Digital Commons Network^™

How Biden Could Keep Filling The Federal Circuit Court Vacancies, Carl Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

In October 2020, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speculated that the fifty-four talented, extremely conservative, and exceptionally young, appellate court judges whom then-President Donald Trump and two relatively similar Grand Old Party (GOP) Senate majorities appointed had left the federal appeals courts “out of whack.” Problematic were the many deleterious ways in which Trump and both of the upper chamber majorities in the 115th and 116th Senate undermined the courts of appeals, which are the courts of last resort for practically all lawsuits, because the United States Supreme Court hears so few appeals. The nomination and confirmation processes which Trump …

The Case For Subsidizing Harm: Constrained And Costly Pigouvian Taxation With Multiple Externalities, Daniel Schaffa, Daniel Jaqua

Law Faculty Publications

Many activities are subsidized despite generating negative externalities. Examples include needle exchanges and energy production subsidies. We explain this phenomenon by developing a model in which the policymaker faces constraints or costs. We highlight three examples. First, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful activity if the policymaker cannot set the first-best tax on an externally harmful substitute. Second, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful production process if the activity mix at lower levels of output uses more harmful activities than the activity mix at higher levels of output. Third, it may be optimal to subsidize a …

Blackcurrants: A Nutrient-Rich Source For The Development Of Functional Foods For Improved Athletic Performance, Ali Ali Redha, Shahida Anusha Siddiqui, Reza Zare, Daniele Spadaccini, Silvia Guazzotti, Xi Feng, Nur Alim Bahmid, Yuan Seng Wu, Fathima Zahraa Ozeer, Rotimi E. Aluko

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Blackcurrants are nutrient-rich fruits with a significant amount of bioactive compounds including vitamin C and polyphenols, especially anthocyanins. The high phytochemical content of blackcurrants promotes this fruit to become a valuable functional food ingredient with varying health-promoting activities targeting different consumers including athletes. Athletes experience oxidative stress during intense exercise, which can result in inflammation and reduced exercise performance. Antioxidants such as vitamin C and polyphenols can restore the regular oxidative status of the body. Blackcurrant supplementation has shown potential ergogenic activity to improve athlete performance during high-intensity training. Clinical trials have evaluated the effectiveness of blackcurrant supplementation on exercise …

Leveraging Hispanic-Serving Institutions Within Physics Education Research, Brianne Gutmann, Rebecca Rosenblatt

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Hispanic serving institutions (HSIs) are an increasingly large set of higher education institutions in the United States. From 2010-2020 the number of HSIs increased from 311 to 569. Within the physics education research (PER) community, research perspectives from HSIs have provided critical insights into how to support racially and ethnically diverse students. Within the last decade, research from HSIs made up approximately 20% of publications from US higher education institutions in common PER journals. These publications do not always fully name and leverage their HSI context, though the work done at HSIs still more consistently centers students’ identities as compared …

Abortion Attempts Without Clinical Supervision Among Transgender, Nonbinary And Gender-Expansive People In The United States, Heidi Moseson, Laura Fix, Caitlin Gerdts, Sachiko Ragosta, Jen Hastings, Ari Stoeffler, Eli A. Goldberg, Mitchell R. Lunn, Annesa Flentje, Matthew R. Capriotti, Micah E. Lubensky, Juno Obedin-Maliver

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background Transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive (TGE) people face barriers to abortion care and may consider abortion without clinical supervision. Methods In 2019, we recruited participants for an online survey about sexual and reproductive health. Eligible participants were TGE people assigned female or intersex at birth, 18 years and older, from across the United States, and recruited through The PRIDE Study or via online and in-person postings. Results Of 1694 TGE participants, 76 people (36% of those ever pregnant) reported considering trying to end a pregnancy on their own without clinical supervision, and a subset of these (n=40; 19% of those …

Sieve Or Shield? High Tech Firms And Entrepreneurs And The Impacts Of Covid 19 On North American Border Regions, Kathrine Eileen Richardson, Francesco Cappellano

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This study examines the role of international borders in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to unprecedented national decisions to close borders in order to contain the domestic contagion. The idea that borders act as shields conflicts with the needs of cross-border regions, as they rely on networks straddling the borders for goods and services’ provisions. This paper explores different approaches at individual, local, and regional policy levels used to counterbalance such impacts. As evidenced by North American border closures to most non-citizens seeking entry (shield effects), it is important to understand how professionals, firms, and their networks …

Law And Recordkeeping: A Tale Of Four African Countries, Darra Hofman, Shadrack Katuu

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Tracking The Functions Of Ai As Paradata & Pursuing Archival Accountability, Jeremy Davet, Babak Hamidzadeh, Patricia Franks, Jenny Bunn

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

While a familiar term in fields like social science research and digital cultural heritage, 'paradata' has not yet been introduced conceptually into the archival realm. In response to an increasing number of experiments with machine learning and artificial intelligence, the InterPARES Trust AI research group proposes the definition of paradata as 'information about the procedure(s) and tools used to create and process information resources, along with information about the persons carrying out those procedures.' The utilization of this concept in archives can help to ensure that AI-driven systems are designed from the outset to honor the archival ethic, and to …

“We Are About Life-Changing Research”: Community Partner Perspectives On Community-Engaged Research Collaborations, Rebecca A. London, Ronald David Glass, Ethan Chang, Sheeva Sabati, Saugher Nojan

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This study examines the ethics and politics of knowledge across 15 distinctive community-engaged research projects. We focus our analysis on interviews with community partners and consider their perceptions of research, academic research partners, motivations for partnering, and the benefits and challenges of community-engaged research. We highlight three themes: Community partners’ (1) motivations to know better and more systematically what they already know, (2) interests in legitimating community-based knowledge (i.e., knowledge produced beyond the academy), and (3) efforts to navigate often inflexible university timelines and budgetary processes. Our findings highlight concerns at various ethical, political, and epistemic intersections and connect to …

Verification Of Nand Flash Controller, M. J. Prajwala, Kush Desai, Lili He

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

NAND structure-based Flash memory-made SSDs are turning more popular than HDDs in several applications notably in consumer microelectronics devices and enterprise memory storage devices. The NAND controller is the heart of this system. It acts as a bridge for communication between the host system (usually the Personal Computer system) and the NAND Flash memory storage device. Unarguably, it can be said that it is an essential part of the NAND flash-based memory device and it helps to manage the directory containing file systems. The controller is also accountable for managing system features like wear levelling, error code correction (through ECC), …

“Don't Downvote A$$$$$$S!!”: An Exploration Of Reddit's Advice Communities, Emily Cannon, Bianca Crouse, Souvick Ghosh, Nicholas Rihn, Kristen Chua

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Advice forums are a crowdsourced way to reinforce cultural norms and moral behavior. Sites like Reddit contain massive amounts of natural language human interaction, with rules and norms unique to each individual subreddit community. To explore this data, we created a dataset with top 1000 posts from each of two such forums, r/AmItheAsshole and r/relationships, and extracted natural language features including sentiment, similarity, word frequency, and demographics using both algorithmic and manual methods. Further, we developed a method to extract demographic information from the subreddits, examined how the post authors' self-disclosures reflect the unique communities in which their posts are …

The League Of Nations, Traffic In Women And The Transnationalization Of Criminal Law, Paul Knepper

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

During the 1920s, the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women, of the League of Nations operated as a legal regime in the transnationalization of criminal law. This can be seen in its management of the first >worldwide< investigation into the traffic in women which sent undercover investigators to more than a 100 countries across Europe, the Americas, and the Mediterranean. The Advisory Committee initiated >trafficking< as a transnational crime and advanced the understanding of transnational criminal law beyond concepts of professional criminality.

Charting A Course Past Spokeo And Transunion, Elizabeth Earle Beske

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez has dramatically upended standing doctrine, apparently out of concern that any other move will invite congressional manipulation and give rise to even greater evils. The Court has done so at considerable cost. TransUnion’s concreteness inquiry leaves lower courts at sea, inviting them to substitute their own policy preferences for legislative will in frustration of the separation of powers. It curtails the deferential review of economic legislation the Court has employed since the New Deal. It circumscribes Congress’s ability to act proactively to respond to novel challenges. Bearing these costs, we …

Why The U.S. Founders' Conceptions Of Human Agency Matter Today: The Example Of Senate Malapportionment, Susan D. Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article links the U.S. founders’ ideas about “human agency”—i.e., their understandings of the link between the individual and the social and political structure—with how they designed the Constitution and, in particular, how they designed the U.S. Senate as a non-majoritarian institution. I mine primary sources to show that although the founders struggled with many dis- agreements in drafting the Constitution, they shared an amalgam of historically received ideas about human agency derived from both liberal and civic republican traditions. I identify five such ideas and then parse which of them continue to pertain today. I argue that although contemporary …

On Fatigue Detection For Air Traffic Controllers Based On Fuzzy Fusion Of Multiple Features, Yi Hu, Zhuo Liu, Aiqin Hou, Chase Wu, Wenbin Wei, Yanjun Wang, Min Liu

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Fatigue detection for air traffic controllers is an important yet challenging problem in aviation safety research. Most of the existing methods for this problem are based on facial features. In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning model that combines both facial features and voice features and design a fatigue detection method through multifeature fusion, referred to as Facial and Voice Stacking (FV-Stacking). Specifically, for facial features, we first use OpenCV and Dlib libraries to extract mouth and eye areas and then employ a combination of M-Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) and E-Convolutional Neural Network (E-CNN) to determine the state of …

Presence 5 For Racial Justice Workshop: Fostering Dialogue Across Medical Education To Disrupt Anti-Black Racism In Clinical Encounters, Megha Shankar, Kelsey Henderson, Raquel Garcia, Gabrielle Li, Ke Andrea Titer, Rhonda Graves Acholonu, Utibe R. Essien, Cati Brown-Johnson, Joy Cox, Jonathan G. Shaw, Marie Christine Haverfield, Kenji Taylor, Sonoo Thadaney Israni, Donna Zulman

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Introduction: Anti-Black racism has strong roots in American health care and medical education. While curricula on social determinants of health are increasingly common in medical training, curricula directly addressing anti-Black racism are limited. Existing frameworks like the Presence 5 framework for humanism in medicine can be adapted to develop a novel workshop that promotes anti-racism communication. Methods: We performed a literature review of anti-racism collections and categorized anti-racism communication practices using the Presence 5 framework to develop the Presence 5 for Racial Justice Workshop. Implementation included an introductory didactic, a small-group discussion, and a large-group debrief. Participants evaluated the workshop …

In-Vehicle Human Machine Interface: Investigating The Effects Of Tactile Displays On Information Presentation In Automated Vehicles, Kimberly D. Martinez, Gaojian Huang

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background: Semi-autonomous vehicles still require human drivers to take over when the automated systems can no longer perform the driving task. Objective: The goal of this study was to design and test the effects of six meaningful tactile signal types, representing six driving scenarios (i.e., navigation, speed, surrounding vehicles, over the speed limit, headway reductions, and pedestrian status) respectively, and two pattern durations (lower and higher urgencies), on drivers' perception and performance during automated driving. Methods: Sixteen volunteers participated in an experiment utilizing a medium-fidelity driving simulator presenting vibrotactile signals via 20 tactors embedded in the seat back, pan, and …

Prediction Of Length Of Stay In The Emergency Department For Covid-19 Patients: A Machine Learning Approach, Egbe Etu Etu, Leslie Monplaisir, Suzan Arslanturk, Sara Masoud, Celestine Aguwa, Ihor Markevych, Joseph Miller

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has become a global public health threat. The influx of COVID-19 patients has prolonged the length of stay (LOS) in the emergency department (ED) in the United States. Our objective is to develop a reliable prediction model for COVID-19 patient ED LOS and identify clinical factors, such as age and comorbidities, associated with LOS within a '4-hour target.' Data were collected from an urban, demographically diverse hospital in Detroit for all COVID-19 patients' ED presentations from March 16 to December 29, 2020. We trained four machine learning models, namely logistic regression (LR), gradient boosting (GB), …

The Rumertime Process As A Protective Factor In School Attendance Problems, Yvonne Larrier, Monica Allen, Arline Edwards-Joseph, Geneva Fleming, Vanessa Kelleybrew

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The RUMERTIME Process (RP) is a five-step culturally responsive social-emotional, problem-solving, prevention-intervention strategy used to educate, equip, and empower students, educators, and families. The RP equips individuals with the abilities to recognize, understand, manage, express, and reflect on their thoughts, interactions, mindsets, and emotions (RUMERTIME) in relation to themselves, others, and the daily life challenges they face within multiple systems and settings. The RP is embedded within the Cultivating SEEDS System framework (CSS) and is utilized to equip culturally diverse communities, inclusive of students, family members, educators, and administrators, with the social-emotional skills to effectively solve student attendance problems (SAPs). …

Spanish-Speaking Caregivers’ Use Of Referential Labels With Toddlers Is A Better Predictor Of Later Vocabulary Than Their Use Of Referential Gestures, Janet Y. Bang, Manuel Bohn, Joel Ramírez, Virginia A. Marchman, Anne Fernald

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Variation in how frequently caregivers engage with their children is associated with variation in children's later language outcomes. One explanation for this link is that caregivers use both verbal behaviors, such as labels, and non-verbal behaviors, such as gestures, to help children establish reference to objects or events in the world. However, few studies have directly explored whether language outcomes are more strongly associated with referential behaviors that are expressed verbally, such as labels, or non-verbally, such as gestures, or whether both are equally predictive. Here, we observed caregivers from 42 Spanish-speaking families in the US engage with their 18-month-old …

Impact Of Location Spoofing Attacks On Performance Prediction In Mobile Networks, Nikhil Sai Kanuri, Sang Yoon Chang, Younghee Park, Jonghyun Kim, Jinoh Kim

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Performance prediction in wireless mobile networks is essential for diverse purposes in network management and operation. Particularly, the position of mobile devices is crucial to estimating the performance in the mobile communication setting. With its importance, this paper investigates mobile communication performance based on the coordinate information of mobile devices. We analyze a recent 5G data collection and examine the feasibility of location-based performance prediction. As location information is key to performance prediction, the basic assumption of making a relevant prediction is the correctness of the coordinate information of devices given. With its criticality, this paper also investigates the impact …

A Blockchain-Based Tamper-Resistant Logging Framework, Thomas H. Austin, Fabio Di Troia

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Since its introduction in Bitcoin, the blockchain has proven to be a versatile data structure. In its role as an immutable ledger, it has grown beyond its initial use in financial transactions to be used in recording a wide variety of other useful information. In this paper, we explore the application of the blockchain outside of its traditional decentralized, financial domain. We show how, even with only a single “mining” node, a proof-of-work blockchain can be the cornerstone of a tamper resistant logging framework. By attaching a proof-of-work to blocks of logging messages, we make it increasingly difficult for an …

Crowdfunding Non-Fungible Tokens On The Blockchain, Sean Basu, Kimaya Basu, Thomas H. Austin

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been used as a way of rewarding content creators. Artists publish their works on the blockchain as NFTs, which they can then sell. The buyer of an NFT then holds ownership of a unique digital asset, which can be resold in much the same way that real-world art collectors might trade paintings. However, while a deal of effort has been spent on selling works of art on the blockchain, very little attention has been paid to using the blockchain as a means of fundraising to help finance the artist’s work in the first place. Additionally, while …

Teaching About Justice By Teaching With Justice: Global Perspectives On Clinical Legal Education And Rebellious Lawyering, Olinda Moyd, Catherine F. Klein, Richard Roe, Mizanur Rahman, Dipika Jain, Abhayraj Naik, Natalia Martinuzzi Castilho, Taysa Schiocchet, Sunday Kenechukwu Agwu, Bianca Sukrow, Christoph Konig

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The inspiration for this Article was the 2021 Conference of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE), a biannual gathering since 1999 of law educators and others interested in justice education from around the world. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was conducted virtually. During the three-day conference, over 450 participants from 45 countries gathered to participate in the sharing of workshops and presentations, ranging from discussions of papers to five-minute "lightning talks." In addition, there were virtual spaces for social meetings with new and old friends. The authors attended as many of the sessions as possible in …

Academy On Human Rights And Humanitarian Law Articles On Human Rights And States Of Emergency: Unexpected Crisis And New Challenges: Prologue, Claudio Grossman, Robert K. Goldman

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

We are pleased to write this prologue for the special issue of the American UniversityInternationalLaw Review featuring the winning papers from the 2021 Human Rights Essay Award, sponsored by the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law of American University Washington College of Law.

Academy On Human Rights And Humanitarian Law Articles On Human Rights And States Of Emergency: Unexpected Crisis And New Challenges: Introduction, Claudia Martin, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

We are delighted to present this year's special issue of the American UniversityInternationalLaw Review and the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, which includes two of the best essays in English and in Spanish recognized in the 2021 Human Rights Essay Award competition. It is satisfying to think that this competition allowed a number of participants an opportunity to expound their thoughts on so many important topics, regarding so many areas of the world. We hope these participants are able to use their articles as mechanisms for change.

Why Digital Policing Is Different, Andrew Ferguson

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Many Fourth Amendment debates boil down to following argument: if police can already do something in an analog world, why does it matter that new digital technology allows them to do it better, more efficiently, or faster? This Article addresses why digital is, in fact, different when it comes to police surveillance technologies. The Article argues that courts should think of these digital technologies not as enhancements of traditional analog policing practices but as something completely different, warranting a different Fourth Amendment approach. Properly understood, certain digital searches should be legally distinguishable from analog search precedent such that the older …

The Perils Of Private Prosecutions, Angela J. Davis

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In Against Prosecutors, Bennett Capers proposes that we largely abandon the current system of public prosecutions and return to private prosecutions. His goal is to empower the victims of crime to make decisions currently made by public prosecutors—whether to bring charges, what the charges should be, and how the cases should be resolved.

Professor Capers’ goals are laudable. As he notes, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the criminal legal system is rife with unwarranted racial disparities. Professor Capers correctly notes that prosecutors play a substantial role in perpetuating these problems. However, his proposed …

A Path Analysis Model Examining Parent Perception, Dieting, And Food Behaviors On Bmi Among Predominately Hispanic Families With Preschool Children, Alicia Quiroz

Health Nutrition and Exercise Science

Children and adults continue to suffer from obesity, which poses a great public health threat. This research focused on protective factors for its prevention. Parent’s perception of a healthy child’s body size, parent dieting, child dieting, and food behaviors influence on Hispanic preschool children’s weight (assessed by BMI z-scores and raw BMI) was examined in 534 mother-child dyads. A hypothesized model was constructed and tested through a secondary analysis of baseline data collected in fall 2018 from the South Texas Early Prevention Study Project. All data except BMI, were collected via self-administered questionnaires completed by the parents (or guardians). Path …

Print Collections Reconsidered, Rebecca Lubas

Library Scholarship

This article discusses the transition back to in-person library services after a year or more of remote services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the article argues the necessity for libraries to reinvest in their print collections.