Whither Unregulated Access Competition?

Book Review: Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System, by Milton L. Mueller, Jr., MIT Press and AEI Press, 1997, 191 pages

Effects of Sexual Abuse and Cultural Coping on African American Parent-Child Relationships: Implications for Intervention

Few studies have been conducted to determine relationships between maternal childhood sexual abuse (CSA) history and parenting practices. Furthermore, no studies have attempted to understand how cultural coping methods dynamically impact the relationship between maternal CSA history and parenting outcomes. The purpose of this study is to understand if maternal coping mediates the relation between maternal CSA history and mother-daughter relational outcomes in a sample of African American mothers. The Strong Black Woman (SBW) Cultural Coping Scale, which consists of caretaking, affect regulation, and self-reliance factors, was used to represent maternal coping, and the Parent-Child Relationship Questionnaire (PCRQ) was used to assess warmth, personal relationship, possessiveness, and power assertion. Results showed that maternal CSA history was significantly related to SBW Cultural Coping total scores in the positive direction (i.e., mothers with CSA history reported higher scores). Mediation and indirect effects analyses revealed maternal CSA history was associated with mother-daughter possessiveness and power assertion through SBW Cultural Coping total scores. Additional analyses revealed a significant relation between maternal CSA history and subscales of the SBW, specifically caretaking and self-reliance. The meditational analyses, utilizing SBW subscale scores, revealed significant relations between maternal CSA and maternal warmth in the inverse direction via SBW caretaking, CSA and possessiveness in the positive direction via SBW self-reliance, and CSA and power assertion in the positive direction via both SBW caretaking and self-reliance factors. The results of this study highlight that specific types of trauma (i.e., CSA) can have significant implications for familial functioning within minority populations based on culturally-driven coping

Targeting occupant feedback using digital twins: Adaptive spatial-temporal thermal preference sampling to optimize personal comfort models

Collecting intensive longitudinal thermal preference data from building occupants is emerging as an innovative means of characterizing the performance of buildings and the people who use them. These techniques have occupants giving subjective feedback using smartphones or smartwatches frequently over the course of days or weeks. The intention is that the data will be collected with high spatial and temporal diversity to best characterize a building and the occupant's preferences. But in reality, leaving the occupant to respond in an ad-hoc or fixed interval way creates unneeded survey fatigue and redundant data. This paper outlines a scenario-based (virtual experiment) method for optimizing data sampling using a smartwatch to achieve comparable accuracy in a personal thermal preference model with fewer data. This method uses BIM-extracted spatial data and Graph Neural Network-based (GNN) modeling to find regions of similar comfort preference to identify the best scenarios for triggering the occupant to give feedback. This method is compared to two baseline scenarios that use conventional zoning and a generic 4x4 square meter grid method from two field-based data sets. The results show that the proposed Build2Vec method has an 18-23\% higher overall sampling quality than the spaces-based and square-grid-based sampling methods. The Build2Vec method also performs similar to the baselines when removing redundant occupant feedback points but with better scalability potential

Judicial Mediation in British Columbia: Moving Towards a More Effective Process

My thesis examines judges acting as mediators in the court process. I wanted to examine how judicial mediation compares to private mediation through identified best practices. Styles of mediation are examined looking at evaluative mediation, facilitative mediation, transformative mediation and interest-based mediation. The rules of court dealing with judicial mediation in British Columbia are then examined to identify how judge lead mediations become part of the court process. Identified best practices of mediation are set out with an emphasis on process, neutrality, communication, emotions, culture and continuing education. These identified best practices are then compared and contrasted to how mediation is incorporated into the court process. The interviews of judges from the Supreme Court of British Columbia are used as an entry to their particular views about the benefits judicial mediation has to parties engaged in the court process and to the court process itself. I conclude by identifying the important role judicial mediation has within the court process and how the prevalence of judicial mediation will likely continue in family law litigation. Given that judicial mediation will continue, I argue it is important that the judicial mediation process be as effective as possible to maximize the benefits to parties and the court system. To move towards this goal, I make a number of recommendations on how the judicial mediation process may be changed

Decadal Growth of Traffic Volume on US Highway 2 in Northwestern Montana

We measured vehicle traffic volume at two locations on US Highway 2 along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park during 2012 and 2013 and then compared results to those collected during 1999 through 2001.  We show that traffic volumes have increased substantially in the 11 years between counts and that the increases are most dramatic during the hours in which grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) are most likely to cross the highway.  Over the preceding decade, grizzly bears have lost two hours of suitable crossing opportunity and will, should observed growth rates and traffic continue, lose an additional three hours within five years

Tricarbonylchlorido(6'7'-dihydro-5’H-spiro[cyclopentane-1,6'-dipyrido-[3,2-d:2',3'-f][1,3]diazepine]-κ2N1,N11)-rhenium(I)

In the title compound, [ReCl(C15H16N4)(CO)3], the ReI ion is coordinated in a distorted octahedral geometry by one Cl atom, two N atoms of the bidentate ligand and three carbonyl groups. The cyclopentane group is orientated in a transoid fashion with respect to the chloride ligand. The dihedral angle between the pryridine rings is 10.91 (12)°. In the crystal, N-H...Cl hydrogen bonds link complex molecules, forming a two-dimensional network parallel to (001)