Digital Commons Network^™

Canaries In The Coal Mine: The Tactical Use Of The National Labor Relations Act To Aid In The Protection Of Non-Union Workers Exposed To Pollutants, Michael C. Duff

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Canaries were used in times past to alert miners to the presence of dangerous gases in a mine. A canary would die, and the miners would thereby become aware of deadly, but sometimes odorless, gases. Just as canaries have alerted miners to the presence of dangerous gases in mines, workers exposed to dangerous pollutants and conditions in workplaces may function as societal canaries warning the broader public of environmental dangers; but hopefully without having to die in the process. To perform this role, the workers must live to work (and protest) another day. Section 7 of the National Labor Relations …

Reducing Disparities Through Health Care Reform: Disability And Accessible Medical Equipment, Elizabeth Pendo

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People with disabilities face multiple barriers to adequate health care and report poorer health status than people without disabilities. Although health care institutions, offices, and programs are required to be accessible, people with disabilities are still receiving unequal and in many cases inadequate care. The 2009 report by the National Council on Disability, The Current State of Health Care for People with Disabilities, reaffirmed some of these findings, concluding that people with disabilities experience significant health disparities and barriers to health care; encounter a lack of coverage for necessary services, medications, equipment, and technologies; and are not included in the …

Race, Sex And Genes At Work: Uncovering The Lessons Of Norman-Bloodsaw, Elizabeth Pendo

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The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) is the first federal, uniform protection against the use of genetic information in both the workplace and health insurance. Signed into law on May 21, 2008, GINA prohibits an employer or health insurer from acquiring or using an individual’s genetic information, with some exceptions. One of the goals of GINA is to eradicate actual, or perceived, discrimination based on genetic information in the workplace and in health insurance. Although the threat of genetic discrimination is often discussed in universal terms - as something that could happen to any of us - the …

International Commercial Transactions, Franchising, And Distribution, Arnold S. Rosenberg, Alfredo L. Rovira, Michael R. Daigle, Florian S. Jörg, Marc Ryser, William P. Johnson, Anders Forkman, Alan S. Gutterman, Ed., Calvin A. Hamilton, Ed.

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With the encouragement of the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and other international financial institutions, in 2008-09 several countries modernized their secured transactions laws, expanded the types of moveable property that can serve as collateral for a debt, and established and streamlined registries for non-possessory security interests in moveable property.

Reply: Clawback To The Future, Miriam A. Cherry, Jarrod Wong

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In an earlier article also available on Scholarship Commons, Clawbacks: Prospective Contract Measures in an Era of Excessive Executive Compensation and Ponzi Schemes, Minnesota Law Review, Vol. 94, p. 368, 2009, Professors Miriam Cherry and Jarrod Wong set out an initial description and analysis of contractual clawback provisions. In this Reply, Profs. Cherry and Wong address three aspects of Michael Macchiarola's Response: its application of the clawback doctrine to the recoupment of executive compensation; the criticism that the clawbacks doctrine introduces latent subjectivity into contractual analysis; and the apparent operational difficulties in implementing clawbacks.

Back To Color Blindness: Recent Developments In Race Discrimination Law In The United States, Marcia L. Mccormick

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The United States has a long and somewhat conflicted history of espousing egalitarian values and yet tolerating a certain level of subordination of particular groups to a greater or lesser extent at the same time. Like many countries, it struggles with reconciling the goals of equality, pluralism, and liberty, and the balance has been struck differently at different times. In the current wave of such efforts, the Supreme Court is marking an increasingly formalist approach to the question of discrimination, while Congress appears to be pushing a slightly more substantive approach to discrimination. This short paper analyzes the Court’s recent …

Regulatory Adjudication, Marcia L. Mccormick

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Calls for increased regulation are flying fast and furious these days. We use regulation in the United States to prevent harm that various kinds of activities might cause and also to create positive external benefits that those activities could yield, but might not without incentives. Most regulatory programs in the United States provide a blend of measures designed to create these positive external benefits, promote good practices in the industry, prevent harms, and provide those harmed with remedies. At a time in which we contemplate new ways to regulate to deal with the crises of the day and prevent the …

Bentham On Stilts: The Bare Relevance Of Subjectivity To Retributive Justice, Dan Markel, Chad Flanders, David C. Gray

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In recent work, various scholars have challenged retributive justice theorists to pay more attention to the subjective experience of punishment, specifically how punishment affects the experiences and well-being of offenders. The claim developed by these “subjectivists” is that because people’s experiences with pain and suffering differ, both diachronically and inter-subjectively, their punishments will have to be tailored to individual circumstances as well.

Our response is that this set of claims, once scrutinized, is either true, but of limited significance, or nontrivial, but unsound. We don’t doubt the possibility that different people will react differently to the same infliction of punishment. …

A Prisoner's Constitutional Right To Medical Information: Doctrinally Flawed And A Threat To State Informed Consent Law, Robert Gatter

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White v. Napoleon and its progeny recognize a substantive due process right to receive the disclosure of medical treatment information. While each case involves a prisoner receiving treatment while in custody, the constitutional right described in those cases is not limited to prisoners. Instead, the right is described as belonging to all individuals. Consequently, this line of cases is poised to interfere with the disclosure standards that operate in state informed consent law in the many instances where state action exists. This Article argues that the substantive due process right recognized in White should be overturned. The right is based …

Human Capital And Transfer Taxation, Kerry A. Ryan

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This article addresses the question of whether education and healthcare transfers should be included in the federal gift tax base. It initially frames the issue in two ways: (1) through the lens of a proposal by the American Law Institute to exempt all “transfers for consumption” from gift taxation, and (2) within the context of a debate among economists about whether such expenditures should be included in the definition of “intergenerational transfers” for purposes of determining the total share of such transfers in U.S. accumulated wealth. Finding the first lens unsatisfactory on its own doctrinal terms and the second lens …

Candoluminescence Of Cave Gypsum, John R. Sweet, John W. Hess, William B. White

International Journal of Speleology

A selection of gypsum specimens from a variety of caves as well as CaSO₄ synthesized in the laboratory emit both a green and yellow candoluminescence when excited by a hydrogen diffusion flame. The green emission is attributed to dehydration of gypsum to bassanite and the yellow emission appears upon further dehydration to anhydrite. The source of the luminescence is ascribed to minor concentrations of Mn²⁺ in the gypsum.

An Essay On Cataloging, Daniel Canncasciato

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The imminent arrival of Resource Description and Access (RDA), the proposed successor to Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR), makes now an opportune time to clarify a profound misunderstanding regarding the objective of cataloging. The objective has been widely misunderstood to be about the production of bibliographic records, or about the production of bibliographic records and their supporting authority records, or about the production of perfect bibliographic and authority records. This essay offers a more accurate picture of the objective of cataloging, working from Cutter’s early statement of principles as a reference point in re-considering some misperceptions and actions being taken in …

Digital Divide: Bridging The Gap Through Ict In Nigerian Libraries, W. O. Nkanu, Henry Itohowo Okon

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

For Nigerian libraries to fully use available opportunities arising from the use of emerging digital technologies, and contend with the challenges offered by globalization in a rapidly changing information society like ours, the use of ICT must be given top priority. The widening imbalances of access to ICT has resulted in inequitable access to ICTs and other internet-related technologies associated with the provision and use of information services in Nigerian libraries. These imbalances have implication for quality information service delivery in Nigerian libraries. It is in this context that, this paper, discusses the need to bridge the gap through adequate …

Embedding Semantic Markup In Web Pages, Virginia Shilling

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The World Wide Web first revolutionized the presentation of text and data for people. The next wave of technology, the semantic web, will make data accessible to computers as well as people. Underpinning the semantic web is the Resource Description Framework (RDF). One way to make RDF-compatible data available on the web is to embed it in the X/HTML document. A small project investigates the available syntax for encoding RDF in web pages, the available descriptive vocabularies, and discusses the results of manually encoding web pages using RDFa and Dublin Core

An Image Never Reaching The Perfect, Yuanyuan Wang

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

My thesis seeks to take several concrete texts to examine this ΓÇ£new womenΓÇ¥ genealogy in modern Chinese literature, analyze the differences and development of such an image, and argue that because all the new women images in modern Chinese literature are created with the writersΓÇÖ certain purpose, they can never be ideal or perfect. They all have some drawbacks, and we could not even find one till today.

Class Dismissed: Contemporary Judicial Hostility To Small-Claims Consumer Class Actions, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

I start from the view that small-value consumer claims are a primary reason that class actions exist, and that without class actions many - if not most - of the wrongs perpetrated upon small-claims consumers would not be capable of redress. It would then seem to follow that the class action device should be readily available in small-claims consumer cases. And yet, over the past decade, federal district courts have repeatedly declined to certify class actions on grounds that are specific to small-claims consumer cases. Foremost among those grounds is the notion that the federal class action rule carries within …

Rethinking Guardianship (Again): Substituted Decision Making As A Violation Of The Integration Mandated Of Title Ii Of The Americans With Disabilities Act, Leslie Salzman

Articles

In every state, when an adult has a diminished capacity to make decisions about personal affairs or property management, a court may transfer the individual’s right to make decisions to a guardian. This Article argues that, in most cases, it would be preferable to support decision making rather than supplant it through guardianship, and then seeks to locate a right to receive such support as a less restrictive alternative to the substituted decision making that characterizes guardianship.

Building on the reasoning in Olmstead v. L.C. and subsequent decisions interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act’s integration mandate, this Article argues that …

A Thesis On Utilizing High Altitude Platforms (Haps) To Provide Wirelss Communications Coverage To Close Coverage Gaps - Case Study: Providing Umts Service To The Non-Radar Coverage Area In The Gulf Of Mexico (Gomex), Amad El-Disi

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Antimicrobial Effect Of Transition Metal Oxide Nanoparticles, Zhipeng Wang

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis On Point-Wise Machine Learning Techniques Using Regression Trees For Web-Search Ranking, Ananth Mohan

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Learning how to rank a set of objects relative to an user defined query has received much interest in the machine learning community during the past decade. In fact, there have been two recent competitions hosted by internationally prominent search companies to encourage research on ranking web site documents. Recent literature on learning to rank has focused on three approaches: point-wise, pair-wise, and list-wise. Many different kinds of classifiers, including boosted decision trees, neural networks, and SVMs have proven successful in the field. This thesis surveys traditional point-wise techniques that use regression trees for web-search ranking. The thesis contains empirical …

Prediction Of Optical Properties Of Plasmonic Composites: Applications To Solar Energy Harvesting, Satvik Wani

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The finite difference time domain method was used to simulate the optical response of plasmonic composites with one and two nanoscale spherical metallic inclusion(s): Ag/Cu in Air/SiO2) with various diameters and compositions. Fair agreement was found between simulation and effective medium theories for binary and ternary composites. Responses of ternary Ag/Cu/SiO2 composites with various Ag:Cu ratios were found to be in fair agreement with the experimental data obtained from literature. Experiments with photosynthetic microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii and Cyanothece showed that the wavelength specific backscattering in the blue region of the spectrum from an Ag nanoparticle suspension could promote microalgal growth …

Dact Family Molecules In Wnt Signaling In Mouse Development, Daniel Fisher

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The Wnt: Wingless-Integration) molecular signaling pathways are known to be integral in the embryonic patterning of multicellular animals, and are misregulated in multiple types of cancer. Wnt signaling includes multiple biochemical signaling pathways downstream of the Wnt family of secreted proteins and their receptors. Many, and possibly all, of these pathways converge on the intracellular protein Dishevelled, whose interactions appear essential in determining the cell-autonomous effects of the Wnt signal. Dact: Dapper, Antagonist of Beta Catenin Targeting) proteins were identified based on their binding to Dishevelled. There are three Dact encoding genes in mammals, and these show unique expression patterns …

The Role Of The Clock Gene Bmal1 In Female Fertility And Parturition, Christine Ratajczak

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Successful reproduction is essential for survival of species. For humans, reproductive problems can cause large emotional and medical burdens. Evidence in both humans and rodents indicates that circadian rhythmicity is important for supporting reproductive function. A molecular clock orchestrates circadian rhythmicity. Impairment in fertility and parturition are observed in female mice expressing a mutant form of Clock, suggesting critical roles for clock genes in reproduction. Since the clock gene Bmal1, but not Clock, is necessary for the generation of circadian rhythmicity, exploring the role of Bmal1 in reproduction may yield a better understanding of the importance of the molecular clock …

Foreign Policy Mismanagement During American Presidential Transitions, Linda Schulte

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Despite vast literature on American foreign policy and presidential decision-making, little attention has been given to the problems associated with presidential transitions. The American presidential transition period is accompanied by three limitations that threaten the effectiveness of presidential authority. First, presidential authority is unclear in the ambiguity of the transition period. Second, new administrations struggle to incorporate overlapping initiatives and personnel into new policies and priorities. Third, inexperience can cripple a new administration in the first few months of a presidency. These limitations are illustrated by an analysis of two transitional foreign policy crises: the Bay of Pigs crisis overlapping …

Stress Reactivity, Stress Appraisal And Coping Responses In Schizophrenia, Zainab Delawalla

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Psychosocial factors have long been recognized as important to the etiology of schizophrenia. According to the stress-vulnerability model, the experience of stress is critical to the onset and/or maintenance of schizophrenia. Although there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that people with schizophrenia experience more stressful events than the general population, there is ample evidence that stress is linked with the course of illness. Traditionally, two lines of research have examined stress processing mechanisms: one focusing on the biological response to stress by studying the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal: HPA) axis and the other focusing on the psychological mechanisms delineated in the transactional …

[Introduction To] Lincoln's Legacy Of Leadership, George R. Goethals, Gary L. Mcdowell

Bookshelf

Through this in-depth look at Abraham Lincoln, both before and during his presidency, we can learn through his leadership in times of confusion, war, and dissent. The set of chapters included in this volume are based on papers that constituted part of the 2008-2009 Jepson Leadership Forum at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. The chapters consider Lincoln’s intellectual, moral, political, and military leadership. The authors include the world’s foremost Lincoln scholars, including Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Walker Howe, and Lincoln Prize winners Richard Carwardine and Douglas Wilson.

[Introduction To] Leading Change In Multiple Contexts: Concepts And Practices In Organizational, Community, Political, Social, And Global Change Settings, Gill Robinson Hickman

Bookshelf

The first book to bring together both leadership and change theories, concepts, and processes, Leading Change in Multiple Contexts uses a consistent framework and the latest research to help readers understand and apply the concepts and practices of leading change.

Key Features

Brings together leadership and change concepts and practices in five distinct contexts—organizational, community, political, social change, and global

Draws from a wide range of classic and recent scholarship from multiple disciplines

Includes the perspectives of change and leadership experts

Offers real-life vignettes that provide examples of leading change in every context

Provides readers with application and reflection exercises …

Functional Genomic Examinations Of Interactions Between Common Members Of The Human Gut Microbiota, Michael Mahowald

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The adult human gut microbiota consists of hundreds to thousands of bacterial species, the majority belonging to the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes. Differences in the balance between these phyla has been linked to obesity in mice and humans. However, little is known about their interactions in vivo. I have used comparative and functional genomics, proteomics and biochemical assays to identify the ways they marshal their genomic resources to adapt to life together in the distal gut. I first annotated the complete genome sequences of two human gut Bacteroidetes (Bacteroides vulgatus and Parabacteroides distasonis) and two Firmicutes (Eubacterium rectale and E. …

Conservation Of The Intracellular Bacterial Community Pathogenic Pathway In Urinary Tract Infection, David Rosen

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Urinary tract infections: UTIs) affect 13 million women annually in the United States. Uropathogenic Escherichia coli: UPEC) is the predominant etiologic agent of UTI; however, several other uropathogens, including Klebsiella pneumoniae, are also significant causative agents. In a murine cystitis model, UPEC utilize a multistep pathogenic pathway in which they invade and form intracellular bacterial communities: IBCs) within bladder facet cells. Type 1 pili, adhesive fimbriae, are necessary for UPEC binding and invasion of urothelial cells and formation of IBCs. UPEC ultimately disperse from the IBC, many with filamentous morphology, and proceed to infect other host urothelial cells. This work …

Development Of A Unified Approach (An Index) To Study The Particulate, Carbon Monoxide Emissions And The Combustion Efficiency Using Field And Laboratory Investigations, Vidhi Singhal

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

About one-third of the world’s population uses biomass and other renewable sources of fuel for cooking and other heating purposes. The Biomass is not burnt efficiently which results in the release of pollutants which are the products of incomplete combustion. Previously, studies have been done to study the PM2.5, CO, methane and non methane compounds to study the dose exposure relationships of the cookstoves. One major drawback in these studies was that they didn’t use the surface area of the particles emitted from the cookstoves. As it has been established in the previous studies, the ultrafine particles have more surface …