Digital Commons Network^™

Climate Science Literacy: A Study Of Climate Programs' Usability, Amber Rochelle Williams

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Literacy is an important facet of understanding how undergraduate college students comprehend climate science. This research, conducted at West Virginia University, examines the usability of climate data in three commonly used climate programs to reduce the prominent knowledge gap in climate science literacy about college students.

The objective of this research is to investigate the knowledge gap in climate science literacy by conducting focus group surveys to examine the usability of programs that use climate datasets. The three programs used in this research were the NOAA online tool, NASA’s Panoply data viewer, and GrADS programmable tool. The NOAA tool is …

Medical Celebrity In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Katherine Richards

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Medical Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain argues that the cultural mechanisms responsible for creating and sustaining celebrity culture helped create and sustain commercialized medicine in eighteenth-century Britain. I identify the process by which celebrity and medical culture impact one another as a sociocultural phenomenon that I term medical celebrity. The following chapters present four case studies of how medical celebrity impacted the development of the medical profession, the medical market, cultural representations and perceptions of health and illness, and the patient experience. I engage with the work done by scholars in contemporary and early celebrity studies to shed light on the …

Qualitative And Quantitative Analysis Of Carbonate Waters In The Peters Mountain Region Of Monroe County, Wv, Emily A. Bausher

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Water in Monroe County, WV is used extensively for public and private supply and requires quantification, chemical analysis, and assessment for contamination susceptibility. Over 250 springs were previously identified in the eastern side of Monroe County on or near Peters Mountain; 14 were continuously monitored in this study. Springs were grouped based on geologic and spatial distribution: interbedded clastic-rock springs on the mountain flanks, carbonate springs in the valley, and a thermal spring associated with the St. Clair thrust fault. Clastic and carbonate springs have calcium-magnesium-bicarbonate chemistries, neutral pHs and high alkalinities; the thermal spring has calcium-magnesium-sulfate-carbonate chemistry, low pH, …

Optimal Anteroposterior Position Of Maxillary Incisors In Caucasian Males Viewed From A Smiling Profile, Amer Shammaa

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Background and Objectives: Anteroposterior (AP) position of the maxillary incisors affects the harmony of a facial profile. Different methods have been suggested to evaluate the maxillary incisor AP position, including cephalometric analysis and soft-tissue analysis. Andrews suggested using a lateral smiling profile to evaluate the AP position of the maxillary incisors. The objective of this study was to investigate the optimal AP position of maxillary incisors in Caucasian males using Glabella Vertical (GV), a coronal plane tangent to soft tissue Glabella, as a reference line. In addition, an attempt was made to determine if there are differences in judged facial …

A Method Of Teaching English Speaking Learners To Produce Mandarin-Chinese Tones, Hui Shi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Learning Mandarin Chinese tones is a big challenge for English speaking learners. The average tonal production accuracy is reported to be about 70 percent for intermediate-level learners and 40 percent for beginning-level Chinese learners. The Chinese tonal proficiency significantly influences the learners' communicative effectiveness, including listening and speaking, but research often overlooks tonal production. This study proposed and tested a novel method of teaching English-speaking learners to pronounce Mandarin Chinese tones. This teaching method includes a Chinese tones bookmark, and a 30--50 minutes in-class training module. The research undertook five cycles of Design-Based Research (DBR) implementations with 31 public school …

Contemporary Trends Of Information Seeking Behaviour Of Research Scholars Of Gujarat University: A Case Study, Dharmendra Trivedi, Atul Bhatt Dr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study inspects the Information needs and seeking behavior of research scholars of Gujarat University in Social science and Linguistics disciplines. Sample constituted the population of total 80 research scholars from social science and linguistic disciplines. The study conducted through survey methodology with questionnaire developed basis on the core compounds of information seeking behaviour and collected the research data from the registered research scholars of Gujarat University. The results revealed that female little dominated in research work and the major purpose of seeking behaviour is for research work, knowledge enrichment and writing research and conference papers. Research scholars desired to …

Influence Of Electronic Information Resources Utilization On Academic Performance Of Hnd Students In Federal Polytechnic, Nekede, Owerri, Justice Nnamdi Okorie

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study investigated the influence of Electronic Information Resources utilization on academic performance of HND students of Federal Polytechnic Nekede, Owerri. The research was descriptive in design and adopted the quantitative survey method using questionnaire as instrument for data collection. The population of the study was 385 students which comprised 202 students in HND 1 and 183 in HND 2 in the Department of Library and Information Science. The entire population was used for the study due to the manageable size. The data was analyzed using mean and standard deviation. The findings revealed that the HND students used Electronic Information …

Journal Of Information Science: A Bibliometric Analysis, Rushmanasab Gurikar, Gururaj S. Hadagali Assistant Professor, Renuka S. Mulimani Senior Research Fellow

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The present study analyses the Journal of Information Science for the time frame 2005 to 2014. The data for the study was retrieved from the official website of the journal. The analysis of the publications was done using various parameters such as authorship pattern, Degree of Collaboration, Collaborative index, Collaborative Coefficient, Country wise share of total publications. The findings of the study include the highest number of contributions to the journal were from UK (16.35%) followed by USA (13.57%). The values of Collaborative Coefficient (CC), Collaborative Index and Degree of Collaboration (DC) indicated that the authorship trend is shifting towards …

Dissenting Opinions In The Wto Appellate Body: Drivers Of Their Issuance & Implications For The Institutional Jurisprudence, Petros C. Mavroidis, Evan Y. Kim

Faculty Scholarship

The Appellate Body (AB) of the WTO has issued over 140 reports but only eight separate opinions, four of which are genuinely dissenting. Such paucity, in fact, is the WTO’s implicit tradition inherited from GATT of prioritizing unanimous decisions, hoping they solidify the institution’s legitimacy and countries’ confidence in the system. But at the more individual level, an AB member’s decision to dissent is driven by multiple factors that have implications for the institution’s jurisprudence. First, the factors explain how the symbiotic relationship between an AB member and his or her nominating country – whose interests turn out to be …

Consequential Damages And Exclusion Clauses, Victor P. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Contracts often include language excluding compensation for consequential damages. However, the boundary between consequential and direct damages is a blurry one. Courts have used concepts like foreseeability, natural result of the breach, and collateral business in their attempts to define the boundary. Those categories, I argue, are not particularly helpful. I consider three classes of cases: wrongful termination, delay, and breach of warranty. This paper argues that lost profits, when referring to the change in value of the contract after a wrongful termination would be direct damages; the hard case involves terminated dealers who had been paid indirectly for retailing …

Fulfilling States’ Duty To Evaluate Medicaid Waivers, Kristen Underhill, Atheendar Venkataramani, Kevin G. Volpp

Faculty Scholarship

Nearly 75 million U.S. residents have health insurance coverage through Medicaid. Benefits and program designs vary from state to state. One source of state-based variation is Section 1115 projects, which are defined as “experimental, pilot, or demonstration” programs that are “likely to assist in promoting the objectives” of the Medicaid statute. States seeking to implement experimental policies in their Medicaid programs must apply to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for a Section 1115 waiver, which lifts certain federal regulations for 5 years. Thirty-seven states had active Section 1115 waivers as of October 31, 2018, and more than …

Regulating By Example, Susan C. Morse, Leigh Osofsky

Articles

Agency regulations are full of examples. Regulated parties and their advisors parse the examples to develop an understanding of the applicable law and to determine how to conduct their affairs. However, the theoretical literature contains no study of regulatory examples or of how they might be interpreted. Courts differ about whether examples serve as an independent source of law. There is uncertainty about the proper role of this frequently used regulatory tool.

In this Article, we argue that regulatory examples make law. Our claim is that, as a default rule, the legal content offered by regulatory examples is coequal with, …

Dispute Settlement Under The Next Generation Of Free Trade Agreements, Kathleen Claussen

Articles

No abstract provided.

Justice Beyond Dispute, Mary Anne Franks

Articles

No abstract provided.

Last Mile For Tuna (To A Safe Harbor): What Is The Tbt Agreement All About?, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO Agreement on TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) aims at taming NTBs (nontariff barriers), the main instrument segmenting markets nowadays. Some of the terms used to flesh out the commitments undertaken are borrowed from the GATT, and some originate in the modern regulatory reality as expressed through SDOs (standard-development organizations). It does not share a copy-cat function with the GATT, though. Alas, the WTO Appellate Body, by understanding words as ‘invariances’, e.g., interpreting them out of context (without asking what is the purpose for the TBT?), has not only exported its GATT case law, but also misapplied it into …

Happy Birthday Siri! Dialing In Legal Ethics For Artificial Intelligence, Smartphones, And Real Time Lawyers, Jan L. Jacobowitz, Justin Ortiz

Articles

No abstract provided.

The New Separability, Lili Levi

Articles

In Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, the Supreme Court recently unveiled a new approach to separability. Because copyright law protects expression, not function, aesthetic features of useful articles are eligible for copyright protection only if they are separable from the functional work in which they are incorporated. But the Copyright Actdoes not define separability, and Star Athletica is the latest judicial effort to try to fill that void. Unfortunately, the new separability is open to a wide range of critiques. Relatively low-hanging fruit are the vagueness and indeterminacy of the new test, the Court's unsatisfactory attempts to avoid defining "function," …

Real "Fake News" And Fake "Fake News", Lili Levi

Articles

No abstract provided.

Measuring Law School Clinics, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jeffrey Selbin, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

Legal education reformers have long argued that law school clinics address two related needs: first, clinics teach students to be lawyers; and second, clinics serve low-income clients. In clinics, so the argument goes, law students working under the close supervision of faculty members learn the requisite skills to be good practitioners and professionals. In turn, clinical law students serve clients with civil and criminal justice needs that would otherwise go unmet.

Though we have these laudable teaching and service goals – and a vast literature describing the role of clinics in both the teaching and service dimensions – we have …

Modularity In Cross-Border Insolvency, Andrew B. Dawson

Articles

No abstract provided.

Beyond Norms: Using International Economic Tools To Deter Malicious State-Sponsored Cyber Activities, Kathleen Claussen

Articles

In thinking about strategy and doctrine for cyberspace, one cannot ignore either the cyber domain's interaction with other domains or the applicability of existing legal tools to address cyberspace issues. This Comment focuses on the latter and argues that any discussion regarding deterrence and a playbook for consequences for cyber incidents by state actors ought necessarily to include a careful examination of existing plays, particularly where those incidents have an economic component as many do. Focusing on multilateral institutions, regional and bilateral trade and investment agreements, and unilateral tariff and non-tariff trade and investment tools, this Comment maintains that current …

The American Express Opinion, Tech Platforms & The Rule Of Reason, Tim Wu

Faculty Scholarship

This paper makes two points. First, it describes the opinion as creating a mirror-image of the "per se" rulings, this time favoring defendants instead of plaintiffs. Second, however, it points out the narrowness of the decision. If the American Express opinion had created rules for all two-sided platforms it would have fundamentally changed much of antitrust law, by reaching so much of American commerce. For the concept of a two-sided platform is open-ended enough to conceivably describe businesses as diverse as malls, sports leagues, real estate agents, stock exchanges, and most tech platforms. However, the American Express opinion is narrower …

Trauma, Depression, And Burnout In The Human Rights Field: Identifying Barriers And Pathways To Resilient Advocacy, Sarah Knuckey, Margaret Satterthwaite, Adam Brown

Faculty Scholarship

Human rights advocates often confront trauma and stress in their work. They are exposed to testimony about heinous abuses; work in insecure locations; visit physical sites of abuse; review forensic, photographic, and video evidence; directly witness abuses; experience threats; and can also suffer detention, be attacked, or be tortured themselves. Such exposure risks adversely impacting the wellbeing and mental health of advocates. While the human rights field is diverse and work varies widely, most – if not all – advocates are likely directly or indirectly exposed to potentially traumatic events or material in the course of their work. The degree …

The Kumaraswamy Weibull Geometric Distribution With Applications, Mahdi Rasekhi, Morad Alizadeh, Gholamhossein G. Hamedani

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

In this work, we study the kumaraswamy weibull geometric (Kw-WG) distribution which includes as special cases, several models such as the kumaraswamy weibull distribution, kumaraswamy exponential distribution, weibull geometric distribution, exponential geometric distribution, to name a few. This distribution was monotone and non-monotone hazard rate functions, which are useful in lifetime data analysis and reliability. We derive some basic properties of the Kw-WG distribution including non-central rth-moments, skewness, kurtosis, generating functions, mean deviations, mean residual life, entropy, order statistics and certain characterizations of our distribution. The method of maximum likelihood is used for estimating the model parameters and a simulation …

Constrained Bayesian Method For Testing The Directional Hypotheses, Kartlos J. Kachiashvili, Naveen K. Bansal, I. A. Prangishvili

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

The paper discusses the generalization of constrained Bayesian method (CBM) for arbitrary loss functions and its application for testing the directional hypotheses. The problem is stated in terms of false and true discovery rates. One more criterion of estimation of directional hypotheses tests quality, the Type III errors rate, is considered. The ratio among discovery rates and the Type III errors rate in CBM is considered. The advantage of CBM in comparison with Bayes and frequentist methods is theoretically proved and demonstrated by an example.

The Law Firm Chief Innovation Officer: Goals, Roles, And Holes, Michele M. Destefano

Articles

No abstract provided.

Learned Hand's Seven Other Ideas About The Freedom Of Speech, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

I say “other” because, regarding the freedom of speech, Learned Hand has suffered the not uncommon fate of having his best ideas either drowned out or credited exclusively to others due to the excessive attention that has been bestowed on one of his lesser ideas. Sitting as a district judge in the case of Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Hand wrote the earliest judicial opinion about the freedom of speech that has attained canonical status. He ruled that under the recently passed Espionage Act of 1917, writings critical of government cannot be grounds for imposing criminal punishment or the …

The Supreme Court, Judicial Elections, And Dark Money, Richard Briffault

Faculty Scholarship

Judges, even when popularly elected, are not representatives; they are not agents for their voters, nor should they take voter preferences into account in adjudicating cases. However, popularly elected judges are representatives for some election law purposes. Unlike other elected officials, judges are not politicians. But judges are policy-makers. Judicial elections are subject to the same constitutional doctrines that govern voting on legislators, executives, and ballot propositions. Except when they are not. The same First Amendment doctrine that protects campaign speech in legislative, executive, and ballot proposition elections applies to campaign speech in judicial elections – but not in quite …

Free Expression On Campus: Mitigating The Costs Of Contentious Speakers, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

“If you’re afraid to offend, you can’t be honest.”

“If you offend me, I can’t hear what you’re trying to tell me.”

—overheard on campus

The debate over how colleges and universities should respond to contentious guest speakers on campus is not a new one. A quick look back to the early 1990s, among other times, shows commentators squaring off much as they do today about the tensions between protecting free expression and ensuring meaningful equality.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the issues that contested speakers address are also much the same as they have been for several decades – government action …

Informed Trading And Its Regulation, Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, Gabriel Rauterberg

Faculty Scholarship

Informed trading – trading on information not yet reflected in a stock’s price – drives the stock market. Such informational advantages can arise from astute analysis of varied pieces of public news, from just released public information, or from confidential information from inside a firm. We argue that these disparate types of trading are all better regulated as part of the broader phenomenon of informed trading. Informed trading makes share prices more accurate, enhancing the allocation of capital, but also makes markets less liquid, which is costly to the efficiency of trade. Informed trading thus poses a fundamental trade-off in …