Volume 4 Foreword

In this brief foreword, the Lincoln Memorial University Law Review says thank you, and provides a glimpse into this publication\u27s future

Agree to Disagree: Moving Tennessee Toward Pure No-Fault Divorce

This Note addresses Tennessee\u27s no-fault divorce statute. Currently, married couples are forced to either agree on all issues or prove at least one fault ground. This author contends that the current law imposes an unnecessary burden on litigants, which wastes precious resources that Tennessee families could use for more productive purposes. Moreover, pure no-fault states have not seen a disproportionate rise in divorce rates. Last, pure no-fault divorce better reflects current societal trends and the evolving effect of religious affiliation on how a younger generation defines morality

A Multicommodity Flow Approach to FACTS Device Control

One solution to the problem of preventing cascading failures in the electrical power system is the use of power electronics, such as Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices. In order to effectively use these devices, we must be able to calculate control settings quickly enough to mitigate a cascading failure. In this research, we abstract away the complexity of the power grid by modeling it as a directed graph, which allows us to use standard network flow algorithms to determine control settings. In particular, we investigate the use of so-called multicommodity flow algorithms, which model networks that carry more than one type of flow, in this case real and reactive power

Out of Sight and Out of My Mind: How Rural Tennessee Treats the Mentally Ill

The following article will give you an inside look at how rural Tennessee approaches the mentally ill flowing through the criminal justice system. Being admittedly more editorial than academic, this article will, however, look at some nationwide and statewide statistics to frame the problem. Next, this article will paint a picture of a perfect storm, which has decimated families, communities, and entire counties. This article will also describe the incarceration sales pitch given to rural counties from the prospective of an uninformed county commissioner at twenty-four years of age. Lastly, this article will conclude with some parting thoughts and suggestions from the front lines of the mess created by ignorance, complicity, and greed. The purpose behind this article is to deliver some insight into areas where non-critical academics rarely venture, to give a voice to the silent, and hopefully, inspire more people to take an interest in transforming how mental illness is treated in rural Tennessee, and across the United States. Rural Tennesseans lack some of the education and resources that are available in urban communities. Changing how we treat people afflicted with mental illness will take leadership from within those communities. Legal professionals living and working in rural Tennessee must be the catalyst for this most needed change

MPH

thesisA synthetic zeolite and four natural zeolites were examined for fibers by scanning electron microscopy. Free fibers were detected in two samples of natural erionite, but no free fibers were present in two samples of natural mordenite or the sample of synthetic mordenite. The fiber size distributions were compared to fiber size distributions of borosilicate fibrous glass which is known to cause tumors in rats. There was an overlap of the erionite and borosilicate fibrous glass fiber size distributions. Although the majority of the erionite fibers were short and thick, a small percentage corresponded to fiber size categories that have correlated highly with pleural mesothelioma production in rats

Feasibility of Using Nonlinear Time-Frequency Control for Magnetorheological Dampers in Vehicle Suspension

Semi-active vehicle suspensions that use magnetorheological (MR) dampers are able to better dissipate vibrations compared to conventional dampers because of their controllable damping characteristics. The performance of current MR damper control methods is often hindered by incorrect assumptions and linearized models. Therefore, a need exists to design an adaptive controller with improved accuracy and reliability. The objective of this research is to design an improved controller for MR dampers in vehicle suspension using the nonlinear time-frequency control approach and evaluate its feasibility by numerically employing MATLAB Simulink. Simulations in this research are performed using a simplified quarter car suspension model and modified Bouc-Wen damper model. The proposed control method is evaluated based on its ability to reduce the amplitude of vibrations and minimize acceleration of the car body for various test cases. Simulations are also performed using the skyhook controller and passive suspension to assess the performance of the proposed controller. The results of the simulations show that the proposed nonlinear time-frequency controller can successfully be applied to an MR damper suspensions system for vibration control. The proposed controller outperforms the skyhook controller in terms of reducing acceleration of the car body in each of the tested scenarios. The proposed controller also shows the ability to more efficiently manage the current input to the system. In general, the skyhook controller gives more improved vibration amplitude responses but is prone to generate large spikes in car body acceleration at higher frequency road profile inputs. Simulations performed with the passive system show large displacement amplitudes and inability to prevent oscillation. The feed-forward aspect and adaptive nature of the proposed controller gives it the ability to better compensate for the time-delay in the operation of the MR damper. The proposed controller shows sensitivity to controller parameters when pursuing the best response for different road profile input cases

A biosynthetic approach to the discovery of novel bioactive peptides

Peptides represent a source of novel therapeutics for recalcitrant human diseases, but screening for bioactivity from natural or synthetic sources can be uneconomic. In contrast, in vivo expression of peptides from DNA libraries in a heterologous host such as Escherichia coli may combine production with screening. This dissertation aimed to use such an approach to discover novel bioactive peptides in a high throughput and cost-effective manner, with a focus on antimicrobials and antiaggregants as proof-of-principle. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are innate defence effectors that may combat antibiotic-resistant pathogens. An inducible, autocleaving fusion tag was utilised to produce the model murine cathelicidin K2C18, along with a number of variants, which exhibited varying degrees of antimicrobial activity against a panel of microbes. Importantly, K2C18 also exhibited a bacteriostatic effect in vivo when secreted to the periplasm. This allowed for the implementation of an in vivo whole cell screen for novel AMPs, using genomic DNA libraries as an input. One putative hit, the peptide S-H4, showed similar in vivo behaviour to K2C18 and was active when added exogenously to microbial cultures. A second in vivo screen was constructed to search for inhibitors of Aβ42 aggregation, a process implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. The aggregation state of Aβ42 was coupled to the fluorescence of a chromophore fusion partner, and used to screen co-expressed peptides from a random DNA library for putative antiaggregants. Additionally, the system incorporated an internal fluorescent reference to allow ratiometric comparison between samples. Several hits were identified and further validated using flow cytometry, with work ongoing to assess their activity in vitro. Proof-of-principle of these two screens was achieved, indicating that such in vivo approaches to bioactive peptide discovery could lead to the development of new and useful therapeutics.This work was supported by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, an Overseas Research Studentship, the C. T. Taylor Studentship, the Searle Scholarship, Emmanuel College, the Cambridge Philosophical Society and the European Research Council

Cultural Heritage Destruction in Middle Eastern Museums: Problems and Causes

Destruction of cultural heritage sites and museums in the Middle East has become increasingly prevalent in the recent decades. This thesis aims to unravel the causes for these violent acts. It uses a socio-historical perspective of how culture, religion, and politics have polarized people and contributed to the ruination. Three museums are examined through a scope of progressive violence: The Kuwait National Museum, The National Museum of Iraq and the National Museum of Afghanistan. This thesis shows that both secular and religious factors have contributed to this destruction, and faults by international governing agencies and of investment of mitigation strategies are the causes for what came about. The research also presents ideas on what can be done to improve present circumstances

Essays in Applied Microeconomics

Crowdfunding is a novel industry which facilitates the matching of consumers who want new interesting products with entrepreneurs who need capital to produce those products. Consumers may pledge to a crowdfunding project, essentially preordering the product, which allows entrepreneurs to obtain the minimum amount of capital necessary for production while simultaneously measuring demand for the product. The bulk of this dissertation explores how consumers behave when thinking about and pledging to crowdfunding projects. Chapter 1 illustrates several notable empirical results with novel data from Kickstarter and Reddit. First, the number of new backers (consumers who pledge) per day accelerates up to the point when a project hits its goal then drops down---replicating previous findings in the literature with a different sample and more relaxed empirical assumptions. Second, "advertising" (Reddit posts) about projects has a positive effect on the number of new backers, and this effect is stronger when a project is close to or has already met its goal. These effects are shown to be both statistically and economically significant. Chapter 2 proposes a dynamic theoretical model of consumer behavior in the context of crowdfunding. The model implies an acceleration in new backers per day as a project's probability of success nears one, offering one explanation for the acceleration identified in Chapter 2 and previous literature. In addition, the immediate effect of advertising on the number of backers is generally larger when the probability of success is higher, but there remains some ambiguity for probabilities close to one. The model relies on fairly simple assumptions about the preferences of consumers, but is only solved numerically. Chapter 3 deviates from crowdfunding to discuss a particular econometric methodology, the synthetic control method (SCM). We highlight some data generating processes where the SCM could perform differently across units. However, we show inference based on the mean squared prediction error (MSPE) ratio is not substantially distorted. Additionally, we offer a word of warning about including all pretreatment outcomes as economic predictors in the selection of synthetic weights. Doing so could complicate inference based on the post/pretreatment MSPE ratio.PHDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138620/1/enwright_1.pd