Digital Commons Network^™

Original Discrimination: How The Supreme Court Disadvantages Plaintiff States, Heather Elliott

Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court is famously the nation's top appellate court, but Article III also makes the Court a trial court, giving it original jurisdiction over several categories of cases. One of those categories suits by states against other states-remains exclusive. Thus, when Texas sought to overturn the 202o presidential election by suing four swing states, it had only one court in which to sue. The Court properly rebuffed Texas's claim for lack of standing, but the Justices give even meritorious claims by state plaintiffs short shrift. They have made clear that these suits detract from the Court's appellate role …

Transition Administration, Michael Herz, Katherine A. Shaw

Articles

The period from November 3, 2020 to January 20, 2021, was unlike any presidential transition in our history. President Donald Trump refused to accept his ballot-box defeat, instead battling to overturn the election’s outcome. This dramatic public campaign was waged in state and federal courts, state legislatures, the offices of state and local election officials, the Department of Justice, and finally the halls of Congress, where on January 6, 2021, a mob incited by the President stormed the Capitol with the explicit goal of preventing the final counting of electoral votes for Joe Biden. These efforts had more mundane and …

On The Documentation Of Refactoring Types, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Jiaqian Liu, Kenneth Addo, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni, Zhe Yu

Articles

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting feature updates and bug fixes, little is known about how developers document their refactoring activities. Specifically, developers can perform multiple refactoring operations, including moving methods, extracting classes, renaming attributes, for various reasons, such as improving software quality, managing technical debt, and removing defects. Yet, there is no systematic study that analyzes the extent to which the documentation of refactoring accurately describes the refactoring operations performed at the …

Explaining Deep Learning Models For Tabular Data Using Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation, Ihsan Ullah, Andre Rios, Vaibhov Gala, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Trust and credibility in machine learning models are bolstered by the ability of a model to explain its decisions. While explainability of deep learning models is a well-known challenge, a further challenge is clarity of the explanation itself for relevant stakeholders of the model. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), an established explainability technique developed for deep models in computer vision, provides intuitive human-readable heat maps of input images. We present the novel application of LRP with tabular datasets containing mixed data (categorical and numerical) using a deep neural network (1D-CNN), for Credit Card Fraud detection and Telecom Customer Churn prediction use …

Artificial Intelligence-Based Power System Stabilizers For Frequency Stability Enhancement In Multi-Machine Power Systems, Aliyu Sabo, Noor Izzri Abdul Wahab, Mohammad Lutfi Othman, Mai Zurwatul Ahlam Mohd Jaffar, Hakan Acikgoz, Hamed Nafisi, Hossein Shahinzadeh

Articles

Low frequency oscillations (LFOs) occur in a system of interconnected generators connected by weak interconnection. A power system stabilizer (PSS) is commonly used to improve the capacity of the power system dampening. Under a variety of operating conditions, traditional PSSs fail to deliver superior damping. To address this issue, a Farmland Fertility Algorithm (FFA-PSSs controller) was used to solve an optimization problem for optimal design of PSSs system parameters, and its performance efficiency was compared to GA and PSO-based PSSs controllers. In addition to PSS, flexible current transmission (FACTS) devices are widely used. PSSs controllers and FACTS devices are frequently …

Hospital Effluents And Wastewaters Treatment Plants: A Source Of Oxytetracycline And Antimicrobial-Resistant Bacteria In Seafood, Bozena Mccarthy, Samuel Obeng Apori, Michelle Giltrap, Abhijnan Bhat, James Curtin, Furong Tian

Articles

The present study employs a data review on the presence and aggregation of oxytetracycline (OTC) and resistance (AMR) bacteria in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and distribution of the contaminated effluent with the aid of shallow and deep ocean currents. The study aims to determine the fate of OTC, AMR bacteria in seafood, and demonstrate a relationship between AMR levels and human health. This review includes (1) OTC, (2) AMR bacteria, (3) heavy metals in aquatic environments, and their relationship. Few publications describe OCT in surface waters. Although, OTC and other tetracyclines were found in 10 countries in relatively low concentrations, …

On Preserving The Behavior In Software Refactoring: A Systematic Mapping Study, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni

Articles

Context: Refactoring is the art of modifying the design of a system without altering its behavior. The idea is to reorganize variables, classes and methods to facilitate their future adaptations and comprehension. As the concept of behavior preservation is fundamental for refactoring, several studies, using formal verification, language transformation and dynamic analysis, have been proposed to monitor the execution of refactoring operations and their impact on the program semantics. However, there is no existing study that examines the available behavior preservation strategies for each refactoring operation.

Objective: This paper identifies behavior preservation approaches in the research literature. Method: We conduct, …

Corticothalamic Projections Deliver Enhanced Responses To Medial Geniculate Body As A Function Of The Temporal Reliability Of The Stimulus, Srinivasa P Kommajosyula, Edward L Bartlett, Rui Cai, Lynne Ling, Donald M Caspary

Articles

Ageing and challenging signal-in-noise conditions are known to engage the use of cortical resources to help maintain speech understanding. Extensive corticothalamic projections are thought to provide attentional, mnemonic and cognitive-related inputs in support of sensory inferior colliculus (IC) inputs to the medial geniculate body (MGB). Here we show that a decrease in modulation depth, a temporally less distinct periodic acoustic signal, leads to a jittered ascending temporal code, changing MGB unit responses from adapting responses to responses showing repetition enhancement, posited to aid identification of important communication and environmental sounds. Young-adult male Fischer Brown Norway rats, injected with the inhibitory …

The Myth Of The Great Writ, Leah M. Litman

Articles

Habeas corpus is known as the “Great Writ” because it supposedly protects individual liberty against government overreach and guards against wrongful detentions. This idea shapes habeas doctrine, federal courts theories, and habeas-reform proposals.

It is also incomplete. While the writ has sometimes protected individual liberty, it has also served as a vehicle for the legitimation of excesses of governmental power. A more complete picture of the writ emerges when one considers traditionally neglected areas of public law that are often treated as distinct—the law of slavery and freedom, Native American affairs, and immigration. There, habeas has empowered abusive exercises of …

Notions Of Explainability And Evaluation Approaches For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has experienced a significant growth over the last few years. This is due to the widespread application of machine learning, particularly deep learning, that has led to the development of highly accurate models that lack explainability and interpretability. A plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, developed and tested, coupled with several studies attempting to define the concept of explainability and its evaluation. This systematic review contributes to the body of knowledge by clustering all the scientific studies via a hierarchical system that classifies theories and notions related to the concept of explainability …

A Survey Of Machine Learning Techniques For Video Quality Prediction From Quality Of Delivery Metrics, Obinna Izima, Ruairí De Fréin, Ali Malik

Articles

A growing number of video streaming networks are incorporating machine learning (ML) applications. The growth of video streaming services places enormous pressure on network and video content providers who need to proactively maintain high levels of video quality. ML has been applied to predict the quality of video streams. Quality of delivery (QoD) measurements, which capture the end-to-end performances of network services, have been leveraged in video quality prediction. The drive for end-to-end encryption, for privacy and digital rights management, has brought about a lack of visibility for operators who desire insights from video quality metrics. In response, numerous solutions …

Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews?, David Abraham

Articles

No abstract provided.

Provenance: An Intermediary-Free Solution For Digital Content Verification, Bilal Yousuf, M. Atif Qureshi, Brendan Spillane, Gary Munnelly, Oisin Carroll, Matthew Runswick, Kirsty Park, Eileen Culloty, Owen Conlan, Jane Suiter

Articles

The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Provenance is designed to help combat this threat by warning users when the content they are looking at may be misinformation or disinformation. It is also designed to improve media literacy among its users and ultimately reduce susceptibility to the threat among vulnerable groups within society. The Provenance browser plugin checks the content that users see on the Internet and social media and provides warnings in their browser or social media feed. Unlike similar plugins, which require human experts to provide evaluations and …

Towards A Framework For Comparing Functionalities Of Multimorbidity Clinical Decision Support: A Literature-Based Feature Set And Benchmark Cases., Dympna O'Sullivan, William Van Woensel, Szymon Wilk, Samson Tu, Wojtek Michalowski, Samina Abidi, Marc Carrier, Ruth Edry, Irit Hochberg, Stephen Kingwell, Alexandra Kogan, Martin Michalowski, Hugh O'Sullivan, Mor Peleg

Articles

Multimorbidity, the coexistence of two or more health conditions, has become more prevalent as mortality rates in many countries have declined and their populations have aged. Multimorbidity presents significant difficulties for Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), particularly in cases where recommendations from relevant clinical guidelines offer conflicting advice. A number of research groups are developing computer-interpretable guideline (CIG) modeling formalisms that integrate recommendations from multiple Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) for knowledge-based multimorbidity decision support. In this paper we describe work towards the development of a framework for comparing the different approaches to multimorbidity CIG-based clinical decision support (MGCDS). We present …

A Quantitative Evaluation Of Global, Rule-Based Explanations Of Post-Hoc, Model Agnostic Methods, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Understanding the inferences of data-driven, machine-learned models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships consist and can be represented as a set of inference rules. However, the models usually do not explicit these rules to their end-users who, subsequently, perceive them as black-boxes and might not trust their predictions. Therefore, scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models to explain their logic. However, limited work exists on the evaluation and comparison of these methods. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the …

Shifting The Eu Taxonomy From Theory To Practice: A Review Of The Literature Highlighting Potential Academic Contributions To Its Adoption, Implementation, And Impact, Dylan Kirby, Sandra Thompson, Cormac H. Macmahon

Articles

The EU Taxonomy seeks to identify those sustainable economic activities, thereby supporting climate change mitigation and adaptation. Recent legislation underpinning the EU Taxonomy, such as the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), highlight the urgency for academic contributions that might shed light on its operationalisation. At this embryonic stage in the Taxonomy’s lifecycle, there is potential for the academic community to contribute to understanding its implications. Hence, we undertake a thematic analysis of predominantly, but not exclusively, professional literature to prioritise potential empirical research or conceptualisations that might offer insights for finance and accounting professionals, …

Team Production Revisited, William Wilson Bratton

Articles

This Article reconsiders Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout's team production model of corporate law, offering a favorable evaluation. The model explains both the legal corporate entity and corporate governance institutions in microeconomic terms as the means to the end of encouraging investment, situating corporations within markets and subject to market constraints but simultaneously insisting that productive success requires that corporations remain independent of markets. The model also integrates the inherited framework of corporate law into an economically derived model of production, constructing a microeconomic description of large enterprises firmly rooted in corporate doctrine but neither focused on nor limited by …

Team Production Revisited, William Wilson Bratton

Articles

This Article reconsiders Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout's team production model of corporate law, offering a favorable evaluation. The model explains both the legal corporate entity and corporate governance institutions in microeconomic terms as the means to the end of encouraging investment, situating corporations within markets and subject to market constraints but simultaneously insisting that productive success requires that corporations remain independent of markets. The model also integrates the inherited framework of corporate law into an economically derived model of production, constructing a microeconomic description of large enterprises firmly rooted in corporate doctrine but neither focused on nor limited by …

Editing And Interleaving, Patrick Barry

Articles

This essay suggests that a powerful learning strategy called "interleaving"--which involves strategically switching between cognitive tasks--is being underused. It can do more than make study sessions more productive; it can also make editing sessions more productive.

Property Law For The Ages, Michael C. Pollack, Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Articles

Within the next forty years, the number of Americans over age sixty-five is projected to nearly double. This seismic demographic shift will necessitate a reckoning in several areas of law and policy, but property law is especially unprepared. Built primarily for young and middle-aged white men, the common law of property has been critiqued for decades for the ways in which it oppresses or simply leaves behind people based on their race, sex, Native heritage, and more. This Article contributes a new focus on property law’s treatment of people based on their advanced age. Burdened by higher relocation costs, more …

Behind The Scenes: On The Relationship Between Developer Experience And Refactoring, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Anthony Peruma, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system’s design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results by analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, …

Handouts Don’T Exist. Hustle Or You Don’T Eat., Conor Mcgarrigle Dr.

Articles

It is well established that AI has a bias problem; however, black-boxed machine learning systems render it difficult to even understand and visualize the nature and extent of the problem, let alone find solutions. This paper discusses an artistic research approach toward highlighting AI bias and explores the aesthetic potential of machine learning through a case study of an AI artwork called #RiseandGrind.The artist trained a recurrent neural network on a dataset extracted from Twitter hashtags (#Riseandgrind and #Hustle),which were selected to represent a specific filter bubble (embodied neoliberal precarity) in order to produce a biased AI that generates tweets …

Teaching Meiosis With The Dna Triangle Framework: A Classroom Activity That Changes How Students Think About Chromosomes, Leslie Kate Wright, Paulina Cortez, Margaret A. Franzen, Dina L. Newman

Articles

Many biology students struggle to learn about the process of meiosis and have particular difficulty understanding the molecular basis of crossing over and the importance of homologous pairing for proper segregation. To help students overcome these challenges, we designed an activity that uses a newly developed Chromosome Connections Kit® from 3-D Molecular Designs to allow learners to explore meiosis at the molecular level. We took a backwards design approach in constructing an effective classroom activity. We developed evidence-based learning objectives and designed a crossing over activity that targets students' misconceptions and key concepts about meiosis. Assessment questions were designed based …

Special Matters: Filtering Privileged Materials In Federal Prosecutions, Christina Frohock

Articles

This Article reviews the U.S. Department of Justice's toolbox for handling potentially privileged materials, with close attention to the evolution from filter teams to the Special Matters Unit in fraud prosecutions. Significant case opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fourth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits reveal the judiciary's diverse views on filter teams. The recent case of United States v. Esformes in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, now on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, illustrates how a filter team can fall short and draw unflattering attention to the Department of Justice. In the …

Why Are You Here? Modeling Illicit Massage Business Location Characteristics With Machine Learning, Anna White, Seth Guikema, Bridgette Carr

Articles

Illicit massage businesses are a venue for sex and labor trafficking in the United States. Though many of their locations are made publicly available through online advertising, little is known about why they choose to locate where they do. In this work, we use inferential modeling to better understand the spatial distribution of illicit massage businesses within the U.S. Based on addresses web-scraped weekly from online advertisements over 6 months, we modeled illicit massage business prevalence at the census tract and county levels. We used publicly available data to characterize census tracts and counties, finding that the state in which …

Immigration Law's Arbitrariness Problem, Shalini Ray

Articles

Despite deportation’s devastating effects, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) specifies deportation as the penalty for nearly every immigration law violation. Critics have regularly decried the INA’s lack of proportionality, contending that the penalty often does not fit the offense. The immigration bureaucracy’s implementation of the INA, however, involves a spectrum of penalties short of deportation. Using tools such as administrative closure, orders of supervision, and deferred action, agency bureaucrats decide who is deported and who stays, and on what terms, on a purely ad hoc basis. In this “shadow system,” immigrants, their advocates, and the broader public lack basic …

Perspectives On Computing Ethics: A Multi-Stakeholder Analysis, Damian Gordon, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Paul J. Gibson, Brendan Tierney, Anna Becevel, Andrea Curley, Michael Collins, William O'Mahony, Dympna O'Sullivan

Articles

Purpose:

Computing ethics represents a long established, yet rapidly evolving, discipline that grows in complexity and scope on a near-daily basis. Therefore, to help understand some of that scope it is essential to incorporate a range of perspectives, from a range of stakeholders, on current and emerging ethical challenges associated with computer technology. This study aims to achieve this by using, a three-pronged, stakeholder analysis of Computer Science academics, ICT industry professionals, and citizen groups was undertaken to explore what they consider to be crucial computing ethics concerns. The overlap between these stakeholder groups are explored, as well as whether …

Punnett Square Or Protein Production? The Expert-Novice Divide For Conceptions Of Genes And Gene Expression, Dina L. Newman, Aeowynn Coakley, Aidan Link, Korinne Mills, Leslie Kate Wright

Articles

Concepts of molecular biology and genetics are difficult for many biology undergraduate students to master yet are crucial for deep understanding of how life works. By asking students to draw their ideas, we attempted to uncover the mental models about genes and gene expression held by biology students (n = 23) and experts (n = 18) using semistructured interviews. A large divide was identified between novice and expert conceptions. While experts typically drew box-and-line representations and thought about genes as regions of DNA that were used to encode products, students typically drew whole chromosomes rather than focusing on gene structure …

The Promise And Limits Of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, And The Techlash, Salomé Viljoen

Articles

In response to widespread skepticism about the recent rise of “tech ethics”, many critics have called for legal reform instead. In contrast with the “ethics response”, critics consider the “lawfulness response” more capable of disciplining the excesses of the technology industry. In fact, both are simultaneously vulnerable to industry capture and capable of advancing a more democratic egalitarian agenda for the information economy. Both ethics and law offer a terrain of contestation, rather than a predetermined set of commitments by which to achieve more democratic and egalitarian technological production. In advancing this argument, the essay focuses on two misunderstandings common …

Voices From A Prison Pandemic: Lives Lost From Covid-19 At Lakeland Correctional, Kimberly Thomas

Articles

Coronavirus tore through jails and prisons like wildfire. In some states, more than half of the people incarcerated there tested positive for COVID-19; nearly 400,000 people in prison across the United States have tested positive. For people in prison, COVID-19 brought the loss of close friends, solitary confinement, loss of connection with family and programming, lack of information, and fear of contracting the virus. It has also reminded those who are incarcerated of the one-dimensional way in which people in prison are perceived. As stated by one collaborator, Cory Souders, "[s]o many men and women who come to prison are …