Digital Commons Network^™

Guest Editor's Column, Geoffrey Kain

Publications

“Increasingly in higher education we are said to value interdisciplinary approaches to subjects, to consider creative means to perforate if not actually dissolve some boundaries between disciplines, to potentially develop courses or opportunities for students and/or faculty to establish some innovative bridges between the arts and sciences, philosophy and technology, etc…”

An Interview With Dilip K. Basu, Geoffrey Kain

Publications

[Dr. Dilip K. Basu, professor emeritus of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the founding director of the Satyajit Ray Film and Study Center, now located in Crown College on the UCSC campus. He and his wife, Dayani Kowshik-Basu, who serves as curator for the Center, continue to maintain, direct, and develop the Ray archival collection and oversee the continuing restoration efforts of a range of Satyajit Ray materials. Dilip Basu has played one of the most vital roles, worldwide, in the recovery and restoration of Satyajit Ray’s films. In 1992, when the Motion Picture Academy, with …

Focusing The Village: Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali And Prafulla Mohanti's My Village, My Life, Geoffrey Kain

Publications

Gandhi insisted that the spirit of India lives in its villages, but the drift away from the village and toward urbanization in post- independence India continues. Questions arise regarding the ideological motivations driving artists’ treatments of the village in various notable works in the modern South Asian canon. A comparison is drawn between Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali [1955] and Orissan artist and author Prafulla Mohanti’s My Village, My Life [1973]. While at first glance the two may seem to have little to do with another, a close consideration reveals some striking similarities between them, providing some compelling insights into Ray’s …

Actra - A Case Study For Threat Information Sharing, Jon C. Haass, Gail-Joon Ahn, Frank Grimmelmann

Publications

This paper provides a case study for information sharing within a public/private not-for-profit partnership organization called ACTRA – Arizona Cyber Threat Response Alliance, Inc.. This initiative is comprised of public and private entities with government agencies as invited guests aligned around the goal of improved response to cyber security events. Technical, political, legal and organizational issues arise when multiple parties attempt to exchange information in a formal setting. Benefits and specific solutions developed are discussed. The study concludes with several areas for future improvement and investigation as well as recommendations for newly forming sharing groups.

Formation And Assessment Of A Tool To Evaluate Stem Literacy In Service-Learning Projects, Barbara Hayford, Sally Blomstrom, Lori A. Mumpower

Publications

The purpose of the authors’ research was to create a tool to evaluate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) literacy in service-learning projects. The researchers posited that components of service-learning, which in this case included the deliverable and reflections, are examples of fundamental STEM literacy and thus can be assessed for STEM learning outcomes. The authors review the literature on service-learning and on STEM literacy. Combining components of literacy-based learning objectives and service-learning objectives with the revised Bloom’s taxonomy in a taxonomy table, they created a general STEM literacy evaluation tool. They then applied the tool to a service-learning project …

Virginia As A Response To Parental Influence, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Publications

In his 1807 poem, "Resolution and Independence," a poem that brings to mind Oliver Treadwell's artistic crisis in Virginia, William Wordsworth describes the precipice that he faces when trying to come to terms with the emotional extremes he must allow himself in creating the art he desires.

The Confidence Information Ontology: A Step Towards A Standard For Asserting Confidence In Annotations, Frederic B. Bastian, Marcus C. Chibucos, Pascale Gaudet, Michelle Giglio, Gemma L. Holiday, Hong Huang, Suzanna E. Lewis, Anne Niknejad, Sandra Orchard, Sylvain Poux, Nives Skunca, Marc Robinson-Rechavi

School of Information Faculty Publications

Biocuration has become a cornerstone for analyses in biology, and to meet needs, the amount of annotations has considerably grown in recent years. However, the reliability of these annotations varies; it has thus become necessary to be able to assess the confidence in annotations. Although several resources already provide confidence information about the annotations that they produce, a standard way of providing such information has yet to be defined. This lack of standardization undermines the propagation of knowledge across resources, as well as the credibility of results from high-throughput analyses. Seeded at a workshop during the Biocuration 2012 conference, a …

A Heuristic Text Analytic Approach For Classifying Research Articles, Steven Walczak, Deborah L. Kellogg

School of Information Faculty Publications

Classification of research articles is fundamental to analyze and understand research literature. Underlying concepts from both text analytics and concept mining form a foundation for the development of a quantitative heuristic methodology, the Scale of Theoretical and Applied Research (STAR), for classifying research. STAR demonstrates how concept mining may be used to classify research with respect to its theoretical and applied emphases. This research reports on evaluating the STAR heuristic classifier using the Business Analytics domain, by classifying 774 Business Analytics articles from 23 journals. The results indicate that STAR effectively evaluates overall article content of journals to be consistent …

Examining Political Mobilization Of Online Communities Through E-Petitioning Behavior In We The People, Catherine L. Dumas, Daniel Lamanna, Teresa M. Harrison, S. S. Ravi, Christopher Kotfila, Norman Gervais, Loni Hagen, Feng Chen

School of Information Faculty Publications

This study aims to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of the political mobilization of online “communities”. We discuss the case of We the People, a US national experiment in the use of social media technology to enable users to propose and solicit support for policy suggestions to the White House. We apply Baumgartner and Jones's work on agenda setting and punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that policy issues may lie dormant for periods of time until some event triggers attention from the media, interest groups, and elected representatives. In the case study presented, we focus on …

A Novel Algorithm For Analyzing Drug-Drug Interactions From Medline Literature, Yin Lu, Dan Shen, Maxwell Pietsch, Chetan Nagar, Zayd Fadli, Hong Huang, Yi-Cheng Tu, Feng Chen

School of Information Faculty Publications

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) is becoming a serious clinical safety issue as the use of multiple medications becomes more common. Searching the MEDLINE database for journal articles related to DDI produces over 330,000 results. It is impossible to read and summarize these references manually. As the volume of biomedical reference in the MEDLINE database continues to expand at a rapid pace, automatic identification of DDIs from literature is becoming increasingly important. In this article, we present a random-sampling-based statistical algorithm to identify possible DDIs and the underlying mechanism from the substances field of MEDLINE records. The substances terms are essentially carriers …

No One Left-Behind! Teaching Information Literacy In A Different Way To An Urban Population, Kiersten Cox, Vicki L. Gregory, Julius Fleschner

School of Information Faculty Publications

The demographics of student-athletes at the University of South Florida closely resemble that of many urban areas in the USA. These students often have little academic success. The School of Information pioneered a credit bearing information literacy course specifically for student-athletes to increase their academic success and to improve their information literacy. The article describes five strategies that make this class successful. These strategies can employed in this class can be employed in other setting such as an urban library or other institution interested in improving clients information literacy.

A Study On The Limitations Of Evolutionary Computation And Other Bio-Inspired Approaches For Integer Factorization, Mohit Mishra, Vaibhav Gupta, Utkarsh Chaturvedi, K. K. Shukla, Roman Yampolskiy

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Integer Factorization is a vital number theoretic problem frequently finding application in public-key cryptography like RSA encryption systems, and other areas like Fourier transform algorithm. The problem is computationally intractable because it is a one-way mathematical function. Due to its computational infeasibility, it is extremely hard to find the prime factors of a semi prime number generated from two randomly chosen similar sized prime numbers. There has been a recently growing interest in the community with regards to evolutionary computation and other alternative approaches to solving this problem as an optimization task. However, the results still seem to be very …

Human Origins, Dispersal And Associated Environments: An African Perspective, Amanuel Beyin

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Africa’s position as the cradle of humanity is widely accepted, supported by rich fossil and archaeological discoveries from different parts of the continent. Drawing on the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins, this article provides a condensed narrative of the major milestones in human evolution and associated environmental settings. The underlying hypothesis is that changes in global climate played an important role in fueling early modern human origins and dispersals within and outside of Africa. As one will discover in this article, the history of humanity is a tale of small events that merged together into major milestones over a long …

A Trustworthiness Of Commercial Airline Pilots (T-Cap) Scale For American Consumers, Stephen C. Rice, Rian Mehta, Scott Winter, Korhan Oyman

Publications

The purpose of this study was to create a Trustworthiness of Commercial Airline Pilots (T-CAP) scale that could be used with American participants. Previous research (Rice, Mehta, Steelman, & Winter, 2014) created a similar scale that may be used with Indian participants. However, due to cultural differences, it was necessary to recreate an instrument that could be used with American consumers. In fact, the scale developed by American participants did differ significantly, both in terms of length and items to measure trustworthiness of commercial pilots. Participants were used in the entire process of creating the scale, including item generation and …

The Impact Of Climate Change On Human Health, Mary Snow, Richard Snow

Publications

Climate change is impacting human health. An obvious effect of a warmer environment is more frequent and severe heat waves. During the European heat wave of 2003, there were an estimated 35,000 more deaths than normal in the first two weeks of August. Many of the deaths resulted from cardiovascular complications among the elderly. As heat waves become more commonplace in the future, so will the number of heat strokes and the onset of other cardiovascular problems. Higher summertime temperatures also increase tropospheric ozone concentrations which in turn affects people with asthma and causes lung and heart damage. Increases in …

The Walking Qur’An: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, And History In West Africa By Rudolph Ware Iii, Emad Hamdeh

Publications

With the introduction of new educational systems in the Muslim world during the late-eighteenth through the early-twentieth century, many Muslims and non-Muslims became critical of traditional pedagogical methods. In particular, the image of Qur’an schools in West Africa are often criticized for their “backward” forms of education and commonly perceived as places where children simply parrot Qur’anic verses without much understanding. These institutions have largely been abandoned and replaced by modern and secular schooling systems. In his The Walking Qur’an, Rudolph Ware argues that Qur’an schools have survived in places like West Africa. By studying them, he seeks to historicize …

Editorial: Special Issue: Safety & Efficiency Of Civil Aviation: Selected Papers From The World Conferences Of The Air Transport Research Society And The World Conference On Transport Society - 2013, Paul Hooper, Ian Douglas, Chunyan Yu, Stefano Paleari

Publications

The Air Transport Research Society (ATRS) is a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS). The ATRS annual World Conference was held at the University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy on 26-29 June 2013 and it attracted 266 papers from 37 countries. Also, the WCTRS triennial World Conference was held on 15- 18 July at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during which the ATRS organised several sessions devoted to air transport topics. This special issue of the Journal of Air Transport Studies has drawn upon all of this material to present four papers that promote improvements …

The Role Of Neighborhood Environment In Promoting Risk Factors Of Cardiovascular Disease Among Young Adults: Data From Middle To High Income Population In An Asian Megacity, Mohammad Ahraz Hussain, Sandal Noorani, Amna Khan, Hafsa Asad, Anam Rehan, Aamir Kazi, Mirza Zain Baig, Arish Noor, Amash Aqil, Nida Shahab Bham

Community Health Sciences

Background: Modifiable risk factors of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) have their triggers in the neighborhood environments of communities. Studying the environmental triggers for CVD risk factors is important to understand the situation in a broader perspective. Young adults are influenced the most by the environment profile around them hence it is important to study this subset of the population.Methods: This was a descriptive study conducted using the EPOCH research tool designed by the authors of the PURE study. The study population consisted of young adults aged 18-25 in two areas of Karachi. The study setting was busy shopping malls frequented by …

Does Academic Assessment System Type Affect Levels Of Academic Stress In Medical Students? A Cross-Sectional Study From Pakistan, Madiha Ali, Hamna Asim, Ahmed Iqbal Edhi, Muhammad Daniya Hashmi, Muhammad Shahjahan Khan, Farah Qamar, Kanza Noor Qaiser, Sidra Masud Qureshi, Mohammad Faizan Zahid, Imtiaz Jehan

Community Health Sciences

Introduction: Stress among medical students induced by academic pressures is on the rise among the student population in Pakistan and other parts of the world. Our study examined the relationship between two different systems employed to assess academic performance and the levels of stress among students at two different medical schools in Karachi, Pakistan.
Methods: A sample consisting of 387 medical students enrolled in pre-clinical years was taken from two universities, one employing the semester examination system with grade point average (GPA) scores (a tiered system) and the other employing an annual examination system with only pass/fail grading. A pre-designed, …

Searching For Safe, Fair, And Affordable Housing: Learning From Experiences., Lauren Heberle, Cate Fosl, T. Kagaba

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Compendium Of Organics Recovery Programs At Colleges And Universities, A.P. Lacy, A. Sizemore, Lauren Heberle, C. Norton

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Intelligence Legalism And The National Security Agency’S Civil Liberties Gap, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Since June 2013, we have seen unprecedented security breaches and disclosures relating to American electronic surveillance. The nearly daily drip, and occasional gush, of once-secret policy and operational information makes it possible to analyze and understand National Security Agency activities, including the organizations and processes inside and outside the NSA that are supposed to safeguard American’s civil liberties as the agency goes about its intelligence gathering business. Some have suggested that what we have learned is that the NSA is running wild, lawlessly flouting legal constraints on its behavior. This assessment is unfair. In fact, the picture that emerges from …

Reflections On Freedom And Criminal Responsibility In Late Twentieth Century American Legal Thought, Thomas A. Green, Merrill Catharine Hodnefield

Articles

It is now a commonplace among historians that American criminal jurisprudence underwent a dramatic change something like two-thirds to three-quarters into the last century. Roughly, this development is understood as a shift (or drift) from a more-or-less pure consequentialism to a "mixed theory" wherein retributivism played a major-at times, dominant-role. As the new paradigm remains intact, now approaching a half-century, the development qualifies as a significant historical fact. The fact applies not only to the history of justification for punishment but also to conceptions of the underlying principle of (basis for) responsibility. The two are rightly distinguished: for many scholars …

No Reason To Blame Liberals (Or, The Unbearable Lightness Of Perversity Arguments), Margo Schlanger

Reviews

In addition to the current extraordinary number of people behind American bars, the other key feature of our current carceral state is the very high concentration of non-whites in that population. That concentration of non-whites has grown significantly since the 1960s, when whites constituted nearly two thirds of American prison population; today, they are only a bit over one-third. Since 72% of Americans are white, the distinction in terms of incarceration rate is far more stark: among white men, the current imprisonment rate (counting only sentenced prisoners) is 4.7/1000; among Latino men it is two-and-a-half times that (11.3/1000); and among …

Consent Searches And Fourth Amendment Reasonableness, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article builds on a growing body of scholarship discussing the role of reasonableness in consent-search doctrine. Although the language of “voluntary consent” implies a subjective inquiry into the state of mind of the person granting consent, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly injected an objective standard of reasonableness into its analysis of a citizen’s consent. Several scholars have characterized the Court’s consent jurisprudence as focusing not on true voluntariness but on the reasonableness of police conduct, which they argue is appropriate because the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is “reasonableness.” While the renewed scholarly focus on the role of …

Asset Preservation And The Evolving Role Of Trusts In The Twenty-First Century, Jay A. Soled, Mitchell Gans

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

For the vast majority of the twentieth century, trusts served two pivotal roles. The first was as a vehicle to help mitigate federal and state estate tax burdens, the rates of which could be quite significant. The second was to assist in asset preservation, safeguarding trust beneficiaries from their profligacy, former spouses, creditors, and the like.

At the start of the twenty-first century, Congress passed legislation that curtailed the impact of the federal estate tax, and many state legislatures have followed suit, either eliminating or significantly reducing their estate taxes. As a result of these legislative changes, trust instrument reliance …

Intellectual Property And The Presumption Of Innocence, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Our current methods of imposing criminal convictions on defendants for copyright and trademark infringement are constitutionally defective. Previous works have argued that due process under the Sixth Amendment requires prosecutors to prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, including the jurisdictional element. Applying this theory to criminal trademark counterfeiting results in the conclusion that prosecutors should have to demonstrate that an infringing mark needs to have traveled in or affected interstate commerce, which currently is not mandated. Parallel to this construction of the Commerce Clause, criminal prosecutors would also have to prove that Congress has the power …

Moving Forward, Looking Back: A Retrospective On Sexual Harassment Law, Joanna L. Grossman

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The history of sexual harassment law─which I have occasion to consider as part of this symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Title VII─can be divided, if not neatly, into three eras. The 1970s was home to the emergence of consciousness about the frequency and harm of sexually harassing behaviors in the workplace─and a name to describe them. The 1980s and 1990s saw the development and embrace of a theoretical understanding of sexual harassment as a form of discrimination, outlined in Catharine MacKinnon's path-breaking 1979 book, The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, and the development of a comprehensive set of …

The New York Llc Act At Twenty: Is Piercing Still 'Enveloped In The Midst Of Metaphor'?, Miriam R. Albert

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Twenty years ago, the New York Limited Liability Company Law was enacted, including § 609(a), which explicitly disclaims liability of members, managers, and agents for the debts and obligations of the LLC. However, New York courts have held that this limitation on liability is not absolute, and certain conduct on the part of the owners can erode the liability shield. The statute provides that the members will not have personal liability for LLC debts solely because of their role as owners in the LLC. The statute does not say that members will never have liability, just that any liability will …

Why Do Law Students Want To Become Tax Lawyers?, Linda Galler

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

The paper lays out a list of reasons why law students develop an interest in tax law. It is part of a compendium of papers commemorating the 75th anniversary of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation. It is written to provide law students with guidance concerning their choice of career and practicing attorneys with a bit of nostalgia.