The Constitutional Failure of the Strickland Standard in Capital Cases under the Eighth Amendment

Criminal defendants are guaranteed the right to effective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment, but the Supreme Court\u27s decision in Strickland has given appellate courts overly broad discretion to determine exactly what constitutes ineffective assistance of counsel. Murphy reviews the right to counsel and discusses the crucial role of counsel in capital cases throughout the trial and appellate processes

Discarding the North Dakota Dictum: An Argument for Strict Scrutiny of the Three-Tier Distribution System

In Granholm v. Heald, the Supreme Court held that states must treat instate and out-of-state alcoholic beverages equally under the dormant Commerce Clause and established a heightened standard of review for state alcohol laws. Yet in dictum the Court acknowledged that the three-tier distribution system-a regime that imposes a physical presence requirement on alcoholic beverage wholesalers and retailers-was unquestionably legitimate. Though the system\u27s physical presence requirement should trigger strict scrutiny, lower courts have placed special emphasis on Granholm\u27s dictum, refusing to subject the three-tier distribution system to Granholm\u27s heightened standard of review. This Note argues that the dictum should be discarded and that courts should carefully scrutinize the three-tier distribution system. Under Granholm\u27s heightened standard of review, the three-tier distribution system would be found unconstitutional

Recommendations for Conservation Easement Reform

Virginia has a well-established easement program which offers landowners a state income tax credit in return for donating land rights such as development and subdivision rights. Currently, there are inefficiencies with easements which could be lessened with reform (Owley 2011, Rissman 2011). This paper proposes that Virginia establish statewide conservation priorities and switches from a flat rate credit for easement donations to a tiered system which provides greater incentives for easements on land with high conservation value (McLaughlin and Pidot 2013). Additionally, this paper proposes that Virginia require adaptive language in easement terms and standardizes monitoring procedures. Poster session prepared for Environmental Studies Senior Seminar

Embracing Localization Inaccuracy: A Case Study

In recent years, indoor localization has become a hot research topic with some sophisticated solutions reaching accuracy on the order of ten centimeters. While certain classes of applications can justify the corresponding costs that come with these solutions, a wealth of applications have requirements that can be met at much lower cost by accepting lower accuracy. This paper explores one specific application for monitoring patients in a nursing home, showing that sufficient accuracy can be achieved with a carefully designed deployment of low-cost wireless sensor network nodes in combination with a simple RSSI-based localization technique. Notably our solution uses a single radio sample per period, a number that is much lower than similar approaches. This greatly eases the power burden of the nodes, resulting in a significant lifetime increase. This paper evaluates a concrete deployment from summer 2012 composed of fixed anchor motes throughout one floor of a nursing home and mobile units carried by patients. We show how two localization algorithms perform and demonstrate a clear improvement by following a set of simple guidelines to tune the anchor node placement. We show both quantitatively and qualitatively that the results meet the functional and non-functional system requirements

KRATOS: An Open Source Hardware-Software Platform for Rapid Research in LPWANs

Long-range (LoRa) radio technologies have recently gained momentum in the IoT landscape, allowing low-power communications over distances up to several kilometers. As a result, more and more LoRa networks are being deployed. However, commercially available LoRa devices are expensive and propriety, creating a barrier to entry and possibly slowing down developments and deployments of novel applications. Using open-source hardware and software platforms would allow more developers to test and build intelligent devices resulting in a better overall development ecosystem, lower barriers to entry, and rapid growth in the number of IoT applications. Toward this goal, this paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of KRATOS, a low-cost LoRa platform running ContikiOS. Both, our hardware and software designs are released as an open- source to the research community.Comment: Accepted at WiMob 201

Interpersonal violence, drug use, and adult attachment

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references: leaves 23-26.Although numerous studies have investigated the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), little research has examined the effects of violent and non-violent trauma on individuals with sub-clinical levels of PTSD. Texas A&M undergraduates (N = 396) completed a PTSD self-report scale, the Adult Attachment Questionnaire, the World Assumptions Scale, the Lifetime Involvement in Violent Events Survey, and a substance abuse questionnaire. Subjects were also asked if they had experienced a trauma, and if not, what was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Sexual trauma was the best predictor of PTSD symptoms, insecure attachment in romantic relationships and friendships, marijuana use, and frequency and amount of alcohol use. Gender effects indicated that women reported higher levels of PTSD symptoms, avoidance, and ambivalence, whereas men reported high levels of marijuana and alcohol us

A Rapid Development of Dependable Applications in Ad Hoc Mobility

Advances in wireless communication and network computing technologies make possible new kinds of applications involving transient interactions among physical components that move across a wide range of spaces, from the confines of a room to the airspace across an ocean, and require no fixed networking infrastructure to communicate with one another. Such components may come together to form ad hoc networks for the purpose of exchanging information or in order to engage in cooperative task-oriented behaviors. Ad hoc networks are assembled, reshaped and taken apart as components move in and out of communication range; all interactions are transient; computations become highly decoupled and rely on weak forms of data consistency; disconnections are frequent and unpredictable; and component behavior is sensitive to changes in location, context, quality of service, or administrative domain. Our objective is to develop an environment that will facilitate rapid development of dependable mobile applications executing over ad hoc networks. Our primary focus will be the development of coordination constructs that support transient interactions among components, specifically through the design of global virtual data structures. Operations and their effects on these data structures must be defined with respect to the current connectivity context. We intend to use formal modeling techniques to define these constructs and their operating constraints as well as providing the specification for implementing these structure. Part of this specification will involve the development of algorithms for the ad hoc environment such as leader election, termination detection, and transactions

Not All Wireless Sensor Networks Are Created Equal: A Comparative Study On Tunnels

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are envisioned for a number of application scenarios. Nevertheless, the few in-the-field experiences typically focus on the features of a specific system, and rarely report about the characteristics of the target environment, especially w.r.t. the behavior and performance of low-power wireless communication. The TRITon project, funded by our local administration, aims to improve safety and reduce maintenance costs of road tunnels, using a WSN-based control infrastructure. The access to real tunnels within TRITon gives us the opportunity to experimentally assess the peculiarities of this environment, hitherto not investigated in the WSN field. We report about three deployments: i) an operational road tunnel, enabling us to assess the impact of vehicular traffic; ii) a non-operational tunnel, providing insights into analogous scenarios (e.g., underground mines) without vehicles; iii) a vineyard, serving as a baseline representative of the existing literature. Our setup, replicated in each deployment, uses mainstream WSN hardware, and popular MAC and routing protocols. We analyze and compare the deployments w.r.t. reliability, stability, and asymmetry of links, the accuracy of link quality estimators, and the impact of these aspects on MAC and routing layers. Our analysis shows that a number of criteria commonly used in the design of WSN protocols do not hold in tunnels. Therefore, our results are useful for designing networking solutions operating efficiently in similar environments