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Disability, Repressive Regimes, And Health Disparity: Assessing Country Conditions In North Korea, Jae-Chun Won, Janet E. Lord, Michael Ashley Stein, Yosung Song

Articles

This article examines the potential of international human rights standards to account for heightened risk and vulnerability to human rights abuses for persons with disabilities in politically repressive environments. We offer a preliminary assessment of whether and how a disability-cognizant accounting of human rights in repressive regimes can lead to a more credible and comprehensive understanding of disability in such contexts. In so doing, we make the case for a more thorough and thoughtful application of international disability rights standards to better inform human rights investigations, transitional justice approaches, and international criminal law proceedings. To illustrate this methodology, we analyze …

Our Records Panopticon And The American Bar Association Standards For Criminal Justice, Stephen E. Henderson

Oklahoma Law Review

“Secrets are lies. Sharing is caring. Privacy is theft.” So concludes the main character in Dave Egger’s novel, The Circle, in which a single company that unites Google, Facebook, and Twitter—and on steroids—has the ambition not only to know, but also to share, all of the world’s information. It is telling that a current dystopian novel features not the government in the first instance, but instead a private third party that, through no act of overt coercion, knows so much about us. This is indeed the greatest risk to privacy in our day, both the unprecedented, massive collection and retention …

The Aba Standards For Criminal Justice: Law Enforcement Access To Third Party Records: Critical Perspectives From A Technology-Centered Approach To Quantitative Privacy, David C. Gray

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tethered To The Statute: How The Third Circuit’S Narrow Interpretation Of 28 U.S.C. § 1920(4) Will Shape The Future Of Cost-Shifting And E-Discovery For The Better, Jason L. Callaway

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Geoneutrino Production Of The Northern Black Hills, South Dakota, United States Of America, Eric Eric Zimney

Theses and Dissertations

Current neutrino observatories operate underground to isolate the detector from cosmic rays and background radiation. However, background radiation from local sources has yet to be accounted for. Current models for neutrino contributions from terrestrial rocks are formulated from bulk compositional estimates of the whole Earth. To better understand local background radiation from geologic sources surfaces rocks were collected throughout the area surrounding the Homestake Mine, South Dakota, home of the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory. The surface rocks were analyzed for radioactivity and neutrino luminosity, producing heat maps indicating the levels of neutrino production throughout the area. The area around the …

Treatment Of Infectious Mastitis, Elizabeth Sandberg,

Theses and Dissertations

Mastitis is a complication of breast feeding encountered often by primary care providers. The goal of treating mastitis is not only resolution of the infection, but also the continuation of lactation so that both mother and child may continue to enjoy the innumerable health benefits of breastfeeding. The patient discussed in this case study is a first time mother who is exclusively breastfeeding, but whose planned change in feeding schedules places her at risk for developing mastitis as a result of engorgement or plugged milk ducts. This case report examines current recommendations and evidence for treatment of infectious mastitis. Attention …

Application Of Method Developed For The Identification And Quantification Of Polar Components In Organic Liquid Products Of Selected Crop Oils And Deciphering The Mechanistic Aspects Of Cracking, Ashwini Geetla

Theses and Dissertations

Pyrolysis is a fundamental thermochemical process that can be used to convert triacylglycerides (TGs) in crop oils into valuable chemicals that may replace petroleum products. Biofuels, complex mixtures containing hundreds of species, are generated by the pyrolysis of crop oils. Presence of fatty acids (FAs) will limit the applicability of plant oils as biofuels since they are corrosive and form wax-like crystals at a cloud point that would plug filters. However, short chain FAs have a high commercial value as byproducts of biofuel production. The understanding of mechanism of pyrolysis may reveal pathways for production of favorable products. These pathways …

Software Documentation Guidelines For Maintainability, Justin Roger Huber

Theses and Dissertations

Software maintenance is the final stage in the software engineering process; and can also be the longest and most costly. The ability of, and ease in which software upkeep and change is performed is an important software quality attribute called maintainability. Software maintenance however is an expensive process in both time and financial cost and can account for a majority of a system's overall lifetime cost. It would be beneficial then to have a set of guidelines for obtaining a higher degree of maintainability in software before and after its release and evolution stage in order to limit the cost …

Successful Reorganization Of Rural North Dakota Schools With Declining Enrollment, Steven Lewis Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify perceptions of North Dakota leaders who had been involved in successfully reorganized school districts resulting from declining enrollments and reduced resources. All reorganized districts in this study were affected by serious declining enrollments in their respective rural communities. These successfully reorganized school districts developed reorganization plans and positive cultures within their communities that resulted in each plan being passed by a voting citizenship. The school districts studied laid the groundwork for reorganization with neighboring districts by forming cooperative agreements in athletics, shared staff, and shared special education services.

The researcher sought answers …

Deflating Rural North Dakota: Mechanization, Industrialization, And Depopulation In The Small Community, Alyson Leas

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis serves to examine the continued decline of population in rural North Dakota. In the face of a large oil boom in the state's western third, agricultural communities in the central third of the state continue to struggle. Through an examination of United States Department of Agriculture yearly agricultural censuses, experiment station notes, personal correspondence, local histories, and the United States decennial census from the first fifty years of the twentieth century, information regarding the rise and fall of communities in northern Towner County, North Dakota, has been tabulated. Results show that the better agriculture did in terms of …

Advances In The Electrodeposition Of Aluminum From Ionic Liquid Based Electrolytes, Kirt Leadbetter

Theses and Dissertations

Aluminum plating is of considerable technical and economic interest because it provides an eco-friendly substitute for cadmium coatings used on many military systems. However, cadmium has been determined to be a significant environmental safety and occupational health (ESOH) hazard because of its toxicity and carcinogenic nature. Furthermore, the cost of treating and disposing of generated wastes, which often contain cyanide, is costly and is becoming prohibitive in the face of increasingly stringent regulatory standards. The non-toxic alternative aluminum is equivalent or superior in performance to cadmium. In addition, it could serve to provide an alternative to hexavalent chromium coatings used …

Space Tourism Law: Lessons From Aviation, Antarctica, And The International Space Station, Denise Meeks

Theses and Dissertations

Space tourism has economic, social, and educational benefits, however, unresolved legal issues remain that need to be addressed on state and international levels in order for space tourism to succeed and for these benefits to be realized. Space treaties do not address and federal laws have impeded space tourism efforts. Aviation industry regulations, Antarctic treaties, and International Space Station agreements serve as models to guide the space tourism. In the future, however, the space tourism industry will create its own legal regime based on the technical expertise of its practitioners and the social mores of its participants.

A Study Of Bench Scale, Pressurized, Continuous Flow Thermal Cracking Of Crop Oil, Blake Sander

Theses and Dissertations

This study builds upon previous research at UND which demonstrated that crop oils are a potential renewable alternative to select petroleum based products. The crop oils investigated for this study include soybean, canola, and jojoba oil. The processing method utilized was a non-catalytic cracking process.

The goal of this work was to build a new bench-scale continuous flow thermal cracking reactor system capable of being operated under high pressure, and also to use this reactor to explore the effects of pressure, temperature, and feed rate during non-catalytic cracking on the yield and composition of the liquid and gas products produced …

Application And Prospect Of Orthogonal On-Off Keying As An Error Control Coding In Laser Communication, Tasbirun Nahian Upal

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis work, a bandwidth efficient coded modulation technique has been proposed for LASER based communication. It offers reliable error correction and bandwidth optimization for free space connectivity. Laser communication has been emerging as a potential alternative of Radio Frequency (RF) communication for long-haul connectivity. It provides several advantages over RF systems. Some of specific advantages are its high speed data transfer, higher bandwidth, robust security, immunity to electromagnetic interference, lower implementation cost. However, as any other communication system, it requires an error control system that detects and corrects error in the data transmission. The proposed technique blends well …

Study Of The Suit Inflation Effect On Crew Safety During Landing Using A Full-Pressure Iva Suit For New-Generation Reentry Space Vehicles, Suzuki Wataru

Theses and Dissertations

Recently, manned space capsules have been recognized as beneficial and reasonable human space vehicles again. The Dragon capsule already achieved several significant successes. The Orion capsule is going to be sent to a high-apogee orbit without crews for experimental purposes in September 2014. For such human-rated space capsules, the study of acceleration impacts against the human body during splashdown is essential to ensure the safety of crews. Moreover, it is also known that wearing a full pressure rescue suit significantly increases safety of a crew, compared to wearing a partial pressure suit. This is mainly because it enables the use …

A Novel Assembly Algorithm That Optimizes For Rna-Seq Data, Yi Yang

Theses and Dissertations

The advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology has shown unprecedented promise for accurately identifying and quantifying genomic variants for living organisms. For species whose genome sequences are unknown, the first step of RNA sequencing data analysis is to assemble all short reads. The de Bruijn graph-based algorithms, such as Oases, are usually used for short reads assembly to resolve the issue of computational complexity. However, de Bruijn graph-based assemblers normally generate high error rates when assembling RNA-Seq data. We have developed a novel assembly algorithm that can be used jointly with any other assembly methods for RNA-Seq short reads. The …

A Comparative Study Of Spectrum Sensing Methods For Cognitive Radio Systems, Mohammad Shakib Apu

Theses and Dissertations

With the increase of portable devices utilization and ever-growing demand for greater data rates in wireless transmission, an increasing demand for spectrum channels was observed since last decade. Conventionally, licensed spectrum channels are assigned for comparatively long time spans to the license holders who may not over time continuously use these channels, which creates an under-utilized spectrum. The inefficient utilization of inadequate wireless spectrum resources has motivated researchers to look for advanced and innovative technologies that enable an efficient use of the spectrum resources in a smart and efficient manner.

The notion of Cognitive Radio technology was proposed to address …

Unmanned Aircraft Systems: Factors That Affect The Acceptance Of Unmanned Aircraft Usage Within The United States National Airspace System, Eric Cameron

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned aircraft have been around since before the Wright brothers took flight in 1903. Even though unmanned aircraft have had a history that well exceeds the century of manned aviation, they were primarily used by the military, and were mostly outside the public's purview. In recent years unmanned aircraft have made a giant leap from military use to commercial use within the United States and around the world. While pilots and operators flying these aircraft may have accepted the technology and its future potential; the public might have a different point of view on utilization over their home, town, state, …

Translation Of Aadl To Pnml To Ensure The Utilization Of Petri Nets, Amrita Chatterjee

Theses and Dissertations

Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL), which is used to design and analyze software and hardware architectures of embedded and real-time systems, has proven to be a very efficient way of expressing the non-functional properties of safety-critical systems and architectural modeling. Petri nets are the graphical and mathematical modeling tools used to describe and study information processing systems characterized as concurrent and distributed. As AADL lacks the formal semantics needed to show the functional properties of such systems, the objective of this research was to extend AADL to enable other Petri nets to be incorporated into Petri Net Markup Language …

Investigating The Heterogeneous Chemistry Of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons And Other Organic Species In Atmospheric Aerosols, Richard Cochran

Theses and Dissertations

Organic aerosols (OA; organic compounds present on the surface or within aerosols) in the atmosphere may play a significant role in various atmospheric processes as well as have an impact on human health. While many primary (direct) sources of OA (POA) are known, a significant portion of OA is formed through the oxidation of primary precursors, creating secondary organic aerosols (SOA) through processes that are still unclear. This dissertation, therefore, focuses on the development of analytical methods for characterizing SOA as well as investigating the mechanism behind their formation and aerosol chemistry.

In the first phase of this work, methods …

Optimal Allocation Of Distributed Renewable Energy Sources In Power Distribution Networks, Samir Dahal

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation study, various methods for optimum allocation of renewable distributed generators (DGs) in both balanced and unbalanced distribution networks have been proposed, developed, and tested. These methods were developed with an objective of maximizing several advantages of DG integration into the current distribution system infrastructure.

The first method addressed the optimal sitting and sizing of DGs for minimum distribution power losses and maximum voltage profile improvement of distribution feeders. The proposed method was validated by comparing the results of a balanced distribution system with those reported in the literature. This method was then implemented in a co-simulation environment …

Satellite Derived Volumetric Soil Moisture In A Hec-Hms Model, Damon Grabow

Theses and Dissertations

This research is intended to enhance recent hydrologic research that focused on a rainfall-runoff model of the Devils Lake basin in central North Dakota. This research employs the spatial volumetric soil moisture data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) instrument. The AMSR-E data, collected from 2002-2011 from the NASA EOS Aqua satellite, was used in the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM) to estimate the surface soil moisture at a scale of 25-km. AMSR-E data is used in collaboration with the current rainfall-runoff model to better understand the influences …

Therapeutic Igy: Safe, Diverse, And Effective For Use Against Viral Targets, Nicole Noel Haese

Theses and Dissertations

Passive antibody treatments are used to target infectious disease, toxins, venoms, and cancer antigens. Recently, there has been an increased interest in the use of avian-derived antibody treatments such as IgY. IgY is the primary serum antibody isotype present in the avian system, and IgY treatments have already been demonstrated to be effective against a variety of bacterial and viral infectious agents. There are two forms of IgY expressed in anseriformes birds, a full length IgY that is functionally similar to mammalian IgG, and an alternatively spliced IgY, IgY(ÄFc), that is comparable to the mammalian F(ab')2 fragment. The difference in …

Multiple Baseline Study Of The Effects Of Left Visual Field Stimulation During Emotion Recognition Training Among Four Male Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Rachelle Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are characterized by social deficits in emotional comprehension. Research has demonstrated that for the neurotypical population, recognizing, and reacting to facial emotions improve when using the left visual field by employing the right brain hemisphere's configural processes. Behavioral, physiological, and neuroimaging findings suggest an opposite pattern within the autistic population - left hemisphere activation contributing to a right visual field preference for analyzing and assessing facial affect. The present study attempted to activate and strengthen the right hemispheric neural pathway responsible for emotion recognition using modified eyewear to contrive left visual field stimulation during an empirically …

Development Of A Prototype Movement Assistance System For Extravehicular Activity Gloves, Tyler Hill

Theses and Dissertations

Spacesuits utilized a rubberized layer of material to contain a pressurized atmosphere to facilitate respiration and maintain the physiologic functions of the astronaut residing within. However, the elasticity of the material makes it resistant to deformation increasing the amount of work required during movement. This becomes particularly fatiguing for the muscle groups controlling the motion of the hands and fingers. To mitigate this a robotic system was proposed and developed. The system built upon previous concepts and prototypes discovered through research efforts. It utilized electric motors to pull the index, ring, and middle fingers of the right hand closed, ideally …

Autonomous Spacecraft Control During Close-Proximity Near-Earth Object Operations, Joshua Thomas Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

A control scheme is proposed for a satellite orbit controller around a small, irregularly shaped near-Earth object (NEO) combining classical control theory and orbital mechanics into a continuous hybrid control system that achieves and maintains a circular orbit in a perturbed environment. NEOs are asteroids and comets that approach Earth's orbit around the Sun. They are currently being studied for resource allocation and threat mitigation, while providing unique opportunities for control systems. The NEO environment consists of a weak and complex gravity field, as well as other perturbations such as solar radiation pressure (SRP) and third-body gravitational disturbances. This project …

Tribology Of Novel Multifunctional Max Phase Composites, Ryan Roy Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The Mn+1AXn (MAX) phases (over 60+ phases) are thermodynamically stable nanolaminates displaying unusual, and sometimes unique, properties. MAX phases are also highly damage tolerant, thermal shock resistant, creep resistant, lubricious, readily machinable, may possess Vickers hardness values of 2-8 GPa, and are anomalously soft for transition metal carbides and nitrides. Because of these properties, there is a huge potential for MAX phase's to improve tribological properties when used in composites. Here for the first time Al, Sn, and Epoxy MAX phase composites will be explored to gain a better understanding of the tribological properties of the various composites.

Automated Usability Testing Of Websites Using Link Structure, Christoffer Odegaard Korvald

Theses and Dissertations

Websites keeps getting more important in business and other aspects of society. Making the websites as usable as possible is crucial as difficult to use systems tend to frustrate users, which might lead to users leaving or lost revenue for a business. Usability testing is needed to identify and fix those issues. Manual tests in usability labs can be very time consuming and costly. An automated system could reduce time and cost of testing, but are often too focused on one aspect to give a clear view of what needs to be fixed. A system to improve this is needed. …

An Experimental Investigation Of The Aerodynamic Losses For An Incident Tolerant Low Pressure Turbine Blade Over Moderate To Low Reynolds Numbers At Engine Representative Mach Numbers, Jonathan Long

Theses and Dissertations

In the interest of reducing airport congestion in the near future, researchers at NASA Glenn Research Facility have envisioned a new civilian transport aircraft which takes off vertically and cruises horizontally at Mach 0.5 using tilt-rotor technology. The engine under development consists of a four stage low pressure (LP) turbine. Many challenges are presented as the engine transitions from 100% shaft speed at takeoff to 54% shaft speed at cruise. The blading in this engine must be designed to optimize fuel efficiency, especially at cruise. The flow conditions in the LP turbine will change significantly from a Reynolds number of …

Advanced Reactors And Novel Reactions For The Conversion Of Triglyceride Based Oils Into High Quality Renewable Transportation Fuels, Michael James Linnen

Theses and Dissertations

Sustainable energy continues to grow more important to all societies, leading to the research and development of a variety of alternative and renewable energy technologies. Of these, renewable liquid transportation fuels may be the most visible to consumers, and this visibility is further magnified by the long-term trend of increasingly expensive petroleum fuels that the public consumes. While first-generation biofuels such as biodiesel and fuel ethanol have been integrated into the existing fuel infrastructures of several countries, the chemical differences between them and their petroleum counterparts reduce their effectiveness. This gives rise to the development and commercialization of second generation …