Digital Commons Network^™

Wisdom, Not Veritism, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this response to Pritchard's "In Defence of Veritism", I defend the view that it is wisdom rather than truth that is fundamental in epistemology. Given that recent philosophical discussions of the nature of wisdom may be unfamiliar to some epistemologists, a brief overview of these discussions is provided and that which is relevant for the subsequent discussion in this piece is highlighted. I explain that scholars working on the topic tend to accept that wisdom comprises at least one familiar epistemic standing and that, unlike other epistemic goods, wisdom is thought to be tied to a narrowly specified content. …

A New Discrete Distribution: Properties, Characterizations, Modeling Real Count Data, Bayesian And Non-Bayesian Estimations, Haitham M. Yousof, Christophe Chesneau, Gholamhossein Hamedani, Mohamed Ibrahim

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

In this work, a new discrete distribution which includes the discrete Burr-Hatke distribution is defined and studied. Relevant statistical properties are derived. The probability mass function of the new distribution can be "right skewed" with different shapes, bimodal and "uniformed". Also, the corresponding hazard rate function can be "monotonically decreasing", "upside down", "monotonically increasing", "upside down increasing", and "upside down-constant-increasing". A numerical analysis for the mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis and the index of dispersion is presented. The new distribution could be useful in the modeling of "under-dispersed" or "overdispersed" count data. Certain characterizations of the new distribution are presented. These …

Remarks On And Characterizations Of 2s-Lindley And 2d-Lindley Distributions Introduced By Chesneau Et Al. (2020), Gholamhossein Hamedani, Mahrokh Najaf

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

Chesneau et al. (2020) considered the distributions of sum and differences of two independent and identically distributed random variables with the common Lindley distribution. They derived, very nicely, the above mentioned distributions and provided certain important mathematical and statistical properties as well as simulations and applications of the new distributions. In this short note, we like to show that the assumption of “independence” can be replaced with a much weaker assumption of “sub-independence”. Then we present certain characterizations of the proposed distributions to complete, in someway, their work.

Poisson Transmuted-G Family Of Distributions: Its Properties And Applications, Laba Handique, Subrata Chakraborty, M. S. Eliwa, Gholamhossein Hamedani

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

In this article, an extension of the transmuted-G family is proposed, in the so-called Poison transmuted-G family of distributions. Some of its statistical properties including quantile function, moment generating function, order statistics, probability weighted moment, stress-strength reliability, residual lifetime, reversed residual lifetime, Rényi entropy and mean deviation are derived. A few important special models of the proposed family are listed. Stochastic characterizations of the proposed family based on truncated moments, hazard function and reverse hazard function, are also studied. The family parameters are estimated via the maximum likelihood approach. A simulation study is carried out to examine the bias and …

The Type I Quasi Lambert Family: Properties, Characterizations And Different Estimation Methods., Gholamhossein G. Hamedani, Mustafa Ç. Korkmaz, Nadeem Shafique Butt, Haitham M. Yousof

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

A new G family of probability distributions called the type I quasi Lambert family is defined and applied for modeling real lifetime data. Some new bivariate type G families using "Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula", "modified Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern copula", "Clayton copula" and "Renyi's entropy copula" are derived. Three characterizations of the new family are presented. Some of its statistical properties are derived and studied. The maximum likelihood estimation, maximum product spacing estimation, least squares estimation, Anderson-Darling estimation and Cramer-von Mises estimation methods are used for estimating the unknown parameters. Graphical assessments under the five different estimation methods are introduced. Based on these assessments, all …

Characterizations Of The Discrete Lindley And Discrete Poisson-Lindley Distributions, Gholamhossein G. Hamedani, Mahrokh Najaf

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

Certain characterizations of the discrete Lindley and discrete Poisson-Lindley distributions, originally introduced by Bakouch, Jazi and Nadarjah (2014) and Sankaran (1970), respectively, are presented. Al-Babtain, Gemeay and Afify (2020) revisited these distributions and provided estimation methods and actuarial measures as well as their applications in medicine. This short note is intended to complete, in some way, Al-Babtain, Gemeay and Afify (2020)’s work. It should be mentioned that the probability mass functions reported in the two papers mentioned above are not correct. In this note, it will be explained why they are not correct.

A New Extended Alpha Power Transformed Family Of Distributions: Properties, Characterizations And An Application To A Data Set In The Insurance Sciences, Zubair Ahmad, Eisa Mahmoudi, Gholamhossein Hamedani

Mathematical and Statistical Science Faculty Research and Publications

Heavy tailed distributions are useful for modeling actuarial and financial risk management problems. Actuaries often search for finding distributions that provide the best fit to heavy tailed data sets. In the present work, we introduce a new class of heavy tailed distributions of a special sub-model of the proposed family, called a new extended alpha power transformed Weibull distribution, useful for modeling heavy tailed data sets. Mathematical properties along with certain characterizations of the proposed distribution are presented. Maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters are obtained. A simulation study is provided to evaluate the performance of the maximum likelihood …

An Analysis Of Job Stress As Experienced By Public School Site Administrators, Joseph A. Bosco

Dissertations

Public school site administrators face enormous challenges day in and day out. COVID-19 has created more challenges than ever for any organization, but for public school site administrators these types of challenges are once in a lifetime. When crisis hits, leaders are expected to be strong and levelheaded. However, these leaders are experiencing high levels of stress which can lead to burnout, depersonalization, or worse. Using a quantitative method, the study was done to better understand the stress public school site administrators are under. Public school administrators in Silicon Valley were surveyed using the Administrator Stress Index, which is the …

Béryllium : Guide De Nettoyage : Entretien Ménager Et Décontamination Des Lieux De Travail, Stéphanie Viau, Chantal Dion, Mickaël Calosso

Guides

No abstract provided.

Such Hard And Severe Service, Dan Clendaniel

Defending Savannah: History and Archaeology of the Gibson's Point Battery

An excerpt from Dan Clendaniel's Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Volume II ~ 1864-1865 detailing the regiments expedition to Whitemarsh Island in Georgia.

Clendaniel, Dan. Such Hard and Severe Service: The 85th Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Volume II ~ 1864-1865. Vol. 2. Monongahela Books, 2021.

Cause And Effect In Antidiscrimination Law, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Standards of causation in antidiscrimination law, and disparate-treatment cases in particular, are deeply flawed. Their defects have caused an illogical, obscure, and unworkable proof scheme that requires an overhaul to curb the harm that it engenders and to allow the antidiscrimination statutes to serve their objectives effectively. This Article proposes a theory and method of causation that achieves this goal. The problem stems from the inadequacies associated with current standards of causation in disparate-treatment cases—the but-for test and the motivating-factor test. The proposed “factorial” approach introduces a causal standard that addresses these inadequacies. It entails three innovations over current causation …

Transparency In Plea Bargaining, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

lea bargaining is the dominant method by which our criminal justice system resolves cases. More than 95% of state and federal convictions today are the product of guilty pleas. Yet the practice continues to draw widespread criticism. Critics charge that it is too coercive and leads innocent defendants to plead guilty, that it obscures the true facts in criminal cases and produces overly lenient sentences, and that it enables disparate treatment of similarly situated defendants.

Another feature of plea bargaining — its lack of transparency — has received less attention, but is also concerning. In contrast to the trials it …

Remote Criminal Justice, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The coronavirus pandemic has forced courts to innovate to provide criminal justice while protecting public health. Many have turned to online platforms in order to conduct criminal proceedings without undue delay. The convenience of remote proceedings has led some to advocate for their expanded use after the pandemic is over. To assess the promise and peril of online criminal justice, I surveyed state and federal judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys across Texas, where virtual proceedings have been employed for a range of criminal proceedings, starting in March 2020. The survey responses were supplemented with direct observations of remote plea hearings …

Playing By The Rule: How Aba Model Rule 8.4(G) Can Regulate Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Discrimination during voir dire remains a critical impediment to empaneling juries that reflect the diversity of the United States. While various solutions have been proposed, scholars have largely overlooked ethics rules as an instrument for preventing discriminatory behavior during jury selection. Focusing on the ABA Model Rule 8.4(g), which regulates professional misconduct, this article argues that ethics rules can, under certain conditions, offer an effective deterrent to exclusionary practices among legal actors. Part I examines the specific history, evolution, and application of revised ABA Model Rule 8.4(g). Part II delves into the ways that ethics rules in general, despite their …

Selling Out: An Instrumentalist Theory Of Legal Ethics, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Legal ethics has received attention mostly from scholars who view it as a field for the application of moral philosophy. However, economic analysis is also useful in the study of legal ethics, because it can illuminate the incentives that generate ethical dilemmas and controversies. This is especially true in the subfield this paper devotes its attention to, lawyer conflict of interest rules. The problem I focus on is the incentive of the lawyer to "sell out" his client-for example, by providing confidential information to a potential adversary or by providing legal misinformation to the client in order to aid the …

Legacies Of Pragmatism, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Pragmatism has triumphed in the law by becoming all things to all people—or has it? This essay, prepared for a symposium at Drake University Law School's Constitutional Law Center, examines the future of pragmatism in constitutional thought. First, I revisit the work of William James to recover the ideal disposition of a pragmatist decision maker. Second, I analyze pragmatism's impact on constitutional theory from Richard Posner to Cass Sunstein, from Philip Bobbitt to Willy Forbath and Joey Fishkin. I show that pragmatism lives on in constitutional theories that don't self-consciously characterize themselves in such terms. I also contend that pragmatism …

Bound States And Energy Eigenvalues Of A Radial Screened Coulomb Potential, Eric Stachura, N. Hancock

Faculty Articles

We analyze bound states and other properties of solutions of a radial Schrödinger equation with a new screened Coulomb potential. In particular, we employ hypervirial relations to obtain eigen-energies for a Hydrogen atom with this potential. Additionally, we appeal to a sharp estimate for a modified Bessel function to estimate the ground state energy of such a system. Finally, when the angular quantum number ℓ ≠ 0, we obtain evidence for a critical screening parameter, above which bound states cease to exist.

Michael Moore

African American Funeral Programs

No abstract provided.

Genetic Variation Within A Species Of Parasitic Nematode, Skrjabingylus Chitwoodorum, In Skunks, Allie N. Denham, Malorri R. Hughes, Robert C. Dowler, Nicholas J. Negovetich, Loren K. Ammerman

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Carnivores in the families Mustelidae and Mephitidae are essential hosts for the cranial roundworm genus Skrjabingylus. A high prevalence of Skrjabingylus chitwoodorum has been observed in the striped skunk, Mephitis mephitis. Genetic barcoding studies of other nematodes have successfully used the cytochrome oxidase I (COI) mitochondrial gene to analyze genetic variation and divergence. We tested the hypothesis that low population structuring occurs within S. chitwoodorum because M. mephitis is widespread across much of North America and has high levels of gene flow. We extracted DNA from 38 samples of Skrjabingylus removed from the sinuses of M. mephitis and one from …

Menthol To Induce Non-Shivering Thermogenesis Via Trpm8/Pka Signaling For Treatment Of Obesity, Owen Sanders, Jayalekshmi Rajagopalan, Lekshmy Rajagopal

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Increasing basal energy expenditure via uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1)-dependent non-shivering thermogenesis is an attractive therapeutic strategy for treatment of obesity. Transient receptor potential melastatin 8 (TRPM8) channel activation by cold and cold mimetics induces UCP1 transcription and prevents obesity in animals, but the clinical relevance of this relationship remains incompletely understood. A review of TRPM8 channel agonism for treatment of obesity focusing on menthol was undertaken. Adipocyte TRPM8 activation results in Ca2+ influx and protein kinase A (PKA) activation, which induces mitochondrial elongation, mitochondrial localization to lipid droplets, lipolysis, β-oxidation, and UCP1 expression. Ca2+-induced mitochondrial reactive oxygen species activate UCP1. …

Enthusiastic But Inconsistent: Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Perceptions Of Their Role In The Cure Classroom, Erin Shortlidge, Jessica R, Cary, Emma C. Goodwin

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Despite growing evidence of positive student outcomes from course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), little consideration has been given to employing graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) as CURE instructors. GTAs may be novice researchers and/or teachers and likely vary in their interest in teaching a CURE. Guided by expectancy-value theory, we explored how GTAs’ self-efficacy and values regarding teaching a CURE impact motivation and perceptions of their roles as CURE instructors. Using a multiple case study design, we interviewed nine GTAs who taught a network CURE at one research institution. Though most GTAs held a relatively high value for teaching a CURE …

The Vienna Fortresses, Michael J. Zeps S.J.

History Faculty Research and Publications

While I would not like to saddle the military historian Gordon A. Craig with the content of this book still it would not be complete without saying that encouragement to pursue this line of thought came from him. I showed him some photographs of municipal apartment blocks, known as Gemeindebauten, built by the Social Democrats in Vienna between the wars and he spontaneously labeled the architecture "provocative."

Hans and Rudolph Hautmann had recently compiled a comprehensive book on the apartment projects of Red Vienna, but I wanted to visit the sites myself, being less enthusiastic than they were about the …

Sexual Harassment In The Post-Weinstein World, Joanna L. Grossman

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The 2017 iteration of the #MeToo movement has brought tremendous attention to the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as in a variety of other contexts. We learned that sexual harassment is rampant, varied in form, and harmful, or, more accurately, that it is still all of these things. Sexual harassment at work has existed as long as women have worked, whether paid, valued, or enslaved. The law of sexual harassment has a much more recent provenance. Courts began to recognize harassment as a form of sex discrimination in the early 1980s, and the entire current structure …

Race-Conscious Jury Selection, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Among the central issues in scholarship on the American jury is the effect of Batson v. Kentucky (1986) on discriminatory empanelment. Empirical legal research has confirmed that despite the promise of the Batson doctrine, both peremptory strikes and challenges for cause remain tools of racial exclusion. But these studies, based on post facto interviews, transcript analysis, and quantitative methods offer little insight into Batson’s critical impact on real-time decision-making and strategy in voir dire. If we increasingly know what kinds of juries are produced in the post-Batson world, we know very little about how they are produced.

This Article addresses …

Benevolent Exclusion, Anna Offit

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The American jury system holds the promise of bringing commonsense ideas about justice to the enforcement of the law. But its democratizing effect cannot be realized if a segment of the population faces systematic exclusion based on income or wealth. The problem of unequal access to jury service based on socio-economic disparities is a longstanding yet under-studied problem—and one which the uneven fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated. Like race- and sex-based jury discrimination during the peremptory challenge phase of jury selection, the routine dismissal of citizens who face economic hardship excludes not only people but also the diversity …

Framing Individualized Sentencing For Politics And The Constitution, Meghan J. Ryan

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

For decades, there was not much growth in the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation and application of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. In recent years, though, the Court has expanded the Amendment’s scope to prohibit executing intellectually disabled and juvenile offenders, to ban capital punishment for all non-homicide offenses against individuals, and to for-bid life-without-parole sentences for juveniles when that punishment was mandatorily imposed or imposed on non-homicide offenders. With changing politics and a changing Court, any further expansion of Eighth Amendment protections will likely be difficult for years to come. With the recent confirmation of Amy …

A Unified Theory Of Code Connected Contracts, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Smart contracts and their promise of automatic performance capture legal and entrepreneurial imaginations. But the excitement around the technology led to some confusing legal responses. Several legal scholars use chronology to help reduce the confusion and place smart contracts within what is already familiar about computational contracting. According to this line of thinking, blockchain-based smart contracts simply represent the next technological advancement in a long history of computable contracting technologies. However, other scholarly work suggests that such a chronological explanation under-simplifies the nature of the linkages between smart contracts and other forms of code-connected contracts. This Article offers a unified …

Autonomous Business Reality, Carla L. Reyes

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Society tends to expect technology to do more than it can actually achieve, at a faster pace than it can actually move. The resulting hype cycle infects all forms of discourse around technology. Unfortunately, the discourse on law and technology is no exception to this rule. The resulting discussion is often characterized by two or more positions at opposite ends of the spectrum, such that participants in the discussion speak past each other, rather than to each other. The rich context that sits in the middle ground goes disregarded altogether. This dynamic most recently surfaced in the legal literature regarding …

Death Of The Particular Social Group, Natalie Nanasi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Applicants seeking asylum in the United States must demonstrate that they fear persecution on account of one of five protected grounds—race, religion, national origin, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group (PSG). The PSG ground has long been the most complex and challenging avenue for relief, and in the Trump era, already precarious protections for vulnerable people such as survivors of intimate partner and gang violence were further impaired.

The Board of Immigration Appeals’ first, and longstanding, definition of a PSG in Matter of Acosta required members to possess “common immutable characteristics,” those that, like the other statutory …

Facilitating Capital Raising: The Sec’S 2020 Amendments To The Exempt Offering Framework, Marc I. Steinberg, Taylor E. Santori

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.