Digital Commons Network^™

Where Music Shapes A Legacy, Manuel Rivera, Margaret Zorrilla

Hospitality+™ Center for Innovation and Training

The 2025 Curaçao North Sea Jazz Festival (CNSJF) reinforced its reputation as one of the Caribbean’s leading cultural events, delivering substantial economic benefits, an outstanding visitor experience, and deepening loyalty to both the festival and Curaçao. CNSJF 2025 stands as a powerful engine for Curaçao’s economy, a benchmark for festival experiences, and a driver of lasting loyalty and advocacy for both the event and the island. Its legacy is not only musical but also economic and cultural, shaping how visitors connect with Curaçao for years to come.

Educational Leadership In Model Plc Schools: Actions That Lead To Sustained Success, Nathan L. Wear

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of the current study was to identify leadership characteristics and actions by administrators in Model Professional Learning Community (PLC) status schools and identify what actions led to achieving Model PLC School status. The current study explored how effective PLC implementation impacts student achievement. Guided by DuFour et al.’s (2006) framework for PLCs (i.e., focus on learning, collaboration, and results), the current study investigated specific leadership behaviors that school leaders in Model PLC schools use to leverage results. The study sought to answer two research questions. First, what are the key characteristics and actions of the administrators in Model …

Meta-Learning Approaches For Causal Discovery In Dynamic Healthcare And Robotics Environments, Hayder Abbood Md Facp

Mesopotamian Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Healthcare and robotics dynamic task domains are also known to be both complex and time-varying systems where reasoning about causal links are important for making reliable decisions. But causal structures in these domains are difficult to ascertain with limited data, distribution shifts, and changing environments. Meta-learning (or learning to learn) is a promising approach to combating these two obstacles by learning from experience across tasks to quickly adapt to new task environments. In this paper we provide a new framework that combines ideas from meta-learning and causal discovery, whose objective is to discover the underlying cause effect relationships in sequential, …

Accessing Online And Remote Learning Platforms In Kenyan Remote Areas During Covid-19 Pandemic, Florence Deya, Jane Rarieya

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

Online learning has taken root and with the advancement in technology more and more educators are embracing online learning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, with total shut down of face-to-face learning, the Kenyan government had moved learning online and remotely. To find out on how learners in remote areas were experiencing learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, a study was carried out using rapid ethnography design. Five final year secondary students were sampled. Data was collected through interviews, observations, and document analysis. This paper reports on the findings of online and remote learning platforms, which were available, accessed, and preferred by the …

Endocrine Responses To Two Distinct Foraging Contexts In The Bonobo (Pan Paniscus), Lauren Mitchell

Master's Theses

In gregarious animals, a social structure characterized by female dominance is relatively rare. However, bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of the two species most closely related to humans, are characterized by partial female dominance, with females forming close social bonds. In contrast, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), a close relative of the bonobo, are characterized by strong male-male bonding and social dominance with female chimpanzees lacking close social bonds. There is a lack of consensus concerning the reasons for these behavioral differences in Pan, specifically, the physiological processes responsible for female dominance in bonobos. The role of hormones …

Tricolored Bat (Perimyotis Subflavus) Population Genetic Structure In The Southeastern United States, Laura Henderson

Master's Theses

Tricolored bats (Perimyotis subflavus) have experienced substantial population losses from white-nose syndrome (WNS), a disease caused by the pathogenic fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) which infects hibernating bats. Determining population genetic structure helps assess genetic diversity and the impacts of wildlife threats to populations. Pre-WNS data shows weak-to-negligible structure and panmictic P. subflavus populations at core portions of their range. However, current genetic data from their southeastern U.S. range is lacking. I sought to determine whether recent genetic data help resolve genetic structure among southeastern populations and assess genetic differences at two stages of impact: post-WNS and …

Algorithmic Selection Of Iconic Constitutions, Tejas Ramdas, Patrick Chung-Chia Huang, Nuno Garoupa, Martin T. Wells, Yun-Chien Chang, Tom Ginsburg

Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers

This chapter examines the influence of pre-20th century constitutions using a quantitative approach, comparing expert-selected “iconic” constitutions with those identified algorithmically. In prior work, human experts identified four influential constitutions: the U.S. 1791, France 1791, Spain 1812, and France 1848. Here, we employ a genetic algorithm and Document Term Matrix (DTM) analysis to assess which one or four of 180 pre-1899 constitutions had the greatest textual impact on 581 post-1900 constitutions. Two criteria guide the selection: coverage and originality. Through iterative optimization, the algorithm identifies the most textually influential constitutions, allowing for a direct comparison with expert selections. This chapter …

The U.S. Forced Labor Import Ban: A Tool For Raising Labor Standards In Supply Chains?, Jennifer Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

Forced labor is rampant across global supply chains. Addressing it at individual sites of production results in a game of whack-a-mole. An effective response must target the structural drivers of the problem: the large firms at the top and middle of supply chains that pressure suppliers at the bottom to cut labor costs in order to remain competitive. In the absence of other U.S. laws that address the structural causes of forced labor, this Article argues that the forced labor import ban in section 307 of the United States Tariff Act may have the potential to be utilized by civil …

How Ai Reinforces Caste: Creating And Amplifying Systematic Inequality, Catherine Powell

Faculty Scholarship

In arguing that artificial intelligence (“AI”) creates, reinscribes, and amplifies caste, this Article asserts that algorithmic discrimination is not just a bug, it is an essential feature of the system that powers the digital economy. Because this economy traffics in our information and is monetized through targeted advertising, it depends on knowing our race, gender, and other protected characteristics (i.e., our caste). Given that the digital economy is inherently an information economy, it is driven by population-wide demographics and predictions, which algorithms can process and commodify at scale. As such, digital surveillance can lead not only to individual harm, but …

Race, The Academy, And The Constitution Of The War On Drugs, I. Bennett Capers, Jeffrey Bellin

Faculty Scholarship

The war on drugs is widely viewed as a policy failure. Despite massive government intrusions on personal liberty, drug addiction, overdoses, and drug-related violence have only increased since the war was declared in 1971. David Pozen’s new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs, reveals a constitutional failure as well. Pozen chronicles a host of constitutional arguments that American litigants deployed to protect a “right” to use drugs with surprising, if fleeting, success. Pozen asks what might have been, exploring why the courts backtracked and effectively removed the Constitution as a meaningful obstacle to drug prohibitions. 

This Review …

Now?, I. Bennett Capers

Faculty Scholarship

This essay brings Afrofuturism, and its notion of the plasticity of time, to imagine how we will think of the past in the future and, more specifically, to consider what will "enrapture, haunt, and/or plague thinkers in the future." Although many answers come to mind, including this country's original sin-slavery-ultimately this essay turns to our current technologies, especially policing technologies. And this essay turns the question around to ask, "How should we in the present think about the future? And what can we do now to change it?"

Under Political Pressure: How Courts And Congress Can Help Prosecutors Do Justice, Bruce A. Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Faculty Scholarship

Some subordinate federal prosecutors faced a challenging professional dilemma in the early days of the second Trump Administration. It arose from the tension between their role as public officials and lawyers who owe fiduciary duties to the public and their role as Department of Justice (DOJ) employees who take direction from higher-ups. The DOJ leadership directed these subordinate prosecutors to use their considerable power in ways evidently designed to advance partisan political objectives. This was contrary to the clear understanding previously expressed by courts, the legal profession, and the DOJ itself that prosecutors have a duty to seek justice, which …

Super-Dicta, Courtney M. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

A weird thing happens when a conscientious, rational judge lacks certainty and has the humility to know it: she will often decide cases for reasons that differ from the reasons in her opinions. To illustrate, suppose she thinks it’s 50/50 whether Defendant’s copying infringed or was fair use. She could rationally flip a coin. But if she does, and she finds for Defendant, it will not be because of fair use. Rather, it will be because she thought it was 50/50 whether the copying was fair use—and the coin landed tails.

Coin-flip cases are rare, but uncertainty is not. There …

Subordinate Prosecutors’ Independence, Bruce A. Green, Jessica A. Roth

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is about subordinate prosecutors’ independence to do what they think constitutes “seeking justice” when they perceive that their boss, or their boss’s boss, wants them to do something that is unjust—not illegal, but unjust. Of course, if subordinate prosecutors want to do either what they are told to do or what they infer that a higher-up wants them to do, they can do so, as long as the conduct is legal. Subordinate prosecutors might choose to disregard their own professional judgment of what justice requires because they share their boss’s objectives, because they see conforming as a route …

Heat Camps: Juvenile Curfews, Extreme Heat & The Eighth Amendment, Norrinda Brown

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, in the summertime, America has confined certain of its youth in what are essentially open-air heat camps. In city after city, camp-form is established through the enactment of warm-weather juvenile curfews which keep the youth at home or in state-sponsored centers during summer nights and, increasingly, during days as well. Local governments justify these curfews with general notions of “public safety,” including to protect the youth they confine. But the laws are not benevolent. Reducing youth mobility by curfew results in exclusion, oversurveillance, and potentially lethal heat punishment of the youth, possibly in violation of the Eighth Amendment. …

100 Years Of The Federal Arbitration Act, Paul Bland, John H. Chun, Linda A. Klein, Pamela K. Bookman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Novel Sex Work Anti-Discrimination Protections, Chi Adanna Mgbako, Christine Eldabh, Katie Falk, Emma Pennie

Faculty Scholarship

Sex workers throughout the world experience ubiquitous and acute discrimination in every facet of their lives due to deeprooted stigma. Societal fear and hatred of sex workers often lead to their exclusion from healthcare services, financial institutions, and accessible housing, as well as their marginalization by the carceral state, family law systems, media, and politicians. Between 2022 and 2024, the Australian jurisdictions of the Northern Territory, Queensland, and Victoria passed groundbreaking legislation codifying novel anti-discrimination protections for sex workers. These laws are the first in the world to explicitly protect sex workers against discrimination in accommodation, employment, government services, and …

Reconceptualizing Incomplete Attempt, Youngjae Lee

Faculty Scholarship

Incomplete attempt laws are typically explained as laws that exist to justify timely law enforcement intervention. Such explanations may well provide good reasons for the laws based on harm prevention rationales, but they do not address the question whether a person who has, say, “cocked and aimed the pistol” has actually attempted to kill and is blameworthy for having done so. It turns out that this question is notoriously difficult to answer. This Article describes the challenge of defining incomplete attempt and of identifying and articulating its wrongfulness as a general theoretical matter. This Article then argues in favor of …

Transcending Through The Body: The Embodied Transcendence Scale, John Elfers, Patty Hlava

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Advance Publication Archive

This article describes the development of a psychometric instrument called The Embodied Transcendence Scale, a psychometric instrument, is designed to measure the phenomenological features of the felt and lived experience of transcendence. Its development began with interviews on experiences of awe, gratitude, and compassion, from which 77 unique items were identified; a survey with these items was completed by a diverse demographic sample (N = 408). An exploratory factor analysis reduced these items to a 4-factor structure of 20 items. A confirmatory factor analysis (N = 358) showed good fit indices for the factor structure and a reliability coefficient of …

Popular Sovereignty And A Right To Know About The Government, David S. Ardia

Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the U.S. Constitution implicitly contains a structural “right to know” about the government, rooted in the doctrine of popular sovereignty rather than the First Amendment. Democratic self‑government requires public access to governmental information; without it, the people cannot exercise informed consent or their sovereign authority. The Article critiques reliance on purely statutory transparency regimes such as FOIA, noting their fragility and susceptibility to political rollback. Through historical and structural analysis, it shows that the Framers viewed an informed citizenry as essential to maintaining checks and balances. The Article proposes three principles for operationalizing a constitutional right …

Death And Debts, Kevin Bennardo

Faculty Publications

This Article analyzes how inheritance law treats debts owed to and by a decedent, focusing on the Uniform Probate Code’s treatment of unpaid purchase-price balances associated with specifically devised property. While UPC §2‑606(a)(1) automatically gives the outstanding balance to the specific devisee, the Article argues that this rule is inconsistent with modern intent‑based ademption doctrine and with the Code’s treatment of debts owed by the estate. It contends that only outstanding balances secured by the devised asset reflect a meaningful connection to the testator’s likely intent. Unsecured balances, by contrast, should not automatically avoid ademption. The Article proposes amending the …

Debt, Work, And The State, Kate Sablosky Elengold

Faculty Publications

In every state and the District of Columbia, an individual who owes a debt to the state can lose their license to work. Without the ability to make a living, it is much harder to pay off debt. Although using occupational license restrictions as a debt collection tool appears nonsensical, it has never before been the subject of scholarly debate. This Article thus begins an important conversation about debt, work, and the state.

This Article identifies the pervasive authority that state and local governments have to revoke an individual’s occupational license solely because that person owes a debt to the …

Alienation On Campus: Students, Agency, And A 'Praxis Of Possibility', Julia R. Allison

Dissertations

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, the idea of alienation took hold across the United States as a way of explaining feelings of disconnection, powerlessness, and meaninglessness that seemed to be pervading American society. This was no less true on college and university campuses, where students engaged in protest over both government action and inaction and a new youth counterculture took root. What led to alienation’s prominence as a social phenomenon is a matter of some debate, as are the causes of its precipitous decline in the early 70s. However, after an extended silence more recent decades have seen something …

2025 Engage For Change Awards Program, Bonner Center For Civic Engagement

Engage for Change Awards

2025 Award Print: Alfonso Pérez Acosta

Keynote Address: Taylor Scott, Founder, RVA Community Fridges

Leveraging Artificial Intelligent For Optimized Crop Production: An Ann-Based Approach, Yahya Layth Khaleel, Fadya A. Habeeb, Mustafa Abdulfattah Habeeb, Fatimah N. Ameen

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

To incite modern day crop production and ensure sustainability, exact crop recommendations are key to the process. This study pays significant attention to the need for the use of big data tools in studies involving comprehensive data sets that contain information on soil and other environmental characteristics. The set of data used in this research includes Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium content coordinated with Temperature, Humidity, pH Value, and Rainfall. Knowing these factors is to make a favorable decision about improving agricultural products yield, availability and management of the resources, as well as general well-being of the crops. Specialized advisory on …

Approach For Detecting Face Morphing Attacks Using Convolution Neural Network, Essa M. Namis, Khalid Shaker, Sufyan Al-Janabi

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

The facial morphing method combines at least two images of the face to get a singular altered facial image that exposes the vulnerabilities of face recognition systems (FRS). The extensive implementation of face recognition algorithms, particularly in Automatic Border Control (ABC) systems, has raised apprehensions over potential threats, as modified passports present significant risks to national security. In this paper, a new face morphing attack detection approach has been proposed using two different datasets (StyleGAN and AMSL) for testing and validation. A new model for face morphing attack detection based on a special Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architecture has been …

Securing The Internet Of Wetland Things (Iowt) Using Machine And Deep Learning Methods: A Survey, Guma Ali, Wamusi Robert, Maad M. Mijwil, Malik Sallam, Jenan Ayad

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

Wetlands are essential ecosystems that provide ecological, hydrological, and economic benefits. However, human activities and climate change are degrading their health and jeopardizing their long-term sustainability. To address these challenges, the Internet of Wetland Things (IoWT) has emerged as an innovative framework integrating advanced sensing, data collection, and communication technologies to monitor and manage wetland ecosystems. Despite its potential, the IoWT faces substantial security and privacy risks, compromising its effectiveness and hindering adoption. This survey explores integrating machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques as solutions to address the security threats, vulnerabilities, and challenges inherent in IoWT ecosystems. The …

Anila: Adaptive Neuro-Inspired Learning Algorithm For Efficient Machine Learning, Ai Optimization, And Healthcare Enhancement, Ismael Khaleel, Wijdan Noaman Marzoog, Ghada Al-Kateb

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

The Adaptive Neuro-Inspired Learning Algorithm (ANILA) offers a breakthrough in the realm of machine learning by drawing inspiration from the biological processes of the human brain. Developed to address limitations in conventional models such as CNNs and RNNs, ANILA enhances real-time responsiveness, energy efficiency, and system adaptability. By emulating neurobiological behaviors particularly sparse coding and synaptic plasticity ANILA allows systems to process data dynamically, adjust to novel inputs without retraining, and scale effectively across environments like IoT and healthcare diagnostics. Performance evaluations highlight significant reductions in latency, increases in energy efficiency (up to 92%), and exceptional adaptability to changing data …

Enhancing Cybersecurity In Smart Education With Deep Learning And Computer Vision: A Survey, Guma Ali, Aziku Samuel, Maad M. Mijwil, Kholoud Al-Mahzoum, Malik Sallam, Ioannis Adamopoulos, Ayodeji Olalekan Salau, Indu Bala, Klodian Dhoska, Engin Melekoglu

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

The rapid digital transformation of education, driven by the widespread adoption of smart devices and online platforms, has ushered in the era of smart education. While this shift enhances learning experiences, it also introduces significant cybersecurity risks that threaten the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of educational resources, student data, and institutional systems. This survey examines how deep learning (DL) and computer vision (CV) techniques can enhance cybersecurity in smart education environments. By reviewing 202 peer-reviewed research papers published between January 2022 and June 2025 across leading publishers such as ACM Digital Library, Frontiers, Wiley Online Library, IGI Global, Nature, Springer, …

Real-Time Sdn–Iot Integrated Framework For Intelligent Emergency Vehicle Prioritization In Smart Cities, Sura F. Ismail

Mesopotamian Journal of Computer Science

Urban traffic control has become increasingly complex with rising vehicle density, particularly in smart cities. Timely arrival of emergency vehicles is critical, yet existing systems relying on manual transmitters and sirens offer limited range and effectiveness. This paper proposes a real-time intelligent traffic management framework integrating Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, and the Edge of Things (EoT)—a paradigm combining edge computing with IoT to enable low-latency processing at the network edge. The framework connects the SUMO traffic simulator and Veins vehicular network framework via TraCI, with the RYU SDN controller dynamically adjusting traffic signals and vehicle routes …