Digital Commons Network^™

Enhancing Cybersecurity By Generating User-Specific Security Policy Through The Formal Modeling Of User Behavior, Arwa Alqadheeb

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the ongoing efforts to develop cutting-edge security solutions, the question always remains whether these technologies can overcome system vulnerabilities that often result from poor security practices made by end-users. Recently, some research devoted to study the human role in cybersecurity, especially the psychological aspect. Researchers found that the users’ responses to security-related situations correlate with various elusive factors such as demographics, personality traits, decision-making styles, and risk-taking preferences. That explains why some users neglect to act according to common security tips and advice. The goal of this research is to make cybersecurity maintain a high-level of quality and reliability; …

Which Early Withdrawal Penalty Attracts The Most Deposits To A Commitment Savings Account?, John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Harris, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, Jung Sakong

Faculty Publications

Previous research has shown that some people voluntarily use commitment contracts that restrict their own choice sets. We study how people divide money between two accounts: a liquid account that permits unrestricted withdrawals and a commitment account that is randomly assigned in a between-subject design to have either a 10% earlywithdrawal penalty, or a 20% early withdrawal penalty, or not to allowearlywithdrawals at all (i.e., an infinite penalty).When the liquid account and the commitment account pay the same interest rate, higher early-withdrawal penalties attract more commitment account deposits. This pattern is predicted by the hypothesis that some participants are partially- …

Do Physician Incentives Increase Patient Medication Adherence?, Edward Kong, John Beshears, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, Kevin Volpp, George Loewenstein, Jonathan Kolstad, James J. Choi

Faculty Publications

Objective: To test the effectiveness of physician incentives for increasing patient medication adherence in three drug classes: diabetes medication, antihypertensives, and statins.

Data Sources: Pharmacy and medical claims from a large Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug Plan from January 2011 to December 2012.

Study Design: We conducted a randomized experiment (911 primary care practices and 8,935 nonadherent patients) to test the effect of paying physicians for increasing patient medication adherence in three drug classes: diabetes medication, antihypertensives, and statins. We measured patients’ medication adherence for 18 (6) months before (after) the intervention.

Data collection/extraction methods: We obtained data directly from the …

Estimating The Need For Additional Bankruptcy Judges In Light Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Benjamin Iverson, Jared A. Ellias, Mark Roe

Faculty Publications

In this Article, we present the first effort to use an empirical approach to bolster the capacity of the bankruptcy system during a national crisis—here, the COVID-19 crisis. We provide two analyses, one using data from May 2020, very early on in the crisis, and another using data from September 2020, closer to the publication of this Article. Our analysis is based on an empirical observation: Historically, an increase in the unemployment rate has been a leading indicator of a rise in bankruptcy filings. If this historical trend continues to hold, the May 2020 unemployment rate of 13.3% would have …

Forced (2 + 1)-Dimensional Discrete Three-Wave Equation, Junyi Zhu, Sishou Zhou, Zhijun Qiao

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

We generalize the ∂-dressing method to investigate a (2 + 1)-dimensional lattice, which can be regarded as a forced (2 + 1)-dimensional discrete three-wave equation. The soliton solutions to the (2 + 1)-dimensional lattice are given through constructing different symmetry conditions. The asymptotic analysis of one-soliton solution is discussed. For the soliton solution, the forces are zero.

Decomposition Of 2-Soliton Solutions For The Good Boussinesq Equations, Vesselin Vatchev

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

We consider decompositions of two-soliton solutions for the good Boussinesq equation obtained by the Hirota method and the Wronskian technique. The explicit forms of the components are used to study the dynamics of 2-soliton solutions. An interpretation in the context of eigenvalue problems arising from KdV type equations and transport equations is considered. Numerical examples are included.

Professional Development For Mathematics Teacher Education Faculty: Need And Design, Billy Jackson, Shandy Hauk, Jenq Jong Tsay, Alma Ramirez

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

The purpose of this report is to share a conceptual model useful in the design of professional learning about teaching for university mathematics faculty. The model is illustrated by examples from a particular design effort: the development of an online shortcourse for faculty new to teaching mathematics courses for prospective primary school teachers. How novice mathematics teacher educators grow as instructors is an emerging area of research and development in the United States. At the same time, it is well established that effective instructional design of any course, including a course for faculty, requires breadth first: understanding and anticipating the …

Event Flyer

MLK 2020 Event Information

Flyer promoting the 2020 Martin Luther King, Jr. lecture featuring Michelle J. DePass

Ailing In Place: Environmental Inequities And Health Disparities In Appalachia, Michele Morrone

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

In Ailing in Place, Michele Morrone explores the relationship between environmental conditions in Appalachia and health outcomes that are too often ascribed to individual choices only. She applies quantitative data to observations from environmental health professionals to frame the ways in which the environment, as a social determinant of health, leads to health disparities in Appalachian communities. These examples—these stories of place—trace the impacts of water quality, waste disposal, and natural resource extraction on the health and quality of life of Appalachian people.

Public health is inextricably linked to place. Environmental conditions such as contaminated water, unsafe food, and polluted …

Richmond Law Magazine: Winter 2020, University Of Richmond

Richmond Law Magazine

To Right A Wrong

A Whistleblower and A Wiretap

A Homegrown Panel

Richmond Law Magazine: Summer 2020, University Of Richmond

Richmond Law Magazine

Dear Professor

Building a Better Lawyer

A Lightning Rod of a Ruling

Effect Of Subsurface Microseismicity On The Motion Of Surrounding Dispersed Droplets: Supporting Information, Chao Zeng, Wen Deng

Research Data

The human-induced seismicity has called substantial attention in recent years. The effect of seismicity on the subsurface structure has been extensively studied. However, the effect of seismicity, especially those microseismicity, on surrounding immiscible fluids is rarely investigated. In porous media with two or more immiscible fluids, different amplitudes of vibration induced by seismicity have distinct effects on the dynamic behavior of fluids. Three types of pore-scale models are prevalent in the analysis of the motion of immiscible droplets. The underlying assumptions and accuracy of these models are compared in this study in both frequency domain and time domain. The frequency …

Molding Your Child’S Development, Part 1: The Forces That Shape The Worldview Of Your Child, S. Joseph Kidder, Katelyn Campbell

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Concepts, Applications, Research Challenges And Visions, Luca Longo, Randy Goebel, Freddy Lecue, Peter Kieseberg, Andreas Holzinger

Conference papers

The development of theory, frameworks and tools for Explainable AI (XAI) is a very active area of research these days, and articulating any kind of coherence on a vision and challenges is itself a challenge. At least two sometimes complementary and colliding threads have emerged. The first focuses on the development of pragmatic tools for increasing the transparency of automatically learned prediction models, as for instance by deep or reinforcement learning. The second is aimed at anticipating the negative impact of opaque models with the desire to regulate or control impactful consequences of incorrect predictions, especially in sensitive areas like …

Design And Evaluation Of An Adventure Videogame Based In The History Of Mathematics, Mariana Rocha, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

The present paper describes the design and evaluation of an adventure videogame developed to cover the mathematics primary school curriculum. The narrative of the game is based in the history of mathematics and, to win, the player needs to travel through time, starting from the ancient Egypt and finishing at the modern world. To achieve that, the player interacts with real-life characters, such as Pythagoras of Samos, learning about their contributions to the field and using this knowledge to solve puzzles. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to understand the effects of the game on students’ …

Smpl-Based 3d Pedestrian Pose Prediction, Anil Kunchala, Bianca Schoen-Phelan, Mélanie Bouroche, Lorraine D'Arcy

Conference papers

Modeling human motion is a long-standing problem in computer vision. The rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision problems resulted in increased attention in the area of pose prediction due to its vital role in a multitude of applications, for example, behavior analysis, autonomous vehicles, and visual surveillance. In 3D pedestrian pose prediction, joint-rotation-based pose representation is extensively used due to the unconstrained degree of freedom for each joint and its ability to regress the 3D statistical wireframe. However, all the existing joint-rotation-based pose prediction approaches ignore the centrality of the distinct pose parameter components and are consequently …

Empowering Qualitative Research Methods In Education With Artificial Intelligence, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing disciplines, disrupting many sectors. Originally mainly for computer scientists and engineers, it has been expanding its horizons and empowering many other disciplines contributing to the development of many novel applications in many sectors. These include medicine and health care, business and finance, psychology and neuroscience, physics and biology to mention a few. However, one of the disciplines in which artificial intelligence has not been fully explored and exploited yet is education. In this discipline, many research methods are employed by scholars, lecturers and practitioners to investigate the impact of different instructional approaches …

Start Of Epidemy In A City: Short-Term Forecast Of Covid-19 With Gmdh-Based Algorithms And Official Medical Statistics, Anna Boldyreva, Mikhail Alexandrov, Olexiy Koshulko, Svetland Popova

Conference papers

The sudden onset and quick development of an unknown epidemic may lead to tragic consequences: panic of population due to victims and unpreparedness of authorities for effectively help to population. These circumstances define extremely high requirements to the tools for short-term operational forecast. Namely, such tools should provide reliable results when model of phenomenon is unknown (factors of disease spreading) and data are limited (time series of observations). GMDH-based algorithms just meet these requirements unlike modern differential or advanced statistical models. In this study we test different algorithms from GMDH Shell platform on the example of Covid-19 epidemic in Moscow …

Brexit: Psychometric Profiling The Political Salubrious Through Machine Learning: Predicting Personality Traits Of Boris Johnson Through Twitter Political Text, James Usher, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

Whilst the CIA have been using psychometric profiling for decades, Cambridge Analytica showed that people's psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook or Twitter accounts. To exploit this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we propose machine learning methods for assessing political personality from Twitter. We have extracted the tweet content of Prime Minster Boris Johnson’s Twitter account and built three predictive personality models based on his Twitter political content. We use a Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural network, a Naive Bayes multinomial model and a Support Machine Vector model to predict the OCEAN …

Ingenia, A Novel Program Impacting Sustainable Development Goals Locally Through Students’ Actions, C E Mora, Shannon M. Chance, Inês Direito, M D Morera, L Hernández-Zamora, B Williams

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

No abstract provided.

Winter 2020

The Weldon Times

A student-run publication from the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

Editors in Chief: Justin Monahan, Anthony Buckland

Editor: Joel Tichinoff

Graphic Design & Layout: Alexandra Fox

Photography: Luke MacGillivray

Airport Operations Delays And Possible Mitigation Through Electric Taxi Systems: A Qualitative Case Study, David Cross, Kristy Kiernan, Mark Scharf Phd

Publications

Airline daily departures, not including private aircraft, increased from 25,143 in 2000 to 36,722 in 2017. More passengers necessitate more aircraft and more flights. With more aircraft at terminals, ground delays, based on current airport design, will continue to increase. Systems that allow for reduced aircraft time on the ground will improve airline economics and airport operations, in addition, will reduce airline delays both for departure and arrival at the gate. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the efficacy, from ramp controllers’ perspectives, of equipping airliners with an electric taxi system. Prototype electric taxi systems have …

Nothing New Under The Sun: How Existing Screening Programs Can Inform The Design Of Social Determinants Of Health Screening In Health Care., Bradley Iott, Denise Anthony, Jessica Pater, Shauna Wagner, Tammy Toscos Phd, Tiffany Veinot

Health Services and Informatics Research

Research Objective Up to 80% of the factors contributing to an individual’s health status are social determinants of health (SDOH). As healthcare systems transition to value-based payment models which compensate providers for patient health outcomes, many have called for healthcare organizations to screen patients for SDOH-related social needs and for providers to consider them when providing medical care. Screening for social needs is expected to involve collecting information that may make patients feel vulnerable, creating a need to develop screening methods that emphasize patient comfort. Similarly, social needs screening may place burdens on providers that have limited training and time …

A Microscopic View Of The Covid-19 Virus: Pandemics Move The World Forward: A History Of Humanity’S Progression Via Pandemics, Harold D. Johnson

Capstone Projects

This project argues that pandemics have the ability to move the world forward in ways such as causing economic shifts, leading to new medical innovations and stimulate changes to current religious ideas. By examining past pandemics, such as bubonic plague, the influenza outbreak of 1918 and smallpox, this project demonstrates how humanity has risen to the challenge pandemics create. Through innovations, invention and societal changes, pandemics are often the catalyst for major changes in the world. As the world wrestles with COVID-19, it is good to remind ourselves of humanity’s resilience and to consider what the lasting results of the …

The Southwest History Project, S. Michael Sleeter

Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to expand Public History practices in the community of the Southwest Independent School District. Its main goal is to establish a community historical society that will preserve and promote the local history of the area while allowing students to gain practical experience in the field. A newly created Public History class at the High School will support it. By giving members of the community the knowledge and ability to record and preserve their local history, the power to keep alive the collective memory is in the hands of those who made this area their …

Baseball, Hot Dogs, And Raspas: The Prospect Hill Yellow Jackets Athletic Club During The 1960s In San Antonio, Tx, Adam M. Nerio

Capstone Projects

The Prospect Hill Yellow Jackets Athletic Club was an important institution in San Antonio’s West Side in the 1960’s. It was a vehicle through which the emerging Mexican American middle-class families integrated and acculturated into the American mainstream. Using images, maps, archival photographs, newspaper articles, obituaries, and oral histories, this project presents evidence on how organized youth sports played a major role in helping shape and define the identity of a Mexican American community in San Antonio and provided the foundation that spawned an engaged generation of achievers.

Modelling Mycorrhizal Fungi Dispersal By The Mycophagous Swamp Wallaby (Wallabia Bicolor) [Dataset], Melissa Danks, Natalie Simpson, Todd F. Elliot, C.E. Timothy Paine, Karl Vernes

Research Datasets

Despite the importance of mammal-fungal interactions, tools to estimate the mammal-assisted dispersal distances of fungi are lacking. Many mammals actively consume fungal fruiting bodies, the spores of which remain viable after passage through their digestive tract. Many of these fungi form symbiotic relationships with trees and provide an array of other key ecosystem functions. We present a flexible, general model to predict the distance a mycophagous mammal would disperse fungal spores. We modelled the probability of spore dispersal by combining animal movement data from GPS-telemetry with data on spore gut-retention time. We test this model using an exemplar generalist mycophagist, …

Human Impact Overrides Bioclimatic Drivers Of Red Fox Home Range Size Globally, Michael Main, Robert Davis, David Blake, Harriet Mills, Tim Doherty

Research Datasets

Aim Identifying the variables that influence animal home range size is important for understanding the biological requirements of individuals and their social interactions. Given their often broad distributions, carnivores are model organisms for studying range-wide determinants of home range size. Here we test predictions about environmental determinants of home range size for one of the world’s most widely distributed carnivores, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes).

Location Global

Methods We compiled a database of 70 mean home range estimates from 62 studies and four continents, which we analysed according to site-based temperature, precipitation, environmental productivity and human influence …

Hybrid Zone Barriers Comparative Data Set, David L. Field

Research Datasets

Many recent studies have addressed the mechanisms operating during the early stages of speciation, but surprisingly few studies have tested theoretical predictions on the evolution of strong reproductive isolation (RI). To help address this gap, we first undertook a quantitative review of the hybrid zone literature for flowering plants in relation to reproductive barriers. Then, using Populus as an exemplary model group, we analysed genome-wide variation for phylogenetic tree topologies in both early- and late-stage speciation taxa to determine how these patterns may be related to the genomic architecture of RI. Our plant literature survey revealed variation in barrier complexity …

Floral Display And Habitat Fragmentation: Effects On The Reproductive Success Of The Threatened Mass-Flowering Conospermum Undulatum (Proteaceae), Nicola Delnevo, Eddie Van Etten, Margaret Byrne, William Stock

Research Datasets

1. Fragmentation of natural vegetation is currently one of the largest threats to plant populations and their interactions with pollinators. Plant reproductive susceptibility to habitat fragmentation has been investigated in many species; however, the response of wild mass-flowering species is poorly known, with research limited to mainly boreal plant species.

2. Here we studied twelve remnant populations of the threatened mass-flowering shrub Conospermum undulatum in the southwest Australian biodiversity hotspot, each presenting different population size, level of isolation, and floral display. We assessed the impact of fragmentation on: 1) fruit and seed production; and 2) seed germination. To gain a …