Digital Commons Network^™

Aspects On The Quantum Dynamics Of A System Coupled To A Bosonic Environment, Qidong Xu

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

In this work we study various aspects of the quantum dynamics for a system coupled to a Bosonic environment, which is described by a collection of quantum harmonic oscillators or a quantum field. We first consider two quantum mechanical oscillator system-bath models obtained by dimensionally truncating linearized gravity coupled to a massive scalar field and scalar QED, and we show that they separately map onto the phase damped oscillator model and the oscillator system subject to two-photon damping. The phase damped oscillator model also corresponds to the optomechanical system with an acoustic field environment, and we study the acoustic environment …

Information Entropic Content Of Astrophysical Spectra: Applications To Cosmology And Astrobiology, Sara Vannah

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Astrophysics faces two critical challenges: the difficulty of observing very distant targets and the difficulty of interpreting science in diverse and often extreme environments that have not been replicated on Earth. In this thesis, we discuss two types of spectra — one from early universe cosmology and one from astrobiology — where improvements in telescope technology are just ushering in a wave of precise observations, addressing the first challenge. This accelerates the need for a solution to the second challenge. Traditional methods for analyzing these two spectra rely heavily on unsettled science, biasing results to match the input assumptions. In …

Self-Acquisition Of Liquid Propellant Versatile Arsenal Of Resources Endeavour (S.A.L.V.A.R.E.), Vittorio Baraldi, Nikki Smith-Cielo, Sotirios Zormpas

Student Works

Unlocking the mysteries of Mars’s past and future habitability is just within humanity’s grasp. With a multitude of inherent similarities to Earth, Mars is one of the most promising locations to extend humankind’s reach in manned space exploration. As humanity is at the summit of taking the next leap for mankind by preparing the first crewed missions to Mars, a need that must be met is to significantly reduce the mass necessary to deliver to the surface.

The Self-Acquisition of Liquid propellant Versatile Arsenal of Resources Endeavour (SALVARE) project details a mission for creating the first Mars water-based In-Situ Resources …

Unleashing Pets From Dead-Hand Control, Kaity Emerson, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

Many pet owners feel strongly about their animals. Some feel so strongly that they desire their pets to accompany them to the grave. This Article addresses the validity of pet euthanasia provisions in decedents’ wills.

Pet owners generally have the legal power to humanely euthanize their pets. In addition, the primary focus of the law of wills is to effectuate the wishes of the decedent. These two facts seem to counsel in favor of carrying out a testamentary instruction to humanely euthanize a companion animal. Yet courts generally decline to enforce pet euthanasia provisions whenever an objection is raised by …

The Last Breakfast With Aunt Jemima And Its Impact On Trademark Theory, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

The generally-accepted law and economics theory of trademarks fails to explain why a brand owner would ever walk away from a trademark that generates financially lucrative returns. In 2020, that is exactly what happened again and again as brand owners pledged to abandon racially explicit marks in the weeks following George Floyd’s murder. As citizens became more attuned to the experiences of those depicted in racial marks, the owners of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, the Cleveland Indians, the Redskins, the Dixie Chicks, Lady Antebellum and others announced these brands’ days were numbered. By evoking racist stereotypes, they became a moral …

“Shall Not Be Construed”: Reversal Of Supreme Court Decisions By Constitutional Amendment, John V. Orth

Faculty Publications

This Article considers the way in which small changes of wording can signal large changes of thought in the United States Constitution (Constitution). Drawing upon examples found in the Eleventh and Sixteenth Amendments, and in the Reconstruction Amendments, the Article shows that there are two ways to reverse a U.S. Supreme Court decision by constitutional amendment. The first type of amendment may reverse the decision by instructing the Court on the proper construction of a particular provision, as in the case of the Eleventh Amendment. The second means involves reversing the decision by altering the constitutional provision in question, rather …

The Law According To She-Hulk, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

First introduced in Marvel comics in 1979, Jennifer Walters is the fictional character best known as the She-Hulk. Her profession is an attorney. While this article occasionally draws from source material elsewhere in the Marvel comics, its primary focus is the third She-Hulk series, which was published in twelve issues from 2014 to 2015. This series is considered to be the most legally focused of the She-Hulk series and was written by an attorney, Charles Soule. Soule himself describes the series as “a book starring a superhero who rarely super heroes. Instead of that, she *gulp* lawyers.”

As is normal …

Citation Stickiness, Computer-Assisted Legal Research, And The Universe Of Thinkable Thoughts, Aaron S. Kirschenfeld, Alexa Z. Chew

Faculty Publications

This article seeks to answer two main questions. The first is whether courts cited the same cases as the parties more often during the print era than during the digital era. The second is what, if anything, the answer to the first question can contribute to the debate about how print-era forms of organizing and describing case law influenced researchers’ behavior. To that end, we sampled cases from 1957, 1987, and 2017, and used “citation stickiness” to study the differences in how parties and judges cited authorities during each of those years. In short, we found that there is less …

Implicit Legislative Bias: The Case Of The Mortgage Interest Deduction, Kathleen Delaney Thomas, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

The home mortgage interest deduction is over 100 years old. The deduction has been subject to increasing and, at times, withering criticism from commentators. Scholars have argued that the mortgage interest deduction may be a particularly ineffective and regressive way to subsidize homeownership. Other scholars have made the important point that the mortgage interest deduction has a disparate racial impact: homeowners are disproportionately white, so the deduction disproportionately benefits white people at the expense of people of color. Yet, the mortgage interest deduction has retained remarkable and costly staying power despite all the critiques.

How has the mortgage interest deduction …

Qualified Sovereignty, Kate Sablosky Elengold, Jonathan D. Glater

Faculty Publications

Sometimes acts of the federal government cause harm; sometimes acts of contractors hired by the federal government cause harm. In cases involving the latter, federal contractors often invoke the sovereign’s constitutionally granted and doctrinally expanded supremacy to restrict avenues for the injured to recover even from private actors. In prior work, we analyzed how federal contractors exploit three “sovereign shield” defenses—preemption, derivative sovereign immunity, and derivative intergovernmental immunity—to evade liability, accountability, and oversight.

This Article considers whether, when, and how private federal contractors should be held accountable in a court of law. We argue that a contractor should be required …

Amar’S The Words That Made Us, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

Our generation’s preeminent constitutional scholar, Professor Akhil Amar of the Yale Law School, is, like the Constitution itself, a national treasure. His most recent book, The Words that Made Us, is another masterpiece of constitutional and historical exegesis, the first of three volumes that illuminate in what ways the American Constitution has defined, energized, united, and divided the nation and its people through constitutional conversations and engagements over its meaning throughout our history. The book is awash with stories about the incremental broadening of “We the People,” the hero, authority, casualty, and beneficiary of the words that made us. …

Public Investment In Climate Resiliency: Lessons From The Law And Economics Of Natural Disasters, Donald T. Hornstein

Faculty Publications

This Article takes issue with an important claim in the public choice and climate disaster literature: that American political markets will not allow appropriate investments in disaster preparedness and prevention, even when those investments are cost-benefit bargains. The claim is significant because the costs of climate disasters in the twenty-first century are estimated to be in the trillions of dollars due to the presence of legacy greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Thus, even assuming a sustained, successful global campaign to limit future greenhouse gases, the ingredients for decades of droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods are already locked into the atmosphere. …

A Debt Of Dishonor, Kim Oosterlinck, Ugo Panizza, W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Mitu Gulati

Faculty Publications

In 1825, France conditioned its grant of recognition to the new nation of Haiti on the payment of 150 million francs plus trade benefits. The payments were, at least in part, compensation for the losses that French plantation owners suffered, a key part of which was the loss of enslaved Haitians, who took their freedom via revolution. France has officially apologized and acknowledged a “moral debt” that it owes the Haitian people. But is there a legal debt that Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, could claim today from France, one of the richest?

Racialized Religious School Segregation, Erika Wilson

Faculty Publications

Carson v. Makin has several implications for the future of school-choice programs. This Essay explores one possibility: an increase in sectarian schools participating in state-funded school-choice programs, causing new forms of school segregation based on race and religion and impairing the democracy-enhancing functions of public education.

Working Memory In College Students Participating In Moderate Aerobic Physical Activity Vs. Light Intensity Activity, Abriana Jones

Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Populism And Democracy: A Comparative Analysis Of Trump’S And Zelenskyy’S Presidencies, Diana Butsko

Research Papers

No abstract provided.

First Comes Love. Then Comes Marriage. Then Comes A Baby In A Baby Carriage: An Application Of Protective Surrogacy Laws To The Tarheel State, Justin Lo

Seattle University Law Review

Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and determining parentage have a common feature: each is governed by state law or the lack of such laws. This lack of statutory regulations presents significant legal challenges to gay men who wish to start a family. Because same-sex male couples seeking to become fathers through ART and surrogacy are the most likely demographic to be impacted when determining parentage, laws that influence the direction of surrogacy will undeniably facilitate whether both males will be deemed a father. To provide same-sex male couples with a pathway to parenthood, North Carolina should (1) develop robust, protective surrogacy …

Race In Washington’S Juvenile Legal System: 2021 Report To The Washington Supreme Court, Task Force 2.0 Juvenile Justice Subcommittee

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this report provides the core work of the subcommittee and is intended to function as a stand-alone document, expressed in youth- friendly language, that sets forth: (1) the youth-articulated goals for systemic change to the juvenile legal system; (2) a narrative of how the system currently works and the harms caused; and (3) the change needed to bring about the youth-articulated goals for systemic change. This document is intended to be a youth-centered blueprint for change—a tool for community advocates, a framework for policy makers, and a call-in to the many institutional actors to center the leadership …

Importance Of Economic Freedom In Georgia’S Democratization Efforts, Dachi Mazanashvili

Research Papers

The breakup of the Soviet Union gave the 15 republics a unique chance to transform their states into democracies. Although more than 30 years later we are seeing very mixed results in the democratic transitions across the post-Soviet space. Despite overwhelming efforts from the scholars in this field to come up with comprehensive theories explaining the reasons behind such large variance in the degrees of democratization between the states, still, the discipline is quite far from providing us with a single firm answer to such crucial questions. This paper is therefore aiming to contribute to this debate through a qualitative …

Implementation Of A Tactical Dispatcher Team: The Critical Incident Support System, Kaitlin Durband

Research Papers

A Tactical Dispatch Team is comprised of highly skilled and trained 911 telecommunicators with experience in police, fire, and EMS dispatching. Tactical Dispatch Team members will participate in various training courses and in real-life staged scenarios. Tactical Dispatchers know what and when to document vital information and what data could later be needed in court (Tactical Dispatcher, n.d.). Any incident can turn from calm and simple to chaotic and complex. The Tactical Dispatch Team is a major support system for first responder personnel.

Athletic Injury And Resources For Student-Athletes: A Proposal For An Athlete Injury Playbook, Jessica J. Pauley

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Athletic injury happens frequently and is rarely predictable. While injury is common in sport involvement at all levels, this proposal focused on National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) student-athletes and expanding the resources they have available to them. The vast literature on athletic injury and rehabilitation in sport has served researchers and academic consumers, and unfortunately, has lacked an easily accessible resource for student-athletes and sports medicine professionals to utilize. Therefore, the purpose of this doctoral paper was to propose a resource focused on post-athletic injury and written for collegiate student-athletes to understand called, The Secret Playbook. This playbook included information …

Using Eeg To Measure L2 Word Learning, Jeffrey Jack Green, Ellen Knell, Rachel Yu Liu

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Regional Patterns In Prevelar Raising, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Prevelar raising is the raising of trap and dress vowels before voiced velars. While bag and beg raising have been described in Canada, the Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, an in-depth investigation of their distribution across North America is lacking, especially for beg. Using an online survey distributed to over 5,000 participants via Reddit (which skews toward younger, White males) and ordinary kriging for spatial interpolation, this study finds that prevelar raising is more widespread than previously reported: bag raising is found in much of the North and the Upper Midwest, and beg raising is far more variable and …

Vowels Can Merge Because Of Changes In Trajectory: Prelaterals In Rural Utah English, Joseph A. Stanley, Lisa Morgan Johnson

Faculty Publications

Overview

• Front vowels: tense-lax pairs getting closer in apparent time.
• Back vowels: three-way convergence of WOLF, JOLT, and MULCH.
• This data suggests a merger by approximation.

Expanding to trajectories gives greater insight into this type of merger.

• Kinda like a zipper.

Greater detail in this merger by approximation.

• The nuclei don’t appear to trigger the shift
• The lateral gradually increases its influence, and the nucleus follows.

Trajectories are potentially important for discovering how vowels shift.

• More recent techniques can allow us to answer these questions.

Homogeneity And Heterogeneity In Western American English, Joseph A. Stanley, Jessica Sheperd, Auna Nygaard

Faculty Publications

The Low-Back-Merger Shift (Becker 2019)

Description:

• BAT, BET, BIT lower and retract
• Arguably a chain shift
• Triggered by BOT-retraction
• Typically BAT shifts the most
• BET and especially BIT less shifted

Previous accounts are based on isolated, independent studies.

“Clearly, collecting the same type of data from all sites would be optimal in allowing us the most reliable cross-region assessment.” (Fridland et al. 2017:172)

This study is a direct response to that call.

Methods:

Speakers:

• Recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (“MTurk”; cf. Kim et al 2019)
• 85 speakers

Procedure:

• Read 132 sentences and a 300-item wordlist
• Submitted audio 10 sentences at …

Assessing Potentiation Of The (Α4)3(Β2)2 Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor By The Allosteric Agonist Cmpi, Farah Deba, Kemburli Munoz, Eloisa Peredia, Gustav Akk, Ayman K Hamouda

Open Access Publications

The extracellular domain of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor isoforms formed by three α4 and two β2 subunits ((α4)3(β2)2 nAChR) harbors two high-affinity "canonical" acetylcholine (ACh)-binding sites located in the two α4:β2 intersubunit interfaces and a low-affinity "noncanonical" ACh-binding site located in the α4:α4 intersubunit interface. In this study, we used ACh, cytisine, and nicotine (which bind at both the α4:α4 and α4:β2 interfaces), TC-2559 (which binds at the α4:β2 but not at the α4:α4 interface), and 3-(2-chlorophenyl)-5-(5-methyl-1-(piperidin-4-yl)-1H-pyrrazol-4-yl)isoxazole (CMPI, which binds at the α4:α4 but not at the α4:β2 interface), to investigate the binding and gating properties of CMPI at the …

Low Knowledge Of Hiv Prep Within A Midwestern Us Cohort Of Persons Who Inject Drugs, Sena Sayood, Laura R. Marks, Rupa Patel, Nathanial S. Nolan, Stephen Y. Liang, Michael J. Durkin

Open Access Publications

We interviewed persons who inject drugs (PWID) to understand perceptions of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV infection. Knowledge of PrEP was poor. Patients felt that PrEP was for sexual intercourse rather than injection drug use, and PWID managed on medications for opioid use disorder felt that they had no need for PrEP.

Prospective Nasal Screening For Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus In Critically Ill Patients With Suspected Pneumonia, Nicholas Raush, Kevin D. Betthauser, Karen Shen, Tamara Krekel, Marin H. Kollef

Open Access Publications

We carried out a prospective de-escalation study based on methicillin-resistant

Understanding And Application Of Daptomycin-Susceptible Dose-Dependent Category For Enterococcus: A Mixed-Methods Study, Jennifer L. Adema, Laurel N. Lake, Ryan W. Stevens, Breann M. Hogan, Audrey N. Schuetz, Aaron J. Tande, Kristin C. Mara, Allison R. Eberly, Christina G. Rivera

Open Access Publications

Background: In 2018, the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at our institution adopted updated daptomycin

Methods: This mixed-methods study combined a clinician survey with a retrospective pre-post prescribing analysis. An 8-question survey was distributed to infectious diseases (ID) and internal medicine (IM) clinicians. A retrospective chart review of hospitalized adults with infections due to

Results: Survey response rates were 40 of 98 (41%) for IM and 22 of 34 (65%) for ID clinicians. ID clinicians scored significantly higher than IM clinicians in knowledge of SDD. Chart review of 474 patients (225 pre- vs 249 post-SDD) showed that daptomycin dosage following susceptibility testing …

Outcomes Of Sars-Cov-2-Positive Youths Tested In Emergency Departments: The Global Pern-Covid-19 Study, Anna L. Funk, Fahd A. Ahmad, Et Al

Open Access Publications

Importance: Severe outcomes among youths with SARS-CoV-2 infections are poorly characterized.

Objective: To estimate the proportion of children with severe outcomes within 14 days of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 in an emergency department (ED).

Design, Setting, and Participants: This prospective cohort study with 14-day follow-up enrolled participants between March 2020 and June 2021. Participants were youths aged younger than 18 years who were tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection at one of 41 EDs across 10 countries including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, New Zealand, Paraguay, Singapore, Spain, and the United States. Statistical analysis was performed from September to October 2021. …