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Pursuing Gender Equality Through The Courts: The Role Of South Africa’S Women Judges, Penelope Andrews

Articles & Chapters

This chapter will focus on the contribution of female judges to the transformation of the judiciary in South Africa and specifically the pursuit of gender equality. It is a limited project that will explore the impacts of women judges on constitutional jurisprudence and how the influence of women judges has interacted with the broader transformation of the judicial and political system in South Africa after apartheid. In examining the impact of women judges on constitutional jurisprudence with respect to gender equality, I explore whether women judges have, in their judgments, conscripted and interpreted the constitution to highlight and guarantee its …

Family Law During Covid-19: Virtual Hearings, Family Court Proceedings, And The Future: Editors' Notes, Lisa Grumet

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Inherent Powers And The Limits Of Public Health Fake News, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

The world has changed dramatically over the past year. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges and has caused a catastrophic loss of over 300,000 U.S. lives. This crisis has been compounded by an infodemic, an effusion of misinformation and fake news about COVID-19. This incorrect information has flooded social media and online platforms, confusing and misleading the American public. Yet U.S. constitutional law largely upholds fake news as protected free speech under the First Amendment. This legal reality has significantly compounded the COVID-19 crisis.

But U.S. law is not limited to only constitutional enumerated powers. An underexamined approach to …

Priam's Folly: United States V. Alvarez And The Fake News Trojan Horse, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

In legal scholarship over the past few years, fake news has been criticized and pondered repeatedly. In many ways, 2020 was a year of reckoning which brought to the fore the myriad problems posed by fake news. This Article uses the context of 2020 to critique the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Alvarez, the latest Supreme Court ruling on the issue of whether fake news is protected by the First Amendment. Alvarez was decided in 2012, before the true dangers of fake news during the Internet Age were made fully apparent to the public. While Alvarez upheld the …

A Rising Tide Lifts All Consumers: Penumbras Of Foreign Data Protection Laws In The United States, Michael Goodyear

Articles & Chapters

With the growth of collecting, processing, and transferring personal information to third parties, consumers’ data is increasingly exposed to a myriad of risks. Perhaps chief among these are the data protection practices of data collectors themselves. Yet despite the risk to consumers, U.S. data protection law has remained fragmented, focused on individual industries at the federal law and only made comprehensive, occasionally, at the state level. This lack of a comprehensive data protection law in the United States is a significant detriment to the security of U.S. consumers. International law also offers no such path that could comprehensively protect U.S. …

Christianity, Human Rights, And Dignity: Squaring The Triangle, Brett Scharffs, Andrea Pin, Dmytro Vovk

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Use Of Force Policy Adequacy In Rural And Urban Agencies, Benjamin David Seyfried

Criminal Justice and Political Science

Police use of force has become one of the most widely covered topics in the media today. Especially in the past year, police use of force incidents have been heavily scrutinized and reviewed, and it was one of the most prominent topics of discussion in the 2020 presidential election. Previous studies have shown that there are factors which influence an officer’s choice to use force beyond the circumstances of the encounter itself. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the adequacy of a rural law enforcement agency’s use of force policy – the National Park Service – while comparing …

Development Of A High-Efficiency, Cost-Effective Ground Source Heat Pump System For Single-Family Houses, Xiaoou Hu

Construction Management and Engineering

Multi-Source Heat Pump systems are intended to achieve a high system efficiency through the combined or alternate use of two or more sources for a heat pump. This thesis entails the research work to develop a hybrid Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) system integrated with a dry cooler with vertical underground loops for single-family houses. TRNSYS is used to verify the feasibility of this integrated system, so as to optimize the control strategy and quantify the energy and energy cost savings. The primary objective is to demonstrate the improved system efficiency of the GSHP through the combined use of a …

Correctional Case Planning: An Examination Into The Impacts Of Case Plans On Offender Recidivism, Jenna Lynn Borseth

Criminal Justice and Political Science

Case planning has become common practice within many correctional intervention programs. While the practice of case planning is not a new idea, it remains a largely neglected field within the study of offender rehabilitation. The current study seeks to expand this literature by investigating the effects of four case plan components: compliance, specificity (consisting of positively stated, measurable, and singular objectives), breadth, and expiration. To do so, the study examines 859 correctional case plans of offenders receiving treatment at a Halfway House facility. The results indicate that case plan compliance, breadth, and expiration are not significantly associated with offender recidivism. …

Integrating The Balanced Scorecard (Bsc) And The Data Envelopment Analysis (Dea) Approaches For An Enhanced Police Performance Measurement System, Myungwoo Lee

Criminal Justice and Political Science

An effective performance measurement system is an integral part of modern police management. Police agencies have measured their performance against a very restricted set of crime-focused indicators, such as crime rates, arrests, response times, and clearance rates. Police performance should be measured across multiple dimensions to capture public values produced by modern police agencies. This study set out to present an enhanced performance measurement system for police agencies by integrating the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approaches. The BSC provides the theoretical foundation for building a comprehensive performance measurement framework, while the DEA provides the analytical tool …

Differences In Dui Punishments And Recidivism Between Transfers Among Municipal And District Court, Alexander Menke

Criminal Justice and Political Science

The relationship between court transfers and punishment differences, as well as changes in recidivism, have been seldomly researched. This paper adds to the body of research by comparing punishments from DUI cases heard in municipal court and DUI cases heard in district court. The differences in recidivism between the defendants whose cases were heard in municipal and district court are also compared. A systematic sample of DUI offenders from Fargo and West Fargo, North Dakota make up the experimental and control groups. The 511 non-transfer cases are analyzed against the 402 transfer cases using crosstabulations and logistic regression techniques. The …

Conceptual Cost Estimation Of Highway Bid Items Using Geostatistical Interpolation, Bright Awuku

Construction Management and Engineering

Challenges associated with ensuring the accuracy and reliability of cost estimation of highway bid items, especially during the conceptual phase of a project, are of significant interest to state highway agencies. Even with the existing research undertaken on the subject, the problem of inaccurate estimation of highway bid items still exists. A systematic literature review was performed to determine research trends, identify, categorize the factors influencing highway unit prices, and assess the performance of conceptual cost prediction models. This research proposes a geographic information system (GIS)–based methodology that leverages vast historical bid data for unit-price estimation and the robust GIS …

Power Washing Pulmonary Alveolar Proteinosis, Tiana R Endicott-Yazdani, Gary S Schwartz, Haiying Zhang, Randall L Rosenblatt, Puneet S Garcha

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Pulmonary alveolar proteinosis is an uncommon cause of insidious onset shortness of breath and hypoxemia. It is caused by an accumulation of surfactant within the alveoli. Left untreated, it can be fatal. Standard-of-care treatment is whole-lung lavage; however, in severe cases, the associated hypoxemia can be profound and single-lung ventilation would not be tolerated, potentially preventing a lifesaving treatment. Single cases using veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to perform whole-lung lavage have been reported. Here we describe three patients with severe pulmonary alveolar proteinosis who were successfully treated with whole-lung lavage using veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for oxygenation support.

Conduction Disorders In The Setting Of Acute Stemi, Kjell Nikus, Yochai Birnbaum, Miquel Fiol-Sala, Jani Rankinen, Antoni Bayés De Luna

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

ST-elevation myocardial (STEMI) is frequently associated with conduction disorders. Regional myocardial ischemia or injury may affect the cardiac conduction system at various locations, and neural reflexes or changes in the balance of the autonomous nervous system may be involved. Sinoatrial and atrioventricular blocks are more frequent in inferior than anterior STEMI, while new left anterior fascicular block and right bundle branch block indicate proximal occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery. New left bundle branch block is associated with multi-vessel disease. Most conduction disorders associated with STEMI are reversible with reperfusion therapy, but they may still impair prognosis because …

Novel Mutations In The Gtpbp3 Gene For Mitochondrial Disease And Characteristics Of Related Phenotypic Spectrum: The First Three Cases From China, Hui-Ming Yan, Zhi-Mei Liu, Bei Cao, Victor Wei Zhang, Yi-Duo He, Zheng-Jun Jia, Hui Xi, Jing Liu, Fang Fang, Hua Wang

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Combined Oxidative Phosphorylation Deficiency 23 (COXPD23) caused by mutations in GTPBP3 gene is a rare mitochondrial disease, and this disorder identified from the Chinese population has not been described thus far. Here, we report a case series of three patients with COXPD23 caused by GTPBP3 mutations, from a severe to a mild phenotype. The main clinical features of these patients include lactic acidosis, myocardial damage, and neurologic symptoms. Whole genome sequencing and targeted panels of candidate human mitochondrial genome revealed that patient 1 was a compound heterozygote with novel mutations c.413C > T (p. A138V) and c.509_510del (p. E170Gfs∗42) in GTPBP3 …

Trace Element Concentrations In Blood And Scute Tissues From Wild And Captive Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia Mydas), Katherine R Shaw, Jennifer M Lynch, George H Balazs, T Todd Jones, Jeff Pawloski, Marc R Rice, Amanda D French, Jing Liu, George P Cobb, David M Klein

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Sea turtles are exposed to trace elements through water, sediment, and food. Exposure to these elements has been shown to decrease immune function, impair growth, and decrease reproductive output in wildlife. This study compares trace element concentrations in green turtles in captivity at Sea Life Park Hawaii (n = 6) to wild green turtles in Kapoho Bay, HI (n = 5 to 7). Blood and scute samples were collected and analyzed for eleven elements via inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Selenium was significantly greater (p < 0.05) in the blood of captive turtles compared to wild turtles, while V, Ni, and Pb were significantly greater in the blood of wild turtles. In scute, V, Cu, Se, and Cr were significantly greater in captive turtles, while As was significantly greater in wild turtles. Pelleted food fed to the captive turtles and representative samples of the wild turtle diet were analyzed via ICP-MS to calculate trophic transfer factors and daily intake values. Wild turtles had greater estimated daily intake than captive turtles for all elements except Cu and Se. Because captive turtles are fed a diet very different from their wild counterparts, captive turtles do not represent control or reference samples for chemical exposure studies in wild turtles. No toxic thresholds are known for sea turtles, but rehabilitation and managed care facilities should monitor sea turtle elemental concentrations to ensure the animals’ health.

Effects Of Intensive Blood Pressure Treatment On Orthostatic Hypotension : A Systematic Review And Individual Participant-Based Meta-Analysis, Stephen P Juraschek, Jiun-Ruey Hu, Jennifer L Cluett, Anthony Ishak, Carol Mita, Lewis A Lipsitz, Lawrence J Appel, Nigel S Beckett, Ruth L Coleman, William C Cushman, Barry R Davis, Greg Grandits, Rury R Holman, Edgar R Miller, Ruth Peters, Jan A Staessen, Addison A Taylor, Lutgarde Thijs, Jackson T Wright, Kenneth J Mukamal

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND: Although intensive blood pressure (BP)-lowering treatment reduces risk for cardiovascular disease, there are concerns that it might cause orthostatic hypotension (OH).

PURPOSE: To examine the effects of intensive BP-lowering treatment on OH in hypertensive adults.

DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane CENTRAL from inception through 7 October 2019, without language restrictions.

STUDY SELECTION: Randomized trials of BP pharmacologic treatment (more intensive BP goal or active agent) that involved more than 500 adults with hypertension or elevated BP and that were 6 months or longer in duration. Trial comparisons were groups assigned to either less intensive BP goals or placebo, …

Distribution Of Calcium Volume, Density, Number, And Type Of Coronary Vessel With Calcified Plaque In South Asians In The Us And Other Race/Ethnic Groups: The Masala And Mesa Studies, Mahmoud Al Rifai, Alka M Kanaya, Namratha R Kandula, Miguel Cainzos-Achirica, Jaideep Patel, Matthew Budoff, Michael H Criqui, Michael J Blaha, Salim S Virani

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: South Asians (SA) experience disproportionately higher rates of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) events than non-Hispanic whites (NHW) and several other Asian groups. The coronary artery calcium (CAC) Agatston score may not capture the unique characteristics of coronary plaque in SA. We therefore evaluated the prevalence and patterns of advanced CAC measures (specific coronary vessel involvement, CAC volume and density) in SA versus other race/ethnicities.

METHODS: We combined data from the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) and Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) cohorts. We used multivariable-adjusted linear regression models to compare advanced CAC …

Patient-Perceived Versus Actual Risk Of Cardiovascular Disease And Associated Willingness To Consider And Use Prevention Therapy, Ann Marie Navar, Tracy Y Wang, Shuang Li, Xiaojuan Mi, Zhuokai Li, Jennifer G Robinson, Salim S Virani, Eric D Peterson

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular prevention guidelines use estimated 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk based on the pooled cohort equations to guide treatment decisions and engage patients in shared decision-making. We sought to determine patient perceived versus actual risk of atherosclerotic CVD and associations with willingness for preventive therapy.

METHODS: We evaluated calculated and perceived CVD risk among 4187 patients across 124 sites in the Patient and Provider Assessment of Lipid Management Registry. Ten-year risk was assessed using the pooled cohort equations; risk relative-to-peers was determined based on age-, sex-, and race-based percentiles; and patient estimates of risk were assessed using patient …

Mining Approximate Frequent Dense Modules From Multiple Gene Expression Datasets, San Ha Seo

Computer Science

Large amount of gene expression data has been collected for various environmental and biological conditions. Extracting dense modules that are recurrent in multiple gene coexpression networks has been shown to be promising in functional gene annotation and biomarkers discovery. In this thesis, we propose a biclustering-based approach for mining approximate frequent dense modules. This approach reports a large number of modules with many duplicate modules. Thus, we build on this approach and propose two extended approaches for mining dense modules, which mine set of representative patterns using post-processing and on-line pattern summarization methods. The extended approaches report smaller number of …

Attacking The Messenger: Exploring The Security Of Big Data Messenger Apache Kafka, Tyler Losinski

Computer Science

As technology becomes faster, cheaper, and more compact, a higher volume of data must be processed. This demand drives the need to process high volumes of data in near real time. As a result, technologies such as Kafka have been created as high throughput messaging bus systems. Utilizing these new technologies could vastly improve the way we look at data processing, especially when that data is coming from IoT or distributed systems. Kafka provides multiple methods of encryption and authentication with its brokers, however, securing the producers and consumers is the responsibility of the application owner. This paper focuses on …

Addressing Challenges In Data Privacy And Security: Various Approaches To Secure Data, Sayantica Pattanayak

Computer Science

Emerging neural networks based machine learning techniques such as deep learning and its variants have shown tremendous potential in many application domains. However, the neural network models raise serious privacy concerns due to the risk of leakage of highly privacy-sensitive data. In this dissertation, we propose various techniques to hide the sensitive information and also evaluate the performance and efficacy of our proposed models. In our first research work we propose a model, which can both encrypt and decrypt a ciphertext. Our model is based on symmetric key encryption and back propagation neural network. Our model takes the decimal values …

Building Plant 3d Genome Computing Resources, Chanaka Sampath Cooray Bulathsinghalage

Computer Science

Chromatin interactions play increasingly important roles in three-dimensional genome organization and long-range gene regulation. Analyzing the three-dimensional structure of the plants is currently a growing field and we noticed that there is lack of computing resources on chromatin interactions for the plants. So, we are introducing a database of statistically significant chromatin interactions processed using Hi-C experimental approach. The users can search in the database using a set of genes or regions for a selected plant organism through a web browser and it lists down all the statistically significant chromatin interactions involved those genes or regions with the confidence scores, …

Comparison Analysis Of Classification Algorithms For Intrusion Detection, Binita Saha

Computer Science

As the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent in our lives, we are confronted with more security concerns. Network attacks have become more common in the cyber world these days. Denial of service, Prove, Remote to Local attacks, and other types of attacks are on the rise. In our research, we used five machine learning classifiers and conducted a comparison analysis to see which one performed better in predicting network anomalies. Since the dataset we used is unbalanced, we experimented with oversampling and under sampling techniques for the minority and majority groups to improve the model's prediction. Then, in order …

Decision-Making For Self-Replicating 3d Printed Robot Systems, Andrew Burkhard Jones

Computer Science

This work addresses decision-making for robot systems that can self-replicate. With the advent of 3D printing technology, the development of self-replicating robot systems is more feasible to implement than it was previously. This opens the door to various opportunities in this area of robotics. A major benefit of having robots that are able to make more robots is that the survivability of the multi-robot system increases dramatically. A single surviving robot that has the necessary capabilities to self-replicate could prospectively repopulate an entire ‘colony’ of robots, given sufficient resources and time. This gives robots an opportunity to take more risks …

Deep Learning Applied To Public Company Valuation For Value Investing, Abram Paul Haich

Computer Science

Value investing is an investing approach that seeks to discover and take advantage of price discrepancies between the market price and the actual value of a company (intrinsic value). The purpose of this work is to measure the intrinsic value of companies using an approach that has had success in the broad field of Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning. Finding patterns in large amounts of data is what Deep Learning can be used for. Typically for value investing an investor will seek to find conservative estimates on the current value of a company by analyzing fundamental data. Our method attempts to …

Assessment Of Engineering Methodologies For Increasing Cubesat Mission Success Rates, Abdulaziz Alanazi

Computer Science

In the last twenty years, CubeSat Systems have gained popularity in educational institutions and commercial industries. CubeSats have attracted educators and manufacturers due to their ability to be quickly produced and their low cost, and small sizes and masses. However, while developers can swiftly design and build their CubeSats, with a team of students from different disciplines using COTS parts, this does not guarantee that the CubeSat mission will be successful. Statistics show that mission failure is frequent. For example, out of 270 “university-class” CubeSats, 139 failed in their mission between 2002 and 2016 [1]. Statistics also show that the …

Comparative Analysis Of Interface Usability For Cybersecurity Applications, Wyly West Andrews

Computer Science

In cybersecurity, understanding the technologies and the best ways to interface with them is paramount for staying ahead of growing cyberthreats. Developers of cybersecurity software will benefit greatly from a greater understanding of how users prefer to interact with cybersecurity technology. In the modern world, two primary interface methods are currently used: the command-line interface (CLI) and the graphical user interface (GUI). This study is a survey and introspective into what benefits and drawbacks that each method has when in the hands of users who do not have a comprehensive background in cybersecurity. Untrained individuals showed proficiency when working with …

Image Registration And Fusion Application, Shreya Singh

Computer Science

Image Registration and Fusion is a process of manipulating two or more input images through a combination of geometric transformation operations and fusion rules to obtain the information from the input images into one fused image. Currently, most existing image registration and fusion techniques are appropriate for grayscale images. There are a few techniques which support colored images but cannot be used for a large input data set. The aim of this research is to propose an image registration and fusion technique that supports large input data sets of both grayscale and colored images. To this end, we explored various …

Development And Validation Of A Library For Iterative Window-Based Processing Of Geospatial Data, David Michael Schwartz

Computer Science

High-resolution spectral images and digital elevation models are widely available. With this quantity of data, it is imperative to develop fast algorithms to extract information. We present a Python library that implements a set of algorithms for aggregating data within sliding windows. The algorithms have O(log(n)) time complexity and maintain the original image resolution. They are vectorized and written with NumPy to create fast code with C-like performance. The library offers several analysis procedures, architected such that additional procedures utilizing sliding windows can easily be added. Slope, aspect, and curvature analyses exist for digital elevation models. Fractal dimensions and correlation …