Digital Commons Network^™

Sexbots; An Obloquy, Thomas Simmons

Faculty Publications

Sexbots may displace humans in the sex trade (or on a wider scale) sometime between the 2020s and the 2050s. Although some perquisites may derive from the proliferation of sexbots (lower levels of sexually transmitted diseases, for example), significant social harms can also be predicted. In anticipation of those harms, lawmakers may endorse targeted regulation or outright bans. The uncertain limits of Lawrence v. Texas and its progeny of sex-toy decisions will present vague constitutional shoals to these aims. The legislating-of-sexbots crusade will also make for strange bedfellows, politically speaking, as social conservatives aiming to maintain traditional values ally with …

The Impact Of Faculty Status And Gender On Employee Well-Being In Academic Libraries, Quinn Galbraith, Leanna Fry, Melissa Garrison

Faculty Publications

This study measures job satisfaction, personal fulfillment, work/life balance, and stress levels of male and female librarians. Researchers surveyed 719 librarians at ARL institutions that either offer faculty status and tenure or offer neither. Females at libraries offering faculty status indicated poor work/life balance and high levels of stress compared to male colleagues and female librarians without faculty status; however, their reported job satisfaction was similar. Possible implications of the results are discussed.

Developing A Risk Model To Target High-Risk Preventive Interventions For Sexual Assault Victimization Among Female U.S. Army Soldiers, Amy E. Street, Anthony J. Rosellini, Robert J. Ursano, Steven G. Heeringa, Eric D. Hill, John Monahan, James A. Naifeh, Maria V. Petukhova, Ben Y. Reis, Nancy A. Sampson, Paul D. Biese, Murray B. Stein, Alan M. Zaslavsky, Ronald C. Kessler

Faculty Publications

Sexual violence victimization is a significant problem among female U.S. military personnel. Preventive interventions for high-risk individuals might reduce prevalence but would require accurate targeting. We attempted to develop a targeting model for female Regular U.S. Army soldiers based on theoretically guided predictors abstracted from administrative data records. As administrative reports of sexual assault victimization are known to be incomplete, parallel machine learning models were developed to predict administratively recorded (in the population) and self-reported (in a representative survey) victimization. Capture–recapture methods were used to combine predictions across models. Key predictors included low status, crime involvement, and treated mental disorders. …

Employing Trafficking Laws To Capture Elusive Leaders Of Destructive Cults, Robin Boyle Laisure

Faculty Publications

In the 1970s and ‘80s in the United States, American newspapers raised public awareness about cults. Capturing headlines were articles about women, and later men, who followed Charles Manson to the extreme length of committing “Helter Skelter,” a cold-blooded killing spree. Cult activity continued to exist, out of sight and unobserved, until culminating in tragedy when it would, again, become the topic of a news story. Even when cults did not achieve “front-page” status in the news, they continued to recruit adults and raise children born into the group.

Destructive cults are the focus of this paper. Cults continue to …

The Jury Trial In Antitrust Cases: An Anachronism?, Edward D. Cavanagh

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The Seventh Amendment of the United States Constitution provides in relevant part that "[i]n suits at common law, where the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." The jury trial has long been the foundation of the American civil justice system and is deeply embedded in American culture. As the Supreme Court has observed, "[m]aintenance of the jury as a factfinding body is of such importance and occupies so firm a place in our history and jurisprudence that any seeming curtailment of the right to a jury trial should be scrutinized …

...Because It’S Not Just About Money, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

When lawyers represent their clients in party-decided dispute resolution processes such as negotiation or mediation, lawyers have a unique opportunity to work with their clients to help shape a comprehensive settlement beyond just a monetary settlement. This is an opportunity to address the client’s human and core concerns and to help their client secure their personalized sense of justice. However, lawyers and mediators who myopically seek to resolve every legal conflict by just monetary resolution are akin to the carpenter who sees everything as a nail because the only tool available is a hammer. This column invites you to …

Expanding The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Schools (K-12) And The Regulation Of Cyberbullying, Philip Lee

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In a tragic case that received international attention, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince killed herself after being bullied—both physically and online—by some of her classmates. Phoebe had moved to Massachusetts from a small town in Ireland, enrolling as a freshman at South Hadley High School. After a brief relationship with a popular boy in the senior class, the taunting by her classmates began. Some students called her an “Irish slut” and a “whore,” knocked things out of her hands, and sent her threatening texts. Some of the students used Facebook and Twitter to speak badly about her. Phoebe suffered this treatment …

Lawyers’ Obligations When Representing Clients With Diminished Capacity, Elissa Germaine

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Lawyers have a significant role to play in protecting clients with diminished capacity from financial exploitation. PIABA members, in particular, see the issue from a unique vantage point – usually after a person with diminished capacity (or a family member or concerned third party) notices a drop in value in his or her brokerage account and approaches the lawyer to help figure out what happened in the account and, if appropriate, to pursue a claim to recover damages. As such, members must understand their own obligations as lawyers to clients with diminished capacity, obligations that apply in the context …

On Expressivism And Retributivism In 'The Mighty And The Almighty', Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This short comment explores Nicholas Wolterstorff's claims about expressivism and retributivism as justifications for the state's punishment of criminal offenders in his book, "The Mighty and the Almighty." It asks two questions about his account of expressivism and retributivism respectively, focusing on his interpretation of the reasons for punishment given by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans.

How We Prosecute The Police, Kate Levine

Faculty Publications

Police brutality is at the center of a growing national conversation on state power, race, and our problematic law enforcement culture. Focus on police conduct, in particular when and whether it should be criminal, is on the minds of scholars and political actors like never before. Yet this new focus has brought up a host of undertheorized questions about how the police are treated when they become the subject of criminal prosecutions.

This Article is part of a larger project wherein I examine the ways in which criminal procedure is different for the police than other suspects. Here, my focus …

Re-Shaming The Debate: Social Norms, Shame, And Regulation In An Internet Age, Kate Klonick

Faculty Publications

Advances in technological communication have dramatically changed the ways in which social norm enforcement is used to constrain behavior. Nowhere is this more powerfully demonstrated than through current events around online shaming and cyber harassment. Low cost, anonymous, instant, and ubiquitous access to the Internet has removed most—if not all—of the natural checks on shaming. The result is norm enforcement that is indeterminate, uncalibrated, and often tips into behavior punishable in its own right—thus generating a debate over whether the state should intervene to curb online shaming and cyber harassment.

A few years before this change in technology, a group …

Free Exercise By Moonlight, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

How is the current condition of religious free exercise, and religious accommodation in specific, best understood? What is the relationship of the two most important free exercise cases of the past half-century, Employment Division v. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC? This essay explores four possible answers to these questions.

1. Smith and Hosanna-Tabor are the twin suns of religious accommodation under the Constitution. They are distinctively powerful approaches.

2. Hosanna-Tabor’s approach to constitutional free exercise is now more powerful than Smith’s. Smith has been eclipsed.

3. Hosanna-Tabor has shown itself to be feeble. It has …

Corporate Wrongdoing: Interactions Of Legal Mandates And Corporate Culture, Vincent Dilorenzo

Faculty Publications

In recent years, enforcement officials have imposed billions of dollars in sanctions on all major U.S. financial institutions and many major financial institutions abroad. Similar sanctions have been imposed on nonfinancial institutions. The sanctions are the result of findings of recurrent violations of law, as well as recidivism. Why have existing regulatory standards and enforcement policies led to repeated violations of law? Will the recent billion dollar sanctions deter future wrongdoing?

This article explores these issues by examining the philosophy motivating regulatory policy and action in the United States and United Kingdom, using financial regulators as a case study. This …

Publication Of Government-Funded Research, Open Access, And The Public Interest, Julie Kimbrough, Laura N. Gasaway

Faculty Publications

Public access to government-funded research is an issue of tremendous importance to researchers, librarians, and ordinary citizens around the world. Based on the notion that taxpayers finance research through their tax dollars, research data should be available to them. Rapid, unfettered access to research publications provides access to medical research to patients, encourages further exploration and inquiry by other researchers, informs citizens, and advances scientific research. Scientists typically write articles that divulge the results of their government-funded research. Prior to the open access movement, these articles were published in commercially produced journals. Subscriptions to these journals are expensive, and cost …

The New School Segregation, Erika K. Wilson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Linguistic Cohesion In Middle-School Texts: A Comparison Of Logical Connectives Usage In Science And Social Studies Textbooks, Diego Román, Allison Briceño, Hannah Rhode, Stephanie Hironka

Faculty Publications

Learning from textbooks is challenging because students must understand novel concepts while also comprehending the language used to convey those concepts. In the domain of science, one posited reason for the perceived difficulty in the reading comprehension of science texts is the low frequency of logical connectives (words that signal relationships between sentences and ideas). To test this claim and discuss its potential effects on the reading comprehension of texts used at the middle school level, this study measured whether the usage of logical connectives (e.g., therefore, so) differed between science and social studies textbooks. Our findings from a large …

Making Instructional Decisions: Deepening Our Understanding Of Emergent English Learners' Processing Of Text, Allison Briceño, Adria Klein

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Reframing Pictures: Reading The Art Of Appropriation, Liz Linden

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Whole Woman's Health And The Supreme Court's Kaleidoscopic Review Of Constitutional Rights, Elizabeth Price Foley

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Evidence Of The Military's Sexual Assault Blind Spot, Eric R. Carpenter

Faculty Publications

In response to the American military's perceived inability to handle sexual assault cases, many members of Congress have lost confidence in those who run the military justice system. Critics say that those who run the military justice system are sexist and perceive sexual assault cases differently than the public does. This article is the first to empirically test that assertion. Further, this is the first study to focus on the military population that matters – those who actually run the military justice system. This study finds that this narrow military population endorses two constructs that are associated with the acceptance …

Regulating The U.S. Treasury Market, Jerry W. Markham

Faculty Publications

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is critical to our monetary policy and government funding. It also serves as a benchmark for pricing other investments and has provided a haven for investors seeking safety and stability. However, concern has recently arisen that “primary dealers” in that market might have manipulated prices. In addition, an unusual market volatility event that occurred in October 2014, and the growth of high-frequency trading have raised further questions over the adequacy of regulation in that market. This article addresses those concerns. It first describes the U.S. Treasury market and identifies efforts by traders over the …

Airline Safety Improvement Through Experience With Near-Misses: A Cautionary Tale, Peter Madsen, Robin L. Dillon, Catherine H. Tinsley

Faculty Publications

In recent years, the U.S. commercial airline industry has achieved unprecedented levels of safety, with the statistical risk associated with U.S. commercial aviation falling to 0.003 fatalities per 100 million passengers. But decades of research on organizational learning show that success often breeds complacency and failure inspires improvement. With accidents as rare events, can the airline industry continue safety advancements? This question is complicated by the complex system in which the industry operates where chance combinations of multiple factors contribute to what are largely probabilistic (rather than deterministic) outcomes. Thus, some apparent successes are realized because of good fortune rather …

The Effects Of Noise On Speech Movements In Young, Middle- Aged, And Older Adults. Speech, Language And Hearing, Christopher Dromey, Sarah Scott

Faculty Publications

People often talk in noisy environments, which can influence the effectiveness of communication. This study examined the impact of several types of noise on speech production by measuring lip movements during a sentence repetition task. Sixty participants in three age groups ranging from 20 to 70 repeated a sentence under five noise conditions (silence, one person reading aloud, two readers, six readers, and pink noise).A head-mounted strain gauge system tracked vertical lip movements. With the presentation of noise during a speaking task, the intensity increased due to the Lombard effect in all of the noise conditions. The utterance duration for …

Blended Learning Citation Patterns And Publication Networks Across Seven Worldwide Regions, Kristian J. Spring, Charles R. Graham

Faculty Publications

The field of international blended learning (BL) is primed to benefit from stronger communication and collaboration. Collaboration is currently limited, and regions vary greatly in terms of citations. However, BL is growing worldwide and each region is an important part of the community. The goal of this research is to explore where the most impactful conversations about BL worldwide are occurring and how, if at all, are they connected to one another in terms of citations and publications. We present here the most cited BL articles from each region, the journals that publish these articles, and citation and publication patterns …

A Qualitative Analysis Of Institutional Drivers And Barriers To Blended Learning Adoption In Higher Education, Wendy W. Porter, Charles R. Graham, Robert G. Bodily, Daniel S. Sandberg

Faculty Publications

The authors previously proposed a framework for institutional BL adoption (Graham, Woodfield, & Harrison, 2012), identifying three stages: (a) awareness/exploration, (b) adoption/early implementation, and (c) mature implementation/growth. The framework also identified key strategy, structure, and support issues universities may address at each stage. In this paper, the authors applied that framework as well as Rogers' (2003) diffusion of innovations theory to determine the degree to which institutional strategy, structure, and support measures facilitate or impede BL adoption among higher education faculty. In addition, the authors explored whether higher education faculty's innovation adoption category affects which measures facilitate or impede BL …

Family Therapy In Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare: Current Practices And Future Possibilities, Anita R. Tucker, Mark A. Widmer, Troy Faddis, Bryan Randolph, Michael Gass

Faculty Publications

This paper highlights the role of the family in the treatment of youth who attend Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare (OBH) programs. It discusses the history of OBH, provides a critical overview of the research on the impact of OBH programs on family functioning, and discusses the importance of increased intentional integration of family therapy into OBH settings. To show this integration, this study presents a case study that highlights the role of the family, as well as the home family therapist throughout the phase of OBH treatment. Areas for future esearch are provided as well as suggestions for the increased utilization …

Assessing Users Satisfaction With Web Digital Library: The Case Of Universiti Teknologi Mara, Mohamad Noorman Masrek, James Eric Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of user satisfaction in the context of academic web digital library (DL). A model based on the re-specified information system success model was developed and tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

Design/methodology/approach – The study employed survey research methodology with self-administered questionnaire as the research instrument. The questionnaire was developed based on the instruments used by previous researchers. The population of the study was students enrolled for the bachelor’s degree in the Faculty of Information Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. These students were chosen because of …

Folate And Inflammatory Markers Moderate The Association Between Helicobacter Pylori Exposure And Cognitive Function In Us Adults, Bruce L. Brown, Andrew N. Berrett, Shawn D. Gale, Lance D. Erickson, Dawson W. Hedges

Faculty Publications

Background: Helicobacter pylori(H. pylori) infection is associated with cogni-tive deficits in humans, an association potentially mediated or moderated byfolate concentration or inflammation.Materials and

Methods: We used the National Health and Nutrition Exami-nation Survey (NHANES) datasets to examine whether folate concentrationor inflammation mediates or moderates the relationship betweenH. pyloriand cognitive function. Models were performed using linear, Poisson, andzero-inflated Poisson regression, and we performed separate analyses forgroups aged 20–59 and 60–90 years with sample sizes ranging from 700 to1700.Results:We did not find evidence of mediation in either age group. In the20- to 59-year group, interactions betweenH. pyloriand ferritin (pvaluesranging from .004 to …

What Mediates The Relationship Between Religious Service Attendance And Aspects Of Well-Being?, Scott A. Baldwin, Patrick R. Steffen, Kevin S. Masters

Faculty Publications

Religious service attendance predicts increased well-being across a number of studies. It is not clear, however, whether this relationship is due to religious factors such as intrinsic religiosity or due to nonreligious factors such as social support or socially desirable responding. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between religious service attendance and well-being while simultaneously examining intrinsic religiosity, social support, and socially desirable responding as potential mediators of the relationship. A sample of 855 participants (71 % female, average age 19.5) completed questionnaires assessing religiosity, social support, socially desirable responding, and well-being. Path models were …

An Evaluation Of A Smartphone–Assisted Behavioral Weight Control Intervention For Adolescents: Pilot Study, Chad D. Jensen, Kristina M. Duncombe, Mark A. Lott, Sanita L. Hunsaker, Kara Mcrae Duraccio, Susan J. Woolford

Faculty Publications

Background: The efficacy of adolescent weight control treatments is modest, and effective treatments are costly and are not widely available. Smartphones may be an effective method for delivering critical components of behavioral weight control treatment including behavioral self-monitoring.

Objective: To examine the efficacy and acceptability of a smartphone assisted adolescent behavioral weight control intervention.

Methods: A total of 16 overweight or obese adolescents (mean age=14.29 years, standard deviation=1.12) received 12 weeks of combined treatment that consisted of weekly in-person group behavioral weight control treatment sessions plus smartphone self-monitoring and daily text messaging. Subsequently they received 12 weeks of electronic-only intervention, …