Digital Commons Network^™

Journey To Well-Being: An Exploration Of Thrivership Post-Domestic Violence, Kader Gumus

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Domestic violence profoundly affects multiple facets of a survivor’s life. While most existing literature on survivorship addresses the immediate aftermath of domestic violence, this study delves into the extended process following the trauma of abuse to attain “thrivership,” a new concept in the scholarly and practice literature that emphasizes enduring well-being and flourishing. This dissertation examines the journeys from surviving to thriving for 13 women who transformed themselves and their lives to achieve well-being after traumatic domestic violence. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory was applied to examine the multiple layers of environmental influences on an individual’s development, including the micro, meso, …

Investigating The Psychological Determinants Of Rural Volunteer Firefighters’ Health, Occupational Performance, And Resilience, Candice Jaye Brown

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Volunteer firefighters (VFFs) are essential to rural emergency response, and their ability to perform effectively depends on their mental and physical readiness. Given the high prevalence of mental and physical health challenges among VFFs, there is a critical need for research to better understand how these factors interact to develop targeted interventions that can systematically improve VFF functioning. This study addressed gaps in the literature by examining the intersections and mechanisms shaping rural VFFs’ coping functions, physical health, occupational performance, resilience, and social support. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was employed, beginning with a quantitative survey of 180 West …

Cultural Immersion And Practices: Ellie Mannette’S Steel Pan Building Processes In Morgantown, West Virginia., Timothy Clark Friedhaber

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Ellie Mannette, among others, was one of the first builders of the modern steel pan. Born and raised in Trinidad, Mannette started building steel pans at a young age. Eventually, he gained employment with the United States Naval Steel Band, which opened opportunities for him to grow in his field. Through these opportunities and connections, Mannette arrived in the United States permanently in 1967. In the later part of his life, he moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, where he continued building, teaching his building processes, and tuning steel pans. The study aims to serve as an aid for other scholars …

Thermal Inactivation Of E. Faecium On Ground Poultry, Joseph Katz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Chicken products in grocery stores are contaminated with Salmonella that is ranked number one as a foodborne pathogen, and causes about 1.35 million cases of foodborne illness, 26,500 hospitalizations, and 420 deaths annually. The objective of this study is to determine thermal kinetic parameters of Salmonella surrogate bacteria E. faecium in ground poultry as affected by different temperatures and salt concentrations. The raw chicken was sliced up into a 500 g batch with a total of 6 batches per replicate, ground up in the meat grinder followed by inoculation with E. faecium resistant to 200 ppm Nalidixic Acid. NaCl …

Pathogens And Parasites Of Feral And Managed Honey Bee, Apis Mellifera, Colonies From Oklahoma, Allen Szalanski

Entomology and Plant Pathology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Managed honey bee populations in the United States have been under stress over the past several decades, probably due to the interaction among multiple biotic and abiotic stressors. While most research has focused on national surveys of honey bee pathogens and parasites, state-specific studies that include both managed and feral honey bee populations may offer additional insights into the factors that contribute to the decline of honey bees. We conducted a survey to detect parasites and pathogens from feral and managed honey bees in colonies in Oklahoma. A total of 253 (89 managed and 164 feral) honey bees from these …

Genetic Variation Of Rice Stink Bugs, Oebalus Spp. (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) From Southeastern United States And Cuba, Allen Szalanski

Entomology and Plant Pathology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The rice stink bug, Oebalus pugnax (F.; Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) has been a pest of rice in the United States since the 1880s. Besides this species, there now are two invasive Oebalus species, O. ypsilongriseus (De Geer) and O. insularis Stål, which are found in Florida. Genetic variation of these economically important species is unknown, limiting our understanding of Oebalus evolution and demography. Here we provide the first population-level investigation of genetic diversity in these species. Ninety two adult stink bugs were collected from the southeastern United States (Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida), and Cuba. A region of the mitochondrial DNA cytochrome oxidase …

Study Finds Pelvic Floor Dysfunction In Women With Multiple Sclerosis Is An Unmet Need Requiring Nursing Action, Nicole Zhang

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Ai-Generated Text Detection And Source Identification, Anjana Priyatham Tatavarthi, Faranak Abri, Nada Attar

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The use of advanced machine learning techniques to detect AI-generated text is a very practical application. The ability to distinguish human-written content from machine-generated text while identifying the source generative model helps address growing concerns about authenticity and accountability in digital communication. The differentiation of human-generated and AI-generated text is highly relevant to several applications, from news media to academic integrity, and is key to ensuring transparency and trust in content-driven environments. However, existing models are often insufficient to accurately detect AI-generated text and determine the specific AI source due to the complex nature of machine-generated content. To address this, …

Game Theory: Using Play To Talk With My Children About The Unpredictable Road To Recovery, Miranda Worthen

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In this narrative, a mother with an unexpected medical setback creates a board game with her children to talk with them about what happened and share their emotions about the experience.

Moral Intensity Dimensions Of Information Security Policy Compliance: Perspectives Of Construal Level Theory And Ethical Theories, Dailin Zheng, Zhiping Walter

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Sanctions are often ineffective in promoting employee compliance with information systems security policies (ISSPs) and may lead to undesired outcomes. We establish that ISSP compliance is an ethical decision and examine it through the lens of ethical decision-making using scenario-based surveys. Guided by normative ethical theories and the construal level theory, we find that both the opinions of co-workers and perceived negative consequences of noncompliance to the organization influence employee ISSP compliance intention. Additionally, perceived social distance affects employees' assessment of when damages to the organization can occur. Both the assessed timing of damage and the perceived social distance from …

Reliability And Severity Levels Of The Voice-Related Experiences Of Nonbinary Individuals, Grace Shefcik, Pei Tzu Tsai, Satveer Kler

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Objectives: Clinicians providing gender-affirming communication services to nonbinary individuals often utilize client questionnaires. The Voice-related Experiences of Nonbinary Individuals (VENI) is the only published questionnaire exclusively for nonbinary clients. This questionnaire consists of 17 items that gain insight into the client's self-perception of voice and voice-related concerns. According to Shefcik and Tsai (2023), the VENI's content validity is good to excellent. This study evaluated the measure's reliability through internal consistency and test-retest reliability analyses and created impact ratings to support interpretation of scores. Study Design: This study utilized an online survey-based design with test-retest administration. The initial survey was administered …

The Use Of An In Chemico Digestibility Assay To Reduce The In Vivo Fish Bioaccumulation Testing Of Nanomaterials, Craig Mchardy, Nathaniel J. Clark, Robert Clough, Richard D. Handy

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

Currently for engineered nanomaterials (ENMs), there are no alternatives to bioaccumulation testing in fish as prescribed by OECD TG 305. New approaches are being sought, in order to reduce the numbers of animals used and address the ethical concerns associated with the use of vertebrates in such testing. This study aimed to demonstrate the value of an alternative method — the in chemico digestibility assay — as a tool to assess the bioaccumulation potential of ENMs. Titanium dioxide ENMs, or their equivalent bulk form, were incorporated onto a commercial fish diet and the fish digestion process was simulated in vitro …

Discriminatory Censorship Laws, Jonathan Feingold, Joshua Weishart

Faculty Scholarship

The summer of 2020 ignited global protests for racial justice. Across the United States, millions marched with a modest plea: that America reckon with its racism. For K-12 schools, this moment pushed local communities and district leaders to create more inclusive classrooms and curricula. Yet before the summer had ended, America's antiracist turn provoked a backlash campaign that has proven far more impactful and enduring.

This campaign has featured the rise and spread of "discriminatory censorship laws"-a term we apply to government action designed to demean inclusionary values and to deny students access to critical knowledge, inquiry, and thinking. As …

The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping And Privacy, Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems depend on massive quantities of data, often gathered by “scraping”—the automated extraction of large amounts of data from the internet. A great deal of scraped data contains people’s personal information. This personal data provides the grist for AI tools such as facial recognition, deep fakes, and generative AI. Although scraping enables web searching, archiving of records, and meaningful scientific research, scraping for AI can also be objectionable and even harmful to individuals and society.

Organizations are scraping at an escalating pace and scale, even though many privacy laws are seemingly incongruous with the practice. In this …

Law As A Lamp Post, Janet Freilich

Faculty Scholarship

Law produces all manner of public information: court documents, securities filings, patents, property records, and much more. This information is used in a multitude of ways—it teaches readers about individual cases, transactions, or entities, and is also aggregated to inform policymaking, set priorities, and drive predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.

But choices about the information produced (or hidden) by law are often unintentional. Doctrines and institutions that appear facially unrelated to information production—like subject matter jurisdiction—nonetheless affect the shape and quantity of data produced. And even doctrines focused on information— like property recordation—create data used for purposes never envisioned by …

Gig Work At What Cost? Exploring Privacy Risks Of Gig Work Platform Participation In The U.S., Amogh Pradeep, Johanna Gunawan, Álvaro Feal, Woodrow Hartzog, David Choffnes

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, "gig work" platforms have gained popularity as a way for individuals to earn money; as of 2021, 16% of Americans have at some point earned money from such platforms. Despite their popularity and their history of unfair data collection practices and worker safety, little is known about the data collected from workers (and users) by gig platforms and about the privacy dark pattern designs present in their apps.

This paper presents an empirical measurement of 16 gig work platforms' data practices in the U.S. We analyze what data is collected by these platforms, and how it is …

Corporate Scenarios: Drawing Lessons From History, Madison Condon

Faculty Scholarship

As corporations are increasingly pressed to reveal information about their exposure to climate-related risks, they are often asked to undertake and disclose the outcome of “scenario analysis.” In this exercise, corporations, including financial institutions, examine how their business would fare under different pathways the future may take. One oft-used scenario, for example, is the International Energy Agency’s “Net-Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Energy Sector.” This Essay presents a history of the use of scenarios as a corporate planning tool, particularly in the oil industry, arguing that it is key for understanding our present moment and the role of …

Preventing Unjust Enrichment And Copyright Opportunism: An Equitable Interpretation Of Section 103(A), Pamela Samuelson, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

A stealth issue in many close copyright fair use cases is the potential invalidity of second comers’ copyrights under 17 U.S.C. § 103(a) if the secondary use is ultimately held to infringe the derivative work right. Section 103(a) of the Copyright Act says, in effect, that no copyright exists in any part of a derivative work in which the first work’s expression was “used unlawfully.” Courts have largely ignored § 103(a). But recent cases, such as Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith (2023), have raised the profile of § 103(a). This Article traces the origins, history, …

Contested Criminalization, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

How does the U.S. government decide to deploy criminal justice abroad? From the Syrian civil war to the Israel-Gaza conflict, Russia-Ukraine War, and U.S.-China relations, criminal law sits at the heart of contemporary U.S. foreign relations. And yet legal scholarship has never precisely explained how the U.S. government deploys or supports criminal prosecutions abroad, often defaulting to simplistic labels of the United States as exceptionalist, carceral, or isolationist. This Article rectifies this by introducing a theory of contested criminalization, piercing the veil of U.S. government decisionmaking in its use of criminal law in foreign policy. According to this process, …

Book Review: Biglaw's Race Problem, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Anthony V. Alfieri

Faculty Scholarship

Ever since the 1970s when BigLaw firms began to hire Black lawyers into their associate ranks, these firms have wrestled with problems in both recruiting and retaining Black associates. During the ensuing decades, BigLaw firms have minimally increased the low numbers of Black attorneys who have become partners, particularly equity partners, within their organizations. Numerous scholars have explored how racial bias and discrimination, both within BigLaw firms and greater society, have contributed to such failures in the recruitment, retention, and promotion of Black lawyers. In his new book The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace, …

Foundations For Platform Liability, Kathryn E. Spier, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

From spreading misinformation to selling deadly products, bad actors use technology platforms to their advantage while causing devastating harms to privacy, health, and even democracy. Despite their central role in enabling these bad actors, the platforms almost entirely escape liability. This legal immunity is purportedly grounded in economics. From the beginning, courts and legislatures feared that liability would chill innovation, growth, and user access. They also speculated that platforms have sufficient market incentives to voluntarily police bad actors, making liability unnecessary.

Whereas many scholars have argued that platform immunity is blind to justice, this Article shows that it is also …

Consumer Agents, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

In the twenty-first century economy, individuals need market help that they are not getting. The technology has long existed for a browser plug-in that would filter out toxic social media content or a virtual shopping assistant that would find and even purchase the best deals online without having to go to many different websites and product pages. Yet tech platforms have used lawsuits and data control to stifle such tools. The lack of digital helpers has potentially profound consequences. Social media use is linked to alarming increases in teenage depression and anxiety. Businesses’ ability to manipulate consumers into paying higher …

Unequal Ownership, Ofer Eldar, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Market concentration and weak competition do not just lead to lower efficiency but also result in corporate profits flowing primarily to wealthy households that own a disproportionate share of public corporations. We demonstrate that this is a growing distributional problem not only due to familiar reasons in the literature, most notably shifts in market power, but also due to changes in the socio-economic makeup of ownership. Over the past twenty years, households in the bottom 90 percent of wealth have seen their share of stock ownership decline by half. That is, the ownership of corporations has become increasingly concentrated among …

Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology And The End Of Obscurity, Woodrow Hartzog, Evan Selinger, Judy Hyojoo Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that facial recognition technology is the most dangerous surveillance tool ever invented. Given the unique threats this morally suspect tool poses to privacy, civil liberties, human flourishing, and democracy, the only appropriate response is a ban. To justify our position, we explain why facial recognition is distinctive among biometrics, clarify how even seemingly benign and positive uses of the technology can trigger dangerous normalization dynamics, and pinpoint why current United States laws (with reverberations in the EU’s AI Act) are designed to accelerate a slippery slope that makes mass surveillance nearly inevitable. Our most fundamental contribution lies …

Technology-Facilitated Labor Trafficking Power And Control Wheel, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

This wheel is based on the Article, "Digital Servitude", forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review.

Design Problems, Mark P. Mckenna, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay draws on our empirical research into designers and their work to investigate the limits of intellectual property law for achieving its goal of progress in the design context. We focus on two related aspects of our research and also address a pressing doctrinal question in design patent law. The two research questions we discuss are: (1) How do designers conceive of and solve design problems through innovative design practice?; and (2) How do designers incorporate human values of coherence, inclusivity, and sustainability in their process, imbuing their practice with a kind of politics? The related doctrinal question concerns …

Rebalancing Retirement: How 401(K) Plans Exacerbate Inequality And What We Can Do About It, Quinn Curtis, Leo E. Strine, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Incentives for individuals to save for retirement currently total 1.5% of US GDP. For that substantial investment, we get a system that actually deepens wealth inequality. The top 10% of earners capture 60% of the associated tax benefits, and employer matching contributions disproportionately favor the highest earners. Although defined contribution plans have long been subject to non-discrimination requirements aimed at ensuring that benefits do not accrue predominantly to the wealthiest participants, these rules have little bite. In an irony, we estimate that the entire 401(k) system would fail the non-discrimination test that every employer offering such a plan is expected …

Policing Gender: The Interest Convergence Of Women's And Transgender Rights, Michael Ulrich

Faculty Scholarship

The social, political, and legal landscape has seen a resurgence of gender fundamentalism, seeking to reinforce archaic notions of what it means to be a woman. Social media movements run in tandem with this resurgence of gender fundamentalism. For instance, the “tradwife” phenomenon that romanticizes a domestic, subservient role for women.¹ Alabama Senator Katie Britt most infamously reflected the convergence of these trends when she delivered her response to the State of the Union from a kitchen table and proclaimed that her message was “a direct appeal” to her “fellow moms.”² Meanwhile, executive orders and state laws have …

Copyright Law And Property Law, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

Property is at the core of state law since it is the exclusive power of the individual state governments to define and protect property rights within their jurisdiction. In this paper I will discuss the general connection between copyright and property generally. I will argue that property law sheds important light on copyright law and can help us cut through modern controversies in copyright law. If I am correct in this view, any judge sufficiently familiar with property law doctrines could do better than the Supreme Court of the United States in resolving a new copyright controversy. Specifically, property law …

Anticompetitive Directors, Lane Miles, Mark A. Lemley, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust scholars have virtually ignored the question of who controls corporations by sitting on their boards of directors. We show that the problem of who sits on boards of directors is considerably greater than previously believed. Drawing on a new dataset spanning both public and private companies across multiple industries, we find evidence that individual board members sit simultaneously on boards of competitors throughout the economy, despite such “interlocking directorates” being illegal under antitrust law. Many of these individuals are senior directors at private equity, venture capital, and other firms investing in the competing firms on whose boards they sit. …