Digital Commons Network^™

The Supreme Court Corrects A Seventy-Five Year Distortion In Establishment Clause Jurisprudence, Patrick Garry

Faculty Publications

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the US. Supreme Court ruled that the Establishment Clause did not prohibit a high school football coach from offering a brief midfield prayer at the conclusion of games. The Ninth Circuit had held that the coach's free exercise rights had to yield to the Establishment Clause's prohibition of conduct that might reflect a state endorsement of religion. In overturning the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court issued an historic and far-reaching ruling on the scope and nature of the Establishment Clause, providing the first truly clarifying decision in this area in the past seventy-five years. …

Novel Liquor-Based Hot Sauce: Physicochemical Attributes, Volatile Compounds, Sensory Evaluation, Consumer Perception, Emotions, And Purchase Intent, Ricardo S. Aleman, Jhunior A. Marcía, Ismael Montero-Fernández, Joan King, Shirin Kazemzadeh Pournaki, Roberta Targino Hoskin, Marvin Moncada

Faculty Publications

Hot sauces are popular peppery condiments used to add flavor and sensory excitement to gastronomical preparations. While hot sauce occupies a retail category well over a century old, a novel production method using liquor as the base preservative rather than traditional vinegar is now commercially available, and its uniqueness begs study. Hot sauces produced with tequila, rum, vodka, and bourbon were compared to traditional vinegar-based hot sauces concerning physicochemical properties, volatile compounds, microbiological quality, sensory scores, emotions, and purchase intent (PI). Under accelerated conditions, pH, titratable acidity (TA), water activity (Aw), viscosity, and color were analyzed weekly for 20 weeks, …

Part I — Introduction: Social Physics And The Vespace Project, Jeffrey M. Leichman, Ben Samuel

Faculty Publications

This article introduces the VESPACE project, an international, multi-disciplinary digital humanities initiative to build a computer-mediated playable simulation—a video game—of the eighteenth-century Paris Fair theatre. As part of this project, a weeklong postgraduate workshop was convened by the authors in May 2020 to develop protocols and procedures for coding literary and historical data for the Ensemble social physics engine that will govern behaviour of non-player characters (NPCs) in the interactive model. This article lays out the history and theory of social physics, the potential impacts of this project on historiographic practice, and the methodology and outcomes of the workshop week. …

The Rise Of Native Lordships At Pashash, A.D. 200–600, North Highlands Of Ancash, Peru, George F. Lau, Milton Luján Dávila, Jacob L. Bongers, David Chicoine

Faculty Publications

This article examines the rise of native, segmentary lordships in the highlands of north-central Peru. It reports on new excavations and mapping at the seat of a prehispanic polity, Pashash (Recuay culture), a large hilltop center that developed after the collapse of Chavín civilization. Fieldwork revealed monumental constructions and two special activity contexts radiocarbon-dated to ca. a.d. 200–400: an offering area in a large palatial compound and a room-complex with chambers closed off and sealed with feasting refuse. Multiple lines of evidence help reconstruct a regional picture for the establishment of wealthy local elites. Cultural innovations explicitly link new leaders …

A Cyclically Adjusted Spatio-Temporal Kernel Density Estimation Method For Predictive Crime Hotspot Analysis, Ya Han, Yujie Hu, Haojie Zhu, Fahui Wang

Faculty Publications

This paper presents a new method for predictive crime hotspot analysis that further improves the kernel density estimation (KDE) method and the spatio-temporal kernel density estimation (STKDE) method by accounting for temporal crime cycles and is therefore termed the ‘cyclically adjusted STKDE (cSTKDE) method’. The case study on robbery incidents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shows a temporal cycle with a 6-month period of statistical significance from January 2010 to May 2018. This identified period is incorporated into the temporal kernel function of the new cSTKDE method. For validation, the Forecast Accuracy Index (FAI) and Forecast Precision Index (FPI) are used …

Between Black Mothers And Daughters: A Critical Intergenerational Duoethnography On The Silence Of Health Disparities And Hope Of Loud Healing, Asha S. Winfield, Hope Hickerson, Deshara C. Doub, Ann R. Winfield, Brigitte Mcphatter

Faculty Publications

Introduction: Black American women's health outcomes have been altered by a number of factors. Those factors include social determinants of health, lack of culturally competent healthcare providers, and generations of medical racism leading to prolonged pain, delayed care, and sometimes, untimely deaths. Methods: This original research article centers Southern Black women's lived experiences through family storytelling. We explored generations of health narratives in regard to age, region, and at times, their own acts of silence. Building from theorizing on loud healing, two Black daughters turned the mic on for their mothers by engaging in a critical intergenerational double duoethnography to …

Prep On Tiktok: Benefits, Barriers, And Possibilities, Joseph Schwartz, Josh Grimm, Cameron Jamison

Faculty Publications

HIV remains a serious problem in the U.S. particularly for men who have sex with men. PrEP is an intervention that can dramatically decrease the risk of HIV infection. Because rates of PrEP adoption have been lower than anticipated, researchers have called for new tactics for promoting PrEP. For this reason, we analyzed PrEP messaging on TikTok. In an analysis guided by the Health Belief Model, we found that discussions of PrEP benefits and barriers were most common on TikTok. Severity and susceptibility were least common. We distilled these findings into suggestions for promoting PrEP adoption.

Exploring The Effects Of Cross-Cultural Variation And Tourism In Utah English, Zoe Eldredge, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Emerging Social Meaning

• Eckert (2016): sociolinguistic variation is not just a consequence of social change but helps contribute to it.
• Such changes become enregistered and are linked to groups or personae.
• Fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000) may contribute to the beginnings of such differences (e.g. Zhang 2021).

Data Visualization In 10-K Filings, Theodore E. Christensen, Karson E. Fronk, Joshua A. Lee, Karen K. Nelson

Faculty Publications

The Securities and Exchange Commission encourages the presentation of information or data in graphical form to improve users’ ability to understand financial disclosures. We find a dramatic increase in the disclosure of both qualitative and quantitative infographics in 10-K filings over time and substantial cross-sectional variation in firms’ choices regarding image types, data content, and the placement of infographics within 10-Ks. We provide evidence on factors associated with firms’ use of infographics and explore the persistence with which they are disclosed over time. Finally, we investigate the relation between the use of infographics and uncertainty in capital markets.

U.S. College Students’ Perspectives On Contraception And Abortion Post-Dobbs: The Influence Of Socioeconomic Privilege And Gender Inequity, Emily S. Mann, Jessica A. Mclennan, Kathleen Broussard

Faculty Publications

This study examined college students’ perspectives about contraception and abortion in the context of the United States Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022. Individual, semi-structured interviews were conducted between October 2022 and February 2023 with a convenience sample of 20 college students, ages 18–22, attending a public university in the southeastern United States. Qualitative data analysis revealed three main themes. First, most participants conveyed fear, dismay, and anger about the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade and a few expressed concerns about potential restrictions on contraception. …

U.S. Travelers’ Perceived Image Of Latin America As Their Future Travel Destination, Maricela I. Montes-Guerra, Natalia Zapata-Cuervo, Miyoung Jeong

Faculty Publications

This study identified U.S. travelers’ perceptions toward Latin America as their future place to visit, based on their perceived destination attributes, activities, and overall affective image. Selecting nine attractive destinations, this study aimed, first, to develop U.S. travelers’ perceptual mapping of countries by using destination image attributes and activities, second, to determine comparative strengths and weaknesses, and third, to propose destination marketing strategies that will derive U.S. travelers' attention to the country. Overall, Americans have favorable affective image toward the nine tourism destinations in Latin America. Costa Rica was respondents’ most preferred country to visit, followed by Peru and Brazil.

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) …

Get Out: Structural Racism And Academic Terror, Renee Nicole Allen

Faculty Publications

Released in 2017, Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed film Get Out explores the horrors of racism. The film’s plot involves the murder and appropriation of Black bodies for the benefit of wealthy, white people. After luring Black people to their country home, a white family uses hypnosis to paralyze victims and send them to the Sunken Place where screams go unheard. Black bodies are auctioned off to the highest bidder; the winner’s brain is transplanted into the prized Black body. Black victims are rendered passengers in their own bodies so that white inhabitants can obtain physical advantages and immortality.

Like Get …

Hats For Sale: Efficiency, Economics, And Process Integrity, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

What are the ethical considerations for a mediator when a neutral is asked to be both the mediator and arbitrator on the same case? Some parties and their lawyers opt to select one neutral to serve as both the mediator and arbitrator on the same case, believing it will be a more efficient and cost-effective way to resolve their dispute. After all, the mediator already knows the facts of the case. Why waste time and money getting another neutral up to speed? This design choice, however, may collide with the mediator ethical mandates of party self-determination, neutral impartiality, confidentiality, …

Humanizing Virtual Dispute Resolution, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

How might neutrals and advocates foster interpersonal dynamics when conducting arbitrations and mediations virtually, consistent with the ethical obligations of each profession and the ethical underpinnings of each process?

Virtual dispute resolution for commercial dispute resolution has become the new normal. Yet, the dispute resolution listserves are still peppered with posts from mediators and arbitrators who, although publicly extolling their own commitments to their impartiality and neutrality, are also simultaneously voicing their strong preferences for conducting their dispute resolution processes in person. According to these neutrals, they are unable to attain the same results when the process is conducted …

Copyright’S Capacity Gap, Andrew Gilden, Eva E. Subotnik

Faculty Publications

Most areas of law require that individuals meet a certain threshold of capacity before their decisions — e.g., to marry, to enter into a contract, or to execute an estate plan — are given legal effect. Copyright law, by contrast, gives legal effect to creative decisions by granting the decisionmaker many decades of exclusive rights so long as they are a human being and have demonstrated a “creative spark.” This Article examines the overlooked consequences of this gap in capacity standards between copyright and other areas of law. It shows that this gap has produced numerous opportunities for vulnerable creators …

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 …

In Pursuit Of Sustainable Educational Development: The Philippines And The English Dilemma, Rosemary C. Salomone

Faculty Publications

The English language poses a dilemma in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially for education in countries with high multilingualism, high poverty and unequal schooling, such as the Philippines. This chapter considers Goal 1 (reducing poverty), Goal 4 (promoting educational quality) and Goal 10 (reducing inequalities) in relation to what has become an array of executive orders, regulations and laws that have shifted in the political winds, even as the judiciary has tried to navigate a measured course. It underscores how the primacy of English in the national consciousness, tied to global markets, undercuts multilingual policies based in …

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 …

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 …

Editorial: Application Of Periodic Structure Theory With Finite Element Approach, Chitaranjan Pany, Guoqiang Li

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Study On Soft Robotic Pinniped Locomotion, Dimuthu D.K. Arachchige, Tanmay Varshney, Umer Huzaifa, Iyad Kanj, Thrishantha Nanayakkara, Yue Chen, Hunter B. Gilbert, Isuru S. Godage

Faculty Publications

Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and navigate through tight spaces. These robots have the potential to be used for various applications, such as search and rescue, inspection, surveillance, and more. The state-of-the-art still faces many challenges, including limited degrees of freedom, a lack of diversity in gait trajectories, insufficient limb dexterity, and limited payload capabilities. To address these challenges, we develop a modular soft-limbed robot that can mimic the locomotion of pinnipeds. By …

Dynamic Modeling And Validation Of Soft Robotic Snake Locomotion, Dimuthu D.K. Arachchige, Sanjaya Mallikarachchi, Iyad Kanj, Dulanjana M. Perera, Yue Chen, Hunter B. Gilbert, Isuru S. Godage

Faculty Publications

Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to date, soft robotic snakes are limited to emulating planar locomotion gaits, which are derived via kinematic modeling and tested on robotic prototypes. Given that the snake locomotion results from the reaction forces due to the distributed contact between their skin and the ground, it is essential to investigate the locomotion gaits through efficient dynamic models capable of accommodating distributed contact forces. We present a complete spatial dynamic model …

Show Us The Data: Global Covid-19 Wastewater Monitoring Efforts, Equity, And Gaps, Colleen C. Naughton, Fernando A. Roman, Ana Grace F. Alvarado, Arianna Q. Tariqi, Matthew A. Deeming, Krystin F. Kadonsky, Kyle Bibby, Aaron Bivins, Gertjan Medema, Warish Ahmed, Panagis Katsivelis, Vajra Allan, Ryan Sinclair, Joan B. Rose

Faculty Publications

A year since the declaration of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there were over 110 million cases and 2.5 million deaths. Learning from methods to track community spread of other viruses such as poliovirus, environmental virologists and those in the wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) field quickly adapted their existing methods to detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Unlike COVID-19 case and mortality data, there was not a global dashboard to track wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA worldwide. This study provides a 1-year review of the “COVIDPoops19” global dashboard of universities, sites, and countries monitoring SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Methods to …

Simulating Stellar Merger Using Hpx/Kokkos On A64fx On Supercomputer Fugaku, Patrick Diehl, Gregor Dais, Kevin Huck, Dominic Marcello, Sagiv Shiber, Hartmut Kaiser, Dirk Pfluger

Faculty Publications

The increasing availability of machines relying on non-GPU architectures, such as ARM A64FX in high-performance computing, provides a set of interesting challenges to application developers. In addition to requiring code portability across different parallelization schemes, programs targeting these architectures have to be highly adaptable in terms of compute kernel sizes to accommodate different execution characteristics for various heterogeneous workloads. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to code and performance portability that is based entirely on established standards in the industry. In addition to applying Kokkos as an abstraction over the execution of compute kernels on different heterogeneous execution environments, …

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 …

Freeboard Life-Cycle Benefit-Cost Analysis Of A Rental Single-Family Residence For Landlord, Tenant, And Insurer, Ehab Gnan, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz, Md Adilur Rahim, Carol J. Friedland, Robert V. Rohli, Arash Taghinezhad, Ayat Al Assi

Faculty Publications

Flood risk to single-family rental housing remains poorly understood, leaving a large and increasing population underinformed to protect themselves, including regarding insurance. This research introduces a life-cycle benefit-cost analysis for the landlord, tenant, and insurer [i.e., (U.S.) National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)] to optimize freeboard [i.e., additional first-floor height above the base flood elevation (BFE)] selection for a rental single-family home. Flood insurance premium; apportioned flood risk among the landlord, tenant, and NFIP by insurance coverage and deductible; rental loss; moving and displacement costs; freeboard construction cost; and rent increase upon freeboard implementation are considered in estimating net benefit (NB) …

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 …

International Society Of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: Ketogenic Diets, Arny A. Ferrando, Robert R. Wolfe, Katie R. Hirsch Phd,Ep-C, Cissn, David D. Church, Shiloah A. Kviatkovsky, Michael D. Roberts, Jeffrey R. Stout, Drew E. Gonzalez, Ryan J. Sowinski, Richard B. Kreider, Chad M. Kerksick, Nicholas A. Burd, Stefan M. Pasiakos, Michael J. Ormsbee, Shawn M. Arent Ph.D., Cscs*D, Fissn, Facsm, Fnak, Paul J. Arciero, Bill I. Campbell, Trisha A. Vandusseldorp, Ralf Jager, Darryn S. Willoughby, Douglas S. Kalman, Jose Antonio

Faculty Publications

Position Statement: The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) presents this position based on a critical examination of literature surrounding the effects of essential amino acid (EAA) supplementation on skeletal muscle maintenance and performance. This position stand is intended to provide a scientific foundation to athletes, dietitians, trainers, and other practitioners as to the benefits of supplemental EAA in both healthy and resistant (aging/clinical) populations. EAAs are crucial components of protein intake in humans, as the body cannot synthesize them. The daily recommended intake (DRI) for protein was established to prevent deficiencies due to inadequate EAA consumption. The following conclusions …