Digital Commons Network^™

Congressional Testimony: Shareholder Proposals, Index Fund Voting And The Need For Proxy Advisor Reform, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Congressional testimony, requested by the House Financial Services Committee, reviews the history and current state of the federal shareholder proposal rule and how it has been seized by special interests to push agendas at odds with shareholder interests; ponders the conundrum that passive investment funds deign to actively vote shares without either knowledge or authority; and laments how proxy advisors, intended to support such passive funds, make matters worse through a lack of both accountability and incentives to promote accuracy rather than expediency. Congress should restore the legitimacy of the shareholder proposal process, revisit and/or eliminate voting by index …

The Unintended Consequences Of International Trade Law Adjudicatory Exceptionalism, Aram Gavoor

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

On account of the fact that first impression judicial review over federal questions of international trade law is committed to the U.S. Court of International Trade, a national Article III court with appellate review vesting with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, advocates often litigate their cases in a vacuum from other areas of law. This essay argues that such an approach is unsupported by the statutory framework of the U.S. Court of International Trade, which was meant to operate under traditional Article III administrative law review norms. This essay also argues that advocates would strategically benefit …

A New Approach To Measuring Ai Bias In Human Resources Functions: Model Risk Management, Keith E. Sonderling, Aram Gavoor

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This scholarship is the first to offer a commonsense, durable, implementable, and traceable solution to the problem of artificial intelligence bias in the human resources industry by proposing the application of the Model Risk Management structure that has proven successful in the financial services industry since the Great Recession of 2008. Such industry regulation will likely reduce the incidents of EEOC charges of violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and produce a more stable and safe regulatory environment for firms. Most importantly, the promise of an American workplace with less disparate treatment and disparate impact …

Brief Of Amici Curiae Administrative Law Scholars In Support Of Petitioner In Sec V. Jarkesy, Ronald M. Levin, Alan B. Morrison, Richard J. Pierce Jr

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This is an amicus brief that several scholars have filed in the Supreme Court in SEC v. Jarkesy. The brief argues that (1) the double-for-cause removal requirement of Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB should not apply to ALJs at the SEC; and (2) the Seventh Amendment does not apply to administrative adjudication at the SEC.

Feature Comment: Omb Issues Final Build America, Buy America (Baba) Guidance Which May Trigger Compliance, Enforcement And Trade Issues—And Bid Protests, Christopher R. Yukins, Kristen E. Ittig

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued final guidance implementing the “Build America, Buy America” (BABA) provisions in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which President Joseph Biden signed in November 2021. The final guidance is intended, as President Biden said in his 2023 State of the Union address, to ensure that when hundreds of billions of dollars of federally funded infrastructure projects are built with federal grant funding, “we’re going to Buy American.” But because of its extraordinary complexity and the conflicts it creates with other domestic-preference laws, in practice the new OMB guidance …

Common Law Statutes, Charles Tyler

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

A “common law statute” is an important type of federal statute, the defining feature of which is that it resists standard methods of statutory interpretation. The category in-cludes such important statutes as the Sherman Act, § 1983, and the Labor Management Relations Act, among others. Despite the manifest significance of this category, existing caselaw and legal scholarship lack a minimally defensible account of how courts should decide cases arising under common law statutes. This Article supplies such an account. It argues that judges should decide cases arising under common law statutes by applying rules representing a consensus among American courts …

The Prediction Society: Algorithms And The Problems Of Forecasting The Future, Hideyuki Matsumi, Daniel J. Solove

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Predictions about the future have been made since the earliest days of humankind, but today, we are living in a brave new world of prediction. Today’s predictions are produced by machine learning algorithms that analyze massive quantities of personal data. Increasingly, important decisions about people are being made based on these predictions.

Algorithmic predictions are a type of inference. Many laws struggle to account for inferences, and even when they do, the laws lump all inferences together. But as we argue in this Article, predictions are different from other inferences. Predictions raise several unique problems that current law is ill-suited …

Schutte & Polansky: Shifting The Landscape Of False Claims Act Litigation & Compliance, Jessica Tillipman, Teddie Arnold

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Supreme Court issued two opinions in June 2023 that are set to alter the False Claims Act (“FCA”) landscape for years to come. In United States ex rel. Schutte v. SuperValu Inc., 143 S. Ct. 1391 (2023) the Court elevated the scienter element of the FCA in cases dealing with a defendant’s compliance with law or regulation, whereby no longer can a defendant point to an objective interpretation of an ambiguous law or regulation to the exclusion of a company’s subjective knowledge at the time of claim submission. In United States, ex rel. Polansky v. Exec. Health Res., Inc., …

How To Make A Zoning Atlas 2.0: The Official Methodology Of The National Zoning Atlas, Sara C. Bronin, Scott Markley, Aline Fader, Evan Derickson

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This methodology, How to Make a Zoning Atlas 2.0, followed on How to Make a Zoning Atlas and was used for a period by the National Zoning Atlas team. It has since been superseded in several key respects and no longer reflects the current process, but is maintained here for historical reference. The National Zoning Atlas has two workflows – one involving analysis of zoning texts, the other involving analysis of zoning maps – the products of which are merged and published to an online, interactive map. This methodology tracks methods used to create both workflows, giving zoning code and …

Decentralizability Of Efficient Allocations With Heterogenous Forecasts, Shurojit Chatterji, Atsushi Kajii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Do price forecasts of rational economic agents need to coincide in perfectly competitive complete markets? To address this question, we define an efficient temporary equilibrium (ETE) within the framework of a two period economy. Although an ETE allocation is intertemporally efficient and is obtained by perfect competition, it can arise without the agents forecasts being completely coordinated on a perfect foresight price. Nevertheless, it entails price forecasts delicately related with each other: we show that regardless of the number of agents, there is a one dimensional set of such Pareto efficient allocations for generic endowments.

A Mixture Autoregressive Model Based On Student’S T–Distribution, Mika Meitz, Daniel Preve, Pentti Saikkonen

Research Collection School Of Economics

A new mixture autoregressive model based on Student’s t–distribution is proposed. A key feature of our model is that the conditional t–distributions of the component models are based on autoregressions that have multivariate t–distributions as their (low-dimensional) stationary distributions. That autoregressions with such stationary distributions exist is not immediate. Our formulation implies that the conditional mean of each component model is a linear function of past observations and the conditional variance is also time-varying. Compared to previous mixture autoregressive models our model may therefore be useful in applications where the data exhibits rather strong conditional heteroskedasticity. Our formulation also has …

Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Is democracy a better political regime for economic prosperity than autocracy? This paper shows that the answer depends on the initial economic development level during the democratic transition when the foundation of institutions was laid. Democracy facilitates growth only in countries that already have adequate development at transition time. These countries are more likely to create and sustain growth-enhancing institutions than others. Without appropriate development, democracy does not improve growth; this applies to about 40% of the third-wave democratized countries. These results are based on a sample of 153 countries in 1960–2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues.

School Attendance Information Or Conditional Cash Transfer? Evidence From A Randomized Field Experiment In Rural Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Christine Ho, Rohan Ray, Abu S. Shonchoy

Research Collection School Of Economics

Low school attendance remains an important challenge in resource-poor settings with cash and information constraints. We compare conditional cash transfer (CCT) treatments with framing variations (gain and loss) against attendance information treatment as interventions to address these constraints in a unified framework. Our randomized evaluation shows CCT treatments increase attendance by 11 percentage points, about half of which is attributable to attendance information. These treatments improve girls’ academic aspirations and reduce early marriage. Daily CCT set at a quarter of local child wage maximizes attendance impact. We highlight the importance of low-cost information technology to boost attendance sustainably and cost-effectively.

Retail Pharmacies And Drug Diversion During The Opioid Epidemic, Aljoscha Janssen, Xuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study investigates the role of retail pharmacy ownership in the opioid epidemic. Using data of prescription opioid orders, we show that compared with chain pharmacies, independent pharmacies dispense 39.1% more opioids and 60.5% more OxyContin. After an independent pharmacy becomes a chain pharmacy, opioid dispensing decreases. Using the OxyContin reformulation, which reduced non-medical demand but not the legitimate medical demand, we show that at least a third of the difference in the amount of OxyContin dispensed can be attributed to non-medical demand. We show that differences in competitive pressure and whether pharmacists own the pharmacy drive our estimates.

Volatility Puzzle: Long Memory Or Antipersistency, Shuping Shi, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The log realized volatility (RV) is often modeled as an autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average model ARFIMA(1, d, 0). Two conflicting empirical results have been found in the literature. One stream shows that log RV has a long memory (i.e., the fractional parameter d > 0). The other stream suggests that the autoregressive coefficient α is near unity with antipersistent errors (i.e., d

Reks: Role-Based Encrypted Keyword Search With Enhanced Access Control For Outsourced Cloud Data, Yibin Miao, Feng Li, Xiaohua Jia, Huaxiong Wang, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Keyword-based search over encrypted data is an important technique to achieve both data confidentiality and utilization in cloud outsourcing services. While commonly used access control mechanisms, such as identity-based encryption and attribute-based encryption, do not generally scale well for hierarchical access permissions. To solve this problem, we propose a Role-based Encrypted Keyword Search (REKS) scheme by using the role-based access control and broadcast encryption. Specifically, REKS allows owners to deploy hierarchical access control by allowing users with parent roles to have access permissions from child roles. Using REKS, we further facilitate token generation preprocessing and efficient user management, thereby significantly …

Seven Pillars For The Future Of Artificial Intelligence, Erik Cambria, Rui Mao, Melvin Chen, Zhaoxia Wang, Seng-Beng Ho

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In recent years, AI research has showcased tremendous potential to impact positively humanity and society. Although AI frequently outperforms humans in tasks related to classification and pattern recognition, it continues to face challenges when dealing with complex tasks such as intuitive decision-making, sense disambiguation, sarcasm detection, and narrative understanding, as these require advanced kinds of reasoning, e.g., commonsense reasoning and causal reasoning, which have not been emulated satisfactorily yet. To address these shortcomings, we propose seven pillars that we believe represent the key hallmark features for the future of AI, namely: Multidisciplinarity, Task Decomposition, Parallel Analogy, Symbol Grounding, Similarity Measure, …

I Know What You Are Searching For: Code Snippet Recommendation From Stack Overflow Posts, Zhipeng Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo, John C. Grundy, Xindong Zhang, Zhenchang Xing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish a certain coding task. This is often considered to be more efficient than working from source documentation, tutorials, or full worked examples. However, due to the complexity of these online Question and Answer forums and the very large volume of information they contain, developers can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available information. This makes it hard to find and/or even be aware …

Spatiotemporal Analyses Of Pelagic Sargassum : Biodiversity, Morphotypes And Arsenic Content, Kristie Alleyne

World Maritime University Ph.D. Dissertations

Pelagic sargassum blooming in the Tropical Atlantic has been linked to the mass shoreline inundations observed over the last decade in Caribbean and West African countries. Since the onset in 2011, affected countries have and continue to experience multiscale impacts across fisheries, tourism, nearshore coastal ecosystems, maritime transport and public health. Impacts associated with influx events have generated significant economic damage across the region. Moreover, clean-up efforts in response to mass shoreline strandings placed further strain on national economies and in some instances amplified the negative environmental effects caused by inundations.

Evidence suggests that influx events are likely to continue …

Deciphering The Salivary Microbiome In Crohn’S Disease Patients With Different Factors Contributing To Dysbiosis, Hala Elzayat

Theses

Crohn’s Disease (CD) is a chronic Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), common in the UAE. Microbiota is necessary to maintain a balanced gut environment which is essential for good health. Dysbiosis can predispose to many diseases including CD. The oral cavity has the second largest and most diverse microbiota after the gut harboring over 700 species of bacteria. This study aims to investigate the alterations in the salivary microbiome in patients with CD compared to Healthy controls (HC). It also aims to compare CD patients for salivary microbiome complexity and diversity according to different factors that can contribute to dysbiosis, including …

Empowering L2 Learners: The Role Of Relational Empathy In L2 Learning, Gabriela Olivares-Cuhat, Giovanni Zimotti

Faculty Publications

In this article, we explore the relevance of the concept of relational empathy to L2 learning. To this end, we first provide a short overview of the notion of empathy in second language acquisition (SLA). Then, we present ideas that gave rise to the introduction of relational empathy in the field of intercultural communication, along with potential benefits of taking this perspective in SLA. Next, we describe the post-method framework for L2 teaching as a strategy that is both well-suited for the fostering of relational empathy and is facilitated by the exercise of this approach. Following this lead, we explain …

A Multisite Qualitative Analysis Of Perceived Roles In Medication Safety: Older Adults' Perspectives, Fatoumata Jallow, Elisa Stehling, Zara Sajwani-Merchant, Kathryn M. Daniel, Kimberly G. Fulda, Anna M. Espinoza, Ayse P. Gurses, Alicia I. Arbaje, Yan Xiao

SAGE Open Access Agreement Publications-Archive

Older adults and caregivers play an essential role in medication safety; however, self-perception of their and health professionals' roles in medication safety is not well-understood. The objective of our study was to identify the roles of patients, providers, and pharmacists in medication safety from the perspective of older adults. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were held with 28 community-dwelling older adults over 65 years who took five or more prescription medications daily. Results suggest that older adults' self-perceptions of their role in medication safety varied widely. Older adults perceived that self-learning about their medications and securing them are critical to avoiding medication-related …

Readiness For Transfer: A Mixed-Methods Study On Icu Transfers Of Care, Soo-Hoon Lee, Clarice Wee, Phillip Phan, Yanika Kowitlawakul, Chee-Kiat Tan, Amartya Mukhopadhyay

Management Faculty Publications

Objective Past studies on intensive care unit (ICU) patient transfers compare the efficacy of using standardised checklists against unstructured communications. Less studied are the experiences of clinicians in enacting bidirectional (send/receive) transfers. This study reports on the differences in protocols and data elements between receiving and sending transfers in the ICU, and the elements constituting readiness for transfer.

Methods Mixed-methods study of a 574-bed general hospital in Singapore with a 74-bed ICU for surgical and medical patients. Six focus group discussions (FGDs) with 34 clinicians comprising 15 residents and 19 nurses, followed by a structured questionnaire survey of 140 clinicians …

Joint Congestion And Contention Avoidance In A Scalable Qos-Aware Opportunistic Routing In Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks, Ali Parsa, Neda Moghim, Sasan Haghani

VMASC Publications

Opportunistic routing (OR) can greatly increase transmission reliability and network throughput in wireless ad-hoc networks by taking advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. However, network congestion is a barrier in the way of OR's performance improvement, and network congestion control is a challenge in OR algorithms, because only the pure physical channel conditions of the links are considered in forwarding decisions. This paper proposes a new method to control network congestion in OR, considering three types of parameters, namely, the backlogged traffic, the traffic flows' Quality of Service (QoS) level, and the channel occupancy rate. Simulation results …

Heart Disease Prediction Using Stacking Model With Balancing Techniques And Dimensionality Reduction, Ayesha Noor, Nadeem Javaid, Nabil Alrajeh, Babar Mansoor, Ali Khaqan, Safdar Hussain Bouk

School of Cybersecurity Faculty Publications

Heart disease is a serious worldwide health issue with wide-reaching effects. Since heart disease is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide, early detection is crucial. Emerging technologies like Machine Learning (ML) are currently being actively used by the biomedical, healthcare, and health prediction industries. PaRSEL, a new stacking model is proposed in this research, that combines four classifiers, Passive Aggressive Classifier (PAC), Ridge Classifier (RC), Stochastic Gradient Descent Classifier (SGDC), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), at the base layer, and LogitBoost is deployed for the final predictions at the meta layer. The imbalanced and irrelevant features in the …

Werewolf On Campus: A Case Study In Inoculation Theory And Gamified One-Shot Library Instruction, Abigail Adams

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

This case study details the development and results of an information literacy game in which undergraduate students evaluated fictional sources to learn how to recognize a werewolf on campus. The game relied on inoculation theory and fiction to teach students to identify indicators of mis and disinformation outside of any real-world examples that might affect their learning experience. The game showed promise as students were far more engaged and demonstrated better retention later in the semester than students who received a more traditional lecture about disinformation and source evaluation. However, the game would likely be more effective if it were …

Exercise Intensity And Fractionated Response Time, Danielle R. Martineau, Ronald V. Croce, Wayne Smith

Data Catalog

We investigated the role of three intensities of aerobic exercise (Low Intensity [LI], Moderate Intensity [MI], High Intensity [HI]) on information processing and cognition (IPC) by analyzing response time (RPT) and its fractionated components (1) reaction time (RT, interval between stimulus onset and muscle activation, and (2) movement time (MT, time interval between muscle activation and completion of the required motor response). Twenty-seven participants (16, male; 11, female) between the ages of 18-25 (mean age = 21.9 years) took part in 1-choice, 5-choice, and dual-task (DT, counting backwards by 3) conditions prior to and 1-min and 20-min postexercise. Based on …

Systematic Review Of Necrophilia Aetiology Focusing On The Link Between Childhood Sexual Abuse And Necrophiliac Behaviours, Sophie Foxcroft

Theses : Honours

Sexual attraction to corpses is a disturbing concept to those who do not achieve sexual gratification from the stimuli. Due to this reason, as well as ethical concerns with relations and methods of obtaining, there has been little to no research on correlations between behaviours and psychological concepts. This is especially evident since the 1980s after the bulk of the literature on necrophilia was published. This systematic review looked at the existing literature on necrophilia and, in addition to reviewing the aetiology, aimed to identify cases that included individuals' upbringings and childhoods. Out of all existing literature, only 11 sources …

The Space Between Writing And Dancing: Dancingwords/Wordsthatdance, Lara Dorling

Theses : Honours

This practice-led research investigates the figurative space between writing and dancing through a looped feedback cycle. The project explores the ‘conversation’ between writing and improvisational dance and how it forms a responsive process named dancingwords/wordsthatdance. Conducted in sessions lasting 30 minutes at a time, this project asks: how can writing and dancing intersect to create a broader and clearer understanding of embodied knowledge, improvisation, creative research process and personal practice? This research project involved solo studio investigation and an hour-long interview with dancer, writer, researcher, and choreographer Dr Jo Pollitt, who is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the ECU School …

Extending Aerial Surveys Beyond Target Marine Mammal Species: An Application Of Strip Transect Methodology To Humpback Whale And Dugong Abundance Estimation In Exmouth Gulf, Western Australia, Jennah Tucker

Theses : Honours

Aerial surveys are commonly used to estimate abundance of marine mammal populations, to detect trends over time and inform conservation management. Estimating abundance in areas critical to a species’ survival and reproduction is important to assess that population’s status and its vulnerability. Aerial surveys allow relatively large areas to be covered over short periods of time which can be important for highly mobile species with wide-ranging movement patterns such as marine mammals. While aerial surveys are often designed for specific target species, information on additional non-target species is often recorded, as surveys are generally infrequent due to expense and logistical …