Digital Commons Network^™

From Overt Threat To Invisible Presence: Discursive Shifts In Representations Of Gender In Menstrual Product Advertising, Valerie Gannon, Olivia Freeman, Rachel Campbell

Articles

The menstrual product brand ‘Always’ and its #LikeAGirl campaign has made headlines for being at the forefront of a menstrual liberation, championing female empowerment and gender equality. This paper utilises a visual discourse analysis approach (Rose, 2016) to explore the discursive shifts in ‘Always’ advertisements over the past four decades. Specifically, the question as to how the construction of menstruation has changed over time in the advertising discourse of the ‘Always’ brand is addressed. Three dominant discourses of menstruation are identified: overt threat, uncontrollable and invisible. These discourses function as strong claims to truth as they reach the everyday life …

Financing Early Stage Cleantech Firms, Sean O'Reilly, Ciarán Mac An Bhaird, Damien Cassells

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T HE report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [47] highlighted the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strive for decarbonization in order to restrict global warming. The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, has a vision of accelerating technology development and transfer [92] in order to reduce harmful carbon emissions. The development of new and innovative disruptive technologies to ameliorate and reverse the harmful effects of carbon emissions is emphasized by governments and international agencies [6], [53], [59], [102]. Large incumbent firms are well resourced to conduct this research and development (R&D), although …

The Challenge Of Sustainable Consumption For Governance And Policy Development—A Systematic Review, Vivienne Byers, Alan Gilmer

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The modern industry discourse on sustainability is the idea of ‘green growth’, which is described as the paradox of the continuation of increased economic growth, at the same time as increasing sustainability. Policy makers face the challenge of how to encourage and sustain appropriate levels of individual behavioural change to manage consumption in a changing environment. In addressing this challenge, this study seeks to move beyond discrete elements of human consumption behaviour and develop a better understand of the wider inputs including culture, societal norms, institutions and governance. The research methodology adopted uses a systematic literature review approach coupled with …

Parents' Experiences Of A Language-Focused Home Visiting Scheme In Ireland, Aisling Ni Dhiorbhain Dr, Maire Mhic Mhathuna, Padraig Ó Duibhir Dr

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This article reports parents’ experiences of the Tús Maith (Good Start) home visiting scheme in South-West Ireland. The goal of Tús Maith is to support parents who wish to speak Irish to their children at home in the Kerry Gaeltacht, an Irish-speaking heartland area. Home visitors spend an hour a week, over a period of six weeks, interacting with children and parents with varying levels of competency in Irish. Home visitors who are native speakers of Irish, offer individualised guidance on how to promote the use of Irish as a home language, while encouraging families to engage in activities …

Fedoram: A Federated Oblivious Ram Scheme, Alexandre Pujol, Liam Murphy, Christina Thorpe

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Instant messaging (IM) applications, even with end-to-end encryption enabled, pose privacy issues due to metadata and pattern leakage. Our goal is to develop a model for a privacy preserving IM application, by designing an IM application that focuses on hiding metadata and discussion patterns. To solve the issue of privacy preservation through the obfuscation of metadata, cryptographic constructions like Oblivious Random Access Machines (ORAM) have been proposed in recent years. However, although they completely hide the user access patterns, they incur high computational costs, often resulting in excessively slow performance in practice. We propose a new federated model, FedORAM, which …

Covid-19 Prediction Using Lstm Algorithm: Gcc Case Study, Kareem Kamal A. Ghany, Hossam Zawbaa, Heba M. Sabri

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Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) is the black swan of 2020. Still, the human response to restrain the virus is also creating massive ripples through different systems, such as health, economy, education, and tourism. This paper focuses on research and applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to predict COVID-19 propagation using the available time-series data and study the effect of the quality of life, the number of tests performed, and the awareness of citizens on the virus in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries at the Gulf area. So we focused on cases in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), United Arab of Emirates …

Case Study: Transition To A Vegan Diet In An Elite Male Gaelic Football Player, Daniel Davey, Shane Malone, Brendan Egan

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Vegan diets are increasingly of interest to athletes, but require a well-planned approach in order to mitigate the risk of potential adverse effects on nutrient intakes, and consequently performance. This case study reports the process of an elite male Gaelic football player (age 25 years; height, 1.88 m; body mass, 87.8 kg; lean body mass, 73.26 kg; body fat, 11.3%) transitioning from an omnivorous diet to a vegan diet at the beginning of a competitive season. The report encompasses key considerations in the planning and provision of nutrition support in this context, in addition to iterations needed based on challenges …

A System For Resilience Learning: Developing A Community-Driven, Multi-Sector Research Approach For Greater Preparedness And Resilience To Long-Term Climate Stressors And Extreme Events In The Miami Metropolitan Region, Abigail L. Fleming, Tiffany G. Troxer, Amy C. Clement, Yoca Arditi-Rocha, Gretchen Beesing, Mahadev Bhat, Jessica Bolson, Carissa Cabán-Alemán, Karina Castillo, Olivia Collins, Mayra Cruz, Alan Dodd, Scotney D. Evans, Carlos Genatios, Jane Gilbert, Alyssa Hernandez, Cheryl Holder, Maria Ilcheva, Elizabeth Kelly, Arturo Leon, Joanna Lombard, Katharine J. March, Diana Moanga, James F. Murley, Amy Knowles, Jayantha Obeysekera, Loren Parra, Jennifer Posner, Arif Sarwat, Rachel Silverstein, John A. Stuart, Michael C. Sukop, Shimon Wdowinski, Elizabeth Wheaton

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There is a growing need for integrated approaches that align community priorities with strategies that build resilience to climate hazards, societal shocks, and economic crises to ensure more equitable and sustainable outcomes. We anticipate that adaptive management and resilience learning are central elements for these approaches. In this paper, we describe an approach to build and test a Resilience Learning System to support research and implementation of a resilience strategy developed for the Greater Miami and the Beaches or the Resilient305 Strategy. Elements foundational to the design of this integrated research strategy and replicable Resilience Learning System are: (1) strong …

The Virtual Law School, 2.0, A. Michael Froomkin

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Just over twenty years ago I gave a talk to the AALS called The Virtual Law School? Or, How the Internet Will De-skill the Professoriate, and Turn Your Law School Into a Conference Center. I came to the subject because I had been working on internet law, learning about virtual worlds and e-commerce, and about the power of one-to-many communications, and it struck me that a lot of what I had learned applied to education in general and to legal education in particular.
It didn't happen. Or at least, it has not happened yet. In this essay I want …

Application Of Plasma Technology In Bioscience And Biomedicine, Daniela Boehm, Christina Canal

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Plasma technology has been an integral part of research in life sciences for decades through its role in the manufacture and modification of material surface characteristics of many common laboratory consumables, and it is still of interest in many fields, including the treatment of biomaterials and implants. In recent years, the use of plasma at room temperature and atmospheric pressure (cold atmospheric plasma) has led to a shift in the field by putting the focus on biomedicine due to its applicability to heat-sensitive materials, including biomaterials, and expanding the traditional applicability of plasmas to cells and tissues. Consequently, biomedical applications …

Homes, History, And Shadows: Select Criminal Law And Procedure Cases From The Supreme Court’S 2020-21 Term, Eve Brensike Primus, Lily Sawyer-Kaplan

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The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 and the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace her solidified a 6-3 majority on the Court for Republican appointees and is already affecting how the Court approaches and decides its criminal law and procedure cases. Justice Ginsburg, a strong advocate for equality and fair treatment, generally construed criminal statutes narrowly and stressed the importance of defendants’ procedural rights. Justice Barrett is an originalist who will look to history to seek answers on the scope of criminal procedure amendments. The combined appointments of Justice Gorsuch and Justice Barrett mean …

Electrodeposition From A Graphene Bath: A Sustainable Copper Composite Alloy In A Graphene Matrix, Hayley Richardson, Charles Bopp, Bao Ha, Reeba Thomas, Kalathur S.V. Santhanam

Articles

The leaching effect of metals has led to the introduction of government regulations for the safety of the environment and humans. This has led to the search for new alloys with long-lasting sustainability. Herein, we wish to report a new brass alloy containing carbon with a remarkable sustainability produced by electrodeposition from a graphene quantum dots bath. The electrochemical measurements were carried out using cyclic voltammetry, potentiodynamic analysis, and Tafel measurements, and the deposits were characterized by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), Raman imaging, X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to understand the surface morphology …

Evaluating Instructional Designs With Mental Workload Assessments In University Classrooms, Luca Longo, Giuliano Orru'

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Cognitive cognitive load theory (CLT) has been conceived for improving instructional design practices. Although researched for many years, one open problem is a clear definition of its cognitive load types and their aggregation towards an index of overall cognitive load. In Ergonomics, the situation is different with plenty of research devoted to the development of robust constructs of mental workload (MWL). By drawing a parallel between CLT and MWL, as well as by integrating relevant theories and measurement techniques from these two fields, this paper is aimed at investigating the reliability, validity and sensitivity of three existing self-reporting mental workload …

State Of The Art In Composition, Fabrication, Characterization, And Modeling Methods Of Cement-Based Thermoelectric Materials For Low-Temperature Applications, Xiaoli Liu, Ruchita Jani, Esther Orisakwee, Conrad Johnston, Piotr Chudzinski, Ming Qu, Brian Norton, Niall Holmes Dr., Jorge Kohanoff, Lorenzo Stella, Hongxi Yin, Kazuaki Yazawa

Articles

The worldwide energy crisis and environmental deterioration are probably humanity’s greatest challenges. Thermoelectricity, which allows for the mutual conversion between thermal and electrical energy, has become a promising technology to alleviate this challenge. Increasingly more research focuses on how to fabricate and apply thermoelectric materials for harvesting energy and regulating the indoor thermal environment. However, only a few studies have focused on cementitious materials with thermoelectric potential. Thermoelectric cement is a composite material in which particular additives can enhance the thermoelectric performance of ordinary cement. By potentially replacing traditional construction materials with thermoelectric cement in building applications, electricity could be …

Bio-Binder—Innovative Asphalt Technology, Amir Tabakovic

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The global road network spans 16.3 million km [1], of which 5 million km is in the EU. These road networks fulfil major economic and social goals by facilitating the movement of goods and people throughout the EU, and are therefore of the utmost importance to the economic and social life of the EU [2]. National governments invest heavily in their road networks, e.g., in 2014, EUR 53.33 billion was invested in the development and maintenance of the EU road network [3]. Each year, the world produces 1.6 trillion tonnes of asphalt [4], of which 218 million tonnes is produced …

Do Greenhouse Gases Impact Our Respiratory System? A Study Of The Effect Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions On Respiratory Disease Related Mortality In Ireland, Anushree Priyadarshini, Christina Kenny

Articles

Respiratory-related deaths are one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality every year in the developed world. Previous research outlines that greenhouse gas emission levels have a negative effect on respiratory health and can cause worsening of symptoms. This study examines the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on respiratory disease related mortality in Ireland from 2007-2017 using Statbank data from Central Statistics Office, Ireland. Analysis shows that over the last decade, while greenhouse gases emissions in Ireland have reduced by 1.1%, respiratory disease related mortality has increased on an average by 2.1%. Results indicate that greenhouse gas emis- sions …

On The Generation, Structure, And Semantics Of Grammar Patterns In Source Code Identifiers, Christian D. Newman,, Reem S. Alsuhaibani, Michael J. Decker, Anthony Peruma, Dishant Kaushik, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Emily Hill

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Identifier names are the atoms of program comprehension. Weak identifier names decrease developer productivity and degrade the performance of automated approaches that leverage identifier names in source code analysis; threatening many of the advantages which stand to be gained from advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Therefore, it is vital to support developers in naming and renaming identifiers. In this paper, we extend our prior work, which studies the primary method through which names evolve: rename refactorings. In our prior work, we contextualize rename changes by examining commit messages and other refactorings. In this extension, we further consider data …

A Comparative Analysis Of Rule-Based, Model-Agnostic Methods For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Giulia Vilone, Lucas Rizzo, Luca Longo

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The ultimate goal of Explainable Artificial Intelligence is to build models that possess both high accuracy and degree of explainability. Understanding the inferences of such models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships can be represented as a set of inference rules which are usually not explicit within a model. Scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models. However, limited work exists on their comparison. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the rulesets produced by four post-hoc rule extractors by employing …

Exploring The Potential Of Defeasible Argumentation For Quantitative Inferences In Real-World Contexts: An Assessment Of Computational Trust, Lucas Rizzo, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo

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Argumentation has recently shown appealing properties for inference under uncertainty and conflicting knowledge. However, there is a lack of studies focused on the examination of its capacity of exploiting real-world knowledge bases for performing quantitative, case-by-case inferences. This study performs an analysis of the inferential capacity of a set of argument-based models, designed by a human reasoner, for the problem of trust assessment. Precisely, these models are exploited using data from Wikipedia, and are aimed at inferring the trustworthiness of its editors. A comparison against non-deductive approaches revealed that these models were superior according to values inferred to recognised trustworthy …

Lightgwas: A Novel Machine Learning Procedure For Genome-Wide Association Study, Ambrozio Bruno, Luca Longo, Lucas Rizzo

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This paper proposes a novel machine learning procedure for genome-wide association study (GWAS), named LightGWAS. It is based on the LightGBM framework, in addition to being a single, resilient, autonomous and scalable solution to address common limitations of GWAS implementations found in the literature. These include reliance on massive manual quality control steps and specific GWAS methods for each type of dataset morphology and size. Through this research, LightGWAS has been contrasted against PLINK2, one of the current state-of-the-art for GWAS implementations based on general linear model with support to firth regularisation. The mean differences measured upon standard classification metrics, …

A Conceptual Model To Explain Dark Matter And Dark Energy, Jonathan Blackledge

Articles

This paper considers a conceptual model that attempts to explain ‘Dark Matter’ and‘Dark Energy’. The model is based on considering a gravitational field to be the result of a mass (aHiggs field) scattering pre-existing cosmic background space-time waves or ‘Uber-waves’. The term‘Uber’ is used to denote an outstanding or supreme example of a particular kind of gravitationalwave with cosmic-scale wavelengths that are far in excess of those associated with the gravitationalwaves generated by accelerating masses. Such waves are taken to be the very lowest frequencycomponents associated with the spectrum of space-time waves generated by the ‘Big Bang’ andare supported by …

All-Caps, Yonathan A. Arbel, Andrew Toler

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A hallmark of consumer contracts is their use of long blocks of capitalized text. These "all-caps" clauses are meant to alert consumers to nonstandard, risky, or important aspects of the transaction that would otherwise be hidden in the fine print. Based on a belief in the power of all-caps, courts will often deny enforcement of many key terms-such as war­ranty disclaimers, liability releases, arbitration clauses, and automatic billing-unless they are presented in all-caps. This article is the first to empirically examine the effectiveness of all-caps. Using an experimental methodology, the article finds that all-caps fail to apprecia­bly improve consent. Moreover, …

Feigned Consensus: Usurping The Law In Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma Prosecutions, Keith A. Findley, D. Michael Risinger, Patrick D. Barnes, Julie A. Mack, David A. Moran, Barry C. Scheck, Thomas L. Bohan

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Few medico-legal matters have generated as much controversy--both in the medical literature and in the courtroom--as Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS), now known more broadly as Abusive Head Trauma (AHT). The controversies are of enormous significance in the law because child abuse pediatricians claim, on the basis of a few non-specific medical findings supported by a weak and methodologically flawed research base, to be able to “diagnose” child abuse, and thereby to provide all of the evidence necessary to satisfy all of the legal elements for criminal prosecution (or removal of children from their parents). It is a matter, therefore, in …

Brightness Matching In Optical See-Through Augmented Reality, Michael Murdoch

Articles

A visual experiment using a beam-splitter-based optical see-through augmented reality (OST-AR) setup tested the effect of the size and alignment of AR overlays with a brightness-matching task using physical cubes. Results indicate that more luminance is required whenARoverlays are oversized with respect to the cubes, showing that observers discount theARoverlay to a greater extent when it is more obviously a transparent layer. This is not explained by conventional color appearance modeling but supports an AR-specific model based on foreground-background discounting. The findings and model will help determine parameters for creating convincingARmanipulation of realworld objects.

Enhancing The Visibility Of Vernier Effect In A Tri-Microfiber Coupler Fiber Loop Interferometer For Ultrasensitive Refractive Index And Temperature Sensing, Fangfang Wei, Dejun Liu, Zhe Wang, Zhuochen Wang, Gerald Farrell, Qiang Wu, Gang-Ding Peng, Yuliya Semenova

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In this paper a Vernier effect based sensor is analyzed and demonstrated experimentally in a tri-microfiber coupler (Tri-MFC) and polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF) loop interferometer (Tri-MFC-PMF) to provide ultrasensitive refractive index and temperature sensing. The main novelty of this work is an analysis of parameters of the proposed Tri-MFC-PMF with the objective of determining the conditions leading to a strong Vernier effect. It has been identified by simulation that the Vernier effect is a primary factor in the design of Tri-MFC-PMF loop sensing structure for sensitivity enhancement. It is furthermore demonstrated experimentally that enhancing the visibility of the Vernier spectrum in …

Eventually Periodic Solutions Of Single Neuron Model, Inese Bula, Michael A. Radin

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In this paper, we consider a non-autonomous piecewise linear difference equation that describes a discrete version of a single neuron model with a periodic (period two and period three) internal decay rate. We investigated the periodic behavior of solutions relative to the periodic internal decay rate in our previous papers. Our goal is to prove that this model contains a large quantity of initial conditions that generate eventually periodic solutions. We will show that only periodic solutions and eventually periodic solutions exist in several cases.

Towards An Urban Disability Agenda, Samuel R. Bagenstos

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The overwhelming majority of Americans with disabilities live in metropolitan areas. Yet those areas continue to contain significant barriers that keep disabled people from fully participating in city life. Although political and social debate has periodically turned its attention to urban issues or problems — or even the so-called “urban crisis” — during the past several decades, it has too rarely attended to the issues of disability access. When political debate has focused on disability issues, it has tended to address them in a nationally uniform way, without paying attention to the particular concerns of disabled people in cities. Even …

Quotient-Transitivity And Cyclic Subgroup-Transitivity, Brendan Goldsmith, Ketao Gong

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We introduce two new notions of transitivity for Abelian 𝑝-groups based on isomorphism of quotients rather than the classical use of equality of height sequences associated with Abelian 𝑝-group theory. Unlike the classical theory where “most” groups are transitive, these new notions lead to much smaller classes, but even these classes are sufficiently large to be interesting.

A Reference Data Set For Image Registration Of The Pelvis Using Combinatorial Rigid Registration Optimization (Corro)., Afua A Yorke, David Solis Jr, Thoas Guerrero

Articles

Purpose Clinical image pairs provide the most realistic test data for image registration evaluation. However, the optimal registration is unknown. Using combinatorial rigid registration optimization (CORRO) we demonstrate a method to estimate the optimal alignment for rigid-registration of clinical image pairs.

Methods Expert selected landmark pairs were selected for each CT/CBCT image pair for six cases representing head and neck, thoracic, and pelvic anatomic regions. Combination subsets of a k number of landmark pairs (k-combination set) were generated without repeat to form a large set of k-combination sets (k-set) for k = 4,8,12. The rigid transformation between the image pairs …

Uv Photo-Oxidation Of Polybenzimidazole (Pbi), Devon Shedden, Kristen M. Atkinson, Ibrahim Cisse, Shin Lutondo, Tyshawn Roundtree, Michilena Teixeira, Joel Shertok, Michael Mehan, Gregory K. Thompson, Surendra K. Gupta, Gerald A. Takacs

Articles

Since polybenzimidazole (PBI) is often used in the aerospace industry and in high temperature fuel cells, this research investigated the surface modification of PBI film with 253.7 and 184.9 nm UV photo-oxidation. As observed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), the oxygen concentration on the surface increased up to a saturation level of 20.2 ± 0.7 at %. With increasing treatment time, there were significant decreases in the concentrations of C-C sp2 and C=N groups and increases in the concentration of C=O, O-C=O, O-(C=O)-O, C-N, N-O, and N-C=O containing moieties due to 253.7 nm photo-oxidation of the aromatic groups of PBI …