Digital Commons Network^™

Migrant Smuggling: Canada's Response To A Global Criminal Enterprise, Benjamin Perrin

All Faculty Publications

Migrant smuggling is a dangerous, sometimes deadly, criminal activity. Failing to respond effectively to migrant smuggling and deter it will risk emboldening those who engage in this illicit enterprise, which generates proceeds for organized crime and criminal networks, funds terrorism and facilitates clandestine terrorist travel, endangers the lives and safety of smuggled migrants, undermines border security, and undermines the integrity and fairness of immigration systems. Introduced in the Canadian House of Commons in June 2011, the Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System Act (Bill C-4) includes proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that would enhance …

State Ownership And Corporate Governance In China: An Executive Career Approach, Li-Wen Lin

All Faculty Publications

China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) now comprise over 60 percent of the largest 500 companies in China and more than 10 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies in the world. Despite their importance to China’s domestic economy and foreign investment strategy, many governance characteristics of the SOEs remain a black box, one of which is the SOEs’ executive composition and recruitment development. This Article shifts away from the typical focus on how the things function (e.g. ownership structure and board of directors) to who the people in charge are, which is an important approach to understanding corporate governance and economic development …

Evolving Capacities: The B.C. Representative For Children And Youth As A Hybrid Model Of Oversight, Mary Liston

All Faculty Publications

This paper explores hybrid models of oversight through an examination of a new institutional creation: British Columbia’s Representative for Children and Youth (BC RCY). The paper argues that societal changes in the conception of children’s worth have significantly affected approaches to child welfare and have also stimulated institutional innovation. The paper begins with a historical overview of the legal and moral status of children, focusing on the child as the subject of government protection, and then considers the evolution of children’s rights in the twentieth century. This conceptual shift from children as passive objects of paternal state care to (near) …

Mature Women Beyond Foster Care: Narratives On Fractors Contributing To Subjective Well-Being And Life-Sustaining Skills, Marie Elizabeth Moore

Doctoral Dissertations

Studies show that African American children enter foster care at a higher rate and remain in foster care longer. The numbers of Black children in foster care increases in any given year. Studies found that even when controlling for risk and poverty, race affects the decision of whether to provide services or remove children from their families. Although poverty may serve as an indicator of risk, when race is included, it changes the decision threshold.

African American women who aged out of foster care and are living self - sustaining lives are small in number and there is an absence …

Untold Stories Or Miraculous Mirrors? The Possibilities Of A Text-Based Understanding Of Socio-Legal Transcript Research, Emma Cunliffe

All Faculty Publications

Austin Sarat has described legal understandings of the transcript as “the verbatim record of a present soon to become past, a mirror/a record/a voice machine in which the “author” exercises no authorial presence.” In this paper I argue that when seeing a transcript as an authorless mirror of court proceedings, lawyers and socio-legal scholars risk overlooking the ways in which the technology of transcripts influences the record that is produced. Paying attention to the laws and practices governing transcript production allows those who engage in transcript research to appreciate how the transcript is defined in relation to the spoken proceedings …

‘Don't Read The Comments!’: Reflections On Writing And Publishing Feminist Socio-Legal Research As A Young Scholar, Emma Cunliffe

All Faculty Publications

This article responds to reviews written by Eve Darian-Smith and Mehera San Roque and published in Feminists@Law. Darian-Smith and San Roque's reviews focus on the contributions made by my 2011 book, Murder, Medicine and Motherhood. In this response, I have taken the opportunity to reflect a little on the experience of writing Murder, Medicine and Motherhood, and on its reception. In the first section, I trace the choices and unanticipated challenges that structured my research for Murder, Medicine and Motherhood. Both Darian-Smith and San Roque have commented on this methodology, and I have noticed that after publication, the scope and …

Innovation-Framing Regulation, Cristie Ford

All Faculty Publications

This paper aims to provide insights into the effective regulation of private sector innovation. It coins a term – “innovation-framing regulation” – to describe a particular quality of the regulation that characterized much of financial regulation in the recent era. After briefly sketching a particular financial innovation (securitization and the marketing of securitized assets on the derivatives markets) it describes three regulatory interactions with that innovation: the Basel II Capital Accords, the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Crisis in Canada, and the ongoing notice-and-comment rulemaking process surrounding the Volcker Rule in the United States. While each case study is different, in each …

Bordering On Failure: Canada-U.S. Border Policy And The Politics Of Refugee Exclusion, Efrat Arbel, Alletta Brenner

All Faculty Publications

In June 2012, the Canadian government ushered in sweeping reforms to Canada’s refugee system. These reforms brought debates about Canadian refugee protection to the forefront of legal and political discourse. In advancing these reforms, the Canadian government has asserted that Canada’s refugee system is among the most generous and compassionate in the world. Canada’s doors, the Canadian government has stated, remain open to legitimate refugees. This report evaluates these claims by examining the U.S.-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement and border measures implemented under the rubric of the Multiple Borders Strategy, and analyzing their effects on asylum seekers. A detailed examination …

Shifting Borders And The Boundaries Of Rights: Examining The Safe Third Country Agreement Between Canada And The United States, Efrat Arbel

All Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the Canadian Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal decisions assessing the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States (STCA). It examines how each court’s treatment of the location and operation of the Canada-US border influences the results obtained. The article suggests that both in its treatment of the STCA and in its constitutional analysis, the Federal Court decision conceives of the border as a moving barrier capable of shifting outside Canada’s formal territorial boundaries. The effect of this decision is to bring refugee claimants outside state soil within the fold of Canadian constitutional …

Democratizing Indian Popular Music: From Cassette Culture To The Digital Era, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

The history of Indian popular music constitutes in itself a significant development in modern culture, as this set of genres—especially but not only in their Bollywood forms—have been cherished by hundreds of millions of listeners not only in South Asia but internationally as well. At the same time, the trajectory of Indian popular music represents a dramatic case study of media culture as well, as its patterns of ownership, consumption, and even musical structures themselves have been conditioned by technological changes. Most striking is the way that a highly monopolized, streamlined, and homogeneous popular music culture dominated for several decades …

Making Higher Education More Affordable, One Course Reading At A Time: Academic Libraries As Key Advocates For Open Access Textbooks And Educational Resources, Karen Okamoto

Publications and Research

Open access textbooks (OATs) and educational resources (OERs) are being lauded as a viable alternative to costly print textbooks. Some academic libraries are joining the OER movement by creating guides to open repositories. Others are promoting OATs and OERs, reviewing them, and even helping to create them. This article analyzes how academic libraries are currently engaged in open access textbook and OER initiatives. By drawing on examples of library initiatives across the United States, the author illustrates how libraries are facilitating the adoption and implementation of these affordable resources.

Stage As Street: Representation At The Juncture Of The Arts And Justice, E. Gabriel Dattatreyan, Daniel L. Stageman

Publications and Research

Arts educators working with court-involved youth face a set of complex and imbricated challenges. First, how do we gain the interest of the young people we would have participate in what we imagine are col-laborative and mutually generative projects? Second, how do we mediate representational tensions when the project is not solely therapeutic but has a broader public pedagogical purpose—to disrupt the simplistic and pathologizing discourses of poverty and violence that so often capture young men and women of color in the United States? (Bourgois, 2002; Noguera, 2008). Third, and not least, how do we navigate the institutional settings where …

The Effect Of Personal Religiosity On Attitudes Toward Abortion, Divorce, And Gender Equality: Does Cultural Context Make A Difference?, Amy Adamczyk

Publications and Research

Across the globe, people differ considerably in their attitudes about abortion, divorce, and gender equality. These differences are reflected in the diversity of laws regulating divorce, penalties for women obtaining abortions, and differences in women's levels of political representation. While personal religious beliefs are often seen as having a significant role in shaping attitudes, economic development and political stability are also seen to be important predictors of attitudes about sexual morality and gender equality. This study draws on ideas from cultural sociology and the sociology of religion to address the interrelationship between personal religiosity and national cultural orientations to explain …

Government Disapproval Of Religion, Jay D. Wexler

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s “Endorsement Test” for evaluating the constitutionality of government sponsored symbols, displays, and messages regarding religion is notoriously controversial and has engendered enormous scholarly attention. In addition to government “endorsement” of religion, however, the test also prohibits the government from sending a message of “disapproval” of religion. The disapproval side of the Endorsement Test has not been subject to almost any scholarly discussion, which is not surprising given that until recently the courts have had no reason to entertain, much less sustain, challenges to alleged government disapproval of religion. In the last few years, however, due to a …

Small Business Disaster Assistance, Peggy Maisel, Natalie Roman

Faculty Scholarship

When a disaster hits, it affects the entire community. A small business is especially vulnerable because it does not necessarily have the resources to respond to a disaster or to catastrophic damage. In fact, it is reported that approximately 25 percent of small businesses that close due to a disaster never reopen, and 40 percent of small businesses hit directly by a serious natural disaster do not recover. This is true regardless of what kind of disaster is involved, from a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, flooding, winter storms, or even civil unrest or terrorism.
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The Concept Of "Harm" In Copyright, Wendy J. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

This essay examines the tort of copyright infringement. It argues that the ideas of "harm" and "fault" already play a role in the tort’s functioning, and that an ideally reformulated version of the tort should perhaps give a more significant role to “harm.” The essay therefore examines what “harm” can or should mean, reviewing four candidates for cognizable harm in copyright law (rivalry-based losses, foregone fees, loss of exclusivity, and subjective distress) and canvassing three philosophical conceptions of "harm" (counterfactual, historical-worsening, and noncomparative). The essay identifies the appropriateness vel non of employing, in the copyright context, each harm-candidate and each …

Distributions Of Industry Payments To Massachusetts Physicians, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Christopher Robertson, Kent Siri, Puneet Batra, Jessica M. Franklin

Faculty Scholarship

Some states have mandated systematic public disclosure of payments made by drug- and device-makers to health care practitioners. We used Massachusetts data to characterize the distribution of payment types and the variation among medical specialties.

The 30 months’ of data included 32,227 reported payments to 11,734 Massachusetts physicians, for a total of $76.7 million. The most common form of payment was food. Compensation for bona fide services was the payment type with the highest value.

We found that 25% of currently licensed Massachusetts physicians received at least one payment during the study period. Prevalence ranged by specialties from pediatricians (12%) …

Proximity Heating Effects In Power Cables, Jonathan Blackledge, Eugene Coyle, Kevin O'Connell

Articles

Researchers at Technological University Dublin (DIT) have developed a new modelling system for evaluating the two and three dimensional heating effects in power cables due to harmonic distortion and proximity field effects.

Three Dimensional Simulation Of The Radiation Field Patterns Generated By An Integrated Antenna, Jonathan Blackledge, Bazar Babajanov

Articles

Simulating the electromagnetic field patterns generated by integrated antennas uses in mobile phones, for example, is fundamental to understanding their transmission characteristics and thereby engineering designs that optimize the directional properties of electromagnetic propagation. Modern integrated antennas have complex three-dimensional geometry designed to optimize their performance in terms of their multi-band and multi -modal attributes. This geometry, coupled with their close proximity to other component of the device (such as the battery and Printed Circuit Board, for example) produce complex field patterns due to the scattering of the electric (and magnetic) field within a spatial domain that is the same …

Financial Forecasting Using The Kolmogorov-Feller Equation, Jonathan Blackledge, Marc Lamphiere, Kieran Murphy, Shaun Overton

Articles

An approach to analysing a financial time series using the Kolmogorov-Feller Equation is considered, in particular, the Generalised Kolmogorov-Feller Equation (GKFE) subject to variations in the Stochastic Volatility. Using the Mittag-Leffler memory function, we derive an expression for the Impulse Response Function associated with a short time window of data which is then used to derive an algorithm for computing a new index using a standard moving window process. It is shown that application of this index to financial time series, subject to a low volatility condition, correlates with the start, direction and end of a trend depending on the …

Russia And Countering Violent Extremism In The Internet And Social Media: Exploring Prospects For U.S.-Russia Cooperation Beyond The "Reset", Sharyl N. Cross Dr.

Journal of Strategic Security

Russia has been targeted with a series of terrorist attacks over the past several years, and there are a growing number of extremist groups operating throughout Russia’s society utilizing the Internet/social media to promote their narratives and objectives. Russia’s policy community has created institutional mechanisms and laws to address the challenge of violent extremism in the Internet/social media, and recognizes the importance of international cooperation toward these ends. This study, based on primary research conducted in Moscow in 2012, defines Russia’s assessment of domestic and international sources violent extremist threats; explains Moscow’s perspective on balancing democratic principles with the challenge …

Social Identity Theory For Investigating Islamic Extremism In The Diaspora, Dina Al Raffie

Journal of Strategic Security

An overview of literature on radicalization in the Muslim diaspora in Europe finds identity crises to be a key precipitant to the process. Studies also typically focus on the manipulation of identify by violent Islamic extremist groups. This paper attempts to contribute to the discussion on the role of identity in radicalization by using social identity theory. In doing so, the article explores the formation and transformation process of social identities, and argues that the nature of community-level groups and networks may contribute to identity ‘readiness’ for radicalization. To this end, special focus is given to formally recognized Islamist non-governmental …

Table Of Contents

Journal of Strategic Security

No abstract provided.

Preventing Violent Extremism Through Value Complexity: Being Muslim Being British, Jose Liht, Sara Savage

Journal of Strategic Security

This article reports on an intervention designed to prevent violent extremism in young UK Muslims, and provides an empirical assessment of its effectiveness. The course was designed to expose participants to the multiplicity of value priorities that influential Muslims embody, and to structure group activities that allow participants to explore all value positions on issues central to radical Islamist discourse, free from criticism or social pressure. The intervention, a 16 contact hour course using films and group activities that enables participants to problem solve according to a broad array of their own values, was pre and post tested with 81 …

Media Use And Source Trust Among Muslims In Seven Countries: Results Of A Large Random Sample Survey, Steven R. Corman, Steven Hitchcock

Journal of Strategic Security

Despite the perceived importance of media in the spread of and resistance against Islamist extremism, little is known about how Muslims use different kinds of media to get information about religious issues, and what sources they trust when doing so. This paper reports the results of a large, random sample survey among Muslims in seven countries Southeast Asia, West Africa and Western Europe, which helps fill this gap. Results show a diverse set of profiles of media use and source trust that differ by country, with overall low trust in mediated sources of information. Based on these findings, we conclude …

"These Illegals": Personhood, Profit, And The Political Economy Of Punishment In Federal-Local Immigration Enforcement Partnerships, Daniel L. Stageman

Publications and Research

Contemporary popular discourse linking immigration and immigrants to crime has proved extremely difficult to dislodge, despite clear evidence that immigrant labor provides broad and direct economic benefits to a significant proportion of the US population. The criminalizing discourse directed at immigrants may in part be functional, by leading to restrictionist immigration policies and practices and subjecting immigrants to intensified economic exploitation.

This study examines the economic context in which state and local governments adopt restrictionist immigration policies and practices, and implicates the political economy of punishment (Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and social structure. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939) …

Fluid Interactions That Enable Stealth Predation By The Upstream-Foraging Hydromedusa Craspedacusta Sowerbyi, K. Lucas, Sean Colin, John H. Costello, K. Katija, E. Klos

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Unlike most medusae that forage with tentacles trailing behind their bells, several species forage upstream of their bells using aborally located tentacles. It has been hypothesized that these medusae forage as stealth predators by placing their tentacles in more quiescent regions of flow around their bells. Consequently, they are able to capture highly mobile, sensitive prey. We used digital particle image velocimetry (DPIV) to quantitatively characterize the flow field around Craspedacusta sowerbyi, a freshwater upstream-foraging hydromedusa, to evaluate the mechanics of its stealth predation. We found that fluid velocities were minimal in front and along the sides of the bell …

Finite Element Analysis Of Balloon-Expandable Coronary Stent Deployment: Influence Of Angioplasty Balloon Configuration, David Martin, Fergal Boyle

Articles

Today, the majority of coronary stents are balloon-expandable and are deployed using a balloon-tipped catheter. To improve deliverability, the membrane of the angioplasty balloon is typically folded about the catheter in a pleated configuration. As such, the deployment of the angioplasty balloon is governed by the material properties of the balloon membrane, its folded configuration and its attachment to the catheter. Despite this observation, however, an optimum strategy for modelling the configuration of the angioplasty balloon in finite element studies of coronary stent deployment has not been identified, and idealised models of the angioplasty balloon are commonly employed in the …

Improving Tribological Properties Of Cast Al-Si Alloys Through Application Of Wear-Resistant Thermal Spray Coatings, David Culliton, Tony Betts, Sandra Carvalho, David Kennedy

Articles

Flame Spray Thermal Spray coatings are low-cost, high-wear surface-treatment technologies. However, little has been reported on their potential effects on cast automotive aluminum alloys. The aim of this research was to investigate the tribological properties of as-sprayed NiCrBSi and WC/12Co Flame Spray coatings applied to two cast aluminum alloys: high-copper LM24 (AlSi8Cu3Fe), and low-copper LM25 (AlSi7Mg). Potential interactions between the mechanical properties of the substrate and the deposited coatings were deemed to be significant. Microstructural, microhardness, friction, and wear (pin-on-disk, microabrasion, Taber abrasion, etc.) results are reported, and the performance differences between coatings on the different substrates were noted. The …

Toc Complex Formation: An Investigation Of The Interactions Governing Toc Complex Composition And Assembly, Steven R. Siman

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Chloroplast-destined preproteins are translated in the cytosol, and posttranslationally targeted to and translocated across the double envelope membrane of the chloroplast by the coordinated activities of two translocon complexes: the Translocons at the Outer and Inner envelope membrane of the Chloroplast (TOC and TIC, respectively). In the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana the core TOC components include two families of GTPase receptors: TOC159 (atToc159, -132, and -120) and TOC34 (atToc33 and -34). These receptor families are hypothesized to assemble into distinct complexes and recognize transit peptides present on the N-terminus of chloroplast-destined preproteins. The GTPase domains of the TOC159 and TOC34 …