Digital Commons Network^™

Access To Appropriate Care, Mortality, And Cost Of Inpatient Hospitalization In Infants With Omphalocele And Gastroschisis In The United States, Treeva A. Jaff

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Congenital abdominal wall defects (AWDs), including omphalocele (OM) and gastroschisis (GS), are rare but clinically significant conditions that require immediate surgical intervention and prolonged neonatal intensive care. OM is a midline defect in which abdominal organs protrude into the umbilical cord covered by a membranous sac, while GS is a full-thickness defect typically located to the right of the umbilicus through which organs protrude without protective coverage. OM is frequently associated with major co-occurring congenital anomalies and chromosomal abnormalities, while GS more commonly occurs as an isolated defect but requires more intensive surgical management. As survival rates have improved, research …

Emotional Factors Influencing Adaptive Memory: An Examination Of The Role Of Valence In The Survival Processing Effect, Dailyn Q. Clark

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Encoding information (e.g., words) in terms of their survival value produces enhanced recall relative to encoding the same information in terms of its value to other schematically similar situations (Nairne et al., 2007). In the survival memory paradigm, a scenario focused on imagining being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land is followed by the rating of individual words (e.g., orange, mountain) as to their relevance to that scenario (Nairne et al., 2007). Using an incidental test of memory, it is often revealed that memory for those words is higher than for those same words encoded under non-survival, control …

Schelling & Spinoza, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

Schelling is notorious for having a fluid vision of systematic philosophy and its methods. In an age where philosophy is expected to result in one or two books, not years of discussions with students and colleagues--and certainly not a distillation of one’s way of life--Schelling’s thought has been called protean or restless, or in Hegel’s snarky verdict “an education pursued in public.” The same could be said of Socrates. But there is a truth in these comments; it is difficult to find in fifty-six years of publications, addresses and abandoned manuscripts the single argument that is Schelling’s philosophy. What provokes …

Taking Scale Seriously In Technology Law, Mark P. Mckenna, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Issues of scale—the relationship between the amount of an activity and its associated costs and benefits—permeate discussions around law and technologies. Indeed, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that scale is the reason for most technology regulation.

But it’s not always clear how lawmakers and judges conceptualize “scale” when approaching questions around automated technologies. Scale is often used intuitively, just to mean “more.” But scale is not always just about more—scale can introduce new harms and benefits along different dimensions, not simply costs or efficiencies of greater magnitude.

In this Article, we argue for a more sustained interrogation …

Social Science Contributions To The Global Action Plan On Antimicrobial Resistance Management, Mathieu Poirier, Jaskeerat Singh, Isaac Weldon, Clare I. R. Chandler, Daniela Corno, Laura Valtere, Pedro Henrique D Batista, Daniel Carelli, Geneviève Boily-Larouche, Sonia Lewycka, Fiona Emdin, Kathleen Liddell, Timo Minssen, Ilaria Natali, Susan Nayiga, Iruka N. Okeke, Emmanuel Olamijuwon, Kevin Outterson, Julianne Piper, Kayla Strong, Jarnail Singh Thakur, Kednapa Thavorn, Maarten Van Der Heijden, A. M. Viens, Mary Wiktorowicz, Steven J. Hoffman

Faculty Scholarship

Social science research on antimicrobial resistance has gained traction in the last decade, employing a diverse set of theoretical perspectives to better understand topics ranging from antimicrobial stewardship to political coordination.4 As the action plan commitments will be updated in 2026, an opportunity exists to employ a broader social science scope to accelerate national antimicrobial resistance interventions.

In January 2025, the Global strategy lab convened leading antimicrobial resistance social scientists from a variety of disciplines to determine which new ways of understanding antimicrobial resistance could catalyse and incentivize action. Three conceptions stood out as important to revisions of the action …

Spending Programs And The New Roberts Court, Nicole Huberfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court is poised to place new limits on Congress’s spending power at the urging of states vying for regulatory dominance, particularly in health care and public health. This article is the first to highlight and catalog the throughlines of argumentation, which sparked after states successfully challenged the ACA but have grown into opposing more than Medicaid’s cooperative federalism. This means federal and state programs that heavily rely on federal spending power are at risk, so studying this pattern is imperative. The article begins with a descriptive account of increasing spending power challenges, which make use of converging factors …

Five Lessons From Ken Kersch’S Conservatives And The Constitution For The Present Moment, James E. Fleming, Linda C. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, a New York Times bestseller, has the subtitle, “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (2019) provides at least twenty lessons from the second half of the Twentieth Century about the development of conservative constitutional thought and activism. Although conservatism has changed in many ways since the 1954-1980 period on which Kersch’s book focuses, these lessons are relevant for understanding the present political moment, filled with concerns that the U.S., during the second Trump Administration, is lurching toward tyranny, authoritarianism, and …

The Punishment Paradox, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

What does criminal punishment do? Across centuries of criminal legal thought, a shared answer persists: punishment incapacitates the wrongdoer. And yet punishment sometimes yields its opposite. Paradoxically, punishment sometimes becomes a rallying point-expanding community identification and solidarity around the defendant. This Article shows this punishment paradox using the 2023-24 prosecutions of President Trump and recent and historical case examples-from Luigi Mangione to Karen Read to Rosa Parks. By arguing that criminal law can generate solidarity rather than stigma, the Article both rethinks foundational theories of punishment and reconsiders the role of criminal law in democratic politics. Such an approach transcends …

Drag’S Impact On Drag Lives, José L. Oropeza Iii

Anthós

Drag’s Impact On Drag Lives

In light of recent political developments where Drag and Trans identities are being punished, why do people still participate in Drag? If there are repercussion to face for being a Drag Queen, then surely it must affect their lives for the better for them to continue the practice.

Through an autoethnographic approach to researching the Portland, OR Drag community, I collected transcripts of conversations with local Queens, took notes of community interactions, and put myself in Drag for the first time as a Queer man to better understand the Drag community and why they Drag. …

From Policy To Practice: Strengthening Black Intellectual Engagement In Psu’S Resr Curriculum, Chantell Wesley

Anthós

This article examines how Portland State University’s Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice (RESR) requirement, while framed as an institutional commitment to equity and inclusion, can inadvertently reproduce White Language Supremacy within Black Studies classrooms. The central question guiding this analysis is how general education equity mandates shape the pedagogical and linguistic conditions of discipline-specific courses, particularly when those courses are positioned as service spaces for non-majors. I argue that RESR implementation often shifts instructional emphasis toward students less familiar with Black intellectual traditions, thereby displacing disciplinary rigor and marginalizing Black students’ intellectual labor.

Methodologically, this study draws on autoethnographic reflection …

Gendered Words And Patent Grant Rates: A Textual Analysis, Deborah R. Gerhardt, Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, W. Michael Schuster, Avshalom Elmalech, Omri Suissa, Moshe Mash

Faculty Publications

Text is a vehicle to convey information that reflects the writer’s linguistic style and communication patterns. By studying these attributes, we can discover latent insights about the author and their underlying message. This article uses such an approach to better understand patent applications and their inventors.

While prior research focuses on patent metadata (i.e., filing year or gendered inventor names), we employ machine learning and natural language processing to extract hidden information from the words in patent applications. Through these methods, we find that inventor gender can often be identified from textual attributes—even without knowing the inventor’s name. This ability …

Health Care Fraud And The End Of Chevron, Joan H. Krause

Faculty Publications

What do the Environmental Protection Agency’s “plantwide” definition of a “stationary” pollution source,” a National Marine Fisheries Service determination of who pays for fishing boat observers, and a Department of Health and Human Services rule governing the marketing of prescription drugs have in common? In short, a government agency’s interpretation of a federal statute. All three cases go to the heart of the administrative state: the ability of an agency, staffed by experts in the field, to interpret static statutory language to offer practical guidance to an ever-evolving industry.

The same is true of health care fraud, although it is …

Tradition Without Text?, Daniel B. Rice

Faculty Publications

This Essay critiques the Supreme Court’s emerging “history and tradition” methodology, as articulated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, arguing that its reliance on affirmative textual recognition in historical positive law fundamentally misrepresents the nature of American liberty traditions. By insisting that unenumerated rights are constitutionally cognizable only when earlier legal sources explicitly identified them as rights, the Court adopts a truncated evidentiary framework that privileges written enactments while disregarding lived experience, social practice, and the normative assumptions that shaped earlier understandings of permissible state power. The result, the Essay contends, is a mechanized and impoverished account of …

The Trademark Bargain: Registration As Disclosure, Dustin Marlan

Faculty Publications

This Article highlights the central—and under-theorized—role that disclosure plays within trademark law. By loose analogy, the patent disclosure requirement is a cornerstone of patent law, embodying the “patent bargain” where an inventor must disclose their invention in exchange for a twenty-year monopoly. This quid pro quo is believed to stimulate the progress of science and technology, making patent disclosure the very pulse of the patent regime. However, the fundamental importance of disclosure in trademark law remains underexplored. Like patents, trademark law imposes a rigorous bargain—to obtain the enhanced rights granted by federal registration, trademark owners must first make significant disclosures …

Who's Afraid Of Copyright And Ai?, Deborah R. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

Copyright and AI need not be a copyright no man’s land. Recent decisions by the Copyright Office have gotten so much media attention that many creators are unsure if they can secure copyright protection if they use AI as a creative tool. The proposed creative control paradigm can help us all tackle the challenge of determining when works created with the assistance of AI are copyrightable. Instead of relying on long-established nuanced precedent for protecting works generated with new technology, the Copyright Office asserts that any content generated with assistance from AI tools is unprotectable. This position is radically inconsistent …

Choice Of Law In Terrorism Cases, John F. Coyle

Faculty Publications

When an Iranian-backed terrorist group operating out of Lebanon detonates a bomb in Israel that kills a U.S. citizen domiciled in Texas, what law governs civil claims brought against Iran in the District of Columbia? Some version of this choice-of-law question has been presented to U.S. courts many times over the past two decades. Their answers have been frustratingly inconsistent. In some cases, courts have applied the law of the place of the attack. In others, they have applied the law of the plaintiff’s domicile. In still others, they have applied the law of the forum where the plaintiff brings …

A Qualitative Study Of Undergraduate Underrepresented Minoritized Students’ Online Learning Experiences, Susanne Morris

Theses and Dissertations--Curriculum and Instruction

This dissertation reports a qualitative secondary analysis of 37 semi-structured interviews with 40 undergraduate underrepresented minoritized (URM) students. Guided by social constructionism and intersectionality, the study explores how students make sense of online learning as a sociomaterial environment, attending to perceptions of constraints, affordances, and missing or misaligned signifiers. Interviews were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis to examine how institutional norms and course design shape what students experience as doable, safe, and meaningful. The study offers insight relevant to research and practice in equity and online learning.

Adolescent Relationships With Digital Actors And Their Influence In A Classroom Setting: An Interpretive Case Study, Kerry A. Hancock

Theses and Dissertations--Curriculum and Instruction

In this post-COVID-19 society students are strongly influenced by their use of digital text and electronic devices. The assumption of the study was that if students spend time with devices and digital text that it might be possible for them to develop relationships with the non-human actors that exist as part of the learning environments in schools. This  interpretive case study rooted, in Posthumanist ideology, used Latour’s Actor Network Theory to approach data collection.

A comparative approach was adopted for this interpretive case study research and data were collected in three stages: initial classroom observation and analysis to determine the …

Industry To Classroom: The Role Of Academic Program Consultants In Building Self-Efficacy Among Occupation-Based Career And Technical Education Teachers, Erica L. Settelen

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Leadership Studies

Occupation-based career and technical education (CTE) teachers bring industry expertise to secondary classrooms but often begin teaching without traditional pedagogical preparation or familiarity with public school systems. In Kentucky’s New Teacher Institute (NTI), academic program consultants (APCs) provide program-area support to strengthen induction. Using the framework of self-efficacy and guided by Ivankova’s mixed methods action research (MMAR) framework, this study examined how occupation-based CTE teachers perceived APC engagement during induction and how APC-created asynchronous supports were experienced.

In the Reconnaissance Phase, a sequential Quantitative → Qualitative design included an initial survey followed by interviews. Survey results indicated midrange familiarity with …

Perceptions Of Sport Psychology Efforts And Access In Women's Wheelchair Basketball, Lindsay C. Cohen

Theses and Dissertations--Kinesiology and Health Promotion

As the field of sport psychology grows, services and training programs must evolve to properly serve the evolution of athletes seeking care. This could mean discovering new measures, testing different types of interventions, or developing programs that can better accommodate specific populations that are looking for sport psychology services. One such population is para athletes, and although they have expressed interest in learning more about the field of sport psychology and how to implement mental skills efficiently, athletes have reported a lack of access to sport psychology services and sport psychology consultants (SPCs) (Dieffenbach et al., 2009). The purpose of …

Biomechanical Effects Of Exercise-Based Interventions In Chronic Nonspecific Low Back Pain: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Lara De Vecchi Machado

Theses and Dissertations--Kinesiology and Health Promotion

Chronic nonspecific low back pain (CNLBP) is the leading cause of years lived with disability worldwide and represents a complex, multifactorial, and heterogeneous condition. It is characterized by substantial interindividual variability in muscle activation patterns, lumbo-pelvic coordination, and movement strategies. Although exercise is widely recommended as a first-line intervention and its clinical benefits are well established, the biomechanical mechanisms underlying functional improvement remain fragmented in the literature and are rarely synthesized quantitatively.

This dissertation conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate the biomechanical effects of exercise-based interventions in individuals with CNLBP. A total of 39 studies were included and …

Test-Retest Reliability And Validity Of The Gas Exchange Threshold, Erik Ryan Snell Mr.

Theses and Dissertations--Kinesiology and Health Promotion

Theoretically, the gas exchange threshold (GET) demarcates the moderate and heavy intensity domains, whereby exercise performed at and below the GET results in a change in oxygen consumption ([ΔVO₂] ≤ 200 mL), and exercise above the GET results in a slow component (ΔVO₂ > 200 mL). This study examined the reliability and validity of the GET. 14 subjects performed two maximal graded exercise tests (GXTs) to determine the GET and its reliability. The minimal difference (MD = 21W) was applied to determine the GET above (GET_+MD) and below (GET_-MD) power outputs for 30 min …

Are Multiple-Choice And Open-Ended Assessments Consistent In Predicting Science Achievement? Multivariate Multilevel Evidence From Chinese Students And Schools, Quan Wu

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

A multivariate multilevel model was developed and applied to secondary data from a large-scale science assessment of Grade 8 students in China to examine the consistency between multiple-choice and open-ended formats of assessment in predicting science achievement at the student and school levels. The sample included 44,534 students from 159 schools across two regions. Multivariate multilevel results indicated a moderately positive consistency between the two formats at the student level and a strongly positive consistency at the school level; these consistencies were stable across regions and did not depend on student and school characteristics. The findings have important practical implications …

Academic Departments As Microfoundations Of Institutional Governance, Karley A. Riffe, Meghan J. Pifer

Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation Faculty Publications

Considerations of governance in US higher education do not typically include the academic department. This results in a knowledge gap about the role of these central organizing units of academic work in the governance of colleges and universities. Through the concept of microfoundations, we explore concrete ways in which departmental governance matters, how it may be challenging, and strategies for fostering effective governance within academic departments.

Digital Technologies And Calculus: Students’ Peaks And Pits, Ricela Feliciano-Semidei, Kevin A. Palencia Infante, Alcibiades Bustillo-Zarate

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Understanding calculus students’ perspectives can provide valuable insights into their learning needs and help develop strategies to enhance persistence in STEM programs. Numerous studies have shown that the use of digital technologies (DT) influences student engagement, motivation, and mathematics achievement. In this project, we explored students’ perspectives on using DT in calculus. We interviewed eight calculus students from a midwestern doctorate-granting institution in the United States and used thematic analysis informed by the didactical tetrahedron, accounting for internal and external factors that may influence the teaching and learning process. Students reflected on their use of technology, identifying various benefits, including …

A Novel Nephron: 3d Visualization Of Glomerular Filtration In The Kidney, Cassie Young

Theses

Renal physiology, particularly the process of glomerular filtration, remains one of the most conceptually challenging topics in medical education due to its microscopic scale, dynamic pressure relationships, and structural complexity. Understanding how plasma passes through the glomerular filtration barrier requires spatial reasoning across multiple levels—from the gross anatomy of the kidney to the ultrastructure of capillaries, podocytes, and the glomerular basement membrane. This thesis addresses these challenges through the development of a scientifically accurate three-dimensional (3D) animation that illustrates glomerular filtration within its anatomical and physiological context. Designed as a visual teaching aid, the animation aims to improve comprehension of …

Cochlear Micropump Drug Delivery System: A Noninvasive Technique For Murine Intracochlear Drug Delivery, Janette Collins

Theses

In a 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) study, over 400 million people worldwide were affected by hearing loss (World Health Organization, 2023). Cochlear implants have provided a conventional route to aid inner ear issues but are ineffective either delivering to unintended targets or delivering unknown concentrations of a particular drug and create toxicity to the user. With medical advances and using 3-D printing technology, new opportunities to use programmable drug delivery systems to treat auditory disorders have been created. Borkholder Labs in Rochester, NY have created and improved a miniaturized implantable and scalable peristaltic micropump that provides programmable and accurate …

Predicting Student Academic Performance Using Behavioural And Parental Engagement Data From Learning Management Systems, Saeed Alfalasi

Theses

This paper explores how behavioral, academic, and parental engagement data provided within the xAPI-Edu-Data dataset can be used to predict the academic performance of students when training on machine learning models with supervised learning. Due to the developing demands of the data-driven initial selection of the learners under risk, the study will create a valid and explainable predictive model that can consider the most significant factors of student success in Learning Management System (LMS). The research is based on behavioral engagement and self-regulation learning theories; the observations included in the analysis of student interaction, i.e. resource usage, classroom engagement and …

A Direct Path Should Be Easy To Follow: Reframing The “Direct Effect” Test For Jurisdictional Immunity Under The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, Greggory Cashmark

Vanderbilt Law Review

As sovereign nations become more involved in international commercial dealings, it becomes more important to establish a reliable and stable framework for resolving disputes with foreign sovereigns. The FSIA is the result of a long historical trend towards establishing that framework. While the FSIA is a step in the right direction, there are a number of interpretive questions regarding where it places the boundaries of a court's jurisdiction over foreign sovereign activity. While these questions remain open and while courts continue to find reasons to keep them open, they undermine the principal purpose of the FSIA: predictability. There is no …

Good Faith And Certainty In Contract Law, Marcus Moore

All Faculty Publications

Does a general principle of good faith create too much uncertainty in  Contract Law? This article provides in-depth consideration of the controversy around this question.Reviewing a number of common arguments and reasonswhy good faith is said to be too uncertain, and responses to these, the article finds a complex picture rather than a simple answer. Recent Canadian experience with recognising a general principle of good faith in contractual performance suggests that at least two further details are critical to the potential for uncertainty: first, whether good faith operates as a freestanding duty or instead functions as a unifying principle that …