Digital Commons Network^™

Rethinking Privacy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Anxiety about surveillance and data mining has led many to embrace implausibly expansive and rigid conceptions of privacy. The premises of some current privacy arguments do not fit well with the broader political commitments of those who make them. In particular, liberals seem to have lost touch with the reservations about privacy expressed in the social criticism of some decades ago. They seem unable to imagine that preoccupation with privacy might amount to a “pursuit of loneliness” or how “eyes on the street” might have reassuring connotations. Without denying the importance of the effort to define and secure privacy values, …

Event Plane Dependent Dihadron Correlations With Harmonic Vⁿ Subtraction In Au + Au Collisions At √ˢᴺᴺ = 200 Gev, H. Agakishiev, M. M. Aggarwal, Z. Ahammed, S. Bueltmann, D. Plyku, Star Collaboration

Physics Faculty Publications

STAR measurements of dihadron azimuthal correlations (ΔΦ) are reported in midcentral (20-60%) Au + Au collisions at √ˢᴺᴺ = 200 GeV as a function of the trigger particle's azimuthal angle relative to the event plane, Φ_s = | Φ_t- Ψ_EP|. The elliptic (v₂), triangular (v₃), and quadratic (v₄) flow harmonic backgrounds are subtracted using the zero yield at minimum (ZYAM) method. It is found that a finite near-side (|ΔΦ| < π/2) long-range pseudorapidity correlation (ridge) is present in the in-plane direction (Φ_s ~ 0). The away-side (|ΔΦ| > π/2) correlation shows a modification from d+ Au data, varying with Φ_s. …

Measurement Of Longitudinal Spin Asymmetries For Weak Boson Production In Polarized Proton-Proton Collisions At Rhic, L. Adamczyk, J. K. Adkins, G. Agakishiev, M. M. Aggarwal, S. Bültmann, Star Collaboration

Physics Faculty Publications

We report measurements of single- and double-spin asymmetries for W± and Z/ɣ* boson production in longitudinally polarized p + p collisions at √s = 510 GeV by the STAR experiment at RHIC. The asymmetries for W± were measured as a function of the decay lepton pseudorapidity, which provides a theoretically clean probe of the proton's polarized quark distributions at the scale of the W mass. The results are compared to theoretical predictions, constrained by polarized deep inelastic scattering measurements, and show a preference for a sizable, positive up antiquark polarization in the range 0.05 < x < 0.2.

Corporate Headhunting, Daniel C. Richman

Faculty Scholarship

A wide range of commentators – including some pretty sophisticated ones – have raked through the ruins of the 2008 financial collapse, confident that there are significant criminal prosecutions to bring against individuals and that the Justice Department should be faulted for its failure to bring them. Their confidence that blockbuster criminal cases could have been made rests on shaky grounds. So, too, does their faith that the hunting of heads is a socially productive response to the collapse. If anything, a focus on headhunting will only distract from, and reduce the pressure for, efforts to explain the collapse and …

Surprisingly Punitive Damages, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Damages can add up to super-punitive amounts in unintended ways. To take a textbook example: The Defendant has caused an industrial accident or other mass tort. Plaintiff 1 sues, winning punitive damages based on the reprehensibility of that original act. Plaintiff 2 also sues – and also wins punitive damages on the same grounds. So do Plaintiff 3, Plaintiff 4, and so forth. If each of these punitive awards is directed at the same general badness of that original act, then these punishments are redundant. When such redundancy occurs, even damages that are meant to be punitive can reach surprisingly …

Concurrent Damages, Bert I. Huang

Faculty Scholarship

Imagine that a hacker is working for a university official secretly spying on faculty members – say, to find out who has been leaking information to the press about internal disciplinary matters. The injuries to a given victim of the hacking might follow a classic learning curve: The first few intrusions into her e-mail account reveal a storehouse of personal secrets, but further break-ins yield less and less new information. One might say there is diminishing marginal harm.

There is no such leveling off, however, in the compensation that would be awarded to that victim. The electronic privacy law …

Putting Stored-Value Cards In Their Place, Liran Haim, Ronald J. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay explores the effects of stored-value cards on social welfare. We argue that stored-value cards, in general, are socially beneficial payment devices. Their burgeoning use benefits society in three main plains. First, by replacing paper-based instruments in market segments previously inaccessible to card-based payments, stored-value cards lower the private and public costs of payment transactions. Second, by extending the use of card-based payment systems towards lower- and middle-income households, stored-value cards foster inclusion of those households in the financial mainstream of our society. Third, by operating without an extension of credit, stored-value cards help to limit the uniquely American …

Protecting Reliance, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Reliance plays a central role in contract law and scholarship. One party relies on the other's promised performance, its statements, or its anticipated entry into a formal agreement. Saying that reliance is important, however, says nothing about what we should do about it. The focus of this Essay is on the many ways that parties choose to protect reliance. The relationship between what parties do and what contract doctrine cares about is tenuous at best. Contract performance takes place over time, and the nature of the parties 'future obligations can be deferred to take into account changing circumstances. Reliance matters …

Legislating Trust, John D. Gregory

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

As governments in Canada and elsewhere have considered statutes to ensure that electronic communications are legally effective, they have invariably had to face questions about the reliability of those communications. Can we trust electronic messages, documents, and signatures? Are they the same in law as if they were on paper? What conditions should be imposed in order to give us the right assurances that we can trust them? To answer these questions properly, we need to understand the nature of “trust” and the extent to which legislation can be a source of it, and what other sources should be enlisted …

Top-K With Diversity-M Data Retrieval In Wireless Sensor Networks, Kiran Kumar Puram

Masters Theses

"Wireless Sensor Network is a network of a few to several thousand sensors deployed over an area to sense data and report that data back to the base station. There are many applications of wireless sensor networks including environment monitoring, wildlife tracking, troop tracking etc. The deployed sensors have many constraints like limited battery, limited memory and very little processing capacity. These constraints show direct effect on the network life time.

In many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks, such as monitoring chemical leak, the user is not interested in all the data points from the entire region, but may want …

On Temporal And Frequency Responses Of Smartphone Accelerometers For Explosives Detection, Srinivas Chakravarthi Thandu

Masters Theses

"The increasing frequency of explosive disasters throughout the world in recent years have created a clear need for the systems to monitor for them continuously for better detection and to improve the post disaster rescue operations. Dedicated sensors deployed in the public places and their associated networks to monitor such explosive events are still inadequate and must be complemented for making the detection more pervasive and effective. Modern smart phones are a rich source of sensing because of the fact that they are equipped with wide range of sensors making these devices an appealing platform for pervasive computing applications. The …

Ecology Of A Declining Great Plains Fish, Fundulus Sciadicus, In The Missouri Ozarks, Gregory Travis Thompson

Masters Theses

"Anthropogenic habitat disturbances are of growing concern due to their impacts on native biota, especially in freshwater ecosystems. Damming, channelization, urbanization, wetland draining, and non-native fish introductions all play large roles in habitat homogeneity, fragmentation, and species competition. This has negative effects on native fish and invertebrate species. In the Midwestern United States, the plains topminnow (Fundulus sciadicus) has been declining across its range, to the point of becoming a species of special concern in Missouri. This is possibly due to a combination of the above anthropogenic habitat disturbances. To better understand the ecology of the plains topminnow …

Foundations Of Academic Success: Words Of Wisdom, Thomas C. Priester

Milne Open Textbooks

Foundations of Academic Success: Words of Wisdom (FAS: WoW) introduces you to the various aspects of student and academic life on campus and prepares you to thrive as a successful college student (since there is a difference between a college student and a successful college student). Each section of FAS: WoW is framed by self-authored, true-to-life short stories from actual State University of New York (SUNY) students, employees, and alumni. The advice they share includes a variety of techniques to help you cope with the demands of college. The lessons learned are meant to enlarge your awareness of …

Literature, The Humanities, And Humanity, Theodore L. Steinberg

Milne Open Textbooks

Literature, the Humanities, and Humanity attempts to make the study of literature more than simply another school subject that students have to take. At a time when all subjects seem to be valued only for their testability, this book tries to show the value of reading and studying literature, even earlier literature. It shows students, some of whom will themselves become teachers, that literature actually has something to say to them. Furthermore, it shows that literature is meant to be enjoyed, that, as the Roman poet Horace (and his Renaissance disciple Sir Philip Sidney) said, the functions of literature are …

Instruction In Functional Assessment, Marcie Desrochers, Moira Fallon

Milne Open Textbooks

Instruction in Functional Assessment introduces learners to functional assessment (FA), which includes a variety of assessment approaches (indirect, observational, and experimental) for identifying the cause of an individual’s challenging behavior for the purpose of designing effective treatments. FA is mandated by federal law and is a recognized empirically based approach to treatment of individuals with challenging behaviors (e.g., disruptive, self-injurious, and aggressive behaviors). Instruction in FA is essential for students who will one day enter professions as educators, psychologists, social workers, counselors, or mental health professionals.

The purpose of this textbook is to provide instruction in FA skills for pre-professionals …

The Missing Link: An Introduction To Web Development And Programming, Michael Mendez

Milne Open Textbooks

Web development is an evolving amalgamation of languages that work in concert to receive, modify, and deliver information between parties using the Internet as a mechanism of delivery.
While it is easy to describe conceptually, implementation is accompanied by an overwhelming variety of languages, platforms, templates, frameworks, guidelines, and standards. Navigating a project from concept to completion often requires more than mastery of one or two complementing languages, meaning today’s developers need both breadth, and depth, of knowledge to be effective.

This text provides the developer with an understanding of the various elements of web development by focusing on the …

How We Got From There To Here: A Story Of Real Analysis, Eugene Boman, Robert Rogers

Milne Open Textbooks

The typical introductory real analysis text starts with an analysis of the real number system and uses this to develop the definition of a limit, which is then used as a foundation for the definitions encountered thereafter. While this is certainly a reasonable approach from a logical point of view, it is not how the subject evolved, nor is it necessarily the best way to introduce students to the rigorous but highly non-intuitive definitions and proofs found in analysis.

This book proposes that an effective way to motivate these definitions is to tell one of the stories (there are many) …

The Information Literacy User’S Guide: An Open, Online Textbook, Allison Hosier, Daryl Bullis, Deborah Bernnard, Greg Bobish, Irina Holden, Jenna Pitera (Hecker), Tor Loney, Trudi Jacobson

Milne Open Textbooks

Good researchers have a host of tools at their disposal that make navigating today’s complex information ecosystem much more manageable. Gaining the knowledge, abilities, and self-reflection necessary to be a good researcher helps not only in academic settings, but is invaluable in any career, and throughout one’s life. The Information Literacy User’s Guide will start you on this route to success.

The Information Literacy User’s Guide is based on two current models in information literacy: The 2011 version of The Seven Pillars Model, developed by the Society of College, National and University Libraries in the United Kingdom and the conception …

Book Review: Juries In The 21st Century, By Jacqueline Horan, Vanessa Macdonnell

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In Juries in the 21st Century, Jacqueline Horan immerses the reader in a discussion of how jury trials operate, how they could be more effective, and how they should adapt to emerging technologies. The book makes three contributions to the existing legal literature. First, it challenges basic assumptions about how juries operate. Horan demonstrates that not all features of modern jury trials are essential or even useful. She argues convincingly that the existing features of the jury system should only be retained if they contribute positively to the process by which the jury arrives at a verdict. This leads Horan …

Near-Field Communication Technology: Regulatory And Legal Recommendations For Embracing The Nfc Revolution, Allan Richarz

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Despite its ease and convenience, NFC technology raises a number of privacy issues. Chief among these concerns are the collection, retention, and usage of personally-identifying information contained within NFC-enabled devices by both private and public entities. Within that category, the most pressing privacy issues inherent in the collection and usage of such information relate to real-time tracking or after-the-fact habit profiling and identity theft. As well, privacy issues persist around the means used, if any, to secure and protect that information from unauthorized third parties both at the end-user and systemic database levels.

In light of these concerns, it is …

Software-Based Instrumentation For Analysis Of Electrostatic Discharge Effects, Antonio James Sabatini

Masters Theses

”Failures caused by electrostatic discharge (ESD) compromise the reliability of embedded systems. Peripherals such as the universal serial bus (USB) are particularly vulnerable, as isolating them to avoid electromagnetic interference would defy their purpose - facilitating communication with and/or by the embedded system. Better understanding the propagation of failures that result from ESD can facilitate defensive development of hardware and software for embedded systems, but is hampered by the lack of non-invasive and lightweight instrumentation techniques.

The original contribution of this thesis is the design and development of software-based instrumentation for monitoring the reaction of the USB peripheral of an …

Market Structure And Political Law: A Taxonomy Of Power, Zephyr Teachout, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

The goal of this Article is to create a way of seeing how market structure is innately political. It provides a taxonomy of ways in which large companies frequently exercise powers that possess the character of governance. Broadly, these exercises of power map onto three bodies of activity we generally assign to government: to set policy, to regulate markets, and to tax. We add a fourth category – which we call "dominance," after Brandeis – as a kind of catchall describing the other political impacts. The activities we outline will not always fit neatly into these categories, nor do all …

Letter From The U.S.: Exclusive Rights, Exceptions, And Uncertain Compliance With International Norms – Part Ii (Fair Use), Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This survey of recent U.S. fair use decisions examines the domestic evolution of the doctrine, particularly in light of the significant expansion of noninfringing “transformative” uses. The article also considers the U.S.’ compliance with its international obligations under the Berne Convention and the TRIPs Accord, and inquires whether the substantial enlargement of the application of the U.S. fair use exception exceeds the leeway that the Berne Convention, art. 9(2), WCT art. 10, and TRIPs art. 13 grant to member states to provide for exceptions and limitations to copyright.

(Un)Conscious (Popular) Underground: Restricted Cultural Production And Underground Rap Music, Matthew Oware

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Alternative (or ‘‘underground’’) rap music proves a worthy site for applying ideas associated with Bourdieu’s field of cultural production. I examine how underground rap music blurs the boundaries of restricted and large-scale production, as represented by noncommercial and commercial rap respectively. Artists identified as ‘‘underground’’ deploy anti-corporate, politically-charged, and socially-conscious lyrics, which can be viewed as restricted production. However, these lyrical themes are relatively scarce compared to themes of misogyny and hyper-masculinity found in this sub-genre and predominately found in commercial rap. This study thus reveals that large-scale and restricted fields of production may intersect (Craig and Dubois, 2010; Elafros, …

Recruiting, Engaging, And Retaining Low Income Parents In Community Parenting Programs: A Phenomenological Study, Jane Elyce Fuqua Glasgow

Theses and Dissertations in Early Childhood Education

This study examined factors that impact recruitment, engagement, and retention of low-income parents in community parenting programs. Using a traditional qualitative phenomenological approach, this research sought to develop an understanding of the difficulties that program providers often encounter in engaging low-income parents. Participants included program stakeholders (providers, policy-makers, and funders) and low-income parents with children under the age of five from urban areas. A series of focus groups were held in order to capture the voices and develop a textural description of the lived experiences of participants. Results revealed that a combination of factors impact engagement, including the important role …

Human Capital Management Within The Federal Government Utilizing Generational Stratification With A Focus On Generation Y, Ian Nathaniel Barford

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

With many individuals in the Baby Boomer generation eligible to retire, many open positions will need to be filled by other Baby Boomers, or those from Generation X or Generation Y. Private industry has taken note of this and has been exploring workplace differences between Generation Y, Generation X, and Baby Boomers. Unfortunately for the federal government, data shows Generation Y is also separating; specifically quitting for unknown reasons. Understanding this apparent dichotomy between Generation Y and Generation X and Baby Boomer federal government employees is a current knowledge gap within the federal government's strategic human capital management focus.

From …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Sugar Based Low Molecular Weight Gelators And The Preparation Of Chiral Sulfinamides, Hari Prasad Reddy Mangunuru

Chemistry & Biochemistry Theses & Dissertations

Low molecular weight gelators (LMWGs) have received considerable attention in the field of chemistry from last few decades. These compounds form self-assembled fibrous networks like micelles, cylindrical, sheets, fibers, layers and so on. The fibrous network entraps the solvent and forms gel, because of the self-assembly phenomenon and their demonstrated potential uses in a variety of areas, ranging from environmental to medicinal applications.

Sugars are good starting materials to synthesize the new class of LMWG's, because these are different from some expensive materials, these are natural products. We have synthesized and characterized the LMGS's based on D-glucose and D …

Albedo-Induced Radiative Forcing From Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreaks In Forests, South-Central Rocky Mountains: Magnitude, Persistence, And Relation To Outbreak Severity, M. Vanderhoof, C. A. Williams, Y. Shuai, D. Jarvis, Dominik Kulakowski, J. Masek

Geography

Mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreaks in North America are widespread and have potentially persistent impacts on forest albedo and associated radiative forcing. This study utilized multiple data sets, both current and historical, within lodgepole pine stands in the south-central Rocky Mountains to quantify the full radiative forcing impact of outbreak events for decades after outbreak (0-60 yr) and the role of outbreak severity in determining that impact. Change in annual albedo and radiative forcing peaked at 14-20 yr post-outbreak (0.06 ± 0.006 and-0.8 ± 0.1 W m-2, respectively) and recovered to pre-outbreak levels by 30-40 yr post-outbreak. Change in albedo …

A Study Of A Professional Development Initiative To Increase Cultural Competency, Jennifer C. Coleman

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

A STUDY OF A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVE TO INCREASE

CULTURAL COMPETENCY

By Jennifer Crowe Coleman, Ph.D.

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014

Major Director: Charol Shakeshaft, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Educational Leadership

School of Education

While there are broad, societal forces that contribute to achievement gaps, the professional development of teachers is one way educational leaders have sought to improve schools, improve teacher performance, and increase teacher knowledge and skills. Given the achievement and cultural gaps that exist between teachers and …

Novel Compounds As Potential Alzheimer's Disease Therapeutics And Inhibitors Of The Nlrp3 Inflammasome, Jeremy E. Chojnacki

Theses and Dissertations

Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating neurodegenerative disorder and the leading cause of dementia. The disease manifests via several pathologies including neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, metal ion dyshomeostasis, and cell death. To address the multifaceted nature of this disorder, the design of several diverse compounds, targeting many pathological effects, was generated. First, a series of compounds based on curcumin and diosgenin were synthesized following the bivalent design strategy. Two compounds were discovered to have neuroprotective ability, anti-oxidative function, and anti-Aß oligomerization (AßO) properties. A second set of molecules was also designed, wherein a hybrid compound strategy was utilized. Three hybrids were to …