Einstein-Klein-Gordon field.

The Effects Of Visual Representations On Teacher Training Of Phonological Awareness Principles, Rachel Kennedy Powell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Teachers are now being held to high accountability standards in reading instruction, yet studies show that teachers lack adequate knowledge in reading and phonological awareness principles (Moats, 1994, 2009; Spencer, Schuele, Guillot, & Lee, 2008). The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of visual representations of letter/sound production (i.e., Phonic Faces, Norris, 2001) on improving teacher knowledge of phonological awareness principles, and to determine if there is a concomitant improvement in phonological awareness and reading acquisition for children in those classrooms. Seventeen kindergarten teachers from a Mississippi school were pretested on phonological awareness principles, then divided into …

An Investigation Of Creative Potential In High School Musicians: Recognizing, Promoting, And Assessing Creative Ability Through Music Composition, Elizabeth Menard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Student attitudes and teacher perceptions regarding creativity, composition, and its assessment possibilities were investigated using mixed-method techniques in two differing high school music programs. A Talented Music Program, providing accelerated instruction to gifted musicians (with composition instruction) and a typical performance based band program (composition never taught) were examined. Students participated in a six-week composition program. Final compositions were evaluated by differing judging groups: teachers, students, and expert composers. Data were collected through interviews, observations, attitude surveys, student and teacher journals, and composition assessment. Analysis of teacher perceptions revealed themes indentifying challenges to creativity development in high school classrooms: tradition …

Statistical Methods And Models For Analyzing Sugarcane (Saccharum Species Hybrids) Plant Breeding Data, Marvellous Mabeza Zhou

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Early generation selection of sugarcane families using means is inadequate while visual seedling selection is subjective and inefficient. Data from advanced variety trials (yield, quality and agronomic traits) are collected over several crop-years to determine yield potential and ratooning ability of genotypes follow a multivariate repeated measures structure. In Louisiana, the sugarcane borer and recently the Mexican rice borer are major insect pests of sugarcane. Both borers have similar feeding habits, providing an opportunity for investigating if genotypes resistant to one species would provide resistance to the other (cross-resistance). The objectives of the study were to identify statistical methods to …

Biophysical Economic Analysis Of Nutrient And Sediment Management Practices In The Mississippi Alluvial Valley, Augustus Nyako Matekole

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Conventional drainage systems and poorly drained soils tend to increase row crop agriculture nutrient and sediment effluent loads. Best management practices help reduce row crop production environmental pollution. This dissertation looked at nutrient and tillage management practices that could help farmers address future total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) for the Cabin-Teele sub-watershed, within the lower Mississippi River Basin. The dissertation had two objectives. The first objective was to examine the economic and environmental impact of tillage and nutrient management practices in reducing agricultural pollutants to meet TMDL requirements. Relative cost effectiveness of different tillage and nutrient management practices were analyzed …

The Effect Of Interactive Homework On Dibels Performance, Shelley M. Scott

LSU Master's Theses

Homework is a common practice in most kindergarten classrooms. There are varying opinions on the purpose of homework, the frequency in which homework should be given, the duration of time kindergarten-aged students should spend on homework, and how the use of homework impacts student performance. The DIBELS (Good & Kamanski, 2003) is an assessment tool that measures student performance on early literacy skills and identifies students who are at-risk for failure to read. The proposed study will incorporate recommendations for creating developmentally appropriate homework that addresses skill deficiencies identified by the DIBELS to determine the impact of homework on DIBELS …

Realtime Reservoir Characterization And Beyond: Cyber-Infrastructure Tools And Technologies, Yaakoub Youssef El-Khamra

LSU Master's Theses

The advent of the digital oil _x000C_eld and rapidly decreasing cost of computing creates opportunities as well as challenges in simulation based reservoir studies, in particular, real-time reservoir characterization and optimization. One challenge our e_x000B_orts are directed toward is the use of real-time production data to perform live reservoir characterization using high throughput, high performance computing environments. To that end we developed the required tools of parallel reservoir simulator, parallel ensemble Kalman _x000C_lter and a scalable work ow manager. When using this collection of tools, a reservoir modeler is able to perform large scale reservoir management studies in short periods …