3,702 research outputs found
Saving Disgorgement from Itself: SEC Enforcement After Kokesh v. SEC
Disgorgement is under threat. In Kokesh v. SEC , the Supreme Court held that disgorgement—a routine remedy that allows the SEC to recoup ill-gotten gains from financial wrongdoers—is subject to a 5-year statute of limitations because it functions as a “penalty.” This ruling threatens to upend the traditional conception of disgorgement as an ancillary remedy granted by the court’s equity power, because there are no penalties at equity. With the possibility that Kokesh’s penalty reasoning could be adopted beyond the statute of limitations context, the future of disgorgement in federal court is in doubt.
This Note proposes a way forward that allows for disgorgement’s continued viability. The SEC should moderate its use of disgorgement for three reasons: because of a trend of suspicion toward strong government enforcement power by the Supreme Court, because it has been improperly used punitively, and because the rise of other statutory schemes has displaced disgorgement’s original justification. At the same time, disgorgement should be saved because of the uncertain future of administrative disgorgement proceedings, the intuitive notion of recovering money from wrongdoers, and the much-needed ability to compensate victims. To save disgorgement, the SEC should limit its use only to restoring the status quo of injured investors, thereby ensuring a remedial—not penal—purpose
Unconscious Bias in United States Marine Corps Leadership Doctrine: Examining Microaggressions Through Document Analysis
This dissertation employed a document analysis format to examine Marine Corps leadership education doctrine for microaggressions. The United States Marine Corps (Marine Corps or USMC) is the military service with the least diverse officer cadre in terms of sex, gender identity, and race. The study results show a pattern of repeating unconscious bias-related content within the Marine Corps’ documents. Such patterns can negatively affect minority members in terms of their health, acceptance, and performance within the organization. The results also document an overriding bias-culture which puts Marine Corps leadership in a dilemma of trying to encourage conformity to traditional organizational cultural identity while embracing a new future of a more diverse and flexible workforce. This “Conformity/Diversity Conflict Dilemma (CDCD)” is likely to also exist in other organizational contexts.
CDCD, Macro Context: The Marine Corps’ warfighting philosophy endorses Maneuver Warfare which relies upon a decentralized command structure with subordinates free to act under guidance given by a Commander’s Intent mission statement. Subordinates require implicit understanding of the commander’s intent statement to ensure unity of effort, but because the Marine Corps is also now encouraging diversity of thought and the recruiting and retaining of a more diverse workforce, the likelihood that implicit understanding of a commander’s intent is achievable decreases under the current leadership paradigm.
CDCD, Micro Findings: Five of twelve microaggression-related themes appear more often in the publications: colorblindness racism, denial of individual bias, bias against non-male gender and non-traditional gender expression, sustaining inequality with a myth of meritocracy, and pathologizing dominant historical white male cultural values in the name of organizational harmony. The themes are present in both words and by omission when authors deny diversity by using a one-size-fits-all approach to culture-building.
Recommendations: The USMC should update publications to reflect a way of writing Commander’s Intent and using decentralized leadership which harnesses diversity of thought, communications styles, and ways of cultural knowledge rather than encouraging conformity to a singular mindset to achieve success. The publications should remove biased language including bias by omission or negation. Education efforts focused on eliminating unconscious bias and microaggressions must continue and become normalized
PERCEPTION OF ACCENTS AND DIALECTS IN ADULTS AND INFANTS
This thesis has been undertaken with the purpose of investigating how adult speech
processing systems are affected by. and how they cope with, the presence of different
regional and foreign accents in speech, and to investigate the developmental origins of
adult accent perception capabilities.
Experiments 1 to 4 were designed to investigate the long term effects of exposure to
different accents, and whether short term adaptation to an accent was possible, using
a lexical decision task. The results demonstrated an effect of accent familiarity but no
short term adaptation was evident. Experiments 5 to 7 investigated the short term
effects of accents by looking at the length of activation of accent-related information in
working memory by using a cross-modal matching task. The results found that
selective accent related effects were reduced after a 1500 millisecond delay.
Experiments 8 to 11 investigated infants' discrimination abilities for regional and
foreign accents using a preferential looking habituation method, and found infants at 5
and 7 months could discriminate their own accent from another, unfamiliar regional
accent, but could not discriminate two unfamiliar regional accents at 5 months or a
foreign accent from their own at 7 months. Experiments 12 and 13 investigated how
accents affected infants' word segmentation abilities with continuous speech at 10
months, and found that segmentation was impaired in the presence of regional and
foreign accents.
Using these results, the Accent Training Model (ATP) is proposed, which attempts to
explain how accent related indexical information is processed in the speech processing
system. The findings of the infant studies further our understanding of the effect of
indexicat variation in early speech perception
Atomic absorption spectrometry and its application in geochemistry
Includes bibliographical references.The atomic absorption method of analysis is reviewed. The theory describing the various phenomena such as atomic population, spectral line shapes, factors influencing absorption, analytical graph curvature, etc.are deduced. The practical aspects of atomic absorption are discussed with respect to: Instrumentation: flame studies and an attempt to develop "a universal" flame; contamination; sources of errors, etc. The method is applied to the analysis of silicate materials. Problems of sample dissolution and standards preparation are discussed. Applications have been made on the determination of the alkali metals (including lithium isotope determination), magnesium and calcium, copper, zinc, iron, manganese, molybdenum and aluminium. Although certain geochemical aspects of these elements are discussed, the analytical problems are stressed. The interference effects by other elements were tested and techniques developed to enable interferences to be overcome. It is concluded that atomic absorption spectrometry has significant uses for the geochemist, especially for the estimation of elements of the trace and minor concentration levels
Practical Hidden Voice Attacks against Speech and Speaker Recognition Systems
Voice Processing Systems (VPSes), now widely deployed, have been made
significantly more accurate through the application of recent advances in
machine learning. However, adversarial machine learning has similarly advanced
and has been used to demonstrate that VPSes are vulnerable to the injection of
hidden commands - audio obscured by noise that is correctly recognized by a VPS
but not by human beings. Such attacks, though, are often highly dependent on
white-box knowledge of a specific machine learning model and limited to
specific microphones and speakers, making their use across different acoustic
hardware platforms (and thus their practicality) limited. In this paper, we
break these dependencies and make hidden command attacks more practical through
model-agnostic (blackbox) attacks, which exploit knowledge of the signal
processing algorithms commonly used by VPSes to generate the data fed into
machine learning systems. Specifically, we exploit the fact that multiple
source audio samples have similar feature vectors when transformed by acoustic
feature extraction algorithms (e.g., FFTs). We develop four classes of
perturbations that create unintelligible audio and test them against 12 machine
learning models, including 7 proprietary models (e.g., Google Speech API, Bing
Speech API, IBM Speech API, Azure Speaker API, etc), and demonstrate successful
attacks against all targets. Moreover, we successfully use our maliciously
generated audio samples in multiple hardware configurations, demonstrating
effectiveness across both models and real systems. In so doing, we demonstrate
that domain-specific knowledge of audio signal processing represents a
practical means of generating successful hidden voice command attacks
Framing and Cultivating the Story of Crime: The Effects of Media Use, Victimization, and Social Networks on Attitudes About Crime
The current study extended prior research by considering the effects of media, victimization, and network experiences on attitudes about crime and justice, drawing on the problem frame, cultivation, real-word, and interpersonal diffusion theses. Data were from a survey of Nebraska adults (n = 550) who were asked about their social networks; beliefs about media reliability; use of newspaper and news on TV, radio, and the Internet; and exposure to violence on TV, movies, and the Internet. Results indicated that viewing TV violence predicted worry and anger about crime. Believing the media are a reliable source of information about crime predicted more anger and more support for the justice system. Personal and network members’ victimization was also linked to attitudes. Other network contacts, including knowing police or correctional officers or knowing someone who had been arrested or incarcerated, had limited effects. The results support the problem frame and cultivation theses in that media framing and media consumption influence attitudes about crime, as do certain real-world experiences
Quantitative spectroscopy of late O-type main-sequence stars with a hybrid non-LTE method
Context. Late O-type stars at luminosities show
weak winds with mass-loss rates lower than 10 yr. This
implies that their photospheric layers are not strongly affected by the stellar
wind. Aims. A hybrid non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE) approach is
tested for analyses of late O-type stars. A sample of 20 mostly sharp-lined
Galactic O stars of spectral types O8 to O9.7 and luminosity classes V and IV,
previously studied in the literature using full non-LTE model atmospheres, is
investigated. Methods. Hydrostatic plane-parallel atmospheric structures and
synthetic spectra computed with Kurucz's Atlas12 code together with non-LTE
line-formation codes Detail and Surface, which account for the effects of
turbulent pressure on the atmosphere, were employed. High-resolution spectra
were analysed to derive atmospheric parameters and elemental abundances.
Fundamental stellar parameters were derived by considering stellar evolution
tracks and Gaia EDR3 parallaxes. Interstellar reddening was characterised by
fitting spectral energy distributions from the UV to the mid-IR. Results. A
high precision and accuracy is achieved for all derived parameters for 16
sample stars. Turbulent pressure effects turn out have significant effects.
Effective temperatures are determined to 1-3% uncertainty levels, surface
gravities to 0.05 to 0.10 dex, masses to better than 8%, radii to better than
10%, and luminosities to better than 20% uncertainty typically. Abundances for
C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Al, Si are derived with uncertainties of 0.05 to 0.10 dex and
for helium within 0.03 to 0.05 dex (1 standard deviations) in general.
Distances to the Lac OB1b association and to the open clusters NGC 2244, IC
1805, NGC 457, and IC 1396 are determined as a byproduct.Comment: 31 pages, 23 figures, Accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Astrophysic
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