Global Cyber Intermediary Liability: A Legal & Cultural Strategy

This Article fills the gap in the debate on fighting cybercrime. It considers the role of intermediaries and the legal and cultural strategies that countries may adopt. Part II.A of this Article examines the critical role of intermediaries in cybercrime. It shows that the intermediaries’ active participation by facilitating the transmission of cybercrime traffic removes a significant barrier for individual perpetrators. Part II.B offers a brief overview of legal efforts to combat cybercrime, and examines the legal liability of intermediaries in both the civil and criminal context and in varying legal regimes with an emphasis on ISPs. Aside from some level of injunctive relief, intermediaries operate in a largely unregulated environment. Part III looks at what we can learn from other countries. The cleanest intermediary country, Finland, and the worst country, Lithuania, were selected in order to explore the causes for the differences between country performances. The section examines the remarkable distinctions between national cultures to explain differences in national cybercrime rates. Part III.A of this Article argues that the criminal code laws do not account for the difference in host and ISP performances between Finland and Lithuania. There are few differences in the codified laws pertaining to cybercrime between these countries. Instead, it is Finland’s cultural and business environments that appear to drive its cybercrime ranking. Part IV suggests reforms to shift a country’s culture to make it less prone to corruption. However, changing a culture takes time so Part IV also proposes a private law scheme in which intermediaries are unable to wave the “flag of immunity,” as they do now. The guiding philosophy for this proposal is that harmed parties should be permitted to recover damages directly from “bad” intermediaries

Introducing Asymmetric Separability in the FAST Multistage Demand System

This paper determines the set of parametric restrictions required to maintain flexibility under asymmetric weak separability for the flexible and separable translog (FAST) multistage demand system. Because there is not a unique set of parametric restrictions that ensures separability and the values of the unconditional price and expenditure elasticities depend on the parametric restrictions imposed, the appropriateness of a chosen set of parametric restrictions should be tested empirically. An empirical example that illustrates how the choice of parametric restrictions affects the estimation results and the functional form of the price and expenditure elasticities is provided.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Anaerobic Digestion of Wastewater: Effects of Inoculants and Nutrient Management on Biomethane Production and Treatment

Due to population expiation and the increased awareness of the impact on the environment by wastewater treatment, improved wastewater treatment systems are needed to treat municipal and agricultural wastewater. Treating wastewater with oxygen decreases carbon compounds at the expense of energy to move carbon and oxygen to be in contact with each other. Anaerobic digestion of wastewater can reduce the cost by utilizing microbes to treat high amounts of carbon in wastewater without the need for extensive oxygen requirement. With a proper balance of nutrients, microbes also produce methane, a renewable energy source. It has been suggested that microalgae be utilized to help balance the nitrogen content of wastewater for treatment by microbes. One challenge with the use of algae is the initial breakdown of algae cells. Using a digester with microorganism that can produce methane and decompose algae could enhance production of methane from the digestion of algae. The combination of wastewater, which is high in carbon content relative to nitrogen, with algae, which is high in nitrogen, could provide the balance needed for the microbes to treat wastewater and provide methane. A biomethane potential test was used to compare the ability of two microbe communities, facultative lagoon sediment and anaerobic digester sludge to digest algae. Each microbe community treated dairy, swine, municipal, and petrochemical wastewater augmented with algae and acetate. The ability to degrade augmented wastewater and produce methane was determined by measuring the volume and composition of biogas produced over time. Both treatments were successful in production of methane. Facultative lagoon sediment showed more methane produced per carbon dioxide than anaerobic digester sludge

Visual assessment of object color chroma and colorfulness

A series of visual experiments were designed to determine whether naive observers typically evaluate chroma or colorfulness when judging color appearance. A total of 7 observers were asked to determine a color appearance match between Munsell samples under the same illuminant (C) at different levels of illuminance. Color appearance matches were determined for 12 Munsell samples, under five reference and matching scene illuminance conditions, for four experimental techniques. The four experimental techniques were haploscopic, simultaneous inspection, successive inspection, and short-term memory matching. Results suggested that a chroma match was most important when observers were evaluating the color appearance of two scenes at different levels of illuminance. Results were also compared to predictions of two color appearance models. While similar trends were apparent between the experimental results and the two model\u27s predictions, only the Hunt model\u27s chroma term satisfactorily predicted experimental observations

Full Court Press: How Mississippi Newspapers Helped Keep State College Basketball Segregated, 1955-1973

During the civil rights era, Mississippi was cloaked in the hateful embrace of the Closed Society, historian James Silver’s description of the white caste systems that used State’s Rights to enforce segregation and promote the subservient treatment of blacks. Surprisingly, challenges from Mississippi’s college basketball courts brought into question the validity of the Closed Society and its unwritten law, a gentleman’s agreement that prevented college teams in the Magnolia State from playing against integrated foes. Led by Mississippi State University’s (MSU) basketball team, which won four Southeastern Conference championships in a five-year span, the newspapers in Mississippi often debated the legitimacy of MSU’s claims to a trip to the integrated NCAA national championship tournament with some reporters, namely Jimmy Ward of the Jackson Daily News, damning the Starkville-five for their attempted violation of the state’s white-dominated social structure. Others, such as Jimmie McDowell of the Jackson State Times, emerged from the sports desk as a bold and progressive voice in the annals of Mississippi journalism. By the time MSU added its first black basketball players in 1971, the Closed Society had loosened its grip on Mississippi’s newspapers as evident in the absence of race-based descriptions and identifications of these brave athletes. This dissertation examines the role Mississippi’s journalists played, from 1955 through 1973, in maintaining segregated college basketball in the state and its reaction to the integration of basketball teams at University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Mississippi, and Mississippi State University. In total, the press either condemned any efforts to introduce social equality in Mississippi’s athletic avenues, remained silent, or supported such efforts in the name of national basketball dominance

Poems on the Effects of 21\u3csup\u3est\u3c/sup\u3e Century Populism

Three poems exploring the toxic effects that today\u27s populism is having on families, society, and the environment. The selection includes “How We Got Here,” “Beyond the Ticket Booth,” and “The End of Conversation.

Adolescent Obesity in the United States: Facts for Policymakers

Adolescent obesity in the United States has many important implications for both the health and well-being of the individual and society. Specific negative impacts of obesity on health include increased susceptibility to a host of diseases, chronic health disorders, psychological disorders, and premature death, which in turn add billions of dollars in health care costs each year. Excess medical costs due to overweight adolescents are estimated at more than $14 billion per year. Furthermore, adolescent obesity affects our nation's ability to protect itself; more than a quarter of 17- to 24-year-olds are not fit to enroll in the military due to their weight. Adolescence is a crucial period for establishing healthy behaviors. Many of the habits formed during this developmental stage will last well into adulthood. Although obesity is a complex problem not yet fully understood by researchers, by addressing the known factors that contribute to obesity in adolescence, policymakers can help ensure a healthy and productive adulthood for our nation's youth. Obesity and poor nutrition — combined with mental health disorders and emotional problems, violence and unintentional injury, substance use, and reproductive health problems — form part of a complex web of potential challenges to adolescents' healthy emotional and physical development

Regional gray matter volumetric changes in autism associated with social and repetitive behavior symptoms.

BackgroundAlthough differences in brain anatomy in autism have been difficult to replicate using manual tracing methods, automated whole brain analyses have begun to find consistent differences in regions of the brain associated with the social cognitive processes that are often impaired in autism. We attempted to replicate these whole brain studies and to correlate regional volume changes with several autism symptom measures.MethodsWe performed MRI scans on 24 individuals diagnosed with DSM-IV autistic disorder and compared those to scans from 23 healthy comparison subjects matched on age. All participants were male. Whole brain, voxel-wise analyses of regional gray matter volume were conducted using voxel-based morphometry (VBM).ResultsControlling for age and total gray matter volume, the volumes of the medial frontal gyri, left pre-central gyrus, right post-central gyrus, right fusiform gyrus, caudate nuclei and the left hippocampus were larger in the autism group relative to controls. Regions exhibiting smaller volumes in the autism group were observed exclusively in the cerebellum. Significant partial correlations were found between the volumes of the caudate nuclei, multiple frontal and temporal regions, the cerebellum and a measure of repetitive behaviors, controlling for total gray matter volume. Social and communication deficits in autism were also associated with caudate, cerebellar, and precuneus volumes, as well as with frontal and temporal lobe regional volumes.ConclusionGray matter enlargement was observed in areas that have been functionally identified as important in social-cognitive processes, such as the medial frontal gyri, sensorimotor cortex and middle temporal gyrus. Additionally, we have shown that VBM is sensitive to associations between social and repetitive behaviors and regional brain volumes in autism