Digital Commons Network^™

The New York Times: A Strategic Audit, Kaylee Campbell, Cassidy June, Keira Cummins, Tanner Maas, Alyssa Fjelstad

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The New York Times is a legacy newspaper that has navigated a great many changes since its founding in 1851. The company rose to success with its traditional print journalism, but has now transformed into a largely digital, subscription-based business model that provides subscribers with access to news, games, recipes, podcasts, product recommendations, and more. This provides an excellent foundation for a strategic audit to understand how one of the giants of a dying industry has not only managed to stay alive, but to thrive.

A PESTEL and Porter’s Five Forces analysis reveals that The New York Times operates in …

Good Life Automobility: Cultural/Rhetorical Resistance And Persistence Of Us Car Hegemony, Trinity O. Thompson

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This project takes the car as a historical signifier of a rhetorical racialization process that enables a hypermobile white, masculine, neoliberal identity that pervades conceptions of mobility in the West. I locate these overlapping social formations under a cultural logic of good life automobility (GLA) that positions cars, a quintessential form of private property, as a motivator for a contemporary “good life” citizenship identity that cultivates neoliberal subjectivities of free movement and market consumption in contempt of socialized and racialized public transit futures. The introduction chapter elaborates on the boundaries of GLA while also contextualizing the two analysis chapters through …

Part Of The Family, Brian Garbrecht

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Part of the Family examines television as both a domestic object and a cultural force. TV was not simply something my family watched, but something we lived with. Through CRT televisions, VHS recordings, family photographs, altered TV Guides, fictional broadcasts, and immersive living-room installations, the project explores how television shaped memory, kinship, attention, and belonging in the American home. Drawing from my family’s archive of Chicago-area broadcasts recorded between the 1990s and early 2000s, the work treats VHS as a hybrid form of home movie, preserving the flow of commercials, news, station IDs, sitcoms, movies, and accidental overlaps that structured …

Application Of Maritime Non-Line-Of-Sight Relay Attack On Wireless Digital Communication, Nathan Meyer

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As wireless communication becomes increasingly prevalent, securing information over wireless channels is an ongoing challenge, especially in maritime environments where communication depends on radio links. While higher layer wireless attacks have been widely studied, lower level physical-layer relay attacks in maritime settings have received less attention. This thesis presents a simulation of a maritime relay attack in a beyond line-of-sight wireless environment for study. A three antenna communication model is developed where a legitimate transmitter sends a digital wireless signal, an attacking antenna intercepts, modifies, and retransmits the signal, and a final receiver observes both the direct and relay transmission. …

Real-Time Adaptable Residential Kitchen: A Plug-In Standard, Rachel Fuelberth

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

This thesis looks at how a real-time adaptable standard could be put in place within the modern kitchen to allow for equitable use of the space by numerous members of the household and their differing physical characteristics. The residential kitchen is a fundamentally exclusionary architectural construction designed around able-bodied, average-height adults. This excludes children, the elderly, anyone outside of the average height, and people with mobility differences. The kitchen has never been a place of equity. It has been designed to be used by an average-height female, and it does not account for the discomfort of those outside this norm. …

Exploring The Biocultural Profile Of The Undocumented Populations Of The Sonoran Corridor: A Skeletal Assessment Of The Prevention Through Deterrence Strategy, Mary A. Vaughn

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

Over the last thirty years the mortality rate of the undocumented population at the US-Mexico border has risen, requiring methods distinguishing US-born individuals from immigrants to improve the likelihood of identification and repatriation through foreign consulates. Forensic anthropologists with the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) have advocated for the use of the biocultural profile, combining the biological profile with factors including oral health, osteological stress, and personal effects. The biocultural profile serves two purposes, functioning both as a tool for identification and with which to document structural inequality within communities of origin.

This study examines changes in …

Gao Weijie’S East–West Encounter, Jiabo Gao

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This portfolio mainly includes the two major dissertation recital papers, program notes and one lecture recital speech I presented throughout my DMA period. The first recital paper primarily compares and examines how Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Carl Loewe, and Franz Schubert set ErlkönigThe Yuanqu Song Cycle, exploring how Gao combines different musical systems of the East and West to express Chinese ancient poetry. This is also my main contribution during my DMA period, which involves in-depth research and performance of art songs from Germany, France, Italy and China.

Breeding For Diverse Color And Protein Quality In Popcorn And Sweet Corn, Jonathan Niyorukundo

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Sweet corn and popcorn are important crops consumed globally as vegetable and snack, respectively. They are deemed healthy foods due to high fiber and carotenoid contents, especially in yellow varieties. Commercial varieties are optimized for high-yielding agronomics, and previous efforts were made to improve specific macro- and micronutrient contents. Both sweet corn and popcorn have poor protein quality due to the inadequate essential amino acids such as lysine and tryptophan. Moreover, commercial varieties are predominantly yellow, thereby offering no diversity of other maize colors, which are potentially healthier and more appealing to the consumer. In this project, we sought to …

Unleashing Stress: The Effects Of Training, Bond Strength, And Stress On Pet Dog Behaviors And Health, London Maria Wolff

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Humans and dogs have formed a unique ability to communicate with each other through evolutionary and developmental mechanisms. This increased communication serves to form dynamic interspecies bonds by facilitating learning and training over the lifetime of a dog. However, it is not known what factors permit the unique capacity of dogs to form bonds with, and learn from, their human companions. Odor is a notable candidate for interspecies communication about emotional states, with studies showing that both dogs and humans use odor information to detect human emotions (Calvi et al., 2020). Possibly, this may include detection of both acute and …

Centering Access: Reimagining Basic Writing Through Critical Disability Frameworks, Jason Burton Mccormick

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Despite decades of scholarship arguing otherwise, developmental writing spaces are still often treated as places of deficit in higher education. This deficit positioning emerges in the ways the courses are discussed (as barriers and burdens to graduation), the way learners are imagined (being “unprepared” for college work), and the way placement is understood as punishment. Developmental educators continue to fight this stigma, but rely on stories of students “overcoming” rather than acknowledging that the stigma is a product of the institution and its discriminatory norms, not the offering itself.

My work reimagines the developmental writing classroom as an essential liminal …

Development Of A Decision Aid For Single-Sided Deafness Intervention For Adults: An Exploratory Mixed Methods Study, Priya Karimuddanahalli Premkumar

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Individuals with single-sided deafness (SSD) encounter challenges such as difficulty localizing sounds, understanding speech in noisy environments, heightened auditory fatigue, and a diminished quality of life. The available treatment options for SSD are diverse, ranging from contralateral routing of signal (CROS) devices and bone conduction devices (BCD) to osseointegrated auditory implants (OAI), cochlear implants (CI), or even opting for no device at all. However, each of these treatment choices comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Navigating the decision-making process for SSD treatment can be challenging due to each option's unique pros and cons. Furthermore, there remains a …

Problems With Small Drinking Water Systems In Developing And Developed Countries: How Do They Compare?, Kurt Kesteloot

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation compares the factors that drive the long-term functionality of small drinking water systems (serving fewer than 10,000 people) in developing and developed country contexts, with a focus on groundwater supplies. Using regression analysis in SAS and complementary fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) for developing countries, the study integrates two datasets: 23 Engineers Without Borders project surveys (90+ variables across 14 countries) and a multi-year National Park Service inspection dataset (approximately 1,561 systems; 7,460 recorded deficiencies, enriched with U.S. Census ZIP-code aggregates). In developing countries, statistically significant predictors of success include government cash contributions (odds ratio [OR] ≈ 67.6), …

Musical Affinities Between Ann Southam's Glass Houses And Canadian Fiddle Tunes With Performance Considerations For Glass Houses No. 5, Evangelia Nikolaidou

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Ann Southam stands as one of Canada’s foremost minimalist composers. Her fifteen-piece piano set Glass Houses, composed in 1981 and revised in 2009, reflects the joyful, dance-like energy of Canadian fiddle music that inspired it. While Glass Houses has frequently been discussed within the context of minimalist composition, less attention has been given to the ways in which the work resonates with Canadian fiddle traditions. This document draws on existing scholarship on Métis, French-Canadian, Newfoundland, Anglo-Canadian, and Scottish fiddle traditions to trace and clarify structural, rhythmic, and textural affinities between Canadian fiddle tunes and Glass Houses. Focusing on …

Open Multi-Agent Systems: The Free-Range-Zoo Framework And Moasei Competition, Ceferino J. Patino Iv

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has made significant strides in addressing sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty. However, traditional MARL frameworks assume closed-world settings with fixed agent sets, static task distributions, and unchanging environment dynamics. This thesis presents two complementary contributions that advance the state of open-world multi-agent systems research: (1) the free-range-zoo framework, an open-source environment suite for MARL in open environments featuring dynamic agent populations, evolving task sets, and changing operational frames; and (2) the MOASEI Competition, an international benchmarking event that leverages free-range-zoo to evaluate how artificial agents handle openness in complex, partially observable domains. The …

A Daily Assessment Of Food And Alcohol Disturbance And Alcohol Intoxication As Predictors Of Sexual Violence Victimization, Amanda Elizabeth Baildon

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Alcohol-involved sexual violence (SV) is a common and detrimental experience for young adult women. To supplement SV prevention strategies aimed at perpetrators, who are fully responsible for the occurrence of SV, risk reduction programs that target women’s drinking have been implemented with limited efficacy. To improve these programs, research must examine novel predictors like food and alcohol disturbance (FAD) that contribute to SV risk. FAD refers to compensatory behaviors (e.g., restricted eating, excessive exercise) to offset alcohol’s calories or enhance intoxication. Approximately 45% of young adult women engage in FAD, a practice that likely heightens SV risk by facilitating rapid …

Exploring The Relations Between Employer Beliefs And Workplace Practices: Organizational Factors And Autism Employment Outcomes, Melinda Ann Henson

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Autistic individuals experience persistent employment disparities despite interventions targeting individual skills and supports, suggesting that workplace factors also shape employment outcomes. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) posits that workplace environments supporting employee autonomy, competence, and relatedness promote employment outcomes. This study examined SDT-aligned practices and tested associations between employer beliefs about autism as a form of neurodiversity, hiring receptivity, and employment outcomes for Autistic professionals. A preliminary aim was to evaluate the psychometric properties of a newly developed measure, the Workplace Inclusivity and Autonomy Survey (WIAS), designed to assess SDT practices via employer report. Participants included 43 professionals representing a range of …

German Is For You! The Making Of A High School Multikulti German Course, Jennene Aten

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This teacher self-study examined the process of creating and teaching a multicultural German curriculum. This study necessarily involved observing students as they went through the semester of course work, but students are not the center of the research. I am. This research focuses on what I learned about teaching, specifically my teaching in my subject area and how I could improve my skills and methods.

Germany is an ethnically diverse nation but not usually thought of as such. The presentation of Germany in German language textbooks is generally portrayed as rather monochromatic. Students who study German, specifically in Fairfield, California, …

Improving Drought Science Communication And Accessibility, Lindsay Erin Johnson

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Effective drought management depends not only on the accuracy of scientific data, but also on how that information is communicated and understood by diverse audiences. This dissertation examines drought communication through the lens of science communication, with a focus on improving readability, accessibility, understandability, and usability of drought information. Using a manuscript-style format, three studies investigate how drought information is written, delivered, and applied. Chapter 1 provides a brief overview and outline of this dissertation. Chapter 2 evaluates the readability of the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) national narratives over almost 8 years. Results show that these narratives are consistently written …

Making The Case For Spandex: The Nature Of Re-Novicing And The Merging Of Expertise For Former Elementary And High School Teachers Who Move To Teaching At The Middle Level, Elizabeth K. Boyle

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

As an academic coach in a large, Midwestern middle school, I noticed an influx of teachers with years of prior experience at the elementary or high school levels being hired to work with students in grades six through eight. Because they were already veteran teachers, they were not assigned mentorship, yet there were aspects of working in a middle-school setting that effectively “re-noviced” them (Hanuscin et al., 2020).

Knowing that cookie-cutter approaches to professional development and learning often do not meet the needs of adult learners, I sought information that would guide what professional growth opportunities could be provided to …

Laser Microprocessing Of Metallic And Composite Materials: Nanosecond Pulsed Laser Surface Melting, Laser Shock Peening, And Femtosecond Laser Machining, Qiuchi Zhu

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation comprises three parts addressing laser microprocessing of metallic and composite materials through nanosecond pulsed laser surface melting, laser shock peening, and femtosecond laser machining. The first part discusses nanosecond pulsed laser surface melting for corrosion mitigation in stainless steel. Commercial 304 stainless steel (SS) was first used to establish a processing window for stable shallow remelting and rapid resolidification. The approach was then extended to 304L/308L SS welded joints relevant to nuclear dry storage canisters. The results show that nanosecond laser surface melting refines the near-surface microstructures in the heat-affected zone and improved pitting corrosion resistance. Electrochemical and …

Integrated Approaches For Valorization Of Chicken Feather Waste: From Extraction To Application Of Keratin-Based Bioproducts, Muhammad Ehtasham Akram

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation explores the optimization of chicken feathers keratin hydrolysate (CFKH) production using alkaline hydrolysis (AH) and sub-critical water hydrolysis (SCWH), focusing on acquiring high keratin yield in the hydrolysate. Then, CFKH along with other locally sourced materials, was used to develop bioplastics with regenerative agriculture properties (BioWRAP), with the ultimate objective of applying it as a soil mulch to suppress weeds in agricultural crops. This work also addresses challenges in process design and industrial scale-up of BioWRAP. Chapter 1 is a literature review that introduces terms like biobased, biodegradable, and bioplastics, materials and methods used to make bioplastics, and …

Leading With The Heart: Fostering Asset-Based Teacher Beliefs And Practices For Multilingual Learners Through Research–Practice Partnership In A Diversifying Suburban Elementary School, Valerie Anne Kyllmann

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This mixed methods study is part of a larger research-practice partnership (RPP) between practitioners and researchers at a Midwestern suburban elementary school experiencing an increase in cultural and linguistic diversity. Like many U.S. schools, its teaching force is mostly White, middle-class, and female, creating not only a pedagogical gap, but also a belief gap about the linguistic and academic assets multilingual students possess. Grounded in linguistically responsive teaching, adult learning, and improvement science, this study explores how RPPs can leverage varying expertise in cycles of inquiry to co-create initiatives that foster asset-based teacher perspectives through building-wide events and professional development. …

Program And Proceedings, The Nebraska Academy Of Sciences 1880–2026: 146th Anniversary Year, One Hundred-Thirty-Sixth Annual Meeting

Nebraska Academy of Sciences: Programs and Proceedings

Program and abstracts of the proceedings for the Nebraska Academy of Sciences 136th annual meeting, 2025

Sessions

Aeronautics and Space Science

Anthropology

Biological and Medical Sciences

Earth Sciences

Ecology, Sustainability, and Environmental Science

Physics and Engineering

General Poster Session

2026 Maiben Lecture: Shifting Extremes: Understanding Nebraska’s Changing Climate and Preparing for What Lies Ahead, Deborah Bathke

2026 Friends of Science Awards: Julie Shaffer and Irina Filina

2026 C. Bertrand and Marian Othmer Schultz Colleaguate Schoalrship Award: Piper Ryschon and Bryce Reeson

In Memoriam: Paul Royster

“The Left Leg Is Not Well”: Identity, Economy, And Ability In Early Modern Drama, Emma D. Whaley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The human reality of the disabled experience often goes overlooked by scholars analyzing early modern literature. Most scholarship seems to interpret disability as metaphorical without examining the human who experiences it. In this paper, I will be examining disability in three early modern texts as literal and inquire into the realities of the disabled experience for the characters. A Larum for London, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and The Fair Maid of the Exchange all prominently feature a disabled character—Stump, Ralph, and Cripple respectively. These characters offer a depth of personhood rarely examined in early modern literary scholarship, even in …

Integration Of Bayesian Networks And Neural Networks For High-Dimensional Data Analysis, Cooper Schmer

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

High-dimensional biomedical datasets, such as omics data, present significant challenges for predictive modeling due to noise, redundancy, and computational complexity. This thesis proposes a hybrid framework that integrates Bayesian Networks (BNs) and Artificial Neural Networks (NNs) to improve classification performance of such data sets while reducing input dimensionality. Central to this work is a novel feature selection method based on d-separation, a structural property of Bayesian networks that encodes conditional independence relationships.

The proposed approach introduces a count-based d-separation metric to quantify the relevance of variables to a target outcome, along with a thresholding scheme to balance feature selection robustness …

Parents Under Pressure: Social Media’S Impact On Parents’ Mental Well-Being, Ali E. Shull

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The rapid growth of social media has transformed how parents access information, evaluate their practices, and compare themselves to others. Although parenting content is widely consumed, limited research has examined its immediate psychological and physiological effects. The present mixed-methods study investigated how exposure to parenting-related social media content influences parental stress responses, affect, and parenting self-efficacy. Participants (N = 83) were randomly assigned to view either parenting-related videos (experimental condition) or non-parenting crafting videos (control condition). Physiological stress responses were assessed using heart rate variability (HRV) during baseline and video exposure. Participants also completed measures of negative affect and …

Patient Facing Physical Therapy Clinicians’ Experience Of Leader Development Across Their Professional Span: A Phenomenological Inquiry, Judith R. Gelber

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

While healthcare professions call for leadership among its practitioners as a key function of practice, hospital systems typically employ a top town leadership structure. In physical therapy, leadership is centered around managers and educators. This leaves a gap in understanding about leadership at the level of the patient facing clinician. This study explored the experience of leader development across the career span of experienced patient facing physical therapists in the United States. The study used a hermeneutic phenomenological approach undergirded with leader development, experiential learning, and distributed leadership theories. Participant recruitment focused on patient facing physical therapists with ten or …

Awareness, Protest, And Action: Women Science-Fiction Writers As Writer Activists, Carolyn Nolte

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Following the end of World War II, science-fiction literature, which was mostly dominated by white male writers, experienced an increase in stories written by women writers. Of these postwar stories written by women, the three women writers in this dissertation imagined how their present-day experiences informed the future by exploring their concerns about humanity’s collective trajectory. By analyzing how their stories dramatize possible future social, psychological, biological, and environmental harms, this dissertation argues that these women writers’ works distinguish them as writer-activists, a concept I borrow from Rob Nixon’s work Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

I …

Bright Star: A Scenic Design, Sariah M, Roberts

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

This thesis documents the process and paperwork of the scenic design and ends with a reflection on how the process affected the final product.

Director, Bobby Pieranunzi

Stage Manager, Savannah Stermer

Lighting Designer, Dean Bressler

Costume Designer, Jamie Bullins

Technical Directors, Bryce Allen, Hayden Honomichl, and Shelby Hindman

Thesis advisor: JD Madsen

The Impact Of State And Federal Policies On Academic Researchers: Findings From A National Survey, Dylan Ruediger, Chelsea Mccracken, Jonathan Barefield

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

Key findings

● State and federal policies targeting divisive concepts or DEI are shaping research agendas at scale and across disciplines. Twenty percent of all respondents, and 29 percent of researchers working in states with divisive concepts or similar laws, reported having avoided certain research topics because of state laws and policies.

● Eight percent of respondents representing a wide range of disciplines reported having had a federal grant cancelled in 2025.

● Eleven percent of respondents reported that federal and state policies restricting research activities are compelling them to seek employment out of state, to leave the academy, or …