Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond The Wto? An Anatomy Of Eu And Us Preferential Trade Agreements, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis, André Sapir

Faculty Scholarship

It is often alleged that PTAs involving the EC and the US include a significant number of obligations in areas not currently covered by the WTO Agreement, such as investment protection, competition policy, labour standards and environmental protection. The primary purpose of this study is to highlight the extent to which these claims are true. The study divides the contents of all PTAs involving the EC and the US currently notified to the WTO, into 14 'WTO' and 38 'WTO-X' areas, where WTO provisions come under the current mandate of the WTO, and WTO-X provisions deal with issues lying outside …

Burden Of Proof In Environmental Disputes In The Wto: Legal Aspects, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses allocation of burden of proof in environmental disputes in the WTO system. Besides laying down the natural principles that (i) the complainant carries the burden to (ii) make a prima facie case that its claim holds, WTO adjudicating bodies have said little of more general nature. The paper therefore examines the case law of relevance to environmental policies, to establish the rules concerning burden of proof that are likely to be applied in such disputes. Evaluating this case law, the paper makes two observations,: First, in cases submitted under the GATTWTO, adjudicating bodies have committed errors regarding …

A Speech Motor Programming Investigation Using Inhibition, Alison Michele Corbett

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Motor learning and its applications have been extensively studied, particularly in the area of sports physiology and kinesiology. From these fields, many theories of movement and its control mechanisms have evolved. Previous research has drawn upon these theatrical principles to investigate the specific parameters of skilled movements, specifically the time required to complete an action. In particular, a finger-lift task has been used to study the refractory period during which a motor program can not be inhibited when trained to occur at a particular temporal target (Slater-Hammel, 1959). The current study applies key methodological concepts from Slater-Hammel's work to examine …

The Writer-Of-Violence-As-School-Shooter Stereotype: How Columbine, Virginia Tech, And Public Fear Make Writing Violence Dangerous For Students, Matt Foy

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In a period when students, parents, teachers and administrators are bombarded with images related to school shooting attacks, efforts to prevent such attacks in the future and to identify students who pose a threat to school safety have intensified. These efforts to fight the seemingly mounting wave of school violence have contributed to the rise of stereotypes of what a school shooter looks, talks, and acts like. This study examines one of these stereotypes: the writer-of-violence-as-school-shooter stereotype. This stereotype, which gained attention after 1990s rampages such as those at Heath High School (Kentucky) and Columbine High School and became highly …

Environmental Law In 2049: A Look Back, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

December 22 marks the 40th anniversary of the National Environmental Policy Act, which started the modern era of environmental law, and the 40th anniversary of the Environmental Law Institute, which was founded to monitor the new field and to create a profession around the emerging discipline. To mark this anniversary, we asked a range of luminaries to forecast how environmental law and the profession dedicated to its successful implementation will mature over the next four decades. Will environmental protection still be the product of a social movement, or will it have become incorporated as part of the cost of doing …

Raising The Cut-Off: The Empirical Case For Extending Adoption And Guardianship Subsidies From Age 18 To 21, Mary Eschelbach Hansen, Joshua Gupta-Kagan

Faculty Scholarship

This article begins with the context: despite increases in the number of adoptions from foster care achieved in the 1990s, tens of thousands of children remain in foster care awaiting adoption or permanent guardianship. The following section provides background on subsidy law and policy. The section describes the recent history of federal and state subsidies for parents who adopt children from the state foster care systems; the section describes state subsidies for caregivers who become legal permanent guardians of children in the state child welfare systems, and the section describes the disparities between adoption and guardianship subsidies and the subsidies …

Comment On Developing A Comprehensive Approach To Climate Change Mitigation Policy In The United States: Integrating Levels Of Government And Economic Sectors, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The article by Thomas D. Peterson, Robert B. McKinstry Jr., and John C. Dernbach (PM&D) has two central insights: (1) Any serious national effort to control emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) must continue to leave important roles to the states; and (2) It would be a mistake to put too many eggs in the cap-and-trade basket. A portfolio approach that utilizes many different regulatory techniques is important.

I certainly agree with PM&D about these insights, and they are correct that much of the current Congressional debate has given too little attention to these considerations. However, I have serious reservations about …

Observer Bias And The Detection Of Low‐Density Populations, Matthew C. Fitzpatrick, Evan L. Preisser, Aaron M. Ellison, Joseph S. Elkinton

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Monitoring programs increasingly are used to document the spread of invasive species in the hope of detecting and eradicating low‐density infestations before they become established. However, interobserver variation in the detection and correct identification of low‐density populations of invasive species remains largely unexplored. In this study, we compare the abilities of volunteer and experienced individuals to detect low‐density populations of an actively spreading invasive species, and we explore how interobserver variation can bias estimates of the proportion of sites infested derived from occupancy models that allow for both false negative and false positive (misclassification) errors. We found that experienced individuals …

Construction And Sequence Sampling Of Deep-Coverage Large-Insect Bac Libraries For Three Model Lepidopteran Species, Chengcang Wu, Dina Proestou, Dorothy Carter, Erica Nicholson, Filippe Santos, Shaying Zhao, Hong-Bin Zhang, Marian R. Goldsmith

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Background: Manduca sexta, Heliothis virescens, and Heliconius erato represent three widely-used insect model species for genomic and fundamental studies in Lepidoptera. Large-insert BAC libraries of these insects are critical resources for many molecular studies, including physical mapping and genome sequencing, but not available to date.

Results: We report the construction and characterization of six large-insert BAC libraries for the three species and sampling sequence analysis of the genomes. The six BAC libraries were constructed with two restriction enzymes, two libraries for each species, and each has an average clone insert size ranging from 152–175 kb. We estimated that …

Reforming Family Court: Getting It Right Between Rhetoric And Reality, Jane M. Spinak

Faculty Scholarship

What do we say about the reform work we do, and to what degree is what we say accurate? How does the way in which we talk about family court reform implicate our analysis of what we are achieving? How does our place or role within the system affect our perceptions of reform? What limits our willingness and ability to apply rigorous evaluative techniques to determine whether we are reaching our goals? And if we are failing, can we acknowledge failure and learn from it? Answering these questions may lead to a better understanding of why family court reform is …

Obstetrical Screening Practices Of Nurse-Midwives And Nurse Practitioners, Laura Ann Abney

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the continued growth in the numbers of nurse practitioners and certified nurse-midwives, more and more women will receive prenatal care from advanced practice nurses. The purpose of this research was to assess the routine screening practices of advance practice nurses providing prenatal care and to compare those practices with current guidelines. The study focused on five areas of prenatal screening: bacterial vaginosis, group B streptococcus, gestational diabetes, maternal serum markers, and fetal movement monitoring. The interaction model of client health behavior by Cheryl Cox, specifically professional-technical competencies, part of the client-professional element of the model, provided the theoretical framework …

Effects Of Provider Education On Documentation Compliance In The O.R., Brenda Kingdon

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Knowledge of The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals and an effective provider cooperative practice involving communication and teamwork are essential for the delivery of safe and compliant patient care in the surgical setting. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of an educational intervention for physicians and nurses designed to increase documentation of compliance with national patient safety standards. As events of noncompliance have impacted patient safety at the hospital where this project was conducted, measures were needed to assess barriers to compliance with standards of practice and to focus educational session plans on identified knowledge-base …

Arabidopsis Thaliana Glx2-1 Contains A Dinuclear Metal Binding Site, But Is Not A Glyoxalase 2, Pattraranee Limphong, Michael W. Crowder, Brian Bennett, Christopher A. Makaroff

Physics Faculty Research and Publications

In an effort to probe the structure and function of a predicted mitochondrial glyoxalase 2, GLX2-1, from Arabidopsis thaliana, GLX2-1 was cloned, overexpressed, purified and characterized using metal analyses, kinetics, and UV–visible, EPR, and ¹H-NMR spectroscopies. The purified enzyme was purple and contained substoichiometric amounts of iron and zinc; however, metal-binding studies reveal that GLX2-1 can bind nearly two equivalents of either iron or zinc and that the most stable analogue of GLX2-1 is the iron-containing form. UV–visible spectra of the purified enzyme suggest the presence of Fe(II) in the protein, but the Fe(II) can be oxidized over …

A Comparison Of Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Sexual Minority Students And Issues In Schools With And Without Gay Straight Alliances, Kelli Ranae Otis Brus

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers' attitudes toward sexual minority students (including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning students) and issues related to this population of students. A sample of 166 high school teachers from schools with and without gay-straight alliances (GSAs) were compared on several measures to determine if teachers from schools with GSAs were significantly more supportive toward sexual minority students and issues than teachers in schools without GSAs .. Participants completed research packets containing the Professional Attitude Index Scale (PAIS) (Sears, 1992), a hypothetical situation of homophobia in a classroom for participants to provide …

Assessing The Legal Risks In Network Forensic Probing, Michael Losavio, Olfa Nasraoui, Vincent Thacker, Jeff Marean, Nick Miles, Roman Yampolskiy, Ibrahim Imam

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper presents a framework for identifying the legal risks associated with performing network forensics on public networks. The framework is discussed in the context of the Gnutella P2P network protocol for which the legal issues related to authorized access have not yet been addressed.

Using Sunflower Plots And Classification Trees To Study Typeface Legibility, Edgar C. Merkle, Barbara S. Chaparro

Publications

This article describes the application of sunflower plots and classification trees to the study of onscreen typeface legibility. The two methods are useful for describing high-dimensional data in an intuitive manner, which is crucial for interacting with both the typographers who design the typefaces and the practitioners who must make decisions about which typeface to use for specific applications. Furthermore, classification trees help us make specific recommendations for how much of a character attribute is “enough” to make it legible. We present examples of sunflower plots and classification trees using data from a recent typeface legibility experiment, and we present …

Employee Personal Wellness Programs: Benefits And Barriers To Participation, Amanda Bakeris

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This research study uses the health belief model as a theoretical framework for investigating employees' perceived costs and benefits to participation in a utility company's personal wellness program. A questionnaire was administered to the employees of the company gauging their current use of the program, as well as costs and benefits they perceive to affect participation. The barrier dimensions investigated were time-effort, social, physical effects, and specific obstacles. The benefit dimensions investigated were social, psychological, body image, and health. Based on the descriptive statistics and regression analysis, it was concluded that the benefits significantly related to participation, biometric participation, satisfaction, …

Understanding Parental Involvement In Youth Sports Through The Concept Of Serious Leisure, Greta Marie Giese

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study was to use the construct of serious leisure to identify to what extent parents are involved in their children's youth sports activities. A sample of 660 parents of children enrolled in Heartland Soccer Club in Cedar Rapids, Iowa or the Panther Pride Soccer Club in Cedar Falls, Iowa was surveyed. Both male and female parents from a variety of ages were surveyed. The research instrument for this study was the "Parental Involvement in Youth Soccer Questionnaire." This survey was created based on the categories of serious leisure and a 1997 article comparing serious leisure and …

The Wrongheaded And Dangerous Campaign To Criminalize Good Faith Legal Advice, Julian G. Ku

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

I argue in this brief essay that the increasingly fervent insistence on criminal punishment of the Bush administration lawyers for their legal advice on interrogation policy is both wrong-headed and dangerous. It is wrongheaded because the insistence on criminal prosecution of attorneys based solely upon their good faith interpretation of the law is highly unlikely to succeed as a matter of both U.S. and international law. It is dangerous because, at least with respect to US. law, prosecuting good faith legal advice is (and should be) a violation of those attorneys' constitutional rights under the US. Constitution's First Amendment and …

Keeping Promises To Immigrant Youth, Theo S. Liebmann

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

As New York's immigrant population of nearly four million continues to grow, so too does the number of immigrant youth. Yet, until recently, there has been remarkably little consistency on the role of the courts and government agencies in addressing the needs of immigrant youth. In particular, questions have lingered on the role of the state in implementing a remarkably compassionate section of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act that provides a pathway for abused, neglected, or abandoned children under twenty-one to obtain legal status. This pathway, called Special Immigrant Juvenile ("SIJ") status, allows immigrant youth to petition for status …

Stopping For Death: Re-Framing Our Perspective On The End Of Life, Ruth C. Stern, J. Herbie Difonzo

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

How we die is increasingly becoming a matter of law and public policy. We grapple with issues of patient autonomy, the proper parameters of doctor-patient discussions on the end of life, the right to hasten death, and the right to control our own medical treatment. But it is physicians and patients, not judges and legislators, who are the principal actors in events at the end of life. Palliative medicine is just beginning to probe the multi-dimensional totality of suffering in dying and seriously ill patients. What we learn will influence our options at the end of life and tell us …

Negotiating Sex: Would It Work?, Robin Charlow

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

With so much good to say about Michelle Anderson's proposal on rape law reform one hesitates to offer any criticism at all. My pause in wholeheartedly embracing her idea stems mostly from hesitation about its implementation.

Anderson's proposal presents practical advantages over the current regime. Using prevailing definitions of rape, countless disputes arise over the meaning and nature ofboth core components, force and consent. Moreover, in the typical scenario, we need to know not only whether a woman consented, but also whether a man was cognizant in some fashion of her nonconsent, resulting in difficult contests regarding mens rea. By …

Supporting Family Strength: The Use Of Transformative Mediation In A Pins Mediation Clinic, Robert A. Baruch Bush, Lisa Hershman, Robert Thaler, Christena Vitkovich

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This article describes, and explains the rationales for, the establishment of an innovative program in which a law school and two social services agencies are collaborating in a mediation clinic that uses the transformative model of mediation to serve clients in cases that seem ideally suited to benefit from this approach to practice—so-called “PINS” (persons in need of supervision) cases involving conflict within families, between parents and their adolescent children. The article first describes the evolution of the PINS system and the changing views of its purpose, especially in New York State. It then offers a brief introduction to the …

New Nurse Residency - An Evidence Based Approach, Alice M. Nied

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nurse educators believe that their graduates are well-prepared for entry level positions in nursing. In the acute healthcare setting, new graduates are placed on virtually every type of nursing unit, including critical care. Employers have developed formal orientations to familiarize new graduate nurses new with the institution and its policies and procedures and to teach the things employers believe new RNs need to know but do not, either because they were never taught the material or they have not retained it.

The purposes of this project were to (a) examine the evidence relative to a disconnect between nursing education and …

The Experiences Of Women Who Live With An Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator (Lcd), Jenea Mary Smith

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The implantable cardioverter defibrillator (lCD) is the most effective treatment available for terminating potentially life-threatening ventricular fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia. The lCD detects and attempts to correct these arrhythmias by pacing, cardioversion, and defibrillation thereby providing lifesaving therapy to patients at risk for sudden cardiac death. Currently, 150,000 Americans receive ICDs each year. Although most lCD recipients are men, more women are now qualifying for insertion (Stutts, Cross, Conti, & Sears, 2007).

Despite its established health benefits, lCD implantation is accompanied by psychological factors which merit research attention. This study investigated the experiences of women who live an lCD. The …

A Focus Group Exploration Of Sexual Identity Formation In Nonmonosexual Women, Sarah Christy Daniels

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nonmonosexuality invisibility in the scientific literature is explored as well as opposing historical viewpoints of nonmonosexuality's origins and nature. A focus group was used to explore the sexual identities of self-identified nonmonosexual women, their own journeys toward sexual identity formation, and the extent to which society has impacted their ability to express these identities. Using Consensual Qualitative Methodology (C. E. Hill, S. Knox, B. J. Thompson, E. N. Williams, S. A. Hess, & N. Ladany, 2005; C. E. Hill, B. J. Thompson, & E. N. Williams, 1997), several themes emerged: (a) defining one's identity; (b) social consciousness; (c) experiences of …

Domestic Partnerships And Same-Sex Marriage, Barbara Stark

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Family law continues to evolve rapidly. Past orthodoxies become unsustainable, while new norms and values are ushered in.

John Murphy, The Recognition of Same-Sex Families in

Britain: The Role of Private International Law,

16 Int’l J. L. Pol. & Fam. 181, 185 (2002)

Perhaps nowhere in family law is this evolution more dramatic than in the burgeoning recognition of rights of same-sex couples. Within the past twenty years courts, legislatures, and international bodies have addressed the extent to which rights and obligations formerly reserved to heterosexual married spouses should be conferred on other partners.

Most western democracies now recognize …

The End Of The Red Queen's Race: Medical Marijuana In The New Century, Ruth C. Stern, J. Herbie Difonzo

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The road to marijuana prohibition is paved with prejudice, hysteria, and the outright rejection of science and rationality. Despite its proven medical value, marijuana remains misclassified under federal law, misrepresented and misunderstood by most of our drug policy makers. Seizing their role as innovators in our federalist system, California and twelve other states have declared their support for the many doctors and patients who believe in the therapeutic benefits of cannabis. The conflict between the federal government and the states on medical marijuana is a study in “cultural federalism,” the experience of citizenship in a divided polity. Whether the medical …

Finding The Shoes That Fit: How Derivative Is The Trustee's Power To Avoid Fraudulent Conveyances Under Section 544(B) Of The Bankruptcy Code, Alan N. Resnick

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Section 544(b) of the Bankruptcy Code, which enables a bankruptcy trustee to avoid transfers that an actual unsecured creditor could have avoided under state law, is a powerful tool most often used to recover assets that were fraudulently transferred several years before a debtor's bankruptcy case. This power is often described as permitting the trustee, for the benefit of the bankruptcy estate and all of the debtor's unsecured creditors, to “stand in the shoes” and assert the rights of the particular unsecured creditor. In a recent case, In re Allou Distributors, Inc., the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of …

Making Pregnancy Work: Overcoming The Pregnancy Discrimination Act's Capacity-Based Model, Joanna L. Grossman, Gillian L. Thomas

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the gaps and obstacles in current law faced by the pregnant woman whose job duties may conflict with pregnancy's physical effects. While there is no inherent conflict between pregnancy and work, women in physically strenuous or hazardous occupations, from nursing to law enforcement, routinely confront situations in which they are physically unable to perform aspects of their job or, though physically able, seek to avoid certain tasks because of the potential risks to maternal or fetal health. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (PDA) broadly protects against pregnancy discrimination, but it provides absolute rights only to the …