Digital Commons Network^™

The Amazing Carrie Menkel-Meadow And What Wins When Passions Collide, Lela Love

Articles

Carrie Menkel-Meadow (sometimes referred to as “Carrie” herein) is famous in the dispute resolution world as one of the field’s founders. Her prolific writing on dispute resolution—negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and the variants of these major processes—evidences an unrivaled passion for the subject. A renaissance thinker, her intellectual explorations also extend to other areas such as women’s rights and restorative justice for victims of egregious wrongs.

Her multiple passions sometimes create dynamic tensions. For example, what happens if mediation norms threaten a woman’s rights? Or if mediators divert the focus of a dispute resolution process to the future, neglecting a horrific …

Carrie Menkel-Meadow: Dispute Resolution In A Feminist Voice, Andrea K. Schneider

Articles

The presence of women in the law has changed the law’s substance, practice, and process. Carrie Menkel-Meadow, whose scholarship centers on this theme, is one such revolutionary woman.

Professor Menkel-Meadow, who I am proud to call my colleague, co-author, and friend (hereinafter referred to as Carrie), began her career in 1977 with a series of simple questions that sparked a breathtaking body of work. Carrie probed the depth of male domination in the realm of law and wondered what changes female representation might engender. In particular, she focused her inquiry on the value orientation each respective gender might bring to …

Article 9 Foreclosures: When Is A Sale Not A Sale?, David G. Carlson

Articles

Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code empowers a secured creditor to sell collateral. This power is circumscribed. A secured party may not sell before default. A secured party cannot self-deal in a private sale. A pledgee of securities can sell to itself in a private sale if the securities are of a kind that is customarily sold on a recognized market, but the law is unclear what formalities the pledgee must meet to memorialize the sale. A secured party may not sell in a commercially reasonable manner to a buyer with notice of the commercial unreason. This article explores …

A Mode-Sum Prescription For The Renormalized Stress Energy Tensor On Black Hole Spacetimes, Peter Taylor, Cormac Breen, Adrian Ottewill

Articles

In this paper, we describe an extremely efficient method for computing the renormalized stress-energy tensor of a quantum scalar field in spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes. The method applies to a scalar field with arbitrary field parameters. We demonstrate the utility of the method by computing the renormalized stress-energy tensor for a scalar field in the Schwarzschild black hole spacetime, applying our results to discuss the null energy condition and the semiclassical backreaction.

Transition From The Informal To The Formal Economy: The Need For A Multi-Faceted Approach, Kamala Sankaran

Articles

The recent international attention paid to the formalization of the informal economy finds reflection in ILO Recommendation No. 204 concerning the transition from the informal to the formal economy and the Sustainable Development Goals (Target 8.3). There is great diversity within the categories of the informal sector, informal employment, and informal economy in India. This paper examines the category of the ‘informal economy’ as understood in international instruments as well as in international statistics and maps these onto legal categories recognized within Indian law. The categories of ‘employed’, ‘engaged’, and ‘work arrangement’ used in Indian laws, and their interpretation by …

Minding The Gap: Computing Ethics And The Political Economy Of Big Tech, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Paul John Gibson, Dympna O'Sullivan, Anna Becevel

Articles

In 1988 Michael Mahoney wrote that “[w]hat is truly revolutionary about the computer will become clear only when computing acquires a proper history, one that ties it to other technologies and thus uncovers the precedents that make its innovations significant” (Mahoney, 1988). Today, over thirty years after this quote was written, we are living right in the middle of the information age and computing technology is constantly transforming modern living in revolutionary ways and in such a high degree that is giving rise to many ethical considerations, dilemmas, and social disruption. To explore the myriad of issues associated with the …

“Be A Pattern For The World”: The Development Of A Dark Patterns Detection Tool To Prevent Online User Loss, Jordan Donnelly, Alan Dowley, Yunpeng Liu, Yufei Su, Quanwei Sun, Lan Zeng, Andrea Curley, Damian Gordon, Paul Kelly, Dympna O'Sullivan, Anna Becevel

Articles

Dark Patterns are designed to trick users into sharing more information or spending more money than they had intended to do, by configuring online interactions to confuse or add pressure to the users. They are highly varied in their form, and are therefore difficult to classify and detect. Therefore, this research is designed to develop a framework for the automated detection of potential instances of web-based dark patterns, and from there to develop a software tool that will provide a highly useful defensive tool that helps detect and highlight these patterns.

Making Sustainability A Core Competency: Consumer Response To Sustainable Innovative Products, Clyde Eiríkur Hull, Jennifer D. Russell, Monika Kukar-Kinney

Articles

Research suggests that sustainability may not be sufficient to yield a competitive advantage. Building on the resource-based view, this research evaluates three questions: (1) Can using sustainability as a differentiator lead to consumers choosing sustainable products? (2) Does product sustainability appeal more to environmentally concerned consumers? (3) Does product sustainability appeal more when paired with innovation? To test the hypotheses, an online survey of 344 US respondents was conducted. Consumers were given a hypothetical budget for an office chair and asked to choose between two products at a time. Hypotheses were tested with frequency and Chisquare tests and logistic regression. …

An Evaluation Of Ireland’S Sustainable Freight Transport Policy, Xu Zhang, Eoin Plant, Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos

Articles

Background: The Irish government has put forth sustainable transport policy measures, yet the emphasis is mainly on the active travel and sustainable mobility for passenger transport. Contrariwise, freight transport has not received equal consideration in policy measures, regulatory frameworks, and support schemes towards the low-carbon transition. This study seeks to address this imbalance. Methods: The paper proposes an adaptation of the ASI framework for freight transport and assesses the applicability of a number of international sustainable transport measures based on their potential sustainability impact if adopted in Ireland. The research applied a Policy Delphi Method to a heterogeneous …

Visual Attention For Linguistic And Non-Linguistic Body Actions In Non-Signing And Native Signing Children, Rain G. Bosworth, So One Hwang, David P. Corina

Articles

Evidence from adult studies of deaf signers supports the dissociation between neural systems involved in processing visual linguistic and non-linguistic body actions. The question of how and when this specialization arises is poorly understood. Visual attention to these forms is likely to change with age and be affected by prior language experience. The present study used eye-tracking methodology with infants and children as they freely viewed alternating video sequences of lexical American sign language (ASL) signs and non-linguistic body actions (self-directed grooming action and objectdirected pantomime). In Experiment 1, we quantified fixation patterns using an area of interest (AOI) approach …

Self-Supervised Learning For Invariant Representations From Multi-Spectral And Sar Images, Pallavi Jain, Bianca Schoen Phelan, Robert J. Ross

Articles

Self-Supervised learning (SSL) has become the new state of the art in several domain classification and segmentation tasks. One popular category of SSL are distillation networks such as Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL). This work proposes RS-BYOL, which builds on BYOL in the remote sensing (RS) domain where data are non-trivially different from natural RGB images. Since multi-spectral (MS) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors provide varied spectral and spatial resolution information, we utilise them as an implicit augmentation to learn invariant feature embeddings. In order to learn RS based invariant features with SSL, we trained RS-BYOL in two ways, …

Relational Justice And Relational Pedagogy In Professional Social Care Work, Niall Hanlon

Articles

The principle of social justice is central to the newly regulated profession of Social Care Worker [SCW] in Ireland and the language of social justice features in the Standards of Proficiency [SoP] and Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics [CPCE]. This is very welcome given the history of institutional neglect and abuse in Irish social care. However, social care work in Ireland lacks a tradition of social justice in theory and practice, and policy is generally couched in minimalist terms of individual civil and political rights, equality of opportunity, and non-discrimination and is heavily focused on protection and risk management. …

An Empirical Comparison Of The Security And Performance Characteristics Of Topology Formation Algorithms For Bitcoin Networks, Muntadher Sallal, Ruairí De Fréin, Ali Malik, Benjamin Aziz

Articles

There is an increasing demand for digital crypto-currencies to be more secure and robust to meet the following business requirements: (1) low transaction fees and (2) the privacy of users. Nowadays, Bitcoin is gaining traction and wide adoption. Many well-known businesses have begun accepting bitcoins as a means of making financial payments. However, the susceptibility of Bitcoin networks to information propagation delay, increases the vulnerability to attack of the Bitcoin network, and decreases its throughput performance. This paper introduces and critically analyses new network clustering methods, named Locality Based Clustering (LBC), Ping Time Based Approach (PTBC), Super Node Based Clustering …

Recognising The Unseen: Emotional Labour In Teenage And Adolescent Care, John Bowe

Articles

This study delves into the often-overlooked aspect of Emotional Labour (EL) within social care work, specifically focusing on its impact on social care workers who support teenagers and adolescents. EL, defined as managing emotions to meet organisational objectives, is crucial in shaping best practices within care professions. While EL can yield positive outcomes, this study primarily examines its negative repercussions, particularly in relation to professional burnout among social care workers. The study explores the organisational barriers that may compel social care workers to emotionally detach from their roles as a protective measure through quantitative analysis. Drawing on Hochschild's EL concept …

Comprehensive Evidence Implies A Higher Social Cost Of Co2, Kevin Rennert, Frank Errickson, Brian C. Prest, Lisa Rennels, Richard G. Newell, William Pizer, Cora Kingdon, Jordan Wingenroth, Roger Cooke, Bryan Parthum, David Smith, Kevin Cromar, Delavane Diaz, Frances C. Moore, Ulrich K. Müller, Richard J. Plevin, Adrian E. Raftery, Hana Ševčíková, Hannah Sheets, James H. Stock, Tammy Tan, Mark Watson, Tony E. Wong, David Anthoff

Articles

The social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) measures the monetized value of the damages to society caused by an incremental metric tonne of CO2 emissions and is a key metric informing climate policy. Used by governments and other decision-makers in beneft–cost analysis for over a decade, SC-CO2 estimates draw on climate science, economics, demography and other disciplines. However, a 2017 report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine1 (NASEM) highlighted that current SC-CO2 estimates no longer refect the latest research. The report provided a series of recommendations for improving the scientifc basis, transparency and uncertainty characterization of …

Facilitating Open Science Without Sacrificing Ip Rights, Or Cohen Sasson, Ofer Tur‐Sinai

Articles

No abstract provided.

Judging Offensiveness: A Rubric For Privacy Torts, Patricia S. Abril, Alissa Del Riego

Articles

How do we judge whether a violation of someone's privacy is offensive? Currently, U.S. tort law requires privacy violations be "highly offensive to a reasonable person" to afford redress. However, our research reveals that there is no effective analysis-or rhyme or reason-to determine what conduct, disclosure, or implication is offensive. Our review of hundreds of privacy tort cases concludes that the ambiguity of the offensiveness prong has created opportunity for both significant legal errors and thriving biases, which often lead to discriminatory and neglectful treatment of women, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups. This is particularly alarming because the offensiveness …

Auditing Google's Search Headlines As A Potential Gateway To Misleading Content: Evidence From The 2020 Us Election, Himanshu Zade, Morgan Wack, Yuanrui Zhang, Kate Starbird, Ryan Calo, Jason Young, Jevin D. West

Articles

The prevalence and spread of online misinformation during the 2020 US presidential election served to perpetuate a false belief in widespread election fraud. Though much research has focused on how social media platforms connected people to election-related rumors and conspiracy theories, less is known about the search engine pathways that linked users to news content with the potential to undermine trust in elections. In this paper, we present novel data related to the content of political headlines during the 2020 US election period. We scraped over 800,000 headlines from Google's search engine results pages (SERP) in response to 20 election-related …

Globalisation And City-Zenship In A Not-So-Networked Society: Looking For Narratives Of Empowerment In The Process Of Seepage Of Techno-Cultural Practices, Atreyee Majumder

Articles

The article seeks to answer questions crucial to the marginalisation debate like - Is commercial globalisation bringing in more than consumer goods into the developing countries? And if so, then what is the consequent impact on the relationship between the state and its citizens. While the city in the developed world acts as a node of contact with the forces of globalisation, sending out the messages of the global ‘fantasy’, the city in the developing world acts as the receptor of such signals from which the 'fantasy’ can be accessed by the rest of the developed world. Persons living in …

Against Progress: Intellectual Property And Fundamental Values In The Internet Age, Or Cohen Sasson

Articles

No abstract provided.

Do Educators Value The Promotion Of Students’ Wellbeing? Quantifying Educators’ Attitudes Toward Wellbeing Promotion, David Byrne, Colm Mcguinness Phd, Aiden Carthy Phd

Articles

Educators’ attitudes toward Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and health and wellbeing promotion can significantly influence the success (or otherwise) of such policies and practices. While numerous studies exist, from which a broad understanding of such attitudes can be garnered, there is currently no attendant measurement which quantifies educators attitudes regarding the promotion of student wellbeing. The aim of this study was to address this gap in knowledge by quantifying the degree to which educators are positively or negatively disposed to the promotion of student wellbeing. The Attitudes Toward Wellbeing Promotion (ATWP) scale was administered …

Dialogue Policies For Confusion Mitigation In Situated Hri, Na Li, Robert J. Ross

Articles

Confusion is a mental state triggered by cognitive disequilibrium that can occur in many types of task-oriented interaction, including Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). People may become confused while interacting with robots due to communicative or even task-centred challenges. To build a smooth and engaging HRI, it is insufficient for an agent to simply detect confusion; instead, the system should aim to mitigate the situation. In light of this, in this paper, we present our approach to a linguistic design of dialogue policies to build a dialogue framework to alleviate interlocutor confusion. We also outline our sketch and discuss challenges with respect …

Mimibrick.Jl: A Julia Package For The Brick Model For Sea-Level Change In The Mimi Integrated Modeling Framework, Tony E. Wong, Lisa Rennels, Vivek Srikrishnan, Alexander Bakker, Klaus Keller, David Anthoff

Articles

BRICK is a semi-empirical model for global and local mean sea-level change (Wong et al., 2017). The core model includes component sub-models for the major contributors to global mean sea-level change - glaciers and ice caps, thermal expansion, land water storage, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The resulting global mean sea levels can be downscaled via a data set that represents the “fingerprint” of each sea-level component on local mean sea level (Slangen et al., 2014). In this way, BRICK provides information about local sea-level changes, including characterizations of key uncertainties. BRICK is flexible and efficient enough to …

Book Review: Christophe Jaffrelot, 2021. Modi’S India: Hindu Nationalism And The Rise Of Ethnic Democracy. Translated By Cynthia Schoch, Aniket Nandan

Articles

Book review: Christophe Jaffrelot, 2021. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Translated by Cynthia Schoch

Visual Factors Associated With Physical Activity In Schoolchildren, Síofra Harrington, John Kearney Prof, Veronica O'Dwyer Dr

Articles

Clinical relevance Physical activity is an essential part of childhood physical and mental development. Recent research identified visual problems associated with a sedentary lifestyle in children in Ireland.

Background This study explored the association between visual function in children and their engagement with physical activities outside school.

Methods Participants were 1,626 schoolchildren (728 aged 6–7 years, 898 old 12–13 years) in randomly selected schools in Ireland. Before data collection, parents/legal guardians of participants completed a standardised questionnaire reporting physical activity as no activity (mostly on screens), light activity (occasional walking/cycling), moderate activity (/week engaged in sports), or regular activity ( …

Prevalence And Incidence Of Nonmotor Symptoms In Individuals With And Without Parkinson’S Disease, Mariam Paracha, Konnor Herbst, Karl Kieburtz, Charles S. Venuto

Articles

Background

The prevalence ratio (PR) and incidence rate ratio (IRR) of nonmotor symptoms (NMS) were calculated for early Parkinson's disease (PD) versus non-PD from 2 observational studies.

Methods

NMS were assessed through the self-reported Non-Motor Symptom Questionnaire in the online Fox Insight study and through self- and clinician-rated scales in the Parkinson's Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI) study. Age- and sex-adjusted/matched PR and IRR were estimated for each NMS by PD status using Poisson regression.

Results

Most NMS occurred more frequently in PD. Among 15,194 Fox Insight participants, sexual dysfunction had the largest adjusted PR (12.4 [95% CI, 6.9–22.2]) and dysgeusia/hyposmia …

Validating And Testing An Agent-Based Model For The Spread Of Covid-19 In Ireland, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Agent-based models can be used to better understand the impacts of lifting restrictions or implementing interventions during a pandemic. However, agent-based models are computationally expensive, and running a model of a large population can result in a simulation taking too long to run for the model to be a useful analysis tool during a public health crisis. To reduce computing time and power while running a detailed agent-based model for the spread of COVID-19 in the Republic of Ireland, we introduce a scaling factor that equates 1 agent to 100 people in the population. We present the results from model …

Understanding The Assumptions Of An Seir Compartmental Model Using Agentization And A Complexity Hierarchy, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Articles

Equation-based and agent-based models are popular methods in understanding disease dynamics. Although there are many types of equation-based models, the most common is the SIR compartmental model that assumes homogeneous mixing and populations. One way to understand the effects of these assumptions is by agentization. Equation-based models can be agentized by creating a simple agent-based model that replicates the results of the equationbased model, then by adding complexity to these agentized models it is possible to break the assumptions of homogeneous mixing and populations and test how breaking these assumptions results in different outputs. We report a set of experiments …

The Psychology Of Taxing Capital Income: Evidence From A Survey Experiment On The Realization Rule, Zachary Liscow, Edward G. Fox

Articles

We conduct the first survey experiment to understand public attitudes about the capital gains realization rules. These rules requires that assets usually must be sold before gains on them are taxed and thus makes taxing capital income much harder. We have three main findings. First, respondents strongly prefer to wait to tax gains on stocks until sale: 75% to 25%. But the flip side is that there is surprisingly strong support for taxing gains on assets at sale or transfer, including at death, in areas where current law never taxes those gains. Second, these stated views change only modestly when …

Understanding The Interplay Between Immigrant Nascent Entrepreneurship And Cross-Cultural Adaptation, Lucia Walsh, Thomas M. Cooney

Articles

Purpose

All entrepreneurs face challenges during their venture start-up process, but immigrant entrepreneurs face additional and distinctive challenges due to their contextual newness. This paper focuses on understanding the intertwined journeys of nascent entrepreneurship and cross-cultural adaptation of immigrants in a small Western European country where immigrant entrepreneurship is still a relatively new phenomenon.

Design/methodology/approach

The induction-driven, 18-month longitudinal empirical inquiry focused on six early-stage nascent entrepreneurs. Qualitative methods included participant observation during an enterprise program, qualitative interviews and ongoing informal communication.

Findings

The data uncovered the interplay between the nascent immigrant entrepreneurship and cross-cultural adaptation. This led to the …