Digital Commons Network^™

The Trouble With Harman And Lorandos’S Attempted Refutation Of The Meier Et Al. Family Court Study, Joan S. Meier, Sean Dickson, Chris S. O'Sullivan, Leora N. Rosen

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Harman and Lorandos assert that they have produced a study analyzing custody cases involving alienation allegations, which “disconfirms” the findings from our study of family court out- comes in cases involving abuse and alienation. In addition to pointing out the authors’ misrepresentation and mis-reporting of some of their findings, this Response details a series of profound flaws in their study’s design, dataset construction and variable coding, interpretations and analytic approach, as well as a series of statistical errors. The statistical analyses demonstrate that Harman and Lorandos’s five findings of a gender bias in favor of fathers are not supported by …

Code Free Or Die: Regulations Of Computer Code And The First Amendment, Dawn C. Nunziato

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

After the San Bernardino terrorist attack in 2015, the FBI sought to enlist Apple in its efforts to acquire potential evidence about the attack by accessing the contents of the cell phone used by the shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The FBI claimed that the messages, contacts, and other information stored on Farook’s cell phone could lead them to potential co-conspirators who assisted in the attack or who were involved in planning other terrorist activities, or other relevant evidence. The FBI claimed that it needed Apple’s help because the cell phone in question embodied a number of security features familiar to …

Afterword: Why 'Taming The Megabanks' Should Remain A Top Priority For Financial Regulators And Policymakers, Arthur E. Wilmarth Jr.

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This essay was published as part of a law review symposium that evaluated my work on the regulation of large, complex financial institutions. Part I of my essay discusses the other articles published in the symposium issue and describes their relationship to my own work. Part II analyzes the global financial crisis that began in March 2020, following the outbreak and rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus. Part II also reviews the extraordinary actions taken by governments and central banks in response to that crisis. Part II argues that the pandemic- induced financial crisis and its aftermath confirm two lessons …

Firearms And Initial Aggressors, Cynthia Lee

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Under the initial aggressor doctrine, an “initial aggressor” loses the right to claim self-defense. Until recently, judges, legal scholars, and others have paid relatively little attention to this doctrinal limitation on the defense of self-defense. Two high-profile criminal trials in 2021 put the initial aggressor doctrine front and center of the national conversation on issues concerning self-defense and racial justice. One involved Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old teenager who brought an AR-15 style rifle to Kenosha, Wisconsin during the third night of racial protests in August 2020, and ended up shooting three men, killing two and injuring the third. The other …

The Common Sense Of A Wealth Tax: Thomas Paine & Taxation As Freedom From Aristocracy, Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Vanessa Williamson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Thomas Paine’s writing helped spur the American colonies to independence and ensure that the new nation would be a republic, not a monarchy. In light of the renewed interest in wealth taxes, this article provides a close examination of Thomas Paine’s wealth tax proposal in the second volume of The Rights of Man. Unlike Paine’s proposal to tax inheritances, his 1792 proposal to tax wealth on an annual basis is often overlooked. The article identifies Paine’s various design specifications, provides original estimates of the impact of Paine’s wealth tax proposal within his own time period and as applied to billionaires …

Regulating Big Tech: Lessons From The Ftc’S Do Not Call Rule, William E. Kovacic, David A. Hyman

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Big Tech (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google) is under regulatory assault. Cases have been brought against each of these companies in multiple countries around the world, but there is an emerging consensus that more needs to be done – most likely in the form of ex ante regulation that prescribes rules of conduct for dominant information platforms. The European Union and the United Kingdom are well on the way to establishing such frameworks, and the United States appears poised to undertake similar measures in the coming years. Most of the debate has focused on the case for ex ante regulation …

Unsexing Breastfeeding, Naomi Schoenbaum

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

For half a century, constitutional sex equality doctrine has been combating harmful sex stereotypes by invalidating laws that treat women as caregivers and men as breadwinners. Yet decades after the constitutional sex equality revolution unsexed parenting roles, one area of parenting has escaped this doctrine’s exacting gaze: breastfeeding. Beginning in the 1990s in the wake of public health efforts to promote breastfeeding, a raft of laws were enacted, from insurance coverage mandates under the Affordable Care Act to workplace accommodations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, that provide substantial breastfeeding protections and benefits, but only to women. Although the sexed …

Democracy And Demography, Paul S. Berman, Neal S. Mehrotra, Kathryn S. Sadasivan

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

American democracy is under siege. This is so because of the confluence of three trends: (1) demographic change and residential segregation, which increasingly have placed more racially diverse Democratic Party voters in cities and suburbs, while rural areas have become more white and Republican; (2) a constitutional structure—particularly the Electoral College, the composition of the Senate, and the use of small, winner-take-all legislative districts—that gives disproportionate representation to rural populations; and (3) the willingness of this rural Republican minority to use its disproportionate power to further entrench counter-majoritarian structures, whether through extreme partisan gerrymandering, increased voter suppression efforts, court-packing, or …

Selective Judicial Activism In The Roberts Court, Alan B. Morrison

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito offers two main reasons why there is no Due Process right to an abortion in the Constitution, and hence why Roe v. Wade should be overturned: abortion is not mentioned in the text, and decisions about whether abortions should be permitted and, if so, under what conditions, are properly the province of the elected representatives and not federal judges. In this essay I show that, in many of the most significant cases decided by the Roberts Court, the Court has disregarded both of those reasons, and engaged in the kind …

Remorse, Relational Legal Consciousness, And The Reproduction Of Carceral Logic, Kathryne M. Young, Hannah Chimowitz

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these “lifers” will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person’s remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional authenticity. Instead, remorse involves numerous elements, including the relationship between a person’s past and present motivations, beliefs, and affective states. To understand how parole board members make …

Does A District Mandate Matter For The Behavior Of Politicians? An Analysis Of Roll-Call Votes And Parliamentary Speeches, Andreas Born, Aljoscha Janssen

Research Collection School Of Economics

In most democracies, members of parliament (MPs) are elected either through a party list or by a district. We use a discontinuity in the German electoral system to investigate the causal effect of a district election on an MP’s conformity with the party line. A district election does not affect roll-call voting behavior causally, possibly due to overall high adherence to party-line voting. Analyzing the parliamentary speeches of each MP allows us to overcome the high party-line discipline with regard to parliamentary voting. Using textual analysis and machine learning techniques, we create two measures of closeness of an MP’s speeches …

Are Simple Mechanisms Optimal When Agents Are Unsophisticated?, Jiangtao Li, Piotr Dworczak

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the design of mechanisms involving agents that have limited strategic sophistication. We define a mechanism to be simple if—given the assumed level of strategic sophistication—agents can determine their optimal strategy. We examine whether it is optimal for the mechanism designer who faces strategically unsophisticated agents to offer a simple mechanism. We show that when the designer uses a mechanism that is not simple, while she loses the ability to predict play, she may nevertheless be better off no matter how agents resolve their strategic confusion

Uniform Nonparametric Inference For Spatially Dependent Panel Data: The Xtnpsreg Command, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao, Wenyu Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this article, we introduce a command, xtnpsreg, that implements a uniform nonparametric inference procedure for possibly unbalanced panel datasets with general forms of spatio-temporal dependence. We demonstrate how to apply this command in several use cases, including (i) the nonparametric estimation of conditional mean function and its marginal response; (ii) the construction of uniform confidence bands for these nonparametric functional parameters; (iii) specification tests for parametric model restrictions; and (iv) the estimation and uniform inference for functional coefficients in semi-nonparametric models.

Energetics Of Interrupted Development In Megachile Rotundata, Rikki Walter

Biological Sciences

Insects in temperate regions may experience temperature fluctuations during springtime development which can lead to low temperature stress. Previous research has shown that short artificial fluctuations in temperature during interrupted development are advantageous when compared to static temperatures, but it is unclear why. One idea is it allows insects to repair chill injury and maintain cellular membrane potential. My goal was to understand what macromolecules are maintaining ion balance through measuring the respiratory quotient (RQ), trehalose, glycogen, simple sugars, and lipids using biochemical assays. The development of Megachile rotundata was stimulated for two weeks before interrupting with either fluctuating or …

Short- And Long-Term Effects Of Environmental Variability On The Ecophysiology Of A Solitary Bee, Kayla Earls

Biological Sciences

Environments can vary across seasons. One characteristic of spring in temperate regions is fluctuations in temperature. Sudden bouts of low temperature can have lasting effects on ectotherms that rely on ambient temperature. For developing insects, being unable to avoid or manage these low temperatures puts them further at risk. For example, Megachile rotundata undergo active development in the spring. Exposure to low temperatures as pupae for short periods does not decrease survival but does affect adult morphology. Pollination services may also be affected if temperatures are too low to promote flight in adults. The overall question is what are the …

Establishing And Characterizing Patient-Derived Breast Cancer Cell Lines, Farid Solaymani Mohammadi

Biological Sciences

Commercial cancer cell lines have long been extensively used as an important platform to study cancer. They have contributed to a plethora of discoveries in the field of cancer research. However, there are limitations with using these cell lines, such as induced mutations over the long-term in vitro culture. These mutations cause incorrect exhibition of the in vivo characteristics of the cancer cells. Here, we focused on establishing Patient-derived breast cancer cell lines and attempted to characterize them in terms of several biomarkers that are shown to be overexpressed in breast cancer cells. Patient-derived breast cancer cell lines are more …

M-Cubes: An Efficient And Portable Implementation Of Multi-Dimensional Integration For Gpus, Ioannis Sakiotis, Kamesh Arumugam, Marc Paterno, Desh Ranjan, Balŝa Terzić, Mohammad Zubair

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The task of multi-dimensional numerical integration is frequently encountered in physics and other scientific fields, e.g., in modeling the effects of systematic uncertainties in physical systems and in Bayesian parameter estimation. Multi-dimensional integration is often time-prohibitive on CPUs. Efficient implementation on many-core architectures is challenging as the workload across the integration space cannot be predicted a priori. We propose m-Cubes, a novel implementation of the well-known Vegas algorithm for execution on GPUs. Vegas transforms integration variables followed by calculation of a Monte Carlo integral estimate using adaptive partitioning of the resulting space. mCubes improves performance on GPUs by maintaining relatively …

Introducing A Real-Time Advanced Eye Movements Analysis Pipeline, Gavindya Jayawardana

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Real-Time Advanced Eye Movements Analysis Pipeline (RAEMAP) is an advanced pipeline to analyze traditional positional gaze measurements as well as advanced eye gaze measurements. The proposed implementation of RAEMAP includes real-time analysis of fixations, saccades, gaze transition entropy, and low/high index of pupillary activity. RAEMAP will also provide visualizations of fixations, fixations on AOIs, heatmaps, and dynamic AOI generation in real-time. This paper outlines the proposed architecture of RAEMAP.

Camouflaged Poisoning Attack On Graph Neural Networks, Chao Jiang, Yi He, Richard Chapman, Hongyi Wu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have enabled the automation of many web applications that entail node classification on graphs, such as scam detection in social media and event prediction in service networks. Nevertheless, recent studies revealed that the GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where feeding GNNs with poisoned data at training time can lead them to yield catastrophically devastative test accuracy. This finding heats up the frontier of attacks and defenses against GNNs. However, the prior studies mainly posit that the adversaries can enjoy free access to manipulate the original graph, while obtaining such access could be too costly in …

I, Jill Alexander, American Girl Revolutionary, Taraneh M. Haghanikar

Faculty Publications

Analyzing the insider-outsider continuum in Remembrance of the Sun (1986, 2011) by Kate Gilmore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal different levels of being a female outsider protagonist moving along the insider-outsider continuum, maintaining an outsider voice, and at the same time developing an insider perspective. Remembrance of the Sun is a historical fiction authored by an outsider and set in 1978, one year before the Islamic revolution in Iran. After moving from New England to Tehran, Jill, a seventeen-year-old American girl, struggles to adjust to an unfamiliar lifestyle. However, her experience becomes a story of love and …

A Blockchain-Based Retribution Mechanism For Collaborative Intrusion Detection, Wenjun Fan, Shubham Kumar, Sang Yoon Chang, Younghee Park

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Collaborative intrusion detection approach uses the shared detection signature between the collaborative participants to facilitate coordinated defense. In the context of collaborative intrusion detection system (CIDS), however, there is no research focusing on the efficiency of the shared detection signature. The inefficient detection signature costs not only the IDS resource but also the process of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. In this paper, we therefore propose a blockchain-based retribution mechanism, which aims to incentivize the participants to contribute to verifying the efficiency of the detection signature in terms of certain distributed consensus. We implement a prototype using Ethereum blockchain, which instantiates …

Influence Of The Cpa Credential On The Life Satisfaction Of University Of Northern Iowa Accounting Alumni, Derek Richard Koppes

Honors Program Theses

This paper aims to explore the relationship between obtaining a CPA as a University of Northern Iowa accounting graduate and measures of life satisfaction. In this study, survey data were collected from a random sample of University of Northern Iowa accounting graduates. The research suggests that graduates who obtained the CPA credential have higher levels of life satisfaction. Accounting students at the University of Northern Iowa for years to come stand to benefit greatly from this research because the results of this study provide more insight into the favorable outcomes that are enjoyed by accounting alumni who elected to pursue …

Testing The Efficiency Of The Nfl Betting Market, Ryan Earl Oswald

Honors Program Theses

This paper seeks to investigate the NFL betting market, using statistical and economic tests to challenge the Efficient Market Hypothesis’ claim that it is efficient and no strategy can be expected to make a profit. Specifically, this paper studies the spread, over-under, and money line markets to see if each is efficient on their own and as a collective. In looking to see how these lines can influence the outcomes of each other, this paper finds a number of strategies that were profitable over the timeframe of the data. This shows that the NFL betting market was not completely efficient …

Leveraging Machine Learning For Detecting Iot-Based Interference In Operational Wifi Networks, Josh Pulse

Honors Program Theses

IoT (Internet of Things) devices have become increasingly popular in recent years while WiFi continues to serve as primary network provider indoors. With the advancements in technology, the networks of IoT devices continue to weave closely with indoor WiFi network deployments. Both kinds of these networks primarily operate in 2.4 GHz ISM Band (though latest WiFi standards can operate in 5 GHz and 60 GHz bands, too). With the multitude of tiny IoT sensors being deployed indoors alongside operational WiFi networks, severe interference scenarios cannot be ruled out. As a result of this interference, performance of WiFi networks is bound …

Evaluation Of House Staff Candidates For Program Fit: A Cohort-Based Controlled Study, Soo-Hoon Lee, Phillip H. Phan, Sanjay V. Desai

Management Faculty Publications

Background: Medical school academic achievements do not necessarily predict house staff job performance. This study explores a selection mechanism that improves house staff-program fit that enhances the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Milestones performance ratings.

Objective: Traditionally, house staff were selected primarily on medical school academic performance. To improve residency performance outcomes, the Program designed a theory-driven selection tool to assess house staff candidates on their personal values and goals fit with Program values and goals. It was hypothesized cohort performance ratings will improve because of the intervention.

Methods: Prospective quasi-experimental cohort design with data from two house staff …

A Zebra's Trust: How Rare Disease Communities' Participation In Data Trusts' Governance Builds Trust And Drives Research, Samantha C. Smith

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Data sharing plays an increasingly prominent role in society, but it remains a necessary component of rare disease research. Because rare diseases are--as the name indicates-- rare, researchers have only a small number of patients from whom to collect data, and the expense of cross-border data sharing to increase research data is significant. Nevertheless, the rise of artificial intelligence and precision medicine increases the need for usable rare disease data. Current legislation and regulations aimed at addressing rare diseases fall short in addressing these data sharing needs for rare disease research. While the European Union (EU) has invested in rare …

Evaluating Ideasthesia As A Creative Tool In Compositional Practice: A Personal Reflection On Coloured Hearing Synesthesia, Suzanne Kosowitz

Theses : Honours

This research presents an evaluation of my compositional process with regard to synesthesia as a creative tool. Traditionally, the phenomenon of synesthesia has been discussed in perceptual terms, such as something that is seen visually elicits an additional experience in another sensory domain, such as sound. However, recent research has identified that there is an additional process involved in creating the secondary sensory experience, which is a semantic representation of concepts (ideasthesia). Specifically, my research considers ideasthesia in combination with a personal reflection on coloured hearing to provide a retrospective analysis of one of my compositions, Dance in Defiance (2012) …

Predictive Models In Software Engineering: Challenges And Opportunities, Yanming Yang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Tingting Bi, John C. Grundy, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Predictive models are one of the most important techniques that are widely applied in many areas of software engineering. There have been a large number of primary studies that apply predictive models and that present well-performed studies in various research domains, including software requirements, software design and development, testing and debugging, and software maintenance. This article is a first attempt to systematically organize knowledge in this area by surveying a body of 421 papers on predictive models published between 2009 and 2020. We describe the key models and approaches used, classify the different models, summarize the range of key application …

Retro-Commissioning For Buildings: Problems And The Way Forward For A Policy Research Study, Wai Yee, Betty Chiu

Department of Construction, Environment and Engineering

Buildings represent a major source of energy use and significantly contribute to carbon emissions and hence, the global warming problem. Towards the goal of sustainable and smart buildings, worldwide a variety of voluntary and mandatory tools have been introduced to enhance buildings’ operational performance. Among these tools is retro-commissioning (RCx) - a knowledge-based systematic process to periodically check and improve existing buildings’ performance. However, the uptake of RCx in the building sector remains limited. Grounded on a literature review, this paper reports on the emergence and development of RCx, a comparison between RCx programmes in cities that pioneered to impose …

Github Discussions: An Exploratory Study Of Early Adoption, Hideaki Hata, Nicole Novielli, Sebastian Baltes, Raula Kula, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software projects. To understand how developers use this novel feature, how they perceive it, and how it impacts the development processes, we conducted a mixed-methods study based on early adopters of GitHub discussions from January until July 2020. We found that: (1) errors, unexpected behavior, and code reviews are prevalent discussion categories; (2) there is a positive relationship between project member involvement and …