Digital Commons Network^™

Rights To Nowhere: The Idea's Inadequacy In High-Poverty Schools, Claire Raj

Faculty Publications

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) successfully opened the schoolhouse doors to millions of students with disabilities. But more than forty years after its enactment, the law has proven largely inept at confronting the educational inequities faced by the many students with disabilities attending underfunded, high-poverty public schools. This shortcoming is inconsistent with common conceptions of the IDEA: Advocates and policymakers alike treat the IDEA’s rights and privately enforceable remedies as strong, meaningful tools. This Article theorizes that the IDEA’s under-appreciated failures are overlooked because they are the products of the law’s internal structure, undue judicial deference to schools, …

The Dental Health Of Rural Elderly People And Its Social Justice Implications, Health In The Hills: Understanding The Impact Of Health Care Law In Rural Communities, Jacqueline R. Fox

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Eschatological Hope Scale: Construct Development And Measurement Of Theistic Eschatological Hope, Charlotte Vanoyen-Witvliet, M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Julie J. Exline, David C. Wang, Lindsey M. Root Luna, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, David G. Myers, Alexis D. Abernethy, John D. Witvliet

Faculty Publications

This study aimed to expand psychological research on hope by contributing a construct and scale to measure central dimensions of theistic eschatological hope derived from Christian scriptures. Eschatological hope was conceptualized as the anticipation that God will make all things new, raising people to everlasting life with God in joyful celebration, including people from every culture and nation, ending all personal pain and suffering, eliminating all societal evil and harm, and bringing reconciliation and healing to all of creation. We developed the Eschatological Hope Scale with three studies (N = 1,466). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported the single-factor structure …

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Copyright Jurisprudence, Ryan Vacca, Ann Bartow

Faculty Publications

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, the world lost a trailblazer for gender equality, a pop culture icon, a feisty liberal luminary who fought on behalf of the disenfranchised in the areas of civil rights and social Justice, and an inspiration to millions of people. She will long be remembered for the social changes she helped effectuate as an advocate, scholar, and Jurist.

Her amazing civil rights legacy overshadows other areas where Justice Ginsburg's contributions have been substantial. This Article discusses one of the most interesting: copyright law. During her time as a Jurist on the …

States Can Infringe Upon Your Intellectual Property Rights With Impunity In The Era Of "New Federalism", Homayoon Rafatijo, Dennis D. Crouch

Faculty Publications

Antagonized by half a century of insouciance toward federalism boundaries, the "New Federalism" revival began under Chief Justice Rehnquist. As part of this revival, the Rehnquist Court substantially restrained Congress's authority to regulate commerce, abrogate sovereign immunity, fashion remedies pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and "commandeer" state officials. The New Federalism has continued in the Roberts Court Era, most recently in a case weighing congressionally enacted copyright policy against the sovereignty of individual states to disregard copyright. In Allen v. Cooper, a unanimous Supreme Court held that Congress's express power under Article I is not a …

Non-State Actors "Under Color Of Law": Closing A Gap In Protection Under The Convention Against Torture, Anna R. Welch, Sangyeob Kim

Faculty Publications

The world is experiencing a global restructuring that poses a serious threat to international efforts to prevent and protect against torture. The rise of powerful transnational non-state actors such as gangs, drug cartels, militias, and terrorist organizations is challenging states’ authority to control and govern torture committed within their territory.

In the United States, those seeking protection against deportation under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) must establish a likelihood of torture at the instigation of or by consent or acquiescence of a public official acting in an official capacity or other person acting in an official capacity. However, what is …

Molecular Characterization And Expression Variation Of The Odorant Receptor Co-Receptor In The Formosan Subterranean Termite, Paula Castillo, Claudia Husseneder, Qian Sun

Faculty Publications

Subterranean termites live in underground colonies with a division of labor among castes (i.e., queens and kings, workers, and soldiers). The function of social colonies relies on sophisticated chemical communication. Olfaction, the sense of smell from food, pathogens, and colony members, plays an important role in their social life. Olfactory plasticity in insects can be induced by long- and short-term environmental perturbations, allowing adaptive responses to the chemical environment according to their physiological and behavioral state. However, there is a paucity of information on the molecular basis of olfaction in termites. In this study, we identified an ortholog encoding the …

A Nondestructive Method Of Calculating The Wing Area Of Insects, Kexin Yu, Gadi V.P. Reddy, Julian Schrader, Xuchen Guo, Yirong Li, Yabing Jiao, Peijian Shi

Faculty Publications

Most insects engage in winged flight. Wing loading, that is, the ratio of body mass to total wing area, has been demonstrated to reflect flight maneuverability. High maneuverability is an important survival trait, allowing insects to escape natural enemies and to compete for mates. In some ecological field experiments, there is a need to calculate the wing area of insects without killing them. However, fast, nondestructive estimation of wing area for insects is not available based on past work. The Montgomery equation (ME), which assumes a proportional relationship between leaf area and the product of leaf length and width, is …

Resistance Allele Frequency To Cry1ab And Vip3aa20 In Helicoverpa Zea (Boddie) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) In Louisiana And Three Other Southeastern U.S. States, Shucong Lin, Isaac Oyediran, Ying Niu, Sebe Brown, Don Cook, Xinzhi Ni, Yan Zhang, Francis P.F. Reay-Jones, Jeng Shong Chen, Zhimou Wen, Marcelo Dimase, Fangneng Huang

Faculty Publications

The corn earworm/bollworm, Helicoverpa zea (Boddie), is a pest species that is targeted by both Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) maize and cotton in the United States. Cry1Ab and Vip3Aa20 are two common Bt toxins that are expressed in transgenic maize. The objective of this study was to determine the resistance allele frequency (RAF) to Cry1Ab and Vip3Aa20 in H. zea populations that were collected during 2018 and 2019 from four southeastern U.S. states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. By using a group-mating approach, 104 F2 iso-lines of H. zea were established from field collections with most iso-lines (85) from Louisiana. …

Wetlands In China: Evolution, Carbon Sequestrations And Services, Threats, And Preservation/Restoration, Siyuan Ye, Lixin Pei, Lei He, Liujuan Xie, Guangming Zhao, Hongming Yuan, Xigui Ding, Shaofeng Pei, Shixiong Yang, Xue Li, Edward Laws

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Wetlands In China: Evolution, Carbon Sequestrations And Services, Threats, And Preservation/Restoration, Siyuan Ye, Lixin Pei, Lei He, Liujuan Xie, Guangming Zhao, Hongming Yuan, Xigui Ding, Shaofeng Pei, Shixiong Yang, Xue Li, Edward Laws

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Do Mobile Consumers Homogenize The Distribution Of Resources In Stream Food Webs? A Test With Overlapping Fish And Mussel Aggregations, Caryn C. Vaughn, Thomas B. Parr, Traci P. Dubose, Kiza K. Gates, Garrett W. Hopper, Keith B. Gido

Faculty Publications

In streams, unionoid mussels and fish form aggregations that exert bottom-up and top-down effects on food webs, but the magnitude and spatial extent of their effects are controlled by species traits. Sedentary mussels live burrowed in the sediment in patchily distributed dense aggregations (mussel beds) where they filter seston and provide a local, relatively constant nutrient subsidy. In contrast, fish move on and off mussel beds, and thus comprise a transient nutrient subsidy. We asked how overlap between fish and mussels influences nutrient recycling and resource distribution in streams. We conducted an 8-week study in experimental streams where we created …

Online Bayesian Optimization For A Recoil Mass Separator, S. A. Miskovich, F. Montes, G. P.A. Berg, J. Blackmon, K. A. Chipps, M. Couder, C. M. Deibel, K. Hermansen, A. A. Hood, R. Jain, T. Ruland, H. Schatz, M. S. Smith, P. Tsintari, L. Wagner

Faculty Publications

The Separator for Capture Reactions (SECAR) is a next-generation recoil separator system at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) designed for the direct measurement of capture reactions on unstable nuclei in inverse kinematics. To maximize the performance of this system, stringent requirements on the beam alignment to the central beam axis and on the ion-optical settings need to be achieved. These can be difficult to attain through manual tuning by human operators without potentially leaving the system in a suboptimal and irreproducible state. In this work, we present the first development of online Bayesian optimization with a Gaussian process …

In Situ Recording Of Mars Soundscape, S. Maurice, B. Chide, N. Murdoch, R. D. Lorenz, D. Mimoun, R. C. Wiens, A. Stott, X. Jacob, T. Bertrand, F. Montmessin, N. L. Lanza, C. Alvarez-Llamas, Stanley M. Angel, M. Aung, J. Balaram, O. Beyssac, A. Cousin, G. Delory, O. Forni, T. Fouchet, Et. Al.

Faculty Publications

Before the Perseverance rover landing, the acoustic environment of Mars was unknown. Models predicted that: (1) atmospheric turbulence changes at centimetre scales or smaller at the point where molecular viscosity converts kinetic energy into heat1, (2) the speed of sound varies at the surface with frequency^2,3 and (3) high-frequency waves are strongly attenuated with distance in CO₂ (refs.^2,3,4). However, theoretical models were uncertain because of a lack of experimental data at low pressure and the difficulty to characterize turbulence or attenuation in a closed environment. Here, using Perseverance …

The Constitutional Right To An Implicit Bias Jury Instruction, Colin Miller

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to prevent jurors from holding defendants’ silence against them. In a trilogy of opinions, the Court concluded that when a defendant refrains from testifying, (1) the prosecutor and judge cannot make adverse comments about that decision; (2) the judge can give a “no adverse inference” instruction even over a defense objection; and (3) the judge must give a “no adverse inference” instruction upon a defense request. Conversely, the Court has never ruled that jurors can impeach their verdict based upon jurors holding a defendant’s silence against him, and lower courts have ruled …

Flood Detection In Urban Areas Using Satellite Imagery And Machine Learning, Ahad Hasan Tanim, Callum Blake Mcrae, Hassan Tavakol-Davani, Erfan Goharian

Faculty Publications

Urban flooding poses risks to the safety of drivers and pedestrians, and damages infrastructures and lifelines. It is important to accommodate cities and local agencies with enhanced rapid flood detection skills and tools to better understand how much flooding a region may experience at a certain period of time. This results in flood management orders being announced in a timely manner, allowing residents and drivers to preemptively avoid flooded areas. This research combines information received from ground observed data derived from road closure reports from the police department, with remotely sensed satellite imagery to develop and train machine-learning models for …

Enhanced Obfuscation For Software Protection In Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing Platforms, Muhammad Hataba, Ahmed Sherif, Reem Elkhouly

Faculty Publications

Nowadays, sensors, communications connections, and more powerful computing capabilities are added to automobiles, making them more intelligent. The primary goal was to eliminate the need for human control, making them Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Consequently, researchers thought to put all that newly added computational power to use for other endeavors. Hence, Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing (AVCC) models were introduced. Nevertheless, this goal is not an easy undertaking, the dynamic nature of autonomous vehicles introduces a critical challenge in the development of such a distributed computing platform. Furthermore, it presents far complicated issues as far as security and protection of services associated …

Caffeine Supplementation Strategies Among Endurance Athletes, Andreas Kreutzer, Austin J. Graybeal, Kamiah Moss, Robyn Braun-Trocchio, Meena Shah

Faculty Publications

Caffeine is widely accepted as an endurance-performance enhancing supplement. Most scientific research studies use doses of 3–6 mg/kg of caffeine 60 min prior to exercise based on pharmacokinetics. It is not well understood whether endurance athletes employ similar supplementation strategies in practice. The purpose of this study was to investigate caffeine supplementation protocols among endurance athletes. A survey conducted on Qualtrics returned responses regarding caffeine supplementation from 254 endurance athletes (f = 134, m =120; age = 39.4 ± 13.9 y; pro = 11, current collegiate athlete = 37, recreational = 206; running = 98, triathlon = 83, cycling = …

U.S. Abortion Care Providers’ Perspectives On Self-Managed Abortion, Aleta Baldwin, Dana M. Johnson, Kathleen Broussard, Luisa Alejandra Tello-Pérez, Melissa Madera, Carol Ze-Noah, Elisa Padron, Abigail R.A. Aiken

Faculty Publications

State-level restrictions on abortion access may prompt greater numbers of people to self-manage their abortion. The few studies exploring perspectives of providers towards self-managed abortion are focused on physicians and advanced practice clinicians. Little is known about the wider spectrum of abortion care providers who encounter self-managed abortion in their clinic-based work. To gain a deeper understanding of this issue and inform future care delivery, we conducted in-depth interviews with 46 individuals working in a range of positions in 46 abortion clinics across 29 states. Our interpretative analysis resulted in themes shaped by beliefs about safety and autonomy, and a …

Strain Energy-Based Fatigue Failure Analyses Of Lb-Pbf Inconel 718: Effect Of Build Orientation, Arash P. Jirandehi, Behnam Hajshirmohammadi, Patricio Carrion, M. M. Khonsari, Nima Shamsaei, Shuai Shao

Faculty Publications

Additively manufactured Inconel 718 parts fabricated in three build orientations (horizontal, vertical, and angled at 45 degrees) are tested in fully-reversed bending fatigue mode. Damping measurements via the Impulse Excitation technique are used to assess the defects content in the microstructure and fractography analysis is performed to detect the root cause of failure. Two micro- and macro-scale methodologies of fatigue damage estimation based on the dissipated heat per cycle and the statistical estimation of micro-plastic strain energies are used to assess fatigue damage. It is shown that at a given stress level, the vertically built specimens endure the most fatigue …

Against Criminal Law Localism, Brenner M. Fissell

Faculty Publications

Scholars have long called for greater localism in criminal justice as a response to the crises of racialized mass incarceration and over-policing. A downward shift of power to smaller local governments is thought to maximize an array of values, including liberty, equality, and efficient experimentation, and also to allow for criminal justice to better reflect societal viewpoints. In making these claims, localists have at times either explicitly included control over substantive criminal law in their devolutionary project, or have overlooked that more general calls for localism would presumably include this power.

This Article critiques substantive criminal law localism, arguing that …

The Way Lawyers Worked, Michael Risch, Mike Viney

Faculty Publications

Court and litigation operations are opaque in the best of times, and the lack of explanatory Nineteenth Century legal records makes it even more difficult to learn how lawyers and judges went about their business. This may be one of the reasons there are so few accounts detailing the nuts and bolts of 1800s law practice. This Article illuminates the development of litigation and the law in the middle of the Nineteenth Century by examining archival court and Patent Office records. Most accounts of the time focus either on judicial opinions or the relationship of the parties, but few articles …

Evaluating Climatic Influences On The Technical Performance Of Built Infrastructure Assets, Sarah L. Brown, Steven J. Schuldt, Michael N. Grussing, Michael A. Johnson, Justin D. Delorit

Faculty Publications

Asset performance evaluations serve as a benchmark that can be used to make asset manufacturer selection decisions, i.e., choosing the brand of manufacturer that provides the highest performance among all brand competitors. Understanding the environmental conditions to which assets are subjected provides facility managers another data point to understand asset performance. This research builds upon a previously published performance-based manufacturer selection metric by investigating the linkage between asset performance and exposure to local climate, using chiller and air handler data from 20 United States Air Force installations. The link between environmental factors such as Heating Degree Days (HDD); Cooling Degree …

Making The Best From A Mess: Mental Health, Misconduct, And The "Insanity Defense" In The Va Disability Compensation System, Caleb R. Stone

Faculty Publications

The disability compensation system implemented by the Department of Veterans Affairs ("VA") is highly technical and complex. Before veterans reach questions concerning entitlement to benefits or the amount of compensation, they must first achieve basic eligibility for VA benefits. That involves receiving a discharge that is "honorable" for VA purposes. For some former servicemembers seeking benefits, using the VA's "insanity defense" to excuse misconduct leading to a less-than-honorable discharge may be the best avenue for obtaining compensation. The VA insanity provision contemplated in 38 U.S.C. s. 5303(b) and defined in 38 C.F.R. s. 3.354 is the only "defense" that allows …

Through The Looking Glass: A Systematic Review Of Longitudinal Evidence, Providing New Insight For Motor Competence And Health, Lisa M. Barnett, E. Kipling Webster, Ryan M. Hulteen, An De Meester, Nadia C. Valentini, Matthieu Lenoir, Caterina Pesce, Nancy Getchell, Vitor P. Lopes, Leah E. Robinson, Ali Brian, Luis P. Rodrigues

Faculty Publications

Introduction

In 2008, a conceptual model explaining the role of motor competence (MC) in children’s physical activity (PA), weight status, perceived MC and health-related fitness was published.

Objective

The purpose of the current review was to systematically compile mediation, longitudinal and experimental evidence in support of this conceptual model.

Methods

This systematic review (registered with PROSPERO on 28 April 2020) was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) statement. Separate searches were undertaken for each pathway of interest (final search 8 November 2019) using CINAHL Complete, ERIC, Medline (OVID), PsycINFO, Web of Science …

Serving God Across The Divide: A Lesson From Jeremiah, Oliver Glanz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Constraints On Dark Photon Dark Matter Using Data From Ligo's And Virgo's Third Observing Run, R. Abbott

Faculty Publications

We present a search for dark photon dark matter that could couple to gravitational-wave interferometers using data from Advanced LIGO and Virgo's third observing run. To perform this analysis, we use two methods, one based on cross-correlation of the strain channels in the two nearly aligned LIGO detectors, and one that looks for excess power in the strain channels of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. The excess power method optimizes the Fourier transform coherence time as a function of frequency, to account for the expected signal width due to Doppler modulations. We do not find any evidence of dark photon …

Possible Studies On Generalized Parton Distributions And Gravitational Form Factors In Neutrino Reactions, Shunzo Kumano, Roberto Petti

Faculty Publications

Spacelike and timelike generalized parton distributions (GPDs) have been investigated in charged-lepton scattering and electron-positron collisions via deeply virtual Compton scattering and two-photon processes, respectively. Furthermore, we expect that hadron-accelerator-facility measurements will be performed in future. The GPDs will play a crucial role in clarifying the origins of hadron spins and masses in terms of quarks and gluons. It is also possible to probe internal pressure within hadrons for understanding their stability. Gravitational form factors of hadrons used to be considered as a purely academic subject because gravitational interactions are too weak to be measured in microscopic systems. However, due …

Application Of Machine Learning To Predict The Performance Of An Emipg Reactor Using Data From Numerical Simulations, Owen Sedej, Eric G. Mbonimpa, Trevor Sleight, Jeremy Slagley

Faculty Publications

Microwave-driven plasma gasification technology has the potential to produce clean energy from municipal and industrial solid wastes. It can generate temperatures above 2000 K (as high as 30,000 K) in a reactor, leading to complete combustion and reduction of toxic byproducts. Characterizing complex processes inside such a system is however challenging. In previous studies, simulations using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) produced reproducible results, but the simulations are tedious and involve assumptions. In this study, we propose machine-learning models that can be used in tandem with CFD, to accelerate high-fidelity fluid simulation, improve turbulence modeling, and enhance reduced-order models. A two-dimensional …

Bipse: A Biomarker-Based Phase I/Ii Design For Immunotherapy Trials With Progression-Free Survival Endpoint, Beibei Guo, Yong Zang

Faculty Publications

A Bayesian biomarker-based phase I/II design (BIPSE) is presented for immunotherapy trials with a progression-free survival (PFS) endpoint. The objective is to identify the subgroup-specific optimal dose, defined as the dose with the best risk-benefit tradeoff in each biomarker subgroup. We jointly model the immune response, toxicity outcome, and PFS with information borrowing across subgroups. A plateau model is used to describe the marginal distribution of the immune response. Conditional on the immune response, we model toxicity using probit regression and model PFS using the mixture cure rate model. During the trial, based on the accumulating data, we continuously update …