Digital Commons Network^™

Unlocking The Colleague Next Door, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

The structural barriers that isolate faculty from one another—individualistic reward systems, professional identity protection, disciplinary silos, fragmented time—have been documented in detail elsewhere. This paper begins where that analysis ends. Its sole focus is solutions: what actually works, what you can do without waiting for your institution to change, and most importantly, what you can do today. It is organized in three movements: evidence-based institutional strategies, community-level structures any group of faculty can build, and a granular map of the smallest possible individual first steps—the ones that cost almost nothing and have an outsized probability of changing how you experience …

Panda-Plus-Bench: A Clinical Benchmark For Evaluating The Robustness Of Ai Foundation Models In Prostate Cancer Diagnosis, Joshua L. Ebbert, Dennis Della Corte

Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence foundation models are increasingly deployed for prostate cancer Gleason grading, where GP3/GP4 distinction directly impacts treatment decisions (active surveillance vs. intervention). However, these models may achieve high validation accuracy by learning specimen-specific artifacts rather than generalizable biological features, limiting real-world clinical utility. We introduce PANDA-PLUS-Bench, a curated benchmark dataset derived from expertly annotated prostate biopsies designed specifically to quantify this failure mode. The benchmark comprises nine carefully selected whole slide images from nine unique patients containing diverse Gleason patterns, with non-overlapping tissue patches extracted at both 512 × 512 and 224 × 224-pixel resolutions across eight augmentation conditions. …

The Lawyer Is In!: Copyright Litigation Over Time, Ellen Amatangelo, Marissa Bischoff, Morgan Capitan, Jack Newman

Faculty Publications

This presentation is an overview of copyright litigation that has affected libraries. The session provides a hands-on look at specific cases and how they have affected and changed library work over time. A lawyer from the BYU Copyright Office provides commentary on each case and librarians discuss the impact of these cases on library policy. This helps to alleviate librarians' fear of copyright and legislation and provides guiding principles for the future.

This session was hosted by the Copyright Education Roundtable and presented at the Utah Library Association 2026 Annual Conference.

Faculty Focused, Student Supported: Managing Faculty Research In Your Institutional Repository, Ellen Amatangelo, Kelsey Bradshaw, Jillian Peterson, Allejah Young

Faculty Publications

The focus of BYU Library’s Faculty CV Project is to provide a simplified avenue for faculty members to add their scholarly work to our institutional repository, thus making it more accessible to a broader audience. Our project highlights effective strategies for collaborative communication across campus units, along with the use of practical project management tools to track project status. In addition, the Scholarly Publishing Unit provides training and support for managing the increasing demand for scholarly research by utilizing student employees, as well as faculty research assistants. This further supports our institution's goal of providing more experiential learning opportunities.

The Effects Of Phonetic Knowledge And Bilingualism On The Acquisition Of Non-Native Consonant Clusters, Kylie Wakley

Theses and Dissertations

Speech motor learning involves the production of new sounds or sound sequences. This study investigated how explicit phonetic knowledge and bilingualism affect how individuals acquire sound sequences that do not occur in English, or non-native consonant clusters. Sixty adults with typical speech, aged between 18 and 27 years, participated in the experiment. The researcher recruited participants into four groups based on their phonetic background (experienced or not) and language background (monolingual, bilingual). The participants produced stop-stop and fricative-nasal clusters in the initial position of nonsense words across six practice blocks. The duration of each cluster was measured, which in English …

Unlocking The Colleague Next Door, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

The structural barriers that isolate faculty from one another—individualistic reward systems, professional identity protection, disciplinary silos, fragmented time—have been documented in detail elsewhere. This paper begins where that analysis ends. Its sole focus is solutions: what actually works, what you can do without waiting for your institution to change, and most importantly, what you can do today. It is organized in three movements: evidence-based institutional strategies, community-level structures any group of faculty can build, and a granular map of the smallest possible individual first steps—the ones that cost almost nothing and have an outsized probability of changing how you experience …

The Silent Silos Of Academia, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

We work in an environment rich with latent brilliance. Walk down any corridor of a modern university building, and you pass office after office housing world-class expertise, profound pedagogical insights, and raw intellectual power. In terms of human capital, academic faculty represent arguably the most concentrated pool of cognitive resources on the planet. Yet, a strange paradox haunts higher education: despite living and working in such proximity, university faculty remain profoundly isolated. We operate as solitary islands, locked within our own intellectual silos, rarely leveraging the immense potential of our peers.

This isolation is not a personal choice, nor is …

The Impact Of Response Latency On Perceived Level Of Intelligence And Likability Of Autistic Speakers, Brinley Atkinson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine how turn-taking latency and speaker or listener gender affect the perceived intelligence and likability of the speaker across autistic speakers. In addition, the overarching goal of this research is to help speech-language pathologists (SLPs) better provide support and strategies to autistic individuals to improve their social and professional lives. Neurotypical English speakers (20 male and 20 female) were recruited to listen to a series of conversational speech samples collected from a group of eight autistic adults (four male and four female). In each sample, autistic individuals responded to a series of everyday …

Strategic Agency In Action Transforming Academic Life Through Non-Traditional Intellectual Workflows, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

In popular culture and traditional academia, the image of the "productive scholar" is static: a researcher chained to a desk, staring at a screen for eight hours, manually typing out sentences. However, a subculture of modern intellectuals, independent researchers, and creative professionals on the internet is proving that this setup is actually a bottleneck for the human brain.

By experimenting with cognitive offloading, dynamic movement, and collaborative technologies, these individuals have shifted from passive routines to strategic agency. Below are four curated, real-world case studies drawn from intellectual blogs, creators' post-mortems, and digital newsletters that demonstrate how non-traditional strategies unlock …

A Practical Survival Guide For New Faculty, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

This guide was written for faculty who are new to academic life — or who sometimes feel like they are drowning in it. You will not find technical jargon here. What you will find are honest descriptions of the traps most academics fall into, and clear, practical suggestions for getting out of them. Everything here is based on real research with real faculty — but you do not need to know the research to use the advice. Treat it as a menu: try what sounds useful, skip what does not fit your situation, and come back to it as your …

Functional And Structural Lesion Network Mapping: Insights Into Acquired Brain Injury And Insomnia, Kathleen Erekson Rugh

Theses and Dissertations

Insomnia disorder is the most reported sleep disorder and can negatively affect daily functioning. Acquired brain injuries can lead to insomnia disorder. Limited research has explored a causal link between brain networks and insomnia symptoms in this population. This study replicated a lesion network mapping methodology of an insomnia study (Helquist et al., 2024) and extended it to examine structural networks linked to insomnia symptoms in individuals with acquired brain injuries. Traced lesions (N =44) were used as seed regions to compare against normative functional and structural network data. For functional analyses, we used resting state fMRI scans from a …

Baseline Moderators Of A Transdiagnostic Adolescent Sleep And Circadian Health Intervention's Effectiveness At Improving Circadian Sleep Health: A Pilot Investigation, Jamon M. Jex

Theses and Dissertations

The current study examined whether baseline demographic and clinical characteristics moderate the effectiveness of the Transdiagnostic Sleep and Circadian (TSC) intervention in improving adolescent circadian sleep health. Using an integrative data analysis approach, data from three independent adolescent samples (N = 134; ages 10-18) were pooled to evaluate changes across multidimensional sleep outcomes defined by the RU-SATED model of sleep, including regularity, satisfaction, alertness, timing, efficiency, and duration. Linear mixed-effects models were used to assess pre-to-post intervention changes and test moderation by age, sex, family income, and clinical status. Results indicated significant improvements in sleep satisfaction following TSC, with greater …

Real-Time Instruction Internalization For Large Language Models, Brenden Smith

Theses and Dissertations

For the end user, Large Language Models (LLMs) are programs that process natural language inputs into natural language outputs. In popular usage, this tends to take the form of conversation: a user asks a question, provides information, or gives instructions, and the LLM (hopefully) replies in a manner we would expect of an informed and compliant person. While convenient and intuitive for users, this natural conversational format encourages the misconception that LLMs are learning from conversations, when they do not. This work presents the benefits and practicality of a language model paradigm that meets this user expectation -- that is, …

Beyond Pedagogical Inertia: Understanding And Overcoming The Barriers To Effective Faculty Work In Higher Education, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

Academic faculty are among the most educated professionals in the world. Yet a striking body of empirical research demonstrates that they face profound, systematic barriers to performing their own work effectively—barriers that are cognitive, institutional, cultural, and structural in origin. This paper extends the analysis of “pedagogical inertia” beyond the classroom to the full scope of faculty professional life: research, writing, service, advising, and self-directed learning. Drawing on evidence from organizational psychology, cognitive neuroscience, higher education research, and behavioral science, we identify six classes of barriers that consistently impede effective faculty work, and we analyze—with reference to documented successful cases—the …

A Practical Survival Guide For New Faculty, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Spiritual Proficiency

This guide was written for faculty who are new to academic life — or who sometimes feel like they are drowning in it. You will not find technical jargon here. What you will find are honest descriptions of the traps most academics fall into, and clear, practical suggestions for getting out of them. Everything here is based on real research with real faculty — but you do not need to know the research to use the advice. Treat it as a menu: try what sounds useful, skip what does not fit your situation, and come back to it as your …

Neuroscience-Based Intellectual Productivity: A Ten-Principle Methodology For Knowledge Workers, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Learning, Teaching, & Researching Optimization

This paper presents a comprehensive, neuroscience-grounded methodology for enhancing intellectual productivity among knowledge workers—particularly academic faculty and researchers operating under conditions of chronic cognitive overload. Drawing on ten foundational principles derived from contemporary cognitive neuroscience, we argue that substantial gains in research output, creative ideation, and knowledge integration are achievable not by working harder, but by working in deliberate alignment with the brain’s native computational architecture.

The ten principles address: strategic activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN) for incubation and creative insight; prefrontal cortex (PFC) energy management through temporal task separation; externalization of cognitive load via AI-assisted working memory …

Increasing Evolution Acceptance Among Religious Adults Through Targeted Education, Jamie Jensen

ScholarsArchive Data

These data come from a study measuring the effectiveness of the Shareable Home Application for Reconciling Evolution (SHARE) tool, which consists of five short videos addressing the nature of science, compatibility between doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and evolution, evolutionary mechanisms, and evidence for evolution, including human evolution.

Intern Experience And Support In The Byu-Public School Partnership, Ryan S. Nixon, Rebecca K. Hunter, Paul H. Ricks

Faculty Publications

This study examines the experiences and perceived support of early childhood and elementary education interns in the BYU–Public School Partnership. In June 2025, 137 former interns (54% response rate) completed an anonymous survey with open-ended prompts, and responses were qualitatively analyzed. Most interns characterized the experience as positive or both good and hard (84%), though 16% reported largely negative experiences. Relationships with students were consistently identified as the most meaningful aspect, often providing motivation during difficult periods. Support was most frequently attributed to facilitators, with additional support from grade-level teams and Clinical Faculty Associates (CFAs). While generally helpful, support was …

Vaccines And Guns Data File, Alice Ann Crandall

ScholarsArchive Data

Three generation study of family health. The data sets associated with this submission examine attitudes about vaccines and guns across generations.

Pioneering Change: Digital Reformatting For Sustainable Av Stewardship, Cory Nimer, Ben Harry, Abby Beazer, Miya Jensen, Michael Gates, Karen Glenn

Faculty Publications

Archives and libraries face growing preservation challenges from aging audiovisual collections due to carrier degradation and playback equipment obsolescence. As the media becomes more difficult to access, its archival value decreases, leading to questions about its ongoing storage. One proposed solution has been to digitize and discard the original media, preserving the recordings as digital masters with derivative files for public access. The suggestion to reformat audiovisual materials raises questions for cultural heritage professionals, and each stakeholder group may have its own concerns. Yet as media capture and digital preservation technology improve, to maintain our program's sustainability, we have begun …

Faith, Science, And Choice: Vaccine Attitudes Among Religious University Students, Jamie Jensen

ScholarsArchive Data

These data comprise a Q-methodology study conducted at Brigham Young University among undergraduate students to determine vaccine attitudes in relation to religious and political ideologies. It includes raw sort data, templates for running Q-methodology, and interview transcripts.

“Thomas Jefferson: America’S Flawed Founder Of Freedom.”, Jay H. Buckley

Faculty Publications

Thomas Jefferson was a deeply paradoxical figure—both a founding champion of liberty and a lifelong slaveholder—whose legacy must be understood in its full complexity. While he owned more than 600 enslaved people and participated in a system he publicly condemned, Jefferson consistently articulated and promoted ideals of natural rights, equality, and freedom that reshaped the United States and influenced democratic movements worldwide. He made repeated (though often unsuccessful) efforts to curb or end slavery through legislation, legal cases, and policy, including opposing the slave trade, limiting slavery’s expansion into western territories, and helping abolish the transatlantic slave trade. At the …

Invoking The Senior Partner, Yoshihiko Ariizumi

Spiritual Proficiency

For faculty who hold religious faith, the relationship between scholarly work and divine communion is not a private afterthought but a potential cognitive and motivational resource of the first order. This article draws on ten converging theoretical frameworks in organizational psychology, positive psychology, and learning science to argue that actively seeking divine guidance through prayer — treating Heavenly Father as a Senior Partner in the research enterprise — is not a retreat from rigorous scholarship but an extension of it. We examine how practices of spiritual seeking interact with flow states, resilience, intellectual humility, and prospective thinking to produce measurable …

Full Issue

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Investigación Reciente (Resumenes Académicos), Sebastian Dorantes, Erica Jensen, Faith Manchester, Isabelle Stoddard

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

No abstract provided.

Por Qué Las Personas Hacen (Y No Hacen) Donaciones, Sebastian Dorantes

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

La filantropía es una práctica mundial formada por la cultura, los ingresos y las normas sociales. Su escala es considerable y puede ser medible a través de datos e informes. En los Estados Unidos, las donaciones benéficas alcanzaron $592,500 millones de dólares en 2024, la cifra más alta registrada. Las personas contribuyeron con aproximadamente $392,000 millones de dólares de esa cantidad, o aproximadamente dos terceras partes del total de las donaciones. A nivel mundial, la generosidad sigue siendo muy común. Países como Estados Unidos, Myanmar y Nueva Zelanda figuran consistentemente como los más caritativos, con grandes porcentajes de personas que …

Mapping The Global Classroom: An Innovation Spotlight On The Ngo Education Survey Directory Database, Angie Holzer, Roseanne M. Mirabella

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

This article highlights the NGO Education Survey Directory Database as a critical tool for strengthening global nonprofit infrastructure by addressing longstanding gaps in data on nonprofit education programs. It maps the global landscape of nonprofit management education with detailed, institution-level insights, enabling researchers, funders, and practitioners to better understand capacity-building efforts worldwide. By improving transparency and access to information, the directory supports more strategic philanthropy, fosters collaboration, and promotes the development of locally grounded leadership within the nonprofit sector.

Why People Do (And Don’T) Give, Sebastian Dorantes, Erica Jensen, Isabelle Stoddard, Faith Manchester

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Philanthropy is a global practice shaped by culture, income, and social norms. Overall giving remains high, but participation is becoming more concentrated. This raises key questions about who gives, why they give, and why others choose not to. Ultimately, the relationship between donors and nonprofit organizations can have a significant impact on philanthropic behavior. It is essential for nonprofits to consider what motivates a person to donate in order to create a point of connection between the donors and the organizations.

Academic Summaries - Philanthropy, Erica Jensen, Sebastian Dorantes, Faith Manchester, Isabelle Stoddard

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

No abstract provided.

Philanthropy - Joni Full Issue April 2026, Angie Holzer, Erica Jensen

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

No abstract provided.