Digital Commons Network^™

Repeated Healing Of Low Velocity Impact Induced Damage In Orthogrid-Stiffened Sandwich Panel, Patrick Mensah, Guoqiang Li, Obed Tetteh

Faculty Publications

Herein, we present a new sandwich panel composed of a carbon fiber grid-stiffened shape memory vitrimer (SMV) core. The sandwich panels were fabricated via a pin-guided dry-weaving technology, and their impact responses were evaluated via low-velocity impact testing. The main failure mode observed after the first round of impact was the transverse cracking of the SMV matrix in the sandwich core. The healing efficiency according to the crack initiation energy (CIE) was found to be 76.5% after the first healing cycle. Even after the second healing cycle, the healing efficiency was greater than 72%. From the low-velocity impact tests, reinforcing …

Self-Healing Of Macroscopic Cracks In Concrete By Cellulose Fiber Carried Microbes, Emmanuel Igbokwe, Samuel Ibekwe, Patrick Mensah, Ogad Agu, Guoqiang Li

Faculty Publications

This research introduces a new approach to healing millimeter scale cracks in concrete using Lysinibaccilus Sphaericus Bacteria (LSB) encapsulated in cellulose fibers. Cracking in concrete, particularly macroscopic cracking, can cause premature structural failure and reduce its lifespan, which is a critical industry challenge. While bacteria encapsulated in cellulose fibers have been used to heal cement mortar, the studies are limited to heal much narrower cracks. In this study, we integrate LSB, known for its strong biocalcification abilities, with the protective environment of cellulose fibers, which are renewable and sustainable, for healing millimeter scale cracks in ordinary cement concrete. To understand …

Delaware Beware, Anat Alon-Beck

Faculty Publications

This article conducts an in-depth exploration of the dynamic competition among states to attract businesses and determine the legal framework governing corporations. It adopts an innovative market-centric viewpoint, treating corporate law as a product within the broader context of charter competition among U.S. states. While the scholarly spotlight has predominantly shone on publicly traded giants, this article daringly delves into uncharted territory, unraveling the intricate incorporation and governance decisions of privately held “unicorns”—those elusive venture capital-backed behemoths that silently shape the economic landscape.

By unraveling the decision-making processes of where these economic powerhouses incorporate, the article challenges prevailing assumptions on …

Cancel Culture And Censorship Effects Before And After The Introduction Of Social Media, Joseph A. Custer

Faculty Publications

Some people today view free speech as a threat to emotional safety and well-being. Cancel culture attempts to silence authors who express “unapproved” opinions by removing access to their works, publicly shaming them, and making attempts to destroy their livelihood. Cancel culture has been increasing, particularly on social media.

Para Prosdokian And The Comic Bit In Aristophanes, Craig Jendza

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of Hopeful Visions, Practical Actions: Cultural Humility In Library Work, Carol A. Leibiger

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Doing Things With Metaphors: Mobilizing Cultural Humility From The Guest Perspective As Antiracist Pedagogy, Carol A. Leibiger, Alan W. Aldrich

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Permitting The Future, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

Today’s environmental laws impose a range of permitting and review requirements on federal projects and private developments that require federal approval. While well-intentioned, these requirements have imposed substantial costs and delays on economic development, including the development of “green infrastructure.” Alternative energy projects and the infrastructure upon which they depend are constrained by lengthy permit reviews and assessments. While designed to protect the environment, these regimes may constrain the development and deployment of the environmental technologies of tomorrow, including (but not limited to) those necessary to address climate change. This essay is the introduction to a symposium on “Permitting the …

Interactions Between Non‐Native Western Mosquitofish And Native Bluegill Sunfish: Mesocosm Experiments, Jessica E. Rettig, Elizabeth P. Tristano, Anthony C. Burger, Geoffrey R. Smith

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Taxing Remote Workers: The Pandemic And Its Implications, Jonathan L. Entin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Is The Business Of The Court (Still) Business?, Jonathan Adler

Faculty Publications

The Roberts Court has long been characterized as a pro-business court, perhaps the most pro-business court in a century. Insofar as this alleged pro-business orientation is due to the Court’s Republican-appointed majority, President Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court should have magnified the Court’s pro-business orientation. Yet there are reasons to question the general characterization of the Court as “pro-business” as well as the assumption that an increase in the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has increased any pro-business orientation. Quantitative analyses often fail to account for the relative importance of individual decisions, the broader, legal context in which the Court’s decisions …

Incorporating Unicorns: An Empirical Analysis, Anat Alon-Beck

Faculty Publications

There is a growing concern among regulators and academics about how to regulate unicorns - entities large enough to have a public impact yet remaining in the private domain. An examination of corporate charters within a selected sample of unicorn firms reveals an important finding: 97% of these entities are incorporated in Delaware. This concentration provides Delaware with significant leverage to shape regulatory frameworks, especially concerning the protection of parties who may lack the ability to safeguard their interests through contractual means.

This groundbreaking discovery on the dominance of Delaware showcases a substantial deviation from incorporation trends in other business …

Medical Authority And The Right To Life, B. Jessie Hill

Faculty Publications

This essay briefly explores this relationship between the understandings—existing and potential—of the right to “life” and the role of medical authority in constitutional abortion rights litigation. It proceeds as follows. Part I describes the dichotomy between two different understandings of “life” in U.S. legal discourse, with a particular focus on cases dealing with the so-called “right to die.” Part II then explains why this dichotomy is relevant in the post-Dobbs abortion rights context, as it holds the promise of an alternate path to protection for abortion rights at the federal and state levels. Part II also discusses how and why …

Creative Reading: Using Poetic Inquiry In Research And Teaching, Clancy Ratliff, Abdullah Al Musayeb, Barja Islam, Mithila Mumtaz, Rosol Otear, Simon Richard, Noah Smith, Nuzhat Tarannum, Allyssa Veney

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Assessing The Performance Of Place-Based Economic Development Incentives: What’S The Word On The Street?, Matthew Rossman

Faculty Publications

Although politically popular, place-based economic development incentives have had limited success and proven difficult to evaluate. Unlike most legal scholarship on this topic, this article takes a qualitative approach in examining them. It studies the performance of four distinct types of development incentives intended to alleviate economic distress, using insight gathered from interviews with business owners, development professionals, and community members in six adjoining neighborhoods, where past efforts at revitalization have failed despite locational advantages.

The challenges faced by economically distressed places are typically varied and complex. The qualitative sampling techniques employed in this article’s research generated nuanced, ‘on the …

The Supreme Court Punts On The Realization Issue In Moore, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Moore v. United States was a disappointment. The Court upheld the constitutionality of the so-called mandatory repatriation tax, a result that may or may not be defensible. But the Court didn’t resolve what was supposed to be the “question presented” in the case: “Whether the Sixteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to tax unrealized sums without apportionment among the states.” As a result, more than a century after ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, we still don’t know whether realization of some sort is necessary to have income within the meaning of the Amendment. This article describes …

A Survey Of Retail Trade Patterns In South Dakota: 2014-2023, Rand E. Wergin

Faculty Publications

This paper provides an analysis of retail sales and retail trade in the state of South Dakota for the ten years 2014 to 2023. This analysis will provide information to community leaders in the cities and towns of South Dakota. Retail pull is an economic indicator that provides a measure of community’s economic health and its ability to attract shoppers, both shoppers from its own community and from other communities. A community that has a healthy retail economy is generally able to attract shoppers from its own community as well as surrounding communities.

Revising Llm Text To (Re)Discover Rhetoric In A Graduate Seminar, Clancy Ratliff

Faculty Publications

In this essay, I share an assignment that asks students to engage in rhetorical revision of LLM text using a changelog table as a tool to document the revision. To demonstrate to the students what I was asking them to do, I did the assignment myself, and my example is included in this chapter as well. I argue that the style of generated text from LLMs calls for increased resistance to the norms and conventions of school writing and an embrace of writing that’s more rhetorical: a bit more personal, risky, rule-breaking, creative, and experimental, intentionally centering purpose and audience. …

Image Processing Of Big Data For Plant Diseases Of Four Different Plant Categories: Represented By Rice, Banana, Sunflower, And Potato, Richard S. Segall, Prasanna Rajbhandari

Faculty Publications

In this research, plant pathogens are considered as big data because of the numerical counts for high intensity pixels in the images. The research presents an automated approach for early detection of plant diseases using image processing techniques. By analyzing the color features of leaf areas, the k-means algorithm for color segmentation and the Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM) are used for disease classification. A novelty of this research is that it illustrates four categories of plants to analyze and compare: (1.) Grain, represented by Rice Plant Leaf Data; (2.) Fruit, represented by banana plant leaf data, (3.) Flower, represented by …

Extract Clinical Lab Tests From Electronic Hospital Records Through Featured Transformer Model, Lucy M. Lu, Richard S. Segall

Faculty Publications

Natural language, as a rich source of information, has been used as the foundation of the product review, the demographic trend, and the domain specific knowledge bases. To extract entities from texts, the challenge is, free text is so sparse that missing features always exist which makes the training processing incomplete. Based on attention mechanism in deep learning architecture, the authors propose a featured transformer model (FTM) which adds category information into inputs to overcome missing feature issue. When attention mechanism performs Markov-like updates in deep learning architecture, the importance of the category represents the frequency connecting to other entities …

Restricting Academic Freedom At Universities: How Corporations Contribute To The Problem, Hani Morgan

Faculty Publications

Industry-funded research can prevent academic freedom from thriving at universities. It can also lead to misleading research that harms consumers. This book chapter focuses on how corporations sometimes use methods that contribute to the corruption of science and includes descriptions of several cases that occurred at universities. Some of the methods that can lead to deception involve agreements university researchers sometimes sign that prevent them from publishing their results without a corporation’s approval. Other methods include requiring researchers to use research designs that will make a corporation’s products seem beneficial to consumers. Corporations can also require researchers to sign agreements …

Sediment Resuspension And Transport In The Offshore Subaqueous Yangtze Delta During Winter Storms, Min Tian, Haifei Yang, Wenxiang Zhang, Kehui Xu, Benwei Shi, Yaping Wang, Shilun Yang

Faculty Publications

Storm-induced episodic sediment redistribution in coastal systems can reshape geomorphic bodies, disrupt ecosystems, and cause economic damage. However, cold-wave-storm-induced hydrodynamic changes and residual sediment transport in large, exposed subaqueous deltas, such as the Yangtze Delta, are poorly understood because it is typically expensive and difficult to obtain systematic field data in open coast settings during storm events. We conducted a successful field survey of waves, currents, changes in water depth, and turbidity at a station (time-averaged water depth of 20 m) in the offshore subaqueous Yangtze Delta over 10 days during winter, covering two storms and two fair-weather periods. During …

Subsurface Redox Interactions Regulate Ebullitive Methane Flux In Heterogeneous Mississippi River Deltaic Wetland, Jiaze Wang, Theresa O'Meara, Sophie Lafond-Hudson, Songjie He, Kanchan Maiti, Eric J. Ward, Benjamin N. Sulman

Faculty Publications

As interfaces connecting terrestrial and ocean ecosystems, coastal wetlands develop temporally and spatially complex redox conditions, which drive uncertainties in greenhouse gas emission as well as the total carbon budget of the coastal ecosystem. To evaluate the role of complex redox reactions in methane emission from coastal wetlands, a coupled reactive-transport model was configured to represent subsurface biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, along with production and transport of multiple gas species through diffusion and ebullition. This model study was conducted at multiple sites along a salinity gradient in the Barataria Basin at the Mississippi River Deltaic Plain. Over …

Elevated Temperature And Nutrients Lead To Increased N2o Emissions From Salt Marsh Soils From Cold And Warm Climates, Sophie A. Comer-Warner, Sami Ullah, Arunabha Dey, Camille L. Stagg, Tracy Elsey-Quirk, Christopher M. Swarzenski, Fotis Sgouridis, Stefan Krause, Gail L. Chmura

Faculty Publications

Salt marshes can attenuate nutrient pollution and store large amounts of ‘blue carbon’ in their soils, however, the value of sequestered carbon may be partially offset by nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. Global climate and land use changes result in higher temperatures and inputs of reactive nitrogen (Nr) into coastal zones. Here, we investigated the combined effects of elevated temperature (ambient + 5℃) and Nr (double ambient concentrations) on nitrogen processing in marsh soils from two climatic regions (Quebec, Canada and Louisiana, U.S.) with two vegetation types, Sporobolus alterniflorus (= Spartina alterniflora) and Sporobolus pumilus (= Spartina patens), using 24-h laboratory …

Charting The Scorched Trails: A Comparative Analysis Of Roadway Damage From Historical Megafires To The Unprecedented 2020 Labor Day Wildfires On The Usa West Coast, Kevin Christiansen, Ayat Al Assi, Rubayet Bin Mostafiz, Robert V. Rohli

Faculty Publications

Roadways in the US states of Washington (WA), Oregon (OR), and California (CA) incurred extraordinary damage during the 2020 Labor Day wildfires. However, the cost and risk of these fires have not been placed in a historical perspective. This study examines the damage to roadways affected by the 2020 Labor Day wildfires in relation to the history of megafires in WA (1902–2023), OR (1845– 2023), and CA (1889–2023) using carefully selected data sets gathered from the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), and California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). A method for classifying road damage from …

Identifying And Filling Critical Knowledge Gaps Can Optimize Financial Viability Of Blue Carbon Projects In Tidal Wetlands, Tim J.B. Carruthers, S. Beaux Jones, Megan K. Terrell, Jonathan F. Scheibly, Brendan J. Player, Valerie A. Black, Justin R. Ehrenwerth, Patrick D. Biber, Rod M. Connolly, Steve Crooks, Jason P. Curole, Kelly M. Darnell, Alyssa M. Dausman, Allison L. Dejong, Shawn M. Doyle, Christopher R. Esposito, Daniel A. Friess, James W. Fourqurean, Ioannis Y. Georgiou, Gabriel D. Grimsditch, Songjie He, Eva R. Hillmann, Guerry O. Holm, Jennifer Howard, Hoonshin Jung, Stacy D. Jupiter, Erin Kiskaddon, Ken W. Krauss, Paul S. Lavery, Bingqing Liu, Catherine E. Lovelock, Sarah K. Mack, Peter I. Macreadie

Faculty Publications

One of the world’s largest “blue carbon” ecosystems, Louisiana’s tidal wetlands on the US Gulf of Mexico coast, is rapidly being lost. Louisiana’s strong legal, regulatory, and monitoring framework, developed for one of the world’s largest tidal wetland systems, provides an opportunity for a programmatic approach to blue carbon accreditation to support restoration of these ecologically and economically important tidal wetlands. Louisiana’s coastal wetlands span ∼1.4 million ha and accumulate 5.5–7.3 Tg yr⁻¹ of blue carbon (organic carbon), ∼6%–8% of tidal marsh blue carbon accumulation globally. Louisiana has a favorable governance framework to advance blue carbon accreditation, due to …

Correction: Effect Of Mississippi River Discharge Plume On Temporal And Spatial Variability Of Toxic Cyanobacteria In An Oligohaline Estuary (Hydrobiologia, (2024), 851, 1, (87-103), 10.1007/S10750-023-05322-3), Callie Snow, Sibel Bargu, Courtney Nicole Hammond, Matthew Hiatt, John R. White

Faculty Publications

The above-mentioned publication contains an erroneous calculation of flushing times using Eq. 1 in the paper. In the published version, we report flushing times as follows: “According to Eq. 1, flushing times associated with the BCS openings were 45 and 54 days for the first and second openings in 2019, respectively.” In the Discussion section, flushing time is erroneously reported as 51 days. These errors arose from a mistake in calculating the tidal prism of Lake Pontchartrain. In the published version, a data entry mistake in a spreadsheet formula led to 6 km² being used for the area of …

Habitat Use And Movements Of Parrotfishes In A Hawaiian Coral Reef Seascape, Senifa F. Annandale, Jason P. Turner, Daniel L. Lippi, Michael Dance, R. J.David Wells, Jay R. Rooker

Faculty Publications

Parrotfishes (family Scaridae) are important to coral reef ecosystems and highly prized by both commercial and recreational fishers in the Hawaiian Islands. Although parrotfishes are known to be strictly diurnal, our knowledge of their habitat use and movement patterns across daily timescales in tropical systems is still somewhat limited. Here, acoustic telemetry was used to determine parrotfish habitat use and movements within a coral reef seascape at Puakō, Hawai‘i. An array of acoustic receivers was deployed in a nearshore reef to track fine-scale movements of two common species: ember parrotfish (Scarus rubroviolaceus) and palenose parrotfish (Scarus psittacus). Transmitters were mounted …

Variability In Estuarine Habitat Use Of A Threatened Species In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico: Implications For Coastal Restoration, Jenna N. Brogdon, Ashley Baer, Glenn Constant, Cassandra N. Glaspie, Michael D. Miner, Ioannis Y. Georgiou, Michael A. Dance

Faculty Publications

Coastal restoration projects often require sediment resources borrowed from estuarine or marine ecosystems. A generalized additive modeling (GAM) framework was used to characterize fish-habitat relationships and predict spatiotemporal and ontogenetic shifts of Gulf sturgeon distribution within an impacted estuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Lake Pontchartrain. Habitat use and movement of Gulf sturgeon (n = 103) was monitored using an array of acoustic receivers (n = 81) from 2016 to 2019. Telemetry data was paired with environmental conditions hindcast from a high-resolution hydrodynamic model to develop GAMs for three life stages of Gulf sturgeon: juvenile, sub-adult, and adult. Model …

Seaweed As A Resilient Food Solution After A Nuclear War, Florian Ulrich Jehn, Farrah Jasmine Dingal, Aron Mill, Cheryl Harrison, Ekaterina Ilin, Michael Y. Roleda, Scott C. James, David Denkenberger

Faculty Publications

Abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios such as a nuclear winter caused by the burning of cities in a nuclear war, an asteroid/comet impact or an eruption of a large volcano inject large amounts of particles in the atmosphere, which limit sunlight. This could decimate agriculture as it is practiced today. We therefore need resilient food sources for such an event. One promising candidate is seaweed, as it can grow quickly in a wide range of environmental conditions. To explore the feasibility of seaweed after nuclear war, we simulate the growth of seaweed on a global scale using an empirical model based …