Real Property, Real Problems: Expanding Alaska\u27s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act

Alaska’s Unfair and Deceptive Acts and Practices (UDAP) statute was designed to provide broad, robust protections for everyday Alaskan consumers. Astonishingly, Alaska is one of only three states that does not protect Alaskans under its UDAP statute when they fall victim to fraudulent schemes involving real property. The Alaska Supreme Court has consistently upheld this interpretation of the UDAP statute by relying on precedent from over thirty years ago. At the same time, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everyday Alaskans are more economically vulnerable than ever before, with the atmosphere being ripe for proliferation of fraudulent real property schemes. This Note argues that the court has misapplied precedent and must therefore reevaluate the statute’s application to real property transactions, especially because the statute has been amended and strengthened since the court’s original rulings. If it does not, because of the sheer importance of housing in everyday life, a significant portion of the population could face devastating consequences not only to their economic wellbeing but also to their safety, security, and livelihood

Reclaiming White Privilege: The Crisis of White Masculinity in Post-World War II American Literature

This thesis examines the ways in which post-World War II American literature written by white men responded to the Civil Rights and Feminist movements that called for equality during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the United States. I argue that these movements led to a crisis of white male identity, as white men saw their privileged position within American society being questioned. I chart this crisis of white masculinity in the fiction of three white male American novelists: John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Contrary to what current scholarship on these authors has proposed, I suggest that their novels, while purportedly espousing the ideals of the above movements, in truth defend and reinscribe white masculinity through a variety of ways. In Chapter 1, I argue that Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971), Roth’s American Pastoral (1997) and Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) ostensibly show support for the African American cause but upon closer inspection re-establish white privilege and restore the destabilised societal position of white Americans in the context of Civil Rights by merging white identity with that of African Americans. In Chapter 2, focusing on Updike’s Rabbit Redux, Bellow’s Herzog (1964), and Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater (1995), I argue that these novels caricature second-wave feminism as a way of reinstating the social hierarchies that placed men at the top of American society. In Chapter 3, I propose that Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Roth’s American Pastoral, and Bellow’s Herzog turn to religious morality in order to revitalise the privileged position of white masculinity. Reading these novels in this manner, I show how they associate white masculinity with moral goodness in order to pull it out of its postwar crisis

Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2017: Greenhouse gas emissions and energy balances: Supplementary material to "Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2017: How climate policies improve air quality"

This document complements the Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2017 Report. It provides the detailed GHG and energy balances for the Reference, INDC and B2C scenarios described in the main report. The results displayed in this report have been produced with the global energy & GHG model POLES-JRC.JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transpor

Agonist-dependent Single Channel Current and Gating in α4β2δ and α1β2γ2S GABAA Receptors

The family of γ-aminobutyric acid type A receptors (GABAARs) mediates two types of inhibition in the mammalian brain. Phasic inhibition is mediated by synaptic GABAARs that are mainly comprised of α1, β2, and γ2 subunits, whereas tonic inhibition is mediated by extrasynaptic GABAARs comprised of α4/6, β2, and δ subunits. We investigated the activation properties of recombinant α4β2δ and α1β2γ2S GABAARs in response to GABA and 4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazolo[5,4-c]pyridin-3(2H)-one (THIP) using electrophysiological recordings from outside-out membrane patches. Rapid agonist application experiments indicated that THIP produced faster opening rates at α4β2δ GABAARs (β ∼1600 s−1) than at α1β2γ2S GABAARs (β ∼ 460 s−1), whereas GABA activated α1β2γ2S GABAARs more rapidly (β ∼1800 s−1) than α4β2δ GABAARs (β < 440 s−1). Single channel recordings of α1β2γ2S and α4β2δ GABAARs showed that both channels open to a main conductance state of ∼25 pS at −70 mV when activated by GABA and low concentrations of THIP, whereas saturating concentrations of THIP elicited ∼36 pS openings at both channels. Saturating concentrations of GABA elicited brief (<10 ms) openings with low intraburst open probability (PO ∼ 0.3) at α4β2δ GABAARs and at least two “modes” of single channel bursting activity, lasting ∼100 ms at α1β2γ2S GABAARs. The most prevalent bursting mode had a PO of ∼0.7 and was described by a reaction scheme with three open and three shut states, whereas the “high” PO mode (∼0.9) was characterized by two shut and three open states. Single channel activity elicited by THIP in α4β2δ and α1β2γ2S GABAARs occurred as a single population of bursts (PO ∼0.4–0.5) of moderate duration (∼33 ms) that could be described by schemes containing two shut and two open states for both GABAARs. Our data identify kinetic properties that are receptor-subtype specific and others that are agonist specific, including unitary conductance

Combining software cache partitioning and loop tiling for effective shared cache management

One of the biggest challenges in multicore platforms is shared cache management, especially for data dominant applications. Two commonly used approaches for increasing shared cache utilization are cache partitioning and loop tiling. However, state-of-the-art compilers lack of efficient cache partitioning and loop tiling methods for two reasons. First, cache partitioning and loop tiling are strongly coupled together, thus addressing them separately is simply not effective. Second, cache partitioning and loop tiling must be tailored to the target shared cache architecture details and the memory characteristics of the co-running workloads. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a methodology provides i) a theoretical foundation in the above mentioned cache management mechanisms and ii) a unified framework to orchestrate these two mechanisms in tandem (not separately). Our approach manages to lower the number of main memory accesses by an order of magnitude keeping at the same time the number of arithmetic/addressing instructions in a minimal level. We motivate this work by showcasing that cache partitioning, loop tiling, data array layouts, shared cache architecture details (i.e., cache size and associativity) and the memory reuse patterns of the executing tasks must be addressed together as one problem, when a (near)- optimal solution is requested. To this end, we present a search space exploration analysis where our proposal is able to offer a vast deduction in the required search space

FUZZY BINARY PATTERNS FOR UNCERTAINTY-AWARE TEXTURE REPRESENTATION

The Local Binary Pattern (LBP) representation of textures has been proved useful for a wide range of pattern recognition applications, including texture segmentation, face detection, and biomedical image analysis. The interest of the research community in the LBP texture representation gave rise to plenty of LBP and other binary pattern (BP)-based variations. However, noise sensitivity is still a major concern to their applicability on the analysis of real world images. To cope with this problem we propose a generic, uncertainty-aware methodology for the derivation of Fuzzy BP (FBP) texture models. The proposed methodology assumes that a local neighbourhood can be partially characterized by more than one binary patterns due to noise-originated uncertainty in the pixel values. The texture discrimination capability of four representative FBP-based approaches has been evaluated on the basis of comprehensive classification experiments on three reference datasets of natural textures under various types and levels of additive noise. The results reveal that the FBP-based approaches lead to consistent improvement in texture classification as compared with the original BP-based approaches for various degrees of uncertainty. This improved performance is also validated by illustrative unsupervised segmentation experiments on natural scenes

Cache partitioning + loop tiling: A methodology for effective shared cache management

In this paper, we present a new methodology that provides i) a theoretical analysis of the two most commonly used approaches for effective shared cache management (i.e., cache partitioning and loop tiling) and ii) a unified framework to fine tuning those two mechanisms in tandem (not separately). Our approach manages to lower the number of main memory accesses by one order of magnitude keeping at the same time the number of arithmetical/addressing instructions in a minimal level. We also present a search space exploration analysis where our proposal is able to offer a vast deduction in the required search space