Top 10 Law School Home Pages of 2012

For a fourth consecutive year, every website home page of every ABA-accredited law school is evaluated and ranked based on objective criteria. The goal is to identify well-executed sites adopting best practices. For the 2012 report, twenty-six elements are evaluated across these three categories: Design Patterns and Metadata, Accessibility and Validation, & Marketing and Communications. For 2012, there are four new elements, two prior elements have been combined, and one element was dropped. For 2012, forty-six schools now use the HTML5 doctype, which is up from thirteen in 2011 and just one in 2010. Eighteen schools achieve perfect scores in an adjusted web accessibility evaluation, which is a slight increase over previous years. One of the new elements awards points for use of Responsive Web Design practices, which is a page layout method that shifts the order and number of elements on a page, based on the screen size displaying the content. Our survey discovered fourteen home pages using responsive web design. As has been the case since this annual study launched in 2009, there is still no objective way to account for good taste. For interpreting these results, please decide for yourself whether any home page is greater or less than the sum of its evaluated elements

Development of a Decision Support System for Post Mining Land Use on Abandoned Surface Coal Mines in Appalachia

Decision support systems are diverse and have been used to solve multiple problems ranging from the complex to the simple. With the complexity of environmental decisions today, these systems provide a logic based approach to evaluating and choosing environmental solutions. Abandoned mining lands (AML) are an issue for the environment in the Appalachian region. Given this a decision support system was designed using previously created frameworks and indices from other systems created. The system is comprised of two main sections, selecting the ideal post-mining land-use (PMLU), and maximizing the potential of land to be reclaimed under budgetary constraints. This system incorporates stakeholders, and takes into account the regulations governing reclamation of AML in Appalachia. The system could potentially be adjusted and used in other land use decision situations

Comment: The Constitutionality of Medical Malpractice Mediation Panels: A Maryland Perspective

The recent rapid rise in medical malpractice insurance rates has engendered a proliferation of state activity designed to cope with the problem. This Comment analyzes the Constitutional challenges made to the medical malpractice mediation panels adopted by various state legislatures. The author concludes, in light of the decision in Attorney General v. Johnson upholding the somewhat unique Maryland Health Care Malpractice Claims Act, that it is likely that most such plans could withstand Constitutional attack

Mitigating Reversing Vulnerabilities in .NET Applications Using Virtualized Software Protection

Protecting intellectual property contained in application source code and preventing tampering with application binaries are both major concerns for software developers. Simply by possessing an application binary, any user is able to attempt to reverse engineer valuable information or produce unanticipated execution results through tampering. As reverse engineering tools become more prevalent, and as the knowledge required to effectively use those tools decreases, applications come under increased attack from malicious users. Emerging development tools such as Microsoft\u27s .NET Application Framework allow diverse source code composed of multiple programming languages to be integrated into a single application binary, but the potential for theft of intellectual property increases due to the metadata-rich construction of compiled .NET binaries. Microsoft\u27s new Software Licensing and Protection Services (SLPS) application is designed to mitigate trivial reversing of .NET applications through the use of virtualization. This research investigates the viability of the SLPS software protection utility Code Protector as a means of mitigating the inherent vulnerabilities of .NET applications. The results of the research show that Code Protector does indeed protect compiled .NET applications from reversing attempts using commonly-available tools. While the performance of protected applications can suffer if the protections are applied to sections of the code that are used repeatedly, it is clear that low-use .NET application code can be protected by Code Protector with little performance impact

Determining DNA Damage Prevention Mechanisms for Multifunctional Selenium and Sulfur Antioxidants and the DNA-Damaging Capabilities of Clotrimadozle and Pseudoephedrine-Derived Metal Complexes

DNA damage by reactive oxygen species (ROS) is a cause of many chronic diseases. This work examines the ability of sulfur and selenium antioxidants to prevent oxidative DNA damage and the mechanisms for this activity. Although iron- and copper-generated hydroxyl radical are primary causes of damage under oxidative stress conditions, studies typically focus on ROS scavenging rather than antioxidant-metal binding as a mechanism for sulfur and selenium antioxidant behavior. Mass spectrometry studies of sulfur and selenoamino acids (Chapter 2) show that most form CuI and FeII complexes, regardless of their metal-mediated DNA damage prevention abilities. Because their electrochemical properties do not correlate to antioxidant activity, metal binding rather than ROS scavenging is the major mechanism for these sulfur and selenium antioxidants. DNA damage assays with N,N’-dimethylimazole thione (dmit) and selone (dmise) determined that both prevent CuI-mediated DNA damage (IC50 = 1550 and ~240 µM, respectively; Chapter 3). Surprisingly, dmit and dmise more effectively inhibit FeII-mediated DNA damage (IC50 = 89.1 and 3.2 µM, respectively), an ability not previously observed for this class of antioxidants. Dmise and dmit coordinate CuI and FeII and prevent DNA damage by peroxynitrite (IC50 = 171.4 and 155.2, respectively). Studies with similar thiones, selones, and their derivatives (Chapter 4) showed that these compounds are also multifunctional antioxidants, preventing DNA damage by CuI (IC50= 22-1023 µM), FeII (IC50 = 2.3-1000 µM) and peroxynitrite (IC50 = 57.4-594 µM). Many of these compounds readily undergo oxidation and reduction, and mass spectrometry studies show CuI or FeII coordination, regardless of antioxidant activity. These are the first sulfur and selenium compounds with multifunctional antioxidant activity, and the structure-activity relationships established in this work will allow development of more potent antioxidants for disease treatment and prevention. Studies in Chapter 5 focus on how metal binding alters drug properties. Clotrimazole-metal complexes kill cancer cells, yet their cytotoxic mechanisms are not understood. Similarly, studies have not examined the effects of metal coordination on the biological properties of pseudoephedrine-derived compounds. DNA damage studies with copper complexes of both compounds found that they significantly damage DNA (EC50 = 10.5-21.7 µM), likely by copper-mediated ROS generation

CPAs and Big 4 office audit quality

Both accounting firms and regulators recognize the importance of human capital in the audit function, yet we know little about whether and how the level of professionally qual-ified human capital varies across offices of an audit firm and whether it is associated with audit quality. In this paper, we examine the association between office professionally qualified human capital and audit quality. Using hand-collected data on Big 4 audit firm office CPA levels from 30 U.S. cities, we find that offices with relatively more professionally qual-ified human capital deliver higher quality audits, with this benefit being more pronounced for audits performed during busy season than for non-busy season audits. The results underscore the importance of the availability of professionally qualified human capital in an audit office to the office’s audit quality. Our finding of CPA levels being an office-level audit quality indicator will potentially help the PCAOB in their ongoing Audit Quality Indicator (AQI) project, whose goal is to assist audit firms, clients, and investors in measur-ing audit quality. Furthermore, the results lend credibility toward the CPA designation, which helps justify the AICPA’s, NASBA’s, and state Accountancy Boards’ regulatory roles of admitting and licensing qualified candidates

Comparing American soccer dialogues: social media commentary Surrounding the 2014 US men’s and 2015 US women’s World Cup teams

Mega sporting events such as the World Cup have been found to stimulate categorization of in-groups and out-groups among fans. While self-categorization correlates with gender, the sport of soccer also facilitates nationalistic categorization. The World Cup features nation vs. nation competition while making gender a non-variable as the men and women compete in separate tournaments in separate years. This study examined 33,529 tweets illustrating social media match commentary involving US teams and opponents on Twitter during the 2014 and 2015 World Cups. Results revealed US teams were more likely to be described in regard to attributions of success and failure, while opposition teams were more likely to receive personal and physical attributions. Conversely, no differences were found between US Men’s and Women’s teams in regard to characterizations of success and failure, but revealed the Women’s team was more likely to receive personal and physical characterizations