Digital Commons Network^™

Promoting Commercial Law Reform In Eastern Europe, Samuel Bufford

Faculty Scholarship

This article is my account of what I did in a decade of advising governments and teaching judicial seminars on commercial law matters in Central and Eastern Europe, beginning in 1991. This article contains my individual reflections on more than a dozen visits to developing countries in Central and Eastern Europe to advise governments and to educate their judges, and several visits of judges from some of those countries to the United States. In many ways, my experiences are typical of United States judges who have done the same kind of work in developing countries. In some ways, my experiences …

Probability, Individualization, And Uniqueness In Forensic Science Evidence: Listening To The Academies, David H. Kaye

Faculty Scholarship

Day in and day out, criminalists testify to positive, uniquely specific identifications of fingerprints, bullets, handwriting, and other trace evidence. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences, building on the writing of academic commentators, has called for sweeping changes in the presentation and production of evidence of identification. These include some form of circumscribed and standardized testimony. But the Academy report is short on the specifics of the testimony that would be legally and professionally allowable. This essay outlines possible types of testimony that might harmonize the testimony of criminalists with the actual state of forensic science. It does …

Reforming Financial Regulation To Address The Too-Big-To-Fail Problem, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The ongoing financial crisis has revealed fundamental weaknesses in the regulatory systems of the United States, the United Kingdom and other European nations. In particular, publicly-funded bailouts of major banks have confirmed that “too big to fail” (TBTF) subsidies distort economic incentives and encourage excessive risk-taking by large, complex financial institutions (LCFIs). Accordingly, the primary goals of regulatory reform must be (i) to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, TBTF subsidies and (ii) to force LCFIs to internalize the risks and costs of their activities.

After surveying the causes and consequences of the financial crisis, this article proposes five regulatory …

Some Realism About Punishment Naturalism, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this paper we critique the increasingly prominent claims of punishment naturalism – the notion that highly nuanced intuitions about most forms of crime and punishment are broadly shared, and that this agreement is best explained by a particular form of evolutionary psychology. While the core claims of punishment naturalism are deeply attractive and intuitive, they are contradicted by a broad array of studies and depend on a number of logical missteps. The most obvious shortcoming of punishment naturalism is that it ignores empirical research demonstrating deep disagreements over what constitutes a wrongful act and just how wrongful it should …

Returning Home: Women In Post-Conflict Societies, Naomi R. Cahn, Dina Francesca Haynes, Fionnuala D. Ni Aolain

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper explores the situation of women returning to their homes and communities after their countries have experienced major conflicts. In that context, it assesses the range of barriers and challenges that women face and offers some thinking to addresses and remedy these complex issues. As countries face the transition process, they can begin to measure the conflict’s impact on the population and the civil infrastructure. Not only have people been displaced from their homes, but, typically, health clinics, schools, roads, businesses, and markets have deteriorated substantially. While the focus is on humanitarian aid in the midst of and during …

Remote Sensing And Terramechanics Study Of Mars Using Orbital And Rover Data Sets, Kimberly Lichtenberg

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Orbital observations, rover-based remote-sensing and in-situ observations, and terramechanics modeling can be used collaboratively to examine the interplay between material properties, scientific setting, and mobility issues facing rovers on other worlds. In this thesis, these types of observations are used concurrently to identify the surface properties on a regional scale for the Gusev Crater Spirit landing site, to understand how the rover interacted with these materials while driving, and as a look ahead to a candidate new landing site, Aram Chaos, with exposed materials that contain key evidence for past environmental conditions. Comparison of rover-based and orbital spectral reflectance data …

Integration Of Multi-Sensory Earth Observations For Characterization Of Air Quality Events, Erin Robinson

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In order to characterize air quality events, such as dust storms or smoke events from fires, a wide variety of Earth observations are needed from satellites, surface monitors and models. Traditionally, the burden of data access and processing was placed on the data user. These challenges of finding, accessing and merging data are overcome through the principles of Service Oriented Architecture. This thesis describes the collaborative, service-oriented approach now available for air quality event analysis, where datasets are turned into services that can be accessed by tools through standard queries. This thesis extends AQ event evidence to include photos, videos …

Two-Direction Cracking Shear-Friction Membrane Model For Finite Elment Analysis Of Reinforced Concrete, Jeffrey Mitchell

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

There are a multitude of existing material models for the finite element analysis of cracked reinforced concrete that provide reduced shear stiffness but do not limit shear strength. In addition typical models are not based on the actual physical behavior of shear transfer across cracks by shear friction recognized in the ACI Building Code and present in previous experimental work. Recently a shear friction model was proposed that was able to capture the recognized cracked concrete behavior by limiting the shear strength as a function of yielding in the reinforcement across the crack. However, the proposed model was only formulated …

Electrical And Magnetic Separation Of Particles, Lin Li

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Particle separation technologies have been utilized in many industrial fields, such as pigment and filler production, mineral processing, environmental protection, the food and beverage industry, and the chemical industry, as well as in biomedical application, such as cell biology, molecular genetics, biotechnological production, clinical diagnostics, and therapeutics. A lot of particle separation technologies using various mechanics in terms of the differences in the physical or physico-chemical properties of the particles have been developed. Among these categories, electrical and magnetic separations are of great interest in recent researches. The overall objective of this dissertation is to advance our current knowledge on …

Characterization Of Scannable Leaky Wave Antennas Using An Extended Metamaterial Framework, Garrett Gilchrist

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Urban Speleology Applied To Groundwater And Geo-Engineering Studies: Underground Topographic Surveying Of The Ancient Arca D’Água Galleries Catchworks (Porto, Nw Portugal), H. I. Chaminé, M. J. Afonso, P. M. Robalo, P. Rodrigues, C. Cortez, F. A. Monteiro Santos, J. P. Plancha, P. E. Fonseca, A. Gomes, N. F. Devy-Vareta, J. M. Marques, M. E. Lopes, G. Fontes, A. Pires, F. Rocha

International Journal of Speleology

The Porto settlement (Northwest Portugal, Iberian Peninsula) was originally built in the twelfth century and has been developed on granitic hill slopes of the Douro riverside, being one of the oldest cities in Europe. In the urban area of Porto, the second most important city of the Portuguese mainland, there is a population of about 216,000 inhabitants. This study highlights the importance of urban speleological mapping applied to groundwater and geo-engineering studies. All the water that flows from the so-called Paranhos or Arca D’Água springs is captured by catchwork galleries and their utilization date back around 1120 AD. Paranhos spring …

Nowhere When It Burns, Fernand Roqueplan

Short Story

No abstract provided.

Family Recipe, Christin Grow

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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An Investigation Of The Kerogen-Mineral Interactions In Green River Oil Shale, Kristin Nadiene Alstadt

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Green River oil shale contains minerals, kerogen, and bitumen and yields a significant amount of oil upon heating. Kerogen is the insoluble organic remains found in sedimentary materials. It is a precursor to crude oil and is one of the most abundant forms of carbonaceous materials on earth. The richest oil shale deposits in the world are found in the Green River Formation located in the states of Utah, Wyoming and Colorado in the United States with the potential to be a major national resource. Current extraction methods involve heating the shale to high temperatures in order to decompose and …

Groundwork For Assessing The Legal Risks Of Cyberjustice, François Senécal, Karim Benyekhlef

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

It is clear that the use of information technology is quickly becoming a necessity for the justice system. In civil cases, delays and costs are causing individuals to abandon the courts, and cases that make it to trial are of ever-increasing complexity. Moreover, public security is weakened by the inefficient and cumbersome conditions by which criminal justice information circulates among the various stakeholders, such as the police, prosecutors, the courts, penitentiaries and parole boards, to name only a few. It becomes apparent that information technology has much to offer individuals involved in court cases and the justice system as a …

Strong Medicine: Patents, Market, And Policy Challenges For Managing Neglected Diseases And Affordable Prescription Drugs, Taiwo A. Oriola

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

The article is divided into six parts. Part one deals with the introduction, part two discusses the evolution of modern medicine and the socio-economic dynamics that shape the current prescription drug economics, part three discusses the pharmaceutical costs conundrum, part four analyses neglected diseases and the scale of the problem, part five discusses the role of patents on the pharmaceuticals costs trajectory and reviews literature on possible alternatives to promoting incentives for pharmaceuticals R&D, and part six sums up the discourse and reiterates the solutions to the problems identified.

Panel I: The Patent Landscape With Bilski On The Map, Jeanne C. Fromer, James W. Dabney, Clarisa Long, Brian P. Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

Welcome to the 2009 Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal’s Symposium titled, “Functionality: At the Crossroads of IP.” My name is Regina Schaffer-Goldman, and I am the Editor-in- Chief of the 20th Volume of the Journal, which is more affectionately known as the IPLJ.

We are so pleased to see the culmination of many months of preparation today. It is the IPLJ’s 20th Anniversary Edition, and we wanted to commemorate this occasion with a fantastic Symposium. As you will see, we have assembled a truly all-star group of legal scholars and practitioners today.

Slope Failure Remediation Design, Adam Ries

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

This senior engineering design project analyzes and remediates a slope failure that occurred in Bismarck, North Dakota. The failure emerged along River Road on the Eastern bank of the Missouri River less than a half mile north of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad Bridge. The failure took place the week of June 28, 2009 and forced closing of River Road until late fall. A local business was forced to close and traffic was affected throughout the summer.

Elevation and geological data was used to reconstruct the pre-failure slope. The slope was analyzed using a slope stability program, Slope 5.0, …

Levee Analysis And Design For Proposed Missouri Refining Co. Petroleum Refinery Site., Matthew Carns

Undergraduate Theses and Senior Projects

This report is intended to cover the design and construction of a levee around the proposed Missouri Refining Co. petroleum refinery, see Figure 1 for location. The location is near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers in Williams County, North Dakota. The recent success in extracting unconventional petroleum reserves in the Williston Basin has led Missouri Refining to consider building the refinery in the area.

Floods, Famines, Or Feasts: Too Much, Too Little, Or Just Right, Sandra B. Zellmer

Faculty Law Review Articles

The United States has a passionate love-hate relationship with water. Americans love to live beside rivers and lakes and use them for drinking water, washing, fishing, generating power, navigating, and recreation. They also love to be able to use water from rivers, lakes, and the ground beneath their property to irrigate their crops. When it's too dry, they pray for rain. But when it's too wet, they beg for sunshine, because as much as they love living as close to the water as they can get, people hate having their homes, workplaces, and crops inundated by floodwater even more. Besides …

Aicpa Technical Practice Aids As Of June 1, 2010, American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (Aicpa)

Guides, Handbooks and Manuals

No abstract provided.

Security By Contractor: Outsourcing In Peace And Stability Operations, Volker Franke

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Retention Fastener Preference For Fisher-Price Toy Packaging, Lakeshia Haynes

Theses

"Wrap Rage" continues to be a growing phenomenon as consumers become increasingly frustrated with toy packaging. Consumers have become dissatisfied with the amount of time and effort it takes to remove product from its packaging. To better meet the needs of consumers, toy company Fisher-Price has implemented several improved consumer-friendly package fastener alternatives. The purpose of this study was to test the three most favorable alternative package fastener concepts executed by Fisher-Price. Interviews were conducted to evaluate the amount of time and effort associated with each fastener and to determine which concept was most preferred. The findings of this study …

Automatic Multi-Resolution Spatio-Frequency Mottle Metric (Sfmm) For Evaluation Of Macrouniformity, Siddharth Khullar

Theses

Evaluation of mottle is an area of on-going research in print quality assessment. We propose an unsupervised evaluation technique and a metric that measures mottle in a hard-copy laser print. The proposed algorithm uses a scanned image to quantify the low frequency variation or mottle in what is supposed to be a uniform field. `Banding' and `Streaking' effects are explicitly ignored and the proposed algorithm scales the test targets from "Flat print" (Good) to "Noisy print" (Bad) based on mottle only. The evaluation procedure is modeled as feature computation in different combinations of spatial, frequency and wavelet domains. The model …

Facilitators And Obstacles Of Intercultural Business Communication For American Companies In China: Lessons Learned From The Ups Case, Hongmei Gao, Penelope Prime

Faculty Articles

This article analyzes how the execution of business strategy for global enterprises is shaped by the dual challenges of communicating in a different national culture and working in a changing economic environment. The article develops a framework from the UPS case in China to illustrate the key components of strategy for US companies operating businesses in China. The article proposes that Chinese-American communication effectiveness can be achieved through overcoming five obstacles: cultural multiplicity, relationship/ task orientation, time concept, business style difference, and language use, while utilizing five facilitators:pragmatism, gender equality, English, American pop culture, and a "big country mentality."

An Attempt To Find Neighbors, Yong Shi, Ryan Rosenblum

Faculty Articles

In this paper, we present our continuous research on similarity search problems. Previously we proposed PanKNN[18]which is a novel technique that explores the meaning of K nearest neighbors from a new perspective, redefines the distances between data points and a given query point Q, and efficiently and effectively selects data points which are closest to Q. It can be applied in various data mining fields. In this paper, we present our approach to solving the similarity search problem in the presence of obstacles. We apply the concept of obstacle points and process the similarity search problems in a different way. …

Macular Pigment And Its Contribution To Visual Performance And Experience [El Pigmento Macular Y Su Contribución Al Rendimiento Y Experiencia Visuals], James Loughman, Peter Davison, John M. Nolan, Mukunda C. Akkali, Stephen Beatty

Articles

There is now a consensus, based on histological, biochemical and spectral absorption data, that the yellow colour observed at the macula lutea is a consequence of the selective accumulation of dietary xanthophylls in the central retina of the living eye. Scientific research continues to explore the function(s) of MP in the human retina, with two main hypotheses premised on its putative capacity to (1) protect the retina from (photo)-oxidative damage by means of its optical filtration and/or antioxidant properties, the so-called protective hypothesis and (2) influence the quality of visual performance by means of selective short wavelength light absorption prior …

Creating A University: University Of North Florida Faculty And Staff Remember 35 Years, James B. Crooks

Creating a University: UNF Oral History Project

Reflecting upon the past thirty-five to forty years at the University of North Florida, one is struck by several themes which have emerged over time. One theme reflects an initial opposition to the new university which gradually changed over time. In the beginning, the Jacksonville community did not welcome UNF. At the time, the city was the largest in the nation without a state university. There were no alumni to support it and few wealthy benefactors. Trustees at Jacksonville University opposed its establishment. In the early 1980s, the legislative delegation voted to make UNF a branch of the University of …

Ecology & Ideology: An Introduction, Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, Ryan Vu

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Person Of The Year: Barack Obama, The Joker, Capitalism, And Schizophrenia, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.