Improving Landlord-Tenant Relations in Kentucky Through the URLA

Kentucky lawmakers should mandate statewide adoption of the Uniform Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1972 (hereafter URLTA), because such a move would benefit everyone involved in landlord-tenant relations, including landlords, tenants, and the lawyers and judges in the state that participate in litigation concerning these relations

Nutrient Recycling: Rural On-Site Wastewater Disposal and Treatment in Can Tho City, Viet Nam

In order to research a topic a holistic perspective is important. Often experiments are performed absent from the environment that is being observed. It is like thrusting one’s hand into an ocean to grope around for a specimen, extract it, and examine it apart from its native habitat. Although this is possible and often primarily the method, to immerse oneself into where one is studying is to increase one’s ability to obtain a more holistic perspective. I have come to believe that the more practical and accurate scientific experiments are a combination of laboratories and on the field. Not only should the substance be analyzed, but the surrounding community that directly or indirectly is affected should also be understood. Personal and communal perspectives, habits, traditions, understandings are often not taken into account. However, when the researcher lives with them, learns from them, and sees life from their perspective, its incorporation only enhances the final results of the analysis. How else can one help another? This paper should not be read scientifically as the experiments were not performed within a strict, controlled environment. Contrary, this should be read as a journal or rather an extended article describing the current issues of wastewater disposal in Can Tho City, Vietnam, the present practices, health hazards, and suggestions on how can to improve the situation. A majority of my time was spent with a typical low-income farmer and his family who live in My Khanh village on the outskirts of urban Can Tho City. There I observed his approach, limitations, and understandings of the environment and how he as an individual, his family and community is contributing both negatively and positively to its future. If one truly desires to influence another’s life, one must begin by stepping into their shoes and perceive life through their eyes in order to gain what they already know and conceive what they have yet to know. From there, one can pinpoint the need or area of unawareness and address it directly. Due to time constraints, language restrictions, and selective observations, this paper can only reflect a small fraction of the wastewater situation in Can Tho City, let alone Vietnam at large. One can either approach the issue from outside and trace the adverse affects to the sources or dive within it and understand it from the inside outward beginning with the vector sources and following them to the victims they influence. I chose the latter

Do College Football Games Affect the Level of Crime in the Local Community?

On the local news channels in major college football towns, there are anecdotal stories during that detail celebratory riots that took place during or after a college football game. Few empirical studies have focused on whether there is a relationship between college football games and crime. This paper attempts to determine that relationship by exploiting the fact that college football games are played in a home stadium and an away stadium. More specifically, the study addressed the following two questions: Do jurisdictions in which a home football game is played differ in crime rate from those where an away game is played? Do crime rates in the same jurisdiction vary depending on whether a home or away game is played there? Data for the analysis was collected for the 2007 NCAA Division I football season. Crime data for the analysis was obtained from the 2007 National Incident Based Reporting System; sixty jurisdictions having college football teams reported data. The data set included jurisdiction demographic information from the 2007 American Community Survey. Various other data sources were used to collect information specific to the college football game, such as rivalry identification, point spread, conference game, game time and outcome of the game. The analysis of data included t-test of difference in means for significance of home versus away games and other t-tests related to the game outcome of home games. The analysis included two regression models, a standard OLS and a fixed effects regression. The regression results found that home games had a significant and positive impact on total crime, compared to away games (i.e. home games increase crime rates). Homes games had a significant and positive impact when both models were run with disorderly conduct, drunkenness and liquor law violation as the dependent variable crime category. In the fixed effects model, the relationship between home games and DUI crime was significant and positive although the magnitude was not meaningful. The game characteristics or outcome of the game had little impact on crime. Recommendations are made for future research to increase the sample size by analyzing multiple years. Further research is needed to analyze the police force and policing practices during college football games. Recommending increasing the number of police on duty during college football games could have either a positive or negative impact on the crime rate. More police could either reduce the number of crimes as they are more visible to spectators or increase crime as police can cover a larger area

The Effect of State-Level Constitutional Debt Limitations On the Costs of Capital

Forty-five states have adopted some form of constitutional limitation on their own legislature’s ability to issue debt and raise capital. Eleven states have more than one such limitation. It seems intuitive to assume that constitutional strictures on a state’s ability to manage its fiscal policy would affect that state’s standing in the market, and it seems equally safe to assume that different combinations of the various forms of debt limitation would lead to varying effects in the market from state to state. However, the specific effects arising from the various constitutional provisions have proven to be difficult to measure. This research explores the substance of these constitutional debt limitations, the history of academic research attempting to measure the effects of these limitations, and the fruitfulness or futility of these academic attempts

Lighting and Optical Tools for Image Forensics

We present new forensic tools that are capable of detecting traces of tampering in digital images without the use of watermarks or specialized hardware. These tools operate under the assumption that images contain natural properties from a variety of sources, including the world, the lens, and the sensor. These properties may be disturbed by digital tampering and by measuring them we can expose the forgery. In this context, we present the following forensic tools: (1) illuminant direction, (2) specularity, (3) lighting environment, and (4) chromatic aberration. The common theme of these tools is that they exploit lighting or optical properties of images. Although each tool is not applicable to every image, they add to a growing set of image forensic tools that together will complicate the process of making a convincing forgery

Role of the Digestive Gland in Ink Production in Four Species of Sea Hares: An Ultrastructural Comparison

The ultrastructure of the digestive gland of several sea hare species that produce different colored ink (Aplysia californica produces purple ink, A. juliana white ink, A. parvula both white and purple ink, while Dolabrifera dolabrifera produces no ink at all) was compared to determine the digestive gland’s role in the diet-derived ink production process. Rhodoplast digestive cells and their digestive vacuoles, the site of digestion of red algal chloroplast (i.e., rhodoplast) in A. californica, were present and had a similar ultrastructure in all four species. Rhodoplast digestive cell vacuoles either contained a whole rhodoplast or fragments of one or were empty. These results suggest that the inability to produce colored ink in some sea hare species is not due to either an absence of appropriate digestive machinery, that is, rhodoplast digestive cells, or an apparent failure of rhodoplast digestive cells to function. These results also propose that the digestive gland structure described herein occurred early in sea hare evolution, at least in the common ancestor to the genera Aplysia and Dolabrifera. Our data, however, do not support the hypothesis that the loss of purple inking is a synapomorphy of the white-ink-producing subgenus Aplysia