Digital Commons Network^™

Voter Id: Combating Voter Fraud Or Disenfranchising? A Comprehensive Analysis Of Voter Id Laws, Native American Disenfranchisement, And Their Intersection, Will Hyland

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

This note discusses the contentious issue of voter ID laws and their ability to disproportionately affect various racial and ethnic groups, with specific attention paid to such laws’ effects on Native Americans. Since the 2000 election catastrophe and subsequent changes to our election system, voter ID laws have become a hot-button issue. Many states have enacted voter ID laws in the years since, some of which have resulted in restrictive voting requirements that may result in disproportionately discriminatory voter disenfranchisement. This note willa first give a general overview of the complicated and convoluted recent development voter ID laws, a history …

Synthetic Aperture Optical Imaging Interferometric Microscopy With Improved Image Quality, Preyom K. Dey

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

The resolution limit of optical microscopy can be extended by using Imaging Interferometric Microscopy (IIM), which uses a low numerical aperture (NA) objective lens to achieve resolution equivalent to that of a high-NA objective lens with multiple sub-images. Along with the resolution enhancement challenge, IIM often suffers from poor image quality. In this dissertation, several image quality improvement methods are proposed and verified with simulation and experimental results. Next, techniques to extend the resolution limit of IIM to ≤ 100nm using a low-NA objective lens are demonstrated. An experimental technique of using a grating coupler on …

The Moral Cost Of Compensatory Damage Claims In Reproductive Negligence Cases, David Wasserman

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

In this original and important work, Dov Fox makes a compelling case for rethinking and reformulating the way that negligent conduct by reproductive health professionals is understood, and in the way the harms resulting from that misconduct are rectified. He seeks a unified account of this negligence and harm that recognizes the “gravamen of the offense” as the wrongful interference with reproductive planning while also recognizing three distinct categories of adverse outcomes: deprived, imposed, and confounded procreation. Fox argues that the injuries in each category differ from each other sufficiently to justify the recognition of three distinct torts.

Birth Rights And Wrongs Extended, Reuven Brandt

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Dov Fox’s Birth Rights and Wrongs offers a largely compelling argument for expanding the scope of legal actions and remedies available to those whose reproductive choices are wrongfully frustrated by the actions of others. The dominant focus of the book is individuals who, due to the negligence and/‌or malice of medical professionals, suffer harms arising from reproduction imposed, denied, or confounded. A serious examination of these kinds of injuries is certainly appropriate given that medical professionals are increasingly involved in individuals’ reproductive plans and that serious harms may arise when desired medical interventions are improperly implemented. I will not take …

Birth Rights And Birth Wrongs Through A Common Law Lens: Why The No Liability Regime Is Likely To Endure, Richard A. Epstein

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Dov Fox’s recent book, the aptly named Birth Rights and Wrongs, is, as its title suggests, a study of the stark conflicts that arise in the highly contested area of reproductive rights. Fox makes the powerful case that the legal protection of reproductive rights, in all their protean forms, is systematically under-protected relative to two key benchmarks: the standards of ordinary decency, and social expectations. In my view, he has an acute awareness of these failures. But his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness, as he systematically ignores the great successes wrought through the current system, as disjointed …

Family Planning And Its Limits, Dov Fox

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

A doctor botches a vasectomy. Or says it’d be dangerous to keep a healthy pregnancy. Or misses a risk of passing along disease. Our laws do little to deter such reproductive negligence or compensate its victims. Some of this misconduct leaves people without the baby they desperately want. Other times, it foists on parents a child they’d set out to avoid. Or one with meaningfully different traits than what they were led to believe.

I call these three harms procreation deprived, procreation imposed, and procreation confounded.

Thousands of fertility patients were deprived of biological parenthood when their …

Multimember Legislative Bodies And Intended Meaning, Jeffrey Goldsworthy

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Intentionalists agree that the meaning of an ordinary communication is either identical to or depends heavily on what the speaker or author intended it to be. But the “or” marks a disagreement between “subjective” intentionalists, such as Larry Alexander and Richard Kay, and “objective” intentionalists such as me.

Subjective intentionalists claim that the meaning of any communication is whatever its speaker intended it to mean. Objective intentionalists find this dubious because it seems possible for the meaning that people intend to communicate to differ from the meaning they do communicate. It surely cannot be the case that, whenever we speak …

(Hypothetical) Communication In (Hypothetical) Context, Gary Lawson

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

I will start with the second of our two “group minds” problems, involving potentially differing understandings of fruit, because I think it is conceptually simpler, or at least more amenable to an answer, than is the first problem.

The precise question is how I would handle the problem of application of the fruit tax to tomatoes and kiwi if that problem came before me as a judge. That specification of interpretative role is crucial.

At the outset, we need one very important piece of information that is not provided: What is the governmental form of Lex? If Lex is a …

Using A Firearm, Using A Word: What Interpretation Just Is, Walter Benn Michaels

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

My response to these hypotheticals is going to be useless, although, I hope, in a useful way. It’s going to be useless because I’m an English teacher, not a lawyer, and I have no idea what Mary or the judge should do. But, of course, Larry Alexander and Steve Smith already knew this when they asked me to contribute. Presumably, it’s in my capacity as a theorist of interpretation and in particular (since the hypotheticals might be understood to raise particular difficulties for intentionalists) as an intentionalist theorist that they asked for my views. But, as an intentionalist theorist, I …

Intentional Procreation, Robin L. West

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

Dov Fox’s book Birth Rights and Wrongs makes the case for the development, through judicial decision-making, of various torts that would respond to the disruption of intentional conception, contraception, gestation and childbirth, where those intentions are thwarted because of the negligence of professionals employed to assist or guide consumers of their services in reaching their reproductive goals.

Formalist Textualism And The Cernauskas Problem, Larry Alexander

The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues

In a recent article, Tara Grove distinguishes between what she calls “formalist textualism” and “flexible textualism.” Formalist textualism is really another term for literalism, in which statutory and constitutional language is given its semantic meaning—presumably its meaning at the time of enactment—in its “semantic context.” Grove illustrates the latter by pointing out that the phrase “domestic violence” appears in a statute that also mentions “insurrection,” thus suggesting that domestic violence there refers to acts similar to insurrection rather than to spousal abuse.

Flexible textualism, on the other hand, looks beyond the semantic meaning of the text and its semantic context …

Does Digital Literacy Empower Adolescent Girls In Low- And Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review, Salima Meherali, Komal Abdul Rahim, Sandra Campbell, Zohra S. Lassi

School of Nursing & Midwifery

Background: The vast majority (90%) of the world's adolescents aged 10-19 live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); and in those resource-limited settings, girls face distinct challenges across multiple health, social, and economic domains. Gender equality and girls' empowerment are key goals in their own right and are central to all other development goals. Digital literacy is a great enabler for the empowerment of young girls. This systematic review aims to assess the range and nature of digital literacy interventions implemented to empower adolescent girls in LMICs and identify evidence about adolescent girls' access and use of digital technologies in …

Advancing Cell-Free Protein Synthesis Systems For On-Demand Next-Generation Protein Therapeutics And Clinical Diagnostics, Emily Ann Long Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Recombinant proteins have many medical and industrial applications, but their use is complicated by commercial production and stability constraints. These issues are particularly challenging for recombinant proteins used in pharmaceutical therapeutics and clinical diagnostics. Expensive production and distribution limit the accessibility of therapeutics and diagnostics especially in the developing world. Additionally, clinical use of recombinant proteins face further challenges within biological systems including biological degradation and immunogenicity. To increase the accessibility of recombinant proteins, the cost and inefficiencies of protein manufacturing and distribution need to be significantly reduced. A powerful tool to aid in this endeavor is cell-free protein synthesis …

Using Facies Analysis And Reservoir Characterization Of The Albian-Cenomanian Nanushuk Formation To Assist In Better Understanding Interactions Between Shoreface, Deltaic, And Fluvial Systems On The North Slope, Alaska, Andrea Smoot

Theses and Dissertations

The Albian-Cenomanian Nanushuk Formation located on the North Slope of Alaska is the result of fluvial, deltaic, and shoreface processes and has been the focus of recent petroleum exploration activity in the Colville Basin. The Nanushuk and underlying Torok formations together contain an estimated 8.7 billion barrels of oil and 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves within the resource-rich North Slope. The Nanushuk Formation is composed of sediment sourced from the Chukotka Peninsula to the west and deposited axially within the Colville Basin. High sedimentation rates led to rapid progradation of shoreface and deltaic systems, which effectively filled …

Fear, Loathing, And The Hemispheric Consequences Of Xenophobic Hate, Ernesto Sagás, Ediberto Román

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

“When you have fifteen thousand people marching up . . . how do you stop these people?” “You shoot them” [crowd member shouts] [chuckling, Trump responds:] “[O]nly in the Panhandle can you get away with that thing.”¹
President Donald Trump

“Thousands of criminal aliens. They’re pouring into our country.”²
President Donald Trump

“They’re not people, these are animals.”³
President Donald Trump

“Take a look at the death and destruction that’s been caused by people coming into this country caused by people that shouldn’t be here.”⁴
President Donald Trump

“ [We] have millions and millions of people …

Contextualizing Caves Within An Animate Maya Landscape: Caves As Living Agents In The Past And Present, Brent K. S. Woodfill

KIP Articles

After groundbreaking work by multiple archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th century, caves in the Maya world are currently acknowledged as fundamentally ritual rather than domestic spaces. However, a more nuanced read of the anthropological literature and conversations with Indigenous collaborators in the past and present pushes us to move still farther and see caves not as passive contexts to contain ceremonies directed elsewhere but animate beings with unique identities and personalities in their own right. This article combines archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic documentation of Maya cave use in central Guatemala to build a foundation for examining caves …

A Banner Gift, Uab Heersink School Of Medicine News

Browse All News

No abstract provided.

Rapid Source To Sink Transition In A Mixed-Conifer Forest Following Stand-Replacing Fire, Ryan Matthew Schulze

Biology ETDs

Mixed-conifer forests play an important role in the Southwestern USA’s regional carbon cycle by sequestering and storing large amounts of atmospheric carbon onto the landscape. Despite this, little is known about how large, stand-replacing fire alters ecosystem carbon sink-source dynamics. In this study, we used eddy covariance to quantify how stand-replacing fire altered forest sink strength, and the sensitivity of carbon uptake to soil and atmospheric drought in a mixed-conifer forest located in The Valles Caldera National Preserve, NM. We found that the post-burn ecosystem returned to an annual net sink of carbon in the year immediately following the fire, …

Recovery Network Awareness: A Training Guide To Help Clients Choose An Aftercare Program For Sobriety, Thomas Bosek

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

Abstract

Recovery environments are a crucial role in any individual’s journey to achieve sobriety. A safe environment will allow people who have a history of substance use to work their program effectively and decrease their relapse potential. The purpose of this paper is to identify multiple recovery-based programs for new professionals and providers entering the field of substance abuse treatment that allow their clients to have the best opportunity to succeed with their personal goals. The main programs discussed in this paper include 12 step programs, SMART Recovery, Harm reduction, and Medication Assisted Therapy. Choosing the right program for clients …

Student Success While Incorporating Cooperative Learning In The 6th Grade Classroom, Jacob Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

The purpose of this study is to examine the positive impacts of cooperative learning in the classroom. I will be intentionally teaching skills to enhance cooperative learning throughout the duration of the study. The methods of cooperative learning that will be used will be as follows: positive interdependence, individual accountability, interpersonal skills, face to face promotive interaction, and processing out. This study took place within a 6th grade classroom with three different sections of students. The data that was collected showed that students who learned in the cooperative learning setting had a higher percentage of students fully understanding the material, …

Pushing It To The Limit: Determining Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximus) Olfactory Sensitivity And Discrimination Through A Behavioral Choice Task, Matthew S. Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations

Elephants have shown remarkable olfactory capabilities. Their sense of smell impacts their foraging choices, behavior, and ultimately, survival. Being able to detect a target odor can allow elephants to locate specific resources, identify threats, and find receptive conspecifics. Previous studies have shown that elephants can consistently detect target odors, but have not identified the limits of this detection. Thus, to investigate the extent of elephants’ odor detection capabilities, we tested Asian elephants in a two-step odor discrimination task. First, we investigated whether elephants could detect odors at varying levels of dilution after a training procedure, and then whether they could …

The Influence Of Comorbid Gad On Er Utilization In Urban Youth With Asthma, David A. Karpe

Theses and Dissertations

Current literature indicates a strong association between asthma and the early onset of comorbid generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in minors and their primary caregivers. Studies show that asthma prevalence increases with certain demographic factors, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and housing quality. Evidence also suggests that GAD influences decision-making, especially when deciding to utilize emergency room (ER) services for asthma-related concerns. This study analyzed the effect of comorbid GAD on minors with asthma and ER utilization. The data were provided by an earlier Stress & Justice Study (S&J) baseline survey, an investigation aimed at understanding the impact of parental criminal …

Blended Language Learning: The Decision-Making Process In Designing A Blended Portuguese Course, Camellia Hill

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies how content specialists, instructors, and instructional designers made decisions about what content to teach in person and what to teach online for a second year Portuguese university course. Qualitative vignettes around three course design participants highlight emergent themes and course artifacts from their interviews that show how they made decisions about what learning opportunities to do online and what to leave in person. The blended language course involved Canvas learning management system with two additional main technology tools used in development: GoReact and H5P. The results are subdivided to reflect the views of the instructional designer, the …

Can Man, Dalton G. Lambert Jr

University of New Orleans Thesis Films

CAN MAN tells the story of a man tasked with identifying a room full of unlabeled cans without opening them. I explore the challenges of making a film with the production guidelines set forth during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it impacted the final film. I also discuss all that I've learned in the past five years I spent studying in the UNO Film and Theatre Department.

The Impact Of Motown Drummers In Popular Music, Estevan A. Barrientez

Recital Papers

The Impact of Motown Drummers in Popular Music

Population Ecology Of The Queensnake (Regina Septemvittata) In An Urban Creek, 2008 To 2019, Rachel Beiler, R. Elliot Miller, Norman Reichenbach

Faculty Publications and Presentations

Habitat fragmentation is a common result of urbanization and species living in these fragments are at risk of extirpation. We conducted a 12-y (2008–2019) capture-mark-recapture study on snakes living in a 593-m section of Rock Castle Creek flowing through an urban area in central Virginia, USA. Our study site was occupied primarily by Queensnakes (Regina septemvittata). We used data from 168 individual Queensnakes to examine several aspects of their population ecology including survival rates (0.52), reproductive effort (21.3% juvenile to adult ratio), growth rates (68% and 30.6% increase for 1 to 2 y-old and 2 to 3+ y-old snakes, respectively), …

Effects Of Catharanthine On Dopamine Release In The Nucleus Accumbens And Ethanol Consumption, Emily Baldwin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis discusses the history of catharanthine and related compounds, and their potential anti-addictive properties. Current research is exploring possible mechanisms of these properties. Past studies have found catharanthine has effects on neurons that project to the mesocorticolimbic system, an area implicated in addiction. We have seen that catharanthine decreases evoked dopamine (DA) release but increases basal DA release. This is the first study to investigate catharanthine’s effect on DA transmission in vivo. Using microdialysis, we determined the effect of catharanthine on DA in the nucleus accumbens of the striatum. This study determines the effect of different doses of …

Contextual Considerations Of Green Stormwater Infrastructure Siting, Dexter H. Locke, Amanda K. Phillips De Lucas, Colleen Murphy-Dunning, Dawn Henning, Giovanni Zinn

Cities and the Environment (CATE)

Green infrastructure increasingly is used to ameliorate water quality and quantity problems caused by runoff in cities. Studies show how the spatial distribution of these Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) sites are unevenly distributed relative to socioeconomic and demographic groups. Often this is described as an indicator of perpetuated environment injustice, given the purported social and environmental benefits of GSI. To assess equity, researchers often examine either who gets what with respect to environmental ‘goods’ such as tree canopy and other green infrastructures, or investigate the procedures, decision making processes, and power structures pertaining to planning processes. This paper uses both …

Civic Environmental Stewardship: Aligning Organizational And Participant Motivations, Kathleen L. Wolf, Weston Brinkley, Dale J. Blahna

Cities and the Environment (CATE)

Natural area management and sustainability in cities is ever more reliant on civic environmental stewardship. Many conservation organizations sponsor stewardship programs that enlist volunteers to care for the land and restore urban ecosystems. Stewardship program success depends on alignment of individuals’ and sponsoring organizations’ goals. We conducted surveys with a sample of 165 volunteers across natural areas stewardship events in metropolitan King County (Washington, U.S.). An adapted Volunteer Functions Inventory framework was used to understand volunteers’ motivations, satisfactions, and volunteering history. Our findings confirmed the multidimensional dynamics of volunteerism, as stewardship volunteers were motivated and expressed satisfaction for practical altruism, …

Comparing Macroinvertebrate Total Abundance And Total Biomass On Five Substrate Types From Upstream To Downstream On The North Branch Of The Au Sable River, Paul David Dingman

Masters Theses

The North Branch of the Au Sable River is located in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan and is known for prolific hatches of Ephemeroptera (mayflies), Trichoptera (caddisflies), and Plecoptera (stoneflies). Macroinvertebrates play an important role in processing and recycling organic material in rivers and are a valuable food source for trout. In 2018, anglers were reporting catching fewer numbers of brook and brown trout (Salmo trutta and Salvelinus fontinalis). The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) determined significantly lower abundance than the historical average. We hypothesized that trout abundances were lower due to a lack of prey …