Digital Commons Network^™

Bias Impedes Progress In Physical Biology, Consciousness Studies And Quantum Gravity, Maurice Goodman

Articles

If scientists hope to make progress in consciousness studies they needs to accept that biased judgments have a major influence on the sciences, how we divide them up, how they are funded and this, in turn, has a profound impact on progress. The imbalance in funding, resulting from bias, in favour of the life and health sciences needs to be addressed as does why perversely little of this funding is devoted to a physics explanation of self-organisation and life on the mesoscopic scale? While life (the cell) is an outstanding example of self-organisation on the mesoscopic scale we need to …

Bouncing The Ball – A Novel Communication Framework For Pediatric Inpatient Rounding, Richard J. Mazzaccaro Md, Kristen M. Prendergast Md, Claudia F. Busse Md

Department of Pediatrics

No abstract provided.

Identification Of Nanotechnology Skill Shortages In Ireland’S Agri-Food Sector: Towards The Safe, Innovative And Sustainable Development Of Nano-Food Technology, Eileen Mccarron

Doctoral

The purpose of this research was to assess the nanotechnology skill and capacity shortages in Irelands Agri-food sector. In 2008 the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) published its statement on ‘The Relevance for Food Safety of Applications of Nanotechnology in the Food and Feed Industries’. The importance of the food sector to the Irish economy was clearly emphasised by the FSAI’s statement. The report identified the urgent need for focused research programs into the potential of nanotechnology in the agri-food sector and it highlighted the need for a multi-organisation approach between state agencies, industry and academia to ensure safe …

Western Herbalism: What Drives Individuals Within Rhode Island To Study This Ancient Healing Modality?, Kyla Shea

Student Publications

People globally rely on herbal practices as their main form of healing, yet few people in the West understand how to properly identify and effectively use herbs. This loss of knowledge regarding traditional healing practices was done so intentionally during enslavement and colonization, resulting in exploitation and misinterpretation of herbal practices. By reclaiming this knowledge, it is not only a way to improve the health of communities and the land, but it is also a way of reclaiming ancestral traditions and connection with oneself. Furthermore, this research paper explores the complexities of Western herbalism and determines what drives individuals within …

Using Feature Selection With Machine Learning For Generation Of Insurance Insights, Ayman Taha, Bernard Cosgrave, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Insurance is a data-rich sector, hosting large volumes of customer data that is analysed to evaluate risk. Machine learning techniques are increasingly used in the effective management of insurance risk. Insurance datasets by their nature, however, are often of poor quality with noisy subsets of data (or features). Choosing the right features of data is a significant pre-processing step in the creation of machine learning models. The inclusion of irrelevant and redundant features has been demonstrated to affect the performance of learning models. In this article, we propose a framework for improving predictive machine learning techniques in the insurance sector …

Does Information And Communication Technology Impede Environmental Degradation? Fresh Insights From Non-Parametric Approaches, Tomiwa Sunday Adebayo, Ephraim Bonah Agyekum, Mehmet Altuntas, Sadriddin Khudoyqulov, Hossam Zawbaa, Salah Kamel

Articles

Although ICT has played a critical role in the socio-economic growth of human cultures, it has also brought with it significant environmental risks. Nevertheless, scholars remain divided on this topic; some believe that ICT has had a positive influence on the quality of the environment, while others believe that ICT has created major environmental issues. Hence, this research is another effort to assess the effects of ICT on CO2 emissions in the top 10 ICT nations (Denmark, Japan, Luxemburg, South Korea, Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) using a dataset from the period between 1986Q1 and 2019Q4. …

Human Mental Workload: A Survey And A Novel Inclusive Definition, Luca Longo, Christopher D. Wickens, Gabriella Hancock, P.A. Hancock

Articles

Human mental workload is arguably the most invoked multidimensional construct in Human Factors and Ergonomics, getting momentum also in Neuroscience and Neuroergonomics. Uncertainties exist in its characterization, motivating the design and development of computational models, thus recently and actively receiving support from the discipline of Computer Science. However, its role in human performance prediction is assured. This work is aimed at providing a synthesis of the current state of the art in human mental workload assessment through considerations, definitions, measurement techniques as well as applications, Findings suggest that, despite an increasing number of associated research works, a single, reliable and …

Towards An Inclusive Co-Design Toolkit: Perceptions And Experiences Of Co-Design Stakeholders, Eamon Aswad, Emma Murphy, Claudia Fernandez-Rivera, Sarah Boland

Articles

Participatory design holds great potential for the creation of inclusive technology but existing toolkits and resources to support co-design are not always accessible to designers and co-designers with disabilities. In this paper we present two studies to assist in facilitating the creation of a sustainable, accessible, inclusive co-design toolkit for individuals with intellectual disabilities i) exploration of the perceptions and experiences of lecturers (n =5) and students (n= 5) involved in co-design activities via individual interviews and ii) a protocol and initial findings from focus groups with men and women with intellectual disabilities to inform on best co-design practices (n=15). …

Response: Radicalism And Democracy In Monetary System Reform, John Crawford

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rulemaking's Second Founding, Richard L. Marcus

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Legal And Moral Responsibility To Protect, Karen Musalo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Originalism: Arizona's Founding Progressives On Extreme Punishment, John Mills, Aliya Sternstein

Faculty Scholarship

Originalism, together with textualism, has been of growing interest to legal scholars and jurists alike. Discerning and putting forth the views of “the founders” has become part and parcel of effective advocacy, particularly regarding constitutional questions. Arizona is no exception, with its courts explicitly giving originalism primacy over all other interpretive doctrines for discerning the meaning of an ambiguous provision of its Constitution.

Yet, the Arizona state courts have not engaged with the views of the state’s founders on key issues concerning the purposes of punishment, as demonstrated by the founders’ words and deeds. Arizona was founded in 1912 as …

The House Always Wins: Doctrine And Animus In California’S Covid-19 Prison Litigation, Hadar Aviram

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Making Of The Supreme Court Rules, Scott Dodson

Faculty Scholarship

The reality that rules define institutions is no less applicable to the Su- preme Court. Yet the literature on the Supreme Court Rules, and the rulemak- ing process behind them, is practically nonexistent. Part of the reason is that the rulemaking process for the Supreme Court Rules is a black box—the Court promulgates its rules with neither oversight nor transparency. This Arti- cle, relying on interviews with current and former government officials, opens that black box to reveal the history of the rulemaking process for the Supreme Court Rules from the 1980s to the present. That process, as contrasted with …

A Call For An Intersectional Feminist Restorative Justice Approach To Addressing The Criminalization Of Black Girls, Thalia Gonzalez, Donna Coker

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regulating Democratized Investing, Abraham Cable

Faculty Scholarship

Robinhood and its imitators activated millions of new investors. Perhaps we should applaud them for finally resurrecting the retail investor after a decades-long decline. There are, however, reasons for concern. Robinhood racked up record fines in the run-up to its IPO. Its users are young, inexperienced, and prone to speculating in risky investments. Given these concerns, this Article considers how to protect this new class of “ultra-retail investors” while also leaving regulatory breathing room for these new market participants. It concludes that many current regulatory approaches risk being ineffectual or stamping out ultra-retail investing altogether by targeting product features that …

The New Normal: Regulatory Dysfunction As Policymaking, Ming Hsu Chen, Daimeon Shanks

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars often presume that administrative dysfunction is a deviation from the norm of regularity in administrative law. This presumption is reinforced by courts who defer to agencies on the basis of a legal fiction of idealized regularity. In reality, irregularities are common in policymaking and they make agencies vulnerable to dysfunction. Irregularities are not bugs, but features of the administrative state. Sometimes, a national emergency makes political influence unavoidable and urges departures from usual regulatory processes. At other times, however, the framing of a problem as a national emergency is a pretextual justification to pursue a pre- determined political goal …

Colorblind Nationalism And The Limits Of Liberalism, Ming Hsu Chen

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers and lawyers posit formal citizenship as the key to inclusion. Rather than presume that formal citizenship will necessarily promote equality, this Article examines the relationship between citizenship, racial equality, and nationalism. It asks: What role does formal citizenship play in excluding noncitizens and Asian, Latinx, and Muslim citizens racialized as foreigners? What effects does it have on the meaning of being American as a non-White citizen? The Article argues that commitments to colorblind equality and democratic self-governance of the nation stand in contradiction to aspirations to protect all persons within the nation. Consequently, individual rights designed to remedy racial …

Patents As Property For The Takings, Robin Feldman

Faculty Scholarship

The Fifth Amendment’s Compensation Clause contains only a few simple words: “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” Yet these simple words have confounded legal minds for over 200 years, and as Congress has contemplated various patent law reforms in recent decades, the specter of the Fifth Amendment looms on the horizon. Conventionally, commentators and judges break down the clause into a few diferent components, each of which has generated a voluminous body of caselaw and corresponding scholarly inquiry. First, there is the question of takings: How does one know if something has been “taken” …

Critical Race Feminism, Health, And Restorative Practices In Schools: Centering The Experiences Of Black And Latina Girls, Thalia Gonzalez, Rebecca Epstein

Faculty Scholarship

Restorative practices (RP) in K-12 schools in the United States have grown exponentially since the early 1990s. Developing against a backdrop of systemic racism, RP has become embedded in educa- tion practice and policy to counteract the harmful and persistent patterns of disparities in school discipline experienced by students of color. Within this legal, social, and political context, the em- pirical evidence that has been gathered on school-based restora- tive justice has framed and named RP as a behavioral interven- tion aimed at reducing discipline incidents—that is, an “alternative” to punitive and exclusionary practices. While this view of RP is …

Police Secrecy Exceptionalism, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

Every state has a set of transparency statutes that bind state and local governments. In theory, these statutes apply with equal force to every agency. Yet, in practice, law enforcement agencies enjoy a wide variety of unique secrecy protections denied to other government entities. Legislators write police-specific exemptions into public records laws. Judges develop procedural approaches that they apply exclusively to police and prosecutorial records. Police departments claim special secrecy protections from the bottom up. This Article maps the legal infrastructure of police-records secrecy. It draws upon the text of the public records statutes in all fifty states, along with …

Public Undersight, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Secrecy Creep, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars have long been fascinated by the topic of government secrecy. Yet they have largely focused their attention on federal secrecy, rarely exploring secrecy in other contexts. This Article addresses this gap. It turns its attention to state and local government secrets, applying the lens of federal secrecy to the subfederal regime. In doing so, it identifies a troubling new development in state and local law: the migration of powerful federal secrecy protections, initially developed to shield the national security state, into the state and local context. I refer to this process as “secrecy creep.” By illuminating the architecture …

Transparency Deserts, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

Few contest the importance of a robust transparency regime in a democratic system of government. In the United States, the “crown jewel” of this regime is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Yet despite widespread agreement about the importance of transparency in government, few are satisfied with FOIA. Since its enactment, the statute has engendered criticism from transparency advocates and critics alike for insufficiently serving the needs of both the public and the government. Legal scholars have widely documented these flaws in the federal public records law. In contrast, scholars have paid comparatively little attention to transparency laws at the …

The De Facto Reporter's Privilege, Christina Koningisor

Faculty Scholarship

abstract. While the overwhelming majority of states have established constitutional, statu- tory, or common-law protections for reporters who shield the identity of a confidential source, there is no uniform, crosscutting federal reporter’s privilege. As a consequence, reporters subpoe- naed in federal cases often lack effective formal protections. This can have a chilling effect on news- gathering: sources—and reporters—may find little comfort in knowing that a source’s anonymity is preserved only at a judge’s or prosecutor’s discretion or by a reporter’s willingness to go to jail. For decades, both those in favor of a formal federal reporter’s privilege and those opposed …

The Negotiable Implementation Of Environmental Law, Dave Owen

Faculty Scholarship

tional wisdom describes environmental law as a field filled with rigid mandates. ith that rigidity as a key premise, and they allege that inflexibility is a central failing or, alternatively, a squandered virtue. Influential reform proposals follow from both allegations. This Article demonstrates that these premises are often mistaken. Based on literature reviews and interviews with environmental-law practitioners, it shows that flexibility pervades environmental law, and regulators, regulated entities, and other interest groups routinely use negotiations to navigate that flexibility. Indeed, negotiation is so central to the field that one cannot understand environmental law, either in theory or practice, without …

In Search Of The Public Interest, Jodi L. Short

Faculty Scholarship

“Public interest” standards in statutory delegations to agencies represent the greatest hopes and the darkest fears of the U.S. administrative state. On the one hand, the public interest standard provides a vessel for agencies to infuse policymaking with the moral and ethical commitments of the community. On the other hand, regulation in the public interest opens the door to the arbitrary exercise of tyrannical state power. Despite the lofty aspirations and ominous warnings about regulation in the public interest, little is known about how agencies actually decide what is in the public interest when charged by statute to do so. …

Normative Values Of College-Aged Men And Women For The 1.5-Mile Run Test On A Treadmill For Cardiorespiratory Fitness, Eli Baginski

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Physical activity has been shown to positively affect both mental and physical health. A means of determining an individual’s physical fitness is a necessary tool in developing and maintaining a healthy exercise routine. The 1.5-mile run test provides an accurate and reliable estimate of VO₂ max and can be used to routinely assess cardiorespiratory fitness. The aim of this study is to develop normative data for the 1.5 mile run test for both college-aged women and men. We examine how the calculated normative data presented produced by the Cooper Institute compares to our measured values, as well as compare …

Forecasting The Outcomes Of Managing A Rare Endemic Plant At Its Elevational Limit Under Climate Change Scenarios, Ethan Reibsome

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Lupinus constancei (Lassics lupine) is an exceptionally rare forb with a population that in 2020 consisted of 1,300 individuals located on two adjacent mountaintops in northwestern California, USA. Past work has demonstrated the species is threatened by high levels of seed predation by small mammals, which is likely the result of fire exclusion and the subsequent vegetation encroachment that both increases small mammal habitat and directly reduces suitable habitat for the species. Because of this, active management through caging of reproductive individuals to reduce seed consumption has been conducted every year since 2003. In addition, growing season temperatures have increased …

Evaluating The Use Of Barn Owl Nest Boxes For Rodent Pest Control In Winegrape Vineyards In Napa Valley, Ashley N. Hansen

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Attracting natural enemies to farms to reduce pests has long been a part of integrated pest management for insects, but knowledge of the impact of raptors on rodents and other vertebrate pests is comparatively sparse. In this study, I compared rodent prey on winegrape vineyards in Napa California with and without occupied barn owl nest boxes. We collected data before the breeding season, when hunting pressure should be light, and again when adult owls were hunting actively to feed their chicks. I used the open-hole method to quantify an index of gopher activity, and Sherman live traps to estimate the …