Digital Commons Network^™

Gaza’S Children Are Burying Each Other: The Commemoration Of Palestine’S Martyred Children, Morgan Eames

Spectrum

No abstract provided.

Unpacking The Influencing Factors Of Telehealth Usage Among Older Consumers, Xiaojing Sheng, Yuri Martirosyan, Khondoker Sayeed Hossain, Reto Felix, Arjun Singh

Marketing Faculty Publications

This research unpacks the challenges and motivations of telehealth usage among older consumers—an understudied population in the extant telehealth literature. Through surveying a sample of older consumers who regularly migrate to winter in the southern areas of the United States, our qualitative analysis uncovers motivations (i.e., convenience, ease of use, efficiency, and a forced option) and challenges (i.e., telehealth limitations, privacy concerns, and lack of trust, access, and skills) of older consumers’ telehealth usage. Further, logistic regression identifies attitude toward telehealth, gender, and health status as significant predictors of telehealth usage behavior. Contributions to theory and practice are also discussed.

Fr1: Comics, Cyborgs, And “In Between” Identities, Ella Lehavi

Scripps Senior Theses

As a queer Jew who grew up surrounded by immigrant cultures and communities, I find myself in a liminal space between my identities and the dominant culture of my country– one where my perspective on gender and my cultural experiences aren’t fully understood by the world I exist in. Comics and cartoons are an explorational platform for concepts of reality and identity; they are one of very few spaces where I see my identities explored with so much depth and care.

Cartoons and comics exist in between realistic depictions and abstraction. This makes them a great place to express all …

Transition Towards A Brighter Future: Energy Usage Analysis At Pilgrim Place And Recommendations For Decarbonization, Zhuoyao Wu

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis summarizes the semester-long project I and other Environmental Analysis major students collaborated on for the EA 190 Capstone Project aims to find effective methods to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency. Our group partnered with the Climate Resilience Initiative team (CRI) at Pilgrim Place, a social and environmental justice-focused retirement community in Claremont, CA. As the demand for effective methods for energy efficiency in communal spaces increases, we have conducted an energy analysis and researched potential functional technologies to replace high fossil fuel consumption sources. Our final deliverable is a written report that analyzes the data we collected …

Decoding Job Market Trends: Chatgpt’S Influence On Soft And Hard Skill Demands, Larkin Barnard-Bahn

Scripps Senior Theses

As the abilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) grow, automation anxiety (the fear of being replaced by technology) has plagued the workforce—especially after the launch of the advanced Generative AI tool ChatGPT. To avoid structural unemployment, workers may need to invest in developing skills not easily replaced by AI. Some scholars argue that AI is less able to replicate soft skills than hard skills, but the literature lacks studies that indicate a causal effect across industries and occupations. This paper investigates how the public release of ChatGPT has influenced the demand for soft skills relative to hard skills in the U.S. …

Is Garcetti Too Cool For School?: Why Garcetti V. Ceballos Should Not Apply To School Teachers, Jordan Zaia

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The First Amendment is implicated by students and teachers every day in public schools. For years, courts followed the test established in Pickering v. Board of Education to analyze free speech claims for public school teachers. However, teachers’ protections were changed in 2006 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Garcetti v. Ceballos. Since then, the circuits have inconsistently applied this test in cases relating to education. With the circuit split and high-profile cases rising in the federal circuits, the Supreme Court may have an opportunity to resolve the issue.

This Note advocates for the Supreme Court to rule that Garcetti …

Cross-Border Data Regulatory Frameworks: Opportunities, Challenges, And A Future- Forward Agenda, Andrew D. Mitchell, Neha Mishra

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

This Article evaluates the existing regulatory framework for cross-border data flows across Bahrain, Djibouti, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Rwanda, and Saudi Arabia. A common factor among these countries is that they are members of the Digital Cooperation Organization (“DCO”). It considers how these countries have devised laws, regulations, and policies on cross-border data flows to enable digital trade, and how these instruments promote the growth of a robust digital economy, both domestically and internationally. The Article then offers policy recommendations for DCO members to consider in developing relevant laws and regulations on data flows.

These …

Anti-Drag Laws And Free Speech: The First Amendment Case For Protecting Drag, Dr. Joel Timmer

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

In 2023, there were six federal court cases involving anti-drag laws or government denials of permission to hold drag shows on public property. All but one of these cases concluded that drag shows constituted expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment. Four of the cases involved challenges to recently enacted anti-drag laws, and in each of those cases, the courts found the laws to violate the First Amendment on multiple grounds, including not being narrowly tailored to achieve their purpose, as well as being vague and overbroad. However, one court, ruling on a denial of permission to …

Minecraft As A Teaching Tool: Online Experiential Learning For The Law School Classroom, Maria Jose Schmidt-Kessen, Stina Teilmann-Lock, Florence Villesèche, Andrea Wallace

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

The Article explores the potential use of Minecraft for experiential learning in higher education. In theory and in practice, intellectual property (IP) questions increasingly arise around if or how digital art can be owned, shared, and reused, as well as how digital realities interact with the various legal regimes. In its sandbox environment, Minecraft allows players to explore these questions through collective co-creation and creative decision-making pertaining to the subsequent re-use of their digital creations. Players become better equipped to reflect on the process of copying, creating, and exploiting their digital creations using the legal tools offered by IP law, …

Exploring Sigmoidal Bounded Confidence Models With Mean Field Methods, Tian Dong

HMC Senior Theses

Mathematicians use models of opinion dynamics to describe how opinions in a group of people change over time, which can yield insight into mechanisms behind phenomena like polarization and consensus. In these models, mathematicians represent the community as a graph, where nodes represent agents and edges represent possible interactions. Opinion updates are modeled with a system of differential equations (ODEs). Our work focuses on the sigmoidal bounded confidence model (SBCM), where agents update their opinion toward a weighted average of their neighbors' opinions by weighting similar opinions more heavily. Using tools developed in physics (mean-field theory), we derive a continuity …

On The Legality Of Defrauding The Public, Wes Henricksen

Marquette Law Review

Speech used to intentionally mislead others to gain a tangible benefit while causing harm to the one deceived or to others is generally labeled “fraud.” This term is used in both legal and nonlegal contexts. Where speech used to defraud satisfies the elements of a tort or a crime, it becomes “actionable fraud.” Categories of actionable fraud include common law deceit, securities fraud, and wire fraud. But taken together, these laws address harmful dishonesty in an inconsistent manner. While they broadly prohibit deceiving individual victims, they often allow deceiving the public at large. As a result, it is often lawful …

Recourse For Defects And Deception: A Multifactor Duty Test For Online Platforms, Edward J. Janger, Aaron D. Twerski

Marquette Law Review

Amazon is the world’s largest platform for consumer retail sales. It plays a crucial role in matching buyers and sellers and consummating their transactions. It has, for the most part, escaped tort liability for harm caused by defective products sold by third-party vendors on its website. The majority of cases have held Amazon immune from suit because Amazon did not take title to the goods. It was not formally a seller despite the fact that it controls every aspect of the sale from receiving the order, (often) warehousing and shipping the goods, and collecting payment. This formal approach creates a …

Reform And Removal At The Federal Reserve: Independence, Accountability, And The Separation Of Powers In U.S. Central Banking, Peter Margulies

Marquette Law Review

Separation of powers issues concerning the Federal Reserve System have generated intense debate. Controversy has been acute regarding the system’s provision of for-cause protection from presidential removal for members of the Board of Governors and the absence of the gold standard of presidential appointment or Senate advice and consent for other key officers. This debate has gained traction from the Supreme Court’s recent decisions finding constitutional flaws with removal protections in federal agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and with procedures for appointing and supervising other federal officials.

This Article turns to a novel approach that assesses past …

Benefits Transparency, Samantha J. Prince

Marquette Law Review

Recently, several states and cities have enacted equal pay laws in a push for pay transparency in job postings to inform and help reduce wage gaps. Some of these laws also require a description of the employee benefits that the company offers. However, none of these laws require a detailed description of said benefits, even though employee benefits on average make up 24% of an employee’s compensation.

Businesses can choose how much to disclose with respect to their benefits and they may even engage in what this author calls “benefits washing”—a practice where companies provide vague or misleading information about …

Encryption Backdoors And The Fourth Amendment, Robert M. White

Marquette Law Review

The National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly paid and pressured technology companies to trick their customers into using vulnerable encryption products. This Article examines whether any of three theories removed the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that this be reasonable. The first is that a challenge to the encryption backdoor might fail for want of a search or seizure. The Article rejects this both because the Amendment reaches some vulnerabilities apart from the searches and seizures they enable and because the creation of this vulnerability was itself a search or seizure. The second is that the role of the technology companies might have …

How Victim Impact Statements Promote Justice: Evidence From The Content Of Statements Delivered In Larry Nassar’S Sentencing, Paul G. Cassell, Edna Erez

Marquette Law Review

Whether crime victims should present victim impact statements (VISs) at sentencing remains a subject of controversy in criminal justice literature. But relatively little is known about the content of VISs and how victims use them. This Article provides a content analysis of the 168 VISs presented in a Michigan court sentencing of Larry Nassar, who pleaded guilty to decades of sexual abuse of young athletes while he was treating them for various sports injuries. Nassar committed similar crimes against each of his victims, allowing a robust research approach to answer questions about the content, motivations for, and benefits of submitting …

The Power Of All: Tort In The Age Of Constitution, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Marquette Law Review

Life in a multicultural nation can be fraught. The United States is a case in point, with hostile tension between members of competing identity groups playing out today on streets, in offices, and across the media. Modern Americans assume that bridging race, gender, and class inequity is the stuff of public—constitutional—law. This assumption follows the lead of modern American lawyers, who migrated to this body of law just as historians, sociologists, and economists began to insist that the private law of tort was exclusively concerned with the accidental physical harms inevitable in a modern economy. According to this econostory, tort …

Looking At The Past To Change The Future: Showcasing Featured Collections, Building Communities, And Co-Creating, Sherry Buchanan

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

Academic libraries have the opportunity and the responsibility to promote and advance content that creates transformative and iterative learning opportunities. To that end, and in an effort to build communities and facilitate co-creation, Portland State University showcases three main Featured Collections in our open access repository, PDXScholar: Climate Justice, COVID-19, and Racial and Gender Equity, with a fourth pilot collection—Student Work: An Open Showcase of Outstanding Student-Created Research & Creative Work—under development. The collections include a broad range of audiovisual materials, such as podcasts and webinar series, as well as sustainability and equity work, student-created content, and numerous future-focused multidisciplinary …

Same Book, New Tricks: How An Academic-Public Library Partnership Revitalized A Rural Library, Faith L. Bradham, Ariel Dyer

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

In 2020, many small communities in California’s Central Valley lost their public libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the public library in rural Shafter is thriving today as a result of a unique partnership between the local community college and Shafter: the college provides ongoing library staffing for the city’s library, while the city provides facilities, collections, and oversight for the library. This partnership, though not without its challenges, has provided both Shafter Library and Bakersfield College Library with a singular opportunity to engage multiple communities and expand library access beyond traditional conceptions of an academic or a public library. …

Full Issue

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

LIBRARIES are frequently viewed through a traditional perspective of passively providing information resources, but today’s most innovative college and university libraries have become so much more. When the editorial board issued a call for projects for the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, the librarians at Cal Poly Humboldt jumped at the opportunity to demonstrate this new reality through the lens of community efforts. Our librarian editorial team assembled and edited some of the best of what libraries have been doing so that these under-celebrated community efforts could reach the wider audience they deserve. We hope you enjoy what has been …

Ministry Formation: An African American Pastor's Perspective On The Use Of Non-Seminary And Secular Work Training For Pastoral Leadership, Jerry Kelvin Maynard

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In contemporary society, the role of pastors and religious leaders is crucial in guiding communities towards spiritual growth and providing support during times of hardship. However, the traditional path to becoming a pastor typically involves seminary training and theological education. This project aims to explore how an African American pastor utilizes his non-seminary training and secular work experiences to serve in pastoral leadership. By examining the unique background and experiences of this pastor, the researcher seeks to shed light on the ways in which non-traditional forms of preparation can contribute to effective pastoral ministry, particularly in diverse pastoral selection and …

Augmentative And Alternative Communication For People With Disabilities, Madisen Paulseth

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This literature review examines augmentative and alternative communication for people with disabilities. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is an alternative communication method for people with disabilities and communication deficits. Research to seek this information included identifying what augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems are available to people with disabilities, how AAC is being implemented into instruction for people with disabilities, and the impacts of AAC for people with disabilities. Results indicated that AAC system preferences, AAC awareness, team collaboration, and AAC instruction and intervention are four significant contributors to AAC user success. These four contributors will help enhance the overall …

Dilemmas In Digital Abuse, Thomas E. Kadri

Books and Book Chapters

Digital abuse is on the rise. People are increasingly using networked technologies to engage in harassment, stalking, privacy invasions, and surveillance. The law will often adapt to deal with harmful technologies, but is it adapting quickly enough? Is law even the right tool to confront digital abuse? If it is, which laws work best and who should enforce them? One of the pressing challenges of our time is deciding whether and how to regulate digital abuse. Through a range of “dilemmas” involving digital abuse, this book will interrogate responses to various harms enabled by networked technologies, exploring issues related to …

Tempus Fugit: Unraveling Temporal Occurrence And Display Order Effects Of Online Information On Employer Impressions, Alina Niftulaeva, Omolola Lasisi, Millicent Elewosi, Matthew Edor, Caleb T. Carr

Faculty Publications - Communications

As social media readily enables users to traverse a targets’ posted content across time, the present research explores the effects of two types of temporality – occurrence and display order – on offline perceptions. Using the context of employers’ impression formation of job applicants, N = 200 human resource personnel were exposed to a job posting and an applicant’s resume and supplemental social media posts in a fully crossed 2 (occurrence order: posts becoming either more or less positive over a 4-year period) and display order (most-recent posts presented either first or last), and a one-condition offset in which all …

The Promise And The Law—Part I: Establishing The Relationship Between Promise Keeping And Contract Law, Ben Tice

Western New England Law Review

Many accounts of contract law are promise based, however, these accounts fail to treat The Promise as a tangible social institution. Also, legal realist and law and economic accounts of contract law fail to acknowledge that The Promise exists at all. Using scholarship from political economy, this Article shows that The Promise and contract law are distinct entities. This differs from promissory accounts which treat contracts as a subspecies of promises. This gap in the scholarship matters because the existence of The Promise raises important normative considerations that existing accounts cannot accommodate by failing to address the existence of The …

Cybercrime Scenarios, Thomas E. Kadri, Samuel Won

Books and Book Chapters

Technological innovation alters the commission, definition, and conception of crime. In some cases, computers, social media, and the internet have made existing criminal activity harder to detect or easier to commit. In other cases, they’ve created new forms of criminal activity that challenge longstanding views about the permissibility and punishment of human behavior. Through a range of cybercrime scenarios, this book will address topics such as digital privacy, free speech, terrorism, cybersecurity, image-based sexual abuse, stalking, harassment, doxing, and identity theft.

Revolutionizing Campus Communication: Nlp-Powered University Chatbots, Ritu Ramakrishnan, Priyanka Thangamuthu, Austin Nguyen, Jinzhu Gao

Pacific Faculty Work

Artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbots leverage programmed software instructions to simulate human speech and user interaction. These versatile tools can be employed in various domains, from managing smart home devices to providing personal virtual assistants. They can also be useful in responding to common queries and can make information easier to access. In response to this need, we developed a specialized chatbot tailored for the academic environment by training an NLP model to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) the need of searching through the university website. The main goal is to optimize user engagement and streamline information retrieval within a …

Methodology, Deployment, And Performance Of Pico Balloons In Antarctica, Todd Mckinney

Theses

During the 2022/2023 Antarctic summer, eight pico balloon flights from Neumayer Station III unveiled insights into Antarctic troposphere/stratospheric winds (9 - 15 km AMSL). The most impressive flight lasted an astounding 98 days, completing eight circumnavigations of the Southern Hemisphere. Flight data indicated zonal velocities from -50 to 250 km/hr and meridional velocities of ±100 km/hr, with total wind speeds from 2.0 to 270 km/hr. Pico balloons can ascend due to convection, altering their float density. They also drift further south than larger stratospheric balloons, reaching latitudes close to the south pole. This study showcases the transformation of budget-friendly party …

Queering The Troubled Tropics In Panx Solajes’ Post-Haiyan Short Films, Ian Harvey A. Claros

Filipino Faculty Publications

This article apprehends a precarious moment when the queer and the tropics coincide to form a new fabric of sensing in this age of climate crisis. Queer and tropics are intimate, not only because both embody their inherent openness and fluidity, but also because each is woven closely by the corollary contradictions that besiege them, such as heteronormativity, capitalism, and environmental degradation. Within such an intersecting framework, this study critically engages with a selection of three works by the queer Filipino filmmaker Panx Solajes who attentively observes the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan (locally called Yolanda) in the Philippines, a tropical …

Fourth-Branch Institutions And Political Oppositions, Hernán Gómez Yuri, Fernando Loayza Jordán

Scholarly Articles

Fourth-branch accountability can be characterized as a constitutional trust-type mandate to provide intrastate nonpartisan accountability with a broad repertoire of institutional capacities. Fourth-branch institutions play a significant role in protecting constitutional democracies, and their role in the system of political accountability becomes especially apparent when political oppositions are unwilling or unable to perform a partisan check. These institutions partly emerge from distrust in the political branches’ ability to ensure accountability in a partisan world. Thus, they are designed to be insulated from partisan pressures and anchored to the core principles of legality and impartiality. However, fourth-branch institutions do not exist …