Digital Commons Network^™

Integrating Ai-Generative Tools In Web Design Education: Enhancing Student Aesthetic And Creative Copy Capabilities Using Image And Text-Based Ai Generators, Jason Lively, James Hutson, Elizabeth Melick

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to disrupt all levels of education. The recent advances in the generative capabilities of new chatbots, AI art generators, and large language models have upended the art and design development pipeline. At the same time, the focus has remained on the nature of creativity and the role of humans in the creative process, prompting calls to ban AI art, bring lawsuits over copyright infringement, and demand universal watermarks to identify AI-generative content. Regardless of the outcome of such litigation, AI has already radically altered the workflow for artists and designers. This case study aims to …

Enhancing Institutional Assessment And Reporting Through Conversational Technologies: Exploring The Potential Of Ai-Powered Tools And Natural Language Processing, James Hutson, Daniel Plate

Faculty Scholarship

This study explores the potential of conversational technologies, AI-powered tools, and natural language processing (NLP) in enhancing institutional assessment and reporting processes in higher education. The traditional approach to assessment often involves labor-intensive manual analysis of extensive data and documents, which burdens institutions. To address these challenges, AI-powered tools, such as ChatGPT, LangChain, Poe, Claude, and others, along with NLP techniques, are investigated in relationship to their ability to improve institutional assessment practices and output. By leveraging these advanced technologies, assessment officers and institutional effectiveness, researchers can engage in dynamic conversations with data, transforming spreadsheets and documents from static artifacts …

Patents' New Salience, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

The vast majority of patents do not matter. They are almost never enforced or licensed and, in consequence, are almost always ignored. This is a well-accepted feature of the patent system and has a tremendous impact on patent policy. In particular, while there are many aspects of patent law that are potentially troubling-including grants of unmerited patents, high transaction costs in obtaining necessary patent licenses, and patents' potential to block innovation and hinder economic growth-these problems may be insignificant in practice because patents are under-enforced and routinely infringed without consequence.

This Article argues that technological developments are greatly increasing the …

Immigration Law's Missing Presumption, Fatma Marouf

Faculty Scholarship

The presumption of innocence is a foundational concept in criminal law but is completely missing from quasi-criminal immigration proceedings. This Article explores the relevance of a presumption of innocence to removal proceedings, arguing that immigration law has been designed and interpreted in ways that disrupt formulating any such presumption to facilitate deportation. The Article examines the meaning of “innocence” in the immigration context, revealing how historically racialized perceptions of guilt eroded the notion of innocence early on and connecting the missing presumption to persistent associations between people of color and guilt. By analyzing how a presumption of innocence is impeded …

Grid Governance In The Energy-Trilemma Era: Remedying The Democracy Deficit, Daniel E. Walters, Andrew N. Kleit

Faculty Scholarship

Transforming the electric power grid is central to any viable scenario for addressing global climate change, but the process and politics of this transformation are complex. The desire to transform the grid creates an “energy trilemma” involving often conflicting desires for reliability, cost, and decarbonization; and, at least in the short run, it is difficult to avoid making tradeoffs between these different goals. It is somewhat shocking, then, that many crucial decisions about electric power service in the United States are made not by consumers or their utilities, nor by state public utilities commissions or federal regulators. Instead, for much …

Kindlin-3 Deficiency Leads To Impaired Erythropoiesis And Erythrocyte Cytoskeleton, Chloe Turpin, Utku Goreke, Utku Goreke, Katarzyna Bialkowska, Kamila M. Bledzka, Dmitriy Verbovetskiy, Umut A. Gurkan, Jun Qin, Edward F. Plow, Elzbieta Pluskota

Faculty Scholarship

Kindlin-3 (K3) is critical for the activation of integrin adhesion receptors in hematopoietic cells. In humans and mice, K3 deficiency is associated with impaired immunity and bone development, bleeding, and aberrant erythrocyte shape. To delineate how K3 deficiency (K3KO) contributes to anemia and misshaped erythrocytes, mice deficient in erythroid (K3KO\EpoR-cre) or myeloid cell K3 (K3KO\Lyz2cre), knockin mice expressing mutant K3 (Q597W598 to AA) with reduced integrin-activation function (K3KI), and control wild-type (WT) K3 mice were studied. Both K3-deficient strains and K3KI mice showed anemia at baseline, reduced response to erythropoietin stimulation, and compromised recovery after phenylhydrazine (PHZ)-induced hemolytic anemia as …

Effects Of Uv Radiation On Natural And Synthetic Materials, Laura S. Bruckman

Faculty Scholarship

The deleterious effects of solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation on construction materials, especially wood and plastics, and the consequent impacts on their useful lifetimes, are well documented in scientific literature. Any future increase in solar UV radiation and ambient temperature due to climate change will therefore shorten service lifetimes of materials, which will require higher levels of stabilisation or other interventions to maintain their lifetimes at the present levels. The implementation of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments on substances that deplete the ozone layer, controls the solar UV-B radiation received on Earth. This current quadrennial assessment provides a comprehensive update …

A Cross-Sectional Examination Of Wrist Wrap Use Prevalence And Characterization For Ergogenic Purposes In Actively Competing Powerlifters, Dillon Harris, Thomas Cardaci, Harry Cintineo, Richard Pham, Kristen Dunsmore, Leslee Funderburk, Steven Machek

Faculty Scholarship

Purpose: Wrist wraps are regularly incorporated by competitive powerlifters, but several product-specific variations may influence any potential ergogenic benefits. In addition, the prevalence of athletic wrist wrap use is hitherto undescribed.

Methods: Seventy actively competing powerlifters (n=70; 27±6y) who competed in the last two years were randomly recruited at sanctioned meets, whereby wrist wrap use descriptive data (wrap style [F or S], wrap length, and events used), wrap tightness (assessed via pulse oximeter-detected oxygen saturation (SpO2) and subjective discomfort [Borg CR10+]), as well as post-meet bench press one repetition maximum (1RM) were collected. Wrist wrap use prevalence data (wrap …

The Poetry Of Prompts: The Collaborative Role Of Generative Artificial Intelligence In The Creation Of Poetry And The Anxiety Of Machine Influence, James Hutson, Ana Schnellmann

Faculty Scholarship

2022 has been heralded as the year of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, along with a host of others, launched late in the year and immediately disrupted the status quo of the literary and art worlds, leading to outcries to ban “AI Art” and spawning an entirely new market of NFTs. Fears over the “death of the artist” and the “death of college composition,” however, are unfounded when considering the historical adoption of emerging technologies by creatives and the reconsideration of authorship that began with post structuralism and the Foucauldian Death of the Author …

Echoes Of The Zong Confronting Legal Realism In The Arguments For Reparations From The Atlantic Slave Trade And Modernday Human Trafficking, Glenys Spence

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is based on the premise that modern day human trafficking, like the transatlantic slave trade, violates jus cogens norms, and thus the practice was and still is a violation of US laws under customary international law. The analysis will examine the laws that were applied to chattel slavery in England and her colonies through the lens of some seminal slavery cases to unearth the tyranny of interpretation in human trafficking reparations and liability claims under the current Supreme Court jurisprudence and the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”). The featured cases will reveal that the same philosophies undergirding the jurisprudence …

The Millennial Corporation: Strong Stakeholders, Weak Managers, Michal Barzuza, Quinn Curtis, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

In a prior paper, Shareholder Value(s): Index Fund ESG Activism and The New Millennial Corporate Governance, we argued that the index funds’ sudden shift towards socially-responsible investment, after decades of ignoring or opposing it, was driven by the competition to manage growing Millennial wealth. In our view, the main contribution of that paper was identifying sharp differences between Millennials and prior generations over investment, consumption, and employment. It has now become clear that this contribution has implications far beyond index-fund environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) activism and is in fact completely transforming the corporate world, marking a fundamental shift in …

The Long Shadow Of Inevitable Disclosure, Stacey Dogan, Felicity Slater

Faculty Scholarship

A growing body of evidence has highlighted the human and economic costs associated with contractual restrictions on employee mobility. News accounts describe abusive use of non-compete clauses to prevent low wage workers from seeking better options. Economists, meanwhile, have demonstrated that innovation and economic dynamism may suffer when employers can easily prevent their employees from changing jobs. While state legislatures have attempted to address these concerns by restricting employers' use of non-compete agreements, the Federal Trade Commission recently announced a plan to prohibit them altogether. As policymakers focus attention on contractual limits on employment mobility, however, a more insidious threat …

The Midas Touch: Atuahene's "Stategraft" And Unregulated Artificial Intelligence, Sonia Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Bernadette Atuahene’s article, A Theory of Stategraft, develops the new theoretical conception of “stategraft.” Professor Atuahene notes that when state agents have engaged in practices of transferring property from persons to the state in violation of the state’s own laws or basic human rights, it sits at the nexus of illegal behavior and revenue-generating activity for the government. Although there are countless instances of “stategraft,” one particularly salient example is when the state uses artificial intelligence to illegally extract resources from people. This Essay will apply stategraft to an algorithm implemented in Michigan that falsely accused recipients of unemployment …

Clickable Polymer Scaffolds Enable Ce Recovery With Peptide Ligands, Jacob D. Hostert, Maura R. Sepesy, Christine E. Duval, Julie N. Renner

Faculty Scholarship

Rare earth elements (REEs) are a vital part of many technologies with particular importance to the renewable energy sector and there is a pressing need for environmentally friendly and sustainable processes to recover and recycle them from waste streams. Functionalized polymer scaffolds are a promising means to recover REEs due to the ability to engineer both transport properties of the porous material and specificity for target ions. In this work, REE adsorbing polymer scaffolds were synthesized by first introducing poly(glycidyl methacrylate) (GMA) brushes onto porous polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) surface through activator generated electron transfer atom transfer radical polymerization (AGET ATRP). …

Central Pattern Generator And Control Of Breathing (Ośrodkowy Generator Wzorca I Kontrola Oddychania), Jaroslaw Richard Romaniuk

Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, Clark and Euler published a model of the neural control of respiration that stimulated modern studies on the central generator of the rate and depth of breathing. These studies led to new discoveries concerning both anatomical localization and functional characteristics of respiratory central pattern generator (CPG), and as a result our knowledge has greatly changed. This article describes the history of respiratory CPG research and, more specifically, explains how studies concerning the regulation of breathing parameters affect the creation of new hypotheses and theoretical models of the neural control of respiration. Comparing studies on the generators of …

Estimating The Oblateness Of Dark Matter Halos Using Neutral Hydrogen Velocity Dispersion, Stacy S. Mcgaugh

Faculty Scholarship

We derive the oblateness parameter q of the dark matter halo of a sample of gas-rich, face-on disk galaxies. We have assumed that the halos are triaxial in shape but their axes in the disk plane (a and b) are equal, so that q = c/a measures the halo flattening. We have used the H i velocity dispersion, derived from the stacked H i emission lines and the disk surface density, determined from the H i flux distribution, to determine the disk potential and the halo shape at the R 25 and 1.5R 25 radii. We have applied our model …

Modular Design Of A Polymer-Bilayer-Based Mechanically Compliant Worm-Like Robot, Austin S. Mills, Shane Riddle, Hillel J. J. Chiel, Roger D. Quinn, Kathryn A. Daltorio

Faculty Scholarship

Soft earthworm-like robots that exhibit mechanical compliance can, in principle, navigate through uneven terrains and constricted spaces that are inaccessible to traditional legged and wheeled robots. However, unlike the biological originals that they mimic, most of the worm-like robots reported to date contain rigid components that limit their compliance, such as electromotors or pressure-driven actuation systems. Here, a mechanically compliant worm-like robot with a fully modular body that is based on soft polymers is reported. The robot is composed of strategically assembled, electrothermally activated polymer bilayer actuators, which are based on a semicrystalline polyurethane with an exceptionally large nonlinear thermal …

Statistical Analysis And Degradation Pathway Modeling Of Photovoltaic Minimodules With Varied Packaging Strategies, Sameera Nalin Venkat, Xuanji Yu, Jiqi Liu, Jakob Wegmueller, Jayvic Cristian Jimenez, Erika I. Barcelos, Hein Htet Aung, Roger H. French, Laura S. Bruckman

Faculty Scholarship

Degradation pathway models constructed using network structural equation modeling (netSEM) are used to study degradation modes and pathways active in photovoltaic (PV) system variants in exposure conditions of high humidity and temperature. This data-driven modeling technique enables the exploration of simultaneous pairwise and multiple regression relationships between variables in which several degradation modes are active in specific variants and exposure conditions. Durable and degrading variants are identified from the netSEM degradation mechanisms and pathways, along with potential ways to mitigate these pathways. A combination of domain knowledge and netSEM modeling shows that corrosion is the primary cause of the power …

Pharmacotherapeutic Challenges For Treating The Baby Boomer Cohort, Scott P. Pelok

Faculty Scholarship

As the baby boomer cohort ages, they have an ever‐increasing number of comorbidities and associated poly‐pharmaceutical treatment needs. The challenge for healthcare providers is to stay current of advancements in providing for this aging population. Baby boomers can expect a longer life expectancy than any previous generation. Yet, longevity has not correlated with better health. This cohort is noted for being goal driven and more self‐assured than younger generations. They are resourceful and will often attempt to fix things themselves, including their healthcare. They believe hard work deserves justifiable rewards and relaxation. These beliefs have resulted in baby boomers utilizing …

Microfluidic Concurrent Assessment Of Red Blood Cell Adhesion And Microcapillary Occlusion: Potential Hemorheological Biomarkers In Sickle Cell Disease, Yuncheng Man, Douglas H. Wu, Ran An, Karamoja Monchamp, Utku Goreke, Zoe Sekyonda, William J. Wulftange, Chiara Federici, Allison Bode, Lalitha V. Nayak, Umut A. Gurkan

Faculty Scholarship

Deformability and non-adherence are two fundamental functional properties of red blood cells (RBCs), which allow them to move unimpeded through the microvasculature. In sickle cell disease (SCD), polymerization of abnormal sickle hemoglobin leads to decreased deformability and increased membrane adhesiveness in RBCs. This contributes to abnormal blood vessel occlusion, which is central to the underlying pathophysiology. RBC deformability and adhesiveness are, therefore key hemorheological biomarkers in characterizing disease states as well as in evaluating novel therapeutics. To date, these important interrelated biomarkers have been assessed in distinct laboratory assays, without integration or concurrent assessment in vitro. To this end, we …

Minimal Auxiliary Basis Set Approach For The Electronic Excitation Spectra Of Organic Molecules, Zehao Zhou, Shane M. Parker

Faculty Scholarship

We report a minimal auxiliary basis model for time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) with hybrid density functionals that can accurately reproduce excitation energies and absorption spectra from TDDFT while reducing cost by about \change{two} orders of magnitude. Our method, dubbed TDDFT-ris, employs the resolution-of-the-identity technique with just one $s$-type auxiliary basis function per atom for the linear response operator, where the Gaussian exponents are parametrized across the periodic table using %using tabulated atomic radii with a single global scaling factor. By tuning on a small test set, we determine a single functional-independent scale factor that balances errors in excitation energies …

Digital Twins And Cultural Heritage Preservation: A Case Study Of Best Practices And Reproducibility In Chiesa Dei Ss Apostoli E Biagio, James Hutson, Joe Weber, Angela Russo

Faculty Scholarship

The use of digital twin technologies to preserve cultural heritage has become increasingly common over the past two decades. Evolving from the use of virtual environments (VE) and digital reconstructions that required multiple phases of workflow and multiple software applications and various hardware to output a useable experience to the immediacy of 3D artificial intelligence (AI) generative content and the latest generation of photogrammetric scanning, non-specialists are now able to more easily create digital twins. At the same time, the destruction of cultural heritage has accelerated due to geopolitical instability, seen in examples such as the invasion of Ukraine by …

The Liability Trap: Why The Alec Anti-Esg Bills Create A Legal Quagmire For Fiduciaries Connected With Public Pensions, David J. Berger, David H. Webber, Beth M. Young

Faculty Scholarship

Two proposed bills barring public pensions from considering environmental, social, and governance investment criteria create massive legal risk for any pension fiduciary or service provider. The American Legislative Exchange Council “boycott bill” and the “fiduciary duty” bill, if adopted, would impose irreconcilable legal requirements on such fiduciaries, and subject them to compliance with arbitrary and unworkable legal demands.

The main legal problems the bills create fall into four categories:

(1) the unworkable distinction between “pecuniary” and “non-pecuniary,” a distinction so blurry that the bills are self-contradictory, as we demonstrate;

(2) the clash between the bills’ definition of materiality and that …

A Proposed Meta-Reality Immersive Development Pipeline: Generative Ai Models And Extended Reality (Xr) Content For The Metaverse, Jay Ratican, James Hutson, Andrew Wright

Faculty Scholarship

The realization of an interoperable and scalable virtual platform, currently known as the “metaverse,” is inevitable, but many technological challenges need to be overcome first. With the metaverse still in a nascent phase, research currently indicates that building a new 3D social environment capable of interoperable avatars and digital transactions will represent most of the initial investment in time and capital. The return on investment, however, is worth the financial risk for firms like Meta, Google, and Apple. While the current virtual space of the metaverse is worth $6.30 billion, that is expected to grow to $84.09 billion by the …

Policing & The Problem Of Physical Restraint, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable “seizures” and thus renders unlawful police use of excessive force. On one hand, this definition is expansive. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 Term, in Torres v. Madrid, the Court clarified that a “seizure” includes any police application of physical force to the body with intent to restrain. Crucially, Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion emphasized that police may seize even when merely laying “the end of a finger” on a layperson’s body. And yet, the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment totality-of-the-circumstances reasonableness balancing test is notoriously imprecise—a “factbound morass,” in the famous …

Gamesmanship In Modern Discovery Tech, Neel Guha, Peter Henderson, Diego A. Zambrano

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter explores the potential for gamesmanship in technology-assisted discovery. Attorneys have long embraced gamesmanship strategies in analog discovery, producing reams of irrelevant documents, delaying depositions, or interpreting requests in a hyper-technical manner. The new question, however, is whether machine learning technologies can transform gaming strategies. By now it is well known that technologies have reinvented the practice of civil litigation and, specifically, the extensive search for relevant documents in complex cases. Many sophisticated litigants use machine learning algorithms – under the umbrella of “Technology Assisted Review” (TAR) – to simplify the identification and production of relevant documents in discovery. …

Working With (Not Against) The Technology: Gpt3 And Artificial Intelligence (Ai) In College Composition, James Hutson, Daniel Plate

Faculty Scholarship

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) for improvement of writing is commonplace with word-processing software and cloudbased writing assistants such as Grammarly and Microsoft Word. However, more and more options are cropping up that move beyond assistance with grammar, spelling, and punctuation to complete essay generation. The free availability of AI essay generators has led to lamenting the coming death of college writing. But AI has been used in the previously noted examples for decades without such a reaction. In fact, the idea that the use of essay generating software is synonymous with academic dishonesty is as passé as worries …

Major Questions And An Emergency Question Doctrine: The Biden Student Debt Case Study Of Pretextual Abuse Of Emergency Powers, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The major question doctrine tries to address one problem, the Imperial Executive, by escalating another, the Imperial Judiciary. This article proposes a solution, with the Biden Student Debt Waiver as a case study: An “emergency question” doctrine.

This emergency questions doctrine would apply when the executive relies on a statutory emergency clause or invokes an emergency in its application of a statutory provision. As a matter of statutory interpretation, the emergency question doctrine would follow the two most important steps of the major question approach: 1) relying on purpose and context to clarify and limit the scope of open-ended emergency …

The Disembodied First Amendment, Nathan Cortez, William M. Sage

Faculty Scholarship

First Amendment doctrine is becoming disembodied—increasingly detached from human speakers and listeners. Corporations claim that their speech rights limit government regulation of everything from product labeling to marketing to ordinary business licensing. Courts extend protections to commercial speech that ordinarily extended only to core political and religious speech. And now, we are told, automated information generated for cryptocurrencies, robocalling, and social media bots are also protected speech under the Constitution. Where does it end? It begins, no doubt, with corporate and commercial speech. We show, however, that heightened protection for corporate and commercial speech is built on several “artifices” - …

Selective Infrared Neural Inhibition Can Be Reproduced By Resistive Heating, Junqi Zhuo, Chloe E. Weidrick, Yehe Liu, Michael A. Moffitt, Hillel J. Chiel, Michael W. Jenkins

Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: Small-diameter afferent axons carry various sensory signals that are critical for vital physiological conditions but sometimes contribute to pathologies. Infrared (IR) neural inhibition (INI) can induce selective heat block of small-diameter axons, which holds potential for translational applications such as pain management. Previous research suggested that IR–heating-induced acceleration of voltage-gated potassium channel kinetics is the mechanism for INI. Therefore, we hypothesized that other heating methods, such as resistive heating (RH) in a cuff, could reproduce the selective inhibition observed in INI. Materials and Methods: We conducted ex vivo nerve-heating experiments on pleural-abdominal connective nerves of Aplysia californica using both …