Digital Commons Network^™

The Marginal Value Of Public Pension Wealth: Evidence From Border House Prices, Darren Aiello, Asaf Bernstein, Mahyar Kargar, Ryan Lewis, Michael Schwert

Faculty Publications

We study how state pension windfalls affect property prices near state borders, where theory suggests real estate reflects the value of additional public resources. Windfalls, representing a source of state revenue about half the size of total taxes, provide economically significant and plausibly exogenous variation in fiscal conditions. We find that each dollar of pension asset returns increases border house prices by approximately two dollars, suggesting that governments allocate additional funds towards high-value projects or tax abatement rather than wasting incremental resources. Evidence of larger effects in financially constrained municipalities highlights how fiscal resources amplify welfare effects of economic shocks.

Wellness And The Tax Law, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

The tax law has long provided extensive subsidies for “medical care.” These subsidies cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The definition of medical care, which is at the heart of these subsidies, originated many decades ago at a time when there was little to no conception of wellness.

Times have changed in the medical world. Medical science now emphasizes that wellness practices, like exercise, meditation, and social connection, have an important impact on physical as well as mental health, including by playing a significant role in preventing and treating disease. Under the tax statute, medical care …

A Patent System For Temple Grandin, Andrew Chin

Faculty Publications

This article explores the intersection of neurodiversity and innovation through the lens of Temple Grandin’s contributions to livestock handling systems and her philosophical alignment with the U.S. patent system. Drawing on cognitive research by Simon Baron-Cohen, archaeological insights from Penny Spikins, and personal reflections, I argue that autistic cognitive styles—characterized by heightened “folk physics” aptitudes and visual thinking—have historically driven technological progress. Grandin’s patented inventions, motivated by sensory-based empathy for animals, exemplify how neurodivergent inventors seek to embed their conceptions of ethical utility into the nation’s technological infrastructure. The article critiques modern patent litigation trends, advocating instead for a system …

Scrutinizing Transgender Healthcare Bans Through Intersex Exceptions, Holning Lau, Barbara A. Fedders

Faculty Publications

Major professional medical organizations—for example, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Endocrine Society—consider gender-affirming care to be safe and, at times, essential for vulnerable transgender youth. Despite these benefits, 26 states have banned gender-affirming care for minors. Proponents of these bans raise concerns about potential medical harms, the irreversibility of treatments, and the adequacy of informed consent.

Every state ban includes an exception for so-called gender-normalizing surgeries, which are performed on intersex infants to conform their bodies to socially constructed expectations about the male/female binary. The procedures are rarely medically necessary, but proponents of the surgeries contend …

Flooding The Zone: The State Of Federal Flood Insurance At The Beginning Of Trump 2.0, Maggie Caudle, Jacob Dowler, Donald T. Hornstein

Faculty Publications

The risks of flooding in the United States have never been more apparent, making all the more significant the state of flood insurance and the legal and political volatility of the National Flood Insurance Program. In this Article we discuss the details of “Risk Rating 2.0,” the most significant change to federal flood insurance in half a century, and its legal and political future in the new world of Trump 2.0. And, in addition to describing the details of this new change to federal flood insurance, we describe its advantages and disadvantages in both the newfound political environment in which …

Civic Duties And Cultural Change, Daniel B. Rice

Faculty Publications

What duties do Americans owe the state? Today, this question seems almost incomprehensible. Compulsions in the common interest are received coolly in our rights-obsessed culture, and the Supreme Court has never announced a framework for identifying the burdens of citizenship. Yet the concept of civic duty has played a central role in America’s constitutional tradition. From shoveling snow to repairing roads to fighting overseas, private individuals have long been forced to serve the public in ways menial and profound. Strangely, the discourse of obligation that legitimated numerous compulsions has faded from professional view. Judges’ mawkish tributes to liberty pay no …

Notice, Consent, And Choice-Of-Jurisdiction Clauses In The United States, John F. Coyle

Faculty Publications

Although choice-of-jurisdiction clauses are routinely enforced by courts in the United States, there are circumstances where they are subject to special scrutiny. One of these circumstances is when the party resisting the clause was not provided with proper notice as to the existence of the clause or the identity of the chosen jurisdiction. This Article first reviews the existing case law in this area and shows that while some U.S. courts have refused to enforce clauses for lack of notice, others do so as a matter of course. It then discusses several decisions where U.S. courts have held that notice …

Debt, Work, And The State, Kate Sablosky Elengold

Faculty Publications

In every state and the District of Columbia, an individual who owes a debt to the state can lose their license to work. Without the ability to make a living, it is much harder to pay off debt. Although using occupational license restrictions as a debt collection tool appears nonsensical, it has never before been the subject of scholarly debate. This Article thus begins an important conversation about debt, work, and the state.

This Article identifies the pervasive authority that state and local governments have to revoke an individual’s occupational license solely because that person owes a debt to the …

Arrest Unbound, Eisha Jain

Faculty Publications

Arrest has long been legally defined as a seizure, or temporary restraint on liberty, under the Fourth Amendment. But when the government arrests someone today, it imposes far more than a seizure. The government also marks individuals with arrest records, which enable wide-ranging penalties, such as deportation, civil detention, loss of a professional license, and disruption of custody. One consequence is that this regulatory structure unravels arrest from the key institutional checks that would permit the public or key actors to examine whether the government-imposed consequences stemming from arrest are fair and justified. Proportionality depends on the public at large …

Dividing Trademark Use, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

The trademark law of the United States places special emphasis on whether and how a trademark is used in commerce. But over the long history of the Lanham Act—including some less-than-careful drafting by Congress and some aggressive acts of interpretation by the federal courts—the concept of “use” has become complicated and in many ways confused. Two recent Supreme Court cases—Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC and Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc.—reflect and in some ways exacerbate that confusion. But the opinions in these cases also expose an interesting property of “use” in trademark law …

The Whiteness Of Wealth & Black Student Loan Debt, Renee Nicole Allen

Faculty Publications

On June 30, 2023, to the dismay of many anxious borrowers, the Supreme Court held that the Secretary of Education did not have the authority to cancel roughly $430 billion in federal student loan balances, thus blocking President Biden’s plan for student loan forgiveness. Despite authority delegated to the Secretary to waive or modify provisions of the Education Act to ensure low-to-middle income borrowers were not placed in a worse financial position because of the COVID-19 national emergency, the Court rejected the forgiveness plan and borrowers resumed payments in October 2023. Anti-Black racism in federal law and policy have contributed …

Actuator Disk Model For Aeropropulsive Coupling Effects In Vortex Particle Method, Eduardo Alvarez, Vineet Ahuja, Vinod Lakshminarayan, Aaron Perry, Ryan Anderson, Andrew Ning

Faculty Publications

Blown lift and distributed electric propulsion aircraft pose strong aeropropulsive coupling effects that cannot be ignored during the early stages of design. In this study, we develop an advanced actuator disk model (ADM) for aeropropulsive coupling effects of ducted fans with the vortex particle method (VPM). The advanced ADM consists of (1) an actuator disk at the rotor plane, (2) a surface vortex sheet modeling the mixing and convection of blade tip vorticity along walls, and (3) a powered wake at the exhaust. With these three components, a propulsion jet with an arbitrary velocity profile is formed and interactions with …

A Generalized Coherence Framework For Quantifying Input Contributions In Multi-Input Systems With Correlated Or Uncorrelated Inputs, Nolan H. Howes, Matthew S. Allen, Dario Farina, Steven Knight Charles

Faculty Publications

In multi-input systems, it is often necessary to quantify the contribution of each input to an output. Such contribution analysis is frequently performed using coherence. However, when correlation is present between inputs, existing coherence measures do not accurately quantify the contribution of individual inputs, except in special cases. Here we propose an expanded coherence framework that enables contribution analysis in any multi-input system, regardless of input correlation. We bridged the gap by defining three new coherence measures: component, excluded, and isolated coherence. Component coherence is an intermediate measure that decomposes measured output power into components attributable to inputs directly vs …

Comparing The Sensitivity And Specificity Of Novel Motor Assessments For Traumatic Brain Injury, Paula K. Johnson, Ariana M. Hedges-Muncy, Erin D. Bigler, Lorie Richards, Steven Knight Charles

Faculty Publications

Background: Portable technology that records movements with high accuracy provides potential for sensitive clinical movement tests for individuals who experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Objective: (1)To present impairments assessed using markerless motion capture (MMC) and (2) to compare the sensitivity and specificity of the MMCmediated tests to each other and to common clinical tests. Design: Screening study, using as criterion standard the ability to classify participant with TBI versus control participant. Setting: Research laboratory. Participants: The study included 30 individuals with TBI and 101 control participants. Entry criteria included most recent head injury < 5 years old, no history of movement issues prior to injury, no movement-affecting medications, and sufficient cognitive ability to follow instructions. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measures: Performance on MMC-mediated tests and existing clinical analogs. MMC-mediated tests included finger oscillation, simple reaction time, and visually guided movement tasks. For comparison, participants also completed the following clinical tests: Halstead–Reitan finger tapping, simple reaction time test, and Beery Visuomotor Integration test. Impairments were identified as test scores of participants with TBI that fell outside of the 95% interval of control participants’ test scores. Random forest analysis was used to calculate the sensitivity and specificity of MMC and clinical tests according to their ability to correctly classify participants with TBI and control participants. Results: MMC-mediated tests revealed impairments in more participants with TBI than clinical tests in all three TBI groups (mild, repeated, and moderate to severe). Similarly, MMC-mediated tests revealed a higher percentage of scores as impairments than clinical tests in all three groups with TBI. Furthermore, MMC-mediated tests proved more sensitive and more specific than clinical tests (70% versus 50% and 98% versus 93%, respectively). Conclusion: MMC-mediated tests are sensitive and specific (compared to traditional clinical tests) and have potential to fill a gap in clinical care of TBI.

Business Communication And Editing Students’ Evaluations Of Written Error: An Eye-Tracking Study, Matt Baker, Grant Eck, Ana Barraza, Benjamin Duffield

Faculty Publications

Using eye-tracking and interview methods, this study investigates how business communication students and editing students attend to and evaluate writing. Participants reviewed blog posts embedded with errors and judged publication readiness. While both groups visually fixated longer on errors than non-errors, business communication students were more likely to approve error-containing texts for publication. Qualitative data revealed that business communication students prioritized content while editing students prioritized surface-level issues. These findings suggest that disciplinary background informs evaluative standards, even when error-detection behavior is similar. The results carry implications for instruction in business writing and editing, especially concerning collaborative, cross-disciplinary workplace writing.

An House For The Lord: Solomon's Temple And Temple Worship In Ancient Israel, Dan Belnap

Faculty Publications

It would not be exaggeration to say that at the center of Old Testament history and theology is covenantal worship and the temple. From the Garden of Eden to the altars constructed by Abraham and the patriarchs, and the portable tabernacle of Moses, the concept of sacred space plays a fundamental role throughout biblical history and in the life of ancient Israel. But during the period of the monarchy, it became possible to construct a permanent house for the Lord. Thus, the construction and dedication of the temple are the primary subject within Solomon’s narrative arc. This chapter explores the …

Existential Responsibility In Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, And Chiang, Justin F. White

Faculty Publications

In “Story of Your Life” and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” Ted Chiang explores questions that would be at home in contemporary scholarship on free will, agency, and moral responsibility. In “Story of Your Life,” Chiang asks whether knowledge of the future is compatible with free will. And the prism technology in “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” prompts questions of whether we are responsible for out-of-character actions. If such actions were genuine anomalies, would we be less responsible for them? In these stories, however, these questions are entangled with questions more at home in the existentialist tradition. Put …

If The Body Keeps The Score, What Happens When You Bring The Body To Work? Exploring The Health Effects Of Trauma On Human Capital, Lisa Jones Christensen, Elizabeth Embry, Arielle Badger Newman, Paul C. Godfrey

Faculty Publications

Data reveal that the physical effects of trauma exposure increasingly surface in business, social, and other settings. Exposure to trauma at any point in life can cause employee health concerns, yet many firms do not acknowledge or address this. Herein, we combine trauma theory with human capital theory to explain how manifestations of trauma exposure—hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction—impact employee health and performance. This article outlines how each manifestation affects human capital deployment, and thus employee performance. It further demonstrates how these human capital deployment issues have individual- and unit-level performance implications. This article offers a theory linking health effects of …

Existing Personal Leadership Prototypes Versus Organizational Leadership Prototypes: How Individuals Manage Tensions Between Leading With Authenticity And Conformity During Their Socialization As Leaders In Organizations, Benjamin M. Galvin, Jeffrey S. Bednar, Archie Bates

Faculty Publications

Based on qualitative data collected at the United States Military Academy (West Point), this research enhances our understanding of how individuals manage tensions between leading with authenticity and organizational pressures for conformity, resulting from a lack of alignment between their existing personal leadership prototypes and organizational prototypes of leadership. Our theoretical model moves beyond existing research on leader identity construction− which largely treats individuals as blank slates as they construct who they will be as leaders in organizations− by highlighting how individuals learn to enact a leadership approach during socialization that fits within their personal zone of acceptable authenticity and …

Browsing Within An Academic Library, Holt Zaugg, Jillian Bunderson

Faculty Publications

Purpose – Browsing library resources is a method long used by researchers to expand their understanding of ill-defined projects and to have serendipitous research discoveries. This study sought to understand the browsing activities of students in an academic library. Design/methodology/approach – The study used two methods. First, a link to an online survey was posted on posters throughout the library inviting students to share their browsing experience. Second, library security officers (student employees) were asked to count the number of people browsing within the stacks as they conducted their hourly walk-throughs of the library. Browsing was broadly defined as anyone …

Designing For Relational Ethics In Online And Blended Learning: Levinas, Buber, And Teaching Interfaith Ethics, Michael Hubbard Mackay, Jason K. Mcdonald, Andrew C. Reed

Faculty Publications

Online and blended learning (OBL) overemphasize the process of creating artifacts, producing strategies, or otherwise utilizing a “making” orientation in education. As an alternative to this making-orientation, we offer a model for relational course design founded in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber. We examine an OBL course design focused on interfaith leadership and ethics that lends itself to the need for relational pedagogy. The focus on asymmetrical and symmetrical relationships that separate Levinas and Buber’s philosophies enable rich ways of designing relational pedagogies and for resisting the making orientation. By focusing on human relationships, we demonstrate design …

Sources Of Influence In Marriage And Parenting For Interfaith Couples, William D. Stanford, Justin J. Hendricks, Ted G. Futris, Loren D. Marks, David C. Dollahite

Faculty Publications

Interfaith marriages are increasingly common, yet research on their family dynamics and sources of influence in family functioning remains limited. Relatedly, although research highlights religion’s influence on family processes, most studies only include same-faith couples. Subsequently, we qualitatively explored the experiences of 32 happily married interfaith couples, examining their sources of guidance in marriage and parenting, reasons for rejecting influences, and the role of religion in their family functioning. We identified one theme of rejecting outside influence and five key themes/sources of influence: one another/themselves, family, friends, media/professionals, and spiritual sources. Findings emphasize similarities between interfaith couples and American families …

Assessing Parental Stress And Self-Efficacy: A Multisite Feasibility Study Of Parent-Mediated Physical Activity Interventions For Children With Developmental Disabilities, Luis Columna, Scott Mcnamarra, Beth A. Myers, Nienke Dosa, Ashlyn Barry, Kristi Roth, Christine E. Ashby, Byungmo Ku, Timothy Davis, Nikkia Borowski, Lisa M. Hooper

Faculty Publications

Background: Children with developmental disabilities often face barriers to engaging in physical activity (PA), impacting their health and quality of life. Parent-mediated interventions (PMIs) have shown promise to reduce these barriers, but little research explores online PMIs for parents of children with developmental disabilities. Thus, the purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility and impact of a multi-site collaborative online parent-mediated PA intervention on stress levels and self-efficacy among parents of children with developmental disabilities over a 12-week period.

Methods: Participants (n=55) were parents of children with developmental disabilities, randomly assigned to intervention (n=27) or control (n=28) groups. …

Editorial: Artificial Intelligence For Smart Health: Learning, Simulation, And Optimization, Bing Yao, Nathan Gaw, Hyo Kyung Lee

Faculty Publications

With rapid developments in medical sensing and imaging, we now live in an era of data explosion in which large amounts of data are readily available in clinical environments. The fast-growing biomedical and healthcare data provide unprecedented opportunities for data-driven scientific knowledge discovery and clinical decision support. Our Research Topic aims to catalyze synergies among biomedical informatics, machine learning, computer simulation, operations research, systems engineering, and other related fields with three specific goals: (1) develop cutting-edge data-driven models to accelerate scientific knowledge discovery in biomedicine using healthcare data collected from laboratory systems, imaging systems, and medical and sensing devices; (2) …

Editorial: Infrastructure Maintenance And Monitoring For Sustainable Cities, Yonas Kassa, Saeed Eftekhar Azam, Deepak Khazanchi, Brian Ricks

Faculty Publications

As cities continue to grow and evolve, maintaining and monitoring their infrastructure becomes an 2 increasingly challenging problem, requiring multidisciplinary approaches. This problem is as critical for 3 developing countries that are rapidly building their infrastructure (Gurara et al., 2018Ede et al., 2019) 4 as it is for already developed countries with aging infrastructure (Van Breugel, 2017). Researchers have 14 Such developments can also be integrated into digital twinning-a technology approach that creates 15 virtual replicas of physical infrastructure elements, systems, and cities-that offers a dynamic framework 16 for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance through data integration and simulation. The …

Phase Transitions In The Co-Doped Heusler Alloy Ni2mn1−Xcoxga, Jing Han Chen, Tej Poudel Chhetri, Nathaniel Wrobel, Xiaojian Bai, David P. Young, Igor Dubenko, Saikat Talapatra, Naushad Ali, Shane Stadler

Faculty Publications

The phase transitions of a series of Co-doped Heusler alloys, Ni 2 Mn 1 − x Co x Ga ( 0 ⩽ x ⩽ 0.2 ), were investigated experimentally using the magnetization measurements, x-ray diffraction, and calorimetric measurements up to their respective melting points. With increasing Co concentration, the structural transition temperatures, Curie temperatures, and melting points, were observed to increase, while the order-disorder transition temperatures decreased. Temperature-dependent x-ray diffraction experiments revealed two different crystal structures in the low-temperature martensite phase for different Co concentrations. However, above their respective structural transitions, both low-temperature crystal structures transformed into the L2 1 …

Molten Flux Synthesis Of Plutonium (Iv) Silicates K2Pusi2O7 And Rb2Pusi6O15, Travis K. Deason, Gregory Morrison, Amir Mofrad, Jake Amoroso, David Diprete, Theodore M. Besmann, Shanna L. Estes, Hans Conrad Zur Loye

Faculty Publications

Few plutonium containing silicates have been reported in the literature and only one other tetravalent plutonium silicate structure has been reported using the flux growth method. With the goal of understanding actinide incorporation into silicates, we describe herein two new plutonium (IV) silicates, Rb2PuSi6O15 and K2PuSi2O7, synthesized using a mixed alkali chloride/alkali fluoride flux growth. Both structures crystallize in the C2/c space group with lattice parameters a=24.2980(10) Å, b=7.1466(3) Å, c=17.2025(8) Å and 96.6560(10)° for Rb2PuSi6O15, and a=9.9478(2) Å, b=5.59820 (10) Å, c=13.1848(2) Å, and 105.7400(10)° for K2PuSi2O7. Comparisons to the synthesis of other reported alkali actinide silicates (Ce, U, …

The Creation Of Our Universe: How Science And Our Religious Beliefs Align, Dan Broadbent

Faculty Publications

This presentation describes the author's opinions about how the creation of our universe may align with theories of the multiverse and the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Racial And Ethnic Differences In Outcomes Of Neonates Born At Less Than 30 Weeks' Gestation, 2018-2022, Nansi S. Boghossian, Marco Geraci, Erika M. Edwards, Jeffrey D. Horbar

Faculty Publications

Importance: Previous research has examined outcomes among very preterm newborns by the birthing parent's race and ethnicity, but knowledge about these trends during the COVID-19 pandemic is limited. Objective: To examine trends in outcomes among Black, Hispanic, and Asian preterm newborns compared with White preterm newborns. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study (2018-2022) took place at 774 neonatal intensive care units in the Vermont Oxford Network. Participants were newborns born at 22 to 29 weeks' gestation. Exposure: Race and ethnicity. Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcomes were mortality and complications, including respiratory distress syndrome, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), early-onset …

Capacity-Weighted Figures-Of-Merit For Battery Transport Metrics, Cj Sturgill, Christopher Sutton, Julian Schwenzel, Morgan Stefik

Faculty Publications

New battery materials with improved transport are needed. Typical measurements yield widely varying voltage-dependent diffusivities and reporting practices are diverse. Some materials (e.g. first-order phase change) have most redox occur at a specific voltage and may be sufficiently represented by singular transport metrics. Many rapid intercalation materials, however, exhibit second-order phase transitions with redox over a broad voltage range. How should such cases be compared? The use of capacity-weighted average values is suggested where voltage-dependent metrics are consolidated into representative descriptors as figures-of-merit. Examples are elaborated where differential capacity (dQ/dV) is used to derive a …