Digital Commons Network^™

Review: Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. A Reader's Guide, Michael Ossorgin

Russian Language Journal

For decades, Martinsen fostered international dialogue on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, gathering interpretations from the most dedicated students and scholars. Her reader's guide distills this criticism into a concise, accessible handbook, an authoritative scholarly guide in English. Martinsen' s guide is handy for syllabus writing and as a teaching supplement to cover the novel's central themes and narrative techniques.

Rlj Volume 73, Number 1 Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Maurice-Ernest Gillioz (1877-1962): Great Builder In America, Yves Bordet

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Maurice-Ernest Gillioz is a good example of the American dream. The son of a Swiss emigrant from the Canton of Valais who arrived in New York in the middle of the American Civil War, Gillioz started from nothing and built one of the largest public works companies in the Midwest in the first half of the twentieth century. Philippe Pierroz’ book is 164 pages, written in French, of richly illustrated and strongly documented material. The numerous illustrations and appendices can be easily understood by English-speaking readers.

Book Review: Einer Für Alle, Alle Für Einen—One For All, All For One, Stephen P. Halbrook

Swiss American Historical Society Review

In English, this title is translated as One For All, All For One. A Commemorative for the Bicentenary of the Swiss Shooting Association SSV. This tome does much more than celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Switzerland’s marksmanship society. Given the central role of the SSV in the political, military, and social life of the country, this work is also an interactive history, indeed a reference work, for those same years. This review pinpoints some of the highlights of the volume.

Remembering A Mensch— Dr. Waseem A. Malick: In Memoriam, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Dr. Waseem A. Malick, who spent over 30 years working for Swiss Pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche, was a mensch. He passed away in December 2022 in New Jersey. On February 5, 2023, about 150 of his friends, colleagues and family members gathered to remember him. Being by the side of Dr. Malick’s wife and his children, his Roche colleagues were a source of comfort for the family.

End Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Vortex Particle Method For Electric Ducted Fan In Non-Axisymmetric Flow, Eduardo Alvarez, Cibin Joseph, Andrew Ning

Faculty Publications

The vortex particle method has been reformulated in recent work as a large eddy simulation (LES) in a scheme that is both meshless and numerically stable, solving long-standing issues of numerical stability. In this study, we build upon this meshless LES scheme to create a simulation framework for electric ducted fans. This poses the challenge of introducing solid boundaries in the vorticity form of the Navier-Stokes equations without a mesh. Rotor blades are introduced in our computational domain through an actuator line model (ALM) following well-established practices for LES. A novel, vorticity-based, actuator surface model (ASM) is developed for the …

Nonsolvent-Induced Phase Separation Inside Liquid Droplets, Rami Alhasan, Tanner A. Wilcoxson, Dakota S. Banks, Sion Jung, Douglas R. Tree

Faculty Publications

Nonsolvent-induced phase separation (NIPS) is a popular method for creating polymeric particles with internal microstructure, but many fundamental questions remain surrounding the kinetics of the complex coupled mass transfer and phase separation processes. In this work, we use simulations of a phase-field model to examine how (i) finite domain boundaries of a polymer droplet and (ii) solvent/nonsolvent miscibility affect the NIPS process. To isolate the effects of phase separation kinetics and solvent/nonsolvent mass transfer on the NIPS process, we study two different cases. First, we investigate droplet concentrations that originate inside the two-phase region, where phase separation kinetics alone governs …

Off The Books: Making A Space For Bipoc Representation In Young Adult Publishing, Elisha Fernandez

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The publishing industry in the United States has long been dominated by white voices, resulting in a significant lack of representation for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the form of both authors and characters. This project aims to survey young adult BIPOC readers to explore their experiences with representation in the young adult (YA) genre and assess the impact of representation on their consumption of literature. Through assessing quantitative and qualitative answers to an online survey, the results reveal correlations between representation, enjoyment of literature, and the frequency of YA literature consumption among different BIPOC groups. These …

Informal Practices Of Localizing Open Educational Resources In Ghana, Emily Durham Bradshaw, Jason K. Mcdonald

Faculty Publications

Research on the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) often notes the potential benefits for users to revise, reuse, and remix OER to localize it for specific learners. However, a gap in the literature exists in terms of research that explores how this localization occurs in practice. This is a significant gap given the current flow of OER from higher-income countries in the Global North to lower-income countries in the Global South (King et al., 2018). This study explores how OER from one area of the world is localized when it is used in a different cultural context.

Findings indicated …

How Female Bipoc Students At A Predominantly White Institution Think About Belonging: A Multiperspective Study, Delirio Juarez

Theses and Dissertations

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) report decreased sense of belonging compared to White students (Hunn, 2014; Hurtado & Carter, 1997; Museus et al., 2018; Strayhorn, 2019). The study aimed to answer, "What are the daily lived experiences of BIPOC students at a PWI?" and "How do BIPOC students at a PWI describe feelings of belonging (if at all)?" The study was conducted at a private, religiously affiliated, PWI, in the Western United States. The University Belonging Questionnaire (Slaten et al., 2018) was used to sort students' feelings of belonging. Female participants who …

"I Think They're Poisoning My Mind": Understanding The Motivations Of People Who Have Voluntarily Adopted Secure Email, Warda Usman

Theses and Dissertations

Secure email systems that use end-to-end encryption are the best method we have for ensuring user privacy and security in email communication. However, the adoption of secure email remains low, with previous studies suggesting mainly that secure email is too complex or inconvenient to use. However, the perspectives of those who have, in fact, chosen to use an encrypted email system are largely overlooked. To understand these perspectives, we conducted a semi-structured interview study that aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the mindsets underlying adoption and use of secure email services. Our participants come from a variety of countries …

Racial Empathy Gap In The Workplace: The Existence Of And Consequences For Racial Workplace Disparity Through Lack Of Empathy, Kathleen Bahr

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Extensive research has been done on racial disparities in the workplace and the racial biases and discrimination that causes and contributes to said disparities. This research explores the existence of and causes for a racial empathy gap in the workplace, focusing on empathy between peers. An experimental study was conducted with a sample of 451 people in the United States and the United Kingdom. Using a scenario experiment, I manipulated the gender and race (randomized between male or female and Black or White) of a co-worker who had a negative event occur in their life. The study showed that there …

Hierarchical, Porous Hydrogels Demonstrating Structurally Dependent Mechanical Properties, Elisabeth Lloyd, Rami Alhasan, Sujata Dhakal, Svetlana Morozova, Douglas R. Tree, Robert Hickey

Faculty Publications

While hierarchical ordering is a distinctive feature of natural tissues and is directly responsible for their diverse and unique properties, research efforts to synthesize biomaterials have primarily focused on using molecular-based approaches without considering multiscale structure. Here, we report a bottom-up self-assembly process to produce highly porous hydrogels that resemble natural tissues both structurally and mechanically. Randomly oriented, physically crosslinked nanostructured micelles form the walls of aligned, polymer-rich pore walls that surround water-rich cavities. Extremely soft elastic modulus (<  1 kPa), highly stretchability (greater than 12-times), strain-hardening, and completely reversible deformation result from the hierarchical structure. Independent control of nano and macroscales is realized through the combination of polymer macromolecular parameters and processing conditions, directly impacting the resulting phase behavior. Here, we demonstrate precise control of the material structure and structure orientation over many orders of magnitude (e.g., nm – µm), and reveal how the multiscale structure directly impacts mechanical properties.

A Method Of Reconstructing Historical Destructive Landslides Using Bayesian Inference, Raelynn Wonnacott

Theses and Dissertations

Along with being one of the most populated regions of the world, Indonesia has one of the highest natural disaster rates worldwide. One such natural disaster that Indonesia is particularly prone to are tsunamis. Tsunamis are primarily caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and debris flows. To effectively allocate resources and create emergency plans we need an understanding of the risk factors of the region. Understanding the source events of destructive tsunamis of the past are critical to understanding the these risk factors. We expand upon previous work focusing on earthquake-generated tsunamis to consider landslide-generated tsunamis. Using Bayesian inference and modern …

Recommending Answers To Math Questions Using Kl-Divergence And The Approximate Xml Tree Matching Approach, Siqi Gao

Theses and Dissertations

Mathematics is the science and study of quality, structure, space, and change. It seeks out patterns, formulates new conjectures, and establishes the truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. The study of mathematics makes a person better at solving problems. It gives someone skills that (s)he can use across other subjects and apply in many different job roles. In the modern world, builders use mathematics every day to do their work, since construction workers add, subtract, divide, multiply, and work with fractions. It is obvious that mathematics is a major contributor to many areas of study. For …

Dd Slug Migration: Mathematical Model And Numerical Results, Joy Song

Theses and Dissertations

Amoebae are commonly studied to understand embryogenesis, and the best-characterized amoebozoan species is Dictyostelium discoideum (Dd). Dd has a very simple life cycle with a range of developmental stages, among which we are most interested in the stage of a migrating slug. It has been observed that different sizes of Dd slugs maintain a proportional distribution of prestalk cells and prespore cells: prestalk cells occupy the anterior 20% of the slug, while prespore cells occupy the posterior 80%. However, it remains unknown how the migrating slug forms and preserves this anterior-posterior proportional pattern under so many different dynamics including cell …

Copus Profiles Paper Data, Jamie Jensen, Rebecca L. Sansom, Jennifer B. Nielson, Richard E. West, Geoffrey Wright, Bryn St. Clair

ScholarsArchive Data

COPUS profile data, interview transcripts

Morphogenetic Engineering Of Synthetic Protocell Systems, Qinyu Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Observing and studying how life forms behave, i.e., their movement, adaptability, and so on, have enabled human beings to develop new technologies or optimize existing ones. One of the more noticeable phenomena in Nature is morphogenesis. Morphogenetic processes exist in different stages of biological development, from cellular division to tissue and organ formation. It is easy to observe shape development during mophogenesis due to emerging imaging techniques. However, it is hard to understand this process due to its complex organization, and the morphogenetic responses can be induced by a variety of chemicals or mechanical stresses and are subject to the …

Selection-Based Convolution For Irregular Images And Graph Data, David Marvin Hart

Theses and Dissertations

The field of Computer Vision continues to be revolutionized by advances in Convolutional Neural Networks. These networks are well suited for the regular grid structure of image data. However, there are many irregular image types that do not fit within such a framework, such as multi-view images, spherical images, superpixel representations, and texture maps for 3D meshes. These kinds of representations usually have specially designed networks that only operate and train on that unique form of data, thus requiring large datasets for each data domain. This dissertation aims to bridge the gap between standard convolutional networks and specialized ones. It …

Design And Performance Of A Laboratory Scale Pressurized Oxy-Coal Reactor, Scott Gardner, Cody Carpenter, Jacob Tuia, Aaron Skousen, Dustin Badger, Sandra Thomas, Bradley R. Adams, Dale R. Tree, Andrew R. Fry

Faculty Publications

A pressurized oxy-coal (POC) reactor has been designed, built and tested to investigate key technologies related to oxy-coal combustion including a dry coal feed system, an oxy-coal burner, and a slagging ash management system. The coal feed system utilized a fluidized bed to convey pulverized coal with CO2 from a coal bed into the reactor. The reactor has diagnostic capabilities including optical access, embedded thermocouples, fuel and gas flow rates, exhaust gas analysis (CO2, CO, NO, O2) and heat flux. At 13.6 atm and a firing rate of 89 kWth a mean feed rate of 12.5 kg/h was …

Methods For Designing Compact And Deployable Origami-Inspired Flat-Foldable Spacecraft Antennas And Other Systems, Collin Ryan Ynchausti

Theses and Dissertations

There are times when it is desirable for devices to be stowed compactly, ``transported'' to the location of their desired use, and then deployed to another stable shape or configuration to perform their designed function. Origami-based mechanisms are beneficial in these cases due to their compact, folded nature and large deployments. Unlike traditional mechanical design, compliant mechanism and origami-based design approaches inherently have coupled characteristics, creating complex design problems. The research presented here discusses metrics, methods, and designs to aid in the design of origami-adapted and compliant mechanisms, focusing on the design case of deployable space systems. First, the hexagonal …

Investigating Speech Perception In Children With Speech Delay, Dyslexia, And Speech Delay And Dyslexia, Lauren Marie Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

Perceptual deficits related to phonology in children with speech delay (SD) and children with dyslexia have been identified in separate lines of research. However, there has only been a small number of studies that have investigated the perceptual deficits of children with SD and/or dyslexia in the same study to better understand the overlap of their speech perception abilities. Children with SD have previously shown deficits perceiving speech stimuli that is acoustically sparse, particularly when stimuli contain speech sounds they do not produce correctly. Yet in contrast to children with dyslexia, children with SD are better able to recover linguistic …

Making Space Behind The Veil: Black Agency Within A Predominantly White Religion, Michael Wood, Grace Ann Soelberg, Jacob Rugh

Faculty Publications

The work of W.E.B. Du Bois highlights the significance of Christian religion in Black American life. According to Du Bois, the Black Church serves as a site of self-formation and affirmation, and the White Church as a source of racist beliefs and justifications for inequality. In this paper, we expand Du Bois’ inquiry about the influence of religion with a study of Black Americans who belong to a predominantly White religion. For those whose religious experience is almost wholly within the “white world,” what role does religion play in their lives? We analyze a set of 52 public accounts by …

Algorithmic Fidelity And The Use Of Large Language Models In Social Science Research, Christopher Michael Rytting

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we argue that large language models (LLMs) exhibit a considerable amount of \textit{algorithmic fidelity}, a property where they have modeled ideas, behaviors, and attitudes of the population who generated their training data. This has important implications for social science, as this fidelity theoretically allows for the use of LLMs as effective proxies for human beings in experiments and research. We demonstrate this empirically in various social science domains (political partisanship, demographic surveying, voting behavior, hot-button policy issues, news media, populism, congressional summaries), in various applications (replicating social science survey findings, assisting in coding of text datasets, inferring …

Creating A More Efficient Etd Workflow, Nicole Lewis, Ellen Amatangelo

Faculty Publications

In 2019, the BYU Library began working with the Graduate Studies Department to develop a new workflow for processing incoming theses and dissertations. This presentation will examine our course of action for creating a more efficient process from student submission to institutional repository upload to cataloging. This was accomplished through open discourse in collaborative meetings and flexibility from IT teams. A comparison of the old and new workflows will be examined, along with how decisions were made along the way.

Reviewers For 2022

Western North American Naturalist

No abstract provided.

Unlocking The Mysteries Of Serials, Nicole Lewis, Sharolyn Swenson

Faculty Publications

Serials cataloging can be confusing with its unique properties. This session will discuss some of the challenges involved in cataloging serials including choosing a title, what to do if you do not have the first issue or an early issue of the serial, determining the dates of serials, frequency changes and cataloging serials in languages that are unfamiliar to the cataloger.

Leveraging The Power Of Wikipedia And Wikidata For Your Library, Nicole Lewis, Rachel Helps

Faculty Publications

Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of information on the internet. As information professionals, we can change information on Wikipedia to be more accurate and complete. By using Wikidata, librarians can affect information searches at a deep, machine-readable level. This session will discuss some ways that librarians can increase the accessibility of the media and information in their libraries and bring their hidden collections to light.

The Criminalization Of Female Genital Mutilation In Ohio: A Social And Political Analysis, Madsyn Selph

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research examines the public attitudes towards the criminalization of female genital mutilation (“FGM”) in Ohio in 2018 with the passage of S.B. 214. Content from The Columbus Dispatch, testimony in favor of the bill, and an oral history with a current Ohio Senator who was a House Representative in 2018 were used as data in this research. Data are examined using group threat theory to better understand the attitudes of the Columbus public towards trends in immigration and FGM. Results find that anti-Islam and anti-African sentiments (and specifically anti-Somali sentiments) were widely found in these data, as well as …