Digital Commons Network^™

The Law Of Quitting, Andrew K. Jennings

Faculty Articles

Throughout life, people enter countless positions of authority and trust in relation to one another and the public. These positions include, among many others, being a public official, being a corporate director, and being an employee. Law announces prerequisites for starting such positions, as well as incumbents’ rights and obligations once in them. But no office holds forever. Indeed, incumbents often choose to exit positions before they would otherwise end by expiration, removal, or death. Yet law governs such voluntary relinquishment—often called “resignation” or, more generically, “quitting”—largely as afterthought. That is, law expansively attends how positions of authority and trust …

Managing Deportation: How Docket Control Replaced Substantive Relief In Immigration Courts, R. Linus Chan

SMU Law Review

In the modern deportation era, immigration courts saw their ability to grant relief from deportation undergo significant restrictions, constraining individualized discretion in favor of "categorical" denials. Congress dramatically curtailed the discretionary tools available to immigration judges, with the latest being the pair of immigration reforms from 1996, shifting the locus of individualized decision-making away from the courts and toward enforcement officers and prosecutors. Immigration courts lost discretion in being able to decide who could formally be granted status and stay in the United States when facing deportation through various restrictive eligibility requirements written into the law.

This Article argues that …

Fda After Loper Bright, Erika Lietzan

SMU Law Review

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overruled the Chevron, U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision from 1984, tells us that a court should determine the meaning of all statutory provisions for itself, rather than deferring to the views of the federal agencies that implement those provisions. But the overruling of Chevron may have less of an impact on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) than conventional wisdom supposes. Most challenges to FDA action do not concern its statutory interpretations. And the agency prevailed in most cases involving statutory interpretation before the Chevron doctrine took hold. After 1984, …

Health Communication Challenges In The Digital Era: Two Empirical Investigations, Neeraj Gautam Patel

Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

Background: The quality and availability of health information consumed by the general public have undergone dramatic changes in the 21st century with the rise of digitization and the internet. These include the growth of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs on television and online media, changes in health content on traditional news media platforms, and the propagation of health misinformation and disinformation on social media and other websites. Understanding the nature and sources of these changes can inform efforts and interventions aimed at improving the general public’s understanding of health information. One area of interest within regulated health communication is …

Towards Developing A Career Technology Fit Framework And Analyzing Its Influence On Work-Related Outcomes Among It Professionals, Gunjan Tomer

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

With growing attrition rate and significant demand for skilled IT professionals, the importance of studying their behaviour has become important for both academia and industry. Despite ample amount of research, there is still a gap between theory and practice. Based on our qualitative study conducted on Indian IT professionals we propose that technology allocation might contribute in understanding the behaviour of IT professionals. We found that IT professionals evaluate the technology allocated to them based on their individual career motives. This evaluation, either positive or negative, influences their job outcomes. Further, we explored the factors that make a technology preferable …

High Technology And The Developing State: The Arrival Of Supercomputers In India, Ramesh Subramanian

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

While India has made vast strides in information technology in the last few decades, its success is mainly attributed to its software, rather than its hardware sector. In fact, India’s attempts at developing computer hardware that can match international standards have largely been unsuccessful. A notable exception is its development of a series of supercomputers that match and exceed many international standards. This paper looks at an interesting period in India’s computing history – namely the 1980s and 1990s – focusing on its development of an indigenous supercomputer. During that period, supercomputers were thought to be the sole privy of …

Responsible People Analytics For Remote-Work Decisions: A Machine-Learning Benchmark For Classifying Perceived Productivity, Ruth Menjivar, Nima Molavi, Narges Mashhadi Nejad

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This study examines whether employee-perception survey data can support responsible people-analytics decisions about remote-work productivity. Using the public New South Wales (NSW) Remote Working Survey 2021 (N=1,512), the study benchmarks statistical and machine-learning classifiers for self-reported perceived productivity classes (same, less, or more productive when working remotely relative to onsite work), not objective output, under default, class-weighted, and resampling protocols. Main evidence comes from 5×5 repeated stratified cross-validation using macro F1 and balanced accuracy with fixed model specifications. Class-balanced separability is modest. Random Forest, CatBoost, and LightGBM form a leading cluster with overlapping confidence intervals (macro F1 ≈0.51–0.52). Affective/well-being items, …

The Value Of Personal Data Ecosystems: A Flemish Media Sector Case Study, Maarten De Mildt, Melanie Verstraete, Sofie Verbrugge, Didier Colle

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Personal Data Stores (PDSs) have been proposed as a privacy-preserving approach to data sharing that increases individual control over personal data while enabling new forms of cross-organizational collaboration. This collaboration leads to the emergence of Personal Data Ecosystems (PDEs). Despite growing interest in PDEs, limited research has examined how the organizational and economic barriers identified in prior studies manifest in practice. This paper investigates these challenges through a case study of the Flemish media sector within the Solid4Media project, which explores the use of PDSs to support data sharing and personalization across media organizations. Using a qualitative research design, data …

The Deepfake Litmus Test: A Multimedia Authenticity Mechanism, Amna Alzaabi, Hessa Alqubaisi, Fatima Alzaabi, Richard Ikuesan

All Works

Deepfake technologies have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish authentic video content from manipulated media. This paper presents a forensic detection framework, referred to as the Litmus Test, which focuses on structural analysis of MP4 container files to detect signs of tampering. Unlike conventional AI-based approaches that operate as black boxes, this method examines the atomic composition of video containers to identify anomalies. The proposed method performs atom-level inspection of MP4 file hierarchies and structural markers to uncover anomalies indicative of synthetic manipulation. Evaluations using datasets such as CelebDF, UADFV, and DeeperForensics reveal that the framework can identify inconsistencies common …

Human Factors In Visual Attention: Gender Differences In Engagement With Male-Oriented Ads, Mohamed Basel Almourad, Emad Bataineh, Zelal Wattar, Mohammed Hussain

All Works

In today's competitive market, it is increasingly important to understand how visual design shapes customer behaviour. This study examines the decision drivers influencing female customers' purchase choices when buying male-oriented products as gifts, identifying the visual components of advertisements that attract them by analysing the relationship between purchase intention and visual attention. Results show that participants with higher purchase intent focused more on product imagery and branding, indicating that visual appeal, perceived quality, and brand familiarity significantly guide their decisions, with brand awareness speeding up decision-making by reducing the need for repeated visual checks. Conversely, those with low purchase intent …

Chronofy: A Temporal-Logical Decay Architecture For Information Validity In Time-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Muntaser Syed, Marius Silaghi, Sheikh Abujar, Sharun Akter

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve and integrate external knowledge to ground large language model (LLM) outputs. However, current RAG architectures treat all retrieved facts as equally valid regardless of temporal provenance, leading to temporal hallucination, where plausible but obsolete facts corrupt the output. A clinical lab reading from yesterday is actionable; the same reading from six months ago is noise. We present Chronofy, a three-layer neuro-symbolic framework implementing the Temporal-Logical Decay Architecture (TLDA) that embeds temporal validity directly into the representation, retrieval, and reasoning layers of RAG systems. Layer 1 reserves a dedicated temporal subspace within Matryoshka embeddings to make …

Epistemic Edge: Subjective Logic Guardrails For Llm-Driven Iot Actuation, Muntaser Syed, Marius Silaghi

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Student Publications

Deploying large language models (LLMs) as decision-making agents in safety-critical Internet of Things (IoT) systems introduces risks that purely behavioral guardrails, such as action whitelists, cannot fully address. This paper presents Epistemic Edge, a four-tier neuro-symbolic pipeline that augments LLM-driven actuation with subjective logic (SL) uncertainty quantification, temporal decay, and dual guardrails combining epistemic threshold checks with behavioral whitelists. We evaluate seven locally-deployed models: three PrismML Bonsai 1-bit models (1.7B, 4B, 8B), three 4-bit quantized models (Qwen3-8B, Llama 3.2-3B, Phi-3.5-mini), and the DeepSeek-R18B reasoning model, across eight ablation conditions and five IoT actuation scenarios (2,800 controlled trials). We further validate …

Legal Semiotics, Political Ontology, & Merging Chronotopes Of Identity Through The Federation Of Aboriginal Nations Of The Americas, Kevin T. Inglesby

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This dissertation studies the concept of self-determination related to a confederation known as the Federation of Aboriginal Nations of the Americas. It addresses three main questions: How does FANA represent an institution of legal cooperation? In what ways does cultural capital become reproduced? And what are key principles for the Federations’ code of unity? Self-determination is a core principle of international law and may be identified through treaties and social conventions like Wunnandry. The study explores an interdisciplinary approach to American Indian selfdetermination through a focus on applied anthropology, cultural heritage, and Peircean legal semiotics to problematize some historical approaches …

The Birth Of Afghanistan: From Ancient Persia To A Modern-Day Multiethnic And Linguistic Country, Tyler A. Worm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis offers a comprehensive historical analysis of the formation and evolution of Afghan identity from antiquity through the early medieval period, emphasizing the region’s role as a dynamic crossroads of civilizations. It traces the origins of Afghan populations to Indo-Iranian pastoralist migrations and examines the successive influence of major imperial formations, including the Median and Achaemenid Persian empires, the conquests of Alexander and the Seleucid period, and the rise of the Kushan, Parthian, and Sasanian states. Through this longue durée approach, the study demonstrates how Afghanistan’s geographic position facilitated continuous cultural interaction, economic exchange, and political contestation, producing a …

Advancing Understanding Of Lived Experience Of Unhoused People To Reduce Social Stigma And Promote Community Health: A Theoretically-Guided Photovoice Study, B-Rad Stephen Applegate

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Homelessness is a persistent public health challenge shaped by structural inequities, stigma, and exclusion from social and health systems. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) has increasingly been used to center the knowledge of people who are unhoused, yet limited attention has been given to the theoretical frameworks guiding this work across disciplines. The purpose of this dissertation was to examine theories and methods used in CBPR with unhoused populations and to explore the extension of Margaret Newman’s Theory of Health as Expanding Consciousness from a nursing-focused theory to a public health framework for understanding lived experience.

Using a scoping review methodology …

Between Care And Protection: Constraints On Political Authority In Kamala Harris's 2024 Presidential Campaign, Marissa Barbara Pax

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Competing expectations about strength, care, and protection shape how presidential leadership and authority are constructed in contemporary U.S. politics, particularly for members of marginalized communities. This thesis examines Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign as a case study to explore how candidates negotiate competing understandings of political authority through appeals to Lakoff’s (2002, 2008) Strict Father Morality and the Nurturant Parent Morality. An analysis of her campaign reveals that Harris repeatedly appeals to both moral frameworks, constructing authority through empathy, mutual responsibility, and care while also emphasizing threat identification, protection, discipline, and moral strength. Although Harris successfully mobilizes the rhetorical resources …

Enhancing Market Transparency Through Co-Creation Of Csr And Sustainability Ratings Between Firms, Rating Agencies And Customers, Christopher Agyapong Siaw

Plymouth Business School

No abstract provided.

Video-Dprp: A Differentially Private Approach For Visual Privacy-Preserving Video Human Activity Recognition, Allassan Tchangmena A. Nken, Susan Mckeever, Peter Corcoran, Ihsan Ullah

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Considerable effort has been made in privacy-preserving video human activity recognition (HAR). Two primary approaches to ensure privacy preservation in Video HAR are differential privacy (DP) and visual privacy. Techniques enforcing DP during training provide strong theoretical privacy guarantees but offer limited capabilities for visual privacy assessment. Conversely, methods such as low-resolution transformations, data obfuscation and adversarial networks, emphasize visual privacy but lack clear theoretical privacy assurances. In this work, we focus on two main objectives: (1) leveraging DP properties to develop a model-free approach for visual privacy in videos and (2) evaluating our proposed technique using both differential privacy …

Corporations’ First Amendment Rights And Algorithmic Cocoons, Sol Murgui Orsucci

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

This Note examines how corporate First Amendment doctrine applies to algorithmic systems that curate commercial information and public discourse across online platforms. Courts have increasingly treated ranking, recommendation, and moderation practices as exercises of protected editorial judgment. At the same time, the Court has justified protection for corporate speech in part by reference to listener-centered interests in access to information and competitive comparison. This Note argues that the interaction between these doctrinal strands and contemporary algorithmic intermediation reveals a structural tension. Data-driven optimization can generate individualized informational environments—what this Note terms “algorithmic cocoons”—in which users encounter content, offers, and prices …

Impact Of Prophylactic Oral Azithromycin During Labor On Azithromycin Resistance (Amr) In Nasal Staphylococcus Aureus And Streptococcus Pneumoniae In Women And Infants In The Multi-Country Azithromycin Prevention In Labor Use Study (A-Plus)., Patricia L. Hibberd, Jean H. Kim, Marissa Trotta, Sixto M. Leal, Anna Aceituno, Doyle V. Ward, Archana Patel, Akila Subramaniam, Waldemar A. Carlo, Imran Ahmed, Sarah Saleem, Sk Masum Billah, Rashidun Haque, Manolo Mazariegos, Fabian Esamai, Manjunath S. Somannavar, Shivaprasad S. Goudar, Elwyn Chomba, Muska Mwenchanya, Adrien Lokangaka, Antoinette Tshefu, Robert L. Goldenberg, Melissa Bauserman, Nancy F. Krebs, Sherri Bucher, Richard J. Derman, William A. Petri, Marion Koso-Thomas, Denise C. Babineau, Elizabeth M. Mcclure, Alan T. N. Tita

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology Faculty Papers

BACKGROUND: Prophylactic oral azithromycin vs. placebo reduced maternal, but not neonatal, mortality/sepsis in the A-PLUS Randomized Trial. While prophylactic intrapartum azithromycin reduces maternal mortality/sepsis, it may promote antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in commensal bacteria,.

METHODS: Randomly selected women and their infants participating in A-PLUS were enrolled in a longitudinal cross-sectional sub-study to assess the presence of azithromycin resistance in selected bacteria in nasal cultures. Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae were cultured on selective agar, then azithromycin-containing agar to select for azithromycin resistant bacteria, identified biochemically. Azithromycin susceptibility was assessed by E-test. Nasal cultures were collected from women and infants between August …

Balancing Accuracy And Discovery: A Bias-Aware Evaluation Framework For Music Recommendation, Jose Luis Maidana

ICT

Music recommender systems play an important role in helping users navigate large catalogues, but their reliance on historical interaction data can reinforce popularity bias and limit the visibility of less popular, long-tail items. This research develops and evaluates a bias-aware framework for assessing and mitigating popularity bias in music recommendation using implicit user-item interaction data. The study first quantifies popularity bias through inequality and long-tail metrics, before evaluating two baseline recommender approaches: a non-personalised Most-Popular model and a personalised Matrix Factorisation model. Their performance is assessed using both predictive accuracy measures, including Precision, Recall and NDCG, and beyond-accuracy measures relating …

Against Doctrinal Siloing: Harmonizing Fiscal Federalism And The U.S. Constitution, David Gamage, Darien Shanske

Faculty Publications

This Essay argues that constitutional law’s treatment of fiscal federalism has fractured into a bewildering collection of doctrinal silos. Federal spending that pressures states, federal preemption of state taxes, the Dormant Commerce Clause, sovereign immunity, Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the federal taxing power are all analyzed through distinct tests, even when they implicate the same basic conflict between federal authority and state fiscal autonomy. The result is not just theoretical confusion but inconsistent constitutional answers. Current doctrine can protect states from comparatively modest liabilities while leaving uncertain whether Congress may displace large swaths of state revenue authority. …

Performance Enhancement Of A Fully Integrated Solar Still Using Flat Plate Collector, Reflector, And Evaporative Cooling System, Joe Patrick Gnanaraj Sundararaj, Vanthana Jeyasingh

Mansoura Engineering Journal

Water scarcity has become a major global concern due to increasing population growth, industrialization, and depletion of freshwater resources. Solar desalination is considered an eco-friendly and sustainable solution, especially for rural and off-grid regions where conventional water treatment facilities are limited. However, conventional solar stills suffer from low productivity, which restricts their practical application. In this study, a fully integrated solar still system was designed and fabricated by incorporating a flat plate collector, front-wall reflector, and passive evaporative cooling arrangement. The system was experimentally tested under natural climatic conditions over seven consecutive days to evaluate temperature variation, distillate yield, and …

Boundaries Of Rules: Social Reactions To Legal Intervention, Francesco Parisi

Articles

This chapter examines what happens at the boundaries of rules: when social practices acquire legal recognition, when legal rules seek to reshape social expectations, and when formal and informal enforcement operate together. The conventional economic model treats the expected formal sanction as the principal source of compliance. Although this model provides a fundamental benchmark, it captures only part of the effects of legal intervention. The taxonomy developed here identifies the different ways in which legal, moral, and social incentives may interact. The kinds of public and private enforcement through which individuals express norms shape the additive, nonadditive, and countervailing effects …

The Utah Reusable Root Module: Evapotranspiration Dynamics And Moisture Sensor Performance In Five-Month Reused Peat-Based Media, Claudia Garrido-Ruiz, Bruce Bugbee, Juan D. González-Teruel, Scott B. Jones

Controlled Environments

Efficient water management is essential for closed-loop food production in space applications. The Utah Reusable Root Module (URRM) is designed to support repeated cropping in the same peat-based growth media. Here, we report moisture sensor performance, nighttime-to-daytime evapotranspiration (ET) rate, yield, and water-use efficiency (WUE) in the Engineering Development Unit (EDU) using Outredgeous lettuce. Five previous crops had been planted in the same media, and this study reports growth and ET from the final crop cycle. Volumetric water content (θ_ᵥ) was monitored using two electromagnetic moisture sensors (CS650 and TEROS ONE) across five root modules (RMs) with multiple …

History And Design Overview Of The Utah State University 16-Chamber Photobiology System, Abby Laughlin, Alec Hay, Bruce Bugbee

Controlled Environments

The USU Crop Physiology Laboratory has developed a 16-chamber system for photobiology research. At the time of the design in 2004, the CPL was collaborating with the Russian space agency on plant research and the chambers were constructed to match the dimensions of the Russian LADA plant growth system being flown on the International Space Station.

How Directors Of E-Learning Contribute To New Expectations Of Privacy, William R. Jones

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative research study used semi-structured interviews to ask directors of elearning at regional public universities about decision-making concerning new information technologies that affected the data privacy and security of students and staff. The institutional setting and target population were chosen to standardize the inquiry and allow focus on how privacy decisions were made. The conceptual framework drew on Helen Nissenbaum’s theory of contextual integrity for privacy and contributions of behavioral economists on expert decision-making including studies of heuristics and biases, naturalistic decision-making, and the failures of deliberative groups. Data collection involved a first interview and then a second follow-up …

Examining Knowledge And Comfort Levels Of Nursing Students In Providing Sexual Health Education, Deanna M. Gower

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Sex education has been a part of the education in the United States for over 100 years. Nursing education is focused on educating nursing students in a comprehensive fashion that develops a safe and competent nurse. Due to the substantial scope of content required in nursing programs, sexual health topics can be pushed aside. This may result in gaps in sexual health knowledge and comfort for nursing students as they may be inadequately prepared to competently address patients’ sexual health needs in clinical practice. The purpose of this cross-sectional descriptive study is to examine nursing students knowledge and comfort levels …

Therapeutic Landscape Of Early Symptomatic Alzheimer's Disease Translated Into Everyday Practice For Geriatric Providers., Melissa J Bailey-Taylor, Paula Morrow, James Hendrix, Katherine E. Galluzzi, Golnosh Sharafsaleh

PCOM Scholarly Works

Alzheimer's disease (AD) accounts for 60-80% of all dementia cases. Recent advances in diagnostic biomarkers of early symptomatic AD (ie, mild cognitive impairment and mild dementia due to AD) and amyloid-targeting therapies (ATTs) have the potential to improve outcomes for patients with AD. Two ATTs (donanemab and lecanemab) are currently approved and available for use in the US. Both ATTs can slow disease progression as well as cognitive and functional decline in patients with early symptomatic AD. Treatment with ATTs is associated with specific safety concerns such as amyloid-related imaging abnormalities. Therefore, the benefit versus risk profile needs to be …

2026-2027 Graduate Catalog, Morehead State University. Registrar's Office.

Morehead State Catalog Archive

2026-2027 graduate catalog for Morehead State University.