Digital Commons Network^™

Sex Trafficking In Southern Nevada, Julianna Jovillar

Student Research

Southern Nevada is facing a sex trafficking epidemic that continues to impact people in the state. Thus, in this brief, I investigate Southern Nevada’s sex trafficking crisis. Based on recent sex trafficking studies and the current legislature, it is apparent that although Southern Nevada is aware of the problem, more can still be done to stop it. As a result, this policy work explores sex trafficking in Southern Nevada, addresses stigmatization as a causal factor, provides political context, and offers policy recommendations related to child victim aid and protection to be considered for legislation.

One Hundred & Thirty-Seventh Spring Commencement (2023)

Commencement Activities

No abstract provided.

John Doe 1438 V. Pennsylvania State University

2023 Decisions

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvania

Anthony Twitty V. Margett Barns

2023 Decisions

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Joe Thorpe V. Township Of Salisbury

2023 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

22nd Century Technologies Inc V. Ilabs Inc

2023 Decisions

USDC for the District of New Jersey

Frank Brzozowski V. Pennsylvania Turnpike Commissi

2023 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Class Of 2023 Graduation Ceremony For The Degree Of Juris Doctor And Advanced Degrees, Southern Methodist University, Dedman School Of Law

Law School Commencement / Hooding Programs, 1942-present

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The Value Of Originalism, Tobias Gibson, Jakob Gibson, Matthew Trout

SLU Law Journal Online

Originalism is one of many approaches to Constitutional interpretation that has evolved and changed from the time of its inception. In this article, Tobias Gibson, Jakob Gibson, and Matthew Trout discusses the disagreement between the application and interpretation of what originalism constitutes and mandates.

A Tale Of Two Good Bands: Students’ And Directors’ Perceptions Of Middle School Non-Varsity Band, Carson Ross

Masters of Education in Teaching and Learning

This action-research study was conducted with two middle school bands in West Texas. The researcher primarily studied student and director perceptions in the non-varsity band to identify recurring themes within the ensembles. Fifteen non-varsity band students were given a survey, and eight were interviewed. Four directors participated in small focus groups at each of the two campuses. Data was coded to observe any major themes that occurred simultaneously in the collection process. The findings of this study indicated UIL was a contributing factor to these schools’ non-varsity bands. Another significant factor was the importance of challenging music and social relationships …

A Big Supreme Court Win For Farm Animals, Lewis Bollard

General – Farm Animal Issues

The article reports on the May 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding California’s Proposition 12, a landmark farm animal welfare law, with implications for state and national animal protection efforts.

Appellant's Opening Brief, Zack Greenamyre, W. Gerald Weber, John A. Meiser, Meredith Holland Kessler

Court Briefs

No. 23-10332
Rev. Stephen Jarrard v. Sheriff of Polk County

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia No. 4:20-cv-00002-MLB

From the Summary of the Argument

This is an unusual appeal. Sheriff Johnny Moats and Chief Jailer Al Sharp all but admitted that they retaliated against Jarrard and barred him from Polk County Jail’s volunteer ministry program because they disagree with his religious belief that baptism is required for salvation. Indeed, Moats told Jarrard in writing that Jarrard’s beliefs are “contrary to the teaching of the Bible” and that he would not be allowed to …

Angular Correlations In The Β Decay Of B 8: First Tensor-Current Limits From A Mirror-Nucleus Pair, A. T. Gallant, N. D. Scielzo, G. Savard, J. A. Clark, M. Brodeur, F. Buchinger, D. P. Burdette, M. T. Burkey, S. Caldwell, J. E. Crawford, A. Czeszumska, C. M. Deibel, J. Greene, D. Heslop, T. Y. Hirsh, A. F. Levand, B. Longfellow, G. E. Morgan, P. Mueller, R. Orford, S. Padgett, N. Paul, A. Pérez Galván, A. Reimer, R. Segel, K. S. Sharma, K. Siegl, L. Varriano, B. J. Zabransky

Faculty Publications

We present the first measurement of the α-β-ν angular correlation in the Gamow-Teller β+ decay of B8. This was accomplished using the Beta-decay Paul Trap, expanding on our previous work on the β- decay of Li8. The B8 result is consistent with the V-A electroweak interaction of the standard model and, on its own, provides a limit on the exotic right-handed tensor current relative to the axial-vector current of |CT/CA|2< 0.013 at the 95.5% confidence level. This represents the first high-precision angular correlation measurements in mirror decays and was made possible through the use of an ion trap. By combining this B8 result with our previous Li8 results, we demonstrate a new pathway for increased precision in searches for exotic currents.

Rebuilding Grid Governance, Joel B. Eisen, Heather E. Payne

BYU Law Review

As climate change sharpens the focus on our electricity systems, there is widespread agreement that the institutions that govern our electric grid must change to realize a clean energy future in the timescale necessary. Scholars are actively debating how grid governance needs to change, but in this Article we demonstrate that current proposals are insufficient because they do not contemplate “rebuilding.” This Article defines “rebuilding” as ending entities tasked with grid governance and creating new ones to take their place. We propose what no one else has: an overarching framework for rebuilding any grid governance institutions.

This Article discusses when …

The Relationship Between Teacher Burnout And Physical Activity Among High School Teachers, Jonathan Davis

Doctor of Education in Teacher Leadership Dissertations

Teaching at any level is a high-stress profession, and high levels of stress may result in increased rates of teacher burnout. The implications of teacher burnout are related to physical and emotional health problems for teachers, reduced student academic performance, and increased rates of teacher migration and attrition. One strategy for mitigating teacher burnout is to increase levels of physical activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between level of physical activity and teacher burnout among high school teachers. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT-23) were used to determine levels …

Pandemic, Retail Sales And Local Economies: Evidence From Northeast Oklahoma, Sanchari Ghosh, Brian Jackson, Ray Murphy

Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Technology

Early post-COVID pandemic studies focused on the macroeconomic impacts of that event on employment, income, healthcare costs, food security, etc. Yet there has been little emphasis on how changes in consumption spending patterns resulting from the pandemic affected retail sales and revenues, each of which are major contributors of growth for local economies. This study investigates these relationships by implementing retail pull and sales gap analyses to determine how non-metropolitan rural regions responded to consumption expenditures and retail sales before and after the pandemic. Using three cities of northeastern Oklahoma as a case study, retail pull factors at the city …

Private Sanctions, Public Harm?, Jon J. Lee

BYU Law Review

The legal profession has a secret. In response to widespread public distrust in the profession’s ability to regulate itself, disciplinary authorities have undertaken modest efforts over the last several decades to make their activities more transparent. They have opened up their formal proceedings, publicized the identities of sanctioned attorneys, and shared information about their work online. But at the same time, most have quietly continued to resolve cases of ostensibly “minor” and “isolated” misconduct through private sanctions, keeping the identities of disciplined attorneys – and their misconduct – hidden from view.

This Article takes a comprehensive look at private sanctions …

The Great Debate, Britain 1868-1876: An Exploration Of British Politics Via Reacting To The Past, Ryan Jurich

Honors Theses

The Victorian era (ca. 1830 – 1900) in Britain saw massive economic and social transformations brought about by industrialization and the emergence, for the first time, of a modern class society. This research project focused on creating an innovative way for students of history to learn about the various political, economic, and social changes shaping and being shaped by the decisions of the British government in the latter half of the 19^th century by using the Reacting to the Past curriculum framework. In particular, it focused on the historical first ministries of William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, their famous …

Fritz Lang's Critique Of Capitalism Through Body Language In "Metropolis", Nathan Bailey

Honors Theses

This honors thesis argues that Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis contains nonverbal narrative elements (including body language, architectural proxemics, and phallic imagery) that align the film with Marxist class structures. The film provides a moral epigram, “the mediator between head and hands must be the heart,” which this paper aims to define through a Marxist lens. This thesis narrates Metropolis’ verbal and nonverbal narratives through observing intertitles in the film alongside the elements that perplex the viewer and overload the senses. The aim of this paper is to notice where the head, hands, and heart make …

Regulating Strategic Sovereign Wealth, Paul Rose

BYU Law Review

In an era of ascendant globalization, sovereign wealth funds were used by governments around the world – and, in particular, by governments with massive natural resource wealth or balance-of-trade surpluses – to invest widely in foreign markets. Sovereign wealth funds were products of the international economic order then in existence, adapted to a political and economic environment in which borders could be easily crossed and foreign assets seemed abundant and easily acquired. After the Financial Crisis, and with the increasing nationalization seen in the 2010s, this environment began to change. Both domestic and international forces spurred the development of new, …

Characterization Of Cellular Senescence In Long-Lived Birds And Mammals, Joshua Shirazi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Cellular senescence is characterized by a permanent exit from the cell cycle and the maintenance of a very active secretome termed the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). The accumulation of senescent cells has been associated with several age-related diseases, including cancer, atherosclerosis, osteoarthritis, pulmonary fibrosis, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. For the past two decades, cellular senescence has been intensively studied, but exclusively on laboratory rodents and human cell lines. However, our understandings about cellular senescence in other species are extremely limited. This study aimed to characterize the SASP of long-lived and short-lived species using newly developed cutting-edge proteomic …

Social Work Best Practices In Schools: Effect Of Family-Focused Case Management On Rural School Students’ Success, Sheryl L. Mcklveen

Social Work Doctoral Dissertations

Rural families and children have historically been challenged by a lack of public investment in their communities. Over generations, such deprivation created cycles of pervasive, persistent behavioral health and well-being disparities that negatively impact contemporary families and children, and threaten the socioeconomic future of America (Branson, 2019; Showalter et al., 2019; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, n.d.). The purpose of this dissertation was to build a model of school social work best practices employing strategies intended to break cycles of unmet needs by reducing social determinant of health (SDOH) risks in rural environments, thereby enhancing the health and …

U-No: U-Shaped Neural Operators, Md Ashiqur Rahman, Zachary E Ross, Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

Department of Computer Science Faculty Publications

Neural operators generalize classical neural networks to maps between infinite-dimensional spaces, e.g., function spaces. Prior works on neural operators proposed a series of novel methods to learn such maps and demonstrated unprecedented success in learning solution operators of partial differential equations. Due to their close proximity to fully connected architectures, these models mainly suffer from high memory usage and are generally limited to shallow deep learning models. In this paper, we propose U-shaped Neural Operator (U-NO), a U-shaped memory enhanced architecture that allows for deeper neural operators. U-NOs exploit the problem structures in function predictions and demonstrate fast training, data …

Calling All Cast Members: Elevating Material Objects And Ambient Environments To Non-Human Rhetorical Actors In Arden Of Faversham, Tara Michelle Pulaski

Online Theses and Dissertations

Material rhetoric and ambient rhetoric frameworks offer a unique lens to view the materiality in early modern drama. Using these principles, as well as Actor-Network Theory and Affect Theory, objects and environments can be elevated to non-human actors in a play’s rhetorical situation. Arden of Faversham engages heavily with the material world at every level of the play, making it a prime candidate for such an analysis. The material objects, ambient environments, and geographical places in Arden of Faversham remain so crucial that they become non-human rhetorical actors, complimenting and complicating the human actors. The play cannot be severed from …

Gender, Sexuality, And Lgbtq+ Identities In General Education Literature Courses: Three Major Conceptual Frameworks, Josiah Coleman

Online Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how three major conceptual frameworks can allow instructors of literature courses to explore, define, and utilize their understanding of queerness. For instructors who possess little experience in queer discourse, the three major conceptual frameworks – LGBTQ+ identities, gender critical paradigms, and the sexual episteme – are outlined, with major subfields, lenses, and authors detailed for further research. To demonstrate the veracity of utilizing these three major conceptual frameworks in the existing pedagogical praxis of instructors, a study was conducted. The study was a survey of six instructors who taught general education literature courses in the past five …

21st Century Political Agronomy: Between Collapse And Apocalypse In The Capitalist World System, Harrison Raskin

Honors Scholar Theses

Examinations of the causal chain between ecological impacts and food shortages reveal significant impending global disturbances. This paper draws a causal link between ecological impacts and low food productivity which will lead to food insecurity and economic crises in the near term. Further, this paper argues that food insecurity may lead to the collapse of the capitalist world system. This threat is contrasted with “business as usual” climate models which, rather than depicting the collapse of the capitalist world system, depict its persistence throughout the collapse of the world ecology.

Monolithic Multiphysics Simulation Of Hypersonic Aerothermoelasticity Using A Hybridized Discontinuous Galerkin Method, William Paul England

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents implementation of a hybridized discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for robust simulation of the hypersonic aerothermoelastic multiphysics system. Simulation of hypersonic vehicles requires accurate resolution of complex multiphysics interactions including the effects of high-speed turbulent flow, extreme heating, and vehicle deformation due to considerable pressure loads and thermal stresses. However, the state-of-the-art procedures for hypersonic aerothermoelasticity are comprised of low-fidelity approaches and partitioned coupling schemes. These approaches preclude robust design and analysis of hypersonic vehicles for a number of reasons. First, low-fidelity approaches limit their application to simple geometries and lack the ability to capture small scale flow …

Supreme Court On The Political Upheaval In Maharashtra, Sanjay Jain, Malika Jain

Popular Media

Dr. Sanjay Jain and Ms. Malika Jain explore the key takeaways from the SC’s decision on the role of the Speaker of the Legislature, Governor, Election Commission of India and interpretation of Tenth Schedule laying down disqualifications on the ground of illegal floor-crossing. They also discuss the impact of this decision on Maharashtra politics.

5763 Wadsworth Llc V. Roque

All Decisions

"In the decision, the court granted Respondent’s cross motion to vacate a pro se Stipulation entered before the tenant retained counsel based on a potential meritorious overcharge. Follow the precedent of Butterworth v 281 St. Nicholas Partners. LLC. 60 A.D.3d 434 (App. Div. 1st Dep't), the court found that an increase in the rent at the same time the landlords ""ceased filing the annual registration"" can sustain a finding of fraud. Specifically, Judge Arrindell finds that indicia of fraud could potentially include an unexplained jump in the rent plus landlord's failure to register the apartment (here, for two years). The …

Ditmas Flats Llc V. Perez

All Decisions

In this holdover proceeding based on alleged illegal subletting, the court dismissed the petition due to deficiencies in the predicate notices. The court found the notices vague and conclusory, failing to allege specific facts supporting the claim of illegal subletting as required by the Rent Stabilization Code. As a result, the court granted the tenant's motion to dismiss, striking the proceeding and denying the landlord's motion to strike the tenant's counterclaims.