The Domestic Violence Component of the New York Task Force Report on Women in the Courts: An Evaluation and Assessment of New York City Courts

This piece contains the findings of a survey conducted to evaluate the impact of the New York Task Force On Women in the Court\u27s Report in the area of domestic violence and of the progress that has taken place since the Report\u27s publication. The authors hope to provide insight not only into the next steps that should be taken in New York City, but also into the most effective methods of implementing change to combat bias against women in the courtroom. The authors conclude that although progress has been made in the area of combating bias against women in the courtroom, especially in domestic violence cases, the original issues of bias identified by the Task Force are still very prevalent and must be attacked with educational programs for court employees, judges, practitioners and police

Managers’ Incentives to Manipulate Earnings in Management Buyout Contests: An Examination of How Corporate Governance and Market Mechanisms Mitigate Earnings Management

In an MBO contest, managers offer to buy the firm from public shareholders at a premium to the current market price and thus have incentives to buy the firm “cheap.” Prior studies have found evidence that managers, on average, manipulate earnings downward prior to an MBO offer in an attempt to convince shareholders that their offer is fair. We extend this finding by attempting to explain the substantial cross sectional variation in the degree of manipulation across firms reported in these earlier studies. We find that boards with more independent directors and higher levels of incentive based compensation for the CEO act to discourage such manipulation. Additionally, our results show that some shareholders, minority and preexisting large outside blockholders, appear to be misled by the manipulation. However, new blockholders that acquire large shareholdings in the year before the offer are not. We also discover that managers are more likely to revise their bid upwards when the manipulation is most severe and that these new blockholders put pressure on managers to make these revisions. Finally, we investigate whether the manipulation has an impact on the final buyout contest outcome. We find that downward manipulation does not prevent managers from retaining control of the firm; however, they pay a higher premium

Economic Legitimation in a New Era: Public Attitudes to State Ownership and Market Regulation in China

Autocrats typically seek public support on the basis of economic growth-promotion and redistribution policies, and China is no exception. As important as these factors are for authoritarian resilience, we argue that economic legitimation is a more complex phenomenon than has previously been acknowledged. Beyond improvements in material well-being, citizens form judgements about the state's effectiveness in carrying out a variety of economic roles beyond growth promotion and they also care about the fairness of these market interventions. In this study, we use original survey data collected in late 2015 and early 2016 to evaluate Chinese citizens’ perceptions of two economic roles of the state that have been hotly debated in recent years: state ownership and market regulation. We find that while citizens view the ideas of state ownership and interventionist regulation in a generally positive light, suggesting a broad level of agreement in Chinese society about what economic functions the state ought to perform, perceptions of how the state actually carries out these roles are more mixed. Our results show that the urban young are especially inclined to critical evaluations, raising the question of how the Chinese Communist Party's legitimation strategy will fare under conditions of inter-generational value change.Peer Reviewe

Investigating the Heat Release from a Single-Cylinder Diesel Engine

This project develops a dynamic measuring processes and filtering technique to acquire accurate engine thermodynamic data using LabVIEW. A single-cylinder Kohler diesel engine (model KD440) is instrumented with an in-cylinder pressure monitoring transducer to obtain cylinder pressure and volume data as a function of crank angle position. From this data, several calculations will be made using thermal analysis to understand the engine\u27s performance. An additional objective of the project is to increase the efficiency of the engine\u27s air intake system by modifying the current configuration. We show that the monitoring software accurately measures real-time engine efficiency and combustion dynamics enabling future fuel and combustion research at USM

Exploring Rogeting: Implications for academic integrity

Poor paraphrasing can be a sign of underdeveloped writing skills that can lead to plagiarism. One example of poor paraphrasing is Rogeting, which is the substitution of words with their synonyms using Roget’s thesaurus or other digital synonym providers. In this position paper, we discuss Rogeting as a form of poor paraphrasing that may lead to academic integrity breaches, such as plagiarism. We discuss methods of identifying Rogeted text, concluding with practical recommendations for educators about how to better support student writers so they can avoid Rogeting in favour of developing their writing skills

Writers’ Guide for Prospective Contributors to Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity

In this article we present resources and ideas for prospective writers of Canadian Perspectives on Academic Integrity. The purpose of this article is to generate ideas and build confidence among prospective contributors. Our intention is to provide support for those who have wisdom and insights to share, but who may be inexperienced or lack confidence with their professional writing skills

Not at the table but stuck paying the bill: perceptions of injustice in China’s Xin’anjiang eco-compensation program

A growing body of research highlights the decisive role that justice claims play in creating sustainable payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs. Employing Sikor et al.’s approach to the study of justice claims in ecosystem governance along three dimensions—distribution, procedure and recognition—we study the negotiation process behind China’s flagship interprovincial PES agreement: the Xin’anjiang River eco-compensation agreement between Huangshan (Anhui province) and Hangzhou (Zhejiang province) prefectures. We find that divergent claims between stakeholders on matters of distributive and procedural justice undercut one party’s commitment to the agreement. Local officials in the upstream locality (Huangshan) see themselves as having been disadvantaged in both procedural and distributive aspects of negotiation. They claim to have been insufficiently included in a bargaining process that involved not only the downstream locality (Hangzhou) but also the central government. Huangshan stakeholders also see themselves as largely excluded from the benefits of cleaner water and bearing too much of the pollution abatement cost. For their part, Hangzhou stakeholders have advanced a ‘polluters pay’ view of distributive justice and found partial support for this claim from Beijing. Our findings suggest that attending to environmental justice considerations should be given top priority in China’s design of PES schemes

Association of Diet QualityMeasured by Three A Priori-Defined Dietary Patterns With Gut Microbiota and Intestinal Permeability Among Obese Individuals

Objectives: The human gastrointestinal tract (GI)may play a critical role in the prevention of obesity and metabolic diseases. Considering the importance of a healthy diet for optimal health, this study examined associations of diet quality assessed by three a priori-defined dietary patterns (Healthy Eating Index 2010 [HEI-2010],Mediterranean Eating Pattern for Americans [MEPA], and Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension [DASH] with gut microbiota, short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) and intestinal permeabilitymarkers in adult obese participants. Conclusions: Blautia abundance and inversely associated with intestinal permeability markers such as urinary 24-h sucralose levels suggesting diet quality may have positive impact on the human GI community