Digital Commons Network^™

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

Articles

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 …

Locating A Shadowy State In Queer, Feminist Politics, Atreyee Majumder

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In this commentary, part of a book forum on Srila Roy’s (2022) book ”Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India”, I argue that the feminist and queer movement, in response to the neoliberal turn in India, is not totally separate from the Indian state formations. In fact, a shadowy state emerges in the affective life of citizens as an expression of what Timothy Mitchell would have called “state effect”.

Stopping Runs In The Digital Era, Luís C. Calderón Gómez

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Bank runs, and the financial crises they catalyze and amplify, are incredibly costly-to individuals, families, society, and the economy writ large. Banking regulation has, for the most part, protected us from traditional bank runs for the last ninety years. However, as we saw in the devastating 2008 financial crisis, bank runs can still occur in lightly regulated or opaque segments of the financial sector.

The recent crypto market downturn dramatically forewarned regulators of the potential and significant risks that novel assets could pose to our financial system's stability. In particular, a novel, systemically important asset (stablecoins) revealed its vulnerability to …

Rethinking Resilience Using The R-Factor: Neurobiological Mechanisms Of Static And Dynamic Components Of Resilience Following Trauma, Sanne Van Rooij, Justin Santos, Cecilia A. Hinojosa, Timothy Ely, Nathaniel Harnett, Vishnu P. Murty, Lauren Lebois, Tanja Jovanovic, Stacey House, Robert A. Swor

Articles

Resilience is a dynamic process of recovery after trauma, but in most studies it is conceptualized as the absence of specific psychopathology following trauma. Using the large emergency department AURORA study (n=1,865, 63% women), we took a longitudinal, dynamic and transdiagnostic approach to define a static resilience (r) factor, that could explain >50% of variance in mental wellbeing 6-months following trauma, and a dynamic r-factor, which represented recovery from initial symptoms. We assessed its neurobiological profile across threat, inhibition, and reward processes using fMRI collected 2-weeks post-trauma. Our neuroimaging results suggest that resilience is promoted by activation of higher-level cognitive …

The Credibility Effect: Defamation Law And Audiences, Yonathan A. Arbel

Articles

What should be the legal response to false statements? In the context of defamation law, courts try to set a standard that balances the interests of speakers and their potential targets. This article empirically demonstrates an unappreciated effect of such decisions on third parties: a credibility effect. Using a series of lab experiments, I find that defamation law makes individuals more trusting of reports from various media. This credibility effect is desirable when the report is true but can lead to unintended consequences in the case of misinformation. In particular, the credibility effect is shown to cast a stigma on …

Rethinking Party Autonomy In Trust Law, Stewart E. Sterk

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The article critiques the current approach to party autonomy in trust law, particularly the freedom granted by the Second Restatement of Conflict of Laws for settlors to choose the governing law for their trusts. The author argues that this freedom, rooted in historically uniform trust laws, is now outdated due to the diversification of state trust laws, especially regarding issues like perpetual trusts and asset protection. The analysis advocates for a more restrictive approach to party autonomy, prioritizing the settlor's domicile and home state policies to prevent manipulation and ensure fairness, particularly for third parties affected by trust arrangements.

The State Of Accessibility In Blackboard: Survey And User Reviews Case Study, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Wajdi Aljedaani, Stephanie Ludi, Mohammed Alkahtani, Marcelo M. Eler, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Context: Nowadays, mobile applications (or apps) have become vital in our daily life, particularly within education. Many institutions increasingly rely on mobile apps to provide access to all their students. However, many education mobile apps remain inaccessible to users with disabilities who need to utilize accessibility features like talkback or screen reader features. Accessibility features have to be considered in mobile apps to foster equity and inclusion in the educational environment allowing to use of such apps without limitations. Gaps in the accessibility to educational systems persist.

Objective: In this paper, we focus on the accessibility of the Blackboard mobile …

James And Peirce On The Importance Of Individuals: The Differences That Make A Difference, Susan Haack

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No abstract provided.

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 …

The Replication Crisis And Ip Law: A Novel Policy Tool For Open Science, Or Cohen Sasson, Ofer Tur‐Sinai

Articles

In recent years, the scientific community has faced a considerable problem the replication crisis. Replication is the process of verifying scientific findings by repeating a published study. It is considered a cornerstone of the scientific enterprise, contributing to the credibility of research findings. Over the past two decades, however, replication has become increasingly difficult; in fact, in some disciplines the non-replicability rate is over 50%. A major factor accounting for this is diminished access to research materials required for replication (replication materials). This problem is particularly acute in computational studies, where the code, software documentation, datasets, and other information are …

Who Owns Data? Constitutional Division In Cyberspace, Dongsheng Zang

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Privacy emerged as a concern as soon as the internet became commercial. In early 1995, Lawrence Lessig warned that the internet, though giving us extraordinary potential, was “not designed to protect individuals against this extraordinary potential for others to abuse.” The same technology can “destroy the very essence of what now defines individuality.” Lessig urged that “a constitutional balance will have to be drawn between these increasingly important interests in privacy, and the competing interest in collective security.” Lessig envisioned that creating property rights in data would help individuals by giving them control of their data. As utopian as property …

Telegraph, Telephone And The Internet: The Making Of The Symbiotic Model Of Surveillance States, Dongsheng Zang

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In the early 2000s, shortly before the September 11 attacks, Daniel J. Solove noted that computer databases in the United States were controlled by public as well as private bureaucracies. In that sense, Solove argued, the "Big Brother" metaphor "fails to capture the most important dimension of the database problem." In his 2008 Lockhart lecture, constitutional law scholar Jack M. Balkin argued that the United States has gradually transformed from a welfare and national security state to a National Surveillance State: "a new form of governance that features the collection, collation, and analysis of information about populations both in the …

Dual Sovereignty In The U.S. Territories, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

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This Essay examines the emergence and application of the “ultimate source” test and sheds light on the dual sovereign doctrine’s patently colonial framework, particularly highlighting the paternalistic relationship it has produced between federal and territorial prosecutorial authorities.

Guest Column: Paraquat And The Deliberate Production Of Ignorance, Amit Ray, Earl Ray Dorsey

Articles

The article examines how paraquat's manufacturer used "agnotology" - the deliberate production of ignorance for commercial gain - to hide evidence linking the herbicide to Parkinson's disease. Despite decades of toxic effects documented in company studies, the company expanded sales while allegedly suppressing research and discrediting scientists investigating paraquat dangers.

Paraquat, Parkinson's Disease, And Agnotology, Amit Ray, E. Ray Dorsey

Articles

This commentary examines the controversial relationship between paraquat, a widely used herbicide, and Parkinson's disease through the lens of agnotology—the deliberate production of ignorance for commercial gain. Despite numerous animal and epidemiological studies linking paraquat to Parkinson's disease, its use in the United States doubled from 2013 to 2018. The authors reveal how the manufacturer allegedly employed tactics similar to the tobacco industry, including attempts to discredit scientific researchers and suppress unfavorable findings. While over 30 countries have banned paraquat due to health risks, the EPA reauthorized its use in 2021. The paper argues that internal company documents and emerging …

Harmonizing Music Theory And Music Law, Peter Nicolas

Articles

Those litigating and adjudicating music copyright disputes find themselves at the intersection of two complex fields: U.S. copyright law and music theory. While the attorneys and judges typically have at least some experience with the former, neither they nor the jurors typically have formal training in or experience with the latter. As a result, legal opinions purporting to incorporate musical concepts sometimes fail to do so accurately, resulting in decisions that are inconsistent with copyright law and policy.

This Article seeks to harmonize U.S. copyright law with relevant principles of music theory. It begins with an accessible primer on basic …

Effective Communication With Deaf, Hard Of Hearing, Blind, And Low Vision Incarcerated People, Civil Rights Litigation, Tessa Bialek, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Tens of thousands of people incarcerated in jails and prisons throughout the United States have one or more communication disabilities, a term that describes persons who are deaf, hard of hearing, blind, low vision, deafblind, speech disabled, or otherwise disabled in ways that affect communication. Incarceration is not easy for anyone, but the isolation and inflexibility of incarceration can be especially challenging, dangerous, and further disabling for persons with disabilities. Correctional entities must confront these challenges; the number of incarcerated persons with communication disabilities—already overrepresented in jails and prisons—continues to grow as a proportion. Federal antidiscrimination law obligates jails and …

Medical Training Of Seafarers: International Maritime Health Foundation (Imhf) Expert Panel Consensus Statement, Nebojša Nikolić, Jon Magnus Haga, Jens Tülsner, Per Otto Årland, Alf Magne Horneland, Bill Kavanagh, Klaus Seidenstucker, Spike Briggs, Inger Lund-Kordahl, Cecilia Simolin Pernilla

Articles

Background: Medical emergencies and on-going medical conditions on board may seriously impair seafarers’ health and safety, and also negatively impact on future work prospects for seafarers. When a seafarer gets ill or injured on a ship, medical treatment often relies on the competences on his colleagues on board. The aim of this project was to establish a consensus-based minimum standard for medical education for seafarers, in order to ensure competency for adequate management of ill-health on board.

Materials and methods: International Maritime Health Foundation (IMHF) conducted a workshop on medical training of seafarers. A research-based approach to gain consensus on …

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 …

“Mind The Gap” - An Overview Of The Role Of The Extensions Community Healthcare Outcomes (Echo) Model In Enhancing Value In Health Care Delivery, Christina Kenny, Anushree Priyadarshini

Articles

The ECHO (Extensions Community Healthcare Outcomes) model of healthcare delivery has grown rapidly since its establishment and increased in popularity in recent years. This expansion has developed alongside the growing incidence of chronic diseases and the need to better manage them. The increasing uptake in ECHO has presented a requirement to assess its true value as healthcare costs are increasing globally, resulting in a growing demand by governments and policy makers to ensure chronic disease management strategies provide true value. Therefore, the aim of this review is to examine the impact that ECHO has on clinical practice and how such …

Serum 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Response To Vitamin D Supplementation Using Different Lipid Delivery Systems In Middle-Aged And Older Adults: A Randomised Controlled Trial, Aisling F. Mccourt, Steven L. Mulrooney, Graham O'Neill, E. Dolores O'Riordan, Aifric M. O'Sullivan

Articles

Food fortification improves vitamin D intakes but is not yet mandated in many countries. Combining vitamin D with different dietary lipids altered vitamin D absorption in in vitro and postprandial studies. This randomised, placebo-controlled trial examined the effect of the lipid composition of a vitamin D-fortified dairy drink on change in 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) concentrations. Sixty-three healthy adults aged 50+ years were randomised to one of the following for 4 weeks: vitamin D-fortified olive oil dairy drink, vitamin D-fortified coconut oil dairy drink, vitamin D supplement or placebo control dairy drink. All vitamin D groups received 20 µg of vitamin …

Antibacterial And Antifungal Activity Of Methanolic Extracts Of Salix Alba L. Against Various Disease Causing Pathogens, Bilal Javed, F. Farooq, M. Ibrahim, H.A.B. Abbas, H. Jawwad, S.S. Zehra, H.M. Ahmad, A. Sarwar, K. Malik, K. Nawaz

Articles

The present study was aimed to manifest the antibacterial and antifungal activity of methanolic extracts of Salix alba L. against seven Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial pathogens e.g. Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus aureus (1), S. aureus (2), Shigella sonnei, Escherichia coli (1), E. coli (2) and Neisseria gonorrhoeae and three fungal isolates from the air such as Aspergillus terreus, A. ornatus, and Rhizopus stolonifer. Two different serotypes of S. aureus and E. coli were used. The agar well-diffusion method results showed the dose-dependent response of plant extracts against bacterial and fungal strains while some organisms were found resistant e.g. E. coli (1), …

Numeracy-Meets: An Innovative Professional Development Model For Adult Numeracy Practitioners In Ireland, Mark Prendergast, Annette Forster, Niamh O'Meara, Kathy O'Sullivan, Fiona Faulkner

Articles

Despite the clear and obvious need for adults to be proficient in numeracy, international studies suggest that many continue to struggle in this area. In Ireland, one of the main challenges continues to be the availability of effective adult numeracy education. This is a diverse sector, and little is known about the varied provision of adult numeracy courses and of those who teach on them. Recent research has highlighted an unmet demand for the professional development of adult numeracy practitioners with many looking for opportunities to network and further develop their practice. This study aimed to design, implement and evaluate …

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 …

Hmm, You Seem Confused! Tracking Interlocutor Confusion For Situated Task-Oriented Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

Articles

Our research seeks to develop a long-lasting and high-quality en- gagement between the user and the social robot, which in turn requires a more sophisticated alignment of the user and the system than is currently commonly available. Close monitoring of inter- locutors’ states, and we argue their confusion state in particular, and adjusting dialogue policies based on this state of confusion is needed for successful joint activity. In this paper, we present an ini- tial study of a human-robot conversation scenarios using a Pepper robot to investigate the confusion states of users. A Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) HRI experiment is illustrated in …

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

Articles

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 …

The World Of International & Comparative Law Journals, Kathleen Claussen

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No abstract provided.

Review Of The International Play Policies And Their Contribution To Supporting A Child's Right To Play, Fiona Armstrong, David Gaul

Articles

Play is recognised as a fundamental children's right protected by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Despite legal and constitutional requirements for ensuring children's right to play, there are few international policies dedicated to play. This paper seeks to use a critical discourse analysis lens to compare the current international policies dedicated to play and identify examples of good practice and perceived barriers to the successful development and implementation of play policies.

The Political Question Doctrine And International Law, Curtis Bradley

Articles

Under the political question doctrine, some issues are deemed to be inappropriate for judicial resolution. The modern version of the doctrine is typically traced to the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr, in which the Court listed six reasons why an issue might be treated as political. Although the doctrine has received significant scholarly attention, most modern commentary has overlooked the historic relationship between the doctrine and international law. As this Essay documents, the political question doctrine emerged in part to allow the political branches, rather than the courts, to make determinations about this country’s—and other countries’—rights and …

How Redundant Are Redundant Encodings? Blindness In The Wild And Racial Disparity When Race Is Unobserved, Jacob Goldin, Lingwei Cheng, Isabel Gallegos, Derek Ouyang, Daniel Ho

Articles

We address two emerging concerns in algorithmic fairness: (i) redundant encodings of race – the notion that machine learning models encode race with probability nearing one as the feature set grows – which is widely noted in theory, with little empirical evidence; and (ii) the lack of race and ethnicity data in many domains, where state-of-the-art remains (Naive) Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) that relies on name and geographic information. We leverage a novel and highly granular dataset of over 7.7 million patients’ electronic health records to provide one of the first empirical studies of redundant encodings in a realistic …