Digital Commons Network^™

Bryophyte Community Composition In A Second-Order Tropical Stream At The Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico, Cecilia Sahnow, Jean P. González-Crespo, Amelia Merced

Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Streams are important ecosystems that harbor a high diversity of plant species including bryophytes. Studies suggest streams can function as refugia and/or corridors that buffer against the effects of disturbances. In this study, we sampled five sites along a second-order tropical stream in the Luquillo Experimental Forest. We described the riparian bryophyte community composition in conjunction with the physical structure of the stream to understand what environmental factors influence bryophyte composition in the stream. We identified 56 bryophytes, 33 liverworts and 23 mosses; and we recorded cyanobacteria associated with over half of the species of bryophytes. Rocks were the most …

Nicotine Pouches: Harm Reduction Or Initiation Pathway? A Pharmacy-Focused Review, Emmanuel Fashesin Souza, Keykavous Parang

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Background

Nicotine pouches (NPs) are a rapidly growing category of tobacco-free oral nicotine products increasingly available in the community, including pharmacies. Whether NPs primarily function as harm-reduction tools for existing tobacco users or as a novel initiation pathway into nicotine and tobacco use, particularly among youth, remains a critical and unresolved clinical and public health question.

Objectives

To synthesize current evidence on the pharmacology, harm-reduction potential, and initiation risk of NPs; to compare NPs with U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved nicotine replacement therapy and combustible cigarettes; and to identify implications and counseling priorities for pharmacy practice.

Methods

A narrative evidence …

Authentic Campaign Or Mass Brand Awareness: How To Choose The Right Influencers, Cristina Nistor, Matthew Selove, J. Miguel Villas-Boas

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Cristina Nistor, Matthew Selove, and J. Miguel Villas-Boas explain why micro-influencers are more authentic than celebrities. They also discuss how brands benefit from sponsoring different types of influencers.

The Intersection Of Sport Betting And Consumer Behavior: A Systematic Review, Jackson Sears, Beth Cianfrone

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Sport betting is a popular and lucrative entertainment segment of the sport industry. As such, understanding consumer behavior across the betting experiences is critical for the many stakeholders involved. The current study is a systematic quantitative literature review which assesses the current state of literature that intersects sport betting and consumer behavior literature, specifically cognitive, affective, conative, and consumption behavior of the sport bettors. The purpose of the systematic review is to (1) identify the most recent sport betting consumer behavior research, (2) compile and examine theoretical frameworks guiding sport gambling consumer research, (3) provide a descriptive summary of findings …

In Situ Electrochemical Characterization Techniques For Active Hydrogen In Electrocatalytic Nitrate Reduction To Ammonia, Hong-Mei Li, Mei Yi, Zhao-Yu Jin, Ming-Hao Xie, Khalid M. Omer, Yong Guo, Pan-Pan Li

Journal of Electrochemistry

Electrocatalytic nitrate reduction to ammonia (NitRR) represents a sustainable pathway that integrates environmental remediation with the production of high-value ammonia. However, the activity and selectivity of this process are limited by the generation, consumption, and dynamic equilibrium of the key transient intermediate—active hydrogen (*H). Precise modulation of *H necessitates a comprehensive understanding of its behavior, which relies fundamentally on advanced in situ electrochemical characterization techniques. However, a systematic review dedicated to the rational selection and application of in situ electrochemical techniques for the specific characterization of *H in NitRR, with clear definitions of each technique's "detectable targets, quantitative accuracy, and …

Trustworthy Ai At The Air Quality-Health Nexus: A Systematic Review Of Federated Learning, Distributed Ledger Technologies, And Explainable Ai, Nadia Dahmani, Imen Ben Salem, Syed M Salman Bukhari

All Works

Abstract Air quality (AQ) related health risks are increasing globally, creating urgent demand for artificial intelligence (AI) systems that are privacy-preserving, transparent, and auditable. Although Federated Learning (FL), Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), and Explainable AI (XAI) are widely recognized as core components of trustworthy AI, existing research remains divided across technical and application domains. This study conducts a computational, multistage systematic review (SR) of scholarly literature records published between 2011 and 2025 using the Semantic Scholar Graph API with intersection and union search strategies. A total of 13 458 records were retrieved and refined into a research-grade corpus of 7 …

Nyls Appoints Daniel Friedman As Associate Professor Of Law, Anthony W. Crowell

NYLS Community News

No abstract provided.

The End-Of-Life Option Most People Don’T Know About: Is It Legal?, Pamela Bucy Pierson

Idaho Law Review

This article is about an end-of-life option that many people have not heard of: Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED). With VSED, a person deliberately ceases intake of food and fluid to hasten their death. VSED is a peaceful, pain-free end-of-life option chosen by an increasing number of individuals in their last chapter of life who are suffering from chronic, incurable, progressively debilitating diseases. While there is considerable scholarship on the lawfulness of VSED, there is confusion in the existing literature on whether VSED is suicide, and on the related question whether individuals who provide comfort and care to VSED …

Cheap Talk, Deepfakes, Epistemic Injustice, False Light, And Free Speech, Cosim Sayid

Idaho Law Review

Defamation is a more or less effective tool in tort law to stop damage to one’s reputation, which can be grievous and even lead to a death of despair, but its scope is limited to content that’s literally false. Much reputational harm does not proceed via literally false content; it is a matter of images or what’s implied. Against this opponent an effective False Light tort is of much use when properly understood as a reputational—rather than privacy—tort. False Light can be wielded against conversational implicature as well as deepfakes. It fulfills our moral imperative to not succumb to cheap …

Great Crypto Vanishing Act: Illusory Contracts And The Economic Loss Rule, Henry H. Perritt Jr.

Idaho Law Review

Cryptocurrencies have gained respectability with enactment of the federal GENIUS Act, which lays a regulatory foundation for the safest type of cryptocurrency, stablecoins, while leaving significant uncertainty with respect to unbacked crypto assets like Bitcoin and other cryptomoney and crypto investments that do not come within the GENUIS Act’s scope. The vulnerability of cryptocurrencies to wild fluctuations in value and to outright collapse are legion. The GENIUS Act may tame some actors who choose to operate within its framework, but many questions remain.

Legal remedies available to victims of cryptocurrency mishaps, from exchange collapses to issuer fraud, depend heavily on …

The Federal Rules Of Evidence And Adjudicating Truth To Power, Susan H. Bitensky

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Child Protection Across Cultural Borders: Is Child Neglect Culture-Specific? Should It Be?, David Pimentel, Meeka C. Woods

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Intercountry Adoptions In South Africa And Uganda: Do Different Contracting Statuses Relative To The Hague Convention Matter?, Joseph Isanga

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Marriage Jurisdiction Under European Union Law: Cross-Border Recognition Of Ecclesiastical Decisions, Carmen Garcimartín

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Flexibility And Resistance Of Family Law In France And Other European Countries In The Context Of The Internationalization Of The Family And Of Family Law, Sylwia Castillo-Wyszogrodzka

Idaho Law Review

The international mobility of individuals requires legal orders to adjust their jurisprudence and legal practice. The evolution of family law oscillates between internationalization and protection of national identity. This phenomenon is particularly striking in Europe, where individuals enjoy the right to move and reside freely within the European Union and where family law is influenced by the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

The state reduces its authority to comply with new requirements and gives individuals more power to create their own family bonds. Many questions arise around the legal recognition of …

Idaho Law Review 62.2

Idaho Law Review

No abstract provided.

Vt‑Tce V1.0 — Standalone Buildable Disclosure Vortex‑Tube Thermal Conditioning Engine A Passive Hot/Cold Separation Thermal‑Conditioning System For Remote Energy Installations, Michael Victor Caldwell Mr.

Defensive Publications Series

VT‑TCE v1.0 is a builder‑ready, open‑hardware, standalone thermal‑conditioning engine based on:

• vortex‑tube hot/cold separation

• passive thermal routing

• synthetic‑coolant compatibility

• hot‑stream buffering

• cold‑stream electronics/sensor cooling

It is designed for remote energy installations, providing:

• cold‑stream electronics cooling

• hot‑stream thermal buffering

• auxiliary heat routing

• passive thermal stabilization

This version contains no external invention references and is fully buildable and testable by engineering teams.

Self-Exhausting Fleet-Level Failure Pattern Detection Via Persistent Graph Coloring And Human-In-The-Loop Validation, Nilay Gupta, Wayne W Chen

Defensive Publications Series

Techniques are proposed herein for detecting and validating recurring failure patterns across a fleet-scale corpus of causal event graphs. A pattern-discovery engine groups taxonomy-normalized node labels and categories, computes support as the number of distinct incident graphs containing a pattern, and classifies retained patterns into new taxonomy categories and known but unvalidated patterns. Engineers confirm or reject ranked patterns through a human-in-the-loop workflow. Confirmed patterns are recorded in a persistent validated-pattern registry that is structurally independent of the graph index and reapplied after index rebuilds. The registry acts as a partial graph coloring and active-learning oracle: future discovery operates on …

The Luggage That Allows To Gradually Measure The Progressive Collective Weight Of The Items Being Inserted Into The Luggage Where The Progressive Changes In The Collective Weight Can Be Measured With The Progressive Insertion And With The Progressive Exclusion Of The Items While Keeping The Lid Of The Luggage Open., Punarjeewa Abeysekera

Defensive Publications Series

This paper describes a luggage that allows to gradually measure the progressive collective weight of the items being inserted into the luggage where the progressive changes in the collective weight can be measured with the progressive insertion and with the progressive exclusion of the items while keeping the lid of the luggage open. The entire luggage will consist of a luggage compartment, a lid, a lid compartment, a power source, a structural part attached to the lid, a structural part attached to the luggage compartment, a convex shaped structure attached to the luggage compartment, a scale attached to the convex …

Context-Aware Multimodal Generative Copilot And Cross-Surface Discovery Engine For Automotive Passenger Displays, Richa Gupta

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes an operating-system-level passenger copilot, also referred to as an in-car assistant, passenger companion, or media helper, for vehicles equipped with passenger displays, rear-seat entertainment screens, or secondary displays. The system coordinates video screen image capture (frame ingestion), voice isolation (seat-isolated routing), cross-device watch history syncing (watch graph synchronization), and on-screen landmark navigation (point of interest extraction) to enhance the in-vehicle entertainment experience without distracting the driver. When a user taps an on-screen icon or speaks into a dedicated microphone, the vehicle operating system captures a video frame, screenshot, or image from a streaming video application. A multimodal …

System For Providing Playback-Synchronized Contextual Content To A Secondary Device, Aritri Chakraborty, Himank Airon, Ayushi Goyal

Defensive Publications Series

Obtaining contextual information for content on a primary display can disrupt a viewing experience or involve fragmented manual searches on a separate device. Systems and methods are described that can address this by synchronizing a secondary computing device (e.g., a smartphone, tablet, or wearable device) with a primary display. The primary device may broadcast synchronization data, such as a content identifier and a playback timestamp, to a companion application on the secondary device. This application can then query a backend system to retrieve pre-processed, time-coded metadata corresponding to a specific moment in the media. This process can provide context-aware information …

Edge-Based Causal Analysis For Remediating Micro-Temporal Resource Congestion, Ajit Singh

Defensive Publications Series

Systems and methods are described for mitigating micro-temporal resource congestion in multi-tenant computing environments, where conventional schedulers may not effectively resolve sub-second interference. A decentralized control plane can operate at the node level, using local probabilistic profiling to generate compressed summaries of system behavior. A causal analysis engine can then calculate a correlation coefficient to attribute performance degradation in a affected workload to the resource consumption of a potential source workload. The system can handle analysis edge cases, such as resource saturation, and can employ a return-on-investment framework to select a remediation action, for example, throttling the source, boosting the …

Dynamic And Granular Source Attribution For Structured Content, Hugo Navarrete, David Fengyu Ke

Defensive Publications Series

Systems for presenting structured content, such as lists, can face challenges in providing clear source attribution. Placing a single citation at the end of a list may create a disconnect between a specific claim and its source, potentially making verification difficult for a user. To address this, techniques are described for a system that can dynamically place attribution markers within the content. This system can analyze properties, such as list length, nesting depth, and source mapping, to apply a rules-based strategy, for example, inserting citations on a per-item or sectional basis. The system can then modify the content to insert …

Md/Mba Dual Degree Trends In Ophthalmology Residency: A 12-Year Analysis (2013-2025), Katherine Krishna, Brandon Chou, Felipe Echeverri Tribin, Steven J. Gedde

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: The number of Medical Doctor and Master of Business Administration (MD/MBA) dual degree programs has grown fivefold in the last two decades, reflecting an increased integration of business training in medical education. Despite this growth, the role and prevalence of MD/MBA degrees among ophthalmology residents remain largely uncharacterized.

Purpose: To characterize trends in prevalence, demographics, and educational patterns of MD/MBA dual degree holders among U.S. ophthalmology residents who entered residency between 2013 and 2025.

Methods: Ophthalmology residents in the United States who entered residency between 2013 and 2025 (n = 5,684) were included, with 80 MD/MBA …

An Innovative Surgical Simulator For Globe And Orbit Procedures, Anuj U. Patel, George Lin, Rishi Hoskeri, Chelsea L. Reighard, Marguerite C. Weinert, Zahra Nourmohammadi, David Zopf

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: Increased access to procedural opportunities for trainees in ophthalmology is needed to refine critical surgical skills, including manipulating and suturing the conjunctiva and sclera.

Purpose: To develop an in vitro high-fidelity globe and orbit model, made from synthetic materials and 3D-printing techniques, and to report our experience using the model in a structured wet lab training session on conjunctival and scleral suturing.

Methods: The model was implemented into two resident wet lab courses. Trainees and expert evaluators were asked to perform the same procedures. Evaluators were asked to incise and repair the simulated conjunctiva and sclera …

Geographic And Temporal Trends Of International Medical Graduate Ophthalmologists In The United States, Ju Hyun Jeon, Francisco Altamirano, Ju-Yeun Lee, Nadine Almuasher, Efren Gonzalez, Isdin Oke

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: International medical graduates (IMGs) are an integral part of the U.S. physician workforce. Understanding their representation and geographic distribution is essential for evaluating workforce diversity and access to care.

Purpose: To describe the temporal and geographic trends of IMG ophthalmologists in the United States and provide insights into their contribution to the ophthalmology workforce.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study included ophthalmologists with active state medical licenses between 2010 and 2024. Publicly available data were obtained from Doximity, a national medical professional database, and state licensure records. Physicians were classified as U.S. medical graduates (USMGs) or IMGs …

Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Eye-Related Emergency Department Encounters At An Academic Safety-Net Health System, Eleanor Burton, Taylor Gemperline, Cynthia Wan, Clayton Grundvig, Hannah Harrelson, Caroline Kim, Michael Cusick

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: Emergency departments (EDs) provide care to millions of patients with eye-related concerns annually. Many patients delayed seeking medical care for routine and emergent conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the demographics and diagnoses of eye-related emergency department visits at an academic safety-net health system.

Methods: The medical records of patients seen in the University of Virginia (UVA) ED from 1 July 2017 to 29 December 2022 with a primary ophthalmic diagnosis were reviewed retrospectively. Clinical and demographic information was extracted from electronic health records, and an acuity …

Impact Of Gender And Fellowship Training On Academic Advancement In Ophthalmology, Zahraa Alomar, Ashley Choi, Karine D. Bojikian, Miel Sundararajan, Leona Ding, Shu Feng

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: Women have reached near parity within ophthalmology, but significant gender disparities persist at the higher academic ranks.

Purpose: To evaluate the impact of gender, residency graduation year, and fellowship training with academic rank in ophthalmology across U.S. academic ophthalmology departments.

Methods: Academic ophthalmology residency program websites were reviewed to collect faculty data on gender (as defined by pronoun usage in profiles), year of residency graduation, fellowship training, academic rank, and promotion track (clinical vs. academic). Univariate analysis was performed using one-way ANOVA and Pearson χ² tests. Multinomial regression with likelihood ratio tests were conducted for …

Development And Delivery Of A Novel Psychologically Informed Resident Wellness Curriculum, Marguerite C. Weinert, Alice Lorch, Ethan Lester

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: Residents in training are at increased risk for burnout, depression, and suicide. Wellness efforts are widespread, but common practices are often transient, ineffective, or dependent on additional time from residents.

Purpose: To describe the development, delivery, and reception of a structured wellness curriculum aimed at providing residents psychoeducation, coping skills, and community building opportunities.

Methods: Residents PGY1-4 were surveyed on our wellness curriculum. This included how helpful the curriculum was in achieving its goals (providing a space for resident concerns and challenges, teaching coping tools and skills, reducing burnout, strengthening bonds between coresidents), impressions of the …

Gender Disparities In Academic Productivity Of Early Career Ophthalmologists With Children, Olivia J. Killeen, Theodora Vorias, Stacy L. Pineles, Reshma Jagsi, Laura B. Enyedi, Arghavan Salles, Amanda L. Ely, Michelle T. Cabrera

Journal of Academic Ophthalmology

Background: Female academic physicians are less likely than males to be promoted. Gender disparities related to parenthood and academic productivity may contribute to differing promotion trajectories for men and women.

Purpose: We investigated the association of gender and parenthood on academic productivity among early career ophthalmologists.

Methods: An email questionnaire was distributed to assistant professors of ophthalmology at U.S. institutions from February to April 2023. The questionnaire included items related to demographics, family responsibilities, and academic productivity. Descriptive statistics were calculated by gender alone and gender with parenthood status. Negative binomial regression models were used to analyze …