Digital Commons Network^™

The History Of Bootstrapping: Tracing The Development Of Resampling With Replacement, Denise Lafontaine

The Mathematics Enthusiast

Sampling is one of the most fundamental concepts in statistics, as the quality and accuracy of the statistical inferences made, heavily depend on the method used to obtain the sample and the sample’s ability to represent the population of inference. Despite being a simple concept, sampling presents researchers with many challenges. Generally, due to monetary and time constraints, researchers must take a smaller sample size than they would ideally use. Using statistics from these small samples, estimates for population parameters can be made, typically in the form of a confidence interval. However, the validity of these confidence intervals depends on …

Beauty Is In The Blind Spot Of The Beholder, Ron Aharoni

The Mathematics Enthusiast

The paper addresses the time-old question of what is beauty. A rather ambitious, if not to say presumptuous, endeavour. But I do not aim high – I do not claim to get anywhere near unearthing the secret. Rather, I will use examples from mathematics, poetry, music and chess to substantiate one thesis: that the elusory character of beauty is not incidental. Its defiance of definition is part of its essence. The aesthetic sensation requires unawareness of its precise origin. Beauty is felt when some order is perceived, that is not fully comprehended. The order is too complex, or well hidden, …

Variations On Convergence Criteria, Reinhard Oldenburg

The Mathematics Enthusiast

The didactical idea of variation is exemplified with examples from convergence of series. This yields a new convergence test similar to the root test.

Copyright & Memes: The Fight For Success Kid, Cathay Y. N. Smith, Stacey Lantagne

Faculty Law Review Articles

This Article explores the complicated relationship between memes and copyright. Internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of social communications. They effectively express an idea, message, or sentiment, often more humorously and efficiently than words. Most memes evolved from original content that Internet users found online and copied, altered, shared, and imbued with new cultural and social meaning. Because memes frequently involve the unauthorized use, alteration, and sharing of a content creator’s original image or photograph, they naturally implicate the content creator’s copyright. But who owns a meme? What rights, if any, does the creator of the original content have …

Antiracism, Reflection, And Professional Identity, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills, Eduardo R.C. Capulong

Faculty Law Review Articles

Intent on more systematically developing the emerging professional identities of law students, the professional identity formation movement is recasting how we think about legal education. Notably, however, the movement overlooks the structural racism imbedded in American law and legal education. While current models of professional development value diversity and cross-cultural competence, they do not adequately prepare the next generation of legal professionals to engage in the sustained work of interrupting and overthrowing race and racism in the legal profession and system. This article argues that antiracism is essential to the profession’s responsibility to serve justice and therefore key to legal …

Copyright Silencing, Cathay Y. N. Smith

Faculty Law Review Articles

Copyright has been weaponized to suppress speech,1 frustrate competition,2 punish third parties,3 and silence criticism and erase facts.4 This Essay highlights one form of copyright weaponization I call “copyright silencing.” Copyright silencing is a form of copyright weaponization where owners assert copyrights to silence criticism or suppress facts instead of to protect copyright owners’ legitimate interests5 in their works. This Essay identifies recent or notable instances of copyright silencing, examines the harm copyright silencing perpetrates, and explains why it is increasingly difficult to stop the assertion of copyright to silence, suppress, and censor facts, information, and criticism.

Incorporation By Any Other Name? Comparing Congress' Federalization Of Tribal Court Criminal Procedure With The Supreme Court's Regulation Of State Courts, Jordan Gross

Faculty Law Review Articles

This Article examines the different experience of states and tribes with uniform national standards of criminal procedure imposed by the federal government. Part I describes the federal government’s displacement of indigenous justice in service of colonialist political goals, a policy that has contributed to the public safety crisis in Indian country today. Part II explains the constitutional criminal procedure jurisprudence the Court developed for states on which Congress has modeled ICRA’s criminal procedure provisions. In TLOA and VAWA 2013, Congress recognized that restoring tribal autonomy over wrongdoing in Indian country must be part of the federal policy response to the …

Putting Money Back Into Consumers' Pockets: An Empirical Study Of The Cfpb's Civil Penalty Fund, Craig Cowie

Faculty Law Review Articles

One of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (“CFPB”) primary goals is to protect consumers. Protecting consumers necessarily means ensuring that companies and individuals stop violating the consumer laws. But stopping illegal conduct in the future does not help the consumers who have already been harmed. In many of the cases prosecuted by the CFPB, the defendants illegally took money out of the pockets of consumers: they charged fees that were expressly illegal; they charged consumers more than the consumers owed or more than the defendants had disclosed; and they deceived consumers about what the consumers were buying or how much …

Adapting Sustenance: Indigenous People Preserve Traditional Food Sources, Mary Katherine Auld

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Traditional foodways of Indigenous people around the world are being changed by human-caused climate change, environmental policy, and land management. For Indigenous people in interior Alaska and Montana, culture and survival are tied tightly to hunted and gathered food. The average American gets their food from a grocery store and thus is somewhat insulated from the impact of climate change on their diet. But climate change has its hand directly in the pantries, dinner plates, and seasonal practices of Indigenous people. I believe food is a central way people are tied to the earth, and thus creating narratives about impacts …

The Wild That Remains: A Once In A Generation Forest Plan Reignites The Wilderness Debate In Montana’S Gallatin Range, Anthony Stephen Pavkovich

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The movement to preserve Montana’s Gallatin Mountains, which stretch north from Yellowstone National Park, has been ongoing since the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. Largely undeveloped, the range’s sinuous, rocky crest, fertile meadows and thick lodgepole forests are vital to one of the earth’s last intact temperate ecosystems. The landscape provides refuge to rare populations of grizzly bears, elk, bighorn sheep, wolves and wolverines. Yet, the Gallatins remain the last major mountain range bordering the nation’s first and most iconic national park without congressionally designated wilderness. The closest the Gallatins came to being protected as wilderness was in …

Managed: Examining The Relationship Between Montana's State Government And Its Natural Resources, Peter Dempsey Zimmerman

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The three stories in this portfolio examine the relationship between Montana's government and its natural resources. Chapter one is a narrative outlining the stories, my reporting and publication. Chapter two: New Governor Greg Gianforte makes his picks for the heads of state environmental regulatory agencies, surprising everyone in the process. Chapter three: The state legislature proposes bills to protect the future of Colstrip as the coal industry declines. Chapter four: Data raises questions over the true impact of a new wolf management program.

Dire Straits: A Tale Of Two Treaties, Patrick S. Shea

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

When I arrived in Northern Michigan last May, I came equipped with the pre-reporting I needed to follow this story. I moved to the area just as the Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s deadline to shut down Line 5 approached. But more than seven months later, the 68-year-old pipeline still carries 540,000 barrels of crude oil through a waterway hydrologists’ have deemed “the worst possible place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes.”

Enbridge Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac is more than just another contentious pipeline. This dispute is brewing at the intersection of state and federal jurisdiction. It …

Surviving Education: The Untold Story Of American Indian Boarding Schools, Sandra Su'sana (Redpath) Ashley

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The history of federally-mandated American Indian boarding schools is one that is long overdue in the chronicles of American history. In North America, the original settlers did most of the speaking and precious little listening. In doing so, the traditional education of Native peoples was ignored, degraded, and labeled as “heathen.” Simply said, the Anglo-European considered his way “of life and learning” to be the only way to have value and direction. Consequently, social and political objectives aimed at wiping out any trace of Native American life. Today, Native voices work to reconfigure the position of the perceiver in relation …

Modeling Stromatolite Formation With Diffusion-Limited Aggregation, Laura E. Stevens

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Stromatolites, microbialites, and other microbially induced sedimentary structures exist in the rock record as far back as 3.6 billion years ago and continue to form in the present day. Better characterizing these structures and better understanding how they form is crucial in distinguishing these biosignatures from similar, abiotic structures, which can help us to understand the conditions of early Earth and early Mars. To that end, I have modified DLA 3D EXT, an open-source stromatolite modeling program, to more closely reflect the process of microbial trapping-and-binding by filamentous microbes in a calcite-precipitating hot spring system. This modified program includes a …

Summer Vacation In The Wild: An Historical And Archaeological Study Of Timber Land Fraud In The Tobacco Plains, Montana, Tyler Jay Rounds

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

During the 19th and early 20th century, Congress passed several laws intended to allow average Americans the chance to acquire portions of the public domain for their own benefit. However, contemporary observers and historians alike have noted that several of these laws—especially the Homestead Act and the Timber and Stone Act—were instead used by speculators and lumber companies to amass large landholdings by orchestrating and purchasing fraudulent entries. Local historical tradition suggests that Eureka Lumber Company, Bonners Ferry Lumber Company, and J. Neils Lumber Company employed this tactic within the Kootenai National Forest (KNF), though the veracity of such claims …

Nitrogen Dynamics And Transport Along Flowpaths In A Rural Wetland-Stream Complex, Colton Kyro

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Human activities have doubled the rate of nitrogen inputs onto the landscape resulting in elevated nitrogen concentrations in our streams. Anthropogenically applied nitrogen is largely transported to stream networks via groundwater movement. Groundwater discharge occurs in distinct points along a stream but whose influences can often persist far beyond that area due to insufficient biogeochemical removal of imported nitrogen potentially causing alterations in community structure and precipitating large algae blooms. To understand the factors governing nitrogen abundance in a historical polluted stream, I used a mass-balance approach to quantify groundwater-surface water interaction and the magnitude of groundwater nitrogen input and …

Social Influences And Social Desirability On Recollections Of Childhood Bullying, Jaynee L. Bohart

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Parents and peers play important roles in shaping attitudes toward a variety of matters during adolescence. However, little research has investigated parental and peer influence on developing attitudes toward bullying. Further, few studies have looked at whether socially desirable responding (SDR) impacts self-reports in bullying research. To address these gaps in literature, the current study recruited college students from a mid-sized public university in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States to complete a survey. The survey assessed the participants’ past attitudes toward bullying, perceptions of their parents’ and peers’ influence on their attitudes, and bullying participant roles during …

School Leadership Under Apartheid South Africa As Portrayed In The Apartheid Archive Projectand Interpreted Through Freirean Education, Kevin Bruce Deitle

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This qualitative study employed a phenomenological approach to examine how teachers, school leaders, and students rationalize their roles in the educational process when their institution is bounded by an educational system that openly strives against them. For a context, this study examined apartheid-era South Africa, from 1948 to 1994, which established social and administrative policies that deliberately curtailed the education of Indigenous and other South Africans, as a means of oppressing non-European ethnic groups.

In lieu of face-to-face interviews, stories and interviews submitted to The Apartheid Archive Project, curated by the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa, portrayed …

Integrated Primary Care Is Associated With Greater Job Satisfaction And Less Burnout Among Montana’S Medical And Behavioral Health Care Providers, C. Ivie English

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Most research to date on integrated behavioral health (IBH) or integrated primary care (IPC) practices has examined primary care settings nested within academic medical centers or clinics within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. This leaves clinics in rural and/or underserved communities without much representation in the literature. Likewise, provider job satisfaction and burnout have rarely been linked to the IPC model. Through an online cross-sectional survey of medical and behavioral health care providers in various primary care-based health care settings throughout Montana, this cross-sectional study demonstrates that degree of behavioral health integration significantly predicts greater job satisfaction and lower …

"Its Own Little City": Service Work In Truck Stops, Michelle Elizabeth Williams

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Montana truck stops act as a meeting place for long-haul truckers, vacationers, local commuters, and the workers simply trying to earn a living. The employees at such truck stops must navigate working-class customer service norms while interacting with a unique and diverse set of customers. The ethnographic and interview data that I collected during the 2020 offers a unique view of how customer service employees fared during political unrest, global health concerns, and financial struggle. Additionally, this study highlights the power dynamics that exist in the service industry by examining how such dynamics manifest in the interactions surrounding face masks, …

Leadership: Supporting Students With Asd And The School Wide Community, Chelsae Joy Larson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Leaders work collaboratively with all stakeholders to help understand what systems and supports need to be put into place to meet individual needs. School leaders must create continuous learning opportunities and reinforcement systems for educators in the areas of evidence-based practices, individualized teaching strategies, and student transition plans. Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) require consistent and structured programming starting in preschool and carrying through to post-secondary education. It is imperative that school leaders provide the appropriate training and supports to educators and specialists in relation to executive functioning skills and evidence-based practices to best support students with ASD. This …

Reading The Bones: A Taphonomic Investigation Of Archaeofaunal Remains Recovered From Site 48pa551, Northwest Wyoming, Morgan H. Thurman

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This is a preliminary taphonomy study of archaeofaunal remains found at site 48PA551, more commonly known as the Dead Indian Creek Site. 48PA551 is a well-known and commonly cited example of a McKean Complex occupation dating to between 3,800 and 4,800 B.P. The University of Montana held a field school at the site conducting small test excavations under the supervision of Dr. Anna Marie Prentiss in 2018. In the course of this testing a highly fragmentary bone bed consisting mostly of mammalian bone, cervids largely, was discovered eroding into the nearby creek. Ten 50 x 50 cm quadrants were excavated …

Summit Learning And Rural Montana Teacher Efficacy, A Phenomenology, C. Roch Turner

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Following the global COVID-19 pandemic, schools across the United States experimented with online learning platforms. Prior to that, hundreds of schools adopted the Summit Learning platform, meant to supplement face-to-face learning with digital instruction and curricula. This study is a qualitative phenomenology exploring the lived experiences of teachers in two rural Montana schools that have adopted the Summit Learning platform and maintained its use into the pandemic. Participants of this study taught core courses, such as math, science, and history. Results of this study indicate a high level of curriculum modification and support from leadership. Participants reported modified changes to …

End Of An Animal, Alyx Brittany Chandler

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Mary Of The Yellow Sea, Nicole Rose Gomez

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Maria del Mar is the third of five children born to a poor seventh-generation Hispanic-Indigenous family in rural southern Colorado. Maria’s grandmother is a highly regarded midwife, and she herself is born with the healing gift. When she is twelve years old a gypsy reads her palm and predicts that she will soon receive a letter from the man that she will marry. Soon after the prophecy is made, Maria’s beloved father, Don Antonio suffers a heart attack and is left unable to work the family ranch, part of a land grant by the Spanish crown to their ancestors. Responsibility …

A Hand-Held Structure From Motion Photogrammetric Approach To Riparian And Stream Asseessment And Monitoring, Joseph M. Dehnert, Joseph Dehnert

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Two of the biggest weaknesses in stream restoration and monitoring are: 1) subjective estimation and subsequent comparison of changes in channel form, vegetative cover, and in-stream habitat; and 2) the high costs in terms of financing, human resources, and time necessary to make these estimates. Remote sensing can be used to remedy these weaknesses and save organizations focused on restoration both money and time. However, implementing traditional remote sensing approaches via autonomous aerial systems or light detection and ranging systems is either prohibitively expensive or impossible along small streams with dense vegetation. Hand-held Structure from Motion Multi-view Stereo (SfM-MVS) photogrammetric …

Aquatic Locomotion In Birds – Biomechanics, Morphometrics, And Evolution, Anthony Barrett Lapansky

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The entire diversity of life on earth exists in air or water. Whether an organism lives in air or water provides the most fundamental description of its physical world and establishes an organism’s ecological niche on the most essential level. Because these two fluids are vastly different from one another, they also dictate, via the process of natural selection, the morphology and physiology of the organisms which call them home. By studying how organisms interact with these fluids – to locomote or obtain food, for example – we have the ability to not only link organism form and function, but …

Extending Bootstrap Aggregation Of Neural Networks For Prediction With An Application To Covid-19 Forecasting, Mohsen Tabibian

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The aim of this study is to improve the forecasting accuracy of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and construct prediction bands for ANN models. The focus is on forecasting for epidemiological purposes, and in particular, the problem of predicting new case and death counts from seven to h days into the future for spatially contiguous regions. The task poses several challenges: datasets are quite small, and both spatially and temporally correlated. To overcome these, the methods attempt to exploit information induced by spatial and temporal dependencies. More importantly, we have developed a fusion of ANNs and bootstrap methods. Bootstrap aggregation (bagging) …

Sparse Forward-Backward Alignment For Sensitive Database Search With Small Memory And Time Requirements, David H. Rich

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Sequence annotation is typically performed by aligning an unlabeled sequence to a collection of known sequences, with the aim of identifying non-random similarities. Given the broad diversity of new sequences and the considerable scale of modern sequence databases, there is significant tension between the competing needs for sensitivity and speed, with multiple tools displacing the venerable BLAST software suite on one axis or another. In recent years, alignment based on profile hidden Markov models (pHMMs) and associated probabilistic inference methods have demonstrated increased sensitivity due in part to consideration of the ensemble of all possible alignments between a query and …

Activating Hope: How Functional Support Can Improve Hope In Unemployed Individuals, Rylee P. Walter

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Hope is an adaptive mindset that enables one to work toward their goals and thwart obstacles they encounter in doing so. However, the stress associated with some situations, such as unemployment, can block hopeful thinking, causing one to become stuck in unmotivated and inflexible thinking patterns and therefore potentially trapped in the distressing situation. Through an online survey, this study explored whether functional support would predict reportedly low hope states in unemployed individuals (N = 235). More specifically, we predicted that functional support would encourage reappraisal of (and thus buffer against) distressing unemployment-related emotions, with that reappraisal altering the …