Digital Commons Network^™

What's Appealing In Mississippi?, Virginia C. Carlton

MC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Mississippi Redistricting And The Voting Rights Act: An Historical Supplement, Leslie H. Southwick

MC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Fifth Circuit And Mississippi Law: Asked And Answered (Or Not), Caroline B. Smith, Emily K. Lindsay, Jim Rosenblatt

MC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Liening On The Court: Examining Loblolly Properties, Llc V. Le Papillon Homeowner's Association, Inc. And The Future Of Lien Priority In Mississippi, Thomas C. Jones

MC Law Review

The Mississippi Supreme Court in Loblolly Properties, LLC v. Le Papillon Homeowner’s Association, Inc. held that the nonjudicial foreclosure of a deed of trust does not extinguish restrictive covenants to pay HOA fees that were filed after the recording of the deed of trust.  In doing so, the Court blatantly disregarded the fundamental understanding of lien priority in Mississippi, and also failed to explain how the policy behind lien priority would further be upheld in the future. This decision by the Supreme Court is incorrect and places Mississippi in a “super-minority” of jurisdictions on this issue.  The overwhelming majority of …

Under What Condition Does Additive Unconscious Priming Only Occur?, Shen Tu, Jieyu Lv, Jerwen Jou, Lin Tian, Chengzhen Liu, Lei Song, Simin Wan

Psychological Science Faculty Publications

In the research on unconscious information processing using the masking priming method, there are still controversies regarding whether participants truly unconsciously processed the presented stimuli. The reasons for the controversies mainly stem from the intensity of the masking and the consistency of criterion adopted among different researchers. Two recent studies found that two sources of unconscious stimuli could produce an additive priming effect on the response to the target. This conclusion provides some insights into addressing the aforementioned issues. Based on the results of the additive priming effect, the present study explored the possibility of enhancing the unconscious priming effect …

Primary Care Physicians Prescribe Fewer Expensive Combination Medications Than Dermatologists For Acne: A Retrospective Review, Noah Keime, Oliver Titus, Monika Ziogaite, Jeremy Hugh, Lisa M. Schilling, Robert P. Dellavalle, Sarah J. Billups

Student Publications

Background: Many dermatologic medications are available as expensive combination products, though their lower-cost, generic components are available. Underutilization of these cheaper replacements is common and influenced by several factors, including prescriber's knowledge and disease severity.

Objective: To characterize differences in prescribing patterns for high- vs lower-cost dermatologic agents for acne between dermatologists and primary care physicians (PCPs).

Methods: Using an administrative insurance claims database, IQVIA PharMetrics Plus for Academics, we identified medication claims between January 01, 2017, and June 30, 2022. Inclusion criteria were claims for high-cost medications and lower-cost alternatives for patients diagnosed with acne. We excluded patients without …

Lidar And Radar Investigations Of Gravity Wave Activity In The Middle Atmosphere At Pfrr, Chatanika, Alaska, Satyaki Das

Atmospheric Sciences

The middle atmosphere, spanning the stratosphere and mesosphere, plays a critical role in global atmospheric circulation, particularly in the Arctic, where phenomena like Sudden Stratospheric Warmings (SSW) significantly perturb the circulation patterns. This dissertation investigates the dynamics of the polar middle atmosphere using four-year (20218-2022) temperature and wave activity measurements collected by the three-channel Rayleigh Density Temperature Lidar, Sodium Resonance Wind-Temperature Lidar, and Poker Flat Meteor Wind Radar at Poker Flat Research Range, Chatanika, Alaska (650N,1470W). The primary contributions are the development of a new lidar signal retrieval technique to combine the signal from three-channels and improve the lidar signal …

Biochar As Additive And Modifier In Bitumen And Asphalt Mixtures, Chathurika Dassanayake, Nuha S. Mashaan

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Incorporating biochar into pavement materials is a novel and environmentally sustainable approach that aligns with global sustainability goals and advances greener pavement technologies. Studies have shown that biochar significantly enhances the strength, durability, and stability of pavements, while also contributing to sustainability by lowering the carbon footprint associated with traditional construction materials. Additionally, the incorporation of biochar contributes to the sustainability of asphalt engineering by reducing reliance on petroleum-based products and promoting the valorization of biomass. The primary objective of this review is to critically evaluate and synthesize existing research on the use of biochar in bitumen and asphalt mixtures, …

Time-Resolved 3d Momentum Spectroscopy In Continuous Wave Atomic Photoionization Experiments, K. L. Romans, B. P. Acharya, A. H.N.C.De Silva, K. Foster, O. Russ, Daniel Fischer

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

An experimental continuous-wave (cw) pump-probe scheme is demonstrated by investigating the population and photoionization dynamics of an atomic system. In particular, 6Li atoms are initially prepared in optically pumped 22S1/2 and 22P3/2 states before being excited via multi-photon absorption from a tunable femtosecond laser. The subsequent cascade back to the ground state is analyzed by ionizing the atoms in the field of a cw optical dipole trap laser. Conventional spectroscopic methods, such as standard cold-target recoil ion momentum spectroscopy or velocity map imaging, cannot provide simultaneous momentum and time-resolved information on an event-by-event basis for the system investigated here. The …

Mando-Llm: Heterogeneous Graph Transformers With Large Language Models For Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection, Nhat Minh Nguyen, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Long Le Thanh, Zahra Ahmadi, Thanh Nam Doan, Daoyuan Wu, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts is vital for the security and reliability of decentralized apps. To facilitate vulnerability detection, contract codes, including bug patterns, are represented as heterogeneous graphs with various nodes and edges, like control-flow and function-call graphs. However, existing graph learning techniques struggle with large, complex graphs. This paper presents MANDO-LLM, a novel framework that combines heterogeneous graph transformers (HGTs) with large language models (LLMs) for detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts represented as heterogeneous contract graphs built upon control-flow and call graphs. MANDO-LLM uses LLMs to capture code features from control-flow and call data, customizes HGTs to learn …

Iostom: Offline Imitation Learning From Observations Via State Transition Occupancy Matching, Quang Anh Pham, Brahmanage Janaka Chathuranga Thilakarathna, Tien Mai, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Offline Learning from Observations (LfO) focuses on enabling agents to imitate expert behavior using datasets that contain only expert state trajectories and separate transition data with suboptimal actions. This setting is both practical and critical in real-world scenarios where direct environment interaction or access to expert action labels is costly, risky, or infeasible. Most existing LfO methods attempt to solve this problem through state or state-action occupancy matching. They typically rely on pretraining a discriminator to differentiate between expert and non-expert states, which could introduce errors and instability—especially when the discriminator is poorly trained. While recent discriminator-free methods have emerged, …

No Experts, No Problem: Avoidance Learning From Bad Demonstrations, Minh Huy Hoang, Tien Mai, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper addresses the problem of learning avoidance behavior within the context of offline imitation learning. In contrast to conventional methodologies that prioritize the replication of expert or near-expert demonstrations, our work investigates a setting where expert (or desirable) data is absent, and the objective is to learn to eschew undesirable actions by leveraging demonstrations of such behavior (i.e., learning from negative examples).To address this challenge, we propose a novel training objective grounded in the maximum entropy principle. We further characterize the fundamental properties of this objective function, reformulating the learning process as a cooperative inverse Q-learning task. Moreover, we …

Rising From Ashes: Generalized Federated Learning Via Dynamic Parameter Reset, Jiahao Wu, Ming Hu, Yanxin Yang, Xiaofei Xie, Zekai Chen, Chenyu Song, Mingsong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although Federated Learning (FL) is promising for privacy-preserving collaborative model training, it suffers from low inference performance due to heterogeneous client data. Due to heterogeneous data across clients, FL training easily learns client-specific overfitting features. Existing FL methods adopt coarsegrained averaging, which can easily cause the global model to get stuck in local optima, leading to poor generalization. Specifically, this paper presents a novel FL framework, FedPhoenix, to address this issue. It stochastically resets partial parameters in each round to destroy some features of the global model, guiding FL training to learn multiple generalized features for inference rather than specific …

Generalization Bounds For Rank‑Sparse Neural Networks, Antoine Ledent, Rodrigo Alves, Yunwen Lei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It has been recently observed in much of the literature that neural networks exhibit a bottleneck rank property: for larger depths, the activation and weights of neural networks trained with gradient-based methods tend to be of approximately low rank. In fact, the rank of the activations of each layer converges to a fixed value referred to as the “bottleneck rank”, which is the minimum rank required to represent the training data. This perspective is in line with the observation that regularizing linear networks (without activations) with weight decay is equivalent to minimizing the Schatten p quasi norm of the neural …

Design Principles For Customer‑Engaging Digital Service Systems: An Action Research Study, Keng Siau, Xiaofeng Chen, Xin Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Digital services represent a business approach employed by organizations to operate in the digital environment. However, systematic development guidelines for developing quality digital service systems are lacking in the literature. The authors identified four general challenges for developing and implementing customer-engaging digital service systems (CEDSS). By employing the method of canonical action research in a digital service system project, they derived 10 design principles for developing high-quality CEDSS. They empirically evaluated the design principles in the development project and through follow-up focus group sessions. The design principles provide applicable and actionable guidelines for the development of CEDSS.

Bias Testing And Mitigation In Llm-Based Code Generation, Dong Huang, Jie M. Zhang, Qingwen Bu, Xiaofei Xie, Junjie Chen, Heming Cui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the adoption of LLMs becomes more widespread in software coding ecosystems, a pressing issue has emerged: does the generated code contain social bias and unfairness, such as those related to age, gender, and race? This issue concerns the integrity, fairness, and ethical foundation of software applications that depend on the code generated by these models but are underexplored in the literature. This paper presents a novel bias testing framework that is specifically designed for code generation tasks. Based on this framework, we conduct an extensive empirical study on the biases in code generated by five widely studied LLMs (i.e., …

Genscore: Agent-Based Short-Answer Question Generation And Scoring In Software Engineering Courses, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Short-answer questions are commonly used in educational assessments, as they are often viewed as a more effective way than multiple-choice questions to determine whether students have achieved the intended learning outcomes. However, manually creating appropriate questions targeting different cognitive levels such as those defined by the Bloom’s Taxonomy, and grading text answers from students are not trivial tasks for instructors. Existing work on auto-question generation and scoring in computing education typically targets coding-based questions. However, in software engineering courses, assessments can extend beyond coding to understanding of processes, DevOps methodologies, system design, etc. This work aims to address the dual …

Performance Study Of A Woody Downdraft Gasifier: Numerical Investigation And Experimental Validation, Md Sanowar Hossain, Showmitro Bhowmik, Mujahidul Islam Riad, Md Golam Kibria, Barun K. Das, Sanjay Paul

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Biomass gasification is an established and widely utilized renewable energy system. The research work aims to develop and construct a downdraft gasifier to investigate gasifier performance. The gasifier’s performance and cold gas efficiency were calculated for three volumetric airflow rates: 7.16 m3/h, 5.97 m3/h, and 4.78 m3/h. The efficiency was found maximum of 69.6% for an airflow rate of 7.16 m3/h. The oxidation zone and neck region of the gasifier reactor had the maximum recorded temperatures of 845 °C and 823 °C for Swietenia macrophylla (SM) and Mangifera indica (MI), respectively. A two-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for a …

Predicting Cryptocurrency Prices Using Stochastic Modeling, Reem Hani Al Omari

Theses

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that operate independently of central banks and governments. They were designed to overcome the limitations of traditional financial systems through a decentralized, peer-to-peer electronic cash mechanism. Trading in cryptocurrencies offers several advantages, including decentralized and efficient transactions, reduced costs through the elimination of intermediaries, investment opportunities across exchanges, and seamless cross-border remittances. Modeling cryptocurrency prices is therefore essential, not only due to these advantages but also because of the substantial market capitalization of cryptocurrencies, estimated to exceed 900 billion dollars according to CoinMarketCap [6]. The main objective of this thesis is to propose a predictive framework …

Evaluating The Efficacy Of Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy In Postoperative Rehabilitation After Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction: A Meta-Analysis, Maryam Salimi, Alireza Keshtkar, Seyedarad Mosalamiaghili, Walter Lowe, Aamir Ahmad, Arash Sharafatvaziri

School of Medicine Publications

Background: Recovering from anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction can be challenging. While standard rehabilitation helps restore knee function, many patients still face a slow or incomplete recovery. Extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT) has recently gained attention as a potential way to speed up healing and improve outcomes when added to traditional rehab.

Aim: To explore whether combining ESWT with standard postoperative rehabilitation truly leads to better recovery compared with rehab alone.

Methods: A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, evaluating participant status following ACL reconstruction with standard rehabilitation and without …

Brief Of Edward A. And Doris Zelinsky In The Appellate Division, Third Department, New York Supreme Court, Edward A. Zelinsky, Doris Zelinsky

Amicus Briefs

To combat COVID, New York in 2020 forbade an out-of-state employee like the petitioner to commute into his New York office, forcing him to instead work at his home in Connecticut. New York now takes the remarkable position that it can tax the income Governor Cuomo forced this out-of-state employee to earn at his home exclusively outside New York. That position is as wrong as it sounds.

Both as a matter of New York law and of federal constitutional law under the Due Process and dormant Commerce Clauses, New York may not tax the income the petitioner earned exclusively at …

Presidential Removal As Article I, Not Article Ii, Gary Lawson, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

As a matter of original public meaning, Article I’s Necessary and Proper clause is the starting point for both Congress’s power to create offices and the limits on that power.

We believe that many legal scholars have demonstrated that, as a matter of original public meaning, the term “executive power” did not imply a presidential removal power, and Article II did not imply an indefeasible (unconditional) presidential removal power. By contrast, Article I’s Necessary and Proper Clause is a basis for limiting congressional power that is more historically grounded in original public meaning and in early practice. Tenure protections and …

2025-12-01 Course Proposal / Course Suspension / Deletion Forms, Morehead State University. Faculty Senate., University Graduate Committee.

Faculty Senate Records

Course proposal, suspension, and deletion forms approved on December 1, 2025 by the University Graduate Committee.

Farm Efficiency And Precision Agriculture Technology, Chad Fiechter, Brady Brewer, Jennifer Ifft, Michael Boehlje

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Precision agriculture technology (PAT) is often viewed as a potential driver of future efficiency gains in farming. Using within-farm variation from an unbalanced panel of Kansas farms, this study examines the impact of PAT bundles on efficiency in generating gross revenue. On average, we find little evidence that these technologies improve efficiency. However, among less efficient farms, several bundles are linked to notable efficiency gains, underscoring the importance of accounting for farm heterogeneity.

Constitutional Obiter Dicta On Male-Male Sex And Fundamental Rights In Singapore, Benjamin Joshua Ong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Singapore Court of Appeal held a law prohibiting male–male sexual intercourse (s 377A of the Penal Code) unenforceable on non-rights-based grounds. The court's remarks about the rights to life and liberty (including whether sexual orientation is mutable), freedom of expression, and equality are obiter. But they are significant, since in Singapore, there are few constitutional rights cases and the courts focus on spelling out the limits to executive and legislative power without necessarily striking down exercises of such power on rights grounds. Indeed, the obiter dicta prompted the Legislature to repeal s 377A. Given the repeal, the obiter dicta …

An Open Letter To Leslie, Anne G. Kinne Phd

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This article celebrates the life and work of dear friend and mentor, Allan Leslie Combs, acknowledging his continued presence in my life. Interweaving stories of our relationship with his insights on integral consciousness, Bateson’s concept of aphanipoiesis, Varela et al.’s notion of autopoiesis, and using narrative, storytelling, and autoethnographic methodologies, I tell a tale of becoming that troubles and haunts my past. The sticky tendrils of Ancestral trauma and its transhistorical epigenetic inheritance, once acutely troublesome, are shifting due in large part to the contents of this letter. Woven together, these conscious, intersecting, and interactive lenses show how Leslie has …

The Post-Chevron Law Of Deference For Investor-State Arbitration, Won L. Kidane

Faculty Publications

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the United States Supreme Court clarified the “law of deference” built “on the foundation laid in Chevron.” The American conception of the law of deference, long solidified as the Chevron doctrine, has had extraordinary resonance, having been cited in at least 18,000 cases and 22,000 publications over a period of forty years.

The Court’s overruling of the two-step Chevron analysis for the resolution of statutory ambiguity is the most obvious outcome and is likely to attract the most attention. There is, however, an obscure aspect of the Court’s overruling of Chevron: the clarification of …

Presenteeism Among Health Care Personnel With Covid-19, James C. Crosby, Eliezer Santos Leon, Brian Chinnock, Karisa K. Harland, Anusha Krishnadasan, Nicholas M. Mohr, Ian D. Plumb, Melissa Briggs Hagen, Kelli Wallace, David A. Talan, Anne Zepeski, Tracy Young, Howard A. Smithline, Lilly C. Lee, Stephen C. Lim, Gregory J. Moran, Mark T. Steele, David G. Beiser, John P. Haran, Peter C. Hou, Brett Faine, Utsav Nandi, Walter A. Schrading, Anne Chipman, Frank Lovecchio, Alysia Powers, Lisandra Uribe, Kavitha Pathmarajah, Dean M. Hashimoto, Chloe Namias, Efrat Kean, Elizabeth Krebs, Amy Stubbs, Sara Roy, Lucia Solis, Mary Mulrow, Nathan Graff, Jillian M Tozloski, William Mower, Jacqueline Caldera, Michelle Huber, Jacob Hampton, Abigail Lopes, Katherine Elkort, Stephanie A. Eucker, Carla Kingsbury, Jonathan Femling, Silas Bussmann, Jane Yee, Joseph Stuppy, Richard E. Rothman, Gaby Dashler, Marcel E. Curlin, Mastura Wahedi, Laurie Kemble

Department of Medicine Faculty Papers

IMPORTANCE: Presenteeism-defined as continuing to work during an illness-poses a public health risk in the workplace and is especially hazardous within health care institutions where vulnerable patients may be exposed to nosocomial infections. Understanding the frequency and characteristics of health care personnel (HCP) who report presenteeism while ill with COVID-19 may help mitigate SARS-CoV-2 spread in hospitals and other health care institutions.

OBJECTIVES: To determine the frequency of presenteeism among HCP with symptomatic COVID-19, and to evaluate the demographic, occupational, and clinical factors associated with it.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS: This is an observational cohort study that uses data from …

Sexual Assault, Fault And The Charter, Isabel Grant, Janine Benedet

All Faculty Publications

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the criminal law of sexual assault have in many ways grown up together over the last four decades. In this article we examine the impact of the Charter on the fault requirement for sexual assault and sexual offences against children. We argue that the Charter has been used repeatedly to undermine the early gains of feminist law reform and that courts have gone out of their way to avoid the reasonable steps provisions of the Criminal Code. Courts are consistently reluctant to expect men to desist from sexual activity until they have …

A Model For Training Management System Implementation In Higher Education, David J. Rowe

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In an era where innovation and adaptability are critical to institutional success, the practical training and development of employees in higher education organizations have become essential. This study examined stakeholders’ perceptions of cloud-based Training Management System (TMS) implementation within California Higher Education systems, including both the California Community College (CCC) and the California State University (CSU). Although a TMS offers substantial benefits for administering training programs, large systems face challenges due to uneven adoption across campuses, leading to inefficiencies, regulatory non-compliance, and hindered workforce development. This research identified and evaluated technology, organizational, and environmental critical success factors influencing TMS implementation …