Digital Commons Network^™

Risk Taking, Karl S. Okamoto, Douglas O. Edwards

Cardozo Law Review

First, kill all the bankers.

-Marcus Walker & Emma Moody

With this phrase, the Wall Street Journal recently captured the sentiment driving the movement to regulate bankers' pay. While we agree that financial industry executives made poor decisions, we take issue with the recent suggestion that, to prevent the excessive risk taking that led to the recent financial crisis, we must only correct certain "perverse" compensation-related incentives. This logic, unfortunately, underpins a worldwide call to reform executive compensation in the finance industry. The precise prescriptions differ, but a common view has prevailed: If the government can dampen the incentives to …

Rethinking Children As Property: The Transitive Family, Kevin Noble Maillard

Cardozo Law Review

Despite the collective view in law and social practice that it is intrinsically taboo to consider human beings as chattel, the law persists in treating children as property. Applying principles of property, this Article examines paternity disputes to explain and critique the law's view of children as property of their parents. As evidenced in these conflicts, the Article demonstrates that legal paternity exposes a rhetoric of ownership, possession, and exchange. The law presumes that a child born to a married woman is fathered by her husband, even when irrefutable proof exists that another man fathered the child. Attempts by non-marital …

Online Drift Compensation For Chemical Sensors Using Estimation Theory, Thomas H. Wenzel, Arnold Kweku Mensah-Brown, Fabien Josse, Edwin E. Yaz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Sensor drift from slowly changing environmental conditions and other instabilities can greatly degrade a chemical sensor's performance, resulting in poor identification and analyte quantification. In the present work, estimation theory (i.e., various forms of the Kalman filter) is used for online compensation of baseline drift in the response of chemical sensors. Two different cases, which depend on the knowledge of the characteristics of the sensor system, are studied. First, an unknown input is considered, which represents the practical case of analyte detection and quantification. Then, the more general case, in which the sensor parameters and the input are both unknown, …

A Qualitative Inquiry Of Grade Retention As Perceived By Adults Who Were Retained, Robin Lynn White

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study was to explore the views and recollections of adults who were retained in elementary, middle, or high school. This qualitative, narrative inquiry study was an attempt to give a voice to individuals that have experienced the event, and to understand what effects the retention had on their lives, both past and present. The sample of five participants used in this study was obtained from a population of adults in the state of Georgia who attended a General Education Degree (GED) class at a local library, as well as those who attended a community college. The …

First Search For Gravitational Waves From The Youngest Known Neutron Star, J. Abadie, Marco Cavaglia, For Full List Of Authors, See Publisher's Website.

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present a search for periodic gravitational waves from the neutron star in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. The search coherently analyzes data in a 12 day interval taken from the fifth science run of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It searches gravitational-wave frequencies from 100 to 300 Hz and covers a wide range of first and second frequency derivatives appropriate for the age of the remnant and for different spin-down mechanisms. No gravitational-wave signal was detected. Within the range of search frequencies, we set 95% confidence upper limits of (0.7-1.2) x 10^-24 on the intrinsic gravitational-wave strain, (0.4-4) …

Baryon Acoustic Oscillations In 2d: Modeling Redshift-Space Power Spectrum From Perturbation Theory, Atsushi Taruya, Takahiro Nishimichi, Shun Saito

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present an improved prescription for the matter power spectrum in redshift space taking proper account of both nonlinear gravitational clustering and redshift distortion, which are of particular importance for accurately modeling baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs). Contrary to the models of redshift distortion phenomenologically introduced but frequently used in the literature, the new model includes the corrections arising from the nonlinear coupling between the density and velocity fields associated with two competitive effects of redshift distortion, i.e., Kaiser and Finger-of-God effects. Based on the improved treatment of perturbation theory for gravitational clustering, we compare our model predictions with the monopole …

Relation Between Transmission And Energy Stored In Random Media With Gain, Ben Payne, Jonathan Andreasen, Hui Cao, Alexey Yamilov

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this work, we investigate a possibility of using the ratio between optical transmission, T, and energy stored inside the system, E, as a quantitative measure of the enhanced mesoscopic corrections to diffusive transport of light through a random medium with gain. We obtain an expression for T/E as a function of amplification strength in the diffusive approximation and show that it does not a have tendency to diverge when the threshold for random lasing is approached, as both T and E do. Furthermore, we find that a change in T/E signifies a change in the electric field distribution inside …

Dynamical (E, 2e) Studies Using Tetrahydrofuran As A Dna Analog, Christopher J. Colyer, Susan M. Bellm, B. Lohmann, G. Friedrich Hanne, Ola A. Al-Hagan, Don H. Madison, Chuangang Ning

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Triple differential cross sections for the electron-impact ionization of the outer valence orbital of tetrahydrofuran have been measured using the (e, 2e) technique. The measurements have been performed with coplanar asymmetric kinematics, at an incident electron energy of 250 eV and at an ejected electron energy of 10 eV, over a range of momentum transfers. The experimental results are compared with theoretical calculations carried out using the molecular three-body distorted wave model. The results obtained are important for gaining an understanding of electron driven processes at a molecular level and for modeling energy deposition in living tissue.

Effect Of An Improved Molecular Potential On Strong-Field Tunneling Ionization Of Molecules, Song-Feng Zhao, Cheng Jin, Anh-Thu Le, C. D. Lin

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We study the effect of one-electron model potentials on the tunneling ionization rates of molecules in strong fields. By including electron correlation using the modified Leeuwen-Baerends (LB α) model, the binding energies of outer shells of molecules are significantly improved. However, we show that the tunneling ionization rates from the LB α do not differ much from the earlier calculations [Phys. Rev. A 81, 033423 (2010)], in which the local correlation potential was neglected.

Self-Imaging Of Molecules From Diffraction Spectra By Laser-Induced Rescattering Electrons, Junliang Xu, Zhangjin Chen, Anh-Thu Le, C. D. Lin

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We study high-energy angle-resolved photoelectron spectra of molecules in strong fields. In an oscillating laser electric field, electrons released earlier in the pulse may return to recollide with the target ion, in a process similar to scattering by laboratory prepared electrons. If midinfrared lasers are used, we show that the images generated by the returning electrons are similar to images observed in typical gas-phase electron diffraction (GED). These spectra can be used to retrieve the positions of atoms in a molecule as in GED. Since infrared laser pulses of durations of a few femtoseconds are already available today, the study …

Tracing Multiple Scattering Patterns In Absolute (E, 2e) Cross Sections For H₂ And He Over A 4Π Solid Angle, Xueguang Ren, Arne Senftleben, Thomas Pflüger, Alexander Dorn, James Colgan, Michael S. Pindzola, Ola A. Al-Hagan, Don H. Madison, Igor Bray, Dmitry V. Fursa, Joachim Hermann Ullrich

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Absolutely normalized (e,2e) measurements for H₂ and He covering the full solid angle of one ejected electron are presented for 16 eV sum energy of both final state continuum electrons. For both targets rich cross-section structures in addition to the binary and recoil lobes are identified and studied as a function of the fixed electron's emission angle and the energy sharing among both electrons. For H₂ their behavior is consistent with multiple scattering of the projectile as discussed before. For He the binary and recoil lobes are significantly larger than for H₂ and partly cover the multiple …

Comprehensive Evaluation Of Association Measures For Fault Localization, Lucia Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Aditya Budi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In statistics and data mining communities, there have been many measures proposed to gauge the strength of association between two variables of interest, such as odds ratio, confidence, Yule-Y, Yule-Q, Kappa, and gini index. These association measures have been used in various domains, for example, to evaluate whether a particular medical practice is associated positively to a cure of a disease or whether a particular marketing strategy is associated positively to an increase in revenue, etc. This paper models the problem of locating faults as association between the execution or non-execution of particular program elements with failures. There have been …

Identifying Finite Mixtures In Econometric Models, Marc Henry, Yuichi Kitamura, Bernard Salanié

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We consider partial identification of finite mixture models in the presence of an observable source of variation in the mixture weights that leaves component distributions unchanged, as is the case in large classes of econometric models. We first show that when the number J of component distributions is known a priori, the family of mixture models compatible with the data is a subset of a J ( J – 1)-dimensional space. When the outcome variable is continuous, this subset is defined by linear constraints which we characterize exactly. Our identifying assumption has testable implications which we spell out for J …

Interdependent Preferences And Strategic Distinguishability, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris, Satoru Takahashi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A universal type space of interdependent expected utility preference types is constructed from higher-order preference hierarchies describing (i) an agent’s (unconditional) preferences over a lottery space; (ii) the agent’s preference over Anscombe-Aumann acts conditional on the unconditional preferences; and so on. Two types are said to be strategically indistinguishable if they have an equilibrium action in common in any mechanism that they play. We show that two types are strategically indistinguishable if and only if they have the same preference hierarchy. We examine how this result extends to alternative solution concepts and strategic relations between types.

Stochastic Optimal Control In Nonlinear Systems, Celestin Nkundineza

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Stochastic control is an important area of research in engineering systems that undergo disturbances. Controlling individual states in such systems is critical. The present investigation is concerned with the application of the stochastic optimal control strategy developed by To (2010) and its implementation as well as providing computed results of linear and nonlinear systems under stationary and nonstationary random excitations. In the strategy the feedback matrix is designed based on the achievement of the objectives for individual states in the system through the application of the Lyapunov equation for the system. Each diagonal element in the gain or associated gain …

Magnetoelectric Effects In Ferromagnetic Cobalt/Ferroelectric Copolymer Multilayer Films, Abhijit Mardana, Mengjun Bai, A. Baruth, Stephen Ducharme, Shireen Adenwalla

Stephen Ducharme Publications

Interactions between a ferromagnet, cobalt, and a ferroelectric copolymer, poly(vinylidene fluoride with trifluoroethylene) in thin film heterostructures result in a 5% change in the ferroelectric polarization on application of a perpendicular 6 kG magnetic field corresponding to a magnetoelectric coupling coefficient of α =5.45 V/cm Oe. The effect disappears on magnetic saturation, ruling out conventional strain coupling. A simple model posits that the ferroelectric film develops in-plane strain gradients, a consequence of the coupling to strain gradients present at the domain walls in the multidomain Co layer, resulting in the measured polarization change via the flexoelectric effect.

Design Of A Conditioner For Smoothing Wind Turbine Output Power, Murali Bottu, Mariesa Crow, A. Curt Elmore

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

As a result of wind speed intermittency, highly variable wind power output can adversely impact local loads. We propose a conditioner to smooth the variable wind power by utilizing the energy of an ultracapacitor. The conditioner is based on a single phase voltage source inverter (VSI) connected between the grid interconnection point and the ultracapacitor. The shunt VSI injects or absorbs active power from the line to smooth the wind power by utilizing the short term storage capabilities of the ultracapacitor. The ultracapacitor is connected to the DC link through a DC-DC converter, which maintains the voltage of the DC …

Exploratory Analysis Of Pathogen Resistance Responsible Genetic Elements In Two Eudicots From Whole Genome Sequence, Aubrey Bailey

Theses

Agricultural products are becoming more homogenous in order to conform to consumer expectations. In doing so, they have become a high-risk target for widespread crop failure due to pathogens or other agricultural maladies. Presented here are a collection of tools and a work-flow for the wholesale detection and characterization of disease resistance-associated proteins from whole-genome sequences. These techniques were also adapted for identifying potential miRNA regulatory sequences. Putative R-gene sequences identified from the Malus x Domestica 'Golden Delicious' genome were acquired for verification against wild apple species. Resistance gene analogs were PCR amplified from R-gene associated domains (TIR, NBS, and …

Effect Of A 6-Week Rehabilitation Program On Gait Parameters After Total Knee Arthroplasty, Adel R. Ahmed, Samiha M. Abd-Elkader, Khalid S. Al-Obathani

Saudi Medical Journal

OBJECTIVE: To investigate early changes in gait parameters following total knee arthroplasty (TKA). METHODS: Fifteen patients scheduled to undergo unilateral TKA at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between March 2009 and February 2010, were included in the study. This study was a prospective pretest-posttest experimental design; all patients underwent unilateral TKA, and were subjected to a 6-week standard postoperative rehabilitation program. Pain intensity and gait variables were evaluated before surgery and 6-weeks postoperatively using the Visual Analogue Scale and simple footprint method. RESULTS: Statistical analysis showed improvement in pain intensity and reduction in gait …

The Division Of Matrimonial Assets: A Mathematical Methodology As A "Check"? Ajr V. Ajs, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a recent High Court decision concerning the division of matrimonial assets, the Judge developed an extensive (and somewhat mathematical) methodology “as a rough check” to his discretionary powers in determining a “just and equitable” division of the matrimonial assets. This introduced a new perspective to an exercise long considered to be impossible to be mathematically precise. This piece considers the extent of the utility of the new methodology.

Do Online Reviews Reflect A Product’S True Perceived Quality? An Investigation Of Online Movie Reviews Across Cultures, Noi Sian Koh, Nan Hu, Eric K. Clemons

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper investigates when the reported average of online ratings matches the perceived average assessment of the population as a whole, including the average assessments of both raters and non-raters. We apply behavioral theory to capture intentions in rating online movie reviews in two dissimilar countries – China and the United States. We argue that consumers’ rating behaviors are affected by cultural influences and that they are influenced in predictable ways. Based on data collected from IMDB.com and Douban.com, we found significant differences across raters from these two different cultures. Additionally, we examined how cultural elements influence rating behavior for …

Shortest Path Computation On Air Indexes, Georgios Kellaris, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shortest path computation is one of the most common queries in location-based services that involve transportation net- works. Motivated by scalability challenges faced in the mo- bile network industry, we propose adopting the wireless broad- cast model for such location-dependent applications. In this model the data are continuously transmitted on the air, while clients listen to the broadcast and process their queries locally. Although spatial problems have been considered in this environment, there exists no study on shortest path queries in road networks. We develop the rst framework to compute shortest paths on the air, and demonstrate the practicality and …

On Challenges In Evaluating Malware Clustering, Peng Li, Limin Liu, Debin Gao, Michael K Reiter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malware clustering and classification are important tools that enable analysts to prioritize their malware analysis efforts. The recent emergence of fully automated methods for malware clustering and classification that report high accuracy suggests that this problem may largely be solved. In this paper, we report the results of our attempt to confirm our conjecture that the method of selecting ground-truth data in prior evaluations biases their results toward high accuracy. To examine this conjecture, we apply clustering algorithms from a different domain (plagiarism detection), first to the dataset used in a prior work's evaluation and then to a wholly new …

An Automated Approach For Finding Variable-Constant Pairing Bugs, Julia Lawall, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Named constants are used heavily in operating systems code, both as internal flags and in interactions with devices. Decision making within an operating system thus critically depends on the correct usage of these values. Nevertheless, compilers for the languages typically used in implementing operating systems provide little support for checking the usage of named constants. This affects correctness, when a constant is used in a context where its value is meaningless, and software maintenance, when a constant has the right value for its usage context but the wrong name. We propose a hybrid program-analysis and data-mining based approach to identify …

Scenario-Based And Value-Based Specification Mining: Better Together, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Specification mining takes execution traces as input and extracts likely program invariants, which can be used for comprehension, verification, and evolution related tasks. In this work we integrate scenario-based specification mining, which uses data-mining algorithms to suggest ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts, an inter-object, visual, modal, scenario-based specification language, with mining of value-based invariants, which detects likely invariants holding at specific program points. The key to the integration is a technique we call scenario-based slicing, running on top of the mining algorithms to distinguish the scenario-specific invariants from the general ones. The resulting suggested specifications are …

Event Study Method For Validating Agent-Based Trading Simulations, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce how one can validate an event-centric trading simulation platform that is built with multi-agent technology. The issue of validation is extremely important for agent-based simulations, but unfortunately, so far there is no one universal method that would work in all domains. The primary contribution of this paper is a novel combination of event-centric simulation design and event study approach for market dynamics generation and validation. In our event-centric design, the simulation is progressed by announcing news events that affect market prices. Upon receiving these events, event-aware software agents would adjust their views on the market …

Modeling Acoustic Scattering From The Seabed Using Transport Theory, Jorge Quijano, Lisa M. Zurk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Radiative Transfer (RT) theory has established itself as an important tool for electromagnetic remote sensing in parallel plane geometries with random distributions of scatterers, and most recently it has also been proposed as a model for the propagation of elastic waves in layered ocean sediments. In this work the capabilities of this model are illustrated, as the RT method is used to predict backscattering strength from laboratory models of random media. The RT model is characterized by its flexibility on accommodating scatterers in a broad variety of sizes, shapes, and acoustic contrast relative to the background media. Additionally, this formulation …

Lsuhsc Facilities Daily Update: September 2010, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates: 2010

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates from September 2010.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: September 2010, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2010

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates from September 24, 2010.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Risk As A Proxy For Race, Bernard E. Harcourt

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

No abstract provided.