Digital Commons Network^™

Semantic Preserving Text Tepresentation And Its Applications In Text Clustering, Michael Howard

Masters Theses

Text mining using the vector space representation has proven to be an valuable tool for classification, prediction, information retrieval and extraction. The nature of text data presents several issues to these tasks, including large dimension and the existence of special polysemous and synonymous words. A variety of techniques have been devised to overcome these shortcomings, including feature selection and word sense disambiguation. Privacy preserving data mining is also an area of emerging interest. Existing techniques for privacy preserving data mining require the use of secure computation protocols, which often incur a greatly increased computational cost. In this paper, a generalization-based …

Stochastic Model For Solar Sensor Array Data, Faris Alfaris

Masters Theses

Statistical approaches are often used in time series analysis, for example, to predict the future trend of a time series. Trend forecasting can be applied in many time related parameters such as: solar radiation, generation of electricity and other variables related to time series to improve the efficiency and to set the design requirements. Since the design of any solar energy system requires knowledge of the availability of solar radiation data at the location of interest. Therefore, this research seeks the application of a statistical model to fit the solar radiation time series and predict the future values. There are …

The Effects Of Water On Sympathetic Detonation And Dead Pressing Of Dynamite And Emulsions, Adam Michael Doerfler

Masters Theses

Dynamite and emulsions are very effective explosives in blasting; however they do have some shortcomings. Dynamite is prone to sympathetic detonation whereas emulsions are prone to dead pressing. While this does not happen all the time, the conditions in which the explosives are used do have an effect on whether or not they will sympathetically detonate or dead press.

Numerous researchers have investigated sympathetic detonation for a relationship between the distance between charges, hole separation distance, and size of explosive. This research aimed to look at how hole separation distance was affected when water was introduced into the boreholes for …

Verification Of A Monte Carlo Model Of The Missouri S&T Reactor, Brad Paul Richardson

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research is to ensure that an MCNP model of the Missouri S&T reactor produces accurate results so that it may be used to predict the effects of some desired upgrades to the reactor. The desired upgrades are an increase in licensed power from 200 kW to 400kW, and the installation of a secondary cooling system to prevent heating of the pool. This was performed by comparing simulations performed using the model with experiments performed using the reactor. The experiments performed were, the approach to criticality method of predicting the critical control rod height, measurement of the …

Depth Profiling Of Pahs Treated With Activated Carbon Using In-Situ Spme, Ryan D. Stringer

Masters Theses

"Novel and efficient methods to measure the bioavailability of hydrophobic organic contaminants (HOCs) in contaminated sediments will play an important role in the acceptance of alternative sediment remediation strategies. In this project, solid phase microextraction (SPME) fibers, protected in perforated steel tubes, were used as in situ passive samplers to measure the treatment of activated carbon (AC) in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) contaminated sediment. Contaminated sediment was treated with two modes of AC waterjet amendment. In the first treatment, a single 2-min injection was shot into the center of a test vessel and in the second treatment, multiple 7-sec injections …

Transport Of A Methamphetamine Surrogate Through Painted Drywall And Accumulation In Insulation, Nishanthini Vijayakumar Shakila

Masters Theses

"Methamphetamine is a drug of abuse in the United States and it is frequently produced in residential "meth labs." During a specific cooking stage called "salting out", a high concentration of methamphetamine is released into the air and can accumulate on and within indoor surfaces. Even after remediation, methamphetamine and other chemicals can be released into the occupied space by diffusion and desorption from insulation and painted drywall. To better understand the emission characteristics of methamphetamine, the diffusion coefficient of n- isopropylbenzylamine (NIBA; an isomer and surrogate for methamphetamine) was measured in latex painted drywall. To quantify the diffusion coefficient, …

Synthesis Of A Difluorometric Cross-Membrane Molecular Probe For Studying Amphipathic Systems, Danielle Raymond

Theses

A surfactant is an amphiphile which consists of a hydrophobic and hydrophilic end. In nonpolar solvents containing a small amount of water surfactants can form reverse micelles. Extensive research has been done using fluorescent probes to study several properties of these amphiphilic aggregates including mechanism of formation, critical micelle concentration, aggregate number and size, nanopolarity, and viscosity. Dr. Langner's group at RIT proposed the structure of a difluorometric, ratiometric probe that can transverse the membrane of a reverse micelle created in a system of decane/water/AOT/butyl alcohol. This probe has a dansyl and a coumarin portion making it amphiphilic and could …

Land Law Federalism, Ashira Ostrow

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Land exhibits a unique duality. Each parcel is at once absolutely fixed in location and inextricably linked to a complex array of interconnected systems, natural and man-made. Ecosystems spanning vast geographic areas sustain human life; interstate highways, railways, and airports physically connect remote areas; networks of buildings, homes, offices, and factories create communities and provide the physical context in which most human interaction takes place. Despite this duality, the dominant descriptive and normative account of land-use law is premised upon local control. In a world where capital and information pass freely across increasingly porous jurisdictional boundaries, few regulatory matters can …

Reasonable Behavior At The Cfpb, Norman I. Silber

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The article focuses on deception in the marketplace and the role of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It cites the novel "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair which portrays the truth in mortgage and purchase agreement. It states that CFPB was tasked to improve honesty and the quality of information in the marketplace.

Ladder Safety: Disclosure Of Corporate Client Confidences, Linda Galler

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Essay demonstrates that the theory underlying ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.13(c), granting lawyers the option to reveal certain client confidences on a discretionary basis, doesn’t work. Despite some compelling reasons for permitting disclosure of clients’ “bad” behavior, economics dictate that it should be a rare case in which a lawyer will actually disclose. The Essay utilizes the facts of a recent case involving in-house certified public accountants who revealed to state tax authorities that their employer had not been compliant with state tax laws, and were fired from their jobs. In thinking about whether similarly situated attorneys …

Deschooling The News Media - Democratizing The Civic Discourse, Akilah N. Folami

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article interrogates the traditional role and effect of professionals and professionalism in America's media and civic discourse landscape. It does so by considering Ivan Illich's deschooling theory within the context of broadcast journalism's historic and traditional role in facilitating civic knowledge and engagement during the so-called Golden Era of Journalism. In revisiting "network news" history through the lens of Illich's deschooling theory, this Article highlights broadcast journalism's professionalization of political discourse. Furthermore, it contends that media law reified this professionalization through early interpretations of the bona fide newscast and news interview exemptions to the equal time rule. And finally, …

Demanding Substance Or Form? The Sec's Plain English Handbook As A Basis For Securities Violations, J. Scott Colesanti

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In 1998, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC” or “ “Commission”) released a style manual titled “The Plain English Handbook.” The culmination of a drive by its Chairman, Arthur Levitt, the Handbook drew upon the rules of grammar, best industry practice, and even the support of billionaire Warren Buffett in calling for a layman's translation of corporate disclosure documents.

To varying degrees, commentators noted the significance of the Handbook. Initial textual studies provided mixed results. The press marveled at its novelty but securities regulation experts were less sanguine, chiding Commission members for naming themselves “language czars of the …

Defense Of Marriage Act, Will You Please Go Now!, Joanna L. Grossman

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
GO!
I don’t care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now!

These are the opening lines of Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, a Dr. Seuss book that my three sons and I have read literally hundreds of times. It has all the usual appeal of a Dr. Seuss book -- euphonious rhymes, made-up words and objects, fantastical creatures. But it has something else, too. An air of mystery. The …

The Internationalization Of American Family Law, Barbara Stark

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Even fifty years ago, the United States was a superpower and Americans traveled for pleasure and worked abroad. Then, like now, the United States was a magnet for immigrants seeking freedom, or asylum, or opportunity. Then, like now, human relationships crossed geographical and political boundaries, challenging the limits of family law.

But globalization and the vast migrations of capital and labor that have accompanied it in recent decades have transformed family law in once unimaginable ways. Families have been torn apart and new families have been created. Borders have become more porous, allowing adoptees and mail order brides to join …

Bridging The Gap: How Introducing Ethical Skills Exercises Will Enrich Learning In First Year Courses, Miriam R. Albert, Jennifer A. Gundlach

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Law schools have begun to raise the bar beyond the baseline mandates and aspirational goals of MacCrate and Carnegie, and are looking seriously at how to implement the suggested methods of Best Practices and/or other innovative models. Facing increasing pressure to prepare law students to be ethical, competent practitioners, law schools must rise to the challenge of introducing a broad range of practical skills and ethical values across the curriculum and throughout the students' three years of law school. It is no longer reasonable that a single required course in professional responsibility will somehow suffice to instill the long-lasting and …

Anti-Stereotyping And "The End Of Men", Barbara Stark

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

As scholars have recently shown, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s earliest sex discrimination work was grounded in anti-stereotyping theory. The particular stereotype she challenged was that of males as breadwinners and females as homemakers. As Cary Franklin notes, Justice Ginsburg’s approach was grounded in “constitutional limits on the state’s power to enforce sex-role stereotypes.” While Justice Ginsburg herself has come to realize that anti- stereotyping may not suffice to combat sex discrimination, her early focus on the ways in which stereotyping affects men, specifically men who did not fit the breadwinner stereotype, and her argument that only state-sanctioned stereotypes are constitutionally …

Another Madoff Masquerade?: Questioning “Securities Fraud” In The Crime And Its Cleanup, J. Scott Colesanti

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In December 2008, broker-dealer CEO Bernard Madoff confessed to a massive Ponzi scheme. Days later, he was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Attorney for, among other things, securities fraud. The theory of prosecution proceeded on the premise that Madoff's illicit investment advisory activities (which stemmed from his reputation in the industry) operated wholly apart from his broker-dealer activities. Subsequently, both the SEC and FINRA (the industry's largest self-regulator) concluded studies affirming that no securities transactions took place at the broker-dealer —for years, the man with the famous investment firm and his employees had simply …

Energy-Aware Replica Selection For Data-Intensive Services In Cloud, Bo Li

Theses

With the increasing energy cost in data centers, an energy efficient approach to provide data intensive services in the cloud is highly in demand. This thesis solves the energy cost reduction problem of data centers by formulating an energy-aware replica selection problem in order to guide the distribution of workload among data centers. The current popular centralized replica selection approaches address such problems but they lack scalability and are vulnerable to a crash of the central coordinator. Also, they do not take total data center energy cost as the primary optimization target. We propose a simple decentralized replica selection system …

Flow Analysis Based On Role And Pattern Matching, Pooja Wagh

Theses

Flow analysis has always been a great concern for a network system. An attacker can gain important information through several ways by monitoring the frequency and timing of network packets or by impersonating another user through remote access. Access to a network system based on single-factor authentication is nothing but monitoring the perimeter around the network leaving a company's a network wide open for the inside threat. There is a necessity to develop a classic network to reduce or eliminate threats within the organization. This thesis will analyze the flows to inspect every activity performed within the network in order …

A Mems Viscosity Sensor For Conductive Fluids, Luis Gan Chau

Theses

MEMS Viscosity sensors are widely used in different applications nowadays. MEMS sensors are created by making them small in size almost penny-like sized. With low power consumption, cheap costs of production, and mass production of the devices. These sensors are able to measure viscosity through three different characteristics, the frequency, amplitude and the quality factor. Each of these describes the fluids viscosity, by using a vibrational type viscometer. The sensor has been proven to work in conductive fluids after a post process fabrication of a protective layer of Parylene C. The sensors performance has been altered due to a thicker …

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Farid But Were Afraid To Ask, Linda Galler

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

If you are or have been a student of federal income tax, chances are that you have studied Farid-Es-Sultaneh v. Commissioner, 160 F.2d 812 (2d Cir. 1947), a case addressing a wife’s tax basis in stock received under the terms of a prenuptial agreement. This opinion is included in most basic tax casebooks and is frequently cited by tax scholars and practitioners for the black letter principle that it espouses. Over the last year or so, I have embarked on an archaeology project of sorts, searching for the story behind the case. This article reflects the results of that …

Denying Secured Creditors The Right To Credit Bid In Chapter 11 Cases And The Risk Of Undervaluation, Alan N. Resnick

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The Bankruptcy Code has reached a delicate balance between protecting the rights of secured creditors and providing financially troubled companies with flexibility in reorganizing their businesses. One protection that has been available to secured creditors is the right to "credit bid" at any sale of collateral free of liens, which allows the creditor to buy the property by offsetting its claim against the purchase price instead of paying cash. This right is designed to assure that property is not sold free of security interests at a price that is below the collateral's true value. An inadequate sales price deprives the …

Deep Learning Using Genetic Algorithms, Joshua Lamos-Sweeney

Theses

Deep Learning networks are a new type of neural network that discovers important object features. These networks determine features without supervision, and are adept at learning high level abstractions about their data sets. These networks are useful for a variety of tasks, but are difficult to train. This difficulty is compounded when multiple networks are trained in a layered fashion, which results in increased solution complexity as well as increased training time. This paper examines the use of Genetic Algorithms as a training mechanism for Deep Learning networks, with emphasis on training networks with a large number of layers, each …

Response: Rethinking The Direction Of The Alien Tort Statute, Julian G. Ku

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Despite the voluminous academic literature on the origins, purpose, and significance of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), there has been very little attention paid to the policy consequences of allowing wide-ranging litigation under the statute. Alan Sykes's economic analysis of ATS litigation against corporations, therefore, fills an important gap in the ATS literature. It is the first attempt to apply a rigorous law and economics analysis to the ATS. This intervention is especially important as the Supreme Court reconsiders the role of federal courts in the management of ATS litigation.

This brief Response will consist of two Parts. First, I …

China And The Future Of International Adjudication, Julian G. Ku

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has shunned participation in international adjudication, preferring to settle all disputes through direct negotiations. But in the past two decades, this wholly negative approach to international courts and arbitration tribunals has begun to shift. In addition to the PRC's acceptance and active participation in the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization, the PRC has also accepted limited jurisdiction for arbitration under the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Despite this shift, the PRC still follows a policy of …

Sexual Reorientation, Elizabeth M. Glazer

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

There has been a recent shift in the political and legal treatment of bisexuals. Since Ruth Colker, Naomi Mezey, and Kenji Yoshino began writing about the phenomenon of bisexual erasure and the resulting invisibility of the bisexual from sexual-orientation law and the LGBT rights movement, something strange has happened. Bisexuality is suddenly hypervisible. And not just on Glee or in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or even in the 2010 national sex survey reporting that of the seven percent of the population identifying as non-heterosexual, forty percent of the men and a large majority of the women identified as …

Mediation And Social Justice: Risks And Opportunities, Robert A. Baruch Bush, Joseph P. Fogler

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The article assesses the social justice critique of mediation and its bases. It describes various responses that mediation's proponents have offered to counter its social justice critics and illustrates the flaws in the arguments used to counter the critics. It presents a new view of how mediation can be supportive of social justice and explains the conditions essential for mediation to meet that goal. It discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Table Of Contents, California Western International Law Journal

California Western International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Foreword: Global Justice, History, And Law: Between Fela's Teachers Teaching "Nonsense" And Bob Marley's "Small Axe" For A Big Tree, Ernesto Hernández-López

California Western International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Torture In Chile (1973-1990): Analysis Of One Hundred Survivors' Testimonies, Hugo Rojas Corral

California Western International Law Journal

No abstract provided.