Digital Commons Network^™

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

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Publications

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

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

Exploring Business Data Literacy Competencies And The Acrl Framework, Wendy G. Pothier, Patricia Condon

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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

Faculty Publications

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

Untangling The Solar Wind And Magnetospheric Drivers Of The Radiation Belt Electrons, Simon Wing, Jay R. Johnson, Drew L. Turner, Aleksandr Y. Ukhorskiy, Alexander J. Boyd

Faculty Publications

Plain Language Summary

Many solar wind parameters correlate with one another, which complicates the causal-effect studies of solar wind driving of the magnetosphere. We use conditional mutual information, which is part of information theory, to untangle and isolate the effect of individual solar wind and magnetospheric drivers of the radiation belt electrons. For example, the solar wind density negatively correlates with electron phase space density (PSD) (average energy ∼1.6 MeV) with the response time lag of 15 hr. This has been attributed to the electron loss process such as magnetopause shadowing. The time lag suggests the time scale for this …

I Have To Tell Them What? The New Corporate Transparency Act And Forming Business Entities In Virginia, James J. Wheaton, Gustavo De La Cruz Reynozo

Faculty Publications

The details and requirements of business entity formation traditionally have been solely the province of state law. Most states, such as Virginia, maintain corporate annual report filing requirements that involve the public disclosure of corporate officers and directors. However, these requirements focus on active managers of the entities, not information about beneficial ownership. The recently enacted Corporate Transparency Act ("CTA") will fundamentally change entity disclosure on the national level.

The CTA was part of the fiscal year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act and seeks to aid national security and crime fighting through a national registry of beneficial owners of business …

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

Faculty Publications

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

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

What Are We Talking About? Data Use Among Education Leaders Of Change, Matthew Townsley, Richard Snyder

Faculty Publications

In a time when fewer resources force school leaders to make critical decisions, the data-driven decision-making model continues to offer promise. This research project provides observations about factors used for decision making from 14 district leaders across five Iowa school districts. Placing these factors for decision making within the framework of a data driven decision making model provides insights for school leaders striving to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of decision making in their own districts. In doing so, educational leaders might ultimately implement educational change with greater effectiveness.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: Crucial For Organizational Learning And Health Equity, Bret Lyman, Joy Parchment, Kaitlyn C. George

Faculty Publications

Achieving health equity requires a diversity of perspectives, values, and insights, yet the composition of the United States’ nursing workforce does not reflect the communities where they practice. Nurse leaders can advance health equity and exemplary clinical outcomes by creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive health care teams. Such teams are well-equipped for organizational learning, a crucial process for advancing health equity. Nurse leaders advance health equity by fostering diversity, equity, inclusion, and thus organizational learning in the workplace.

The Way Lawyers Worked, Michael Risch, Mike Viney

Faculty Publications

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

Against Criminal Law Localism, Brenner M. Fissell

Faculty Publications

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

This Article critiques substantive criminal law localism, arguing that …

Obstructions To Shake Sliceness For Links, Anthony Bosman

Faculty Publications

Shake slice generalizes the notion of a slice link, naturally extending the notion of shake slice knots to links. There is also a relative version, shake concordance, that generalizes link concordance. We show that if two links are shake concordant, then their zero surgery manifolds are homology cobordant. Then we give several obstructions to a link being shake slice; for instance, the Arf invariants vanish for both the link and each component. Finally we show that a shake slice link bounds disjoint disks in a homology 4-ball and hence each component is algebraically slice.

Preaching That Turns The World Upside Down, S. Joseph Kidder, Jeffrey Bradburn

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Making Privacy Injuries Concrete, Peter Ormerod

Faculty Publications

In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly said that the doctrine of Article III standing deprives the federal courts of jurisdiction over some lawsuits involving intangible injuries. The lower federal courts are carrying out the Supreme Court’s instructions, and privacy injuries have borne the brunt of the Court’s directive. This Article identifies two incoherencies in the Court’s recent intangible injury decisions and builds on the work of privacy scholars to fashion a solution.

The first incoherency is a line-drawing problem: the Court has never explained why some intangible injuries create an Article III injury in fact while others …

Why Capacity Market Prices Are Too High, Todd S. Aagaard, Andrew N. Kleit

Faculty Publications

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and regional transmission organizations have fixated on a concern that prices in electricity capacity markets are too low. In fact, however, capacity markets are significantly overpriced. The reason for this is that the administratively determined demand curves in capacity markets create conditions that procure far more electricity capacity than what is needed to meet reliability objectives. In particular, the operators of these markets systematically overestimate both the relevant peak demand for electricity and needed payments for generators to enter the market. The result is that consumer pay billions of dollars extra for excess capacity.

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

Faculty Publications

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

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

Faculty Publications

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

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

Faculty Publications

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

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

Faculty Publications

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

Transhiphop Pedagogy And Epistemic Disobedience In Senegal, Noella Binda Niati, Payal Pradip Shah Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This study situates transnégritude within discussions that consider the ways in which young people in Senegal, with a shared transcolonial narrative, bound through an ‘imagined community,’ negotiate their space, their identities, and their ways of knowing through a Hip-Hop pedagogy. Our analysis is informed by Mignolo’s epistemic disobedience and the geo- and body-politics that challenge neo-colonial epistemologies. The global scope of Hip-Hop culture and its manifestations in West Africa nuances the ways in which young people view education and its impact on their social identity. A transnégritude perspective aptly ‘straddles’ black identity, agency, and deconstructionism and allows for a fluid …

Alignment Of Optical Backscatter Measurements From The Exports Northeast Pacific Field Deployment, Zachary K. Erickson, Ivona Cetinić, Xiaodong Zhang, Emmanuel Boss, P. Jeremy Werdell, Scott Freeman, Lianbo Hu, Craig Lee, Melissa Omand, Mary Jane Perry

Faculty Publications

Backscattering of light is commonly measured by ocean observing systems, including ships and autonomous platforms, and is used as a proxy for the concentration of water column constituents such as phytoplankton and particulate carbon. Multiple on-going projects involve large numbers of independent measurements of backscatter, as well as other biologically relevant parameters, to understand how biology is changing in time and space throughout the global ocean. Rarely are there sufficient measurements to test how well these instruments are inter-calibrated in real-world deployment conditions. This paper develops a procedure to align multiple independently calibrated backscatter instruments to each other using nearby …

A Resilience-Based Intervention To Mitigate The Effect Of Hiv-Related Stigma: Protocol For A Stepped Wedge Cluster Randomized Trial, Xiaoming Li, Shan Qiao, Xueying Yang, Sayward Harrison, Cheuk Chi Tam, Zhiyong Shen, Yuejiao Zhou

Faculty Publications

Background: Despite decades of global efforts to tackle HIV-related stigma, previous interventions designed to reduce stigma have had limited effects that were typically in the small- to-moderate range. The knowledge gaps and challenges for combating HIV-related stigma are rooted both in the complexity of the stigma and in the limitations of current conceptualizations of stigma reduction efforts. Recent research has shown the promise of resilience-based approaches that focus on the development of strengths, competencies, resources, and capacities of people living with HIV (PLWH) and their key supporting systems (e.g., family members and healthcare providers) to prevent, reduce, and mitigate the …

A Resilience-Based Intervention To Mitigate The Effect Of Hiv-Related Stigma: Protocol For A Stepped Wedge Cluster Randomized Trial, Xiaoming Li Ph.D., Shan Qiao Ph.D., Xueying Yang, Sayward E. Harrison, Cheuk Chi Tam, Zhiyong Shen, Yuejiao Zhou

Faculty Publications

Background: Despite decades of global efforts to tackle HIV-related stigma, previous interventions designed to reduce stigma have had limited effects that were typically in the small- to-moderate range. The knowledge gaps and challenges for combating HIV-related stigma are rooted both in the complexity of the stigma and in the limitations of current conceptualizations of stigma reduction efforts. Recent research has shown the promise of resilience-based approaches that focus on the development of strengths, competencies, resources, and capacities of people living with HIV (PLWH) and their key supporting systems (e.g., family members and healthcare providers) to prevent, reduce, and mitigate the …

Structural Problems Of Latin American Cities 450 Years After Caracas’ Foundation, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Latin American cities face many problems that compromise them from different angles such as lack of infrastructure, government fragmentation, and environmental degradation. At the same time, each city tries to come up with its own solutions, but there are so many difficulties that in many cases it is difficult to keep attention and efforts focused on all these directions. For these reasons, this research aims to define some of the most common problems faced by cities in Latin America. Disseminating these similarities could help to face those problems, since, if local governments recognize that they face the same situations as …

Correlational Networking Guides The Discovery Of Unclustered Lanthipeptide Protease-Encoding Genes, Dan Xue, Ethan Older, Zheng Zhong, Zhou Shang, Nanzhu Chen, Nolan Dittenhauser, Lukuan Hou, Peiyan Cai, Michael D. Walla, Shi-Hui Dong, Xiaoyu Tang, Hexin Chen, Prakash Nagarkatti, Mitzi Nagarkatti, Yong-Xin Li, Jie Li

Faculty Publications

Bacterial natural product biosynthetic genes, canonically clustered, have been increasingly found to rely on hidden enzymes encoded elsewhere in the genome for completion of biosynthesis. The study and application of lanthipeptides are frequently hindered by unclustered protease genes required for final maturation. Here, we establish a global correlation network bridging the gap between lanthipeptide precursors and hidden proteases. Applying our analysis to 161,954 bacterial genomes, we establish 5209 correlations between precursors and hidden proteases, with 91 prioritized. We use network predictions and co-expression analysis to reveal a previously missing protease for the maturation of class I lanthipeptide paenilan. We further …

Hiv-Related Stigma, Sexual Identity, And Depressive Symptoms Among Msm Living With Hiv: A Moderated Mediation Modeling Analysis, Tianyue Mi, Guanghua Lan, Xueying Yang Ph.D., Xiaoming Li Ph.D., Shan Qiao Ph.D., Zhiyong Shen, Yuejiao Zhou

Faculty Publications

Depression is one of the biggest health issues among men who have sex with men (MSM) living with HIV, where sexual identity might play an intricate role. Yet, findings of the relationship between sexual identity and depression were mixed and few studies explored its underlying mechanisms. This study aimed to examine the association between sexual identity and depression, and the potential mediating role of HIV-related stigma and moderating role of age. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 203 MSM living with HIV in Guangxi, China. Participants provided information on sexual identity, depression, HIV-related stigma, and background information. Descriptive statistics, bivariate …

Developing An Optimized Policy Tree-Based Reservoir Operation Model For High Aswan Dam Reservoir, Nile River, Erfan Goharian, Mohamed Shaltout, Mahdi Erfani, Ahmed Eladawy

Faculty Publications

The impacts of climate change on the Nile River and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) along with the increased water demand downstream suggest an urgent need for more efficient management of the reservoir system that is well-informed by accurate modeling and optimization of the reservoir operation. This study provides an updated water balance model for Aswan High Dam Reservoir, which was validated using combined heterogeneous sources of information, including in situ gauge data, bias-corrected reanalyzed data, and remote sensing information. To investigate the future challenges, the spatial distribution of the annual/seasonal Aswan High Dam Reservoir surface air temperature trends over …

Developing An Optimized Policy Tree-Based Reservoir Operation Model For High Aswan Dam Reservoir, Nile River, Erfan Goharian, Mohamed Shaltout, Mahdi Erfani, Ahmed Eladawy

Faculty Publications

The impacts of climate change on the Nile River and Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) along with the increased water demand downstream suggest an urgent need for more efficient management of the reservoir system that is well-informed by accurate modeling and optimization of the reservoir operation. This study provides an updated water balance model for Aswan High Dam Reservoir, which was validated using combined heterogeneous sources of information, including in situ gauge data, bias-corrected reanalyzed data, and remote sensing information. To investigate the future challenges, the spatial distribution of the annual/seasonal Aswan High Dam Reservoir surface air temperature trends over …

Mental And Physical Health Profile Of Syrian Resettled Refugees, Rahel S. Bosson, Monnica T. Williams, Victoria A. Powers, Ruth M. Carrico, Virginia Frazier, Julio A. Ramirez, Wei Shuang Schneider, Lisa M. Hooper

Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: Newly arriving Syrian refugees can present with specific health characteristics and medical conditions when entering the United States. Given the lack of epidemiological data available for the refugee populations, our study examined the demographic features of Syrian refugees resettled in the state of Kentucky. Specifically, we examined mental and physical health clinical data in both pre-departure health screenings and domestic Refugee Health Assessments (RHA; Kentucky Office for Refugees, n.d.) performed after resettlement. METHOD: The current study adopted a cross-sectional research design. We analyzed outcome data collected from participants from 2013 and 2015. Specifically, a comparative cross-sectional analysis was performed …

For Every Rat Killed, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

If my grandmother had survived the sickness of old age and were alive to witness the economic injustices wrought by capitalist culture, what would she think? If my grandmother were alive to observe familiar technologies for exterminating household pests—surveil-lance, capture, imprisonment, disposal—being increasingly aimed toward low-income Black communities, what would she believe? If my grandmother were alive to discover, in the palm of her hands, a digital platform for spreading information (and misinformation) to the masses and painting new futures into the minds of lawmakers and politicians, what would she say?

Studies have shown that low-income individuals are more likely …