Digital Commons Network^™

Conscientious Objection To Creating Same-Sex Unions: An International Analysis, Bruce Macdougall, Elsje Bonthuys, Kenneth Mck. Norrie, Marjolein Van Den Brink

All Faculty Publications

In jurisdictions that recognize same-sex marriages and unions, the question arises as to the extent to which civic officials who normally preside at such unions can refuse such participation for religious reasons. This paper examines this issue in the context of four jurisdictions: Scotland, Canada, the Netherlands and South Africa. What is striking is how different is the process of reaching a resolution in each jurisdiction, though the actual result might be the same. This difference arises because of the jurisdiction-specific reasons why same-sex marriages and unions are recognized, how they are recognized, the status of the officers who preside …

Patent Law's Audience, Mark D. Janis, Timothy R. Holbrook

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Many rules of patent law rest on a false premise about their target audience. Rules of patentability purport to provide subtle incentives to innovators. However, innovators typically encounter these rules only indirectly, through intermediaries such as lawyers, venture capitalists, managers, and others. Rules of patent scope strive to provide notice of the boundaries of the patent right to anyone whose activities might approach those boundaries, including, in theory, any member of the general public. But the rules of patent scope are practically incomprehensible to the general public. In this Article, we argue that rules of patent law should be designed …

Perceptions And Needs Of Agricultural Teachers On Classroom Diversity And Inclusion., Hari K. Vommi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Classrooms in the United States are more diverse than ever. It is predicted that nearly half of the public education students in the United States will be other than White by 2019. Teachers should have positive attitudes towards classroom diversity and inclusion. They should be well prepared to teach effectively in a diverse classroom. The purpose of the study was to examine the perceptions, the perceived confidence levels, and the perceived needs of agricultural teachers on classroom diversity, inclusion and multicultural education. The study also assessed the willingness of the teachers to participate in college courses and/or professional trainings on …

Disabling Attitudes: U.S. Disability Law And The Ada Amendments Act, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

This is a crucial juncture for U.S. disability law. In 2008, Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA), which aims to reverse the courts’ narrowing interpretations of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. This legislative intervention provides an important lens through which to consider attitudes toward disability, both because the success of the ADAAA will depend on judicial attitudes, and because the changes rendered by the ADAAA shed light on pervasive societal attitudes. This Essay makes three main points. First, the ADAAA intervenes in the developing doctrine on disability discrimination in important ways; in so doing, however, the ADAAA …

The Measure Of A Mac: A Quasi-Experimental Protocol For Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses In M&A; Agreements, Eric L. Talley, Drew O'Kane

Faculty Scholarship

This paper develops a protocol for using a familiar data set on force majeure provisions in corporate acquisitions agreements to tokenize and calibrate a machine-learning algorithm of textual analysis. Our protocol, built on regular expression (RE) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) approaches, serves to replicate, correct, and extend the hand-coded data. Our preliminary results indicate that both approaches perform well, though a hybridized approach improves predictive power further. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that our results are generally robust to out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that similar approaches could be used more broadly in empirical legal scholarship, especially including in business law.

[Introduction To] Believing And Acting: The Pragmatic Turn In Comparative Religion And Ethics, G. Scott Davis

Bookshelf

How should religion and ethics be studied if we want to understand what people believe and why they act the way they do? In the 1980s and '90s postmodernist worries about led to debates that turned on power, truth, and relativism. Since the turn of the century scholars impressed by 'cognitive science' have introduced concepts drawn from evolutionary biology, neurosciences, and linguistics in the attempt to provide 'naturalist' accounts of religion. Deploying concepts and arguments that have their roots in the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, Believing and Acting argues that both approaches are misguided and largely unhelpful in answering …

A Study Of Attitudes Of Faculty And Administrators Towards Interprofessional Education., Catherine Christine Delnat

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Faculty and administrator's attitudes are believed to be important in planning and implementing successful interprofessional education in the academic environment with the goal of increasing health sciences students' competencies in interprofessional collaborative practice. The purpose of this study was to examine attitudes toward interprofessional education and identify attributes that may have an impact on those attitudes. A survey was distributed to all faculty and administrators in the health care sciences field at this institution. Using scales adopted from peer-reviewed literature, respondents were asked questions designed to rate their attitudes toward health care teams, interprofessional education, and interprofessional learning in the …

‘Implicit Creation’ – Non-Programmer Conceptual Models For Authoring In Interactive Digital Storytelling, Ulrike Martina Spierling

Plymouth Business School Theses

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) constitutes a research field that emerged from several areas of art, creation and computer science. It inquires technologies and possible artefacts that allow ‘highly-interactive’ experiences of digital worlds with compelling stories. However, the situation for story creators approaching ‘highly-interactive’ storytelling is complex. There is a gap between the available technology, which requires programming and prior knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, and established models of storytelling, which are too linear to have the potential to be highly interactive. This thesis reports on research that lays the ground for bridging this gap, leading to novel creation philosophies in future …

"The Birth Of Death": Stillborn Birth Certificates And The Problem For Law, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Stillbirth is a confounding event, a reproductive moment that at once combines birth and death. This Essay discusses the complications of this simultaneity as a social experience and as a matter of law. While traditionally, stillbirth didn't count for much on either score, this is no longer the case. Familiarity with fetal life through obstetric ultrasound has transformed stillborn children into participating members of their families long before birth, and this in turn has led to a novel demand on law.

Dissatisfied with the issuance of a stillborn death certificate, bereaved parents of stillborn babies have successfully lobbied state legislatures …

Context Cues For Classification Of Competitive And Collaborative Overlaps, Catharine Oertel, Marcin Wlodarczak, Alexey Tarasov, Nick Campbell, Petra Wagner

Conference papers

Being able to respond appropriately to users’ overlaps should be seen as one of the core competencies of incremental dialogue systems. At the same time identifying whether an interlocutor wants to support or grab the turn is a task which comes naturally to humans, but has not yet been implemented in such systems. Motivated by this we first investigate whether prosodic characteristics of speech in the vicinity of overlaps are significantly different from prosodic characteristics in the vicinity of non-overlapping speech. We then test the suitability of different context sizes, both preceding and following but excluding features of the overlap, …

Creative Differences: Teaching Creativity Across The Disciplines, Elizabeth Marquis, Susan Vajoczki

International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning

Several authors have suggested that educational institutions have a responsibility to foster creativity in their students. Yet, research has shown that creativity is a variable concept that can mean different things in different fields and contexts (Kaufman & Baer, 2005). As a result, generic pedagogical techniques for developing creativity may not be equally appropriate across domains.

In light of these factors, this pilot study explored (via an electronic survey of instructors) the ways in which creativity is defined and taught across McMaster University’s six faculties. Results suggested areas of both commonality and difference across disciplines in terms of academics’ understandings …

Georgia Southern University Fact Book, Georgia Southern University

Georgia Southern Fact Books (1976-2022)

No abstract provided.

Conference Program [2012], Georgia International Conference On Information Literacy

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

N/A

Georgia Southern Magazine, Georgia Southern University

Georgia Southern Magazine

• The Beat Goes On
• Research on the Horizon
• Reaching for the Stars
• Visionary Leader
• Dream Team

Graduate Catalog, Georgia Southern University

Graduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Graduate Studies Fact Book

Graduate Studies Fact Books (2006-2017)

No abstract provided.

Consumer-Driven Innovation Management, Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, Shekhar Mitra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The evolution of human society leads to increased affluence and prosperity of certain populations, sometimes at the expense of well-established markets. Market leaders in products and services tend to be so focused on their current customer base that they are caught off guard with the changes in markets created by the evolution. These changes often go unnoticed until it is too late. The change in customer base often requires the repositioning of products and services through innovations, which address new and emerging markets. Some of these changes could potentially result in tectonic market shifts that force innovation managers to involve …

Who Is Retweeting The Tweeters? Modeling, Originating, And Promoting Behaviors In The Twitter Network, Achananuparp Palakorn, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang, Tuan Anh Hoang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time microblogging systems such as Twitter offer users an easy and lightweight means to exchange information. Instead of writing formal and lengthy messages, microbloggers prefer to frequently broadcast several short messages to be read by other users. Only when messages are interesting, are they propagated further by the readers. In this article, we examine user behavior relevant to information propagation through microblogging. We specifically use retweeting activities among Twitter users to define and model originating and promoting behavior. We propose a basic model for measuring the two behaviors, a mutual dependency model, which considers the mutual relationships between the two …

A Fuzzy Logic Multi-Criteria Decision Framework For Selecting It Service Providers, Amir Karami, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Selecting IT service providers in information systems outsourcing involves both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. This paper proposes an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework to effectively handle uncertainty and subjectivity in the vendor selection process. The proposed methods apply fuzzy logic approach to integrate qualitative survey data into traditional multi-criteria decision models such as data envelope analysis (DEA), analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods, and TOPSIS. Based on case studies from Iranian banking industry, we empirically test the proposed framework and show it is superior to existing methods. We demonstrate that the fuzzy logic approach provides a robust analysis for vendor selection …

Speech Development: Toddlers Don't Mind Getting It Wrong, Piers Messum, Ian S. Howard

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Bodies For The Gods: Image Worship In Chinese Popular Religion, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Cssc Program [2012], Cssc

Curriculum Studies Summer Collaborative (2011-2025)

N/A

2012 Fall Commencement, Georgia Southern University

Commencement Programs

No abstract provided.

Formative Research On Perceptions Of Biobanking: What Community Members Think, John S. Luque, Gwendolyn P. Quinn, Francisco A. Montel-Ishino, Mariana Arevalo, Shalanda A. Bynum, Shalewa Noel-Thomas, Kristen J. Wells, Clement K. Gwede, Cathy D. Meade, Tampa Bay Community Cancer Network Partners

Community Health: Faculty Publications

Preparing healthy community members with timely communications prior to engaging them in a request to donate biospecimens promises to improve the experience of biobanking participation. To this end, a qualitative study was conducted to assess community member knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and informational needs about cancer-related biospecimen collection in a large metropolitan area in southwest Florida. The study utilized purposive sampling techniques to recruit a total of 95 participants to participate in 12 focus groups, segmented by race/ethnicity and language preference (mixed race, African American only, and Spanish speaking) and age (18–29, 30–54, and 55 and older). Focus group interviews were …

Ethics Of Clear Health Communication: Applying The Clean Look Approach To Communicate Biobanking Information For Cancer Research, Alexis Koskan, Mariana Arevalo, Gwen Quinn, Shalwea Noel-Thomas, John S. Luque, Kristen Wells, Cathy Meade, Clement K. Gwede

Community Health: Faculty Publications

Cancer innovations, such as biobanking technologies, are continuously evolving to improve our understanding and knowledge about cancer prevention and treatment modalities. However, the public receives little communication about biobanking and is often unaware about this innovation until asked to donate biospecimens. It is the researchers’ ethical duty to provide clear communications about biobanking and biospecimen research. Such information allows the public to understand biobanking processes and facilitates informed decision making about biospecimen donation. The aims of this paper are 1) to examine the importance of clear communication as an ethical imperative when conveying information about cancer innovations and 2) to …

Creating A Patient Navigation Model To Address Cervical Cancer Disparities In A Rural Hispanic Farmworker Community, Kristen Wells, Maria Rivera, Sara Proctor, Gloria Arroyo, Shalanda A. Bynum, Gwendolyn Quinn, John S. Luque, Marlene Rivera, Dinorah Martinez-Tyson, Cathy Meade

Community Health: Faculty Publications

This report describes the implementation of a pilot patient navigation (PN) program created to address cervical cancer disparities in a predominantly Hispanic agricultural community. Since November 2009, a patient navigator has provided services to patients of Catholic Mobile Medical Services (CMMS). The PN program has resulted in the need for additional clinic sessions to accommodate the demand for preventive care at CMMS.

Refinement Of An Educational Toolkit To Promote Cervical Cancer Screening Among Hispanic Farmworker Women In Southeast Georgia, Lisa C. Watson-Johnson, Jigar Bhagatwala, Claudia Reyes-Garcia, Andrea Hinojosa, Mondi Mason, Cathy Meade, John S. Luque

Community Health: Faculty Publications

Cervical cancer incidence and mortality continue to affect Hispanic women in the U.S. disproportionately. Our project sought to refine a cervical cancer intervention designed for use by community health workers, or promotoras, in rural southern Georgia. We collaborated with Hispanicpromotoras to refine a Spanish language educational flipchart featuring cervical cancer topic areas for use in screening promotion.

Cultural Evolutionary Tipping Points In The Storage And Transmission Of Information, R. A. Bentley, Michael J. O'Brien

History Faculty Publications (Archived)

Human culture has evolved through a series of major tipping points in information storage and communication. The first was the appearance of language, which enabled communication between brains and allowed humans to specialize in what they do and to participate in complex mating games. The second was information storage outside the brain, most obviously expressed in the "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" - the sudden proliferation of cave art, personal adornment, and ritual in Europe some 35,000-45,000 years ago. More recently, this storage has taken the form of writing, mass media, and now the Internet, which is arguably overwhelming humans' ability to …

Undergraduate Catalog, Georgia Southern University

Undergraduate & Graduate Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Code Vs. Code: Nationalist And Internationalist Images Of The Code Civil In The French Resistance To A European Codification, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

French academics reacted to announcements about a possible future European civil code ten years ago in the way in which Americans reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 1940: first with shock, then with rearmament, finally with attempted counterattacks. Military metaphors abound. Yet the defense of the French Code Civil against a European civil code is tricky: they must defend one Code against another. The images drawn of codes are therefore of particular interest for our understanding both of civil codes and of legal nationalism. Often, two mutually exclusive images are presented at the same time. In cultural terms, …