Digital Commons Network^™

The Interdisciplinary Impacts Of Technology Semantics And Communicational Bypassing In The Cybersecurity Field, Brooke Nixon

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

In 2012, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Robert Mueller shocked many when he warned, “[t]here are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be.” As technology and information systems develop rapidly, security has become a topic of increasing interest and concern. In 2018, it was noted that the total cost to account for cybercrime on a global scale surpassed US$1 billion (Milkovich, 2020). In the United States, a hacker attack occurs every 39 seconds, and each year, 1 in 3 Americans are personally impacted by a form of hacking …

Iowa Journal Of Communication, Volume 52, Number 1, Fall 2020 [Download Entire Issue]

Iowa Journal of Communication

No abstract provided.

Smartcitecon: Implicit Citation Context Extraction From Academic Literature Using Unsupervised Learning, Chenrui Gao, Haoran Cui, Li Zhang, Jiamin Wang, Wei Lu, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We introduce SmartCiteCon (SCC), a Java API for extracting both explicit and implicit citation context from academic literature in English. The tool is built on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model trained on a set of 7,058 manually annotated citation context sentences, curated from 34,000 papers in the ACL Anthology. The model with 19 features achieves F₁=85.6%. SCC supports PDF, XML, and JSON files out-of-box, provided that they are conformed to certain schemas. The API supports single document processing and batch processing in parallel. It takes about 12–45 seconds on average depending on the format to process a …

Acknowledgement Entity Recognition In Cord-19 Papers, Jian Wu, Pei Wang, Xin Wei, Sarah Rajtmajer, C. Lee Giles, Christopher Griffin

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Acknowledgements are ubiquitous in scholarly papers. Existing acknowledgement entity recognition methods assume all named entities are acknowledged. Here, we examine the nuances between acknowledged and named entities by analyzing sentence structure. We develop an acknowledgement extraction system, AckExtract based on open-source text mining software and evaluate our method using manually labeled data. AckExtract uses the PDF of a scholarly paper as input and outputs acknowledgement entities. Results show an overall performance of F₁=0.92. We built a supplementary database by linking CORD-19 papers with acknowledgement entities extracted by AckExtract including persons and organizations and find that only up to …

Investigating Relationships Between Student Burnout And Classroom Communication Behavior, Jordan Atkinson, Mary E. Donato, Elijah Smith, Gannon Cornley Iii

Iowa Journal of Communication

Previous research investigating student burnout relating to undergraduate students discovered that burnout has detrimental effects on academic performance and engagement (Schaufeli, Martinez, Pinto, Salanova, & Bakker, 2002). The purpose of this research was to extend the research on undergraduate student burnout by investigating its relationships with interest, engagement, and in-class oral participation. Participants were 120 undergraduate students enrolled at a small Midwestern university. Results indicated that all three dimensions of student burnout were negatively related to emotional interest and cognitive interest. With regard to student engagement: (a) diminished efficacy was negatively related to all four types of student engagement; (b) …

Liquid Gold, Katrice Bridges Copeland

Faculty Scholarship

According to federal health and census data, addiction treatment was a $21 billion business in 2003. By 2020, it is expected to double to $42 billion. The opioid crisis has fueled the growth of the industry by increasing the demand for residential drug treatment programs. Astronomical growth of an industry, however, often invites bad actors.

Bad actors have swarmed the residential drug treatment industry. One category of bad actors includes patient brokers, who recruit drug addicts with health insurance to residential drug treatment centers for sizeable kickbacks. Another category of bad actors are the owners and operators of treatment centers …

Church Taxes And The Original Understanding Of The Establishment Clause, Mark Storslee

Faculty Scholarship

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Everson v. Board of Education, it has been widely assumed that the Establishment Clause forbids government from 'aiding' or subsidizing religious activity, especially religious schools. This Article suggests that this reading of the Establishment Clause rests on a misunderstanding of Founding-era history, especially the history surrounding to church taxes. Contrary to popular belief, the decisive argument against those taxes was not an unqualified assertion that subsidizing religion was prohibited. Rather, the crucial argument was that church taxes were a coerced religious observance: a government-mandated sacrifice to God, a tithe. Understanding that argument helps …

Does Sentience Come In Degrees?, Andrew Y. Lee

Animal Sentience

This commentary is about whether sentience, or what philosophers call “phenomenal consciousness,” comes in degrees.

The Myth Of The Privacy Paradox, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In this article, Professor Daniel Solove deconstructs and critiques the privacy paradox and the arguments made about it. The “privacy paradox” is the phenomenon where people say that they value privacy highly, yet in their behavior relinquish their personal data for very little in exchange or fail to use measures to protect their privacy.

Commentators typically make one of two types of arguments about the privacy paradox. On one side, the “behavior valuation argument” contends behavior is the best metric to evaluate how people actually value privacy. Behavior reveals that people ascribe a low value to privacy or readily trade …

Sentenced To Surveillance: Fourth Amendment Limits On Electronic Monitoring, Kate Weisburd

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

As courts and legislatures increasingly recognize that “digital is different” and attempt to limit government surveillance of private data, one group is conspicuously excluded from this new privacy-protective discourse: the five million people in the United States on probation, parole, or other forms of community supervision. This Article is the first to explore how warrantless electronic surveillance is dramatically transforming community supervision and, as a result, amplifying a growing privacy-protection disparity: those in the criminal legal system are increasingly losing privacy protections even while those not in the system are increasingly gaining privacy protections. The quickly expanding use of GPS-equipped …

The Fdic Should Not Allow Commercial Firms To Acquire Industrial Banks, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

On March 17, 2020, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) published a proposed rule (the “Proposed ILC Rule”), which would govern applications for deposit insurance, changes in control, and mergers involving FDIC-insured industrial banks and industrial loan companies (“ILCs”). If adopted, the Proposed ILC Rule would open the door to widespread acquisitions of ILCs by commercial firms engaged in industrial, retail, information technology, and other types of nonfinancial activities. In addition, on March 18, 2020, the FDIC approved deposit insurance applications filed by ILCs owned by two commercial firms – Square and Nelnet.

The FDIC’s issuance of the Proposed ILC …

Emerging Policy And Practice Issues (2019), Steven L. Schooner

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This paper/chapter, presented at the Thomson Reuters Government Contracts Year in Review Conference (covering 2019), attempts to identify the key evolving trends and issues in U.S. federal procurement for 2019-2020 and beyond. Consistent with prior practice, this chapter offers extensive coverage of the federal procurement and defense spending trends and attempts to predict what lies ahead, particularly with regard to legislative and executive activity. This year's paper discusses, among other things, the high degree of uncertainty currently being experienced in the public procurement sphere, dramatic increases to the micro-purchase and simplified acquisition thresholds, the work of the Congressionally-mandated Section 809 …

What’S Wrong About The Elective Share “Right”?, Naomi R. Cahn

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Article examines one form of property rights available to a surviving
spouse, the elective share. The elective share serves as an override to a
testator’s stated intent by allowing the surviving spouse to choose to take a
portion of the decedent’s estate — even if the will explicitly disinherits the
surviving spouse. The Article analyzes a recent five-year period of state
cases raising elective share issues with the goal of determining the
circumstances under which an elective share is most likely to be contested.

The reported elective share disputes typically involve a subsequent spouse
challenging a will that leaves …

Eu Law In Populist Times: Crises And Prospects, Francesca Bignami

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

EU Law in Populist Times: Crises and Prospects analyzes the sovereignty-sensitive EU law that has emerged over the past decade—in economic policy, human migration, internal security, and constitutional fundamentals (rule-of-law policies to combat democratic backsliding). These are legal areas at the heart of state sovereignty, over which the EU’s prerogatives accelerated following the multiple crises that hit beginning in 2009. They are also EU policies that occupy center stage in the acrimonious debates that have emerged between European establishment parties and populist political forces, precisely because of the huge economic, social, and constitutional stakes involved in reaching into core state …

Comment Letter In Opposition To The Occ's Proposed "True Lender" Rule, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This comment letter opposes the adoption of a proposed rule published by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”) on July 22, 2020. 85 Fed. Reg. 44223 (2020). The proposed rule would determine whether a national bank or federal savings association “makes a loan and is the ‘true lender’ in the context of a partnership between a bank and a third party, such as a marketplace lender.” Id. The proposed rule – to be codified at 12 C.F.R. 7.1031 – would provide that a national bank or federal savings association is deemed to “make” a loan if the …

The Price Of Prevention: Anti-Terrorism Pre-Crime Measures And International Human Rights Law,, Arturo J. Carrillo

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

How far can law go to prevent violent acts of terrorism from happening? This Article examines the response by a number of Western democratic States to that question. These States have enacted special legal mechanisms that can be called ‘anti-terrorist pre-crime measures.’ Anti-terrorist pre-crime measures, or ATPCMs for short, are conditions or restrictions imposed on a person by law enforcement authorities as the outcome of a legal process set up to identify and neutralize potential sources of terrorist activity before it occurs. The issue is whether the ATCPMs regimes in existence today comply with the corresponding States’ international obligations under …

Order And Law In China, Donald C. Clarke

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The near half-century of the post-Mao era has almost universally been called one of construction of China’s legal system. But while great changes have taken place in China’s public order and dispute resolution institutions, other things have changed little or not at all. Most commentary focuses on the changes; this article, by contrast, will look at what has not changed—the important continuities that have persisted for over four decades.

This article argues that the scholarly community has accumulated over the past four decades a number of observations about China’s order maintenance institutions that are increasingly difficult to explain using the …

Covid-19: Lessons Learned In Public Procurement. Time For A New Normal?, Laurence Folliot Lallion, Christopher R. Yukins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The COVID-19 crisis upended markets and assumptions in public procurement, and posed an almost existential threat to traditional procurement systems. Seismic changes in economic relationships – governments were no longer monopsonists, government officials failed as economic intermediaries between suppliers and the public, and supplies that were traditionally treated as private (such as medical equipment) suddenly became “public” goods under worldwide demand. Traditional trade rules were rendered irrelevant, as the goal was no longer simply to open individual procurements but rather to open borders to intense global demand. Although the disruption was revolutionary, ironically the solution is to return to first …

Solving The Challenges To World Trade, Steve Charnovitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

World trade faces fundamental challenges. This essay examines six threats to the intellectual case for open trade: to wit, worries about ecology, fairness, morality, equity, security, and geopolitics. Together, these threats implicate a huge swath of international trade. One of the biggest indicators of diminishing support for trade is the moribund status of the leading institution of the trading system, the World Trade Organization (WTO). There are three branches of WTO governance and all three are in trouble: the judicial branch and its vacant Appellate Body, the executive branch and its vacant post of WTO Director-General, and the legislative branch …

Material Liberty And The Administrative State: Market And Social Rights In American And German Law, Francesca Bignami

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This chapter begins with a forgotten story from American constitutional law. Raymond Belcher worked for a coal mining company in Lynco, West Virginia. During his working life, he paid into the federal insurance scheme for disability—Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Belcher later broke his neck on the job and claimed on his federal SSDI insurance. But he was in for a bad surprise. In 1965, after he began contributing but before he became disabled, Congress enacted an “offset” provision to reduce benefits for individuals like him who qualified for both state-run worker’s compensation and federal SSDI. Belcher went all the …

Modeling Settlement Bargaining With Algorithmic Game Theory, Michael B. Abramowicz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Past computational models of settlement bargaining have lacked explicit game theoretic foundations. Algorithmic game theory, however, offers techniques that can find perfect Bayesian equilibria even where closed-form mathematical solutions may be intractable. Some recent mathematical models tackle two-sided asymmetric information, including evidentiary signals models, in which the judgment is a sum of both shared and independent private information, and correlated signals models, in which both parties receive noisy signals about the same information. To relax assumptions inherent in these models, this paper employs several progressively more complicated techniques, including iterative elimination of dominated alternatives, no regret learning, and counterfactual regret …

The Occ's And Fdic's Attempts To Confer Banking Privileges On Nonbanks And Commercial Firms Violate Federal Laws And Are Contrary To Public Policy, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have adopted several recent measures that attempt to confer benefits and privileges of banks on nonbank providers of financial services and commercial firms. The OCC’s and FDIC’s initiatives are unlawful and dangerous because they would allow nonbanks and commercial firms to subvert fundamental public policies embodied in federal laws governing banks and bank holding companies.

In 2018, the OCC announced that it would approve national bank charters for “fintech” firms that provide lending and payment services but do not accept deposits. The New York …

Great Powers And New Risks: What Businesses And Regulators Should Know About China’S Strategic Ambitions, F. Scott Kieff, Thomas D. Grant

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

China’s geopolitical ambitions give rise to risks that government agencies and the businesses they regulate need to address. In particular, Military-Civil Fusion (MCF), a whole-of-government legal and administrative machinery created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), aims to give China’s military, as well as China’s state championed companies, the technologies essential to strategic competitiveness in the decades ahead. In service of China’s effort to acquire technology, MCF breaks down barriers of professional responsibility and confidentiality that organizations and individuals in the West take for granted. Through both executive and legislative action, the United States has begun to address MCF. To …

The Trans Panic Defense Revisited, Cynthia Lee

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Violence against transgender individuals in general, and trans women of color in particular, is a significant problem today. When a man is charged with murdering a transgender woman, a common defense strategy is to assert what is called the trans panic defense. The trans panic defense is not a traditional criminal law defense. Nor, despite its name, is it recognized as a stand-alone defense. Rather, trans panic is a defense strategy associated with the provocation or heat of passion defense. A murder defendant asserting trans panic will claim that the discovery that the victim was a transgender female—an individual thought …

Comment Letter In Opposition To The Occ's Proposed "Valid-When-Made" Rule, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This comment letter responds to a proposed rule issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which would “codify” an alleged federal common-law “principle” known as “valid-when-made.” The proposed rule would amend two of the OCC’s regulations – 12 C.F.R. 7.4001 and 12 C.F.R. 160.110 – by providing that “interest on a loan that is permissible” for a national bank or a federal savings association, under 12 U.S.C. 85 or 12 U.S.C. 1463(g)(1), “shall not be affected by the sale, assignment, or other transfer of the loan.” 84 Fed. Reg. 64229, 64230-31 (Nov. 21, 2019). Thus, the …

Decisions In The Dark: Why "Pregnancy Exclusion" Statutes Are Unconstitutional And Unethical, Shea Flanagan

Northwestern University Law Review

Advance health care directives are tools that allow people to state their health care treatment wishes or designate a health care proxy in anticipation of being unable to make those decisions in the future, including preferences to remove life-sustaining medical treatment. However, thirty-six states currently have “pregnancy exclusion” laws that require physicians to void the advance directives of pregnant women receiving life-sustaining treatment. This Note assesses the constitutionality and ethics of state pregnancy exclusion statutes by employing a new five-category typology of current pregnancy exclusion laws. This Note argues that all categories of these statutes violate an individual’s constitutional rights …

Data Imperialism: The Gdpr's Disastrous Impact On Africa's E-Commerce Markets, Cara Mannion

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The European Union (EU) recently passed the General Data Protection Regulation--a sweeping regulatory framework that sets a new global standard for the collection, storage, and use of personal data. To ensure far-reaching compliance with the GDPR, the EU has adopted a strict take-it-or-leave-it approach--countries that wish to engage with digital users in the EU must either comply with the GDPR's expansive data obligations or risk losing access to the world's largest trading block.

This presents significant obstacles for several African nations. Notably, no African country currently has domestic laws that comply with the GDPR. Even if they did, several African …

Identification Of Trends In Scientific Communication By Minority Students In An Integrated And Advanced Ninth Grade Science Curriculum, Loren Thalacker

Graduate Research Papers

In the United States, the population of minorities is rapidly increasing. Our nation is facing a shortage in students pursuing STEM careers and it is vital to improve all students’ scientific communication abilities. As our population of minority students is also growing, it is especially important to tap into our potential STEM resources. While the Midwest is less diverse than the rest of the nation, the Waterloo Community School District in Waterloo, Iowa has a large population of minority students. When the district implemented the Next Generation Science Standards it created a problem for students wanting to take advanced science …

Extreme Ultraviolet Quasar Colours From Galex Observations Of The Sdss Dr14q Catalogue, Daniel E. Vanden Berk, Sarah C. Wesolowski, Mary J. Yeckley, Joseph M. Marcinik, Jean M. Quashnock, Lawrence M. Machia, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The rest-frame far to extreme ultraviolet (UV) colour–redshift relationship has been constructed from data on over 480,000 quasars carefully cross-matched between SDSS Data Release 14 and the final GALEX photometric catalogue. UV matching and detection probabilities are given for all the quasars, including dependencies on separation, optical brightness, and redshift. Detection limits are also provided for all objects. The UV colour distributions are skewed redward at virtually all redshifts, especially when detection limits are accounted for. The median GALEX far-UV minus near-UV (FUV − NUV) colour–redshift relation is reliably determined up to z ≈ 2.8, corresponding to rest-frame wavelengths as …

Opening Books And The National Corpus Of Graduate Research, William A. Ingram, Edward A. Fox, Jian Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Virginia Tech University Libraries, in collaboration with Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science and Old Dominion University Department of Computer Science, request $505,214 in grant funding for a 3-year project, the goal of which is to bring computational access to book-length documents, demonstrating that with Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The project is motivated by the following library and community needs. (1) Despite huge volumes of book-length documents in digital libraries, there is a lack of models offering effective and efficient computational access to these long documents. (2) Nationwide open access services for ETDs generally function at the metadata level. …