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Advancing Virtual Care Practices Across the Cognitive Impairment Continuum
No full textAs the population of older adults grows, providing high-quality, cost-effective healthcare for those with cognitive impairments is an increasing priority. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift towards receiving virtual care at home through temporary Medicare flexibilities. However, the uncertainty surrounding the continuing extension of these flexibilities at the federal level and variations in reimbursement policies across the states present challenges for virtual care practices to meet the rising demand for care amid unprecedented workforce shortages. Sustainable, long-term reimbursement at the federal and state levels, a trained and integrated healthcare workforce, and adherence to recognized accreditation standards and guidelines are essential to advance the quality and safety of virtual care for cognitively impaired patients. Furthermore, reimbursement policies that incentivize investments in technology infrastructure and digital literacy outreach are needed to ensure equitable access to virtual care for all patients across the cognitive impairment continuum.Immediate access.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]
The Treatment of Immoral, Scandalous, and Disparaging Marks in Trademark Law of the United States and Turkey [Article]
No full textArticleA trademark serves as a concise mode of communication from a seller to current or prospective buyers wherein the seller signifies an endorsement of certain goods or services. This sets them apart from similar goods or services provided by competitors. However, trademarks often do not simply identify the source of a product or service, but also to convey a broader message. This creates an intersection between trademark law and the fundamental right of freedom of expression and presents challenging legal, ethical, and societal concerns that can differ significantly from one jurisdiction to another.
In the United States, these concerns resulted in the cancellation of registration bars for immoral, scandalous, and disparaging marks. After more than
five decades of the Lanham Act’s operation, the rule that bars disparaging marks was found unconstitutional in 2017 under the Supreme Court’s decision in Matal v. Tam. Then, the rules barring immoral and scandalous marks were found unconstitutional in 2019 by the Supreme Court in Iancu v. Brunetti. Both decisions cited viewpoint discrimination as a violation of the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause.
By contrast, in Turkey and the European Union (EU), the registration bar for marks that are contrary to public policy and accepted principles of morality is still in effect, even though there have been some free speech concerns. This legal landscape offers an opportunity to perform a comparative analysis between jurisdictions and to observe how diverse legal systems address the complex interplay between commerce, speech, and societal norms. Through a detailed examination of legislative frameworks, judicial interpretations, and policies in the United States and Turkey, this paper embarks on a comparative analysis of the treatment of immoral, scandalous, and disparaging marks within these two jurisdictions. This paper makes numerous proposals concerning both the approaches of the United States and Turkey, considering policy and the results of empirical research.
There are five sections. The first section provides an introduction; the second section concerns U.S. trademark law; the third section reviews Turkish trademark law; the fourth section is a comparison of these jurisdictions; and the final section offers proposals. The comparison includes a discussion of
international agreements concerning the treatment of marks considered immoral, scandalous, or disparaging and includes examples from European practice.This material published in Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law is made available by the James E. Rogers College of Law, the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library, and the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact the AJICL Editorial Board at http://arizonajournal.org/contact-us/
The effect of wood chip surface depth on peak force during impacts
No full textObjective: Playgrounds are essential for children’s physical, social, and mental health. However, only 4.7% of playgrounds meet safety standards for wood chip surface depth around playground structures. This study aimed to quantify peak force attenuation at safety-compliant (9-inch) vs. non-compliant (5-inch) wood chip depths. Methods: Wood chip layers of 5 inches and 9 inches were placed on a calibrated force platform. A 4.54-kg medicine ball was dropped from a consistent height onto the wood chips, and peak forces and time to peak force were measured. Results: The 9-inchwood chip layer significantly reduced peak forces compared to the 5-inch layer, showing a 44% reduction (p < 0.001). No significant differences were observed in time to peak force between the two conditions (p=0.46).
Discussion: Compliant wood chip surface depths reduce impact forces substantially, emphasizing the importance of routine inspection and maintenance of playground surfaces to safety standards. This practice can help minimize injuries in children resulting from playground falls.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]
Geologic Map of the Hualapai Spring 7.5' Quadrangle, Mohave County, Arizona
No full textThe Hualapai Spring 7.5’ quadrangle is located in Mohave County, northwestern Arizona, approximately 20 km east of Kingman. The southwestern portion of the quadrangle consists of the northeastern Hualapai Mountains, and the northeastern portion of the quadrangle contains the southern Peacock Mountains. The remainder of the quadrangle consists of relatively low-relief alluvial plains and small hills, with one unnamed bedrock hill in the northwest corner of the quadrangle. A major watershed divide trends southwest-northeast through the quadrangle, separating the Red Lake Playa and Big Sandy River watersheds. The average annual rainfall in the quadrangle is approximately 8–16 inches, with higher rainfall concentrated in the mountainous areas.
This geologic map was funded in part by the U.S. Geological Survey National Cooperative Geological Mapping Program under STATEMAP award G23AC00556. The views and conclusion obtained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.Documents in the AZGS Documents Repository collection are made available by the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact [email protected]
Geologic Map of the Rattlesnake Hill 7.5' Quadrangle, Mohave County, Arizona
No full textThe Rattlesnake Hill 7.5’ quadrangle is located in Mohave County, northwestern Arizona, about 10 km east of Kingman. The southern portion of the quadrangle consists of the northern Hualapai Mountains, while the northern portion is mainly low-relief alluvial plains. Rattlesnake Hill is the only feature of significant topographic relief north of Interstate 40, which trends roughly east-west through the quadrangle. An important watershed divide trends northwest from near the southeastern corner to the west-central portion of the quadrangle. Southwest of this divide is the Thirteenmile Wash-Sacramento Wash watershed, which in the quadrangle is drained by Sawmill Canyon. This stream system is integrated with the Colorado River. Northeast of the watershed divide is the Frees Wash subdivision of the Red Lake Playa watershed. Red Lake Playa is the low point of Hualapai Valley, and is primarily an internally drained watershed not integrated with the Colorado River. The main drainages in this watershed within the quadrangle are Frees Wash and Hualapai Canyon. Average annual rainfall in the quadrangle ranges from 8 to 16 inches, with the higher precipitation values concentrated over the Hualapai Mountains in the southern portion of the quadrangle. The bedrock geology of this quadrangle includes Paleoproterozoic metamorphic rocks that experienced migmatization during the emplacement of a Mesoproterozoic megacrystic granite. Additionally, the Neogene Peach Spring Tuff, and other Neogene lava flows are exposed in the southwestern part of the map and dip gently WNW. This geologic map was funded in part by the U.S. Geological Survey National Cooperative Geological Mapping Program under STATEMAP award G23AC00556. The views and conclusion obtained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Government.Documents in the AZGS Documents Repository collection are made available by the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact [email protected]
PROTECTING DRINKING WATER RESOURCES: A CONSERVATION PRIORITY INDEX FOR VULNERABLE SOURCE WATER AREAS IN NEW HAMPSHIRE
No full textGrowing development pressure and increasingly heavy rainfall events threaten New Hampshire's surface waters and the drinking water supplies they support. While Source Water Protection Areas have been designated around public water supplies, many lack formal conservation protection or planning. This project uses geospatial analysis to identify and prioritize unprotected areas for conservation based on vulnerability and landscape sensitivity. Using ArcGIS Pro, statewide datasets were integrated to assess multiple risk factors: impaired waterways, land cover-based runoff potential, FEMA flood hazard zones, and terrain-derived hydrological characteristics. These factors were standardized to construct a Conservation Priority Index identifying where water resources face the greatest cumulative threats. Results demonstrate that many Source Water Protection Areas remain unprotected and overlap with impaired waterways or areas with elevated runoff potential. High-priority zones are concentrated in central and southeastern regions, where land development pressure intersects with complex topography. The Conservation Priority Index provides a spatial support tool to guide conservation strategies that safeguard public water supplies. By identifying where protection efforts would yield the greatest benefit, this index helps target limited conservation resources more effectively. As development continues and climate change intensifies precipitation events, strategic protection of Source Water Protection Areas will become essential for ensuring safe drinking water and maintaining resilience across New Hampshire.This item is part of the MS-GIST Master's Reports collection. For more information about items in this collection, please contact the UA Campus Repository at [email protected]
Three Essays in Behavioral Economics on Cheating
No full textInformation asymmetry lies at the heart of many economic and business interactions. When one party possesses private information, the incentive to exploit this advantage can give rise to cheating behavior. Classical economic theory assumes that self-interested agents will seize such opportunities to maximize their own benefit. Yet over the past decade, a growing body of experimental evidence suggests otherwise: individuals often cheat only marginally or refrain entirely, even when it is in their financial interest. This dissertation integrates insights from behavioral economics, experimental economics, and game theory to investigate how psychological motivations shape cheating behavior in settings with private information. Across three chapters, I examine different environments in which individuals face opportunities to cheat others. By incorporating preferences such as cheating aversion, social image concerns, and guilt aversion, I shed light on when and why people resist the temptation to cheat, how institutional settings mediate these decisions, and what these findings imply for policy design. In the first chapter, I examine how psychological preferences – Cheating Aversion (CA) and Perceived Cheating Aversion (PCA) – shape outcomes in credence goods markets. These markets are characterized by an information asymmetry: experts possess more knowledge than consumers about the appropriate service or treatment, creating opportunities for fraudsuch as overtreatment or overcharging. I study these markets under two institutional environments: (i) verifiability, where consumers can verify whether the prescribed treatment was actually provided, and (ii) liability, where experts are held accountable for adequate treatment. To address the challenge of defining cheating, I develop a social-norm-based framework that provides a benchmark for assessing the extent of dishonest behavior. I find that when prices are fixed, incorporating CA and PCA reduces unethical behavior and enhances efficiency in both institutional settings. However, when experts have monopoly power over pricing, the outcomes diverge: low sensitivity to CA and PCA can be advantageous for consumers, but high sensitivity may harm them under the verifiability condition. In contrast, under the liability condition, psychological concerns have no effect on consumer utility, and high sensitivity benefits only the expert. This chapter contributes to the credence goods literature by investigating how psychological factors related to cheating influence expert behavior, consumer surplus, and market efficiency. Additionally, the formal social-norm-based framework for defining cheating can be applied to a wide range of contexts beyond credence goods markets.
In the second chapter (joint work with Martin Dufwenberg), we experimentally investigate how externalities influence cheating behavior in reporting tasks. We build on the design of Fischbacher and F¨ollmi-Heusi (2013), in which participants roll a die privately and self-report the outcome. In our adaptation, we introduce a “regular” audience: each participant is paired with another whose payoff is affected by the report but who does not observe the actual die roll. We manipulate the externality structure across three treatments: negative, zero, and positive. Given the presence of a regular audience, an important empirical question is whether experimenter observability influences reporters’ behavior. If it does not, then individual-level cheating can be identified without altering participants’ decisions. To test this, we compare two conditions: an observed condition, in which the experimenter observes the die-roll outcomes, and an unobserved condition, in which the experimenter does not. Our experimental findings show that participants were more likely to cheat when theirdishonesty also benefited others, highlighting the importance of incorporating externalities into models of cheating. Furthermore, we find that when a regular audience is present, experimenter observability has no significant e?ect on participants’ behavior. These results allow us to use the observed data from the zero-externality treatment to test competing theories, such as those proposed by Dufwenberg and Dufwenberg (2018) and Gneezy et al. (2018). Our analysis does not reject either model. To further distinguish between them,
future work may require eliciting participants’ strategies explicitly. The third chapter builds on the behavioral themes of the previous chapters by develop-ing a theoretical model of cheating behavior in environments where misreporting imposes negative externalities on others. I construct a belief-dependent utility model in which a reporter’s payo? depends not only on the monetary benefit from misreporting but also on two psychological costs: perceived cheating aversion (PCA), the discomfort from being seen as dishonest, and guilt aversion (GA), the distress from letting others down relative to their expectations. I characterize a class of sailing-to-ceiling equilibria in which individuals lie partially, avoid downward lies, and engage in uniform overreporting. Comparative statics reveal that the effectiveness of externality-based deterrents depends on the relative strength of PCA and GA: when PCA dominates, increased externality reduces cheating, but when GA dominates, this effect may reverse. This model offers theoretical foundations for designing mechanisms that discourage cheating in real-world contexts where others are affected.
Together with the first two chapters, this essay contributes to a unified understandingof how psychological motivations, institutional structures, and informational environments jointly shape cheating behavior.Release after 07/31/202
Non-Contact Rock Strength Characterization
No full textUnderstanding and classifying the compressive strength of rock, particularly the Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS), is fundamental to rock mass classification and geotechnical design in mining, tunneling, and civil infrastructure development. Traditional methods rely on index testing and destructive laboratory testing, often requiring engineers and geologists to be exposed to rockfall on steep slopes, and producing sparse data sets due to sampling, access, and cost limitations. This dissertation investigates a novel non-contact methodology to characterize intact rock strength using image-based technologies across the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically long-wave infrared and short-wave infrared. The research was conducted in two phases: (1) a field-deployed LWIR imaging study to detect rockfall events using thermal infrared cameras; and (2) the Multi-Image Deformation Analysis System (MIDAS), which used SWIR hyperspectral imaging and machine learning to classify UCS categories from an altered porphyry granite in Arizona. The result demonstrated that thermal imaging can detect rockfall under a range of environmental conditions, from the extreme cold of winter in British Columbia to summer heat at mines in Arizona. In the laboratory, several SWIR absorption features could be correlated to the UCS strength of the granite, and a k-nearest neighbors classification could be used to classify rock strength according to the ISRM classification. While there are limits in detecting quartz and feldspar in the SWIR, the study highlights the potential for expanded spectral coverage and integration into geotechnical workflows. Additionally, a path is outlined for developing physical rock descriptions for engineering classifications using the VNIR and SWIR spectroscopy. This dissertation contributes a repeatable, non-destructive, and auditable framework for strength classification that improves safety, enhances data coverage, and supports the utilization of commercial off-the-shelf imaging technologies from exploration to mining applications. The approach has broad implications for safety and more effective site characterization in mining, civil tunneling, and critical infrastructure monitoring, particularly in altered rock masses.Release after 03/03/202
Black African Students Studying Abroad in China: L2 Investment, Identity Negotiation, and Transformative Life Trajectories
No full textWhile China has long been recognized as a major source of international students, it has also emerged in recent decades as a fast-growing host country (Ma & Zhao, 2018). In particular, strengthened cooperation between China and African nations under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has led to a notable rise in the number of African students studying abroad in China and learning Chinese (e.g., Mulvey, 2020; Xu, 2023). This emerging South–South educational mobility, coupled with the growing prominence of Chinese as a foreign language in Africa, presents new avenues for research in study abroad (SA) and second language (L2) learning. Yet, while existing studies have started to explore African students’ beliefs about Chinese (e.g., Li, 2022; Song & Xia, 2021; Xu, 2023), little is known about how they invest in Chinese through everyday interactions in China. Since the social turn in SLA (Firth & Wagner, 1997), identity has become a central lens for understanding L2 learning in SA contexts (e.g., Block, 2007; Tullock, 2018). Among the identity dimensions studied, race—especially in relation to students of color—has gained increasing attention for its role in shaping language learning in SA (e.g., Anya, 2017; Diao, 2020; Quan, 2018). However, most existing research has focused on Black students from the U.S. (e.g., Anya, 2017; Diao & Wang, 2021; Du, 2018; Goldoni, 2017, 2018), with few studies examining the racialized experiences of Black students from other regions, such as African countries, and how their racialized identity intersects with L2 learning particularly in the Global South context (Xu & Stahl, 2024).
To address these gaps, this multi-case ethnographic study explores the study abroad and language learning experiences of six Black African students from Nigeria, Madagascar, and the Republic of Congo enrolled in a Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL) undergraduate program in China. Informed by Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment––a theoretical framework located at the intersection of identity, ideology, and capital, the study draws on interviews, field observations, and other qualitative data sources to examine how participants negotiate their multiple identities and invest (or divest) in L2 Chinese through their everyday interactions. Findings show that investment in Chinese is a non-linear, dynamic process shaped by intersecting identities and shifting power relations. While participants initially invested in Chinese was largely driven by its perceived value as linguistic capital linked to mobility and opportunity, their continued investment in China was often disrupted by experiences of anti-Black racialization. Despite such challenges, participants exercised agency in strategically disengaging from certain interactions, while cultivating supportive networks, gaining language learning opportunities, and engaging in anti-racist practices. In professional domains, the study further finds that linguistic capital was not always readily converted into the material or symbolic resources participants aspire to, due to shifting values and power structures. Nonetheless, participants leveraged their multilingual repertoires and contextual knowledge to actively construct professional identities and expand their future possibilities. By situating students’ micro-level practices within the broader sociopolitical context of China–Africa relations, this study offers a more nuanced understanding of transnational L2 investment, identity negotiation, as well as power inequalities related to race in SA. It contributes to L2 identity and investment research by centering Black African voices in an underexamined Global South context and calls for greater attention to racialized power dynamics in international education. The study also offers theoretical and pedagogical implications for identity and investment research and equity in the SA language education.Release after 08/29/203
Soft ECM Environments Prime Central Contractility and Stiffness via Myosin II–Mediated
No full textCells are constantly exposed to a dynamic mechanical environment, and their ability to sense and adapt to extracellular matrix (ECM) stiffness plays a critical role in cancer progression. While it is known that ECM stiffness influences cancer cell invasion, morphology, and cytoskeletal organization, how past mechanical experience leaves a persistent intracellular signature remains unclear. In this study, we investigated whether breast cancer cells encode a mechanical memory of prior ECM stiffness through spatially compartmentalized cytoskeletal remodeling and local stiffness adaptation. Two luminal A breast cancer cell lines, MCF-7 and T47D, were cultured on soft (0.5 kPa) or stiff (8 kPa) polyacrylamide hydrogels for 48 hours. Following re-plating on uniform substrates, we performed AFM-based nanoindentation and quantitative immunofluorescence to assess regional stiffness and myosin II (pMLC) intensity in central (perinuclear) and peripheral zones. Our results revealed that preconditioning on soft ECM increased myosin II intensity and mechanical stiffness specifically in the perinuclear region, while peripheral regions remained largely unaffected. Mediation analysis showed that myosin II activity partially accounted for the effect of ECM condition on central-region stiffness. This pattern was conserved in both MCF-7 and T47D cells, suggesting a generalizable mechanism within ER-positive breast cancer phenotypes. These effects were consistently observed across three independent experiments, reinforcing their biological robustness. Together, these findings support a model in which ECM stiffness history imprints spatial mechanical memory within individual cells through region-specific actomyosin remodeling. By linking past extracellular mechanical inputs to persistent intracellular mechanics, this memory may prime cancer cells for context-adapted migration or invasiveness. Our work identifies intracellular stiffness not only as a passive biophysical trait but as an active, regionally tuned effector of mechanoadaptive cell states.Release after 07/08/202