Digital Commons Network^™

Back To Basics In Evaluating Belief, Nazila Ghanea

Emory International Law Review

The growing academic literature around freedom of thought, conscience, and religion has stretched the topic to many arenas and offered a detailed analysis of its relevance to numerous related concerns. It has, rightly, gone beyond a theoretical consideration as an individual right to also examining it within the community and society at large. This Article, however, assesses whether we need to return to ensuring that freedom of thought, conscience, and religion rest on a sufficiently close nexus with the conviction of particular claimant(s), and why this matters.

The Unintended Consequences Of The Court's Religious Freedom Revolution: A History Of White Supremacy And Private Christian Church Schools, Vania Blaiklock

Scholarly Articles

Although private church schools have historically received less attention than charter schools and other private nonsectarian schools in public discourse, in recent years, the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has allowed private church schools to make great strides in achieving state funding. At a time where public education is facing criticism on all sides, it seems natural that school choice supporters are more vocal than ever. This Essay takes a closer look at private church schools and their relationship to white supremacy in anticipation of the Court’s decision in Carson ex rel. O.C. v. Makin. Ultimately, that case will …

Indigenous Language Revitalization: Success, Sustainability, And The Future Of Human Culture, Grace Lewis

Capstone Showcase

This thesis looks at different styles of Indigenous language revitalization programs and seeks to delineate the three most successful characteristics seen across differing designs in an effort to promote the presence of these characteristics in existing programs. The literature analyzed outlines three main schools of thought: first, that language-based education is the most effective program design, second, that language-based education is only effective if it is directed and driven by the community it serves, and third, that culture-based education is the most effective design. The data rejects the idea that one design is superior to another, and instead presents three …

Two Sides Of The Same Token: An Examination Of Segregation, Memory, And White Supremacy In Contemporary Church Schools, Vania Barbriana Blaiklock

Scholarly Articles

A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of The College of William & Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts

This thesis is a portfolio containing two essays about private Christian church schools with an introductory essay to connect both projects. The first essay, “A Convergence of Purpose: Segregation and White Supremacy in Contemporary Church Schools,” is a comprehensive examination of the development and creation of church schools that first looks at the distinction between church schools and segregation academies, and then assesses the relevance that the distinction, or the lack thereof, plays in maintaining white supremacy …

The Cost-Effectiveness And Feminization Of The Human Papillomavirus Vaccine, Audrey Jammes

Scripps Senior Theses

Approved in 2006, the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine provided a medical breakthrough in combating cancer by inoculating first female and then male adolescents in 2010. In 2016, a new HPV vaccine was approved for all adolescents. However, it is the most expensive vaccine created in the United States and its female centered prescription led to debates regarding the vaccine’s necessity and risks. For the STS portion of this paper, analysis of the language in the vaccine’s prescriptions from 2006, 2010, and 2016 demonstrates two implicit assumptions regarding female health built into the vaccine’s rollout. Comparison of the two assumptions to …

Notes Toward A Supreme (Legal) Fiction, Emily Kidd White

All Papers

Maksymilian Del Mar’s new book, Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication offers a finely drawn map of various ways of reasoning in and through law. The book is about the ways that thoughts, values, commitments and ways of seeing, move, take hold, settle, startle and – at times – release grip, reorient, and/or transmute. It is a book that is teeming with references. There are threads to pull at everywhere.

The Construction Of Minorities: Self-Determination And The Legal Politics Of Religious Difference In Late Northern Nigeria, Circa 1949-1960, Rabiat Akande

All Papers

No abstract provided.

The Roots Of Collapse: Imposing Constitutional Governance, Catherine Baylin Duryea

Faculty Publications

The foundational assumption of constitutional governance poses a conundrum for contemporary state-builders: a constitution heavily influenced by foreigners does not represent the views of the governed. Can a modern state-building effort foster democratic institutions when the new government reflects foreign? Nowhere was this tension more apparent than in Afghanistan, where the United States and the United Nations were heavily involved in drafting the 2004 Constitution. They shaped the process from the initial framework to the final, frenzied approval. Foreigners were engaged at both the procedural level—determining how the negotiations would occur and who would participate—and at the substantive level—providing input …

Group-Based Diabetes Self-Management Education For Somali Population With Type Ii Diabetes Mellitus, Hamdi Abdi

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Background and Purpose: Type II Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is a serious chronic disease that requires knowledge, daily self-management, and lifestyle modifications. T2DM is a widespread disease in Western world, however, it affects racial minority immigrant populations, including Somalis at disproportionally higher rates than the general population. This quality improvement project was developed and piloted to discern whether culturally appropriate small group-based education program for Somali patients with T2DM may improve self-management skills to alleviate long-term complications.

Methods: This project used descriptive statistics to compare participants’ knowledge and T2DM self-management behavior pre and post intervention. Subsequent to Seattle University IRB approval, …

Implementation Of A Patient Satisfaction Survey: A Pilot Project, Amy Brenner

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Background: Patients who report higher satisfaction scores have better healthcare outcomes and lower financial burden in comparison to those who report lower satisfaction scores. Those less satisfied with their medical care tend to have poorer physical and mental health, which can impact daily life. For students in particular, health status impacts academic performance. Patient satisfaction surveys are a standard tool used to determine areas needing improvement within a healthcare delivery system.

Objective: The purpose of this project was to implement a patient satisfaction survey at a student health center on a university campus.

Design: The project was a two-month pilot …

Use Of Virtual Resources For Older Adults With Mild Depressive Symptoms, Stephanie Sirisithi

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

With the higher prevalence of depression and disrupted access to healthcare caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rapid shift towards utilizing virtual platforms for treating patients. The use of technology was an innovative way of solving the dilemma but use of this is low among older adults and minorities of low socioeconomic status due to education and access.

The purpose of this study was to develop a guide of virtual resources for residents of an assisted living and to assess its usability and effectiveness in reducing depressive symptoms in lower socioeconomic status and minority older adults. The Donabedian …

How To Bring Your Kids Up Queer: Family Law Realism, Then And Now, Kris Franklin, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Paula Ettelbrick fought for us.

As a pragmatic and radical litigator, Ettelbrick spent years trying to use a frequently uncomprehending and often outright hostile court system to protect LGBTQ+ Americans. While her work took her into the many areas of law that touched queer lives, a special focus and passion of her advocacy was reserved for queer families.

Paula also tried to warn us.

In the absence of legal recognition for the families we construct, queer lives are rendered not just invisible but virtually nonexistent; we become legal strangers to our loved ones in ways that violently obliterate our …

Analyzing Behavioral Adaptation To Covid-19 And Return To Pre-Pandemic Baselines In A Cohort Of College Seniors, Vlado Vojdanovski

Computer Science Senior Theses

As the critical phase of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be winding down, it is important to analyze the adjustment to COVID-19 and return to normalcy of various populations. In this study we focus on the behavioral adjustments exhibited by a cohort of N=114 college seniors. To infer COVID-19 adjustment we compare the 2021 year (second year of COVID-19) to the 2020 year (first year of COVID-19) and 2019 (prepandemic baseline year). We begin with a broad analysis between the second and first covid year, finding that the second year of COVID-19 shows significant returns to pre-pandemic baselines on multiple …

He, She, They, Other: An Examination Of Gender Associations With The Chatelaine In The Anglo-Saxon Culture, Dane A. Williams

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The purpose of this paper is to study the chatelaine as a marker of gender attribution and overall usage within the Anglo-Saxon culture. Chatelaines are artifacts used to suspend multiple items to be employed for such purposes as grooming, tools, or keys and have been used widely from the Roman occupation of England during which it was used by all genders, to the Ninth Century when it was primarily used by women. As such, it is asserted that a single artifact should not to be solely relied upon to assign a gender identity to a burial, that these should be …

"Should Supreme Court Justices Fear Access To Their Papers? An Empirical Study Of The Use Of Three Archival Collections", Susan Demaine, Benjamin J. Keele

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Susan deMaine's contribution to this volume is "Should Supreme Court Justices Fear Access to Their Papers? An Empirical Study of the Use of Three Archival Collections." Co-authored by Benjamin J. Keele.

US. Supreme Court justices typically donate their working papers to archives upon their retirement, often with lengthy embargoes. 1 Researchers have debated whether the justices should be required to retain and disclose their papers as government · records, but there has been little study of how the papers are used in scholarly and journalistic discussions of the Court.· This empirical study examines how the papers of Justices William Brennan, …

Proxy Re-Encryption In Blockchain-Based Application, Wangcheng Yuan

Master's Projects

Nowadays, blockchain-based technology has risen to a new dimension. With the advantage of the decentralized identity, data are transferred through decentralized and public ledgers. Those new contracts provide great visibility. However, there is still a need to keep some data private in many cases. Those private data should be encrypted while still benefiting from the decentralized on-chain protocol. Securing those private data in such a decentralized blockchain-based system is thus a critical problem. Our solution provides a decentralized protocol that lets users grant access to their private data with proxy re-encryption in SpartanGold (a blockchain-based cryptocurrency). We implement a third-party …

Whose Voices Count?: Sourcing U.S. American Television News About The World, David C. Oh, Omotayo O. Banjo, Nancy A. Jennings

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

The current study examines the extent to which U.S. coverage of world news events relies on White and Western sources as well as the role that journalists’ race, story type, and interview type have in the selection of news sources. Furthermore, this study examines whether such sourcing biases exist across commercial and public networks, namely ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. Relying on a critical media effects approach, we drew connections between indexing theory and critical race and postcolonial studies to conduct a content analysis of more than 200 news stories and more than 600 sources in 2019 and 2020. The …

Pitch Perfect: Impression Formation And Impression Management In Women's Pitch Modulation, Grace A. Corrigan

Scripps Senior Theses

How does the pitch of a woman’s voice impact how she is perceived, and how might women change the pitch of their voices to fit the situation at hand? Study 1 examined whether pitch plays a role in impression formation. Participants listened to two women’s voices at three pitch levels (raised, unchanged, lowered) and rated the speakers’ personality traits. Ratings of speaker competence, confidence, and intelligence were significantly lower for the pitch-raised voices than for the unchanged or pitch-lowered voices. Additionally, ratings of speaker persuasiveness and attractiveness were significantly lower for the pitch-raised voices than for the unchanged voices. No …

Virginia Woolf And The Consolations Of Abstraction, Ella Murdock Gardner

Scripps Senior Theses

Woolf believed that there are “two spheres: the novel; and life,” and her “great difficulty is the usual one—how to adjust the two worlds” (A Writer’s Diary 203, 208). But with this “great difficulty” comes great possibility; by pointing to the separation of these two spheres within and throughout her works, Woolf finds ways to create meaning from this border. Even as Woolf’s novels deal with the tragic restrictions of social conventions, the insurmountable barriers to communication and intimacy, the petty insignificance of human life and death within the context of an uncaring universe, the abstraction of both their …

Picture This! Arts Integration In The Classroom To Aid Retention Of Abstract Science Concepts, Chloe Gorman

Scripps Senior Theses

Previous cognitive science research has shown the “drawing effect,” in which people tend to have better recall for something they’ve drawn rather than written. The drawing effect is an example of a “desirable difficulty,” as drawing often takes more mental effort than reading or writing. This study explored whether the drawing effect would persist for more abstract words, which might be overly difficult to draw; rather, they might be a difficulty that is no longer desirable and instead just a source of distraction or cognitive overload. Participants were presented with more abstract and less abstract science terms and alternated drawing …

Let’S Have A Playdate! Comparing Autistic Children's Social Behavior During Play Sessions With Siblings Versus Peers, Clare Boldt

Scripps Senior Theses

Autistic individuals can struggle with social interactions and forming friendships. While siblings and peers are used for social skills intervention, there is a paucity of research analyzing differences in autistic children’s play with siblings versus peers. Investigating these behavior differences helps clinicians learn how to best support social skill development, improve sibling relationships, and determine ideal peer mediators for interventions. I compare social behaviors of autistic children during play sessions with their sibling versus a non-sibling peer. The behaviors measured were prosocial behaviors, cooperative and parallel play, verbalizations (appropriate and inappropriate), aggressive behaviors, eloping, and stereotypy. Based on previous literature, …

Spoken Language Interaction With Robots: Recommendations For Future Research, Casey Kennington

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human–robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language interaction capabilities is still very limited. In this article, based on the report of an interdisciplinary workshop convened by the National Science Foundation, we identify key scientific and engineering advances needed to enable effective spoken language interaction with robotics. We make 25 recommendations, involving eight general themes: putting human needs first, better modeling the social and interactive aspects of language, improving robustness, creating new methods …

Understanding Intention For Machine Theory Of Mind: A Position Paper, Casey Kennington

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Theory of Mind is often characterized as the ability to recognize desires, beliefs, and intentions of others. In this position paper, I look at the literature on modeling Theory of Mind in machines and find that, to date, intention is not usually a focus. I define what I mean by intention—choice with commitment—following prior work. Intention has a long history of research in some communities, and I offer one theoretical framework for modeling intention as a starting point. I take inspiration from how children learn intention through joint attention with others and how that leads to Theory of Mind. I …

Incremental Unit Networks For Distributed, Symbolic Multimodal Processing And Representation, Mir Tahsin Imtiaz, Casey Kennington

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Incremental dialogue processing has been an important topic in spoken dialogue systems research, but the broader research community that makes use of language interaction (e.g., chatbots, conversational AI, spoken interaction with robots) have not adopted incremental processing despite research showing that humans perceive incremental dialogue as more natural. In this paper, we extend prior work that identifies the requirements for making spoken interaction with a system natural with the goal that our framework will be generalizable to many domains where speech is the primary method of communication. The Incremental Unit framework offers a model of incremental processing that has been …

Symbol And Communicative Grounding Through Object Permanence With A Mobile Robot, Josue Torres-Fonseca, Catherine Henry, Casey Kennington

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Object permanence is the ability to form and recall mental representations of objects even when they are not in view. Despite being a crucial developmental step for children, object permanence has had only some exploration as it relates to symbol and communicative grounding in spoken dialogue systems. In this paper, we leverage SLAM as a module for tracking object permanence and use a robot platform to move around a scene where it discovers objects and learns how they are denoted. We evaluated by comparing our system’s effectiveness at learning words from human dialogue partners both with and without object permanence. …

Preface, Kisung Lee, Liang Jie Zhang

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Tweeting Patterns And Public Engagement On Twitter During The Recognition Period Of The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Study Of Two U.S. States, Misbah Ul Hoque, Kisung Lee, Jessica L. Beyer, Sara R. Curran, Katie S. Gonser, Nina S.N. Lam, Volodymyr V. Mihunov, Kejin Wang

Faculty Publications

The abundance of available information on social media can provide invaluable insights into people's responses to health information and public health guidance concerning COVID-19. This study examines tweeting patterns and public engagement on Twitter, as forms of social media, related to public health messaging in two U.S. states (Washington and Louisiana) during the early stage of the pandemic. We analyze more than 7M tweets and 571K COVID-19-related tweets posted by users in the two states over the first 25 days of the pandemic in the U.S. (Feb. 23, 2020, to Mar. 18, 2020). We also qualitatively code and examine 460 …

Reformed Men: Alternative Masculinities In Experimental American Literature, Manuel Reza

English Theses

Gender is an integral aspect to one’s lived experience; however, the collective understanding of gender is constantly being redefined. Consequently, the expectations attached to a particular gender identity are also being questioned. Current gender discourse calls attention to the fluidity of gender and experiences which diverge from traditional representations of gender. This thesis discusses works of contemporary experimental American literature from the perspective of masculinity studies. As a whole, masculinity studies seeks to address issues related to traditional male depictions in literature. This thesis aims to show how authors utilize traditional and experimental narrative elements to present alternatives to prescribed …

Religious Violence And Twitter: Networks Of Knowledge, Empathy And Fascination, Samah Senbel, Carly Seigel, Emily Bryan

School of Computer Science & Engineering Faculty Publications

Twitter analysis through data mining, text analysis, and visualization, coupled with the application of actor-network-theory, reveals a coalition of heterogenous religious affiliations around grief and fascination. While religious violence has always existed, the prevalence of social media has led to an increase in the magnitude of discussions around the topic. This paper examines the different reactions on Twitter to violence targeting three religious communities: the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings. The attacks were all perpetrated by white nationalists with firearms. By analyzing large Twitter datasets in response to the attacks, …

Speech And Enchantment In Early Greek Thought From The Archaic To The Hellenistic Period, R. J. Barnes

Bryn Mawr College Dissertations and Theses

When describing complex aesthetic or cognitive experiences, speakers often reach for idiomatic language. For ancient Greeks, one major cache of idiomatic terms comes from the language of enchantment. This dissertation accounts for how and why ancient Greeks used words related to θέλγω, κηλέω, γοητεία, μαγεία, μαγγανεία, ἐπῳδή, and ψυχαγωγία as a way of describing the effects of speech and song. Examination is given to writers from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. Most important are Gorgias of Leontini, Plato, and Philodemus, who each remark in detail about the experience of enchantment. The study reveals that Greek writers use the language …