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Can Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Produce Human Pluripotent Stem Cells For Regenerative Medicine?, Alexandra Iskhakov

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

In the last half a century, researchers and scientists discovered the application of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) to clone mammalian embryos to produce a line of pluripotent stem cells for medical and laboratory use. This is a breakthrough technology that is applied to stem cell research, regenerative medicine, and cloning. Somatic cells are non-germ cells that are differentiated but provide the nuclei that are transferred to enucleated oocytes. The replacement of the nuclei results in a developing embryo that contains the genetic information of the donated nucleus, which can either be transplanted into a surrogate mother to produce a …

Judicial Peremptory Challenges As Access Enhancers, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Discussions regarding diminishing access to justice have centered on the high disputing costs, gradual contraction of substantive rights, and increasingly defendant-friendly procedure. The importance of the ideological, experiential, and jurisprudential orientation of the judges presiding over litigation at the trial level has received much less-and insufficient-attention. Because so much focus has been on federal appellate courts, commentators have largely overlooked a potentially powerful tool for improving access and promoting a fair airing of claims at the trial level: a litigant's automatic ability to transfer a case to a different judge as a matter of right to avoid judges who are …

Music Modernization And The Labyrinth Of Streaming, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

The shift from record sales to music streaming has revolutionized the music industry. The federal copyright regime, which is rooted in a system of economic rewards based largely on sales, has been slow to adapt. This has impaired the ability of copyright law to channel appropriate royalties to songwriters, music publishers, and recording artists when the streaming of their works displaces record sales. The Orrin G. Hatch-Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act of 2018 addresses some of the most significant flaws in the current system. At the same time, it creates significant ambiguities and leaves some existing issues unresolved.

New York Right Of Publicity Law: Panel Discussion, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Is Pena-Rodriguez V. Colorado Just A Drop In The Bucket Or A Catalyst For Improving A Jury System Still Plagued By Racial Bias, And Still Badly In Need Of Repairs, Robert I. Correales

Scholarly Works

Historically, race-based jury bias has maintained the most prominent place in the hierarchy of social ills that have plagued the American Criminal Justice System. Relying on Due Process and Equal Protection principles, the United States Supreme Court and lower federal courts have chipped away at the problem with mixed results. State Courts have also served as laboratories, providing important lessons on the successes and failures of different approaches, often leading the way with their innovations. A formidable obstacle commonly referred to as a "black box," better known as the no-impeachment rule, has made progress difficult. The no-impeachment rule was designed …

Access To Consumer Bankruptcy, Pamela Foohey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This essay examines the state of access to justice in the context of consumer bankruptcy from two vantage points: (1) how people decide that their money problems are legal problems addressable by filing bankruptcy; and (2) the barriers people face in using the consumer bankruptcy system. To shed new light on how people decide to use bankruptcy to address their financial troubles, I analyze a sample of narratives accompanying consumers' complaints about financial products and services submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I also chronicle the evolution of research regarding consumer bankruptcy’s “local legal culture,” systemic racial bias, and …

State Responses To Federal Tax Reform: Charitable Tax Credits, David Gamage, Joseph Bankman, Jacob Goldin, Daniel Hemel, Darien Shanske, Kirk J. Stark, Dennis J. Ventry Jr., Manoj Viswanathan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This paper summarizes the current federal income tax treatment of charitable contributions where the gift entitles the donor to a state tax credit. Such credits are very common and are used by the states to encourage private donations to a wide range of activities, including natural resource preservation through conservation easements, private school tuition scholarship programs, financial aid for college-bound children from low-income households, shelters for victims of domestic violence, and numerous other state-supported programs. Under these programs, taxpayers receive tax credits for donations to governments, government-created funds, and nonprofits.

A central federal income tax question raised by these donations …

The False Allure Of Settlement Pressure, Nicholas Almendares

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The threat of “blackmail” or “in terrorem” settlements have shaped the law, leading courts to conclude that if the plaintiff does not appear likely to win the case, then the litigation should be halted at an early stage. This Article questions the established logic of settlement pressure. After clarifying the concept and presenting the strongest case for it, I show that it cannot serve as the basis for wide-ranging civil procedure doctrines. Doing so has perverse results, such as privileging the defendant’s idiosyncratic tastes and helping corporate managers hide important facts from their shareholders. In addition, settlement pressure is not …

Judicial Selection And The Search For Middle Ground, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article seeks to transcend perennial election versus appointment debates-including debates over campaign finance and the impact of "dark money"-by taking a closer look at why judicial selection is a contentious mess and discussing how it might be fixed. First, I present the case for elective and appointive systems. Second, I show that the arguments for each system are exaggerated or flawed.Third, I explore why it has been hard for proponents of each system to perceive and acknowledge those exaggerations and flaws, and propose ways to narrow the divide. Although the divide can and should be narrowed, I conclude that …

Well-Timed Solutions For Legal Education And The Bar, William D. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Developments In The Law Affecting Electronic Payments And Financial Services, Sarah Jane Hughes, Stephen T. Middlebrook, Tom Kierner

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Our past surveys have observed that frequent changes in the rules surrounding electronic payments-spurred by both regulation and enforcement actions create uncertainty and make forward progress difficult for many providers. This survey year is no exception: regulators have taken "two steps forward, one step back" on a number of fronts. This survey reports on (1) the proposal by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC") regarding "fintech" charters, which states have challenged in actions still pending- (2) changes to Regulation CC regarding remote check deposit and disputes over altered or forged checks-(3) the Supreme Court's decision in Expression …

Effects Of Water Level Increase On Phytoplankton Assemblages In A Drinking Water Reservoir, Yangdong Pan, Shijun Guo, Yuying Li, Wei Yin, Pengcheng Qi, Jainwei Shi, Lanqun Hu, Bing Li, Shengge Bi, Jingya Zhu

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Excessive water level fluctuation may affect physico-chemical characteristics, and consequently ecosystem function, in lakes and reservoirs. In this study, we assessed the changes of phytoplankton assemblages in response to water level increase in Danjiangkou Reservoir, one of the largest drinking water reservoirs in Asia. The water level increased from a low of 137 m to 161 m in 2014 as a part of the South–North Water Diversion Project. Phytoplankton assemblages were sampled four times per year before, during and after the water level increase, at 10 sites. Environmental variables such as total nitrogen as well as phytoplankton biomass decreased after …

Wolbachia Modifies Thermal Reference In Drosophila Melanogaster, Amy Michelle Truitt, Martin Kapun, Rupinder Kaur, Wolfgang J. Miller

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Environmental variation can have profound and direct effects on fitness, fecundity, and host symbiont interactions. Replication rates of microbes within arthropod hosts, for example, are correlated with incubation temperature but less is known about the influence of host-symbiont dynamics on environmental preference. Hence, we conducted thermal preference (Tp) assays and tested if infection status and genetic variation in endosymbiont bacterium Wolbachia affected temperature choice of Drosophila melanogaster. We demonstrate that isogenic flies infected with Wolbachia preferred lower temperatures compared to uninfected Drosophila. Moreover, Tp varied with respect to three investigated Wolbachia variants (wMel, wMelCS and wMelPop). While uninfected individuals preferred …

Tesla Solar Roof Marketing Plan, Mustafa Almuzel, Touraj Goudarznia, Ali Daneshi, Mohammadsaleh Saadatmand, Mufeed Yacoub

Engineering and Technology Management Student Projects

This marketing plan for Tesla roof has been written to find the best marketing strategies for this new product. Tesla roof was launched in 2017 as part of Tesla’s mission to accelerate the transition of the world into sustainable energy. The objective is to position Tesla roof tile as the first choice for homeowners seeking aesthetics and green energy, gaining market share within three years. The research shows that positioning Tesla roof in the solar market would be the most suitable approach for Tesla. Research and customer interviews analysis implies that the value proposition for this solar roof would be …

The Politics Of Twilights: Notes On The Semiotics Of Horizon Photography, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Visual sociology is crucial for exploring the indexical meanings that thick description cannot capture within a cultural setting. This paper explores how such meanings are created within a subset of the domain of photography. Using data gathered over several years, I constructed the semiotic code ‘horizon’ photographers use when ‘in the field’ for photographing periods of twilight. This code explains the relevance of subject matter to the photograph’s aesthetics. Specifically, I detail how ‘the horizon’ communicates the potential for the photographer to ‘capture’ the index of a symbol that later permits the photographer to culturally mark scenes with ‘light’. In …

Forgiveness: An Ordered Pluralism, Miranda Fricker

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Acceptance And Commitment Therapy As An Intervention For Adolescent Chronic Pain Related To Pectus Excavatum: A Case Study, Hayley N. Roberts

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

The most common chest wall deformity, Pectus Excavatum (PE), is a congenital deformity in which the sternum and adjoining chest wall cave inwards toward the spine (Lawson et al., 2003). While corrective surgical procedures have been shown to have positive effects on the physical and psychosocial well-being of patients with PE (Krasopoulos, Dusmet, Ladas, & Goldstraw, 2006), often surgical procedures, such as those done to correct PE, can result in what is known as Chronic Post-Surgical Pain (CPSP). CPSP has been shown to have great bearing on the patient’s overall well-being (Weinrib et al., 2017), meaning that while the corrective …

Octet Baryons In Large Magnetic Fields, Amol Deshmukh, Brian C. Tiburzi

Publications and Research

Magnetic properties of octet baryons are investigated within the framework of chiral perturbation theory. Utilizing a power counting for large magnetic fields, the Landau levels of charged mesons are treated exactly giving rise to baryon energies that depend nonanalytically on the strength of the magnetic field. In the small-field limit, baryon magnetic moments and polarizabilities emerge from the calculated energies. We argue that the magnetic polarizabilities of hyperons provide a testing ground for potentially large contributions from decuplet pole diagrams. In external magnetic fields, such contributions manifest themselves through decuplet-octet mixing, for which possible results are compared in a few …

Global Constraints On Top Quark Anomalous Couplings, Frédéric Déliot, Ricardo Faria, Miguel C. N. Fiolhais, Pedro Lagarelhos, António Onofre, Christopher M. Pease, Ana Vasconcelos

Publications and Research

The latest results on top quark physics, namely single top quark production cross sections, W-boson helicity and asymmetry measurements are used to probe the Lorentz structure of the Wtb vertex. The increase of sensitivity to new anomalous physics contributions to the top quark sector of the standard model is quantified by combining the relevant results from Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider. The results show that combining an increasing set of available precision measurements in the search for new physics phenomena beyond the standard model leads to significant sensitivity improvements, especially when compared with the current expectation for the …

Master Integrals For Double Real Radiation Emission In Heavy-To-Light Quark Decay, Roberto Bonciani, Alessandro Broggio, Leandro Cieri, Andrea Ferroglia

Publications and Research

We evaluate analytically the master integrals for double real radiation emission in the b → uW* decay, where b and u are a massive and massless quark, respectively, while W* is an off-shell charged weak boson. Since the W boson can subsequently decay in a lepton anti-neutrino pair, the results of the present paper constitute a further step toward a fully analytic computation of differential distributions for the semileptonic decay of a b quark at NNLO in QCD. The latter partonic process plays a crucial role in the study of inclusive semileptonic charmless decays of B mesons. Our …

The Weizsäcker-Williams Distribution Of Linearly Polarized Gluons (And Its Fluctuations) At Small X, Adrian Dumitru, Vladimir Skokov

Publications and Research

The conventional and linearly polarized Weizsäcker-Williams gluon distributions at small x are defined from the two-point function of the gluon field in light-cone gauge. They appear in the cross section for dijet production in deep inelastic scattering at high energy. We determine these functions in the small-x limit from solutions of the JIMWLK evolution equations and show that they exhibit approximate geometric scaling. Also, we discuss the functional distributions of these WW gluon distributions over the JIMWLK ensemble at rapidity Y ∼ 1/α_s. These are determined by a 2d Liouville action for the logarithm of the …

Prompt Photon-Jet Angular Correlations At Central Rapidities In P + A Collisions, Sanjin Benić, Adrian Dumitru

Publications and Research

Photon-jet azimuthal correlations in proton-nucleus collisions are a promising tool for gaining information on the gluon distribution of the nucleus in the regime of nonlinear color fields. We compute such correlations from the process $g → q\bar{q}γ$ in the rapidity regime where both the projectile and target light-cone momentum fractions are small. By integrating over the phase space of the quark which emits the photon, subject to the restriction that the photon picks up most of the transverse momentum (to pass an isolation cut), we effectively obtain a g + A → qγ process. For nearly back-to-back photon-jet configurations we …

Bipartite Field Theories And D-Brane Instantons, Sebastían Franco, Eduardo García-Valdecasas, Angel M. Uranga

Publications and Research

We study D-brane instantons in systems of D3-branes at toric CY 3-fold singularities. The instanton effect can be described as a backreaction modifying the geometry of the mirror configuration, in which the breaking of U(1) symmetries by the instanton translates into the recombination of gauge D-branes, which also directly generates the instanton-induced charged field theory operator. In this paper we describe the D-brane instanton backreaction in terms of a combinatorial operation in the bipartite dimer diagram of the original theory. Interestingly, the resulting theory is a general Bipartite Field Theory (BFT), defined by a bipartite graph tiling a general (possibly …

An Expanded View Of Translanguaging: Leveraging The Dynamic Interactions Between A Young Multilingual Writer And Machine Translation Software, Sara Vogel, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, Ofelia García

Publications and Research

Two central forces re-shaping education in the 21st century in the United States are the increasingly diverse and rich multilingual practices of students, as well as our growing use of digital technologies to communicate and make meaning (Deumert, 2014; García, Bartlett & Kleifgen, 2007; Jewitt, 2008; New London Group, 1996). Even if much scholarship has focused on the trends of multilingualism and multimodalities as separate entities, there are many intersections. Digital tools like machine translation software are being used in schools by multilingual students, and their often-monolingual teachers. Frameworks for multilingual teaching and learning involving intentional use of machine translation …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 4.0: The Interactive Course, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm, Anders A. Wallace, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 22-23, 2018, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Critical Play with History (Panel) - Composition & Storytelling - Health & Cognitive Sciences - Gaming Anthropology: Teaching Culture and Power Through Games and Design (Panel) - Twine & Writing Games - Easy Ideas II - STEM Games - Global Games for Change Catalog (Panel) - Comics & Active Learning - Fact Checking & Research - Computer Science & Game Design - SimGlobal: Building a Serious Roleplay Course for the Social Sciences (Panel) - Role Playing Games, Narrative, …

Burnout Syndrome And Depression, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Laurent

Publications and Research

In this chapter, we proposed an overview of burnout, from the introduction of the construct in the mid-1970s to the growing realization that the syndrome was better conceived of as a depressive condition. Recent studies have shown that the distinction between burnout and depression is problematic, both theoretically and empirically. The history of burnout research suggests that transdisciplinary communication and methodological standards should be strengthened to avoid the proliferation of constructs that, in fact, refer to the same phenomena. Construct proliferation, a transgression of the scientific canon of parsimony, is considered a major problem today because it undermines theory building …

When We Say 'Physician Burnout,' We Really Mean Depression, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

There has been controversy regarding the extent to which burnout overlaps depression. I enumerate eight reasons explaining to why depression is at the heart of burnout. Some of these reasons pertain to the highly similar work-related causes of burnout and depression, burnout adherents' faulty categorical and dimensional conceptualizations of burnout and depression, problematically high correlations between emotional exhaustion (the core of burnout) and depressive symptoms, research on physicians and dentists that underline burnout-depression overlap, and the problem of alexithymia being similarly related to burnout and depression. Suggestions for addressing the problem of burnout-depression among physicians are presented.

Perception Of American–English Vowels By Early And Late Spanish–English Bilinguals, Miriam Baigorri, Luca Campanelli, Erika S. Levy

Publications and Research

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American–English (AE) as a second–language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending such previous research, this study examined the patterns with which early and late Spanish–English bilingual adults assimilated naturally-produced AE vowels to their native vowel-inventory and the accuracy with which they discriminated the vowels. Twelve early Spanish–English bilingual, 12 late Spanish–English bilingual, and 10 monolingual listeners performed perceptual-assimilation and categorical-discrimination tasks involving AE /i,ɪ,ɛ,ʌ,æ,ɑ,o/. Early bilinguals …

Estimating The Economic Benefits Of Automatic Section Control In The North Dakota Prairie Pothole Region, Baishali Rahman

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

The impact of Automatic Section Control (ASC) as a tool of Precision Agricultural Technology as considered in the more efficient application of inputs to produce the four major crops, corn, soybean, HRSW, and canola in the North Dakota Prairie Pothole Region. Reduction in machinery overlap in the sample 105 fields was calculated by simulating the routing paths of a 60-feet wide planter with 24 sections controlled and a 120-feet wide boom sprayer with individual nozzle control. The dollar and percentage seed and chemical costs that a farm can save by reducing overlapping area were calculated. Impact of field parameters on …

Economic Efficiency Of Occupational Health And Safety Investments At Agricultural Cooperatives, Thilani Kaushalya Wearaduwa Vidana Kankanamge

Agribusiness and Applied Economics

Industries related to agricultural cooperatives record some of the highest injury rates in the U.S. Therefore, agricultural cooperatives are highly motivated to invest in occupational health and safety (OHS). This thesis examines the economic efficiency of OHS investments at agricultural cooperatives and identifies cooperative characteristics leading to greater economic efficiency of OHS investments. A multiple input-output data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to estimate technical efficiency. The effects of cooperative characteristics on the efficiency of OHS investments are estimated using ordinary least squares, censored regression, truncated regression, and the Simar and Wilson (2007) bootstrap procedure. Results show that the mean …