Digital Commons Network^™

Blockchain In Supply Chain Management: A Feature-Function Framework For Future Research, James C. Brau, John Gardner, Hugo A. Decampos, Krista Gardner

Faculty Publications

Purpose – Blockchain technology offers numerous venues for supply chain applications and research. However, the connections between specific blockchain features and future applications have been unclear to date in its evolution. The purpose of this study is to fill this void.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors advance the understanding of blockchain in supply chain management by providing a new research framework built on unique blockchain features as applied across core supply chain functions.

Findings – This study’s framework is a feature-function matrix that integrates four overarching supply chain functions (i.e. supplier management, logistics, production processes and customer management) with nine blockchain …

Institutional Support For Academic Engagement In Online And Blended Learning Environments: Exploring Affective, Behavioral, And Cognitive Dimensions, Charles R. Graham, Jered Borup, Sara Tuiloma, Adriana Martínez Arias, Ross Larsen

Faculty Publications

In light of the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders of higher education institutions around the world have been contemplating ways to help their universities engage in a digital transformation that must have student engagement and learning as the foremost considerations. This study reports on the work conducted at a university in Colombia that created an evaluation instrument based on the Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework (Borup et al., 2020) to examine how well the institution was supporting the affective, behavioral, and cognitive (ABC) dimensions of engagement in its online and blended learning course offerings. This survey, the …

The Right To A Public Trial, Conditional Courtroom Entry And Tiers Of Constitutional Scrutiny, Stephen Smith

Faculty Publications

The constitutional test the SupremeCourt has prescribed to review courtroom closures for compliance with the Sixth Amendment’s right to a public trial is in the nature ofstrictscrutiny. The Courtrequires an “overriding interest” to justify the closure, and a narrow, minimally restrictive scope to the closure. Many lower courts have imposed a less demanding test for “partial” closures, which admit to the courtroom some, but not all, of the public. These courts require a less demanding justification before closing the courtroom to certain individuals—the justification need be only “substantial,” ratherthan “overriding.” Thisstandard is in the nature of intermediate scrutiny, as applied …

Investigating Consumer Values Of Secondhand Fashion Consumption In The Mass Market Vs. Luxury Market: A Text-Mining Approach, H. M.Rakib Ul Hasan, Chunmin Lang, Sibei Xia

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this research is to investigate consumer values of secondhand fashion (SHF) consumption from online platforms in both the mass market and luxury market. The luxury SHF business is closely related to the business of SHF mass market. A cross-market value analysis would provide better insights to understand consumers’ motivations to purchase secondhand fashion products. Three mass-market SHF companies and three luxury SHF companies were selected as sample companies based on their revenues in the U.S. market. Consumers’ comments and reviews from a third-party business review site, trustpilot.com, were collected using the web-scraping technique. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) …

The Two Title Ixs, Emily Suski

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Lidar-Change-Based Mapping Of Sediment Movement From An Extreme Rainfall Event, Silvia E. Piovan, Michael E. Hodgson, Paolo Mozzi, Dwayne E. Porter, Bryan Hall

Faculty Publications

Mapping landscape change at fine scales (e.g. < 1.0 m resolution) using airborne LiDAR data from manned aircraft is a significant challenge. This challenge is magnified in disaster response contexts. A combination of collection and processing factors contributes to horizontal and vertical errors (and resulting uncertainty) in each pre- and post-LiDAR derived digital elevation model (DEM). Subsequently, the errors in the change surface from the two (or more) DEMs are an accumulation of the errors in the individual DEMs. Thus, reliable mapping erosion/deposition changes at sub-meter precision in change detection studies using LiDAR data is largely the domain of terrestrial LiDAR or sUAS with LiDAR scanners rather than manned aircraft. Unfortunately, terrestrial and sUAS LiDAR scanners are not well suited for mapping large areas and sUAS collections are subject to additional airspace constraints compared to manned aircraft. In this study, we probed one of the significant issues in airborne LiDAR change projects–vertical height errors from sequential flight lines. A simplified solution for determining flight line vertical biases in areas of low topographic relief with natural cover types was developed and tested for normalizing point clouds. The approach was tested in a fine-scale erosion/deposition study from an extreme rainfall event that eroded and deposited sand at depths of about 1.0 m. Airborne LiDAR had been collected prior to the rainfall event, and another airborne LiDAR collection was made 1 month after the event. Eleven field campaigns to collect reference data and visit anomalies in the change surface were conducted in a 15-month period after the event, beginning 25 February 2016 and ending 8 May 2017. The validation results indicate accuracies for the pre-event and post-event LiDAR derived DEMs were 7.8 cm and 13.0 cm RMSE, respectively. After modeling vertical errors and corrections applied to the post-event point clouds, the RMSE for the post-event DEM was 8.3 cm. In the depositional use case, 27 locations were sampled with auger boreholes/sand pits and compared with LiDAR-based change. The LiDAR-based change detection analysis resulted in predicted sand depth accuracies of 94% with a mean error of 4.7 cm.

Monitoring Of Wave, Current, And Sediment Dynamics Along The Chincoteague Living Shoreline, Virginia, Hongqing Wang, Qin Chen, Nan Wang, William D. Capurso, Lukasz M. Niemoczynski, Ling Zhu, Gregg A. Snedden, Kevin S. Holcomb, Bowdoin W. Lusk, Carol A. Wilson, Sean R. Cornell

Faculty Publications

Nature-based features, also called living shorelines, are increasingly applied in coastal protection and restoration. However, the processes and mechanisms (feedbacks and interactions) of wave attenuation, current velocity change, and sediment deposition and erosion along the living shoreline remain unclear, thus limiting the adaptive management of living shoreline restoration projects for coastal shoreline resilience under future storm conditions. In this study, wave, current, and sediment dynamics along the Little Toms Cove living shoreline, Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, Virginia, a low wave energy environment, were investigated during a 2-month winter period in 2019 to examine the effects of living shoreline structures on …

“Wilfrid Sellars And Pragmatism”, Willem A. Devries

Faculty Publications

A brief survey of Wilfrid Sellars' relation to Pragmatism, focusing on the priority of the practical in the constitution of meaning, the critique of the given, and sociality of thought and inquiry.

Thompson V. Clark And The “Reasonable” Policing Of Marginalized Families, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

This Article uses the experience of Larry Thompson, the plaintiff in Thompson v. Clark, 142 S. Ct. 1332 (2022), to examine the absence of privacy for poor families, particularly poor Black, Latinx, and Native families, in the United States. Mr. Thompson may end up remembered in legal history as a victor, as the Supreme Court lowered the barriers to bringing malicious prosecution claims and reinstated Mr. Thompson’s own previously dismissed malicious prosecution claim. Yet before securing this victory, Mr. Thompson lost a slew of other Fourth Amendment claims against the police. Mr. Thompson’s claims arose from state agents’ warrantless …

The Ethics Of Artificial Intelligence In Legal Advocacy, Elissa Germaine

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The use of AI in our personal and professional lives has entered the public consciousness over the past several months. The legal profession and the securities industry are no exception. This article begins to explore the use of open source generative AI in legal advocacy, and the related ethical implications for securities arbitration practitioners.

Studies have corroborated the impact of AI on the legal profession that many of us have been seeing in practice or hearing and reading about. A Goldman Sachs study predicted that the legal profession will be one of the most likely areas to be impacted …

Judge Frankel’S Fifty-Year-Old Invitation To Reconstruct Sentencing, Jelani Jefferson Exum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

America was a different place at the time Judge Marvin Frankel penned his now-famous text Criminal Sentences: Law without Order in 1973. Richard Nixon was the U.S. president. The Vietnam War was ending. The Watergate scandal was unfolding. There was much to grab the public’s attention, and criminal sentencing was not a national or international headline. Just two years earlier, President Nixon had declared a war on drugs and targeted drug abuse as “public enemy number one,” but it would be over a decade before punitive mandatory minimum drug sentences would become our sentencing norm. At the time of …

Investing In Abolition, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

This Article situates the prison within a broader macro-financial trend, what I call “community capture.” As private equity firms have consolidated the market for carceral services, they have also gained control over other essential social infrastructure, like housing and healthcare. By layering debt, fees, and aggressive profit expectations over companies or assets that provide for basic needs, their strategies intensify the economic pressures communities face. These strategies rely on various forms of coordination and legal protection from contestation. To demonstrate this process in the context of mass incarceration, this Article tells the story of Securus, a dominant carceral service company …

Why Corporate Boards Should Include Lgbtq+ People, Jeremy Mcclane, Darren Rosenblum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Corporate boardrooms sit at the heart of most of society’s most consequential decisions but fall far short of the diversity of our society. The current movement toward board diversification aims to remedy the underrepresentation of marginalized groups on corporate boards. More recently, some efforts have included LGBTQ+ people, even though the basis for their inclusion on corporate boards remains largely unstated. This Article examines both the normative and instrumental bases for LGBTQ+ inclusion in board diversity initiatives, articulating unspoken assumptions and linking LGBTQ+ people to the broader inclusion effort. In so doing, it begins to surface the unique issues …

Of Systems Thinking And Straw Men, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In Content Moderation as Systems Thinking, Professor Evelyn Douek, as the title suggests, endorses an approach to the people, rules, and processes governing online speech as one not of anecdote and doctrine but of systems thinking. She constructs this concept as a novel and superior understanding of the problems of online-speech governance as compared to those existent in what she calls the “standard [scholarly] picture of content moderation.” This standard picture of content moderation — which is roughly five years old — is “outdated and incomplete,” she argues. It is preoccupied with anecdotal, high-profile adjudications in which platforms …

Deliberate Indifference: Respondeat Superior Liability For Municipalities In Civil Rights Cases As An Alternative To Qualified Immunity Reform, Mark C. Niles

Faculty Publications

The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has resulted in a renewed focus on adjudication of civil rights claims against government officials and the perceived inadequacy of the legal resolution of these claims. Calls for reform or complete removal of the defense of qualified immunity for government officials have been central to these discussions.

This Article argues that while arguments for qualified immunity reform are convincing and vital, the exclusive focus on this aspect of civil rights adjudication is misplaced and serves as a distraction from a more basic and consequential flaw in the constitutional tort jurisprudence: the …

Crt Forward: Tracking The Attack On Critical Race Theory, Taifha Natalee Alexander, Latoya Baldwin Clark, Kyle Reinhard, Noah Zatz

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary practice and approach to understanding the foundations and maintenance of race and racial subordination in the legal system throughout history. Since its genesis in United States law schools in the mid-1980s, CRT has explored how racial, and other, hierarchies have persisted despite advancements in racial justice made during times like the Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras. CRT contests many of the standard assumptions underlying traditional civil rights discourse, including that the legal system is a neutral apparatus disconnected from the legacy of racial subordination in the United States. Since its inception, CRT …

Learning Infused Quantum-Classical Distributed Optimization Technique For Power Generation Scheduling, Reza Mahroo, Amin Kargarian

Faculty Publications

The advent of quantum computing can potentially revolutionize how complex problems are solved. This article proposes a two-loop quantum-classical solution algorithm for generation scheduling by infusing quantum computing, machine learning, and distributed optimization. The aim is to facilitate employing noisy near-term quantum machines with a limited number of qubits to solve practical power system optimization problems, such as generation scheduling. The outer loop is a three-block quantum alternating direction method of multipliers (QADMM) algorithm that decomposes the generation scheduling problem into three subproblems, including one quadratically unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) and two non-QUBOs. The inner loop is a trainable quantum …

Machine Learning Approach For Predicting Bridge Components’ Condition Ratings, Md Manik Mia, Sabarethinam Kameshwar

Faculty Publications

Information on bridge condition rating is critical to make decisions regarding rehabilitation or replacement of bridges. Currently, bridge components’ condition ratings are evaluated manually using inspection reports. Markov chain and Petri net models are most commonly used for predicting future values of bridge parameters, however, applicability of these models for a regional or statewide portfolio of bridges may be limited. The existing data based models have low prediction accuracy. Hence, a data and machine learning based approach is presented herein for predicting the future condition values of major components—deck, superstructure and substructure—in a portfolio of bridges with an objective to …

Improving Social Media Use For Disaster Resilience: Challenges And Strategies, Nina S.N. Lam, Michelle Meyer, Margaret Reams, Seungwon Yang, Kisung Lee, Lei Zou, Volodymyr Mihunov, Kejin Wang, Ryan Kirby, Heng Cai

Faculty Publications

This paper develops a social media-disaster resilience analysis framework by categorizing types of social media use and their challenges to better understand and assess its role in disaster resilience research and management. The framework is derived primarily from several case studies of Twitter use in three hurricane events in the United States–Hurricanes Isaac, Sandy, and Harvey. The paper first outlines four major contributions of social media data for disaster resilience research and management, which include serving as an effective communication platform, providing ground truth information for emergency response and rescue operations, providing information on people’s sentiments, and allowing predictive modeling. …

Achieving Online And Scalable Information Integrity By Harnessing Social Spam Correlations, Hailu Xu, Pinchao Liu, Boyuan Guan, Qingyang Wang, Dilma Da Silva, Liting Hu

Faculty Publications

Malicious web links, social rumors, fraudulent advertisements, faked comments, and biased propaganda are overwhelmingly influencing online social networks. Enabling information integrity is a hot topic in both academia and industry. Traditional social spam detection techniques rely on centralized processing, focusing only on one specific set of data sources, thereby ignoring the social spam correlations between distributed data sources. In this paper, we propose an online and scalable misinformation detection system, named Spiral, to uncover social spam by leveraging the correlations between different social data sources in geo-distributed sites. The key insight in our approach is to amplify the effectiveness of …

Historical Global And Regional Spatiotemporal Patterns In Daily Temperature, Md Adilur Rahim, Robert V. Rohli, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz, Nazla Bushra, Carol J. Friedland

Faculty Publications

The abrupt increase in surface air temperature over the last few decades has received abundant scholarly and popular attention. However, less attention has focused on the specific nature of the warming spatially and seasonally, using high-resolution reanalysis output based on historical temperature observations. This research uses the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis Version 5 (ERA5) output to identify spatiotemporal features of daily mean surface air temperature, defined both as the mean of the maximum and minimum temperatures over the calendar day (“meanmaxmin”) and as the mean of the 24 hourly observations per day (“meanhourly”), across the terrestrial …

Analytical Advances In Homeowner Flood Risk Quantification Considering Insurance, Building Replacement Value, And Freeboard, Md Adilur Rahim, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz, Carol J. Friedland, Robert V. Rohli, Nazla Bushra

Faculty Publications

An accurate economic loss assessment for natural hazards is vital for planning, mitigation, and actuarial purposes. The widespread and costly nature of flood hazards, with the economically disadvantaged disproportionately victimized population, makes flood risk assessment particularly important. Here, flood risk is assessed as incurred by the homeowner vs. the flood insurer for insured U.S. properties through the derivation of average annual loss (AAL). AAL is estimated and partitioned using Monte Carlo simulation at the individual home scale, considering insurance coverage and deductible, and the first-floor height (i.e., height of the first floor above the ground), to determine the AAL proportion …

Flood Damage And Shutdown Times For Industrial Process Facilities: A Vulnerability Assessment Process Framework, Carol J. Friedland, Fatemeh Orooji, Ayat Al Assi, Matthew L. Flynn, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz

Faculty Publications

Much of the U.S. petrochemical infrastructure is heavily concentrated along the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico within the impact zone of major tropical cyclone events. Flood impacts of recent tropical disturbances have been exacerbated by an overall lack of recognition of the vulnerabilities to process systems from water intrusion, as well as insufficient disaster mitigation planning. Vulnerability assessment methods currently call for the aggregation of qualitative data to survey the susceptibility of industrial systems to floodwater damage. A means to quantify these consequences is less often employed, resulting in a poor translation of the threat of flood hazards …

Feasible Delivery System Based On Poly(Lactictide-Co-Glycolide) Nanoparticles Loaded With Antimicrobial Mupirocin For Possible Wound Healing, Ludmila Košarišťanová, Tomáš Komprda, Vendula Popelková, Tatiana Fialová, Pavla Vymazalová, Carlos E. Astete

Faculty Publications

The objective of the study was to assess cytotoxicity (based on the dimethylthiazol– diphenyltetrazolium bromide cell viability assay) and antimicrobial effects of poly(lactictide-co-glycolide) nanoparticles with entrapped mupirocin (PLGA/MUP NPs) on Staphylococcus aureus and methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains using a disk-diffusion method, cryo-scanning electron microscopy (cryo-SEM) and fluorescence microscopy. Based on the evaluation of the growth curve, PLGA/MUP NPs inhibited growth of the both tested strains already at a concentration of 0.29 µg/ml, and their inhibitory effect at concentrations from 0.29 to 1.17 µg/ml was comparable with free MUP using the disk-diffusion method. PLGA/MUP NPs also tended to increase the …

Gcs Site Selection In Saline Miocene Formations In South Louisiana, Muhammad Zulqarnain, Stephen O. Sears, Mehdi Zeidouni, Richard G. Hughes, Douglas Carlson, Carlos F. Rivera

Faculty Publications

One of the key requirements of a commercial scale geologic carbon sequestration (GCS) site selection process is identifying injection sites to safely inject and retain injected CO2 over extended time scales. This requires thorough evaluation of site-specific surface and subsurface features. A site screening and selection framework was developed and used to identify potential sites in South Louisiana, incorporating surface data including site proximity to large CO2 stationary sources, vicinity of large population centres and state lands, land usage, legacy oil and gas wells, and local/regional geologic trends. Regionally the Miocene sediments thicken and dip towards the south, reflecting a …

The Impact Of Weibo Features On User’S Information Comprehension: The Mediating Role Of Cognitive Load, Ying Xu, Jia-Qiong Xie, Fu-Xing Wang, Rebecca L. Monk, James Gaskin, Jin-Liang Wang

Faculty Publications

Social media, such as Microblogs, have become an important source for people to obtain information. However, we know little about how this would influence our comprehension over online information. Based on the cognitive load theory, this research explores whether and how two important features of Weibo, which are the feedback function and information fragmentation, would increase cognitive load and may in turn hinder users’ information comprehension in Weibo. A 2 (feedback or non-feedback) × 2 (strong-interference or weak-interference information) between-participants experimental design was conducted. Our results revealed that the Weibo feedback function and interference information exerted a negative impact over …

Multiple-Choice Reading Behaviors Of Esl Students: An Eye-Tracking Study, Juan Escalante, Grant Eckstein, Troy L. Cox, Steven Luke

Faculty Publications

Only recently has eye-tracking been used to investigate test-taker reading behavior, and results have been primarily used to confirm a range of cognitive tasks elicited by test items. This study explores test taker reading behavior for its own sake by describing how ESL readers of different proficiency levels behaviorally view multiple-choice passages and test items at different difficulty levels. Data were gathered from 51 students at three proficiency levels attending a university-sponsored intensive English program (IEP). Participants read eight validated reading comprehension items at varying difficulty levels while their eye movements were recorded on the passage, multiple-choice stem, correct answer, …

Rapid Prediction Of Verbs Based On Pronoun Interpretation Is Modulated By Individual Differences In Pronoun Processing, Jeffrey Jack Green

Faculty Publications

How quickly can pronoun interpretation affect the prediction of a following verb? Readers were presented with implicit causality contexts in which a specific pronoun and following verb were predictable. N400 and reaction time results indicated that predictable verbs were facilitated relative to unpredictable verbs when following predicted pronouns, suggesting that verbal predictions were rapidly updated based on pronoun interpretation. There was also some evidence for rapid updating of verb predictions after unexpected pronouns, but this was modulated by individual differences. Some readers appear to have placed higher weight on top–down implicit causality predictions to interpret unexpected pronouns, and others on …

Solving The Cherry-Picking Problem In Legislative History Use – A Corpus-Based Approach For Empirical Intentionalist Legal Interpretation Analysis, Brett James Hashimoto, James Heilpern

Faculty Publications

The use of legislative histories under intentionalist/purposivist theories of statutory interpretation is frequently criticized because it can be easily biased (see, e.g., Scheppele, 2012). To date, corpus-based statutory interpretation has relied almost exclusively on textualist theory of legal interpretation. However, corpus linguistic methods are not necessarily bound to any one theory (e.g., Biber & Reppen, 2015). The present study analyses two legislative histories as corpora and compares them against a general corpus of English to determine if interpretative theory makes a meaningful difference in two example cases (Costello v. United States, 2012; Taniguchi v. Kan Saipan Pacific, 2012). Senses of …

School Resource Officers' Impact On Violence And Crime, Angelo Kevin Brown

Faculty Publications

School resource officers (SRO) have been involved in the American school system for about 70 years. SRO programs began in the early 1950s beginning within a school district in Flint, Michigan. Since the start of SRO programs, police officers were predominately placed in schools with a high percentage of African American students and in low-income communities. School administration had implemented a program to station law enforcement officers in the school because of crime, drugs, and violence within the school. The community in the Flint School District had a lot of racial discrimination and elevated levels of racial inequality and segregation. …