IRis

Fabrication and characterization of pentacene devices

Erfan Kheirkhahi — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:16:31 PDT

Organic devices have shown great promise during the past decade. These devices have several advantages including light weight, flexibility, ease of manufacturability and low cost. These pros make the organic devices good candidates to replace the current semiconductor technology in the areas of thin film transistors, photovoltaics and light-emitting diode fabrication. Pentacene as a conjugated compound shows high performance (including high carrier mobility) among many organic compounds. In contrast to the high electrical performance, these materials suffer from photo-oxidation, a phenomenon in which the devices degrade over time.

In this thesis five novel derivatives of pentacene are introduced and electrically...

Statistical signal processing methods in scattering

Maytee Zambrano Núñez — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:07:27 PDT

This Ph.D. dissertation project addresses two related topics in wave-based signal processing: 1) Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) analysis of scattering systems formed by pointlike scatterers in one-dimensional (1D) and three-dimensional (3D) spaces. 2) Compressive optical coherent imaging, based on the incorporation of sparsity priors in the reconstructions. The first topic addresses for wave scattering systems in 1D and 3D spaces the information content about scattering parameters, in particular, the targets' positions and strengths, and derived quantities, that is contained in scattering data corresponding to reflective, transmissive, and more general sensing modalities. This part of the dissertation derives the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB)...

Public health versus court-sponsored secrecy

Daniel Givelber — Sat, 12 May 2012 12:57:57 PDT

Public health practice - the prevention of disease and injury and the protection of the population - relies on access to information. Legal practice treats information very differently: it is a weapon: has power and value, and it is rarely yielded without getting something in return. Civil litigation uncovers a great deal of otherwise unavailable information about practices and products which may cause disease and injury. However, common practice in and related to lawsuits, trials, and courts, such as protective orders, sealing orders, and confidential settlement agreements, can deprive public health authorities and the public itself of information that might...

Harmonizing disease prevention and police practice in the implementation of HIV prevention programs: up-stream strategies from Wilmington, Delaware

Leo Beletsky — Sat, 12 May 2012 10:36:28 PDT

Introduction: Improving access to sterile injection equipment is a key component in community-based infectious disease prevention. Implementation of syringe access programs has sometimes been complicated by community opposition and police interference.
Case description: In 2006, the Delaware legislature authorized a pilot syringe exchange program (SEP). A program designed to prevent, monitor, and respond to possible policing and community barriers before they had a chance to effect program implementation and operation was planned and implemented by a multidisciplinary team of legal practitioners and public health professionals.
Discussion: We report on an integrated intervention to address structural barriers to syringe exchange program...

Stillborn enterprises: calculating expectation damages using forensic economics

Roger I. Abrams — Fri, 11 May 2012 07:34:54 PDT

In this jointly-authored article, Dean Abrams and forensic economists Donald Welsch and Bruce Jonas explain how the tools of forensic economics can be used to calculate expectation damages for stillborn enterprise. A breach of contract or tortuous misconduct may prevent a business from beginning operations. Courts are often asked to determine what damages have been suffered, but without a track record of performance that determination is often left uncertain. This article offers a formula that lawyers and experts can use to make these determinations with “reasonable certainty.”

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Time at a premium: the arbitration of overtime and premium pay disputes

Roger I. Abrams — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:40:39 PDT

This article continues the joint work of Professors Abrams and Nolan concerning the major issues addressed in labor arbitration. Unionized workplaces often include in their collective bargaining agreements provisions for the payment of premium pay to employees who work in certain situations, such as overtime hours beyond the normal workday or work week or hours worked when employees are called-in to work during non-working hours. The resolution of these disputes requires careful attention to the terms used by parties in their agreements within the context of the basic purposes of such provisions and an understanding of how they generally operate...

Seniority rights under the collective agreement

Roger I. Abrams — Fri, 11 May 2012 05:35:46 PDT

This article discusses the important factor of seniority which is used in most American workplaces as a measure of employee rights. Labor arbitrators are often asked to read and interpret seniority provisions in collective bargaining agreements to determine whether management has promoted the right person or laid off the wrong person. As “the coin of the industrial realm,” seniority normally defines job preferences, benefit eligibility and benefit calculation. The article analyzes and critiques a series of arbitration cases to determine whether they fulfill the parties’ expectations.

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Law and the chicken: an eggs-agerated curriculum proposal

Roger I. Abrams — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:39:07 PDT

In this tongue-in-cheek article, Dean Abrams offers his proposal for a new law school course that would allow every member of a faculty to teach one class in his or her own field. The unifying theme of the course would be that every case discussed must deal in some way with chicken. Dean Abrams would teach the Labor Law case involving the unionization of chicken farmers under the Labor Act. Others would teach criminal cases involving chickens or securities case where the accused party is Chicken Delight. A famous Supreme Court case under the Takings Clause that involved low-flying aircraft...

Magnetic and magnetotransport characteristics of nanostructures and nanostructured semiconductor systems

Steven Bennett — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:39:06 PDT

The unique properties of single domain magnetic nanoparticles have been studied since the 1950's. When a material is geometrically confined to nanoscale dimensions its characteristic properties can change dramatically. In this thesis the magnetic and magnetotransport characteristics of GaMnAs and MnAs nanostructured systems are explored in several novel experimental studies. The ternary magnetic semiconductor GaMnAs was investigated under 3 dimensions (3D) of spatial confinement.1 Up until this research, GaMnAs hadn't been successfully fabricated, or studied, as a nanodot. By creating a novel patterning approach using anodic porous alumina, the superparamagnetism of confined GaMnAs was able to be acquired using SQUID...

Theoretical and experimental investigation of a two-agent consensus dynamics with communication delays

Andranik Valedi — Thu, 10 May 2012 06:29:36 PDT

We utilize two DC motors with shaft-mounted encoders as agents of a coupled system, and both manipulate and measure the motors' velocities using Simulink graphical inter- face software and QuaRC data acquisition software. We create a mathematical model of the physical system using MATLAB's System Identification Toolbox, and design a con- trol scheme to drive the motors to a reference input. The control design calculations are facilitated by MATLAB's well-suited computational resources. We then introduce commu- nication delays into feedback pathways and show how the system stability and performance is affected as a function of the delay length. The system...

Orbit closures of quiver representations

Kavita Sutar — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:51:07 PDT

Let $Q$ be a Dynkin quiver. We study orbit closures in $\mathrm{Rep}(Q, \underline{d})$, the affine space of quiver representations of a fixed dimension vector. The orbits arise from the action of $\mathrm{Gl}(\underline{d})$ on $\mathrm{Rep}(Q, \underline{d})$ and we consider their closure in the Zariski topology.

We investigate the properties of coordinate rings of orbit closures for quivers of type $A_3$ by considering the desingularization given by Reineke. We construct explicit minimal free resolutions of the defining ideals of the orbit closures thus giving us a minimal set of generators for the defining ideal. The resolution allows us to read off some...

Integrating RHEED-TRAXS and molecular beam epitaxy for real-time compositional control of functional oxide deposition processes

Bing Sun — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:27:21 PDT

Real-time chemical analysis during film growth by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) has been unattainable because traditional Ultra High Vacuum (UHV) tools such as X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) or Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) cannot be used at pressures above 10-8 Torr, and MBE growth pressure are typically 10-6 to 10-5 Torr. Real-time chemical analysis and stoichiometry control is important, however, because stoichiometry changes of less than one percent in materials such as functional oxides can cause measurable changes in their physical properties. Indirect measurements of stoichiometry, such as surface Reflection High Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED) pattern, are often misleading. RHEED -...

Gender, sexuality and power: is feminist theory enough?

Dan Danielsen — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:12:40 PDT

In this dialogue, four authors critically examine how to describe feminism and what it can and cannot do, particularly with regard to sexuality. The authors use the Texas Supreme Court case Twyman v. Twyman, involving divorce, sadomasochistic sex, and a claim of emotional distress, as a focal point to explore how feminism deals with gender, sexuality, and power, and whether it does so sufficiently. The roundtable discussion revolves around Janet Halley's radical suggestion that not only is feminism not enough, but that we should "Take a Break" from it in order to see the issues feminism does not address as...

The 'worthy' unemployed: societal stratification and unemployment insurance programs in China and the United States

Lucy A. Williams — Wed, 09 May 2012 07:34:47 PDT

This is a comparative study of the unemployment compensation schemes in China and in the U.S. The article emphasizes how the structure of unemployment scheme can add to or detract from the view of the unemployed as “worthy” or “unworthy.”

Consumer-directed health care

Kristin M. Madison — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:25:15 PDT

You won’t hear many health experts claim that the American
healthcare system is functioning perfectly in terms of core considerations
such as cost, access, and quality. The question that arises with
the advent of any new policy approach seeking to improve the system
is obvious: Does the change represent a step forward or backward?
Professors Kristin Madison and Peter Jacobson take up this question in
regard to the latest innovation in health care policy—consumer-directed
healthcare (CDHC).

Professor Madison argues that while CDHC is not a panacea,
“[e]ven if its shortcomings prevent its full diffusion through the
American health care system,...

The umuD gene products are molecular adaptors in the regulation of DNA damage tolerance

Jaylene N. Ollivierre — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:48:02 PDT

The homodimeric umuD gene products play key roles in regulating the cellular response to DNA damage in Escherichia coli. UmuD is composed of 139-amino acid subunits and is upregulated as part of the SOS DNA damage response. Subsequently, damage-induced RecA:ssDNA nucleoprotein filaments mediate the slow autocleavage of the N-terminal 24-amino acid arms of UmuD yielding UmuD'. It was previously proposed that UmuD cleaves only in the trans conformation, in which the arm of one monomer utilizes that active site of the adjacent monomer for cleavage. Cleavage in trans would therefore require dimerization. However, isoenergetic models of UmuD suggested that the...

Gatekeepers of legal information: evaluating and integrating free internet legal resources into the classroom

Jootaek Lee — Tue, 08 May 2012 08:05:47 PDT

This Article provides a new analytical tool for legal researchers and practitioners to evaluate free or low-cost Internet resources. Since the global financial crisis has discouraged legal researchers and practitioners from accessing high-cost databases and has encouraged increased reliance on free or low-cost Internet resources, it is important now to establish appropriate evaluation standards for free or low-cost Internet resources. The author believes that evaluation standards based on authority, accuracy, currency, coverage, and usability are necessary for legal instructors in order to safely introduce these resources into their classrooms.

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