Digital Commons Network^™

Is R&D Rivalry Slowing The Growth Of Productive Firms?, Yoshiki Ando, James Bessen, Xiupeng Wang

Faculty Scholarship

The reallocation of jobs to more productive firms is a substantial component of aggregate productivity growth, yet job reallocation rates have declined substantially in the United States. This paper explores the hypothesis that greater technological rivalry has exacerbated adjustment costs, slowing reallocation. Using microdata at the US Census and estimates of technological rivalry in firm growth regressions, we find that technological rivalry slows firm responses to productivity shocks. Firms do not expand as rapidly in the face of higher obsolescence risk. Estimating counterfactual firm growth from 1997-2018, we find that growing technological rivalry accounts for most of the decline in …

Mitigating Ai Bias With Prompt Augmentation, Verónica C. Gonzales

Faculty Scholarship

Large-language-model (“LLM”) outputs are inevitably shaped by assumptions, biases, and attitudes rooted in racism and other systemic inequities embedded in the civil-law tradition. This Equity-in-Justice CLE focuses on helping civil legal service providers recognize and work to eliminate biases in generative AI outputs through equity-centered prompt augmentation and engineering. These small, cost-free interventions re-orient LLMs assistance toward fairness, cultural competency, and client-centered outcomes. Participants leave with an action plan for embedding anti-bias safeguards in everyday research, drafting, and client communication tasks.

Cultivating Identity, Workforce Readiness, And Heutagogical Lifelong Learning: The Case For Student-Trained Ai Agents In Postsecondary Education, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

The accelerated integration of human-centered artificial intelligence and human-computer intelligent interaction (HCII) into postsecondary education has inaugurated a paradigm shift in how learners develop cognitive, socio emotional, and professional competencies. This article argues that requiring students to iteratively build and refine custom AI agents—digital “clones” or GPTs trained on their evolving beliefs, knowledge, values, and interests addresses three pressing challenges facing contemporary higher education. First, the process of self-modeling via agent training compels deep self-reflection, fostering socio-economic development and identity formation during the critical neurodevelopmental period that extends into the mid-twenties. Second, as industry trends increasingly prioritize the creation of …

Classifying Heterogeneous Cooperation In Social Dilemmas: Experimental Evidence And Simulation Insights, Sining Wang

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we introduce a revealed strategy method to capture heterogeneous behavioral patterns in repeated public goods experiments. This method identifies an individual’s strategic type—a stable decision-making tendency in interactive settings—by analyzing behavioral profiles. We conduct a repeated public goods game to collect participants’ behavioral data and then apply both k-medians and hierarchical clustering algorithms to classify them into five distinctive types: free riders, strong cooperators, above-average conditional cooperators, below-average conditional cooperators, and hump-shaped players. These classifications are then used to construct and calibrate an agent-based simulation model. Our simulation results suggest that policies targeting how conditional cooperators respond …

Asymptotic Behavior Of Evolution Equations Via Spectral Theory Of Functions On The Half Line, Sums Of Commuting Operators And Evolution Semigroups, Minh Nguyen, Vu Trong Luong

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper we give a survey of recent developments in the spectral theory of bounded functions on the half line, and its applications to study the asymptotic behavior of solutions of evolution equations of the form , where A(t) is periodic in t. For the applications we consider spectra of the evolution semigroups associated with the evolution equations in various spectral invariant function spaces and their generators. The main results presented in the paper are concerned with the existence and uniqueness within decaying functions with specific spectral properties. These asymptotic behaviors are related to the Katznelson–Tzafriri Theorem and Massera …

Polylactic Acid (Pla)-Based Multifunctional And Biodegradable Nanocomposites And Their Applications, Md Shariful Islam, G. M. Fazley Elahee, Xiong (Bill) Yu, Rigoberto Castillo Advincula, Changyong (Chase) Cao

Faculty Scholarship

Polylactic acid (PLA)-based nanocomposites are emerging as multifunctional, biodegradable materials, offering sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based plastics. This review examines recent advancements in PLA nanocomposites, focusing on enhanced mechanical strength, thermal stability, and biodegradability achieved through nanofillers like metallic particles, carbon-based materials, and ceramics. Techniques such as in situ polymerization, melt mixing, and electrospinning enable application-specific improvements. PLA's limitations, including brittleness and low barrier properties, are addressed to support diverse applications: in packaging (e.g., extended shelf life), biomedicine (e.g., degradable implants), and electronics (e.g., flexible devices). Despite challenges with filler dispersion and thermal resistance, continued innovations expand PLA's potential across multiple …

Family Caregivers’ Perceptions Of Quality Of Dementia Self-Care In Wakiso District, Uganda, Martha Sajatovic, Kylie Meyer

Faculty Scholarship

INTRODUCTION: In Sub-Saharan Africa, most people with dementia are cared for in the home setting (dementia self-care) with hardly any support from the formal health and social care system. The study explored family caregivers' perceptions of quality of dementia self-care. METHODS: A descriptive-exploratory qualitative study design was used. Data were collected through four focus group discussions with 48 family caregivers of older people with dementia, recruited from four villages of the Wakiso district in Uganda. RESULTS: Five themes emerged: (1) patience and understanding; (2) maintaining hygiene and cleanliness; (3) constant supervision and safety precautions; (4) personalized care by understanding individual …

Targeted Delivery Of Rapamycin Via Epidermal Growth Factor Receptors In Pancreatic Cancer Cells Inhibits Cell Proliferation And Induces Apoptosis, Nawab Ali, Adeolu S. Oluremi, Christopher Baldwin, Nickolas Gustavison, Mujeebat Bashiru, Adeniyi Oyebade, Noureen Siraj, Raj Raghavendra Rao

Faculty Scholarship

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is aggressive and deadly; most PC cells overexpress an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). EGFR-targeting peptide (GE11) was conjugated to gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) for delivering rapamycin (Rap), an mTOR inhibitor that reduces proliferation and induces apoptosis. Biophysical techniques confirmed the conjugation. Rap loading efficiency was 41.5%, with sustained release at a lower pH. Conjugates showed higher uptake in PANC-1 cells than unmodified AuNPs. It also inhibited proliferation and induced apoptosis via pathways involving reactive oxygen species, mitochondrial damage, and caspase activation. This approach represents a promising nanoparticle-based therapeutic strategy targeting PC cells, utilizing GE11-EGFR interactions to minimize …

Diffusion Model For Medical Image Denoising, Reconstruction And Translation, Wei Wang, Shuo Li

Faculty Scholarship

Diffusion models, as a class of generative models, have demonstrated significant performance in image generation since their inception. The fundamental principle behind diffusion models is the definition of a forward process and a reverse process. The input data is progressively perturbed by adding random noise during the forward process, and the expected noise distribution is learned. In the reverse process, noise is gradually reduced from a Gaussian distribution to generate the image. Recently, diffusion models have been widely adopted in various image processing tasks, including text-to-image synthesis, denoising, segmentation, and object detection. In medical image analysis, diffusion models have shown …

Conceptualizing The Research Cycle For The Field Of Materials Science And Engineering, Jennifer L.W. Carter

Faculty Scholarship

Abstract: Early-career materials researchers often receive guidance from their individual advisors on best practices for conducting research, but the materials science community lacks an explicit model of the research process. As a result, the lived experience of an individual researcher can be quite different from their peers since they may be exposed to a different unique set of implicit research steps. In this article, we translate an existing research heuristic from other fields and make explicit the steps, methodologies, and strategies materials science engineering researchers utilize to advance our collective materials science knowledge. This newly proposed research cycle can improve …

Alpha-Synuclein Dysregulation In Systemic Pathophysiology Of Synucleinopathies, Hallie H. Dolin, Bowen Zhou, Robert W. Maitta

Faculty Scholarship

Alpha-synuclein (α-syn) has long been identified as the etiologic agent of multiple neurodegenerative diseases, the most common and well-known of which are Parkinson's disease (PD) and Lewy body dementia (LBD). While it is known that the pathophysiology of these synucleinopathies involves aggregation of improperly-folded α-syn, the mechanisms leading to its accumulation have not been fully identified. However, multiple pathways have been proposed, any or all of which may contribute to synucleinopathies. The role of α-syn in normal homeostasis and in other organ systems, especially the hematopoietic system, has been reported recently. Research within the last decade has shown that α-syn …

Medium Matters In Preparing For Law Practice: Critical E-Reading, Amanda L. Sholtis

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Digital Bibliography In The Age Of Linked Data, Kate Ozment

Faculty Scholarship

The article explores how the interplay of ideological values and technological capacities have shaped the digital bibliography of British print history. Using a misgendering in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) as a case study, the article explores how information flows through resources like Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Early English Books Online (EEBO), library catalogues, WorldCat, and retail outlets like Amazon. The article argues that as data from the ESTC is reproduced through linked data structures, information is ‘authorized’ far beyond what a single resource would do alone or what its original authors imagined or designed. While feminist, …

Experimental Determination Of Diffusion Flame Extinction Boundaries Over A Pmma Sphere: The Effect Of Sub-Surface Solid Heating, James S. T'Ien, Chengyao Li

Faculty Scholarship

The SoFIE-GEL (Solid Fuel Ignition and Extinction-Growth and Extinction Limit) microgravity combustion experiment was recently conducted aboard the International Space Station (ISS). In these tests, diffusion flame extinction limits of 4-cm diameter PMMA (polymethacrylate) spheres were determined as a function of forced flows (0.2 to 80 cm/s), oxygen concentrations (13 % to 34 %) and pressure (0.15–1.1 atm). In particular, the effect of sample heat-up is investigated. The sample surface layer is preheated by the ignitor and the diffusion flame itself before the extinction procedure (e.g. flow velocity decrease or increase or oxygen decrease) is implemented. The degree of sample …

The East Palestine Train Derailment: A Complex Environmental Disaster, Lynn T. Singer, Fredrick R. Schumacher, Timothy Ciesielski

Faculty Scholarship

This symposium, The East Palestine Train Derailment: A Complex Environmental Disaster, brought together scientists whose research represented initial scientific responses to the community health impacts of the chemical exposures incurred from a disastrous train derailment and subsequent combustion in East Palestine, Ohio in February, 2023. This derailment and burn led to multiple complex toxic exposures to air, soil and water, including vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate. Presenters described the multi-university consortium formed to assist with developing and communicating data-informed summaries to the affected community. Presenters also reported on the immediate health sequelae experienced by the community and the stress and …

Annual Review Of Seqra Cases And Developments, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

The New York State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) turns 50 this year. The statute has changed only a little in the last half century, but it continues to be a font of litigation. The courts decided 43 cases under SEQRA in 2024.

Implementation of SEQRA is also raising policy issues. The legislature is considering whether to amend SEQRA to speed up affordable housing projects, and the State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is drafting regulations concerning the role SEQRA should play in advancing environmental justice.

A constant theme is the tension between thoroughly studying important project impacts and involving …

Transforming The World With Reparations?, Ingrid Brunk, Monica Hakimi

Faculty Scholarship

Claims for reparations in international law commonly reflect two competing visions--one transformative, the other corrective. The transformative vision looks to reparations to end the long tail of injustices that are associated with large-scale historic harms. The corrective vision is more confined; it focuses on repairing specific, legally cognizable harms and returning the agents or entities involved as closely as possible to the status quo ante. We argue in this Essay that these two visions have distinct conceptual logics, even though they often overlap in practice, and that the transformative vision cannot carry the burdens that are placed on it.

Wealth Taxes Under The Constitution: An Originalist Analysis, David M. Schizer, Steven G. Calabresi

Faculty Scholarship

A federal wealth tax is high on the wish list of progressives, but is it constitutional? This Article shows that under the original public meaning of the Constitution, a wealth tax is a “direct tax” that must be apportioned. This means that the percentage of revenue collected in each state must match its percentage of the population. For instance, if two states both have three percent of the population, each must provide three percent of the revenue. This leads to an unappealing outcome: if one state is less wealthy, it needs a higher tax rate to supply its share.

Article …

Examining Pricing And Availability For Neglected Tropical Disease Therapies In The Us, Maple Goh, Kevin Outterson, Aaron S. Kesselheim

Faculty Scholarship

Background

Neglected tropical diseases primarily affect vulnerable populations in low-resource settings worldwide. In the US, neglected tropical diseases such as Chagas, soil-transmitted helminthiases, and other infections historically impacted immigrants but are increasingly relevant for US residents with climate change. We examined the pricing, prescribing rates, and supply of therapies used to treat neglected tropical diseases in the US and their implications for accessibility and patient care. Methods

A retrospective analysis of prescription rates, wholesale acquisition costs, and shortages was conducted for 11 treatment products from 2019 to 2024, aggregating data from Symphony Metys, First Databank, NAVLIN, Red Book, and the …

Liquid Power: Myths, Realities, And Policy Responses To Wall Street's Takeover Of Water Markets, Vanessa Casado-Pérez

Faculty Scholarship

In Don Quixote, there is a moment when all the knightly novels are thrown into the fire for their fantastical depictions of chivalry. Yet one book is spared: Tirant lo Blanc. It is saved because, unlike the others, it portrays knights who die in their beds-offering a more realistic depiction of medieval battles. Similarly, Liquid Asset stands out as the book that should be preserved from the extensive body of scholarship on water markets. Many works in this field are influenced by ideological biases that shape their analyses. In contrast, Buzz Thompson's books provides the nuance and balance often lacking …

Dark Patterns As Disloyal Design, Johanna Gunawan, Woodrow Hartzog, Neil Richards, David Choffnes, Christo Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

Lawmakers have started to regulate “dark patterns,” understood to be design practices meant to influence technology users’ decisions through manipulative or deceptive means. Most agree that dark patterns are undesirable, but open questions remain as to which design choices should be subjected to scrutiny, much less the best way to regulate them.

In this Article, we propose adapting the concept of dark patterns to better fit legal frameworks. Critics allege that the legal conceptualizations of dark patterns are overbroad, impractical, and counterproductive. We argue that law and policy conceptualizations of dark patterns suffer from three deficiencies: First, dark patterns lack …

The Potential And Perils Of Financializing Climate Risk Governance: Insights For Urban Policymakers, Emma Colven, Madison Condon, Kelly Hereid, Savannah Cox

Faculty Scholarship

In this roundtable discussion, Savannah Cox speaks with three experts about the financialization of climate risk governance: Kelly Hereid, a climate scientist at Liberty Mutual, Madison Condon, an associate professor at Boston University School of Law, and Emma Colven, a lecturer in risk, environment, and society at King’s College London. In this conversation that ranges from Miami to Jakarta, Savannah, Kelly, Madison, and Emma discuss the legal, political, and technical challenges relating to financialized climate risk governance: on one hand, the rise of insurance companies and rating agencies as de facto “risk assessors” and, on the other hand, the proliferation …

An Originalist Case For Birthright Citizenship Of Unlawful Immigrants' Children: Anti-Gypsy And Anti-Chinese Restrictions As Context, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The Trump administration and other opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of “unlawful immigrants” make the following originalist claim about the Fourteenth Amendment: Even if the clause meant birthright citizenship, it applies today only to “lawful immigrants,” because the category of “unlawful immigrant” or “illegal immigrant” did not exist in the 1860s, when the clause was written and ratified. Opponents also argue that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause originally implied a “loyalty” or “allegiance” requirement.

These assertions are historically inaccurate.

To the contrary, the concept of “unlawful immigrants” existed in the 1850s-60s, and Americans ratified birthright citizenship without indicating …

A Historical Case For A Robust But Non-Remedial Seventh Amendment, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

In Jarkesy, the Supreme Court rightly held that the Seventh Amendment required a jury trial for a case fundamentally similar to common law fraud, and it rightly limited the scope of the “public rights” exception to the Seventh Amendment. Grounded in historical and originalist methods, this essay makes four suggestions after Jarkesy:

1. Following Jarkesy, the judiciary should continue a more robust enforcement of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. The courts should eliminate the “public rights” exception to the Seventh Amendment, which does not appear to have an original link to the Seventh Amendment. The …

From Palimpsest To Prompt: Rewriting Shakespeare, Creative Authorship, And The Generative Logics Of Large Language Models In Contemporary Theatre, Michael Harding, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the convergence of creative authorship, adaptation, and generative artificial intelligence within contemporary theatre, taking Michael Harding‘s Awake, Young King as a central case study. Through the rewriting of Shakespearean drama, Harding‘s creative process demonstrates how theatrical meaning emerges through ongoing negotiation among playwright, performer, and audience, with scripts historically subject to revision, improvisation, and reinterpretation. Concerns regarding copyright, intellectual property, and the role of AI in the performing arts are reframed as extensions of enduring debates over originality and authorship, rather than novel threats. Tracing the evolution from The Rise of James VI to Awake, Young King, …

Voclosporin‐Induced Gingival Enlargement: A Case Report, Dimitris N. Tatakis

Faculty Scholarship

The gingiva (gums) is often a site in the mouth where changes or reactions can occur in response to certain systemic medications. Some drugs, particularly those used to treat autoimmune conditions or following organ transplants, can cause the gums to grow excessively, a condition known as drug-induced gingival enlargement (also known as gingival overgrowth). In this report, we document the case of a 27-year-old woman with lupus nephritis who developed gingival enlargement after starting a medication called voclosporin. This drug is a newer treatment option for lupus nephritis, but until now had not been linked to gingival enlargement. The patient …

Effects Of Heating Orientation On Flow Boiling In Copper Manifold Microchannel Heat Sinks, Huigang Wang, Yue Qiu, Jennifer Carter, James Mcguffin-Cawley, Chirag R. Kharangate

Faculty Scholarship

Recently, two-phase cooling configurations are being proposed to meet the power dissipation requirements of high heat flux electronic devices. Flow boiling in Manifold Microchannel (MMC) offers high heat transfer coefficients with low pressure drops, making it a popular choice. While many studies have explored flow boiling in microchannels, the influence of heating orientation in MMCs with complex 3D flow paths has not been investigated thoroughly. In this study, experiments are conducted to investigate the effects of heating orientations and mass flow rates on heat transfer performance, pressure drop, and the hysteresis phenomenon during flow boiling in a copper manifold microchannel …

Risk-Sensitive Markov-Perfect Equilibrium, Matthew J. Sobel

Faculty Scholarship

We investigate the existence and structure of Markov-perfect equilibria of discrete-time dynamic games in which players are risk averse and have time preferences consistent with discounting. We establish the existence of a Markov-perfect equilibrium when each player strives to maximize the expected exponential utility of the present value of the time stream of rewards. Also, we give sufficient conditions for a Markov-perfect equilibrium to be myopic, namely to be a sequence of Nash equilibria of static games. The myopia results are applied to a dynamic oligopoly model in which firms choose prices and production quantities, encounter stochastic demand and hold …

Computational Model Predicts Function Of Rho-Gtpase Binding For Plexin Receptor Gap Activity On Rap1b Via Dynamic Allosteric Changes, Nisha Bhattarai

Faculty Scholarship

Plexin-semaphorin signaling regulates key processes such as cell migration, neuronal development, angiogenesis, and immune responses. Plexins stand out because they can directly bind with both Rho- and Ras-family small GTPases through their intracellular domains when these GTPases are in their active, GTP-bound states. This binding occurs via intracellular regions, which include a Rho-GTPase binding domain and a GTPase-activating protein (GAP) segment. Studies have shown that Rho and Ras GTPases play vital roles in plexin signaling and activation. However, the structural dynamics of plexins and GTPases and how these conformational changes affect interactions when plexin is bound with both Ras and …

Management Of Severe Gingival Recession Using A Double Papilla Connective Tissue Graft: A 2-Year Follow-Up Case Study, Dimitris N. Tatakis

Faculty Scholarship

Gum recession is a common condition where the gum tissue pulls away from the teeth, exposing the roots and making them more prone to damage. This report describes the treatment of a 30-year-old woman who had severe gum recession on her lower left canine tooth, caused by her long-term habit of scratching the gums with her fingernail. To restore the lost tissue and protect the tooth, a double papilla flap (a surgical technique that moves nearby tissue) along with a connective tissue graft (transplanted tissue from the roof of the mouth) was used. Over 2 years, the recession was reduced …