Digital Commons Network^™

A Computational Simulation-Based Framework For Estimating Potential Product Impact During Product Design, Christopher S. Mabey, Andrew G. Armstrong, Christopher A. Mattson, John L. Salmon, Nile W. Hatch, Eric C. Dahlin

Faculty Publications

The impact of engineered products is a topic of concern in society. Product impact may fall under the categories of economic, environmental or social impact, with the last category defined as the effect of a product on the day-to-day life of people. Design teams lack sufficient tools to estimate the social impact of products, and the combined impacts of economic, environmental and social impacts for the products they are designing. This paper aims to provide a framework for the estimation of product impact during product design. To estimate product impact, models of both the product and society are required. This …

What Is Your Status Portfolio? Higher Status Variance Across Groups Increases Interpersonal Helping But Decreases Intrapersonal Well-Being, Catarina R. Fernandes, Siyu Yu, Taeya M. Howell, Alison Wood Brooks, Gavin J. Kilduff, Nathan C. Pettit

Faculty Publications

Individuals belong to multiple groups across various domains of life, which in aggregate constitute a portfolio of potentially distinct levels of experienced status. We propose a two-factor model for assessing the effects of an individual’s status portfolio, based on status average (mean status level across groups) and status variance (degree to which status varies across those groups). Five studies using samples in general-life and work-specific contexts reveal the importance of both status average and status variance, the latter of which has been largely unexplored by status researchers to date. Individuals experiencing higher status variance show greater perspective taking, which in …

Models Behaving Badly: The Limits Of Data-Driven Lending, Itzhak Ben-David, Mark J. Johnson, René M. Stulz

Faculty Publications

Data-driven lending relies on the calibration of models using training periods. We find that this type of lending is not resilient in the presence of economic conditions that are materially different from those experienced during the training period. Using data from a small business fintech lending platform, we document that the small business credit supply collapsed during the COVID-19 crisis of March 2020 even though the demand for loans doubled relative to pre-pandemic levels. As the month progressed, most lenders significantly reduced or halted their lending activities, likely due to the heightened risk of model miscalibration under the new economic …

Marketplace Lending: Matching Small Businesses With Specialized Fintech Lenders, Mark J. Johnson

Faculty Publications

Fintech promises improvements in access to credit for small businesses through more efficient search and better pricing. Using novel data from a marketplace platform of 115,000 loan offers from 46 online lenders I show that the primary contribution of fintech is not in precisely measuring and pricing risk, but rather in facilitating search between small firms and preferred-habitat lenders. Loan rate offers are largely unexplained by firm characteristics and differ substantially even for the same applicant. The dispersion in offers is largely explained by the fact that lenders have preferred habitats -- lending to borrowers of certain risk types and …

Is 2020: Developing An Acm/Ais Information Systems Model Curriculum For Undergraduate Programs, Paul M. Leidig, Hannu Salmela, Greg Anderson, Jeff Babb, Lesley Gardner, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Brenda Scholtz, Venky Shankararaman, Raja Sooriamurthi, Mark Thouin, Carina De Villiers

Faculty Publications

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS) engaged in a project to revise the Information Systems Curriculum. The IS2010 model curriculum has been widely used for nearly a decade. However, its value may be decreasing as new approaches to model curricula have been introduced. The AIS and ACM established an exploratory taskforce which found there have been substantial changes in the IS field, and that current graduates’ technical skills do not appear to meet industry needs. The IS discipline must express its core in terms of a standard curriculum that meet stakeholder demands. A …

Workshop Outcomes Report: 1st International Workshop On Seismic Resilience Of Arctic Infrastructure And Social Systems, Majid Ghayoomi, Katharine Duderstadt, Alexander Kholodov, Alexander Shiklomanov, Matthew Turner, Elham Ajorlou

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Perspective On Nanofiber Electrochemical Sensors: Design Of Relative Selectivity Experiments, Stanley G. Feeney, Joelle M.J. Lafreniere, Jeffrey Mark Halpern

Faculty Publications

The use of nanofibers creates the ability for non-enzymatic sensing in various applications and greatly improves the sensitivity, speed, and accuracy of electrochemical sensors for a wide variety of analytes. The high surface area to volume ratio of the fibers as well as their high porosity, even when compared to other common nanostructures, allows for enhanced electrocatalytic, adsorptive, and analyte-specific recognition mechanisms. Nanofibers have the potential to rival and replace materials used in electrochemical sensing. As more types of nanofibers are developed and tested for new applications, more consistent and refined selectivity experiments are needed. We applied this idea in …

Estimating Primary Forest Attributes And Rare Community Characteristics Using Unmanned Aerial Systems (Uas): An Enrichment Of Conventional Forest Inventories, Benjamin T. Fraser, Russell G. Congalton

Faculty Publications

The techniques for conducting forest inventories have been established over centuries of land management and conservation. In recent decades, however, compelling new tools and methodologies in remote sensing, computer vision, and data science have offered innovative pathways for enhancing the effectiveness and comprehension of these sampling designs. Now with the aid of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and advanced image processing techniques, we have never been closer to mapping forests at field-based inventory scales. Our research, conducted in New Hampshire on complex mixed-species forests, used natural color UAS imagery for estimating individual tree diameters (diameter at breast height (dbh)) as well …

Inter-Generational Family Reconstitution With Enriched Ontologies, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Scott N. Woodfield

Faculty Publications

Enriching ontologies can measurably enhance research in digital humanities. Support for this claim is shown by using an enriched ontology to attack a well known and challenging problem: record linkage of historical records for inter-generational family reconstitution. An enriched ontology enables extraction of birth, death, and marriage records via linguistic grounding, curation of record-comprising information with pragmatic constraints and cultural normatives, and record linkage by evidential reasoning. The result is a fully automatic reconstruction of family trees. Using three historical record books containing a total of 29,229 extracted records, the enriched ontology links records with high accuracy: F-scores in the …

Follow The Scientists? How Beliefs About The Practice Of Science Shaped Covid-19 Views, Thomas G. Safford, Emily H. Whitmore, Lawrence C. Hamilton

Faculty Publications

“Follow the science” became the mantra for responding to COVID-19 pandemic. However, for the public this also meant “follow the scientists,” and this led to uneasiness as some viewed scientists as not credible. We investigate how beliefs about the way scientists develop their findings affect pandemic-related views. Our analysis shows that beliefs about scientists’ objectivity predict views regrading coronavirus-related risks, behavioral changes, and policy priorities. While political party identity also predicts views about COVID-19-related concerns, these vary by political leaders whose approaches embraced versus dismissed science based strategies, highlighting the importance of perceptions of scientists in shaping pandemic related attitudes …

Aidez Moi: Cleaning Up Non_English Language Cataloging, Sarah H. Theimer

Faculty Publications

From a Presentation given at ELUNA Learns, September 8, 2021. This presentation discusses the importance of using quality data in describing non_English Language material, as often errors negatively impact searching and public displays. By correcting the language codes, add 800 paired MARC fields, and correcting Diacritics the library can improve the quality of these records.

How Policies Portray Students: A Discourse Analysis Of Codes Of Conduct In Academic Libraries, Megan Bresnahan

Faculty Publications

In academic libraries, “codes of conduct” are policies that define what people who use those libraries are allowed to do in library spaces and serve as rules for enforcement. In this policy discourse analysis, the author examines these policies to understand what dominant discourses emerge about students who use libraries. The discourses represented in these policies portray students through frames of deficit thinking, adultism, exclusion, and surveillance. The study advocates for a critical shift in the design and purpose of these policies, and the results may inspire academic librarians to revise their policies to center care and respect for students.

Photoreceptor Phosphodiesterase (Pde6): Activation And Inactivation Mechanisms During Visual Transduction In Rods And Cones, Rick H. Cote

Faculty Publications

Rod and cone photoreceptors of the vertebrate retina utilize cGMP as the primary

intracellular messenger for the visual signaling pathway that converts a light stimulus into an electrical response. cGMP metabolism in the signal-transducing photoreceptor outer segment reflects the balance of cGMP synthesis (catalyzed by guanylyl cyclase) and degradation (catalyzed by the photoreceptor phosphodiesterase, PDE6). Upon light stimulation, rapid activation of PDE6 by the heterotrimeric G-protein (transducin) triggers a dramatic drop in cGMP levels that lead to cell hyperpolarization. Following cessation of the light stimulus, the lifetime of activated PDE6 is also precisely regulated by additional processes. This review summarizes …

Active Choice, Implicit Defaults, And The Incentive To Choose, John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian

Faculty Publications

Home-delivered prescriptions have no delivery charge and lower copayments than prescriptions picked up at a pharmacy. Nevertheless, when home delivery is offered on an opt-in basis, the take-up rate is only 6%. We study a program that makes active choice of either home delivery or pharmacy pick-up a requirement for insurance eligibility. The program introduces an implicit default for those who don’t make an active choice: pharmacy pickup without insurance subsidies. Under this program, 42% of eligible employees actively choose home delivery, 39% actively choose pharmacy pick-up, and 19% make no active choice and are assigned the implicit default. Individuals …

Trauma And Memory In The Prosecution Of Sexual Assault, Cynthia V. Ward

Faculty Publications

Part I of this article traces the history of the recovered memory movement in the criminal prosecution of sexual assault, discussing some prominent cases and their consequences for wrongly convicted defendants. Part II asks why the criminal law was so vulnerable to claims of sexual assault, and other violent crimes, that were often wildly improbable on their face. The article concludes that the structure of recovered memory theory had the effect of disabling checks in the criminal process which are designed to prevent unjust convictions. Part III applies that conclusion to the theory of Trauma-informed Investigation (TII) and the "Neurobiology …

Corporate Commitment To International Law, Jay Butler

Faculty Publications

Corporations are increasingly important actors in international law. But vital questions underlying this development have long gone unanswered: How and why do corporations commit to international law?

This article constructs a general account of business interaction with international legal obligation and suggests that a gateway to demystifying this persistent puzzle lies in corporate opinio juris.

Corporate opinio juris describes a company's subscription to a rule of international law, even though the company is not technically bound by that rule. This subscription functions as a kind of pledge that, once made, has sway over the company and its peers and symbiotically …

Pure Privacy, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Publications

n 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis began a storied legal tradition of trying to conceptualize privacy. Since that time, privacy's appeal has grown beyond those authors' wildest expectations, but its essence remains elusive. One of the rare points of agreement in boisterous academic privacy debates is that there is no consensus on what privacy means.

The modern trend is to embrace the ambiguity. Unable to settle on boundaries, scholars welcome a broad array of interests into an expanding theoretical framework. As a result, privacy is invoked in debates about COVID-19 contact tracing, police body cameras, marriage equality, facial recognition, …

Trademarks In Conversation: Assessing Genericism After Booking.Com, Laura A. Heymann

Faculty Publications

It is a fundamental principle of U.S. trademark law that to serve as a trademark, a word or phrase must “indicate the source” of the goods or services with which it is associated and, conversely, that a term that is understood to be the common name of a good or service is “generic” and cannot be protected as a trademark. Yet it still seems difficult to determine exactly what each concept means, particularly when the actual “source” of any goods or services might be opaque to consumers.

In part, this difficulty comes from the fact that status as a trademark …

Benevolent Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Publications

The American jury system holds the promise of bringing commonsense ideas about justice to the enforcement of the law. But its democratizing effect cannot be realized if a segment of the population faces systematic exclusion based on income or wealth. The problem of unequal access to jury service based on socio-economic disparities is a longstanding yet under-studied problem—and one which the uneven fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated. Like race- and sex-based jury discrimination during the peremptory challenge phase of jury selection, the routine dismissal of citizens who face economic hardship excludes not only people but also the diversity …

Task Adherence: An Agentic Perspective On Task-Focused Dedication In An Interrupting Work Environment, Tanner Skousen, Justin Ames, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Purpose – Knowledge workers live and work in a technology-enabled, push-notification world full of interruptions that create information overload, often requiring these workers to utilize task switching as a mechanism to meet multiple competing tasks’ demands. Previous research has examined both the positive and, more often, negative effects from interruptions and task switching on knowledge workers’ performance. However, this paper aims to examine knowledge workers’ agentic approach to managing interruption signals and consequent task switching to remain dedicated to the task at hand.

Design/methodology/approach – Using an inductive grounded theory approach, we analyzed data from semi-structured interviews with knowledge workers …

The Roles Of Supervisory Support And Involvement In Influencing Scientists’ Job Satisfaction To Ensure The Achievement Of Sdgs In Academic Organizations, Majid Ghasemy, Isabel Maria Rosa-Díaz, James Eric Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Job satisfaction is the focus of this study, given its strategic importance, both to generate differentiation and competitive advantages, and to promote better and more sustainable results in organizations. Guided by the Affective Events Theory (AET), the interest is in analyzing the direct and indirect effects of supervisory support and involvement on job satisfaction and highlighting the implications of the academics’ emotions for sustainability-related policies and practices in academic environments. The context selected is the higher education (HE) sector in Malaysia for science disciplines, due to its socioeconomic relevance and its direct link to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4), as …

Responsible Innovation In Organisations – Unpacking The Effects Of Leader Trustworthiness And Organizational Culture On Employee Creativity, Samuel Ogbeibu, Vijay Pereira, John Burgess, James Gaskin, Jude Emelifeonwu, Shlomo Y. Tarba, Ahmad Arslan

Faculty Publications

Ongoing changes in competitiveness and advancements in technology are challenging the ability of manufacturing firms to bring about responsible innovation in emerging economies. A crucial response to this situation involves supporting employee creativity as a strategy suited to foster responsible innovation. Prior research has established a positive correlation between employee creativity and responsible innovation. However, when attempting to promote employee creativity, firms are often faced with challenges to their organizational culture (OC), especially in the presence of limited employee trust in their leaders. Although, extant research has suggested a positive correlation between leader trustworthiness and employee creativity, little is known …

What Can Mental Health Teach Us About Social Media Screen Time Misestimation?, Mark Keith, Parker Nokes, Alexandra Spruill

Faculty Publications

Mobile platform providers have provided the ability to measure the time consumers spend on each app. This provides the opportunity to measure a consumer’s misestimation of their screentime which is a concept relevant to several mental health attributes such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. We provide additional evidence about the effect of objective screentime on mental health, but add a unique perspective on how screentime misestimation is determined by various mental health attributes. We collected data from a student sample (n=1005) who are from the demographic who most commonly use social media apps (18-29 yr olds). We measured our model …

Journalism As A Public Good: How The Nonprofit News Model Can Save Us From Ourselves, Rosalie Westenskow, Edward L. Carter

Faculty Publications

At a time when many U.S. newspapers find themselves at the edge of a financial precipice, The Salt Lake Tribune’s recent transformation into a 501(c)(3) public charity presents a potentially promising route to economic safety for other daily newspapers. Although the nonprofit, tax-exempt model has been an increasingly popular one for new media outlets, the IRS’s bestowal of such status on a major daily newspaper marks an historic event—one that other newspapers, and their legal counsel, can learn from. This Article outlines several issues such practitioners and owners should be aware of as they consider taking the leap to …

Order Of Operations In Sociophonetic Data Analysis, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

It’s difficult to say objectively whether a vowel is shifted:

• Relationship to other vowels (which may also be shifting)
• Benchmarks don’t work because of normalization and dialect differences

Compare to ANAE Benchmarks:

More processing involved:

• remove stopwords
• remove outliers
• remove diphthongs
• remove presonorants
• isolating midpoints
• specific normalization procedure
• remove unstressed vowels

Seven steps = 5040 combinations

What Can Vowel Formant Trajectories Tell Us About Language Change?, Joseph A. Stanley

Faculty Publications

Recent Developments

Easier to extract trajectory data:

• FAVE is good, but only returns 5 points, English-only
• Fast Track has more gradience, cleaner, any language.

Easier to analyze trajectory data:

• Generalized additive mixed effects models
• "Difference smooths” can tells us where along the trajectory we see statistical significance between two curves.

We can analyze the trajectories themselves , rather than properties about them.

Overview

Vowel shifts may involve changes in trajectory:

• Data: sociolinguistic interviews in Cowlitz County
• Phenomenon: The “Elsewhere Shift”

Vowel shift might night involve changes in trajectory:

• Data: Legacy linguistic atlas interviews in the South
• Phenomenon: Southern Vowel Shift …

Rigor, Relevance, And Practical Significance: A Real-Life Journey To Organizational Value, Joseph S. Valacich, Jeffrey L. Jenkins

Faculty Publications

In this essay, we describe a research journey focusing on how to analyze mouse cursor movements, typing fidelity, and data from other human-computer interaction (HCI) devices to better understand the end-user online experience. We begin by defining organizational value and how it relates to other aspects that researchers use to assess academic research quality. We then describe and contrast our research journey by demonstrating key research milestones: from achieving statistical significance to achieving practical significance and, finally, to reaching relevance to practice. We then explain how we crossed the chasm between academic research and technology commercialization (i.e., the last research …

Is Germline Gene Editing Exceptional?, Myrisha S. Lewis

Faculty Publications

Advances in gene editing have recently received significant scientific and media attention. Gene editing, especially CRISPR-Cas9, has revived multiple longstanding ethical debates, including debates related to parental autonomy, health disparities, disability perspectives, and racial and economic inequalities. Germline, or heritable, gene editing generates several newer, neglected bioethical debates, including those about the shared human germline and whether there is a "line" that humans should not cross.

This Article addresses several interrelated ethical and legal questions related to germline gene editing. Those questions address why, if at all, germline gene editing needs to be regulated and, if germline gene editing needs …

Redistricting Transparency & Litigation, Rebecca Green

Faculty Publications

Legislative redistricting following the 2010 Census kicked up a deluge of litigation. It did not abate. In several states, redistricting litigation extended throughout the decade, costing taxpayers millions. Factors leading plaintiffs to challenge legislative lines are multifaceted; the reasons redistricting litigation flares (and persists) are complex. One underexamined question is the extent to which process fairness in redistricting impacted redistricting litigation after the 2010 Census. At least in theory, a transparent redistricting process should produce fairer maps less likely to be challenged in court. But fights over maps result from myriad sources--the raw quest for political power, the availability of …

The Evolving Technology-Augmented Courtroom Before, During, And After The Pandemic, Fredric I. Lederer

Faculty Publications

Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic, technology was changing the nature of America’s courtrooms. Access to case management and e-filing data and documents coupled with electronic display of information and evidence at trial, remote appearances, electronic court records, and assistive technology for those with disabilities defined the technology-augmented trial courtroom. With the advent of the Pandemic and the need for social distancing, numerous courts moved to remote appearances, virtual hearings, and even virtual trials. This Article reviews the nature of technology-augmented courtrooms and discusses virtual hearings and trials at length, reviewing legality, technology, human factors, and public acceptance, and concludes that …