Digital Commons Network^™

Contractual Incapacity And The Americans With Disabilities Act, Sean M. Scott

Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of contractual incapacity allows people with mental disabilities to avoid their contractual liability. Its underlying premise is that the law has an obligation to protect people with such disabilities both from themselves and from unscrupulous people who would take advantage of them; mental incapacity provides this protection by rendering certain contracts unenforceable. The Disability Rights Movement ("DRM"), however, has challenged such protective legal doctrines, as they rest on outmoded concepts about people with mental disabilities.

This essay argues that the mental incapacity doctrine undermines the goals of the DRM and the legislative goals of the Americans with Disabilities …

Service Members With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Who Face Employment Challenges Postdeployment, Donna Scurlark Sargent

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractThe Iraq War was the longest war in the history of the United States, involving over 2 million service members. Service members who served in Iraq or Afghanistan experienced a high rate of mental health disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and substance abuse as they returned from deployment. Research is lacking in regard to how Army reservists and National Guardsmen function at home, school, work, and in the community upon their return from service. The purpose of this qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of service members with PTSD who experienced challenges with work …

Geographic Access To Community Mental Healthcare And Adherence To Treatment Among Patients With Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders, Marie Smith-East

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Disparities in access to mental health care for individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders continue to exist in the United States despite the creation of mental health policies seeking to improve access to care. As an integral element of healthcare system delivery, access is influenced by spatial (location) and non-spatial (sociodemographic) factors. Highlighting both spatial and non-spatial dimensions of access to mental healthcare, this study employed an innovative approach encompassing the geography of access and the integration of location analyses to bridge the gap between psychosocial dynamics and mental health services for improving cost-effective continuity of care. The aims were as …

Action Recognition In Still Images: Confluence Of Multilinear Methods And Deep Learning, Marjaneh Safaei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Motion is a missing information in an image, however, it is a valuable cue for action recognition. Thus, lack of motion information in a single image makes action recognition for still images inherently a very challenging problem in computer vision. In this dissertation, we show that both spatial and temporal patterns provide crucial information for recognizing human actions. Therefore, action recognition depends not only on the spatially-salient pixels, but also on the temporal patterns of those pixels. To address the challenge caused by the absence of temporal information in a single image, we introduce five effective action classification methodologies along …

Reducing Information Overload In Situated Visualization For Firefighting: A Human Factors Evaluation Of User Interface Prototypes For Pre-Incident Planning, Katelynn Kapalo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

High profile structure fires, like the Grenfell Tower tragedy, have demonstrated that the quality of the information provided to firefighters arriving on the scene of an emergency is a matter of life or death. It has been suggested that access to structural information such as electronic building plans or unmanned aerial vehicle footage may bridge the information gap to help first responders build situation awareness at the incident scene. However, these technologies have not been fully evaluated from a human performance perspective. The use of pre-incident plans (PIPs), information captured systematically about a facility prior to an emergency, provides a …

The Verbal And Non-Verbal Indicators Of Deceit In Financial And Political Fraud: A Case Study Of Bernard L. Madoff, Chen Shui-Bien And Bo Xilai, Vivian Wu

Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations

From the earliest financial scams of the seventeenth century, through the headlinegrabbing Wall Street scandals of our time, financial fraud and embezzlement have damaged both domestic and global economic systems. Preventative measures are the best way to reduce fraud. Fraudsters are adaptive and will find ways to circumvent such measures. Detecting fraud is essential once the prevention mechanisms have failed. This dissertation investigated the inherent problems of financial fraud detection for high stake fraudsters in the corporate and political fields in the United States, China and Taiwan. Both verbal and non-verbal signs of deception were examined in the case studies …

The Morning After: A Phenomenological Approach To Understanding The Process Of Repair And Reconciliation In The Aftermath Of Clergy Sexual Misconduct, Damion Taj Quaye

Department of Conflict Resolution Studies Theses and Dissertations

American religious institutions are expected to be free from the unsettling behaviors found in secular institutions. However, scandals in churches have revealed a difficult truth; the people who operate these faith institutions are just as flawed as those who do not. This hermeneutic phenomenological study explored the damage caused by clergy sexual misconduct. Congregations, families, religious organizations, and the concept of the Christian church suffer because of clergy sexual misconduct. There are significant barriers to repair and reconciliation. Cases of clergy sexual misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church have received much of the attention, but the problem is bigger than …

Pls 3773 : Religion & Politics In The Us, Political Science

Approved Course Proposals

No abstract provided.

From Hobbes To Habermas: The Anti-Cultural Turn In Western Political Thought, Ralph Gert Schoellhammer

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

The theme of this dissertation is the anti-cultural turn of Western Political Thought that has emerged out of Enlightenment thinking and was first turned into a comprehensive political idea by Thomas Hobbes.

Beginning with an overview of psychological research into the phenomenon of culture I put forward the argument that human beings are by nature social and individualistic, but that they oscillate between their ability to put group-interests before individual interests and vice versa. Culture is the main mechanism that influences which interest we give priority. This mechanism work through emotional attachments that create intuitions about what is morally right …

Judicial Elections, Public Opinion, And Their Impact On State Criminal Justice Policy, Travis N. Taylor

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

This dissertation explores whether and how the re-election prospects faced by trial court judges in many American states influence criminal justice policy, specifically, state levels of incarceration, as well as the disparity in rates of incarceration for Whites and Blacks. Do states where trial court judges must worry about facing reelection tend to encourage judicial behavior that results in higher incarceration rates? And are levels of incarceration and racial disparities in the states influenced by the proportion of the state publics who want more punitive policies? These are clearly important questions because they speak directly to several normative and empirical …

Maid Legislation At A Crossroads: Persons With Mental Disorders As Their Sole Underlying Medical Condition, The Halifax Group, Melissa K. Andrew, Jennifer A. Chandler, Jocelyn Downie, Colleen M. M. Flood, Arthur Frank, Mona Gupta, Kwame Mckenzie, Tanya Park

Reports & Public Policy Documents

Legislation permitting medical assistance in dying (MAiD) came into force in Quebec in December 2015, and in the rest of Canada in June 2016. The Quebec and federal MAiD laws contain detailed eligibility criteria as well as procedural safeguards. In particular, Quebec’s MAiD legislation requires that to be eligible for MAiD, a person must be “at the end of life,” whereas the federal legislation requires that a person’s “natural death” must have become “reasonably foreseeable.” At the time the two laws were introduced, legal experts warned that some eligibility criteria would require further clarification and could even face Charter of …

Jurisprudence—Merely Judgment: A Fallibilist Account Of The Rule Of Law, Bruce K. Miller

Western New England Law Review

How should judges decide the cases presented to them? In our system the answer is, “according to law,” as opposed to the judges’ preferred outcomes. But for at least a century, skeptics have cast doubt on whether adjudication under law is possible. Judge Richard Posner, now retired from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has, for example, argued that the indeterminacy of legal argument and the influence of judges’ predispositions show that it is not. Judge Posner thus recommends that judges give up on the rule of law in contested cases and instead candidly base their decisions …

From Suffrage To Substantive Human Rights: The Continuing Journey For Racially Marginalized Women, Bandana Purkayastha

Western New England Law Review

This Article highlights racially marginalized women’s struggles to substantively access rights. Suffrage was meant to acquire political rights for women, and through that mechanism, move towards greater equality between women and men in the public and private spheres. Yet, racial minority women, working class and immigrant women, among others, continued to encounter a series of political, civil, economic, cultural, and social boundaries that deprived them of access to rights. From the struggles of working-class immigrant women for economic rights, to equal pay, and better work conditions, to the struggles of Japanese American women who were interned because they were assumed …

Foreword, Sudha Setty

Western New England Law Review

In November 2019, the Western New England Law Review held its symposium, On Account of Sex: Women’s Suffrage and the Role of Gender in Politics Today. The symposium articles ask us to look at history to see what factors enabled path-breaking activists to secure the right to vote in a time of immense national turmoil. They also ask us to weigh how history should assess the strategic decisions that ultimately gained political rights for some women, but deliberately excluded Black women and other activists.

These historical accounts help us consider how the right to vote is faring, particularly after …

Nothing Generic About It: Promoting Therapeutic Access By Overcoming Regulatory And Legal Barriers To A Robust Generic Medical Device Market, Megan S. Wright, Zachary Shapiro, Adam Pan, Keturah James, Joseph Fins

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses a paradox in American healthcare technology: a thriving market for generic drugs but a paucity of generic medical devices. Despite the success of generic pharmaceuticals in reducing healthcare costs, no analogous market exists for generic medical devices. This plays a part in keeping prices high while limiting access to affordable therapies. In this Article, we highlight the regulatory and legal barriers currently impeding the development of a generic medical device market in the United States. We explore differences between generic drugs and generic devices in FDA regulation, products liability, and patentability, all of which contribute to the …

Learning Context-Sensitive Human Emotions In Categorical And Dimensional Domains, Pooyan Balouchian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Still image emotion recognition (ER) has been receiving increasing attention in recent years due to the tremendous amount of social media content on the Web. Many works offer both categorical and dimensional methods to detect image sentiments, while others focus on extracting the true social signals, such as happiness and anger. Deep learning architectures have delivered great suc- cess, however, their dependency on large-scale datasets labeled with (1) emotion, and (2) valence, arousal and dominance, in categorical and dimensional domains respectively, introduce challenges the community tries to tackle. Emotions offer dissimilar semantics when aroused in different con- texts, however "context-sensitive" …

Tax Policy And Our Democracy, Clint Wallace

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Of American Fragility: Public Rituals, Human Rights, And The End Of Invisible Man, Etienne C. Toussaint

Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of American democracy in at least two important ways. First, the coronavirus has ravaged Black communities across the United States, unmasking decades of inequitable laws and public policies that have rendered Black lives socially and economically isolated from adequate health care services, educational resources, housing stability, environmental security, stable and living wage jobs, generational wealth, and other institutional structures necessary for resilience. Second, government-mandated social distancing in response to the coronavirus has failed to dampen America’s racially biased, violent, and supervisory policing culture, reigniting demands from the Movement for Black Lives for police …

Exploring Crisis Communication And Information Dissemination On Social Media: Social Network Analysis Of Hurricane Irma Tweets, Xianlin Jin

Communication Graduate Research

This study utilized social network analysis to identify the top 10 Twitter influentials during the Hurricane Irma crisis period and examined the relationship between social media attributes and the bridge influence of controlling information flow. The number of a user’s followers and tweets significantly predicted one’s control of information. Crisis information tended to be shared in scattered subgroups. Social network boundaries impeded information diffusion, and the communication pattern was largely one-way. The findings partially supported the opinion leader argument while indicating that influentials can directly generate information, which is consistent with the social-mediated crisis communication model. Such findings will contribute …

Loneliness During Mass Social Distancing: An Exploratory Qualitative Study Of Loneliness In College Students During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Madeline Williams

Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique environment to study loneliness in college students. Loneliness has a deeply rooted history in psychology and sociology where both attempt to explain it as either a lack of physical contact, a discrepancy in one’s actual quality or type of relationships and the quality or type of sought-after relationships, or as an emotional reaction to social factors. One way that psychologists have attempted to quantify loneliness is with the UCLA loneliness scale. Previous research has focused on the conceptualization and definition of loneliness, social stress theory regarding studying mental health, and the strength of …

Replacing Death With Life? The Rise Of Lwop In The Context Of Abolitionist Campaigns In The United States, Michelle Miao

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

On the basis of fifty-four elite interviews[1] with legislators, judges, attorneys, and civil society advocates as well as a state-by-state data survey, this Article examines the complex linkage between the two major penal trends in American society during the past decades: a declining use of capital punishment across the United States and a growing population of prisoners serving “life without the possibility of parole” or “LWOP” sentences. The main contribution of the research is threefold. First, the research proposes to redefine the boundary between life and death in relation to penal discourses regarding the death penalty and LWOP. LWOP …

Fostering Preservice And In-Service Ela Teachers’ Digital Practices For Addressing Climate Change, Richard Beach, George Boggs, Jill Castek, James Damico, Alexandra Panos, Renee Spellman, Nance Wilson

Teaching and Learning Faculty Publications

This report presents research on preservice (PST) and in-service teachers acquiring digital practices for addressing climate change related to knowing how to employ digital practices for studying visual representations of climate change and engaging students in critiquing online information about climate change. Study 1 examined PSTs understanding of climate change through participation in visiting a laboratory involving scientific study of ecological systems to interact with scientists, collect digital artifacts, and create a virtual field trip using these artifacts for instructional purposes. Study 2 involved PSTs and in-service teachers responding critically to the NASA Climate Change website, identifying digital literacies their …

Functional, Motivational And Emotional Support: A Qualitative Study Of Social Influences On Diabetes Management Among Low-Income Adults, Emily Helen Miron

Public Health Theses

Objective To understand how low-income adults living with type 2 diabetes conceptualize and utilize social support in their diabetes management.

Methods The data for this paper came from a larger qualitative study, conducted by the advisor and last author, exploring the intersection of housing access and diabetes management among 40 low-income adults diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in New Haven, Connecticut. This qualitative study utilized 58 of the previously collected semi-structured interviews (some participants were interviewed more than once). Excerpts from two broad parent codes from the original study were analyzed using a flexible and iterative coding process.

Results Participants …

Downstream Impacts Of Racial Discrimination In Us-Born And Foreign-Born Latinxs, Dominic Schnabel

Public Health Theses

Latinxs experience high levels of discrimination with potential negative downstream health impacts and there is question as to what extent nativity status moderates the relationship between discrimination and health. I utilized the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions Wave III to characterize the impact of self-reported instances of racial discrimination on anxiety as well as engagement with emergency department services in the Latinx population. I found that for Latinxs, each additional reported experience of racial discrimination was associated with 1.23 times odds of reporting generalized anxiety (95% CI: 1.16-1.30). Stratified analyses suggested no difference in the relationship between …

Realizing The Possibilities Of Notetaking Software For Academic Support: An Intervention For Academic Coaches, Paul B. Cortopassi

West Chester University Master’s Theses

College students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are a sizeable group whose qualitative experience with use of digital tools or assistive technology is not yet fully understood. This cohort of students may not know of the potential applicability of digital tool use to extend and enhance their learning. Part of why students with ADHD may not know about digital tools or assistive technology and its relevance for their learning may be due to that fact that many campus disability services programs position themselves primarily toward compliance with applicable laws. Campus disability services programs can benefit from moving beyond both …

Assessing The Potential Of Implementing Blockchain In Supply Chains Using Agent-Based Simulation And Deep Learning, Mohammad Obeidat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In this decade, with the rise of data science accompanying the growth of e-commerce, many technologies have been developed. An example of these technologies is Blockchain, which has appeared to overcome security problems potentially. This research assesses Blockchain's implementation in supply chains through a methodology that uses deep learning and agent-based simulation. A case study was utilized to observe and validate research developments. The unique method predicts intrusions by using deep learning, and agent-based modeling reproduces artificial but convincing agents (e.g., customers, companies, hackers, and cyber pirates) in a computer-generated market. Trust and other relationships are systematically captured to represent …

Climate Change Impact Upon The Working Class And Poor, Nancy Elghamri

HHE 169: Urban Sustainability through Science, Literature, and the Arts, 2020

No abstract provided.

Behind The Pretty Sight: The Grimy Forces Of Gentrification In Brooklyn, Mariam Mohamed

HHE 169: Urban Sustainability through Science, Literature, and the Arts, 2020

No abstract provided.

2020-2021 Nsu Undergraduate Student Catalog, Nova Southeastern University

Undergraduate Programs Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Center On Finance, Law & Policy Progress Report, 2020, Center On Finance, Law & Policy

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Six years after its 2013 launch, the Center on Finance, Law, and Policy (CFLP) continues to uphold its commitment to actionable, interdisciplinary research. What started with convening of 40 faculty members from across the University has evolved into a robust team of more than 70 faculty affiliates with expertise ranging from fintech to financial egulation to entrepreneurship to behavioral economics, along with three staff members, and a network of 26 student research assistants from seven schools across the University.