Digital Commons Network^™

Sex-Dependent Differences In Vulnerability To Early Risk Factors For Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Results From The Aurora Study, Stephanie Haering, Antonia V. Seligowski, Sarah D. Linnstaedt, Vasiliki Michopoulos, Stacey L. House, Francesca L. Beaudoin, Xinming An, Thomas C. Neylan, Robert A. Swor

Articles

No abstract provided.

Slipping Into Judicial Barbarism?, Pranav Verma

Articles

Book Review | Gautam Bhatia, Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts and the State, HarperCollins Publisher India, 2023

Legislating Courts, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

No abstract provided.

Rejoinder To Rural Transformations And Rural Crime Book Review Published In Rural Society (Vol. 32, Iss. 3), Matt Bowden, Alistair Harkness

Articles

In his review, John Scott makes two key but misleading charges: first is an intimation that rural criminology is dominated by a clique of scholars; and second that the book by and large lacks ‘critical’ analysis to his liking. The reviewer provides a glimpse of a broad analysis of the field and adopts an independently minded position. Indeed, some observations and claims are made that should rightly be part of a wider debate in criminology broadly, about its relevance, impact and contribution to the social sciences: legitimate and important questions that ought to be addressed. However, a few errors in …

Spectralomics – Towards A Holistic Adaptation Of Label Free Spectroscopy, Hugh Byrne

Articles

Vibrational spectroscopy, largely based on infrared absorption and Raman scattering techniques, is much vaunted as a label free approach, delivering a high content, holistic characterisation of a sample, with demonstrable applications in a broad range of fields, from process analytical technologies and preclinical drug screening, to disease diagnostics, therapeutics, prognostics and personalised medicine. However, in the analysis of such complex systems, a trend has emerged in which spectral analysis is reduced to the identification of individual peaks, based on reference tables of assignments derived from literature, which are then interpreted as biomarkers. More sophisticated analysis attempts to unmix the spectrum …

What's In A Name?: Common Carriage, Social Media, And The First Amendment, Christopher S. Yoo

Articles

Courts and legislatures have suggested that classifying social media as common carriers would make restrictions on their right to exclude users more constitutionally permissible under the First Amendment. A review of the relevant statutory definitions reveals that the statutes provide no support for classifying social media as common carriers. Moreover, the fact that a legislature may apply a label to a particular actor plays no significant role in the constitutional analysis. A further review of the elements of the common law definition of common carrier reveals that four of the purported criteria (whether the industry is affected with a public …

Toward Abolitionist Remedies: Police (Non)Reform Litigation After The 2020 Uprisings, Cara Mcclellan, Jamelia N. Morgan

Articles

In the summer of 2020, across the country, Americans took to the street in protest of Mr. George Floyd’s murder and the police killings of countless other Black people. In too many cases, police responded to protesters with excessive force and the very brutality that had led people to protest police in the first place. In the wake of these horrific displays of force, over 40 lawsuits were filed nationwide that challenged police conduct at protests. Smith v. City of Philadelphia, one of the lawsuits brought on behalf of residents and protesters in Philadelphia, was unique because the tragic underlying …

A Rapidly Shifting Landscape : Why Digitized Violence Is The Newest Category Of Gender-Based Violence, Rangita De Silva De Alwis

Articles

This paper proposes that new research on technology-facilitated violence must shape gender-based violence against women laws. Given the AI revolution, including large language models (“ LLMs ”), and generative artificial intelligence, new technologies continue to create power disparities that help facilitate gender-based violence both online and offline. The paper argues that the veil of anonymity provided by the digital realm facilitates violence ; and the automation capabilities offered by technology amplify the scope and impact of abusive behavior. Although the direct physical act of sexual violence is different from offline violence, there are similarities. Firstly, both acts share the structural …

What Can State Medical Boards Do To Effectively Address Serious Ethical Violations?, Tristan Mcintosh, Elizabeth Pendo, Heidi A. Walsh, Kari A. Baldwin, Patricia King, Emily E. Anderson, Catherine V. Caldicott, Jeffrey D. Carter, Sandra H. Johnson, Katherine Matthews, William A. Norcross, Dana C. Shaffer, James M. Dubois

Articles

State Medical Boards (SMBs) can take severe disciplinary actions (e.g., license revocation or suspension) against physicians who commit egregious wrongdoing in order to protect the public. However, there is noteworthy variability in the extent to which SMBs impose severe disciplinary action. In this manuscript, we present and synthesize a subset of 11 recommendations based on findings from our team’s larger consensus-building project that identified a list of 56 policies and legal provisions SMBs can use to better protect patients from egregious wrongdoing by physicians.

Modelling Hoe Performance With An Extended Source; Experimental Investigation Using Misaligned Point Sources, Jorge Lasarte, Kevin Murphy, Izabela Naydenova, Maria Victoria Collados, Jesús Atencia, Suzanne Martin

Articles

Holographic optical elements (HOEs) have the potential to enable more compact, versatile, and lightweight optical designs, but many challenges remain. Volume HOEs have the advantage of high diffraction efficiency, but they present both chromatic selectivity and chromatic dispersion, which impact their use with wide spectrum light sources. Single-color light emitting diode (LED) sources have a narrow spectrum that reduces these issues and this makes them better suited for use with volume HOEs. However, the LED source size must be taken into consideration for compact volume HOE-LED systems. To investigate the design limits for compact HOE-LED systems, a theoretical and experimental …

Sidewalk Government, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

This Article is about one of the most used, least studied spaces in the country: the sidewalk.

It is easy to think of sidewalks simply as spaces for pedestrians, and that is exactly how most scholars, policymakers, and laws treat them. But this view is fundamentally mistaken. In big cities and small towns, sidewalks are also where we gather, demonstrate, dine, exercise, rest, and shop. They are host to commerce and infrastructure. They are spaces of public access and sources of private obligation. And in all of these things, sidewalks are sites of under-appreciated conflict. The centrality of sidewalks in …

Antisocial Innovation, Christopher Buccafusco, Samuel N. Weinstein

Articles

Innovation is a form of civic religion in the United States. In the popular imagination, innovators are heroic figures. Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and (for a while) Elizabeth Holmes were lauded for their vision and drive, and seen to embody the American spirit of invention and improvement. For their part, politicians rarely miss a chance to trumpet their vision for boosting innovative activity. Popular and political culture alike treat innovation as an unalloyed good. And the law is deeply committed to fostering innovation, spending billions of dollars a year to make sure society has enough of it. But this sunny …

Immigration - Lifeboat Earth - Is The Boat Full, Thomas Power

Articles

The Lifeboat Earth metaphor requires western liberals to consider answers to those normative questions posed by Hardin. But the answer to them possibly depends on the economic effects of immigration and this can come from both economic theory and research.

Lost & Found (Game Series) [Book Chapter], Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Description of game series for use in the classroom with best practices.

Kinetic Modelling Of The Cellular Metabolic Responses Underpinning In Vitro Glycolysis Assays, Nitin Patil, Zohreh Mirveis, Hugh Byrne

Articles

This study aims to demonstrate the benefits of augmenting commercially available, real-time, in vitro glycolysis assays with phenomenological rate equation-based kinetic models, describing the contributions of the underpinning metabolic pathways. To this end, a commercially available glycolysis assay, sensitive to changes in extracellular acidification (extracellular pH), was used to derive the glycolysis pathway kinetics. The pathway was numerically modelled using a series of ordinary differential rate equations, to simulate the obtained experimental results. The sensitivity of the model to the key equation parameters was also explored. The cellular glycolysis pathway kinetics were determined for three different cell-lines, under nonmodulated and …

Giving People The Words To Say No Leads Them To Feel Freer To Say Yes, Rachel Schlund, Roseanna Sommers, Vanessa K. Bohns

Articles

We examine how to structure requests to help people feel they can say no (or yes) more voluntarily. Specifically, we examine the effect of having the requester provide the request-target with an explicit phrase they can use to decline requests. Part of the difficulty of saying no is finding the words to do so when put on the spot. Providing individuals with an explicit script they can use to decline a request may help override implicit scripts and norms of politeness that generally dictate compliance. This should make individuals feel more comfortable refusing requests and make agreement feel more voluntary. …

Generalised Zero-Shot Learning For Action Recognition Fusing Text And Image Gans, Kaiqiang Huang, Susan Mckeever, Luis Miralles-Pechuán

Articles

Generalized Zero-Shot Action Recognition (GZSAR) is geared towards recognizing classes that the model has not been trained on, while still maintaining robust performance on the familiar, trained classes. This approach mitigates the need for an extensive amount of labeled training data and enhances the efficient utilization of available datasets. The main contribution of this paper is a novel approach for GZSAR that combines the power of two Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). One GAN is responsible for generating embeddings from visual representations, while the other GAN focuses on generating embeddings from textual representations. These generated embeddings are fused, with the selection …

Disaggregating Longer-Term Trends From Seasonal Variations In Measured Pv System Performance, Chibuisi Chinasaokwu Okorieimoh, Brian Norton, Michael Conlon

Articles

Photovoltaic (PV) systems are widely adopted for renewable energy generation, but their performance is influenced by complex interactions between longer-term trends and seasonal variations. This study aims to remove these factors and provide valuable insights for optimising PV system operation. We employ comprehensive datasets of measured PV system performance over five years, focusing on identifying the distinct contributions of longer-term trends and seasonal effects. To achieve this, we develop a novel analytical framework that combines time series and statistical analytical techniques. By applying this framework to the extensive performance data, we successfully break down the overall PV system output into …

Populist Politics And International Business Policy: Problems, Practices, And Prescriptions For Mnes, Paul Vaaler, Christopher Hartwell, Barclay James, Thomas Lindner, Jakob Müllner

Articles

In this editorial introduction to the Special Issue on populism, we discuss different approaches to defining populism in ways relevant to multinational enterprise (MNE) strategy and organization. In addition, we demonstrate how populist host-country government policies often target MNEs in ways that give rise to distinctly new forms of discriminatory treatment. This theoretical background sets the stage for the papers of this Special Issue, explaining the origins of these populist host-country government policies and the impact of such policies on FDI and international trade. We conclude with various suggestions for advancing IB policy research on populism, including building a better …

Centralizing Pharmaceutical Innovation, Sapna Kumar

Articles

The United States has a mostly decentralized system for promoting new medicine development. By offering patents and regulatory exclusivities, the government incentivizes pharmaceutical companies to invent and bring to market new medicines. Although this development model offers benefits for promoting innovation, it comes at a cost: Market-based incentives lead companies to prioritize research and development (“R&D”) for medicines that offer a safe path to profitability, as opposed to those that offer the greatest social benefit. In particular, pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to invest in R&D for critically-needed antibiotics and infectious disease vaccines—both of which are difficult to develop and provide …

Light And Dark Mode: A Comparison Between Android And Ios App Ui Modes And Interviews With App Designers And Developers, Sarah Andrew, Chelsea Bishop, Garreth W. Tigwell

Articles

Mobile app light and dark modes offer improved usability within different contexts (e.g., dark mode for easier night reading). Yet, little research has investigated the prevalence of light and dark modes across platforms, the intricacies of UI color changes, and challenges in the design and development process. Our investigation focused on comparing light and dark mode designs. We carried out a manual inspection of 120 popular Android and iOS apps to find that only 55\% (Android) and 48\% (iOS) of the apps included any modes. We also found significant variability in how many UI elements changed between modes. We interviewed …

Theorising Political Legitimisation: From Stasis To Processes, Paddy Dolan, Stephen Vertigans, John Connolly

Articles

Legitimacy remains a key concept in political sociology, and perhaps even more so in lay understandings of political processes and structures, as evidenced by conflict over territories and regimes around the world. However, the concept suffers from a rather static representation, and even when addressed in processual form, in terms of specific moments in the process, such as conditions favouring legitimacy or its effects. Building from an Eliasian perspective, we argue for a more processual concept of legitimisation to encompass the dynamic social networks (figurations) that constitute the more unintentional context for deliberate legitimation claims. As networks expand and intensify, …

The New Gender Panic In Sport: Why State Laws Banning Transgender Athletes Are Unconstitutional, Deborah Brake

Articles

The scope and pace of legislative activity targeting transgender individuals is nothing short of a gender panic. From restrictions on medical care to the regulation of library books and the use of pronouns in schools, attacks on the transgender community have reached crisis proportions. A growing number of families with transgender children are being forced to leave their states of residence to keep their children healthy and their families safe and intact. The breadth and pace of these developments is striking. Although the anti-transgender backlash now extends broadly into health and family governance, sport was one of the first settings—the …

Keep Charitable Oversight In The Irs, Philip Hackney

Articles

Critics are increasingly calling for Congress to remove charity regulation from the IRS. The critics are wrong. Congress should maintain charity regulation in the IRS. What is at stake is balancing power between the state, charity as civil society, and the economic order. In a well-balanced democracy, civil society maintains its independence from the state and the economic order. Removing charitable jurisdiction from the IRS would blind the IRS to dollars placed in charitable solution increasing tax and political shelters and wealthy dominance of charities as civil society. A new agency without understanding of, or jurisdiction over, tax cannot act …

Toward A Better Criminal Legal System: Improving Prisons, Prosecution, And Criminal Defense, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

Articles

During the Fall 2023 semester, 15 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 13 incarcerated (Inside) students from the State Correctional Institution – Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full semester class together called Issues in Criminal Justice and Law. The class, occurring each week at the prison, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange pedagogy, and was facilitated by Professor David Harris. Subjects include the purposes of prison, addressing crime, the criminal legal system and race, and issues surrounding victims and survivors of crime. The course culminated in a Group Project; under the heading “improving the …

Shareholder Primacy Versus Shareholder Accountability, William Wilson Bratton

Articles

When corporations inflict injuries in the course of business, shareholders wielding environmental, social, and governance ("ESG") principles can, and now sometimes do, intervene to correct the matter. In the emerging fact pattern, corporate social accountability expands out of its historic collectivized frame to become an internal subject matter-a corporate governance topic. As a result, shareholder accountability surfaces as a policy question for the first time. The Big Three index fund managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, responded to the accountability question with ESG activism. In so doing, they defected against corporate legal theory's central tenet, shareholder primacy. Shareholder primacy builds …

Abortion Disorientation, Greer Donley, Caroline M. Kelly

Articles

The word “abortion” pervades public discourse in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But do we know what it means? Not only do law and medicine define it differently; state legislatures have codified wildly different definitions of abortion across jurisdictions. Our analysis exposes inherent ambiguities at the boundaries of the term, particularly as abortion intersects with other categories that we often think of as distinct: pregnancy loss, ectopic pregnancy, and other forms of medically necessary care. By juxtaposing statutory text next to real people’s experiences of being denied care in states with abortion bans, we reveal …

An Image Processing Approach For Real-Time Safety Assessment Of Autonomous Drone Delivery, Assem A. Abdelhak, Dan Moss, Alan Hicks, Susan Mckeever

Articles

The aim of producing self-driving drones has driven many researchers to automate various drone driving functions, such as take-off, navigation, and landing. However, despite the emergence of delivery as one of the most important uses of autonomous drones, there is still no automatic way to verify the safety of the delivery stage. One of the primary steps in the delivery operation is to ensure that the dropping zone is a safe area on arrival and during the dropping process. This paper proposes an image-processing-based classification approach for the delivery drone dropping process at a predefined destination. It employs live streaming …

Grid Reliability In The Electric Era, Joshua Macey, Shelley Welton, Hannah Wiseman

Articles

The United States has delegated the weighty responsibility of keeping the lights on to a self-regulatory organization called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). Despite the fact that NERC is one of the largest and most important examples of industry-led governance—and regulates in an area that is central to our economy and basic human survival—this unusual institution has received scant attention from policymakers and scholars. Such attention is overdue. To achieve deep decarbonization, the United States must enter a new “electric era,” transitioning many sectors to run on electricity while also transforming the electricity system itself to run largely …

An Analysis Of The Public Participation Processes Employed For An Urban Greenway Project, Maeve O'Connell

Articles

The purpose of this study is to examine the public participation mechanisms employed for a proposed new infrastructure project. Public participation is a core characteristic of a contemporary democratic society as policy makers are increasingly encouraged to engage with citizens for learning and legitimacy. Participation is a loose concept with many forms and interpretations. This study explores the key characteristics of public participation formats, challenges to and the criteria for success. This analysis is then applied to the proposed local infrastructure consultation process. An additional survey is designed and its role in the public participation process is assessed. The processes …