Digital Commons Network^™

Designing For Communities In Bushfire-Prone Situations: Redesigning The Firewatch Website Interface, Paul William Haimes

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This research describes the redesign of Landgate’s FireWatch service – a web-based map application that uses data derived from satellites to provide near real-time bushfire information. FireWatch was originally built for emergency services personnel, but recent Australian state government inquiries have called for individuals, households and communities to have independent access to bushfire information. Therefore, it was necessary to redesign FireWatch with a new remote community-based audience in mind. The thesis describes multiple iterations of a user-centred action research design process that resulted in a publicly accessible web application known as MyFireWatch. Due to delayed access to actual community–based users, …

Cognitive Fatigue: Exploring The Relationship Between The Fatigue Effect And Action Video-Game Experience, James Brooks

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

the effects of cognitive fatigue. Despite this, there remain advantages to regularly playing action video games. In Study 1, VGPs were significantly better at multitasking on the MATB-II compared to the NVGPs. Further, VGPs also demonstrated superior multitasking when driving, as they made significantly fewer traffic violations compared to NVGPs when not fatigued. VGPs demonstrated eye-movements similar to those of expert drivers; however, this did not result in any difference in performance between the two groups. There was also some evidence of a positive effect of video game training, although there was no advantage of one training technique over the …

The Use Of Ontologies In Forensic Analysis Of Smartphone Content, Mohammed Alzaabi, Thomas Anthony Martin, Kamal Taha, Andy Jones

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Digital forensics investigators face a constant challenge in keeping track with evolving technologies such as smartphones. Analyzing the contents of these devices to infer useful information is becoming more time consuming as the volume and complexity of data are increasing. Typically, such analysis is undertaken by a human, which makes it dependent on the experience of the investigator. To overcome such impediments, an automated technique can be utilized in order to aid the investigator to quickly and efficiently analyze the data. In this paper, we propose F-DOS; a set of ontologies that models the smartphone content for the purpose of …

Effects Of Stress On 9-1-1 Call-Takers And Police Dispatchers: A Study At The San Jose Police Department, Kimberly D. Turner

Master's Theses

This research addresses the significant gap in literature related to stress among 9-1-1 call-takers and dispatchers. The relationship between perceived stress and work-life balance, fairness at work, support at home, and work control as well as physiological and psychological outcomes is examined. Survey responses were collected during the summer of 2012 from 89 police 9-1-1 call-takers and radio dispatchers of the San José Police Department Communications Division in San José, California. Using hierarchical multiple regression analysis, I found those who enjoy a balance between work and personal life experience less stress. Also, greater stress is associated with more psychological and …

Location Gathering: An Evaluation Of Smartphone-Based Geographic Mobile Field Data Collection Hardware And Applications, Joel Clark

Master's Theses

Mobile field spatial data collection is the act of gathering attribute data, including spatial position, about features in a study area. A common method of field data collection is to use a handheld computing device attached to a global navigation satellite system in which attribute data are directly inputted into a database table. The market for mobile data collection systems was formerly dominated by bulky positioning systems and highly specialized software. However, recent years have seen the emergence and widespread adoption of highly customizable and user-friendly mobile smartphones and tablets. In this research, smartphone devices and smartphone data collection applications …

Effects Of Acute Exercise, Mindfulness Meditation, And Mindfulness Meditation Neurofeedback On Stroop Performance, Claire Evelyn Balgemann

Master's Theses

Empirical research has demonstrated that acute aerobic physical exercise, neurofeedback, and mindfulness meditation independently have positive effects on executive performance. Technology has enabled a new intervention that combines neurofeedback and mindfulness meditation; however its effects on executive function are unknown. The aim in the present study was to understand how executive function may be enhanced in healthy individuals. Forty-two participants were randomly assigned to one of three intervention groups: acute physical exercise, mindfulness meditation, or mindfulness meditation neurofeedback delivered via the Muse brain-sensing headband. Participants completed 50 trials of the Stroop task, a well-established measure of executive function. A statistically …

0829: John Mckernan Collection, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

The John McKernan Collection contains mostly published materials that John McKernan collected related to his own poetry. There are a limited number of non-McKernan publications that he saved.

Reactive To Proactive: Title Ix's Unrealized Capacity To Prevent Campus Sexual Assault, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the efforts to use Title IX to address the problem of sexual assaults on college campuses. It seeks to explain an odd phenomenon: universities seem to put more resources into addressing assaults that have already occurred than they do into preventing sexual assaults from occurring. To better understand how universities implicitly frame their options for addressing sexual assault, I’m going to posit that there are two particularly prevalent analytic approaches to sexual assault prevention. I’m going to call one the law enforcement approach and the other the public health approach. I’m going to link the law enforcement …

Microsoft After Fifteen Years, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

United States v. Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft III) is now fifteen years old, and that I would write such a long introduction to a reprint of significant portions from the opinion is a sign its significance has not died out. Just the opposite, I think it will become more significant in the near future, and not only because of its impact on U.S. antitrust law. The decision lays the groundwork for international enforcement of antitrust in high technology markets, at least as we have come to know them, and this is likely to continue to be significant for the foreseeable future.

Sink Or Swim: In Search Of A Model For Coastal City Climate Resilience, Sarah Adams-Schoen

Scholarly Works

New York City, like other major cities around the world, has acknowledged the problem of climate change, undertaken a comprehensive risk assessment, created a suite of adaptation and mitigation planning initiatives, and begun to implement policies to decrease the city’s contribution to the problem and to make the city less vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This detailed analysis of the city’s climate change resilience initiatives concludes that, although many of the city’s initiatives provide a model for other coastal communities, the initiatives likely still fall short of what is required to sufficiently moderate harm from dangerous interference with …

Discoverymania: Plausibility Pleading As Misprescription, Fabio Arcila Jr.

Scholarly Works

In replacing notice pleading with plausibility pleading, the Supreme Court chose to use a pleading solution to address a perceived discovery problem. This dissonance calls into question both the wisdom and legitimacy of the Court’s choice because plausibility pleading is too blunt an instrument to serve the Court’s goals: it is destabilizing because it ignores the interrelationship between discovery and other Federal Rules of Civil Procedure; it is unfairly overinclusive because it impacts all plaintiffs in all federal cases rather than only those in the minority of cases in which discovery is likely to be problematic; and it is unfairly …

The Law And The “Spirit Of The Law” In Legal Ethics, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

This article aims to explore the notion of the lawyer’s ethical responsibility to go “beyond” the letter of the law and to comply with the “spirit” or “purpose” of the law. The article suggests that, notwithstanding its promotion of admirable principles and goals, a spirit of the law model may prove inconsistent with basic legal and ethical obligations of lawyers. The lawyer’s duties as fiduciary, as agent, and as zealous advocate, responsible for representing the best interests of the client, preclude the lawyer from focusing on the spirit and purpose of the law rather than on the aims of the …

Land Use Law Update: Reed V. Town Of Gilbert Redux, Sarah Adams-Schoen

Scholarly Works

The Winter 2015 Land Use Law Update asked whether the Supreme Court’s decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert would require municipalities throughout the country to rewrite their sign codes. The short answer is “yes.”

At a minimum, following the Supreme Court’s decision that the Town of Gilbert’s temporary directional sign regulations violated petitioners Good News Community Church’s and Pastor Clyde Reed’s First Amendment rights, municipalities will want to act quickly to amend their sign codes if they regulate different categories of signs differently. A code that places fewer restrictions on political or ideological signs than on directional signs likely …

Land Use Law Update: The 2015 Mid-Year Roundup, Sarah Adams-Schoen

Scholarly Works

This update summarizes New York cases related to land use and zoning that were decided in the first half of 2015.

Land Use Law Update: Will Reed V. Town Of Gilbert Require Municipalities Throughout The Country To Rewrite Their Sign Codes?, Sarah Adams-Schoen

Scholarly Works

The author discusses the imminent Supreme Court decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert. Depending on how the Court decides the case, municipalities may need to act quickly to amend their sign regulations.

A Response To The Ipcc Fifth Assessment, Sarah Adams-Schoen, Deepa Badrinarayana, Cinnamon Pinon Carlarne, Robin Kundis Craig, John C. Dernbach, Keith H. Hirokawa, Alexandra B. Klass, Katrina Fischer Kuh, Stephen R. Miller, Jessica Owley, Shannon Roesler, Jonathan D. Rosenbloom, Inara K. Scott, David Takacs

Scholarly Works

This collection of essays is the initial product of the second meeting of the Environmental Law Collaborative, a group of environmental law scholars that meet to discuss important and timely environmental issues. Here, the group provides an array of perspectives arising from the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each scholar chose one passage from one of the IPCC’s three Summaries for Policymakers as a jumping-off point for exploring climate change issues and responding directly to the reports. The result is a variety of viewpoints on the future of how law relates to climate change, a result …

Further Developments In Land Use Ethics, Patricia E. Salkin, Darren Stakey

Scholarly Works

Ethical considerations continue to play a fundamental role in shaping the course of land use and developmental regulatory proceedings throughout the country. From an innocuous donation by one public official to his alma mater, to the outright bribery of a former mayor, the past year has been rife with a range of conduct implicating professional responsibility and land use.

Robotic Marriage And The Law, Mark Goldfeder, Yosef Razin

Scholarly Works

The United States, and the world at large, is in the midst of a family law revolution that will fundamentally change our very conception of family. Ethical challenges to age-old ideas have prompted people to ask foundational questions, such as how and why our most important personal relationships evolved. In a world where same-sex marriage has been legalized, it is only natural to wonder who marriage may include in the future. This essay explores the question of whether a human and a robot could ever legally marry in the United States. Through a thought experiment, it examines the legal and …

Millennial Generation And The Mobile Internet Devices In Shopping Activities, Giovanna Cabrera, Katia Gutiérrez, Pedro Guzmán Espinal

Theses

The Millennial Generation and the technology revolution using MID’s are changing business interactions with customers. Despite the fact Millennials are purchasing through MID’s and using these devices to support their purchasing decision, in Dominican Republic there is no available data to explain this consumer trend. The purpose of this study is to explore what Millennials value the most in the purchase process using MID’s. For this study a phenomenological interview approach, contrasting two main elements: “Social Management” and “Consumer Empowerment”, using the framework described in “The Meaning of Shopping Experiences Augmented by Mobile Internet Devices” from Brian Spaid and Daniel …

Performance And Energy Trade-Offs For 3d Ic Noc Interconnects And Architectures, James David Coddington

Theses

With the increased complexity and continual scaling of integrated circuit performance, multi-core chips with dozens, hundreds, even thousands of parallel computing units require high performance interconnects to maximize data throughput and minimize latency and energy consumption. High core counts render bus based interconnects inefficient and lackluster in performance. Networks-on-Chip were introduced to simplify the interconnect design process and maintain a more scalable interconnection architecture. With the continual scaling of feature sizes for smaller and smaller transistors, the global interconnections of planar integrated circuits are consuming higher energy proportional to the rest of the chip power dissipation as well as increasing …

The Impact Of Law On The Right To Water And Adding Normative Change To The Global Agenda, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

A resolution was passed at the United Nations Water Conference in 1977 to achieve universal access to sufficient water by 1990. This bar was lowered significantly as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, as the MDGs come to an end this year, even this reduced benchmark will not be reached. Water is inescapably intertwined with every other MDG, as well as the ability to exercise any human right. Consequently, the failure to achieve this goal implores an exploration of its causes. As the global community embarks on setting a new post-MDG agenda, one currently overlooked aspect is the …

The Scope And Potential Of Ftc Data Protection, Woodrow Hartzog, Daniel J. Solove

Faculty Scholarship

For more than fifteen years, the FTC has regulated privacy and data security through its authority to police deceptive and unfair trade practices as well as through powers conferred by specific statutes and international agreements. Recently, the FTC’s powers for data protection have been challenged by Wyndham Worldwide Corp. and LabMD. These recent cases raise a fundamental issue, and one that has surprisingly not been well explored: How broad are the FTC’s privacy and data security regulatory powers? How broad should they be?

In this Article, we address the issue of the scope of FTC authority in the areas of …

Unfair And Deceptive Robots, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Robots, like household helpers, personal digital assistants, automated cars, and personal drones are or will soon be available to consumers. These robots raise common consumer protection issues, such as fraud, privacy, data security, and risks to health, physical safety and finances. Robots also raise new consumer protection issues, or at least call into question how existing consumer protection regimes might be applied to such emerging technologies. Yet it is unclear which legal regimes should govern these robots and what consumer protection rules for robots should look like.

The thesis of the Article is that the FTC’s grant of authority and …

Increasing The Transaction Costs Of Harassment, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger

Faculty Scholarship

Wouldn’t it be nice if the rules, agreements, and guidelines designed to prevent online harassment were sufficient to curb improper behavior? As if. Wrongdoers are not always so easily deterred. Sometimes these approaches are about as effective as attacking tanks with toothpicks.

As Danielle Citron contends in her critically important work, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, the design of the Internet facilitates vitriol and abuse, even when it is legally, contractually, and normatively prohibited. Communicating almost effortlessly at distance—sometimes anonymously and typically with minimized body language—can heighten emotional detachment and blunt moral sensitivity. Tragically, when a mediated environment makes it …

The Return Of The King: The Unsavory Origins Of Administrative Law, Gary S. Lawson

Faculty Scholarship

Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful? is a truly brilliant and important book. In a prodigious feat of scholarship, Professor Hamburger uncovers the British and civil law antecedents of modern American administrative law, showing that contemporary administrative law “is really just the most recent manifestation of a recurring problem.” That problem is the problem of power: its temptations, its dangers, and its tendency to corrupt. Administrative law, far from being a distinctive product of modernity, is thus the “contemporary expression of the old tendency toward absolute power – toward consolidated power outside and above the law.” It represents precisely the …

Does The Quality Of The Plaintiffs' Law Firm Matter In Deal Litigation?, Adam B. Badawi, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines how the stock market reacts to the filing of lawsuits against mergers and acquisitions targets as the quality of the plaintiffs’ law firm varies. Our primary dataset includes all cases of this type filed in the Delaware Chancery Court from November 2003–September 2008. We group the law firms that file these suits into higher and lower quality categories using several quantitative and qualitative measures. We hypothesize that target firm share value should reflect the likelihood that litigation will result in an increase in merger consideration. This effect is likely to depend, at least in part, on law …

The Economics Of Class Actions And Class Action Waivers, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Class action litigation has generated a series of recent Supreme Court decisions imposing greater federal court supervision over the prosecution of collective injury claims. This group of cases raises the question whether class action waivers should be permitted on policy grounds. I examine the economics of class actions and waivers in this paper. I distinguish between the standard one-on-one litigation environment and the class action environment. In the standard environment, waivers between informed agents enhance society's welfare. In the class action environment, in contrast, not all waivers are likely to enhance society's welfare.

Addressing Cyber Harassment: An Overview Of Hate Crimes In Cyberspace, Danielle K. Citron

Faculty Scholarship

This short piece will take a step back and give an overhead view of the problem of cyber harassment and the destructive impact it can have on victims’ lives. Then, it will address about what the law can do to combat online harassment and how a legal agenda can be reconciled with the First Amendment. Finally, it will turn to recent changes in social media companies’ treatment of online abuse and what that might mean for our system of free expression.

Challenges For People With Disabilities Within The Health Care Safety Net, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

Medicare and Medicaid were passed to serve as safety nets for the country's most vulnerable populations, yet, the disabled community continues to be one whose health care needs are not being met. This group is all too frequently left to suffer health disparities due to cultural incompetency, stigma and misunderstanding, and an inability to create policy changes that covers the population as a whole and their acute and long-term needs.

The Relationship Between Transformational Leadership Behavior, Adult Attachment And God Attachment, Deboarah Foulkes

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Transformational leaders are charged with the undertaking of not only accomplishing tasks, but also engaging followers in a manner that will achieve these tasks. An interaction with the follower is needed to achieve this, and the quality of that interaction may be impacted by environmental stressors. Past studies suggest that adult attachment orientation will determine the quality of interpersonal interactions. Additionally, past studies also suggest that an attachment to God influences the quality of interpersonal interactions and how one copes with stress. A correspondence model of God attachment posits that a person’s attachment to God will be similar to their …