Digital Commons Network^™

Teaching Law And Science Fiction At The University Of Mississippi, Ellie Campbell, Antonia Eliason

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Last Breakfast With Aunt Jemima And Its Impact On Trademark Theory, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

The generally-accepted law and economics theory of trademarks fails to explain why a brand owner would ever walk away from a trademark that generates financially lucrative returns. In 2020, that is exactly what happened again and again as brand owners pledged to abandon racially explicit marks in the weeks following George Floyd’s murder. As citizens became more attuned to the experiences of those depicted in racial marks, the owners of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s, the Cleveland Indians, the Redskins, the Dixie Chicks, Lady Antebellum and others announced these brands’ days were numbered. By evoking racist stereotypes, they became a moral …

Superior Status: Relational Obstacles In Law To Racial Justice And Lgbtq Equality, Osamudia James

Faculty Publications

Animus and discrimination are the two legal lenses through which in-equality is typically assessed and understood. Insufficient attention, however, is paid to the role of status in animating inequality, even in landmark cases thought to be equality-promoting. More than an animating force between intractable po-litical conflicts, status also informs the development of equality law in the United States. When courts, advocates, and policymakers affirm, ignore, miss, or con-cede to status hierarchies instead of dismantling them, those groups that perceive a decrease in their status relative to others will only use “equality-promoting” doctrine to rebalance status hierarchy in their favor. Public …

Racial Capitalism In The Civil Courts, Tonya L. Brito, Kathryn A. Sabbeth, Jessica K. Steinberg, Lauren Sudeall

Faculty Publications

This Essay explores how civil courts function as sites of racial capitalism. The racial capitalism conceptual framework posits that capitalism requires racial inequality and relies on racialized systems of expropriation to produce capital. While often associated with traditional economic systems, racial capitalism applies equally to nonmarket settings, including civil courts.

The lens of racial capitalism enriches access to justice scholarship by explaining how and why state civil courts subordinate racialized groups and individuals. Civil cases are often framed as voluntary disputes among private parties, yet many racially and economically marginalized litigants enter the civil legal system involuntarily, and the state …

The Law According To She-Hulk, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

First introduced in Marvel comics in 1979, Jennifer Walters is the fictional character best known as the She-Hulk. Her profession is an attorney. While this article occasionally draws from source material elsewhere in the Marvel comics, its primary focus is the third She-Hulk series, which was published in twelve issues from 2014 to 2015. This series is considered to be the most legally focused of the She-Hulk series and was written by an attorney, Charles Soule. Soule himself describes the series as “a book starring a superhero who rarely super heroes. Instead of that, she *gulp* lawyers.”

As is normal …

Simplicity Lost, Joshua D. Blank, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

Policymakers, government officials, and scholars have long described tax complexity as one of the most serious problems affecting tax administration and tax compliance in the United States. Some of the costs of tax complexity include billions of hours of “paperwork and other headaches” that taxpayers face each year as they attempt to comply with complex tax law, monetary costs that taxpayers bear when they hire advisors and purchase software to report their tax liability and file their tax returns, difficulties that taxpayers encounter when attempting to claim tax credits and other tax benefits, and challenges the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) …

Implicit Legislative Bias: The Case Of The Mortgage Interest Deduction, Kathleen Delaney Thomas, Leigh Z. Osofsky

Faculty Publications

The home mortgage interest deduction is over 100 years old. The deduction has been subject to increasing and, at times, withering criticism from commentators. Scholars have argued that the mortgage interest deduction may be a particularly ineffective and regressive way to subsidize homeownership. Other scholars have made the important point that the mortgage interest deduction has a disparate racial impact: homeowners are disproportionately white, so the deduction disproportionately benefits white people at the expense of people of color. Yet, the mortgage interest deduction has retained remarkable and costly staying power despite all the critiques.

How has the mortgage interest deduction …

Automated Video Interviewing As The New Phrenology, Ifeoma Ajunwa

Faculty Publications

This Article deploys the new business practice of automated video interviewing as a case study to illuminate the limitations of traditional employment antidiscrimination laws. Employment antidiscrimination laws are inadequate to address the unlawful discrimination attributable to emerging workplace technologies which gatekeep employment opportunities. The Article maintains that the practice of automated video interviewing is based on shaky or unproven social scientific principles that disproportionately impact racial minorities. In this way, the practice of automated video interviewing is analogous to the pseudoscience of phrenology, which enabled societal and economic exclusion through the legitimization of eugenicist and racist attitudes. After parsing the …

White Injury And Innocence: On The Legal Future Of Antiracism Education, Osamudia James

Faculty Publications

In the wake of the “racial reckoning” of 2020, antiracism education attracted intense attention and prompted renewed educator commitments to teach more explicitly about the function, operation, and harm of racism in the United States. The increased visibility of antiracism education engendered sustained critique and opposition, resulting in executive orders prohibiting its adoption in the federal government, the introduction or adoption of over sixty state-level bills attempting to control how race is taught in schools, and a round of lawsuits challenging antiracism education as racially discriminatory. Because antiracism so directly runs afoul of norms underlying American antidiscrimination law, including anticlassification, …

Racialized Religious School Segregation, Erika Wilson

Faculty Publications

Carson v. Makin has several implications for the future of school-choice programs. This Essay explores one possibility: an increase in sectarian schools participating in state-funded school-choice programs, causing new forms of school segregation based on race and religion and impairing the democracy-enhancing functions of public education.

Systemically Important Platforms, Caleb N. Griffin

Faculty Publications

Regulating Big Tech is now a matter of intense public debate. We ask how well Big Tech companies fulfill their role as gatekeepers of the public square. We ponder whether their dominant market positions merit an antitrust response. We assess their culpability and complicity in spreading online misinformation and hate. However, in the many normative debates over how Big Tech should use its power, the source of that power remains largely unexamined.

Big Tech, like Big Tobacco before it, is an industry founded on addiction. Although typically “free” to use, the world’s largest digital platforms exploit users’ dopamine pathways to …

Impact And Coping Strategies Among Vulnerable Groups: An Urban-Rural Resilience Trajectory Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Rizki Fillali, Ana Rosidha Tamyis, Sulton Mawardi, Hening Wikan Sawiji

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound effects on the livelihoods of vulnerable groups. Previous studies have indicated that vulnerable groups in urban areas suffer more economic impacts than their counterparts in rural areas, largely due to mobility restrictions, social and physical distancing measures, and pre-pandemic vulnerabilities, exacerbating the challenges that urban groups face to survive. This article examines variations in the impacts and coping strategies of vulnerable groups in selected urban and rural areas in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic, and determines how these impacts and coping strategies have shaped the trajectory of community resilience. The article argues that although …

Creating The Habitus Of Tolerance In Indonesian Schools: Normative, Praxis, And Symbolic Dimensions, Indera Ratna Irawati Pattinasarany, Lucia Ratih Kusumadewi, Aditya Pradana Setiadi

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

In a multicultural society, tolerance is an important prerequisite for maintaining social order in communal life. Schools are one of the most important loci for habituating a character and culture of tolerance. However, most studies that have been carried out tend to focus more on the problem of intolerance in schools, and have not explored how the habitus of tolerance can be created and practiced instead. This research is a study on how nine schools in seven different cities across Indonesia have developed their own habitus of tolerance. We employed a qualitative research method with in-depth interviews, observa¬tion, and document …

Bone, Biomarker, Body Composition, And Performance Responses To 8 Weeks Of Reserve Officers' Training Corps Training, Breanne S. Baker, Samuel R. Buchanan, Christopher D. Black, Michael G. Bemben, Debra A. Bemben

Health & Human Performance Faculty Publications

Context: Military personnel engage in vigorous exercise, often resulting in higher bone mineral density; however, leg bone injuries occur frequently in this population. Predictors of change in tibial bone quality and strength need to be characterized in this high-risk population.

Objectives: To examine the effects of an 8-week military training intervention on total body and site-specific bone density and tibial bone quality, serum biomarkers (parathyroid hormone and sclerostin), body composition, and physical performance and to investigate which outcome variables (biomarkers, body composition, and physical performance) predict estimated tibial bone strength in college-aged Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) participants.

Design: Prospective …

Unsupervised Multiview Embedding Of Node Embeddings, Jia Chen, Lizeth Figueroa, Dalia Orozco, Evangelos E. Papalexakis

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

—In this paper, we propose a comprehensive unsupervised framework that leverages existing and novel multiview learning models, towards obtaining a single node embedding from a collection of node embeddings, combining the best of all worlds. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed multiview node embedding is able to perform on par or better than the best of its constituents and provide reliable performance across downstream tasks including node classification and graph reconstruction

Trapped Under Ice: Spatial And Seasonal Dynamics Of Dissolved Organic Matter Composition In Tundra Lakes, Martin R. Kurek, Karen E. Frey, François Guillemette, David C. Podgorski, Amy Townsend-Small, Christopher D. Arp, Anne M. Kellerman, Robert G.M. Spencer

Geography

Arctic lakes store, modify, and transport large quantities of carbon from terrestrial environments to the atmosphere; however, the spatial and temporal relationships between quantity and composition of dissolved organic matter (DOM) have not been well characterized across broad arctic regions. Moreover, most arctic lake DOM compositions have been examined during the ice-free summer, whereas DOM cycling between the ice-covered winter months and summer have not been addressed. To resolve these spatial and seasonal uncertainties in DOM cycling, we sampled a series of arctic lakes from the North Slope of Alaska across a latitudinal gradient in the winter and summer over …

Thereby Hangs A Tail: Creation And Procreation In Medieval Werewolf Romances, Vicki Blud

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

How do you make a werewolf? Moreover, who makes a werewolf, and why? In medieval romance, the latter questions are often the more pressing, since the transformation of man into wolf is connected less with lunar phases than with human interference—especially the intervention of an unfaithful wife. Following in the pawprints of Marie de France’s lai of Bisclavret, these romances are noted for their “courtly” wolves and antifeminist slant, but they also offer unusual perspectives on procreation. While in Aristotelian thought the generative principle was broadly associated with the male partner, the male werewolf of medieval romance is most often …

May Medica: Divine Healing And The Garden In “The Merchants Tale”, Maria Zygogianni

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The motif of the woman as a healer and/or cure (as a nurse, interceding saint, or beloved lady) occurs across medieval literary genres from romance to hagiography. This article explores the ways in which the character of May in Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale reflects and parodies the figure of the female healer. The first section explores the healing women of romance and hagiographic traditions, as well as the frameworks of magic and saintly intervention which underpin them. The second section applies a framework of disability studies to the enfeebled body of May’s husband January, and his attempts to reconstitute his …

Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, And Race In The Middle Ages, C. Libby

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Exporters In Africa: What Role For Trade Costs?, Helena Afonso, Sebastian Vergara

Journal of African Trade

Abstract This paper investigates the role of trade costs for exporter dynamics in Africa. In comparison to exporters from other regions, African exporting firms are fewer, smaller, and relatively less diversified in terms of products and destinations. African countries also display the highest rates of entry, exit, and turnover of exporting firms, exporting products, and export destinations. This suggests that Africa’s exporting activity is volatile and subject to much experimentation, with exporters facing difficulties maintaining trade relationships. The analysis also confirms that trade costs are a crucial factor in explaining exporter performance in Africa vis-à-vis other regions, but also among …

Secure Storage Model For Digital Forensic Readiness, Avinash Singh, Richard Adeyemi Ikuesan, Hein Venter

All Works

Securing digital evidence is a key factor that contributes to evidence admissibility during digital forensic investigations, particularly in establishing the chain of custody of digital evidence. However, not enough is done to ensure that the environment and access to the evidence are secure. Attackers can go to extreme lengths to cover up their tracks, which is a serious concern to digital forensics – particularly digital forensic readiness. If an attacker gains access to the location where evidence is stored, they could easily alter the evidence (if not remove it altogether). Even though integrity checks can be performed to ensure that …

Loguad: Log Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Based On Word2vec, Jin Wang, Changqing Zhao, Shiming He, Yu Gu, Osama Alfarraj, Ahed Abugabah

All Works

System logs record detailed information about system operation and are important for analyzing the system's operational status and performance. Rapid and accurate detection of system anomalies is of great significance to ensure system stability. However, large-scale distributed systems are becoming more and more complex, and the number of system logs gradually increases, which brings challenges to analyze system logs. Some recent studies show that logs can be unstable due to the evolution of log statements and noise introduced by log collection and parsing. Moreover, deep learning-based detection methods take a long time to train models. Therefore, to reduce the computational …

Marketing Of Luxurious Gastronomic Experiences On Social Media: The Visual Storytelling Of Luxury Hotels, Noela Michael, Francesc Fusté-Forné

All Works

The role of luxury as a source of tourism experiences is gathering growing attention, with special attention to the foundations of the relationships between gastronomy and social media marketing. Drawing from a visual methodology, this study analyses how luxury hotels (Burj Al Arab, Emirates Palace, St. Regis Saadiyat Island, and Atlantis) in the UAE promote gastronomy by identifying visual features of social media posts (N = 1866) to manage their image of luxury. Results show that the most relevant drivers of luxury gastronomy are the discovery of cultures, experiences in the hotel environment, novelty and hedonism, and promotion of a …

Autonomous Driving And Connected Mobility Modeling: Smart Dynamic Traffic Monitoring And Enforcement System For Connected And Autonomous Mobility, Dimitrios Zavantis, Fatma Outay, Youssef El-Hansali, Ansar Yasar, Elhadi Shakshuki, Haroon Malik

All Works

In recent years, autonomous vehicles (AVs), connected vehicles (CVs) and all relative technology have been in the spotlight, being intensively researched and developed. There is high anticipation on the benefits of automation and the overall reform it will bring to the transport sector, with some optimistic estimates considering it as a reality within the next few years. Evidently, AVs and CVs are attracting considerable attention and are developed very rapidly, cultivating great expectations for traffic safety improvements. While their potential is enormous and undeniable, benefits are not automatically guaranteed as there are parameters that currently appear unforeseen. This paper investigates …

An Exploratory Study Of Conversational Discourse Produced By Persons With Aphasia Using Speech Function Analysis, Christa M. Akers

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Casual conversation is essential to everyday life. Because of their language impairment, most people with stroke-induced aphasia have trouble engaging in social interactions and may, as a result, experience a decrease in psychosocial well-being. There is a great need, therefore, to identify the interventions most likely to improve the everyday talk of individuals affected by aphasia. Approaches to intervention that aim to improve the social participation and communicative success of people with aphasia during real-life interactions, known as conversation-based treatment, have increased in popularity.

When delivered in a group setting, conversation-based treatments have been shown to increase scores on standardized …

A Grounded Theory Of White Counselors’ Antiracist Counseling Identity Development, Renee M. Shand-Lubbers

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Research related to the professional counselor’s development of an antiracist counseling identity is scarce. The goal of this dissertation study was to explore White mental health counselors’ unique personal and professional experiences that facilitate the development of an antiracist counseling identity and the impact of an antiracist counseling identity on practice. Using Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Haskins & Singh, 2015) and multicultural and social justice theory (Ratts, 2011; Ratts et al. 2015; Sue & Sue, 1999), this constructivist grounded theory study sought to answer the following questions: (a) How do White counselors develop an antiracist counseling identity?, …

The Effect Of Climate Change, Human Activity, And Water Management Interventions On Environmental And Socio-Economic Outcomes In The Mekong Delta Region, Huynh Truong Gia Nguyen

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The Vietnam Mekong Delta (VMD) is the southernmost part of the Mekong River watershed basin and plays a critical role in Vietnam’s socio-economic and ecological wellbeing. Because of both climate change and anthropogenic activities, such as hydropower dam construction and overwhelming water extraction, the area has recently experienced severe droughts, changing rainfall patterns, and decreasing water resources, collectively heightening disaster risks. Understanding the interactions among these evolving factors is key to preserving resources in the VMD and similarly afflicted regions. Therefore, this dissertation included three objectives. The first objective was to estimate potential impacts of changes in the available water …

The Privacy Leakage Of Ip Camera Systems, Lee R. Castro

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

For in-home security, intelligent operations like top individual recognition and minimizing losses due to home break-ins, emergencies, and fraud are keys to success. This application integrates the closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera and the deep learning algorithms used to process these images. Automated intrusion detection alerts, real-time fire alerts, smart checkout, and potentially fraudulent point of sale (POS) transactions are its main features. Dynamic intrusion with machine learning is a software program in which the price of certain products changes over time through an algorithm that considers a variety of pricing variables. The face locator is a part of the algorithm …

Into The Roach’S Mouth: Beyond The Postmodern Discourse On Silence In Clarice Lispector’S The Passion According To G.H., Eman Halimeh

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. the protagonist experiences a complete break from reality when she enters her maid’s room and encounters a cockroach. The entire plot is predicated on this encounter, but the existential crisis is filtered through a quest for a resounding silence – one that will liberate G.H. from the shackles of a preorganized existence. This thesis will explore Clarice Lispector’s use of silence as it functions in relation to a repurposed posthuman theory. By investigating Lispector’s preoccupation with the “thingness” of being, I expose the limitations of postmodern feminism and offer a way …

Distributed Energy Resources : An Assessment Of New Jersey’S Clean Energy Future, Mary Elizabeth Kenny

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The demand for renewable energy in New Jersey will continue to grow as economic opportunities and community support drive development. The effective integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) will transform energy production, storage, and use. To achieve sustainable energy production, the current reliance on fossil fuels must be reduced and replaced with less carbon-intensive energy sources that optimize the electric grid. DERs help pioneer the path to a clean energy transition where the implementation of new renewable energy projects will diversify New Jersey’s energy portfolio and provide a more resilient, equitable, and independent energy source. This thesis investigates different perspectives …