Washington Research Library Consortium - Digital Collections
Not a member yet
125665 research outputs found
Sort by
The promise of precommitment in democracy and human rights: The hopeful, forgotten failure of the Larreta Doctrine
No full textPublished in: Perspectives on Politics, 1-16.Although international precommitment regimes offer a tool to escape the apparent contradiction between sovereignty and the international protection of democracy and human rights, they raise theoretical and practical questions. This article draws on multinational archival research to explore an overlooked historical episode and suggest new thinking regarding the logjams over sovereignty, incapacity of global decision making, and humanitarian imperialism. In 1945 and 1946, the American states engaged in a debate over the Larreta Doctrine, a Uruguayan proposal about the parallelism between democracy and human rights, and the regional rights and duties to safeguard these values. In the ensuing debate, the Uruguayan foreign minister elaborated a tripartite precommitment mechanism to create a web of national commitments to democratic governance and the domestic protection of human rights, to establish a regional insurance policy against failures to maintain those commitments, and to obligate the great power and neighboring states to precommit to working through the regional system instead of unilaterally. As a proposal that emerged from a weak state—and garnered support from states that faced internal and external threats to democracy and rights—the Larreta Doctrine offers insights on the central tension between state sovereignty and international commitments
Use of chemosynthetic biomass by large, mobile, benthic predators in the Gulf of Mexico
No full textPublished in: Mar. Eco. Pro. Ser., 2002, Vol. 225, pp.65-78.The Gulf of Mexico supports communities of chemoautotrophic and heterotrophic fauna
associated with hydrocarbon seeps. The chemoautotrophic invertebrates, mostly dense epifaunal
assemblages of mussels and tubeworms, derive their nutrition from symbiotic relationships with
sulfide- or methane-oxidizing bacteria. The extent to which benthic predatory fauna feed on the
chemoautotrophic assemblages has been an open question. Owing to differences in stable isotope
values between chemosynthetic- and photosynthetic-derived biomass, isotopic characterization of
predatory fauna would be useful in determining their dependence upon chemoautotrophs for food.
Carbon and sulfur stable isotope analyses reveal that fishes with similar feeding strategies (rat tail
[Nezumia sp.] and eels [Synaphobranchus sp., Ophicthus cruentifer and Dysomma rugosa]) have
similar δ13C values (–32.7 and –42.5‰, respectively), reflecting chemoautotrophic carbon. Large
vagrant predators/scavengers such as isopods Bathynomus giganteus, hagfish Eptatretus sp. and
spider crabs Rochina crassa, have isotope values closer to oceanic ranges (δ13C: –20 to –18‰; δ34S: 18
to 20‰), although some individual Eptatretus sp. and R. crassa show a chemosynthetic component.
Colonist invertebrates, such as the sea star (Sclerasterias cf. tanneri) and a predatory snail Buccinum
canetae, have greatly depleted δ13C and δ34S values, indicating an almost 100% reliance on seep pro-
duction. Nitrogen isotope ratios are depleted (–19‰) in some seep areas, and B. canetae and Syna-
phobranchus sp. reflect the 15N depletion (–10 and –3‰ respectively). On a species-specific basis,
some mobile benthic predators from the background fauna obtain close to 100% of their nutrition
from seep production, indicating that they are residents of the seeps. There is a high degree of
movement in and out of the seep habitat by vagrant benthic predators, and although the majority
derive most of their nutritional needs from photosynthetic production, the incorporation of chemo-
synthetic production is substantial
Appropriating an Identity: The Modern Art of Middle Eastern Women
No full textResearch paper submitted to American University in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Arts; approved as non-thesis optio
A privacy‐preserving framework for ranked retrieval model
No full textPublished in: Computational Social Networks volume 6, Article number: 6 (2019).In this paper, we address privacy issues related to ranked retrieval model in web databases, each of which takes private attributes as part of input in the ranking function. Many web databases keep private attributes invisible to public and believe that the adversary is unable to reveal the private attribute values from query results. However, prior research (Rahman et al. in Proc VLDB Endow 8:1106–17, 2015) studied the problem of rank-based inference of private attributes over web databases. They found that one can infer the value of private attributes of a victim tuple by issuing well-designed queries through a top-k query interface. To address the privacy issue, in this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving framework. Our framework protects private attributes’ privacy not only under inference attacks but also under arbitrary attack methods. In particular, we classify adversaries into two widely existing categories: domain-ignorant and domain-expert adversaries. Then, we develop equivalent set with virtual tuples (ESVT) for domain-ignorant adversaries and equivalent set with true tuples (ESTT) for domain-expert adversaries. The ESVT and the ESTT are the primary parts of our privacy-preserving framework. To evaluate the performance, we define a measurement of privacy guarantee for private attributes and measurements for utility loss. We prove that both ESVT and ESTT achieve the privacy guarantee. We also develop heuristic algorithms for ESVT and ESTT, respectively, under the consideration of minimizing utility loss. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments over real-world dataset
Edouard Vuillard: The Album and Figures in an Interior
No full textResearch paper submitted to American University in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Arts; approved as non-thesis optio
The Old Musician: Manet's Novella of his Family in Crisis
No full textResearch paper submitted to American University in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Arts; approved as thesis optio
2019-02 Does a guaranteed basic income encourage entrepreneurship?: evidence from Alaska
No full textDepartment of Economics, Working Paper Series, no. 2019-02. 29 pages.While the concept has been around for years, recently the policy notio n of a “guaranteed basic income” (GBI) – or universal basic income -- has had a resurgence of interest. In addition to rationales relating to fairness and response to structural employment shifts due to automation and globalization, another motivation sometimes put forward for these plans is to encourage risk-taking by providing a safety net. One would think this would imply greater entrepreneurial activity if an unsuccessful entrepreneur had the GBI to fall back on. In this paper we investigate a rare long-standing example similar to a GBI in the US, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend program. This was not put forth as a GBI and is frankly too small an annual amount to fully allow an individual to rely on these funds, but for a moderate-to-large family the APF can replace a large share of a poverty-level of income. Receipt of the APF also does not preclude a family from receiving other safety net benefits (e.g., food stamps, unemployment compensation), suggesting that the downside risk for a potential entrepreneur may be lower than in other US states. We initially examine trends in small-firm births in Alaska over time from the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics 1977-2014 – before and after the institution of the APF program (the first payment was in 1982) – relative to other US states to investigate a possible impact on entrepreneurship, with results suggestive of a positive effect (perhaps wearing off over time). We then turn to micro data to look at changes in self-employment behavior in Alaska, with somewhat similar findings
Notes and comment: In response to and in defense of Mitchell and Revusky: an analysis of nonassociative effects
No full textPublished in: Animal Learning & Behavior, 1978, 6 (4), 472-473
Olfaction in olfactory bulbectomized rats
No full textPublished in: J Neurosci., 2004 Oct 13, 24(41), 9195-200.Experimental rats had their right olfactory bulb removed on postnatal day 2 (P2) and their left olfactory bulb removed on P90. Control rats had one or both olfactory bulbs removed on P90. Before and after their adult-stage surgery, rats were trained using olfactometry and operant conditioning to detect and discriminate odors. Anterograde transport of horseradish peroxidase applied to the olfactory epithelium revealed numerous axons of olfactory sensory neurons in the right hemisphere of 27 experimental rats. These axons terminated in glomerular-like clusters within the frontal neocortex (n = 5) or anterior olfactory nucleus with some axons extending into the subventricular epithelium (n = 22). Seventeen of the experimental rats were able to detect a variety of odors and to discriminate between odors. Performance accuracy was related to the location and density of these anomalous inputs; experimental rats with inputs confined to frontal neocortex and those lacking any inputs to the forebrain were anosmic, as were adult-operated bilaterally bulbectomized rats. Our results provide strong support for the contention that, in the absence of the olfactory bulbs, olfactory connections to novel forebrain sites can support both odor detection and odor discrimination
Spanish Painting in the Art of Manet and Cassatt
No full textResearch paper submitted to American University in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Arts; approved as non-thesis optio