Digital Commons Network^™

Aesthetics Of Slavery & Slave Trade Crimes, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum

Articles

In his insightful new book, Invisible Atrocities, Randle DeFalco examines the aesthetic biases of international criminal law (ICL). DeFalco astutely argues that ICL prioritizes punishing "horrific spectacles" of violence while ignoring less visible, attritive forms of violence that cause similar levels of harm and suffering, generally over longer periods of time. While ICL is selective in its preference for "horrific spectacles," even the spectacular violence has been rendered invisible in ICL when inconvenient factual evidence counters dominant narratives in international law.

One such dominant narrative is the successful abolition of slavery and the slave trade of the nineteenth and twentieth …

Who Owns Data? Constitutional Division In Cyberspace, Dongsheng Zang

Articles

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 …

Startup Biases, Jennifer S. Fan

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This Article provides an original descriptive account of bias in the startup context and explains why litigation is eschewed and what happens when it is used as a mechanism to combat bias in the venture capital ecosystem. Further, this Article identifies two particular phenomena in the startup context that exacerbate gender and racial bias. First, homophily—the idea that like attracts like—abounds and has been part of the DNA of venture capital since its inception. The thick networks that developed as venture capital made its way from the East Coast to the West Coast were limited to an elite group that …

Taxing Digital Platforms, Andrew Hayashi, Young Ran (Christine) Kim

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The proliferation of digital services taxes (DSTs) in Europe is generally understood as a way for those countries to claim taxing rights over the profits of large digital platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Under prevailing norms of international income taxation, these businesses had been able to avoid paying taxes in countries where they had no physical presence, even if they had many users in those countries. But the rise of big tech has generated a set of regulatory and political challenges, and tax is only one of these. The adoption of DSTs is not only about the fair …

Reflections On Fees And Fines As Stategraft, Rebekah Diller, Mitali Nagrecha, Alicia Bannon

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In A Theory of Stategraft, Bernadette Atuahene advances the concept of “stategraft” to describe situations in which “state agents transfer property from persons to the state in violation of the state’s own laws or basic human rights.” This Essay delineates the ways in which criminal legal system fees and fines can be characterized as stategraft and explores the value of this concept for social movements. In many ways, the stategraft frame, with its focus on illegality, fits well with much of the litigation and advocacy against unconstitutional fees-and-fines practices that have occurred over the last decade. Exposing illegal practices …

Acting In Good Faith, Tanya Dean

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No abstract provided.

Enhanced Internal Coating Structure And Light Reflectance Of Coated Papers: A Sludge Valorization Process, Bilge N. Altay, Anamika Huq, Burak Aksoy, Richard Hailstone, Muslum Demir, Cem Aydemir, Arif Karademir, Scott Williams

Articles

Paper mill sludge (PMS) is a high-volume waste of the pulppapermaking industry, containing cellulose fibers. This paper introduces cellulose nanofibers extracted from PMS (CNFsPMS) and their application in paper coatings using a wire-wound coating method to enhance internal and optical properties of paper. Three factors were investigated: (i) CNFsPMS amount, (ii) number of layers, and (iii) surface treatment via a 4 × 2 × 2 factorial design. The experimental responses were tracked by fundamentally important internal properties including porosity, air permeability, thickness, roughness, and optical properties of brightness, gloss, and CIE L*a*b* color coordination. The results showed that CNFPMS enhances …

Unbelievable: How Narrative Can Help Vulnerable Narrators Overcome Perceived Unreliability In The Legal System, Cathren Page

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This article examines how advocates can champion vulnerable narrators’ truths. First, advocates must prime the audience by educating the audience about the ways the vulnerability manifests; this process helps to allay credibility questions. Second, advocates must reframe seemingly untrustworthy behavior by showing how the behavior is consistent with someone in the vulnerable narrator’s situation. Third, advocates must create what fiction writers call verisimilitude—a sense of reality—by including concrete details that logically fit together in the legal narrative. Finally, advocates must label the tactics commonly used to discredit vulnerable narrators so that the audience can see those tactics for what they …

The Coming Copyright Judge Crisis, Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Dave Fagundes

Articles

Commentary about the Supreme Court's 2021 decision in United States v. Arthrex, Inc. has focused on the nexus between patent and administrative law. But this overlooks the decision's seismic and as-yet unappreciated implication for copyright law: Arthrex renders the Copyright Royalty Board ("CRB") unconstitutional. The CRB has suffered constitutional challenge since its 2004 inception, but these were seemingly resolved in 2011 when the D.C. Circuit held that the CRB's composition did not offend the Appointments Clause as long as Copyright Royalty Judges ("CRJs") were removable atwill. But when the Court invalidated the selection process for administrative patent judges on a …

Microsoft's Cost-Sharing Arrangement: Frankenstein Strikes Again, Stephen L. Curtis, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This paper performs a forensic analysis of Microsoft Corporation’s transfer pricing cost sharing arrangement based on forensic economic analysis of public and information, including Microsoft’s SEC and foreign country regulatory filings, documents disclosed during a recent federal court trial, materials published by Microsoft, and information from former insiders interviewed for this paper, and other sources. The paper finds that Microsoft appears to have violated U.S. transfer pricing laws in 2009 and later years, in ways that caused its transfer pricing cost sharing arrangement with its Irish, Singaporean and Puerto Rican affiliates under U.S. tax laws to be invalid. However IRS …

Digital Tax Arithmetic., James R. Hines Jr.

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More than 20 countries recently adopted digital services taxes, with many others threatening to do so. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is attempting to convince countries to withdraw their digital taxes in return for an international agreement to implement its Pillar One proposal that would let countries tax prorated shares of the profits of foreign firms with local sales. This paper identifies incentives that countries have to impose inefficiently high rates of digital taxes and calls attention to shortcomings of the OECD’s formulary apportionment alternative. Diverging interests and the inflexible nature of the multilateral bargaining process make …

The Association Between Time Spent On Screens And Reading With Myopia, Premyopia And Ocular Biometric And Anthropometric Measures In 6- To 7-Year-Old Schoolchildren In Ireland, Síofra Harrington, Veronica O'Dwyer

Articles

Purpose More time spent on near tasks has consistently been associated with the promotion of myopia. The World Health Organization advises limiting daily screentime to less than 2 h for children aged five and over. This study explored the relationship between time spent on screens and reading/writing with refractive status, ocular biometric and anthropometric factors in 6-to 7-year- olds in Ireland.

Methods Participants were 723 schoolchildren (377 boys [51.8%]), mean age 7.08 (0.45) years. The examination included cycloplegic autorefraction (1% cyclopentolate hydrochloride), ocular biometry (Zeiss IOLMaster), height (cm) and weight (kg). Screentime and reading/writing time were reported by parents/legal guardians …

Cognitive Software Defined Networking And Network Function Virtualization And Applications, Sachin Sharma, Avishek Nag

Articles

The emergence of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the Internet. Using SDN, network devices can be controlled from a centralized, programmable control plane that is decoupled from their data plane, whereas with NFV, network functions (such as network address translation, firewall, and intrusion detection) can be virtualized instead of being implemented on proprietary hardware. In addition, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques will be key to automating network operations and enhancing customer service. Many of the challenges behind SDN and NFV are currently being investigated in several projects all over the world using …

Comparison Of Cycloplegia At 20- And 30-Minutes Following Proxymetacaine And Cyclopentolate Instillation In White 12-13-Year-Olds, Megan Doyle, Veronica O'Dwyer, Siofra Harrington

Articles

Clinical Relevance

Reducing the time between drop instillation and refraction reduces the time paediatric patients and young adults spend in practice, facilitating more eye examinations daily.

Background

The current procedure for paediatric cycloplegic refraction is to wait for at least 30-minutes post-instillation of a cycloplegic before measuring spherical equivalent refraction. This study compared cycloplegia at 20- and 30-minutes following 0.5% proxymetacaine and 1.0% cyclopentolate in 12-13-year-olds.

Methods

Participants were 99 white 12-13-year-olds. One drop of proxymetacaine hydrochloride (Minims, 0.5% w/v, Bausch & Lomb, UK) followed by one drop of cyclopentolate hydrochloride (Minims, 1.0% w/v, Bausch & Lomb, UK) was instilled …

Qualified Immunity’S Flawed Foundation, Alexander A. Reinert

Articles

Qualified immunity has faced trenchant criticism for decades, but recent events have renewed focus on this powerful defense to liability for constitutional violations. This Article takes aim at the roots of the doctrine—fundamental errors that have never been excavated. First, this Article demonstrates that the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence is premised on a flawed application of a dubious canon of statutory construction—namely, that statutes in “derogation” of the common law should be strictly construed. Applying the Derogation Canon, the Court has held that 42 U.S.C. § 1983’s silence regarding immunity should be taken as an implicit adoption of common …

Antimatters: The Curious Case Of Confederate Monuments, Jeremiah Chin

Articles

Confederate monuments sit at a crossroads of speech frameworks as contested government speech, as concrete edifices of hate speech, and as key protest sites. The interplay of state law and speech doctrines in states like Alabama and Florida has cemented monuments as physical representations of government speech that municipal governments cannot speak on. To understand the confounding ways that doctrinal principles take on inverse implications, this Article draws on the concept of antimatter in physics—matter that has the same mass and properties of ordinary matter but with the opposite charge—to analyze doctrinal intersections of constitutional law that are made to …

Mitigating Catastrophe Risk For Landowners, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Local, national, and global catastrophes entail significant risk for landowners. The government-sponsored National Flood Insurance Program illustrates how subsidizing insurance against catastrophe risk can result in overinvestment in risk-prone properties. Government intervention, however, has largely been a response to the historical failure of the private insurance industry to provide adequate protection against correlated risks, a failure with the potential to generate underinvestment in land and devastate existing owners.

When data is available about the incidence and severity of potential disasters, improvements in technology have made it more feasible for insurers to calibrate premiums and discounts with greater accuracy, and sophisticated …

Editorial: Green Chemistry Biocatalysis, Barry J. Ryan, Gary T. Henehan, Bekir E. Eser, Ning Li, Zheng Guo, Gemma K. Kinsella

Articles

Editorial on the Research Topic: Green chemistry biocatalysis

Visual Literacy Of Molecular Biology Revealed Through A Card-Sorting Task, Dina L. Newman, Hannah Spector, Anna Neuenschwander, Anna J. Miller, Lauren Trumpore, Leslie Kate Wright

Articles

Visual literacy, which is the ability to effectively identify, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media, is an important aspect of science literacy. As molecular processes are not directly observable, researchers and educators rely on visual representations (e.g., drawings) to communicate ideas in biology. How learners interpret and organize those numerous diagrams is related to their underlying knowledge about biology and their skills in visual literacy. Furthermore, it is not always obvious how and why learners interpret diagrams in the way they do (especially if their interpretations are unexpected), as it is not possible to “see” inside the …

An Alternative To Hapke’S Macroscopic Roughness Correction, Dylan J. Shiltz, Charles M. Bachmann

Articles

In this paper, we present an alternative to Hapke’s correction for the photometric effect of macroscopic roughness of planetary surfaces (Hapke, 1984). Our model includes the effects of both single-facet scattering and multi-facet scattering. The single-facet scattering model is derived directly from the definition of bidirectional reflectance of a rough surface. We model projected shadowing by adopting an approximation published elsewhere in the literature. Monte Carlo simulations of single-facet scattering demonstrate very good agreement with the single-facet scattering component of our model. Using 3D printed molds with known roughness statistics, we prepared rough mineral surfaces consisting of quartz and olivine …

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 …

Influence Of Physical And Mechanical Parameters On Cavitation Erosion And Antifouling Behaviour Of Multilayer Silica-Based Hybrid Sol–Gel Coatings On Aluminium Alloys, Manasa Hegde, Marta Mroczkowska, Joseph Mohan, Adriana Cunha Neves, Yvonne Kavanagh, Brendan Duffy, Edmond F. Tobin

Articles

Sol–gel coatings can provide anti-fouling and erosion resistance while being safe to use in the marine environment. MAPTMS/ZPO multilayer coatings deposited on the AA2024-T3 aluminium surface using the dip-coating method at three different thicknesses (2, 4, and 6 m) are investigated in this work. The coatings are characterised in terms of physical and mechanical properties, and these properties are investigated in comparison to previously obtained cavitation erosion resistance levels of the coatings. Additionally, the efficiency of the coatings against biofouling was assessed using Phaeodactylum tricornutum, a marine diatom. The influence of the formation of organic–inorganic hybrid materials (OIHMs) from the …

Investing In Virtue And Frowning At Vice? Lessons From The Global Economic And Financial Crisis, Lucia Morales, Daniel Rajmil

Articles

Socially responsible mutual funds (SRMF) and the “antisocially conscious”, Vitium Global Fund Barrier Fund (formerly known as the Vice Fund, the term used in this paper) returns, volatility patterns, and causal effects are examined in this study within the context of the lessons learned from the 2008 Global Economic and Financial Crisis (GEFC). In times of a new and unprecedented crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a look back to our recent past reveals that volatility patterns on daily stock returns presented some level of predictability on prices for both types of funds. The research findings are significant as funds’ …

The Future Of Clinical Trials Of Myopia Control, Mark A. Bullimore, Noel A. Brennan, Daniel I. Flintcroft

Articles

In the field of myopia control, effective optical or pharmaceutical therapies are now available to patients in many markets. This creates challenges for the conduct of placebo-controlled, randomised clinical trials, including ethics, recruitment, retention, selective loss of faster progressors and non-protocol treatments: 1. Ethics: It is valid to question whether withholding treatment in control subjects is ethical. 2. Recruitment: Availability of treatments is making recruitment into clinical trials more difficult. 3. Retention: If masking is not possible, parents may immediately withdraw their child if randomised to no treatment. 4. Selective loss: Withdrawal of fast progressors in the control group leading …

Three-Dimensional (3d) In Vitro Cell Culture Protocols To Enhance Glioblastoma Research, Janith Wanigasekara, Lara Carroll, Patrick J. Cullen, Brijesh K. Tiwari, James Curtin

Articles

Three-dimensional (3D) cell culture models can help bridge the gap between in vitro cell cultures and in vivo responses by more accurately simulating the natural in vivo environment, shape, tissue stiffness, stressors, gradients and cellular response while avoiding the costs and ethical concerns associated with animal models. The inclusion of the third dimension in 3D cell culture influences the spatial organization of cell surface receptors that interact with other cells and imposes physical restrictions on cells in compared to Two-dimensional (2D) cell cultures. Spheroids’ distinctive cyto-architecture mimics in vivo cellular structure, gene expression, metabolism, proliferation, oxygenation, nutrition absorption, waste excretion, …

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), …

Enhanced Gene Transfection Efficacy And Safety Through Granular Hydrogel Mediated Gene Delivery Process, Jing Zhang, Zhonglei He, Yinghao Li, Yu Shen, Guanfu Wu, Laura Power, Rijian Song, Ming Zeng, Xianqing Wang, Irene Lara Sáez, Sigen A, Qian Xu, James Curtin, Ziyi Yu, Wenxin Wang

Articles

Although gene therapy has made great achievements in both laboratory research and clinical translation, there are still challenges such as limited control of drug pharmacokinetics, acute toxicity, poor tissue retention, insufficient efficacy, and inconsistent clinical translation. Herein, a gene therapy gel is formulated by directly redispersing polyplex nanoparticles into granular hydrogels without any gelation pre-treatment, which provides great convenience for storage, dosing and administration. In vitro studies have shown that use of granular hydrogels can regulate the gene drug release, reduce dose dependent toxicity and help improve transfection efficacy. Moreover, the developed gene therapy gel is easy to operate and …

Assessing Authentically – Learnings From Marketing Educators, S. Montano, L. Gill-Simmen, D. Lee, Lucia Walsh, Deirdre Duffy Dr, N. Newman

Articles

This paper demonstrates the importance and role of authentic assessments, that replicate industry practice, within Higher Education marketing programmes. We answer the call from employers, that students need to gain much-needed employability skills, and we illustrate how such assessments can be created to enable the development of employability skills. We provide an overview of four case studies, to illustrate different forms of authentic assessments, the theory which was used to underpin the designs, the skills developed during the assessments, and the outcomes of the assessments. As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a move to online assessments, it …

Tio2-Mwcnt Nanohybrid: Cytotoxicity, Protein Corona Formation And Cellular Internalisation In Rtg-2 Fish Cell Line, Gabriela Helena Da Silva, Lidiane Silva Franqui, Marcelo A. De Farias, Vera Lucia S.S. De Castro, Hugh Byrne, Diego S.T. Martinez, Regina T.R. Monteiro, Alan Casey

Articles

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles-multiwalled carbon nanotubes (TiO2-MWCNT) nanohydrid has an enhanced photocatalytic activity across the visible light with promising applications in environmental remediation, solar energy devices and antimicrobial technologies. However, it is necessary to evaluate the toxicological effects of TiO2-MWCNT towards safe and sustainable development of nanohybrids. In this work, we studied the cytotoxicity, protein corona formation and cellular internalisation of TiO2-MWCNT on fibroblasts derived from gonadal rainbow trout tissue (RTG-2) for the first time. This nanohydrid did not show any toxicity effect on RTG-2 cells up to 100 mg L-1 after 24 h of exposure as monitored by alamar blue, …

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

Articles

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 …