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Spartan Daily, August 25, 2026, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2026

Volume 167, Issue 02

Effects Of Variable Light On Sexual Competition In Kelp Species, Jaycee Lanza

Master's Theses

As foundation species, kelps significantly influence the structure and composition of their surrounding habitat by modifying environmental conditions, including light levels, currents, nutrient availability, sedimentation, and seawater chemistry. Light, in particular, is a critical resource that varies greatly within kelp forests, affecting kelp reproductive processes such as gametogenesis, fertilization, and recruitment, which are vital to population persistence. Biological factors, such as density-dependent competition for resources and sexual competition with other kelps, can also affect such processes. To understand how environmental variables influence kelp populations, it is crucial to recognize their combined effects. This study investigated the impacts of light levels …

Archeota, Spring/Summer 2026, Diane Curtis, Angela Brooks, Gaby Stephenson, Nana Turkson, Siera Milton Beal, Charlene Hardin, Lola Jalbert, Emily Stockton, Ryan Martin

Archeota

Archeota is a platform for SJSU iSchool students to contribute to the archival conversation. It is written BY students, FOR students. It provides substantive content on archival concerns and issues and promotes professional development in the field of archival studies. Archeota upholds the core values of the archival profession. Contents: “It’s Virtual, Baby!!”: Creating a Secure Digital Space for an At-risk Community Archives Online Conference by Diane Curtis, My Experience as a MARA Student at Queer History South 2026 by Ryan Martin, AI and Digital Leadership: Transforming Libraries, Archives and Museums for the Future by Angela Brooks, The Threshold …

Father Knows Best? Not Here: Metaphors Of Kinship And Kingship In Haudenosaunee, Aristotelian, And Confucian Political Thought, Ian Kalman

Comparative Philosophy

The notion that the organization of large-scale social structures are rooted in domestic ones has a longstanding history in both Chinese and Greek classical political philosophy. Aristotle and Confucius independently reasoned that a good family, one with a strong father, mapped onto a good state, one with a strong king - though they differed on the details. While there is a strong literature juxtaposing these two titans, less attention has been paid to how their ideas compare with other philosophical traditions. This article provides an anthropological intervention to the comparative study of Confucius and Aristotle – while both autonomously argued …

A Place For Ancient Philosophy In Axial Age Historiography, John R. Shook

Comparative Philosophy

Long-standing debates over historiographical approaches to the Axial Age have distracted the history of philosophy from its own disciplined inquiry into the breadth and depth of ancient thought beyond the Greeks. The philosopher Karl Jaspers offered a vista for seeing commonalities among ancient innovations and discerning continuities along history to modern times. That dual agenda divided Axial historiography with the question of whether axiality reflects creativities of ancient systems or have modern reflections created images of axiality. A singular chronology for humanity encourages a mode of philosophical history open to providential designs, epochal turns, spiritual evolutions, psychological leaps, or cognitive …

Reassessing The Deontological Undercurrents In Mo Zi’S Ethical Thought, Nuno Miranda

Comparative Philosophy

This article reexamines Mo Zi’s ethical philosophy, challenging the dominant interpretation of Mohism as a purely consequentialist or proto-utilitarian system. While Mo Zi’s emphasis on social utility—such as material welfare, population growth, and aversion to warfare—aligns with outcome-oriented reasoning, I argue that his invocation of the will of Heaven introduces a deontological dimension. Heaven’s will serves not merely as a heuristic for maximizing benefits but as an absolute moral standard, demanding adherence to duties like universal love and non-aggression, irrespective of immediate practical gains. Through a close reading of the Mo-Zi corpus, this study reveals a hybrid ethical framework that …

The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Ecojustice And Ethics, Vishnu S. Pendyala

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has attained human-level performance in tasks like text summarization, machine translation, and code generation while handling multimodal data. Despite these advances, AI poses challenges such as generating false or biased outputs, causing discrimination, and exhibiting opaque decision-making processes that hinder bias mitigation. Additionally, training large language models (LLMs) for AI consumes substantial energy and can enable autonomous warfare, posing a threat to eco-justice, and raising sustainability concerns. Their ability to create realistic content poses the risk of misuse and perpetuating misinformation. This article addresses these ethical issues and presents solutions through regulation and technology, with examples of …

Spartan Daily, April 17, 2025, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2025

Volume 164, Issue 34

Nothing Is Off Limits, But Not Everything Is Done Right: Exploring Ineffability, Alejandro Maciel

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Games are capable of addressing absolutely anything. No topic is too big, too controversial, or too emotional. but not everything is done well; the problem isn't the subject, it's always the delivery. When the developers approach heavy topics without care, they risk doing harm. bwhen they do their research and consult communities and write with purpose, the result can be transformative. Representation, when handled with attention, isn't political correctness; it's simply good storytelling. it's how games become more than entertainment. They become tools for empathy, education, and more valuable connections

Spartan Daily, March 27, 2025, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2025

Volume 164, Issue 28

Mal-Information, The Anatomy Of An “Information Disorder”, Susan Maret

Secrecy and Society

Mal-information is a fairly recent addition to federal policy and the lexicon of political communication with implications for understanding censorship and secrecy during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper reviews documents authored by IGOs, NGOs, and the US government that mark the evolution of mal-information as true information intended to cause harm. The term, as it is currently employed, is now associated with misinformation and disinformation to create a complex of “information disorders” known as the acronym MDM. In this paper, the creep of the term mal-information and its use by federal agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency …

Mastering High-Speed And Low Power Hardware System Design, Kush Desai, Khushbu Shah

Student RSCA

The book “Mastering High-speed and Low-Power Hardware System Design” provides a comprehensive guide to the intricacies of designing embedded systems with a focus on high-speed and low-power constraints. It begins by introducing the fundamental components of embedded systems, including hardware, software, and real-time operating systems, before diving into the essential principles of PCB design. The book emphasizes the importance of understanding the printed circuit board (PCB) as a foundational element in creating electronic devices and explores the various types of PCBs, such as rigid, flexible, and rigid-flex, discussing their unique applications and benefits.

A significant portion of the book is …

Unmasking Public Sentiment: A Sample Efficient Approach To Analyzing Twitter Opinion On U.S. Aid To Ukraine, Satanu Ghosh, Nikhil Dewitt, Souvick Ghosh, Denise Mccoy

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The U.S. aid to Ukraine is a bipartisan topic of extreme socio-political importance. While several organizations have conducted surveys to understand the public stance on this topic, there is no research to date that analyses public opinion on social media, possibly due to the lack of annotated data. Therefore, this research compares several sample-efficient methods (including in-context learning) to analyze tweet sentiments with minimal training data. First, we collect 11,289 tweets about the U.S. aid to Ukraine and mapped them to U.S. states. Next, we explore three different approaches to sentiment analysis: tool-based, embedding-based, and prompt-based. Our results indicate that …

Constructive Engagement Between Ecological Thoughts Of Karl Marx And Lao Zi, Hongyin Zhou, Yuqi Chen

Comparative Philosophy

The global ecological crisis has posed unprecedented survival challenges to human being. Consequently, ecological issues have naturally become central concerns in philosophy. From the methodological perspective of constructive engagement in comparative philosophy, we have chosen to compare the ecological thoughts of two thinkers—Karl Marx and Lao Zi (老子)—who are separated by vast spans of time and cultural tradition. We argue that Karl Marx holds a mild anthropocentric ecological view, while Lao Zi holds a transcendental ecological view. In addressing ecological issues, Lao Zi’s transcendental methodological guiding principles can provide negative methodological constraints for Karl …

A New Look At The Debate Between Confucian Soft-Power And Legalist Hard-Power Statecrafts And Its Contemporary Significance, Shirong Luo

Comparative Philosophy

In recent years, comparative scholars and commentators have attempted to find ways to best characterize the opposition between Confucianism and Legalism. For example, it has been argued that Confucianism exemplifies “idealism”, whereas Legalism is a version of “realism” and that their dispute can be construed as a clash between the broader philosophical frameworks of idealism and realism. While casting these opposing political philosophies as such can shed some light on the differences between the two schools of classical Chinese philosophy, these conceptual labels are too broad to capture their fundamental differences, which in my view are their different understandings of …

Villagran, Gilbert Joseph, San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

San Jose State University, Social Work, 1976 MSW

San Jose State University, Community College Teaching Credential, 1973

San Jose State University, Philosophy, 1971 BA

Reynolds, E. Bruce, San Jose State University

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Biographies

University of Central Missouri (formerly Central Missouri State) , Mass Comm./History, B.S./M.A., 1969/1977

University of Hawaii at Manoa, History, Ph.D., 1988

Combating Terrorism To Promote National Security In Nigeria: Libraries And Information Centres To The Rescue, Udemezue Joseph Ogugua, Jovita Amarachi Ikeagwuani Mrs

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Terrorism is a hydra-headed monster and should be stamped out for the benefit of humanity. Fighting terrorism to enthrone national security should be at the front burner of government stakeholders especially this time that non-state actors operate with impunity. The paper discusses the role of libraries and information centres in combating terrorism and promoting national security in Nigeria. Specifically, the paper examines terrorism and national security, terrorism in Nigeria, the role of libraries and information centres in the fight against terrorism to promote national security. It also looks at the challenges encountered by libraries and information centres in the fight …

Sjsu Erfa News, Winter 2024, San Jose State University, Emeritus And Retired Faculty Association

Emeritus and Retired Faculty Association (ERFA) Newsletter

Volume 38, No. 2

A Two-Stage Machine Learning Approach For Fake News Detection And News Article Categorization, Snegdha Adusumilli

Master's Projects

This project employs machine learning techniques to develop a sequential model for detecting and categorizing fake news, aiming to mitigate its proliferation in today's digital landscape. The model operates in two phases: in the first phase, the classification algorithms like Naïve Bayes, XGBoost and Random Forest are used to distinguish between true and false news stories and in the second phase the capabilities of Naïve Bayes, XGBoost, Random Forest, and the Transformer-based BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model are leveraged to further categorize the news into specific topics.

The methodology encompasses several key steps: data acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction, …

Lithium And Water: Hydrosocial Impacts Across The Life Cycle Of Energy Storage, James J.A. Blair, Noel Vineyard, Dustin Mulvaney, Alida Cantor, Ali Sharbat, Kate Berry, Elizabeth Bartholomew, Ariana Firebaugh Ornelas

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

As a key ingredient of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs), lithium plays a significant role in climate change mitigation, but lithium has considerable impacts on water and society across its life cycle. Upstream extraction methods—including open-pit mining, brine evaporation, and novel direct lithium extraction (DLE)—and downstream processes present different impacts on both the quantity and quality of water resources, leading to water depletion and contamination. Regarding upstream extraction, it is critical for a comprehensive assessment of lithium's life cycle to include cumulative impacts related not only to freshwater, but also mineralized or saline groundwater, also known as brine. Legal frameworks …

Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp

Secrecy and Society

No abstract provided.

Taxonomizing Information Practices In A Large Conspiracy Movement: Using Early Qanon As A Case Study, James A. Hodges

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

This paper presents a taxonomy of the information practices apparent in an imageboard discussion thread that was influential in jump-starting the worldwide QAnon movement. After introducing QAnon with a review of literature, the author examines 4Chan /pol/ thread #147547939 (key in introducing multiple key elements of the QAnon narrative) to enumerate and classify the information practices deployed by discussion participants. In conclusion, the paper expands beyond existing research’s previous focus on outright fabrication, showing that early QAnon participants’ information practices are also defined in large part by suspicious and idiosyncratic modes of reading authentic sources, not simply the propagation of …

Information Scoping Skills And The Research Output Of Academic Librarians In Universities In South-South Geopolitical Zone Of Nigeria, Godson Ehimiyein Ilevbare Phd, Uduak Ubong Enang Phd, Mercy Etukudo Ukpanah Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study investigated the relationship between information scoping skills and the research output of academic librarians in universities in South-South Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria with corresponding specific objective, research question, and research hypothesis. To effectively drive the study two theories were adopted. The theory of social cultural learning for the independent variable (information scoping skill), and the theory of self-efficacy for the dependent variable (research output of academic librarians). More so, conceptual review of literature on information scoping skills and research out were carried, and specific empirical review of literature with extrinsic similarity and dissimilarity to the study was also …

Spartan Daily, March 2, 2023, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2023

Volume 160, Issue 16

The Best Confucian Hybrid Meritocracy-Democracy For Liberal Democracies, John J. Park

Comparative Philosophy

Several contemporary Confucian philosophers have posited differing hybrid views fusing meritocracy to democracy. There is a good deal of interest in a meritocracy in contemporary Confucian thought, and such a view perhaps should receive more serious consideration in liberal democratic thought since it may make for a stronger form of government when appended to democracy. In this paper, four contemporary hybrid theorists who combine elements of a meritocracy with a democracy are critically analyzed concerning an ability for their views to be instantiated in liberal democracies for the legislative branch only. Finally, I provide a modified hybrid view for the …

Archeota Fall/Winter 2023, Amanda Leung, Benja Thompson, Katrina Williams, Amelia Smith, Lawrence Lorraine Mullen

Archeota

Archeota is a platform for SJSU iSchool students to contribute to the archival conversation. It is written BY students, FOR students. It provides substantive content on archival concerns and issues and promotes professional development in the field of archival studies. Archeota upholds the core values of the archival profession.

Contents:

The Southwark Archives: Stories of a London Borough and its People

by Amanda Leung

Chains of Fire: Building a Queer Archive in Mill Valley, CA

By Benja Thompson

The Fabric of a Community: How Events Connect Individuals to Institutions

By Katrina Williams

Farewell to Our Winter 2023 Graduates: Interviews With …

Explainable Ai For Android Malware Detection, Maithili Kulkarni

Master's Projects

Android malware detection based on machine learning (ML) is widely used by the mobile device security community. Machine learning models offer benefits in terms of detection accuracy and efficiency, but it is often difficult to understand how such models make decisions. As a result, popular malware detection strategies remain black box models, which may result in a lack of accountability and trust in the decisions made. The field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) attempts to shed light on such black box models. In this research, we apply XAI techniques to ML-based Android malware detection systems. We train classic ML models …

Disaster Risk Reduction Management Practices: The Case Of A Private Academic Library In Northern Philippines, Rico Bautista Orenia, David A. Cabonero

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study aimed to determine the possible causes of library disasters, disaster practices, and challenges of Saint Mary's University Learning Resource Center (SMULRC) on prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. The respondents were the nine librarians of SMULRC. It made use of mixed methods of research. A quantitative design was used to identify the possible causes of disasters and determine the frequency and percentage of librarians practicing disaster risk reduction management. The qualitative method was used to support the quantitative answers and to know the challenges they experienced in disaster management. The study found that: 1) natural disasters such as storm …

Homelessness And Water Insecurity In The Global North: Trapped In The Dwelling Paradox, Katie Meehan, Melissa Beresford, Fausto Amador Cid, Lourdes Johanna Avelar Portillo, Anna Marin, Marianne Odetola, Raul Pacheco-Vega

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In this article, we introduce the “dwelling paradox” to explore how the state actively produces water insecurity for people experiencing homelessness in the Global North. We explain that the dwelling paradox is (1) produced by a modernist ideology of public service delivery that privileges water provision through private infrastructural connections in the home; (2) is reproduced by the welfare-warfare state, which has increasingly weaponized public water facilities and criminalized body functions in public space; and (3) is actively contested by some houseless communities, who challenge hegemonic ideals of the “home”—and its water infrastructure—as a private, atomized space. In advancing a …