Digital Commons Network^™

Locating Liability For Medical Ai, W. Nicholson Price Ii, I. Glenn Cohen

Articles

When medical AI systems fail, who should be responsible, and how? We argue that various features of medical AI complicate the application of existing tort doctrines and render them ineffective at creating incentives for the safe and effective use of medical AI. In addition to complexity and opacity, the problem of contextual bias, where medical AI systems vary substantially in performance from place to place, hampers traditional doctrines. We suggest instead the application of enterprise liability to hospitals—making them broadly liable for negligent injuries occurring within the hospital system—with an important caveat: hospitals must have access to the information needed …

Valuing Social Data, Amanda Parsons, Salome Viljoen

Articles

Social data production—accumulating, processing, and using large volumes of data about people—is a unique form of value creation that characterizes the digital economy. Social data production also presents critical challenges for the legal regimes that encounter it. This Article provides scholars and policymakers with the tools to comprehend this new form of value creation through two descriptive contributions. First, it presents a theoretical account of social data, a mode of production that is cultivated and exploited for two distinct (albeit related) forms of value: prediction value and exchange value. Second, it creates and defends a taxonomy of three “scripts” that …

Tying Law For The Digital Age, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Tying arrangements, a central concern of antitrust policy since the early days of the Sherman and Clayton Acts, have come into renewed focus with re-spect to the practices of dominant technology companies. Unfortunately, tying law’s doctrinal structure is a self-contradictory and incoherent wreck. A con-ventional view holds that this mess is due to errant Supreme Court precedents, never fully corrected, that expressed hostility to tying based on faulty economic understanding. That is only part of the story. Examination of tying law’s origins and development shows that tying doctrine was built on a now-dated paradigm of what constitutes a tying arrangement. …

Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Drug Development, Louise C. Druedahl, Nicholson Price, Timo Minssen, Dipl Jur, Ameet Sarpatwari

Articles

Considerable focus has been placed on the health care applications of artificial intelligence (AI). Already, machine learning, a subset of AI that involves “the use of data and algorithms to imitate the way that humans learn” has been used to predict diseases, while AI-powered smartphone apps have been developed to promote mental health and weight loss. Owing in part to such successes, the market for AI in health care has been forecasted to increase more than 1000% between 2022 and 2029, from $13.8 billion to $164.1 billion. One area of substantial promise is drug development, which is poised to benefit …

The Macroprudential Myth, Jeremy C. Kress, Jeffery Yufeng Zhang

Articles

According to conventional wisdom, the 2008 fnancial crisis fundamen- tally changed how policymakers approach fnancial regulation. Before the crisis, regulators sought to prevent individual fnancial institutions from collapsing, but this “microprudential” strategy proved inadequate to stop the market-wide meltdown. In response, policymakers purportedly turned to a new “macroprudential” approach that prioritizes the stability of the fnancial system as a whole instead of individual institutions in isolation. Regulators in the United States and abroad enthusiastically embraced macroprudential policy, implementing stress tests, capital buffers, liquidity requirements, and other supposed macroprudential tools. As the United States’ top bank regulator declared in 2015, “[W]e …

Two Takes On Administrative Change From The Roberts Court, Daniel Deacon, Leah Litman

Articles

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court finally did what many long hoped (or feared) it would do: overrule Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Chevron instructed courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statutory provision, provided the interpretation was reasonable. Chevron, according to Justice Kagan, had “served as a cornerstone of administrative law” and “the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds—to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.” Not surprisingly, statutes governing such matters contain quite a number of …

Building The Gateway: Why The Two Pillars Need Each Other., Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Ajitesh Kir

Articles

There is a reason the OECD proposed two pillars for its gateway to a better tax future. A gateway requires both pillars, and neither can stand without the other. Pillar 2 is a fait accompli, but it needs countries to implement Pillar 1 as well because in the absence of a clear sourcing rule there is no limit to countries implementing the Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax (QDMTT), which would turn off the other parts of Pillar 2 and potentially result in double taxation. Pillar 1 is not going forward in the absence of a Multilateral Tax Convention (MLC), but …

Congress And Shifting Sands In Administrative Law., Christopher J. Walker

Articles

In recent years, we have seen an anti-administrativist turn in the federal judiciary, with the Supreme Court limiting agency power in important respects. These shifting sands in administrative law seem to be motivated, at least in part, by the Court’s perception of the rise of presidential administration and decline in legislative activity. As part of the Widener Commonwealth Law Review Judging in Administrative Law Symposium, this Essay assesses how the Court has responded to concerns about over-presidentialism and then sketches out several ways Congress can respond to reassert itself in federal lawmaking.

Fifty Years Of 'Cut To Grow': How Changing Narratives Around Corporate Tax Policy Have Undermined Child And Family Well-Being, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Emily Divito, Niko Lusiani

Articles

What follows in this report is an assessment, though not exhaustive, of the central worldviews and set of assumptions driving key US corporate tax reform moments in history—and their consequences for the well-being of children and families in the US. Though political narratives of all kinds are never cleanly chronological (and this remains true of those pertaining to corporate taxation and well-being policies), we aim to build on existing understanding of how dominant narratives come to be and how they, to the extent that they do, drive corporate tax policy outcomes in the US. Looking back over the past 50 …

A Fractured Supreme Court: Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The Supreme Court’S 2023-24 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Jordan Schuler

Articles

In its 2023-2024 Term, the Supreme Court outlined the contours of when a former President of the United States would be immune from criminal prosecution; issued important decisions interpreting the scope of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause, the Double Jeopardy Clause, the Confrontation Clause, and the Second Amendment right to bear arms; decided a number of important statutory interpretation cases; and continued to avoid Fourth Amendment issues, only addressing them in the context of a malicious prosecution charge. Perhaps more striking than the Court’s decisions in these cases, though, was the Justices’ lack of consensus. Of the 16 criminal …

Global, Regional, And National Burden Of Heatwave-Related Mortality From 1990 To 2019: A Three-Stage Modelling Study, Qi Zhao, Shanshan Li, Tingting Ye, Yao Wu, Antonio Gasparrini, Shilu Tong, Aleš Urban, Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera, Aurelio Tobias, Ben Armstrong, Dominic Royé, Eric Lavigne, Francesca De'donato, Francesco Sera, Haidong Kan, Joel Schwartz, Mathilde Pascal, Niilo Ryti, Patrick Goodman, Paulo Hilario Nascimento Saldiva, Michelle L. Bell, Yuming Guo

Articles

Background The regional disparity of heatwave-related mortality over a long period has not been sufficiently assessed across the globe, impeding the localisation of adaptation planning and risk management towards climate change. We quantified the global mortality burden associated with heatwaves at a spatial resolution of 0.5∘×0.5∘and the temporal change from 1990 to 2019. Methods and findings We collected data on daily deaths and temperature from 750 locations of 43 countries or regions, and 5 meta-predictors in 0.5∘×0.5∘ resolution across the world. Heatwaves were defined as location-specific daily mean temperature ≥95th percentiles of year-round temperature range with duration ≥2 days. We …

Seasonality Of Mortality Under Climate Change: A Multicountry Projection Study, Multi-Country Multi-City (Mcc) Collaborative Network, Patrick Goodman

Articles

Background: Climate change can directly impact temperature-related excess deaths and might subsequently change the seasonal variation in mortality. In this study, we aimed to provide a systematic and comprehensive assessment of potential future changes in the seasonal variation, or seasonality, of mortality across different climate zones. Methods: In this modelling study, we collected daily time series of mean temperature and mortality (all causes or non-external causes only) via the Multi-Country Multi-City Collaborative (MCC) Research Network. These data were collected during overlapping periods, spanning from Jan 1, 1969 to Dec 31, 2020. We projected daily mortality from Jan 1, 2000 to …

A Global Model-Agnostic Rule-Based Xai Method Based On Parameterized Event Primitives For Time Series Classifiers, Ephrem Tibebe Mekonnen, Luca Longo, Pierpaolo Dondio

Articles

Time series classification is a challenging research area where machine learning and deep learning techniques have shown remarkable performance. However, often, these are seen as black boxes due to their minimal interpretability. On the one hand, there is a plethora of eXplainable AI (XAI) methods designed to elucidate the functioning of models trained on image and tabular data. On the other hand, adapting these methods to explain deep learning-based time series classifiers may not be straightforward due to the temporal nature of time series data. This research proposes a novel global post-hoc explainable method for unearthing the key time steps …

Neural Correlates Of Audiovisual Narrative Speech Perception In Children And Adults On The Autism Spectrum: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, Lars A. Ross, Sophie Molholm, John S. Butler, Victor A. Del Bene, Tufikameni Brima, John J. Foxe

Articles

Autistic individuals show substantially reduced benefit from observing visual articulations during audiovisual speech perception, a multisensory integration deficit that is particularly relevant to social communication. This has mostly been studied using simple syllabic or word-level stimuli and it remains unclear how altered lower-level multisensory integration translates to the processing of more complex natural multisensory stimulus environments in autism. Here, functional neuroimaging was used to examine neural correlates of audiovisual gain (AV-gain) in 41 autistic individuals to those of 41 age-matched non-autistic controls when presented with a complex audiovisual narrative. Participants were presented with continuous narration of a story in auditory-alone, …

Conventional Extraction Of Fucoidan From Irish Brown Seaweed Fucus Vesiculosus Followed By Ultrasound-Assisted Depolymerization, Viruja Ummat, Saravana Periaswamy Sivagnanam, Dilip K. Rai, Colm O’Donnell, Gillian E. Conway, Shane M. Heffernan, Stephen Fitzpatrick, Henry Lyons, James Curtin, Brijesh Kumar Tiwari

Articles

Fucoidan has attracted considerable attention from scientists and pharmaceutical companies due to its antioxidant, anticoagulant, anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor, and health-enhancing properties. However, the extraction of fucoidan from seaweeds often involves the use of harsh chemicals, which necessitates the search for alternative solvents. Additionally, the high viscosity and low cell permeability of high molecular weight (Mw) fucoidan can limit its effectiveness in drug action, while lower Mw fractions exhibit increased biological activity and are also utilized as dietary supplements. The study aimed to (1) extract fucoidan from the seaweed Fucus vesiculosus (FV) using an environmentally friendly solvent and compare it with the …

Framing A Feminist Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Lived Experiences Of Women Entrepreneurs, Edicleia Oliveira, Serge Basini, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

Purpose – This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women’s entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework.

Design/methodology/approach – The article critically examines the current state of women’s entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology.

Findings – The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women’s entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance …

Framing A Feminist Phenomenological Inquiry Into The Lived Experiences Of Women Entrepreneurs, Edicleia Oliveira, Serge Basini, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

Purpose: This article aims to explore the potential of feminist phenomenology as a conceptual framework for advancing women's entrepreneurship research and the suitability of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to the proposed framework. Design/methodology/approach: The article critically examines the current state of women's entrepreneurship research regarding the institutional context and highlights the benefits of a shift towards feminist phenomenology. Findings: The prevailing disembodied and gender-neutral portrayal of entrepreneurship has resulted in an equivocal understanding of women's entrepreneurship and perpetuated a male-biased discourse within research and practice. By adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, this article argues for the importance of considering the …

Machine Vs Machine: Large Language Models (Llms) In Applied Machine Learning High-Stakes Open-Book Exams, Keith Quille, Csanad Alattyanyi, Brett A. Becker, Róisín Faherty, Damian Gordon, Miriam Harte, Svetlana Hensman, Markus Hofmann, Jorge Jiménez García, Anthony Kuznetsov, Conrad Marais, Keith Nolan, Cianan Nicolai, Ciarán O'Leary, Andrzej Zero

Articles

There is a significant gap in Computing Education Research (CER) concerning the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) in advanced stages of degree programmes. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the effectiveness of LLMs in answering exam questions within an applied machine learning final-year undergraduate course. The research examines the performance of LLMs in responding to a range of exam questions, including proctored closed-book and open-book questions spanning various levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Question formats encompassed open-ended, tabular data-based, and figure-based inquiries. To achieve this aim, the study has the following objectives: Comparative Analysis: To compare LLM-generated …

Soil Organic Matter Components And Characteristics Of Forest Soil In Spruce And Sycamore Plantations In The Temperate Region, Samuel Obeng Apori, Michelle Giltrap, Julie Dunne, Furong Tian

Articles

No abstract provided.

Toward Circular Economy: Potentials Of Spent Coffee Grounds In Bioproducts And Chemical Production, Hisham Ahmed, Rasaq S. Abolore, Swarna Jaiswal, Amit K. Jaiswal

Articles

With growing concern over environmental sustainability and dwindling fossil resources, it is crucial to prioritise the development of alternative feedstocks to replace fossil resources. Spent coffee grounds (SCGs) are an environmental burden with an estimated six million tons being generated on a wet basis annually, globally. SCGs are rich in cellulose, lignin, protein, lipids, polyphenols and other bioactive compounds which are important raw materials for use in industries including pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. Furthermore, the energy sector has the potential to capitalize on the high calorific value of SCGs for biofuel and biogas production, offering a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. …

Confronting Structural Inequality In State Labor Law, Andrew Elmore

Articles

Low-wage workers face a structural problem in seeking to improve their work standards: While companies have substantial labor market power to impose work terms and conditions, workers require affirmative state support to collectively press their workplace demands. But their employers can mobilize private capital and property rights, often with judicial deference, to fend off state intrusions into the workplace. While the National Labor Relations Act aims to resolve this structural problem by protecting the rights of workers to join unions, strike, and collectively bargain, employers, backed by judicial support for managerial prerogatives and property rights, can often leverage NLRA weaknesses …

Politicizing Antisemitism Amidst Today's Educational Culture Wars, Lili Levi

Articles

The traditional narrative of American Jewry emphasizes American exceptionalism with respect to antisemitism. But there have been clear signs of a resurgence of public antisemitism in the United States even before the massive rise in antisemitic expression and incidents associated with the Israel-Hamas war of fall 2023.

One of the notable aspects of the rise and normalization of antisemitic expression is the deployment of antisemitism as a political tool. For example, in addition to Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of complicity in antisemitism, both federal policy since the Trump era and state anti-antisemitism legislation have targeted campus antisemitism in …

Chickpea Seed Endophyte Enterobacter Sp. Mediated Yield And Nutritional Enrichment Of Chickpea For Improving Human And Livestock Health, Arpan Mukherjee, Anand Kumar Gaurav, Gowardhan Kumar Chouhan, Saurabh Singh, Ankita Sarkar, Saman Abeysinghe, Jay Prakash Verma

Articles

Chickpeas (Cicer arietinum L.) are used as a good source of proteins and energy in the diets of various organisms including humans and animals. Chickpea straws can serve as an alternative option for forage for different ruminants. This research mainly focussed on screening the effects of adding beneficial chickpea seed endophytes on increasing the nutritional properties of the different edible parts of chickpea plants. Two efficient chickpea seed endophytes (Enterobacter sp. strain BHUJPCS-2 and BHUJPCS-8) were selected and applied to the chickpea seeds before sowing in the experiment conducted on clay pots. Chickpea seeds treated with both endophytes showed improved …

Vitamin K2 In Health And Disease: A Clinical Perspective, Tao Zhang, Christine O'Connor, Helen Sheridan, James W. Barlow

Articles

Vitamins are essential organic compounds that vary widely in chemical structure and are vital in small quantities for numerous biochemical and biological functions. They are critical for metabolism, growth, development and maintaining overall health. Vitamins are categorised into two groups: hydrophilic and lipophilic. Vitamin K (VK), a lipophilic vitamin, occurs naturally in two primary forms: phylloquinone (VK1), found in green leafy vegetables and algae, and Menaquinones (VK2), present in certain fermented and animal foods and widely formulated in VK supplements. This review explores the possible factors contributing to VK deficiency, including dietary influences, and discusses the pharmacological and therapeutic potential …

Combinedeepnet: A Deep Network For Multistep Prediction Of Near-Surface Pm2.5 Concentration, Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Bianca Schoen Phelan

Articles

PM2.5 is a type of air pollutant that can cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Precise PM2.5 (μg/m3) concentration prediction may help reduce health concerns and provide early warnings. To better understand air pollution, a number of approaches have been presented for predicting PM2.5 concentrations. Previous research used deep learning models for hourly predictions of air pollutants due to their success in pattern recognition, however, these models were unsuitable for multisite, long-term predictions, particularly in regard to the correlation between pollutants and meteorological data. This article proposes the combine deep network (CombineDeepNet), which combines multiple deep networks, including a bidirectional long …

Mental Workload As A Predictor Of Atco's Performance: Lessons Learnt From Atm Task-Related Experiments, Enrique Muñoz-De-Escalona, Maria Chiara Leva, José Juan Cañas

Articles

Air Traffic Controllers' (ATCos) mental workload is likely to remain the specific greatest functional limitation on the capacity of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. Developing computational models to monitor mental workload and task complexity is essential for enabling ATCOs and ATM systems to adapt to varying task demands. Most methodologies have computed task complexity based on basic parameters such as air-traffic density; however, literature research has shown that it also depends on many other factors. In this paper, we present a study in which we explored the possibility of predicting task complexity and performance through mental workload measurements of …

Enhancing Inclusive Entrepreneurial Activity Through Community Engagement Led By Higher Education Institutions, Emma O'Brien, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

While supporting entrepreneurship through government intervention has become a global phenomenon, the OECD (2021) has identified that several communities (including women, youth, seniors, unemployed and immigrants) remain under-represented in terms of entrepreneurial activity. Inclusive entrepreneurship policies seek to enhance economic and social inclusion and emphasise the significant contribution that people from within these communities could make to local and regional development if appropriate support was offered. The purpose of this study is to examine how higher education institutions (HEIs) can co-create inclusive entrepreneurial training initiatives with local communities that support economic and social inclusion.

A Critical Race Theory Analysis Of Critical Race Theory Bans, Caroline Mala Corbin

Articles

A majority of state legislatures have introduced bills prohibiting public schools from teaching certain "divisive concepts" attributed to critical race theory (CRT), with at least fifteen states successfully enacting them. This Article applies a critical race theory analysis to these critical race theory bans, finding that the bans embody white privilege and especially its companion, white fragility.

After providing a primer on critical race theory, Part I explains how the state bans profoundly misunderstand critical race theory, which focuses on how systems and institutions reproduce racial inequality. These bans, however, assume that racism is individual, intentional, and rare, and that …

Toxicological And Biomarker Assessment Of Freshwater Zebra Mussels (Dreissena Polymorpha) Exposed To Nano-Polystyrene, Andrew Reynolds, Enya Cody, Michelle Giltrap, Gordon Chambers

Articles

The presence of sub-micron-sized plastics in the environment has been increasing, with the possible risks of these particles remaining relatively unknown. In order to assess the toxicity of these particles, 100 nm diameter green fluorescent nano-polystyrene spheres (NPS) (20–60 mg/L) were exposed to zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) to investigate the mortality, clearance rate and stress-related biomarker responses. D. polymorpha were collected and analysed with standard OECD toxicological tests and biomarker analysis to detect both physical and biochemical responses after exposure to NPS. The toxicity of the NPS to D. polymorpha was low, with 60 mg/L NPS causing a mortality rate …

Exoneration Finance, Kay L. Levine, Russell M. Gold

Articles

The path to financial compensation for the wrongfully convicted can be complex and time-consuming. Exonerees often struggle to make ends meet and function in free society, let alone navigate serpentine processes while waiting years for the recovery they deserve. Securing the assistance of an attorney is often a critical step, but too few lawyers are willing to risk accepting these complicated cases on a contingency-fee basis the only way that exoneree-clients can likely pay their lawyers without outside help.

Litigation finance an important tool for increasing access to justice in tort cases could help close this access to justice gap …