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Table Of Contents

Georgia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Soft Whistleblowing, Amanda C. Leiter

Georgia Law Review

This Article explores the underappreciated role that agency insiders play in directing outside oversight of their employer agencies and, in turn, manipulating agency policy development. Specifically, the Article defines, documents, and evaluates the phenomenon of "soft whistleblowing"-an agency employee's deliberate, unsanctioned,substantive, and instrumental disclosure of nonpublic information about issues of policy. This phenomenon is ubiquitous but has received no systematic attention in the academic literature. As the Article demonstrates, agency employees regularly engage in soft whistleblowing to congressional staff, journalists, and agency watchdog groups, in an effort to bring outside pressure to bear on their employer agencies to shift policymaking …

Fast Forward Fifty Years: Protecting Uninhibited, Robust, And Wide-Open Debate After New York Times Co. V. Sullivan, Amy K. Sanders

Georgia Law Review

In September 2013, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 606, criminalizing attempts to photograph or videotape a child if the reason for doing so was because the child's parent is a celebrity or public official. Not surprisingly, the measure garnered significant support from Hollywood's elite, including legislative testimony from actress-moms Halle Berry and Jennifer Garner. Against the outcry of the California Broadcasters Association and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the California Legislature approved the measure, which raises current penalties for first-time offenders to one year of incarceration and/or a $10,000 fine (up from a maximum of six months …

In New York Times Co. V. Sullivan, The Supreme Court Got It Right Then- And Now, David G. Savage

Georgia Law Review

On April 5, 1960, Ray Jenkins, a city editor for the Alabama Journal,the afternoon paper in Montgomery, was having lunch at his desk and skimming through the old papers that had piled up. They included a week-old copy of the New York Times. He spotted an item that had a local angle, and he wrote a thirteen-paragraph story for that day's paper. "Sixty prominent liberals, including [former First Lady] Eleanor Roosevelt, have signed a full page advertisement in the New York Times appealing for contributions to 'The Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the …

Liberty Without Capacity: Why States Should Ban Adolescent Driving, Vivian E. Hamilton

Georgia Law Review

Car crashes kill more teens each year than any other cause, and of the crashes in which they are involved, teens are overwhelmingly at fault. Teens crash at rates far higher than those of older drivers, and the younger the teen driver, the higher the risk-sixteen-year-old drivers have crash rates 250% higher than those of eighteen-year- olds. Driving experience does not explain the difference; younger beginners crash at rates higher than those of older beginners. Instead, younger teens' increased crash risk results primarily from immature regulatory competence. In other words, the capacities required for driving competence are still immature in …

How Does The Presence Of A Special Education Teacher Impact Co-Teachers’ Behavior In An Inclusive Classroom, Ryan O. Kellems Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

The majority of studies regarding co-teaching have primarily looked at what specific instructional practices and teacher characteristics are needed to make co-teaching an effective practice. In contrast, this study investigates how co-teaching affects a teacher’s particular teaching style and behavior. Of greatest interest is how a teacher’s use of instructional technology is impacted by the presence of a co-teacher. With many schools making inclusion a priority, the number of co-taught classes is increasing. In order for students to gain the most from classes that are co-taught, it is important that we first understand the factors that affect co-teachers. Once we …

Does Measuring L2 Utterance Fluency Equal Measuring Overall L2 Proficiency? Evidence From Five Languages, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Dan Dewey, Jennifer Brown, Rob A. Martinsen

Faculty Publications

The current study examined the relationship between overall second language (L2) proficiency and utterance fluency measures for several L2s in order to determine whether utterance measures can be used to predict L2 proficiency. The study measured the speech rate, number of hesitations, number and length of pauses, number and length of runs, and number of false starts using excerpts from 126 ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) spoken by 86 participants. Forty of the participants provided pre‐ and post‐OPI speech samples, which also allowed examination of changes over time. All 86 participants were native English speakers who spoke L2 French, German, …

Assessing The Validity Of Can‐Do Statements In Retrospective (Then‐Now) Self‐Assessment, N. Anthony Brown, Dan Dewey, Troy L. Cox

Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors evaluated the strengths and limitations of a self assessment based on ACTFL Can‐Do statements (ACTFL, 2013) as a tool for measuring linguistic gains over an internship abroad in Russia. They assessed its reliability, determined how its items mapped with the ACTFL scale, and measured the degree to which students’ self‐evaluations matched oral proficiency interview (OPI) test results (i.e., predictive validity). Data revealed a high level of reliability. Furthermore, self assessment items ascended in the order of difficulty expected (i.e., Superior items were the most difficult, followed by Advanced), but differences between the means for items …

Variables Affecting L2 Gains During Study Abroad, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, Dan Dewey, Jennifer Brown, Rob A. Martinsen

Faculty Publications

Second language (L2) gains during study abroad have been related to several variables including length of stay (Llanes, 2011), language use (Martinsen, Baker, Dewey, Bown, & Johnson, 2010), and social network development (Isabelli‐ García, 2006), among others. However, most studies have investigated only a few predictors in single study abroad programs. While these findings are helpful, larger scale studies are needed to better understand the variables that contribute to L2 gains across several different cultures and learner groups. The current study examines predictors of L2 gain of more than 100 native English speakers who participated in study abroad in Mexico, …

Finding Genealogy Facts With Linguistic Analysis, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter Lindes, David W. Embley

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Student Achievement And French Sentence Repetition Test Scores, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Benjamin J. Millard

Faculty Publications

Sentence repetition (SR) tests are one way of probing a language learner’s oral proficiency. Test-takers listen to a set of carefully engineered sentences of varying complexity one-by-one, and then try to repeat them back as exactly as possible. In this paper we explore how well an SR test that we have developed for French corresponds with the test-taker’s achievement levels, represented by proficiency interview scores and by college class enrollment. We describe how we developed our SR test items using various language resources, and present pertinent facts about the test administration. The responses were scored by humans and also by …

Us Federal Climate Change Law In Obama’S Second Term, Michael B. Gerrard, Shelley Welton

Faculty Scholarship

This commentary details the United States’ progress in advancing climate change law since President Barrack Obama’s re-election in 2012, in spite of congressional dysfunction and opposition. It describes how the Obama administration is building upon earlier regulatory efforts by using existing statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from both new and existing power plants. It also explains the important role the judiciary has played in facilitating more robust executive actions, while at the same time courts have rejected citizen efforts to force judicial remedies for the problem of climate change. Finally, it suggests some reasons why climate change has …

Implicit And Explicit Training In The Mitigation Of Cognitive Bias Through The Use Of A Serious Game, Norah E. Dunbar, Claude H. Miller, Bradley J. Adame, Javier Elizondo, Scott N. Wilson, Brianna L. Lane, Abigail Allums Kauffman, Elena Bessarabova, Matthew L. Jensen, Sara K. Straub, Yu-Hao Lee, Judee K. Burgoon, Joseph J. Valacich, Jeffrey Jenkins, Jun Zhang

Faculty Publications

Heuristics can interfere with information processing and hinder decision-making when more systematic processes that might lead to better decisions are ignored. Based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) of information processing, a serious training game (called MACBETH) was designed to address and mitigate cognitive biases that interfere with the analysis of evidence and the generation of hypotheses. Two biases are the focus of this paper—fundamental attribution error and confirmation bias. The efficacy of the serious game on knowledge and mitigation of biases was examined using an experiment in which participants (N = 703) either played the MACBETH game or watched an …

Proposing The Affect-Trust Infusion Model (Atim) To Explain And Predict The Influence Of High- And Low-Affect Infusion On Web-Vendor Trust, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Nathan Twyman, Matthew Pickard, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Son Ngoc Bui

Faculty Publications

Trust is just as essential to online business as it is to offline transactions but can be more difficult to achieve—especially for newer Web sites associated with unknown Web vendors. Research explains that Web vendor trust can be created by cognitive and affective influences. But under what circumstances will emotion more powerfully impact trust and when will cognition be more powerful? Theory-based answers to these questions can help online Web vendors design better Web sites that account for unleveraged factors that will increase trust in the Web vendor.

We adapt the Affect Infusion Model to propose the Affect-Trust Infusion Model …

Hykss: Hybrid Keyword And Semantic Search, Andrew J. Zitzelberger, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Del T. Scott

Faculty Publications

Keyword search suffers from a number of issues: ambiguity, synonymy, and an inability to handle semantic constraints. Semantic search helps resolve these issues but is limited by the quality of annotations which are likely to be incomplete or imprecise. Hybrid search, a search technique that combines the merits of both keyword and semantic search, appears to be a promising solution. In this paper we describe and evaluate HyKSS, a hybrid search system driven by extraction ontologies for both annotation creation and query interpretation. For displaying results, HyKSS uses a dynamic ranking algorithm. We show that over data sets of short …

You Said What? Assessing The Impact Of Collaboration Technologies And Message Characteristics Using Physiological Measures, Taylor M. Wells, Alan R. Dennis

Faculty Publications

Collaboration technologies often are effective but sometimes they can distort messages, especially in emotional communication. We propose and test a theoretical model to explain how different technologies and message characteristics influence the emotional responses of recipients and how recipients evaluate the emotional content of the messages. Two collaboration technologies—email and voicemail—were examined because they differ in richness and naturalness. As some individuals are more capable in interpreting and understanding emotion, we also examined the role of emotional intelligence. The results show that a message sent via email was likely to trigger a different immediate psychophysiological emotional response and be evaluated …

The Buck Stops There: The Impact Of Perceived Accountability And Control On The Intention To Delegate To Software Agents, Nathan Stout, Alan R. Dennis, Taylor M. Wells

Faculty Publications

Software agents with the ability to recommend actions, aid decision-making, and actually make decisions are becoming increasingly common. In many situations, users now choose whether or not to delegate tasks to these agents. While some research has examined software agents, relatively little is known about the factors that influence the intention to delegate decisions to them. An experiment was used to examine the influence of perceived accountability, extent of control, and trust in the agent on the intention to delegate a travel arrangement decision. Users were more likely to delegate to agents that gave them greater control by requiring them …

Neoliberal Constitutionalism: Lochnerism For A New Economy, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Neoliberalism has a constitutional face. It figures in judicial and popular interpretations of free speech, due process, equal protection, and federalism, as surely as it does in intellectual property, family law, health policy, and the other areas that our contributors address. In this article, I make the case that there is something special about the constitutional expression of neoliberalism, which arises from three features of constitutional law: its basicness, its breadth, and its integrating tendency.

President Obama Tackles Climate Change Without Congress, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

With a majority of the House of Representatives hostile to regulatory action on climate change, President Obama announced in his January 2013 State of the Union address, and again shortly thereafter in his second inaugural address, that he would use his existing statutory authority to move on what he called a threat to future generations. The president followed through on June 25 with a detailed action plan.

This article describes the principal elements of The President's Climate Action Plan and the progress so far in implementing it.

Blended Learning In Higher Education: Institutional Adoption And Implementation, Wendy W. Porter, Charles R. Graham, Kristian A. Spring, Kyle R. Welch

Faculty Publications

Relatively little of the current research on blended learning (BL) addresses institutional adoption issues. Additional research is needed to guide institutions of higher education in strategically adopting and implementing blended learning on campus. The authors conducted a prior study in which they proposed a framework for institutional BL adoption (Graham, Woodfield, & Harrison, 2012), identifying three stages: (1) awareness/exploration, (2) adoption/early implementation, and (3) mature implementation/ growth. The framework also identified key strategy, structure, and support issues universities may address at each stage. The current study applies this adoption framework to 11 U. S. institutions participating in a Next Generation …

An Online High School “Shepherding” Program: Teacher Roles And Experiences Mentoring Online Students, Jeffrey S. Drysdale, Charles R. Graham, Jered Borup

Faculty Publications

Several online programs use on-site facilitators to create a stronger sense of community and reduce student dropout. However, little research addresses how programs that are fully online can provide their students with comparable support. This case study analyzed a “shepherding program” at Mountain Heights Academy, a fully online high school. We found that the shepherding program enabled fully online teachers to provide their students with many of the services typical of on-site facilitators. The roles of the shepherding program included building caring relationships, facilitating content interaction, and providing students with the communication links they needed to be successful. In addition, …

Are State Tax Amnesty Programs Associated With Financial Reporting Irregularities?, Neal Buckwalter, Nathan Y. Sharp, Jaron H. Wilde, David A. Wood

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Short Selling Around Restatement Announcements: When Do Bears Pounce?, Michael S. Drake, Linda A. Myers, Susan Scholz, Nathan Y. Sharp

Faculty Publications

This paper draws on two distinct literatures – one that investigates the impact of accounting restatements and another that investigates the trading behavior of short sellers – to further our understanding of how sophisticated investors process and respond to news about accounting corrections. We examine short-seller behavior in the days surrounding restatement announcements to determine when short sellers identify restatements and how they trade on restatement news. Our findings suggest that short sellers do not appear to anticipate restatement announcement dates, but we find that abnormal short selling is significantly higher than is typical when restatements are announced, especially for …

The Tax Reform Road Not Taken – Yet, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has traveled a unique tax policy path, avoiding value added taxes (VATs), which have now been adopted by every OECD country and 160 countries worldwide. Moreover, many U.S. consumption tax advocates have insisted on direct personalized taxes that are unlike taxes used anywhere in the world. This article details a tax reform plan that uses revenues from a VAT to substantially reduce and reform our nation’s tax system. The plan would (1) enact a destination-based VAT; (2) use the revenue produced by this VAT to finance an income tax exemption of $100,000 of family income and to …

A Direct Test Of Agency Theories Of Debt, Yilin Huang, Taylor D. Nadauld

Faculty Publications

When a firm is facing default, equity holders have incentives to engage in asset substitution, underinvest, or directly transfer wealth. Few papers document investment distortions on account of debt-equity agency conflicts, only that the threat of distortions influence ex ante financing costs. A non-agency RMBS deal represents an entity that is highly leveraged where, ex ante, equity holders know they will face default. This provides an ideal laboratory for testing whether the threat of default creates any of the distortions predicted in theory. We estimate agency costs associated with direct wealth transfers to range between $.011 and $.025 per dollar.

Peer Effects In Risk Aversion And Trust, Kenneth R. Ahern, Ran Duchin, Tyler Shumway

Faculty Publications

Existing evidence shows that risk aversion and trust are largely determined by environmental factors. We test whether one such factor is peer influence. Using random assignment of MBA students to peer groups and predetermined survey responses of economic attitudes, we find causal evidence of positive peer effects in risk aversion and no effects in trust. After the first year of the MBA program, the difference between an individual and her peers' average risk aversion is only 41% as large as the difference was before starting the MBA. Finding no peer effects in trust is consistent with recent research showing that …

Users Aren’T (Necessarily) Lazy: Using Neurois To Explain Habituation To Security Warnings, Bonnie Brinton Anderson, Anthony Vance, Brock Kirwan, David Eargle, Seth Howard

Faculty Publications

Warning messages are one of the last lines of defense in information security, and are fundamental to users’ security interactions with technology. Unfortunately, research shows that users routinely ignore security warnings. A key contributor to this disregard is habituation, the diminishing of attention through frequent exposure. However, previous research has examined habituation indirectly by observing its influence on security behavior, rather than measuring habituation itself.

We contribute by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to directly observe habituation as it occurs in the brain. Our results show that with repeated exposure to warnings, neural activity in the visual processing centers …

The Effects Of Team Flow On Performance: A Video Game Experiment, Mark Keith, Greg Anderson, Doug Dean, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Research on effective team work has traditionally explained team performance as a result of team cohesion and goal commitment. Team cohesion was originally defined as the general level of attraction the team members had to all others in their group. This social relations-based concept of team cohesion is generally a strong indicator of team performance. However, more recent research has stressed the importance of incorporating the team members’ mutual level of commitment to the team task as another sub-dimension of cohesion. When including task commitment, team cohesion is a somewhat weaker predictor of team performance (Beal et al., 2003). To …

Exploring Configurations Of Affordances: The Case Of Software Development, Aron Lindberg, James Gaskin, Nicholas Berente, Kalle Lyytinen

Faculty Publications

Affordances have been increasingly used in the information systems literature to account for the usage and effects of information technology. However, a review of the literature shows that the construct has remained nebulously defined, rarely used in anything but singular forms and with little consideration of context. This has resulted in a lack of cumulative research on affordances. We propose that affordances need to be considered not only individually, but also as configurations of multiple affordances. Through a sociomaterial sequence analysis of two software development teams – one waterfall and one agile - we build a framework for the study …

A Reply To "Hollow Spaces", George A. Bermann, Jack J. Coe Jr., Christopher R. Drahozal, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

This short essay responds to Chip Brower's thoughtful and meticulous critique of Tentative Draft No. 2 of the Restatement Third of the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration. While we appreciate the concerns he raises, we disagree with the conclusions he draws both about the Restatement and the drafting process. We address here what we understand to be Professor Brower's major criticisms of the work.