Digital Commons Network^™

A Rapidly Shifting Landscape : Why Digitized Violence Is The Newest Category Of Gender-Based Violence, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

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This paper proposes that new research on technology-facilitated violence must shape gender-based violence against women laws. Given the AI revolution, including large language models (“ LLMs ”), and generative artificial intelligence, new technologies continue to create power disparities that help facilitate gender-based violence both online and offline. The paper argues that the veil of anonymity provided by the digital realm facilitates violence ; and the automation capabilities offered by technology amplify the scope and impact of abusive behavior. Although the direct physical act of sexual violence is different from offline violence, there are similarities. Firstly, both acts share the structural …

Assemblages And Actor Networks In The Borderlands - The Apposition Of Reproductive Rights Along The Mexican-American Border, Madeleine M. Plasencia

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In 1971, Sarah Weddington argued Roe v. Wade as a class action on behalf of pregnant women living in Texas, many of whom, including herself had to flee the State to obtain an abortion in Mexico. In 2021, Texas enacted S. B. 8, otherwise known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, which created a private cause of action for injunctive relief and statutory damages awards against any person assisting in and any physician accused of performing an abortion, thus reigniting the cross-border flows that historically have made Mexico a haven for runaway enslaved people and pregnant persons heading south to freedom. …

Abortion Disorientation, Greer Donley, Caroline M. Kelly

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The word “abortion” pervades public discourse in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But do we know what it means? Not only do law and medicine define it differently; state legislatures have codified wildly different definitions of abortion across jurisdictions. Our analysis exposes inherent ambiguities at the boundaries of the term, particularly as abortion intersects with other categories that we often think of as distinct: pregnancy loss, ectopic pregnancy, and other forms of medically necessary care. By juxtaposing statutory text next to real people’s experiences of being denied care in states with abortion bans, we reveal …

The Right To Access Information On Land Recovery, Compensation, Assistance, And Resettlement: Case Study, City Of Can Tho, Vietnam, Hien Trung Phan, Hugh D. Spitzer

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Land recovery in Vietnam is the process of compulsory transfer of land use rights from the hands of land users to the hands of the State by way of local government agencies. Land recovery frequently raises issues of compensation, assistance, and resettlement. It is vital for affected land users and the general public to have access to reports on land recovery, compensation, and resettlement. The article describes a limited survey of Vietnamese people whose land was subject to government recovery and evaluates their access to and understanding of information at each stage of the land recovery process. The study revealed …

Covid-19 Pandemic’S Impact On Online Sex Advertising And Sex Trafficking, Coxen O. Julia, Vanessa Castro, Bridgette Carr, Glen Redin

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Disruptive social events such as the COVID-19 pandemic can have a significant impact on sex trafficking and the working conditions of victims, yet these effects have been little understood. This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on sex trafficking in the United States, based on analysis of over one million sexual service advertisements from the online platform Rubratings.com, using indicators of third-party management as potential proxies for trafficking. Our results show that there have been measurable changes in online commercial sexual service advertising, both with and without third-party management indicators, in the United States, with a significant decrease …

Inéire: An Interpretable Nlp Pipeline Summarizing Inclusive Policy Making Concerning Migrants In Ireland, Arefeh Kazem, Arjumand Younus, Mingyeong Jeon, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Simon Caton

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Reaching marginal and other migrant communities to elicit their political views and opinions is a well-known challenge. Social media has enabled a certain amount of online activism and participation, especially in societies with abundant multicultural identities. However, it can be quite challenging to isolate the voice of the migrant in English-speaking countries, especially with an abundance of content in English on social media. In this paper, we pursue a case study of Ireland’s Twitter landscape, specifically migrant and native activists. We present a methodology that can accurately ( >80% ) isolate the Irish migrant voice with as little as 25 …

Technical Report: A Framework For Confusion Mitigation In Task-Oriented Interactions, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

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Confusion is a mental state that can be triggered in task-oriented interactions and which can if left unattended lead to boredom, frustration, or disengagement from the task at hand. Since previous work has demonstrated that confusion can be detected in embodied situated interactions from visual and auditory cues, in this technique report, we propose appropriate interaction structures which should be used to mitigate confusion. We motivate and describe this dialogue mechanism through an information state-style policy with examples, and also outline the approach we are taking to integrate such a meta-conversational goal alongside core task-oriented considerations in modern data driven …

A Method For Generating A Non-Manual Feature Model For Sign Language Processing, Robert G. Smith Dr, Markus Hofmann Dr

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While recent approaches to sign language processing have shifted to the domain of Machine Learning (ML), the treatment of Non-Manual Features (NMFs) remains an open question. The principal challenge facing this method is the comparatively small sign language corpora available for training machine learning models. This study produces a statistical model which may be used in future ML, rules-based, and hybrid-learning approaches for sign language processing tasks. In doing so, this research explores the emerging patterns of non-manual articulation concerning grammatical classes in Irish Sign Language (ISL). The experimental method applied here is a novel implementation of an association rules …

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

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Decades of social science research has shown that the identity of the parties in a legal action can affect case outcomes. Parties’ race, gender, class, and age all affect decisions of prosecutors, judges, juries, and other actors in a criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Less studied has been how identity might affect other forms of legal regulation. This Essay begins to explore perceptions of deceptive behavior—i.e., how wrongful it is, and the extent to which it should be regulated or punished—and the relationship of those perceptions to the gender of the actors. We hypothesize that ordinary people tend to perceive …

Definition And Characteristic Features Of A ‘Cultural Flashpoint’: A Case Study Of Exploring Masculinities, A Controversial Gender And Education Programme In Ireland, Joan Hanafin, Paul Conway, Cormac O Beaglaoich, Jack Hanafin

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The concept ‘cultural flashpoint’ (CF) has not been fully defined or described. The authors test this concept through the prism of a controversial gender-focused Irish school programme, Exploring Masculinities (EM). Adopting an instrumental case study methodology, they use media content analysis to develop a temporal trajectory of the CF, describe its shape, explicit and implied contentious themes, and its process. They identify characteristic features of a cultural flashpoint: (i) a focal issue, event and/or object; (ii) conflict; (iii) bounded time period; (iv) the involvement of exo- and multi-sectoral individuals and groups; (v) randomness, opaqueness and conflation among its expressions; and …

Human Frailty, Unbreakable Victims And Asylum, Rebecca Sharpless, Kristi E. Wintermeyer

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This article analyzes the asylum decisions of immigration agencies and federal appellate courts and demonstrates that the case law driven standard for persecution is out of step with the original meaning of the term, international law standards, and contemporary understanding of how human beings experience physical and mental harm. Medical and psychological evidence establishes that even trauma at the lower end of the spectrum of severity can inflict lasting and debilitating effects on people's health. Yet over the last three decades, virtually no court decisions have decreased the showing of harm needed to establish persecution. To the contrary, courts have …

Jury-Related Errors In Copyright, Zahr K. Said

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Copyright law is surprisingly hard. Copyright does not do what laypeople think it does, nor do its terms mean what laypeople expect. Copyright also possesses systemic indeterminacy about what it protects and the extent of that protection. For laypeople, copyright law is decidedly “user-unfriendly.” Nonetheless, copyright law reserves for lay jurors its most-litigated, most difficult, and most consequential question at trial: whether works are “substantially similar” and thus infringing.

Many have criticized this allocation because in the context of copyright law, juries effectively have the power to expand or contract owners’ rights with little oversight or correction. But blaming the …

Engaging Bhakti As/In Translation: An Outline Of A Methodological Approach To Analyse Ranade's Views About The "Saints And Prophets Of Maharashtra", Rinku Lamba

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The analysis in this article suggests that M G Ranade’s reflections in his essay about the ‘Saints and Prophets of Maharashtra’ are significant because they offer a site to unravel shifts from a premodern to a modern conception of moral order on the Indian subcontinent, in the context of the encounter with colonialism. For its role in allowing such unravelling, and for the way it permits attention to hitherto neglected dimensions of Ranade’s comparison between bhakti and the Protestant Reformation, this article argues for the value of investigating Ranade’s reflections through the framework of translation. While doing the above, the …

Current Topics In Technology-Enabled Stroke Rehabilitation And Reintegration: A Scoping Review And Content Analysis, Katryna Cisek

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Background. There is a worldwide health crisis stemming from the rising incidence of various debilitating chronic diseases, with stroke as a leading contributor. Chronic stroke management encompasses rehabilitation and reintegration, and can require decades of personalized medicine and care. Information technology (IT) tools have the potential to support individuals managing chronic stroke symptoms. Objectives. This scoping review identifies prevalent topics and concepts in research literature on IT technology for stroke rehabilitation and reintegration, utilizing content analysis, based on topic modelling techniques from natural language processing to identify gaps in this literature. Eligibility Criteria. Our methodological search initially identified over 14,000 …

Against Political Theory In Constitutional Interpretation, Christopher S. Havasy, Joshua C. Macey, Brian Richardson

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Judges and academics have long relied on the work of a small number of Enlightenment political theorists—particularly Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone—to discern meaning from vague and ambiguous constitutional provisions. This Essay cautions that Enlightenment political theory should rarely, if ever, be cited as an authoritative source of constitutional meaning. There are three principal problems with constitutional interpretation based on eighteenth-century political theory. First, Enlightenment thinkers developed distinct and incompatible theories about how to structure a republican form of government. That makes it difficult to decide which among the conflicting theories should possess constitutional significance. Second, the Framers did not write …

Theorizing International Business In Africa: A Roadmap, Paul Vaaler

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International business in Africa is complicated by colonial history, late internationalization, and the growing interest of various foreign powers in Africa and its resources. We share key indicators about African countries and offer a conceptual map to help make sense of this complex scholarly terrain. We distinguish between three types of multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in sub-Saharan Africa: Advanced MNEs (from high-income previous colonial and non-colonial countries), Emerging MNEs (from middle-income countries both inside and outside the region) and Nascent MNEs (from low-income African countries). We show how these distinct types of MNEs provide different development opportunities, how they engage …

What’S Law Got To Do With It? How The Degree Of Legalization Affects The Durability Of Post-Conflict Autonomy Agreements, Felix Schulte, Gene Carolan

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Research has identified several factors that impact the sustainability of post-conflict territorial autonomy arrangements (TAA), including previous levels of violence, economic development in a given territory, or the strategic importance thereof. We argue that a hitherto neglected variable lies in the legal form of the autonomy agreement – that is, the degree to which it has been ‘legalized’ by the language and processes prescribed in the agreement. Based on a qualitative evaluation, we assess the legalization degree of 236 TAA signed between 1990 and 2019. Survival analyses and Cox regression models show that a higher degree of legalization has a …

The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement And Transformative Change: Promise, Power And Solidarity, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

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In 2023 the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement marks its twenty-fifth anniversary. For many the Agreement projects a global image of a successfully concluded end to conflict. However, key aspects of the agreement remain under-enforced or simply undelivered: in particular, provisions related to significant and wide-ranging guarantees addressing human rights and equality of opportunity. As a result, socio-economic and cultural deficits persist, undermining the capacity to achieve a ‘positive peace’. In this article we address the question of how transformative the Agreement and associated reforms have been in addressing the root causes of the conflict and the structures that underpinned it. …

Textualism And The Administrative Procedure Act, Kristin Hickman

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In recent years, the Supreme Court occasionally has applied a more limited approach to textualist reasoning that, if applied to the APA, could expand the perceived gulf between textualism and existing administrative law doctrine. Our purpose with this Essay is to explore the implications of this trend for APA interpretation, particularly as it might apply to agency rulemaking. We do not purport to address critics of textualism as an interpretive methodology; we speak primarily to those who are persuaded of textualism’s merits. We also will not try to resolve all the many disagreements about textualism’s variations or the APA’s meaning. …

Know An Emotion By The Company It Keeps: Word Embeddings From Reddit/Coronavirus, Alejandro García-Rudolph, David Sanchez-Pinsach, Dietmar Frey, Eloy Opisso, Katryna Cisek, John Kelleher

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Social media is a crucial communication tool (e.g., with 430 million monthly active users in online forums such as Reddit), being an objective of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. One of them (word embeddings) is based on the quotation, “You shall know a word by the company it keeps,” highlighting the importance of context in NLP. Meanwhile, “Context is everything in Emotion Research.” Therefore, we aimed to train a model (W2V) for generating word associations (also known as embeddings) using a popular Coronavirus Reddit forum, validate them using public evidence and apply them to the discovery of context for specific …

Equity, Inclusion And Feminist Pedagogies: Supplement No. 14, Barbara Knežević, Michelle Malone

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This paper describes and expands on the contributions the research team at Technological University Dublin have made to the DICO Digital Career Stories Erasmus+ project from March 2021 through February 2023. This paper examines the TU Dublin presentation of specific Fine Art research methods and technical and practical tools, as a unique way to open these discussions around ethical teaching with regards to access, technology, gender, class, ethnic and racial diversity. This paper looks at some of the specific tools and methods common to fine art education and practice in the points of sharing sessions to ask how lecturing staff …

How Online Discourse Networks Fields Of Practice: The Discursive Negotiation Of Autonomy On Art Organisation About Pages, Tommie Soro

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This article examines how the online discourse of art organisations forges relationships between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy. Combining elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis and Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the article analyses an elite art magazine, e-flux, and an elite art museum, IMMA, and the activities of discourses, genres, and utterances on their about pages. Its results suggest that the about pages of these organisations forge links between the artworld and the fields of politics and economy by mobilising discourse in these fields and by incorporating discourse practices from these fields. The ideological tension …

Performance Improvement Of Hybrid System Based Dfig-Wind/Pv/Batteries Connected To Dc And Ac Grid By Applying Intelligent Control, Younes Sahri, Salah Tamalouzt, Sofia Lalouni Belaid, Mohit Bajaj, Sherif S.M. Ghoneim, Hossam Zawbaa, Salah Kamel

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One of the main causes of CO2 emissions is the production of electrical energy. Therefore, many researchers goal’s is to develop renewable power systems. This paper proposes a new intelligent control development of hybrid PV–Wind-Batteries. Neuro-Fuzzy Direct Power Control (NF-DPC) is invested in order to enhance system performance and generated currents quality. An improved MPPT algorithm based on Fuzzy Controller (FC) is invested for PV power optimization. In addition, a new Modified Fuzzy Direct Power Control (MF-DPC) is developed and applied to the grid side converter to control the active and reactive power by monitoring the involved active power flow …

Toward Inclusive Online Environments: Counterfactual-Inspired Xai For Detecting And Interpreting Hateful And Offensive Tweets, Muhammad Deedahwar Mazhar Qureshi, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Wael Rashwan

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The prevalence of hate speech and offensive language on social media platforms such as Twitter has significant consequences, ranging from psychological harm to the polarization of societies. Consequently, social media companies have implemented content moderation measures to curb harmful or discriminatory language. However, a lack of consistency and transparency hinders their ability to achieve desired outcomes. This article evaluates various ML models, including an ensemble, Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), and Linear Support Vector Classifier (SVC), on a public dataset of 24,792 tweets by T. Davidson, categorizing tweets into three classes: hate, offensive, and neither. The top-performing model achieves a weighted …

Fostering Spatial Ability Development In And For Authentic Stem Learning, Caiwei Zhu, Chloe Oi-Ying Leung, Eleni Lagoudaki, Mariana Velho, Natalia Segura-Caballero, Dietsje Jolles, Gavin Duffy, Gunter Maresch, Marianna Pagkratidou, Remke Klapwijk

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Empirical interdisciplinary research has explored the role of spatial ability in STEM learning and achievement. While most of this research indicates that fostering spatial thinking in educational contexts has the potential to positively impact students’ enrollment and performance in STEM subjects, there is less agreement on the best approach to do so. This article provides an overview of various types of effective spatial interventions and practices in formal or informal educational contexts, including targeted training of STEM-relevant spatial skills, spatialized curricula embedded in schools, integrated STEM practices addressing students’ use of spatial skills, and spatial activities in informal STEM education. …

The International Legal Order And The Rule Of Law, Vivian Grosswald Curran

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This article addresses whether international law today is capable of instituting the rule of law. It offers a renewed look at the internationalists who brought us modern international law, such as Lauterpacht, Cassin and Lemkin. They tenaciously worked at placing the individual’s right to life and to human dignity front and center in international law while also preserving peace among states. Their struggle began in earnest first in the interwar years after the “war to end all wars” (1918 – 1939), and then again in 1945 after yet another, still worse, world war had occurred, devastating Europe, but leaving the …

Exploring Zero-Shot And Joint Training Cross-Lingual Strategies For Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Based On Contextualized Multilingual Language Models, Dang Van Thin, Hung Quoc Ngo, Duong Ngoc Hao, Ngan Luu-Thuy-Nguyen

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Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has attracted many researchers’ attention in recent years. However, the lack of benchmark datasets for specific languages is a common challenge because of the prohibitive cost of manual annotation. The zero-shot cross-lingual strategy can be applied to solve this gap in research. Moreover, previous works mainly focus on improving the performance of supervised ABSA with pre-trained languages. Therefore, there are few to no systematic comparisons of the benefits of multilingual models in zero-shot and joint training cross-lingual for the ABSA task. In this paper, we focus on the zero-shot and joint training cross-lingual transfer task for …

Ar/Vr Teaching-Learning Experiences In Higher Education Institutions (Hei): A Systematic Literature Review, Belen Bermejo, Carlos Juiz, David Cortes, Jeroen Oskam, Teemu Moilanen, Jouko Loijas, Praneschen Govender, Jenniifer Hussey, Alexander Lennart Schmidt, Ralf Burbach, Daniel King, Colin O'Connor, David Dunlea

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During the last few years, learning techniques have changed, both in basic education and in higher education. This change has been accompanied by new technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (AR). The combination of these technologies in education has allowed a greater immersion, positively affecting the learning and teaching processes. In addition, since the COVID-19 pandemic, this trend has been growing due to the diversity of the different fields of application of these technologies, such as heterogeneity in their combination and their different experiences. It is necessary to review the state of the art to determine the …

Discovering Child Sexual Abuse Material Creators’ Behaviors And Preferences On The Dark Web, Vuong Ngo, Rahul Gajula, Christina Thorpe, Susan Mckeever

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Background: Producing, distributing or discussing child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) is often committed through the dark web in order to remain hidden from search engines and regular users. Additionally, on the dark web, the CSAM creators employ various techniques to avoid detection and conceal their activities. The large volume of CSAM on the dark web presents a global social problem and poses a significant challenge for helplines, hotlines and law enforcement agencies.

Objective: Identifying CSAM discussions on the dark web and uncovering associated metadata insights into characteristics, behaviours and motivation of CSAM creators.

Participants and Setting: We have conducted an …

Post-Conflict Reconciliation In Ukraine, Elena Baylis

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Reconciliation mechanisms should be a core component of transitional justice in Ukraine. The nature of this conflict as a war justified by claims about history, identity, and legitimacy suggests that there will be a need for post-war reconciliation initiatives. Such reconciliation measures would be intended to enable Ukraine’s Russian, Ukrainian, and other communities to live together constructively within the same state. The goals of social reconciliation also converge with Ukraine’s long-term, political aims vis-à-vis both Russia and the European Union. This paper addresses three types of reconciliation measures that are important for post-conflict Ukraine. Instrumental mechanisms to engage post-conflict social …