Digital Commons Network^™

Developing Oer For Ai-Assisted Ecure Framework, Kuangchiu Joe Ho

OER at Tech Days

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of “Oldest House In The U.S.” Photo And A Poor Retouching Job, Samuel Sisneros

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

This working paper analyzes a historical photo housed at the UNM’s Center for Southwest Research and Special collections. It looks specifically at a discovery made by the author that the photo was at one time heavily retouched and how this retouching can correspond to current AI image manipulation.

(No part of this paper was written with AI assistance.)

From Disaster To Resilience: Developing Smart Settlements In The Himalayas, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepal’s catastrophic 26 August 2026 Bhote Koshi–Trishuli flood should be understood not only as a humanitarian tragedy but also as a potentially major turning point in updating national settlement and reconstruction policy. Engineers and scientists have described the floods as a glacier–bedrock collapse that triggered an ice-rock avalanche and debris flow. As per the live updates on September 7, 2026, the total death toll was 1,355, and 4,996 people were missing (The Hindu, 2026). Indian and Nepali rescuers worked urgently to locate and rescue people buried under hydropower tunnels, buildings, mud, and landslide debris.

UN News reported on September 3, …

From Himalayan Catastrophe To National Resilience: Lessons From The 2026 Bhote Koshi And Trishuli River Floods In Nepal, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

On the morning of 26 August 2026, the mountains above Nepal’s northern frontier delivered a disaster of almost unimaginable speed and scale. A massive mass of ice, rock, and sediment detached in the high Himalayan terrain near the Nepal–Tibet border, descended roughly 1,200 metres, interacted with the Lhende Khola system, and generated a debris-rich flood that surged through the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli river corridors, destroying settlements, markets, roads, bridges, hydropower facilities, and an international border crossing and transforming them into fields of mud, boulders, and wreckage within minutes (ICIMOD, 2026b; Reuters, 2026a). Satellite analysis indicates that a substantial section …

2026-03 March Newsletter, Sammi Williams

NMOER Newsletters

No abstract provided.

2026-04 April Newsletter, Sammi Williams

NMOER Newsletters

No abstract provided.

2026-05 May Newsletter, Sammi Williams

NMOER Newsletters

No abstract provided.

2026-07 July Newsletter, Sammi Williams

NMOER Newsletters

No abstract provided.

2026-08 August Newsletter, Sammi Williams

NMOER Newsletters

No abstract provided.

2026-09 September Newsletter, Sammi Williams

NMOER Newsletters

No abstract provided.

The Colorado River Water Supply Crisis In A Few Graphs: Part 2 Agricultural Water Use In The Lower Basin, Jack Schmidt, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, Katherine Tara

The Traveling Wilburys of the Colorado River

Reductions in Lower Basin water use during the last four years, including

forecast use in 2026, are similar to the initial targets for Lower Basin shortages

described in the Final Environmental Impact Statement for Post-2026

Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead (FEIS)

and the accompanying Record of Decision (ROD).

6 Lower Basin consumptive

use in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and forecast for 2026 has been the smallest for

the entire 2010-2026 period. These four years of smallest use are between 1.4

and 1.7 million acre feet/year (maf/yr) less than the 7.50 maf/yr amount

generally recognized as …

State Legislatures: Guardians Of The Federal Balance, Practical Strategies For Monitoring, Strengthening, And Sustaining American Federalism (Remarks), Christian G. Fritz

Faculty Scholarship

My remarks today are drawn from my book, Monitoring American Federalism: The History of State Legislative Resistance, and from an essay I wrote this year for the Center for the Study of Federalism about the responsibility of state legislators to sound the alarm when the federal government overreaches its constitutional authority.

Mountain Development In Nepal: Settlements, Infrastructure, And Economic Transformation, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

As Nepal urbanizes, expands infrastructure, strengthens local governments, and explores deeper connectivity with India and China, climate change is increasing floods, landslides, heat, and water insecurity. Rapid internal migration, rising disaster risks, youth outmigration, and dependence on remittances are also revealing the limits of conventional urban development, especially in the mountainous region. The central challenge for Nepal is no longer just to accommodate growing towns and cities, but to build settlements that are safe, productive, environmentally resilient, and capable of sustaining long-term prosperity.

This paper argues that Nepal's urban future must be guided by a new development paradigm centered on …

Increasing Postpartum Appointment Attendance Rates, Tanya Lister

Doctor of Nursing Practice Posters and Presentations

Background: Postpartum visits provide an opportunity to detect and address potential complications, monitor healing and recovery, and offer guidance and support during the transition into motherhood. Current research shows that appointment reminders increase healthcare appointment attendance rates, whether delivered via text messages or phone calls.

Purpose: The purpose of this academic project was to plan, implement, and evaluate a process change within a single health facility to increase postpartum visit attendance rates.

Methods: This evidence-based scholarly project used telephone calls to remind patients scheduled for postpartum visits of their appointment dates and times. Appointment reminder phone calls were completed the …

Increasing Postpartum Appointment Attendance Rates, Tanya Lister

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Background: Postpartum visits provide an opportunity to detect and address potential complications, monitor healing and recovery, and offer guidance and support during the transition into motherhood. Current research shows that appointment reminders increase healthcare appointment attendance rates, whether delivered via text messages or phone calls.

Purpose: The purpose of this academic project was to plan, implement, and evaluate a process change within a single health facility to increase postpartum visit attendance rates.

Methods: This evidence-based scholarly project used telephone calls to remind patients scheduled for postpartum visits of their appointment dates and times. Appointment reminder phone calls were completed the …

Environmental Exposure Risk Education To Enhance Chronic Kidney Disease Prevention And Screening For Nurse Practitioners, Kelsea J. Carrier

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects approximately 36 million adults in the United States, with nearly 90% of individuals unaware of their diagnosis until advanced stages. While diabetes and hypertension remain the primary causes, increasing evidence highlights environmental exposures as significant and underrecognized contributors to CKD onset and progression. Exposures such as heavy metals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), air and water pollution, microplastics, and heat exposure have been linked to impaired renal function. Despite this growing body of evidence, environmental health content remains limited in nursing education, resulting in gaps in environmental health literacy (EHL) among nurse practitioners (NPs) and …

Scale-Dependent Drivers Of Demographic Change For American Pikas (Ochotona Princeps) In Glacier National Park, Montana: Local Habitat Characteristics Vs. Regional Climate Trends, Danielle M. Owens

Biology ETDs

Climate change is shifting thermal environments globally, driving range contractions, upslope movement, and poleward shifts across taxa. However, these changes are not uniform: microclimates, shaped by topography, can amplify or decouple operative temperatures from regional trends. The American pika is an ideal model for studying climate-driven population change given its strong site fidelity and thermal sensitivities. We re-surveyed 173 sites in Glacier National Park, originally surveyed in 2007-2010, using an AIC-based model selection to test competing local and regional hypotheses driving three demographic processes: persistence, colonization, and within-patch density change. Pika occupancy increased over the 15-year period, with a net …

Using Temporal Genomic Data To Uncover Patterns Of Genetic Diversity And Signatures Of Selection For Management Of A Threatened Minnow Species, Erika A. Dunn

Biology ETDs

The Little Colorado River (LCR) spinedace persists only in three isolated watersheds within the LCR Basin in Arizona. This imperiled minnow faces ongoing pressure from habitat alteration, climatic shifts, and invasive non-native predators. Over the past two decades, managers have translocated spinedace within watersheds to increase abundance and expand habitat occupancy. We sequenced a reference genome and analyzed single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 475 individuals over their geographic range. DNA samples were obtained from a previous study in the mid-1990s and compared with samples from 2024 and 2025, allowing us to track genetic diversity, effective population size, population structure, and …

Womanhood On The Veranda: Maternalism And The Expansion Of American Women's Public Life, Abigail J. Swanson

History ETDs

Motherhood and child welfare became central organizing principles for reform during the United States Progressive Era.  From these guiding principles, the government formed the United States Children’s Bureau. It was the country's first governmental agency that focused solely on the welfare of children. Mothers writing to the federal government for motherhood advice was a phenomenon that was completely new to twentieth century mothers. Women took pride in their roles as mothers, particularly when it came to child health matters. To the generation of mothers who came before these early twentieth century letter writers, asking the government for advice on child …

Investigating Nanoparticle Capture By Condensed Phase Coacervates And Their Mixtures, Sanjna A. Bhakta

Chemical and Biological Engineering ETDs

The thermoresponsive polymers elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs) and poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) have served as a programmable bioseparation tool for applications in nanoparticle capture due to biocompatibility and tunable properties. This work investigates how the polymer composition of ELP and PNIPAM coacervates influences their phase behavior, structural morphology, and nanoparticle recruitment. In addition, the influence of interfacial interactions in nanoparticle recruitment using Tween 80 as a mechanistic probe was also investigated. Different mixtures of ELPs E1.40, E1.80, and E3 with PNIPAM14 and PNIPAM20 were used to characterize their phase behavior and analyze structural morphology using turbidity measurements and microscopy, respectively. Nanobead recruitment using …

Synergizing Crowd Collaboration: Enhancing Crowdsourcing Matching Via Integration Of Matching Theory And Coalition Games, Rowan Aengus Kinney

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

This paper tackles the challenges inherent in crowdsourcing dynamics by introducing the CROWDMATCH mechanism. Aimed at enabling crowdworkers to strategically select suitable crowdsourcers while contributing information to crowdsourcing tasks, CROWDMATCH considers incentives, information availability and cost, and the decisions of fellow crowdworkers to model the utility functions for both the crowdworkers and the crowdsourcers. Specifically, the paper presents an initial Approximate CROWDMATCH mechanism grounded in matching theory principles, eliminating externalities from crowdworkers’ decisions and enabling each entity to maximize its utility. Subsequently, the Accurate CROWDMATCH mechanism is introduced, being initiated by the outcome of the Approximate CROWDMATCH mechanism, and employing …

Wildfire Impacts On Fluvial Hydrology From Watershed To National Scales, Paige G. Tunby

Civil Engineering ETDs

Wildfires alter the water quantity and quality in downstream river networks. Fires promote biodiversity, maintain habitat, and provide many ecosystem services in a fire-adapted landscape. However, changes in the natural fire regimes can alter ecosystem function and threaten the water security of impacted downstream communities. The magnitude, timing, and persistence of these impacts are difficult to predict due to the lack of high-resolution datasets with adequate coverage to evaluate spatiotemporal trends after a fire. This dissertation moves us beyond the status quo to evaluate post-fire fluvial responses across scales, from the event-scale impacts after the Hermit’s Peak-Calf Canyon wildfire in …

Effect Of Geothermal Conditions On Silica Flour Modified Wellbore Cement, Travis Benjamin Broadhurst

Civil Engineering ETDs

Considerable work has been conducted on modified wellbore cements, but a knowledge gap exists in the effects of downhole conditions on cement, especially tensile strength. In this study, a pressure vessel simulates representative downhole conditions (200⁰C, 1.5 MPa) with a reference solution for geothermal brine and naturally occurring geothermal gases. Samples are removed after 28-days for unconfined compressive strength testing, Brazilian tensile strength testing, elastic moduli measurement, and chemical analyses by X-ray diffraction and electron microprobe. Aqueous chemical analysis suggests multiple active reactions between the geothermal fluid and cement that are exacerbated by higher temperatures, but do not …

Examining Conditional Indirect Media Effects Through Normative Perceptions: The Role Of Traditional Family Gender Role Expectations And Stigmatizing Beliefs In Human Papillomavirus Vaccination, Moonsun Choi

Communication ETDs

This dissertation examines how indirect media effects operate through normative perceptions within a gendered and stigmatized health context of HPV vaccination. Specifically, this study investigates how these normative mediation processes are conditioned by traditional family gender role expectations at the norm formation stage and stigmatizing beliefs about HPV vaccination at the normative influence stage. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with mothers of children aged 9 – 12 in the United States in June 2025. The key findings show that while gendered perceptions of HPV vaccination persist, the underlying normative mechanism operated in similar ways across gender-referent contexts. Injunctive norms were …

Mapping And Modeling Threat-Evoked Brain States After Early Life Adversity, Taylor W. Uselman

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Early life adversity (ELA) increases lifelong neuropsychiatric vulnerability. Yet how ELA reorganizes brain-wide activity and circuit coordination across later experience remains unclear. This dissertation tests the hypothesis that ELA alters adult brain-wide activity and responses to threat through disrupted coordination among neural systems that regulate emotional experience, including prefrontal-limbic and monoaminergic systems. Longitudinal manganese-enhanced MRI of adult mice exposed to standard or fragmented early care, combined with computational processing and statistical modeling, quantified brain states before, during, and long after innate predator threat. These studies established that acute threat evokes large-scale, distributed brain activity that evolves over time. ELA potentiates …

Prenatal Alcohol Exposure Induces Vulnerability To Mild Stress Through Heightened Limbic Glial Activation And Cytokine Release, Justine R. Zimmerly

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) results from prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) and is linked to development of mood disorders, which in turn are driven by dysregulation of the sympathetic nervous system, the neuroendocrine hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and the central nervous system (CNS) neuroimmune response to stressors. PAE alters brain glial activation and proinflammatory cytokine expression through secondary challenges such as psychological stressors. The goals of the experiments presented in this dissertation were to 1) examine peripheral glucocorticoid receptor function following mild acute stress in adult PAE offspring, 2) characterize a sensitized cytokine stress response in the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, …

Co-Constructing The Common Ground: Responses In American Sign Language Conversation, Deborah Wager

Linguistics ETDs

Common ground between two people consists of the things they both know, that they know they both know. This body of knowledge grows in conversation, through both verbal and nonverbal responses. Responses communicate whether what has been said was accepted into the common ground, and return responses acknowledge this acceptance in turn (H. H. Clark, 1996). In addition to the semantic content of utterances, stance is communicated through a variety of means, and alignment with that stance is also communicated through responses.

This study explores ways in which responses are used in American Sign Language (ASL) conversation to co-construct the …

Documenting Regional And Individual Variation In Taiwan Sign Language, Devin Alexander Tankersley

Linguistics ETDs

Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) has been characterized by a north-south dialectal divide since the beginning of its development in the early twentieth century, further complicated by contact with Chinese Sign Language and with Mandarin. Considering increased interconnectivity across Taiwan, this dissertation asks: does the traditional north-south dialectal distinction still hold? To address this question, fieldwork was conducted across six areas of Taiwan to develop a data set consisting of word elicitations and sociolinguistic interviews. Findings from quantitative and qualitative analyses of these data suggest that TSL is not undergoing straightforward dialect leveling, but rather convergence towards a mixed variety shaped …

Surveyception: An Exploration Of Deceptive Survey Forms, Muhammad Danish

Computer Science ETDs

Survey platforms such as Google Forms and Microsoft Forms are widely used for feedback, data collection, and engagement, but scammers increasingly exploit them to distribute phishing and deceptive attacks. This thesis presents a large-scale study of survey-form abuse across ten major providers. We collected 140,000 forms from three sources: public posts on X, search-engine results, and web pages from the top 10 million DomCop-ranked domains. Using automated filtering and manual qualitative review, we identified 2,645 forms requesting sensitive information and classified 566 as scams. These forms used techniques including phishing, private-secret theft, account and personal-data harvesting, financial deception, and psychological …

You Can't Teach Kids From A Book: Language, Authority And Revitalization In Jicarilla Apache Life, Mariann Skahan

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation examines how Jicarilla Apache is learned, taught, and used across community life, with particular attention to contemporary language revitalization. Based on ethnographic research with elders, educators, language workers, families, and community institutions, it follows language practices across classrooms, culture camps, homes, ceremonial settings, and collaborative archival projects. I show that linguistic knowledge does not carry the same authority or consequences in every setting. Words may be recognized without being taken up, speakers may possess linguistic knowledge without being authorized to teach or correct, and archival texts may preserve linguistic forms without preserving the relations needed to interpret and …