Digital Commons Network^™

Community Social Determinants And Health Outcomes Drive Availability Of Patient-Centered Medical Homes, Nathaniel Bell, Rebecca Wilkerson, Kathy Mayfield-Smith, Ana Lopez-De Fede

Publications

The collaborative design of America’s patient-centered medical homes places these practices at the forefront of emerging efforts to address longstanding inequities in the quality of primary care experienced among socially and economically marginalized populations. We assessed the geographic distribution of the country’s medical homes and assessed whether they are appearing within communities that face greater burdens of disease and social vulnerability. We assessed overlapping spatial clusters of mental and physical health surveys; health behaviors, including alcohol-impaired driving deaths and drug overdose deaths; as well as premature mortality with clusters of medical home saturation and community socioeconomic characteristics. Overlapping spatial clusters …

Airport Operations Delays And Possible Mitigation Through Electric Taxi Systems: A Qualitative Case Study, David Cross, Kristine Kiernan, Mark Scharf Ph.D.

Publications

Airline daily departures, not including private aircraft, increased from 25,143 in 2000 to 36,722 in 2017. More passengers necessitate more aircraft and more flights. With more aircraft at terminals, ground delays, based on current airport design, will continue to increase. Systems that allow for reduced aircraft time on the ground will improve airline economics and airport operations, in addition, will reduce airline delays both for departure and arrival at the gate. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the efficacy, from ramp controllers’ perspectives, of equipping airliners with an electric taxi system. Prototype electric taxi systems have …

Project Management Leadership And Interpersonal Skills: The Past, Present, And Future, Valerie Denney, Gordon Haley, Edward Rivera, Daryl V. Watkins

Publications

The purpose of this research is to examine how interpersonal competencies have evolved in the project management profession and describe which additional skills will be needed in the future. Using an applied thematic analysis, the authors examined the past, present, and future of interpersonal skills in peer reviewed academic literature and project management textbooks. A gap analysis was used to compare the reviewed material vs. interpersonal competencies. This research concluded that project management interpersonal transferrable skills are the ones that will be most highly sought after into the future. The future of interpersonal skills will need to concentrate on those …

Physiological Effects During Aerobatic Flights On Science Astronaut Candidates, Pedro Llanos, Diego M. Garcia

Publications

Spaceflight is considered the last frontier in terms of science, technology, and engineering. But it is also the next frontier in terms of human physiology and performance. After more than 200,000 years humans have evolved under earth’s gravity and atmospheric conditions, spaceflight poses environmental stresses for which human physiology is not adapted. Hypoxia, accelerations, and radiation are among such stressors, our research involves suborbital flights aiming to develop effective countermeasures in order to assure sustainable human space presence. The physiologic baseline of spaceflight participants is subject to great variability driven by age, gender, fitness, and metabolic reserve. The objective of …

Suborbital Payload Testing Aboard Level 3 Rocket Research Platform, Pedro Llanos, Sathya Gangadharan, Nikita Amberkar, Isachi Halphen, Melisa Mastroliberti, Michelle Munasinghe

Publications

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) has launched several suborbital scientific payloads aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard in 2017 and 2019. Students continue gaining hands-on experience in rocket design and construction, and payload integration and testing of future and more mature payloads to be launched into space. A Level 3 Rocket is being designed and developed at ERAU to serve as a scaled-down model research platform for launching and testing of payloads that will be later flown in commercial suborbital platforms such as Blue Origin’s New Shepard and PLD space Miura 1 rockets. Computer simulations were conducted to calculate the key parameters …

Physiological Effects On Scientist Astronaut Candidates: Hypobaric Training Assessment, Pedro Llanos, Diego Garcia

Publications

This paper is addressed to expanding our understanding of the effects of hypoxia training on our bodies to better model its dynamics and leverage some of its implications and effects on human health. Hypoxia training is a recommended practice for military and civilian pilots that allow them to recognize their early hypoxia signs and symptoms, and Scientist Astronaut Candidates (SACs) who underwent hypobaric hypoxia (HH) exposure as part of a training activity for prospective suborbital flight applications. This observational-analytical study describes physiologic responses and symptoms experienced by a SAC group before, during and after HH exposure and proposes a model …

Islam, Emad Hamdeh

Publications

Islam, the religion of 1.2 billion people around the world, provides its followers guidance on how to live according to God’s teachings. The word “Islam” means submission, and in this context, refers to voluntary submission to will and teachings of God. The word Islam stems from the same root word as “peace” salām, by submitting to God one finds inner peace in this world and eternal peace and happiness in the next.

Can Simulated Nature Support Mental Health? Comparing Short, Single-Doses Of 360-Degree Nature Videos In Virtual Reality With The Outdoors, Michael H.E.M. Browning, Katherine J. Mimnaugh, Carena J. Van Riper, Heidemarie K. Laurent, Steven M. Lavalle

Publications

Nature exposure in virtual reality (VR) can provide emotional well-being benefits for people who cannot access the outdoors. Little is known about how these simulated experiences compare with real outdoor experiences. We conduct an experiment with healthy undergraduate students that tests the effects of 6 min of outdoor nature exposure with 6 min of exposure to a 360-degree VR nature video, which is recorded at the outdoor nature exposure location. Skin conductivity, restorativeness, and mood before and after exposure are measured. We find that both types of nature exposure increase physiological arousal, benefit positive mood levels, and are restorative compared …

Civil Engineering Research In Ireland 2020: Conference Proceedings, Kieran Ruane, Vesna Jaksic, Bidisha Ghosh, Magdalena Hajdukiewicz, Ciaran Hanley, Niall Holmes, Jennifer Keenahan, Zili Li, Patrick Mcgetrick, Ted Mckenna, Mary Moloney, Vikram Pakrashi, Niamh Power

Publications

Civil Engineering Research in Ireland 2020: Conference Proceedings.

Not Yet America's Best Idea: Law, Inequality, And Grand Canyon National Park, Sarah Krakoff

Publications

Even the nation’s most cherished and protected public lands are not spaces apart from the workings of law, politics, and power. This Essay explores that premise in the context of Grand Canyon National Park. On the occasion of the Park’s 100th Anniversary, it examines how law — embedded in a political economy committed to rapid growth and development in the southwestern United States — facilitated the violent displacement of indigenous peoples and entrenched racialized inequalities in the surrounding region. It also explores law’s shortcomings in the context of sexual harassment and discrimination within the Park. The Essay concludes by suggesting …

Beyond The Marrakesh Vip Treaty: Typology Of Copyright Access-Enabling Provisions For Persons With Disabilities, Caroline B. Ncube, Blake E. Reid, Desmond O. Oriakhogba

Publications

This paper builds upon the evidence drawn from a scoping study on access to copyright works by persons with disabilities. It identifies and discusses specific access‐enabling technologies for persons with aural, cognitive, physical, and visual disabilities and how they are affected by the exercise of exclusive rights. It shows how, and the extent to which states' ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (Marrakesh Treaty) has enabled the making of accessible format of copyright works for persons with disabilities. To this end, the paper examines …

Internet Architecture And Disability, Blake E. Reid

Publications

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach …

Unsafe At Any Campus: Don't Let Colleges Become The Next Cruise Ships, Nursing Homes, And Food Processing Plants, Peter H. Huang, Debra S. Austin

Publications

The decision to educate our students via in-person or online learning environments while COVID-19 is unrestrained is a false choice, when the clear path to achieve our chief objective safely, the education of our students, can be done online. Our decision-making should be guided by the overriding principle that people matter more than money. We recognize that lost tuition revenue if students delay or defer education is an institutional concern, but we posit that many students and parents would prefer a safer online alternative to riskier in-person options, especially as we get closer to fall, and American death tolls rise. …

Setting Priorities Fairly In Response To Covid-19: Identifying Overlapping Consensus And Reasonable Disagreement, Govind Persad, Govind Persad, Joseph Millum

Publications

Proposals for allocating scarce lifesaving resources in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic have aligned in some ways and conflicted in others. This paper attempts a kind of priority setting in addressing these conflicts. In the first part, we identify points on which we do not believe that reasonable people should differ-even if they do. These are (i) the inadequacy of traditional clinical ethics to address priority-setting in a pandemic; (ii) the relevance of saving lives; (iii) the flaws of first-come, first-served allocation; (iv) the relevance of post-episode survival; (v) the difference between age and other factors that affect life-expectancy; …

Expensive Patients, Reinsurance, And The Future Of Health Care Reform, Govind Persad

Publications

In 2017, Americans spent over $3.4 trillion-nearly 18% of gross domestic product-on health care. This spending is unevenly distributed: Almost a quarter is spent on the costliest 1% of patients, and almost half on the costliest 5%. Most of these patients soon return to a lower percentile, but many continue or economic, analysis of existing and proposed options for sharing expensive patients' costs. Third, it bridges the disconnected literature on reinsurance, limit setting, and health care financing, identifying how proposals in these different areas intersect. to incur health care costs in the top percentiles year after year. This Article focuses …

Disability Law And The Case For Evidence-Based Triage In A Pandemic, Govind Persad

Publications

This Essay explains why model policies proposed or adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that allocate scarce medical resources by using medical evidence to pursue two core goals—saving more lives and saving more years of life—are compatible and consonant with disability law. Disability law, properly understood, permits considering medical evidence about patients’ probability of surviving treatment and the quantity of scarce treatments they will likely use. It also permits prioritizing health workers, and considering patients’ post-treatment life expectancy. These factors, when based on medical evidence and not inaccurate stereotypes, are legal to consider even if they disadvantage some patients …

Factorial Validity Of The Flight Risk Assessment Tool In General Aviation Operations, Flavio A. C. Mendonca, Allen Xie, Chenyu Huang Ph.D.

Publications

The Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT) was developed and is recommended by the Federal Aviation Administration to provide a solution of proactively identifying and mitigating risk before each flight. General aviation (GA) operators are encouraged to adapt the FRAT based upon specific operational characteristics. Currently, most safety management systems-compliant GA operators have implemented various versions of FRATs with different operational purposes. However, the FRAT could be inappropriately implemented because of the dynamic operational features of GA operations. The purpose of this study is to explore insights into potential approaches to validate the FRAT that is used for flight risk assessment …

Wildlife Hazards At Airports: A Practical Review, Robert Sliwinski, Flavio A. C. Mendonca

Publications

Globally, aircraft accidents and incidents due to wildlife strikes are an increasingly serious safety concern;

Airport operators have a professional and legal responsibility to provide an environment conducive to safe aircraft operations;

Airport operators and managers have been sued for property damage and / or for human injuries and death in the aftermath of aircraft accidents due to wildlife strikes.

Deindividuation In Anonymous Social Media: Does Anonymous Social Media Lead To An Increase In Non-Normative Behavior?, Shayn S. Davidson, Amy Bradshaw Hoppock, Rebecca A. Rohmeyer, Joseph Keebler, Christina M. Frederick

Publications

This research presents several aspects of anonymous social media postings using an anonymous social media application (i.e., Yik Yak) that is GPS-linked to college campuses. Anonymous social media been widely criticized for postings containing threats/harassment, vulgarity and suicidal intentions. However, little research has empirically examined the content of anonymous social media postings, and whether they contain a large quantity of negative social content. To best understand this phenomenon an analysis of the content of anonymous social media posts was conducted in accordance with Deindividuation Theory (Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995). Deindividuation Theory predicts group behavior is congruent with group norms. …

Examining Gender And Enjoyment: Do They Predict Job Satisfaction And Well-Being?, Christina M. Frederick, Elizabeth H. Lazzara

Publications

Within organizations, happiness of employees is of key importance, and researchers have theorized that work happiness is comprised of positive well-being and job satisfaction (Sgroi, 2015; Wright & Cropanzano, 2000). However, women experience the workplace differently than their male counterparts (Clark, 1997). In the present study, we examine how female leaders and non-leaders (compared to male leaders and non-leaders), experience well-being and job satisfaction, as well as how work enjoyment predicts well-being and job satisfaction. Participants (286 women and 255 men) completed a demographic measure, the Subjective Vitality Scale (Ryan & Frederick, 1997), the Job Satisfaction Survey (Macdonald & McIntyre, …

Transitioning Out Of Leadership: Is There Life After Higher Administration?, Christina M. Frederick, Alvin Y. Wang, Jane S. Halonen

Publications

This article showcases the case histories of three former higher education administrators who stepped down from their responsibilities to rejoin the faculty. From their collective experiences, they extracted the variables that tend to influence the change in professional trajectory. The authors explain how an assortment of cognitive biases can influence the success or failure of downward transitions. We conclude the article with suggestions regarding how to make a successful transition from academic administration back to faculty status.

Set And Spike: Mentoring A Student-Athlete In Stem For Undergraduate Engineering Education Research, Leroy Long Iii, Mckenna D. Gooch

Publications

It is well known that student-athletes are more diverse and higher academic achievers, on average, than their collegiate peers. However, little research has explored the mentoring relationships of student-athletes who conduct undergraduate research. Unique challenges and opportunities exist for student-athletes and faculty when it comes to mentoring undergraduate research in fields like science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodological approach and apprenticeship theory, our personal narratives detail how an engineering professor mentored a former engineering student-athlete for undergraduate engineering education research. We offer several findings and recommendations.

Language Education For Ab Initio Flight Training: A Plan Going Forward, Jennifer Roberts, Alan Orr

Publications

English language proficiency for the aviation industry is a critical issue given the industry’s growth in regions of the world where English is not a first or a national language. This chapter discusses language training for ab initio flight students who will comprise much of the next generation of aviation professionals (NGAP). It describes aviation English as a form of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), and the language skills required for flight school contexts where English is the Medium of Instruction (EMI). The chapter advocates for the assessment of incoming ab initio flight school students using a tool adapted from …

Creating Diagnostic Assessments: Automated Distractor Generation With Integrity, Darryl Chamberlain, Russell Jeter

Publications

The goal of this paper is to propose a new method to generate multiple-choice items that can make creating quality assessments faster and more efficient, solving a practical issue that many instructors face. There are currently no systematic, efficient methods available to generate quality distractors (plausible but incorrect options that students choose), which are necessary for multiple-choice assessments that accurately assess students’ knowledge. We propose two methods to use technology to generate quality multiple-choice assessments: (1) manipulating the mathematical problem to emulate common student misconceptions or errors and (2) disguising options to protect the integrity of multiple-choice tests. By linking …

Explainable Ai Using Knowledge Graphs, Manas Gaur, Ankit Desai, Keyur Faldu, Amit Sheth

Publications

During the last decade, traditional data-driven deep learning (DL) has shown remarkable success in essential natural language processing tasks, such as relation extraction. Yet, challenges remain in developing artificial intelligence (AI) methods in real-world cases that require explainability through human interpretable and traceable outcomes. The scarcity of labeled data for downstream supervised tasks and entangled embeddings produced as an outcome of self-supervised pre-training objectives also hinders interpretability and explainability. Additionally, data labeling in multiple unstructured domains, particularly healthcare and education, is computationally expensive as it requires a pool of human expertise. Consider Education Technology, where AI systems fall along a …

Relational Sequential Decision Making, Kaushik Roy

Publications

Markov Decision Processes(MDPs) are the standard for sequential decision making. Comprehensive theory and methods have been developed to deal with solving MDPs in the propositional setting. Real world domains however are naturally represented using objects and relationships. To this effect, relational adaptations of algorithms to solve MDPs have been proposed in recent years. This paper presents a study of these techniques both in the model based and model free setting.

Knowledge-Infused Statistical Learning For Social Good, Kaushik Roy, Manas Gaur

Publications

Humans are able to provide symbolic knowledge in structured form for potential use by an AI system in learning human-desirable concepts. In clinical settings, for instance, prediction of patient outcomes by an AI can be guided by knowledge from patient history. This history contains concepts such as treatment information, observational and drug-related information, mental health conditions, and severity of disease/disorder. Additionally, there is also often a certain graphical structure to the knowledge among the concepts, for example, ”patient symptoms cause certain tests to be taken”, which in turn affects the prescription of medication. This type of structure between human interpretable …

Pennsylvania’S Covid-19 Response Vs. Homeland Security Frameworks And Research: Masking The Whole Community, Alexander Siedschlag

Publications

This essay offers an intermediate discussion of select policy, strategic, operational, and tactical issues that demonstrate where and how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s novel coronavirus response on the one hand, and homeland security frameworks and research on the other, converge or—more often so—diverge, and how to narrow this gap. Although typically framed as a pandemic owned by the public health sector, the COVID-19 response falls directly within the homeland security mission space, whose core missions include “Ensuring Resilience to Disasters.” In some respects, Pennsylvania’s response exemplifies best practices suggested by research. In other dimensions, it is neither in line with …

Environmental Advantages In Additive Manufacturing, Analise Walter, Cheryl Marcham

Publications

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a technology that uses a variety of methods to ultimately apply layers of material and create products (Ford & Despeisse, 2016; Ford, Mortara & Minshall, 2016). Although there has been an expansion in recent technology, AM has been used in manufacturing for a few decades (Ford, Mortara, et al., 2016). Since the late 1980s, AM has grown from simple product designs, with a focus on prototyping and customization, to modern times with billions of dollars in revenue and large-scale production of consumer and industrial products (Cotteleer, 2014). Forecasts showed a near $10 billion market by 2020, …

Moving From Image To Narrative To Voice, Eileen Landis-Groom

Publications

As I review rubrics used for evaluating writing in my institution, I notice how voice often is a low priority or nonexistent criterion. Writing, however, with a voice awakens a reader; writing without a voice numbs the reader. Beginning with an image and moving to a narrative may provide writers with a voice, as it has for me. This article is a contemplation resulting from my own writing on the importance of images in generating not only a narrative but also a voice, in other words, a sense that a unique individual is conversing with another, the reader.