Shipwrecked Spaceship with Undersea Overgrowth and Dynamic Weather System

This artifact depicts an underwater overgrowth scene featuring coral, barnacles, sea urchins, and various sea-life enveloping the iconic Slave-1 ship from Star Wars. The ship exhibits visible damage to its hull and substructures, resulting from missile impacts and prolonged decay subsequent to a crash landing in the ocean. Consequently, remnants of destroyed substructures are interspersed with coral growth, transforming the ship into an artificial reef. The artifact comprises four distinct scenes: an initial pristine underwater environment teeming with flourishing kelp, vibrant sea life, and animated corals; a subsequent chaotic scene depicting a vortex that evacuates the water from the environment; a scene where a sandstorm desiccates and buries the reef under sand; and a final tempestuous scene featuring a towering fire tornado that casts an illuminating glow over the surroundings

Still Far From Home – How Personal Jurisdiction Doctrine Undercuts The Montreal Convention’s “Fifth Jurisdiction” For “Wandering Americans”

The rapid growth of global air travel in the mid-20th century gave rise to the problem of the “wandering American”—American residents whose air travel injury claims could not be heard in United States courts under the Warsaw Convention’s Article 28. Prominent cases prompted adoption of a “fifth jurisdiction” in the Montreal Convention’s Article 33, allowing injury suits in the Contracting State where an injured passenger had her “principal and permanent residence” so long as the international carrier served the forum. U.S. officials toasted their success in providing Americans with a domestic forum, but the adoption of the fifth jurisdiction did not finish the job. Even if an American plaintiff meets Article 33’s requirements, personal jurisdiction problems can bar the courthouse door. This article re-examines the problem of the “wandering American” and the fierce debates over the fifth jurisdiction at the 1999 International Conference on Air Law in Montreal through the lens of personal jurisdiction. It argues that the Montreal Convention would likely not have changed the results of prominent “wandering American” cases such as the shoot-down of Korean Air 007 or the hijacking of Air France 139. It comments on how the law is rapidly evolving as federal courts wrestle with whether Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k)(2) can better address the lack of “minimum contacts” carriers have with most U.S. states and the lack of causal connections between forum and claims. Finally, it considers how Congress or American aviation authorities can better align Montreal’s promise of a “fifth jurisdiction” with American jurisdictional law

Best Practices: Using Semiotics in Environmental Storytelling

This thesis explores an aspect of environmental storytelling known as “semiotics.” Semiotics conveys information and relevant interconnections to an individual through visual representations. There are diverse types of semiotic elements, including symbols, icons, and indexes. The researcher examined the use of semiotics in video games and derived seven best practices for conveying story beats and relaying aspects of a video game’s narrative. The researcher implemented these semiotic-related practices into a custom Fallout 4 level, gathered testers to play the level, and asked the testers to give their opinions on the experience. The researcher analysed the tester’s feedback to conclude whether these best practices were truly successful or not

Best Practices: Implementing Dense Level Design Through Reuse of Space

This research explores the correlation between Dense Level Design and the Reuse of Space in video games. It provides assumptions about best practices for implementing Reuse of Space to attain Dense Level Design. To evaluate these best practices, an artifact level is developed for Dying Light 2: Stay Human. The practices are evaluated through an analysis of survey results

The Taxation of Robots and Its Global Challenges

Robots are changing the world. In the past decade, we have already seen robots perform medical procedures, drive cars, serve as virtual assistants, analyze financial data, perform legal research, and win Jeopardy. These examples illustrate powerful new forms of automation that go beyond manual labor and assembly lines into tasks that once seemed impossible to automate. This is just the beginning. Robots now have the potential to invade almost all sectors of the economy and are expected to do so faster than previous technological changes. Many fear that millions will lose their jobs, leading to massive technological unemployment. To address these anticipated problems, there have been calls worldwide to implement a tax on robots. This chapter explores the reasons behind these calls and whether policymakers should pursue a robot tax. It provides an overview of the international implications of increased robot use and critically analyzes robot tax proposals from an international perspective, highlighting negative policy implications and practical issues. After demonstrating why a robot tax is not the best solution, the chapter suggests alternative actions nations should consider to address the challenges of the new automation era. As Erik Brynjolfsson observes, “This is a moment of choice and opportunity. It could be the best 10 years ahead of us or one of the worst because we have more power than ever before.” Thus, while a robot tax may not be the optimal approach, policymakers have a crucial responsibility to acknowledge the potential of robots and address the associated risks and challenges

Experiments on Employer-Employee Relationships

Employer-employee relationships exist commonly in workplaces and are important for people to understand the interactions between employers and employees and also their own behavior. This dissertation presents studies of different aspects of employer-employee relationships using laboratory experiments. Chapter 1 studies how the problematic nature of many middle management positions drive middle managers to interact with their employees in a negative way in workplaces, as they are under pressure from upper management to extract high effort from their employees, but given few incentives to do so. Chapter 2 focuses on the potential peer effects of employees\u27 performance feedback and performance. My current data suggests that there is no overall treatment effect of peer workers\u27 performance feedback or performance on employees\u27 effort choices, but a positive correlation between coworkers\u27 efforts and employees\u27 efforts is found and indicates the peer effects of performance can potentially exist, which echos the results from a number of studies about peer effects. Chapter 3 examines if females and minorities have reduced willingness to participate in tasks with more subjective judgment. My data provides suggestive but not significant results to support my hypotheses that correlations between subjects\u27 avoidance to subjective judgment and their genders, ethnicities, or demographic information being accessible to the judge exist. Correlations between subjects\u27 changes of avoidance to judgment and their genders or ethnicities are found insignificant as well

The Chemistry of Heavy Elements: Probing Relativistic Chemical Bonding

The bottommost part of the periodic table has a unique chemistry, where the high velocities of the inner-shell electrons prevent their description by the usual Schrödinger equation. The resulting so-called relativistic effects have numerous chemical implications, on both macro and microscale, ranging from physical properties to reactivity. However, experimental probes on these intriguing atoms are limited by their natural availability and, more importantly, the danger associated with their radioactivity. Quantum chemical calculations, on the other hand, face the challenge of far more complex algebra, which demands substantial computational resources. Relativistic Hamiltonians, which act over all electrons in the system, are currently among the most accurate methods used to describe the electronic structure of heavy atoms. Over the years, the Normalized Elimination of the Small Component (NESC) Hamiltonian, originally proposed by Dyall, has been extensively improved by the CATCO group; the latest version, NESC with atomic unitary transformation (NESCau), allows for accurate calculations on large systems at a reasonable cost. In this dissertation, we applied the NESC and NESCau Hamiltonians, paired with the well-established theories of local vibrational mode analysis (LMA) and quantum theory of atoms in molecules (QTAIM), to describe chemical bonding in heavy atoms. Our results showcase intriguing aspects of the chemistry of uranium and lanthanides, including their geometry, bonding mechanisms, and chemical affinities

Socially Acceptable Securities Fraud

What is a lie? Moreover, where is it a lie? Lies are bad. Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 create liability for issuer firms and individuals who make “an untrue statement of a material fact” or omit “a material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein not misleading.” In the ninety years since the passage of the Securities Exchange Act, however, the number of ways in which market participants may publicly disseminate statements that will be consumed by investors has exploded; does 10b-5 really apply to all these statements? This Article asks the question the jury in United States v. Schena asked the trial judge during deliberations: Do we not distinguish at all between a tweet and a press release? Presently, the number of ways in which issuers and officers communicate with the wider public and in which buyers and sellers communicate with each other is almost too long to list: social media such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, and Facebook; investor message boards such as InvestorHub, Motley Fool Community, r/wallstreetbets and Seeking Alpha; company websites; YouTube; earnings calls; webinars; investor and industry conferences; and of course, SEC filings. Some of these communications are scripted; some are vetted by legal counsel; and some are crafted with cautionary language that insulates otherwise rosy forward-looking statements from liability. Some of these communications, however, are extemporaneous, unvetted, and uncrafted. Yet all of these types of statements have formed the basis for private investor litigation, civil enforcement, and criminal enforcement. The Twitter trial of the century between Tesla investors and Elon Musk garnered substantial attention with scholars and pundits. This 2023 case, however, is not an isolated securities fraud case involving social media; in fact, in United States v. Schena and United States v. Milton, two different CEOs were convicted of criminal securities fraud based on tweeting activity. Though defendants question the role of social media in enforcement actions, courts are treating these marketplace statements just like formal corporate statements. Issuers and their officers who engage with stakeholders via social media may be unwittingly creating substantial litigation risk for their corporations. This Article presents an empirical analysis of 2022 10b-5 class action lawsuits and of 10b-5 enforcement actions by the SEC that suggests that though social media statements are not yet rich fodder for securities fraud allegations, social media statements are the basis of some lawsuits and prosecutions. In a few cases, the social media statement takes center stage; in some cases, allegedly false statements are repeated in multiple venues, including social media. Currently, courts decide on a case-by-case basis if particular statements in social media should be actionable under traditional rules for falsity, materiality, and nexus to issuer securities. This article argues that this approach may lead to very different outcomes within a single federal securities law regime and should be reformed. Ultimately, this article argues that there may be a level of socially-acceptable securities fraud that must be tolerated in an information society