Digital Commons Network^™

You Hit Your Head, What Comes Next? How Can Speech-Language Pathologists Assist In Traumatic Brain Injury Recovery?, Elayna R. Wollam

Honors Theses

Traumatic Brain Injuries are complex injuries caused by an impact or penetrating wound to the head that disrupts the typical functioning of the brain. TBIs are highly prevalent and complex injuries. They can present in different severities, have numerous causes, and result in a variety of different types of symptoms and impairments. These impairments can include articulation disorders, language disorders, fluency disorders, swallowing disorders, social communication disorders, cognitive communication disorders, and more. Every injury will be different, and every individual will experience different symptoms and have different priorities for their recovery. This means treatment should also be nuanced to reflect …

Legalizing Sex Work: Transforming Hidden Jobs Into Professions, Sakura L. Wilder-Hamilton

Honors Theses

Prostitution, also known as the “world’s oldest profession,” has long been tried and remembered as a tolerated vice. However, sex work is still a stigmatized and criminalized profession around the globe that has yet to become a real profession. Because of this stigma and criminal label, sex workers have become a hidden population within society. Meaning, although there is a lot of stigma attached to sex work and sex workers, there is relatively little known about the realities of sex work, as sex workers are often excluded from scholarly research and discussions regarding their work. This research, through a thematic-chronological …

Me Or We In Criminal Behavior: A Cross-National Examination On The Impact Of Narcissism On Criminal Behavior, Adrian J. Zaragoza

Honors Theses

Crime is a worldwide issue that exists within any society. Many studies have not examined narcissism and its relation to crime in a cross-cultural perspective. The current study aimed to examine how culture can impact narcissism and criminal behavior. Hypothesis 1: Individual narcissism will be positively associated with criminal and antisocial responses to provocation scenarios in the United States. Hypothesis 2: Collective narcissism will be positively associated with criminal and antisocial responses to provocation scenarios in Kenya. Hypothesis 3: The association between individual narcissism and criminal/antisocial behavior will be stronger in the United States than in Kenya, …

Gender Differences In Autism Diagnosis: The Need For Female-Specific Diagnostic Criteria, Leslieann R. Mahl

Honors Theses

Autism has a vastly growing diagnosis rate as more people are understanding the signs of this disorder. This thesis investigates how gender differences affect the presentation of autism in people. Also acknowledging the impact of how these different presentations can lead to misdiagnosis or late diagnosis in females specifically. Using a narrative analysis method, 23 articles were analyzed talking about how autism presents differently in different genders. Results show that females are better able to unconsciously or consciously match their behavior to those around them, allowing for them to not be recognized for their possible autism symptoms. This study describes …

All Harm, All Fouls: Human Trafficking At Large Sporting Events, Addison Caravona

Honors Theses

Human trafficking affects thousands of people worldwide every year. During large sporting events, this can become an issue as the line between consenting sex work and trafficking becomes blurred. The difficulty of quantifying human trafficking combined with the legality of sex work creates a predicament where measuring human trafficking statistics over a smaller period of time becomes incredibly difficult. Sporting events bring in millions of patrons every year, which produces unique challenges for law enforcement and advocacy groups to manage and prevent trafficking. This research investigates human trafficking surrounding large sporting events and the processes and legislation in place to …

"See Something, Say Something": The Effect Of Bystanders And Public Posting On Campus Crime Reporting, Makiah Hollinden

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to see if bystanders reacting (versus not reacting) and the presence (versus no presence) of a public crime post, on a college campus, affected student participants' intent to report a crime. We hypothesized that if bystanders responded to the crime, and if there is a public post about crime reporting, then participants would be more likely to intend to report the crime. Research participants (n = 68) were given an online survey assessing the intent to report the crime and other social norms in one of four vignette conditions: bystanders react/public post, bystanders do …

Kawasaki Strategic Analysis, Felicity Thompson

Honors Theses

Kawasaki Heavy Industries is a global manufacturing and engineering company that operates across  multiple industrial sectors, including aerospace, energy systems, railways, robotics, marine  engineering, and powersports. Kawasaki is structured around engineering capabilities and  large-scale industrial production, allowing it to develop innovative technologies and integrated  systems used in domestic and international markets. In FY2025, Kawasaki generated over 2,340  billion yen in annual revenue, showing its scale as a diversified industrial conglomerate. 

Kawasaki Heavy Industries operates in multiple business units that focus on different industries,  but are connected through shared engineering knowledge, research and development, and production  systems. This structure allows Kawasaki …

Rural Health In Pike County: A Richard & Magnolia Community Health Needs Assessment, Victoria Bracey

Honors Theses

Rural communities across the United States suffer from poor health outcomes due to lack of resources and other compounding factors that make access to quality healthcare difficult. Mississippi is a predominantly rural state, and in the southwestern region of Mississippi lies the community of Magnolia and the community of Richard within Pike County. To better understand the health needs of Pike County, a community health needs assessment was conducted. This study aimed to assess the needs of Pike County in southwest Mississippi through the use of a community health needs assessment using focus groups. Two focus groups, with a total …

Analyzing Antibody Immune Response In Α1,3galt-Ko Mice After Intranasal Vaccination Of Α-Gal Virus-Like Particle, Faith Brown

Honors Theses

In this study, we evaluated the immunogenicity of intranasal immunization with α-Gal-conjugated virus-like particles (VLPs) in an α1,3-galactosyltransferase-knockout (α1,3GalT-KO) mouse model that mimics the human immune response to the α-Gal epitope. The carbohydrate epitope galactose-α-1,3-galactose (α-Gal) is expressed on the cell surface of several pathogens, including Leishmania species. This molecule is absent in humans and has emerged as a promising immunogenic vaccine target. α1,3GalT-KO mice were intranasally immunized with 10 μg either Qβ-α-Gal or Qβ per nostril and boosted twice prior to sample collection. Blood and lung lavage samples were used to evaluate the antibody response. The Qβ-α-Gal group developed …

Effects Of “Zero Sugar” Energy Drinks On Microbial Proliferation In Relation To The Gastrointestinal Microbiome, Madison Hines

Honors Theses

Energy drinks have rapidly increased in popularity and availability in recent years. With the rise of high-caffeine beverages, complications due to caffeine consumption have become more common in younger populations. The aim of this study was to use controlled laboratory methods to determine the effect of energy drinks on a variety of organisms commonly found in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The diverse and dynamic nature of microbes in the gut makes conditions of the GI tract difficult to replicate in a laboratory setting. As an alternative, isolates of bacteria commonly found as normal flora in the GI tract were plated …

Does Sponsorship Context Matter? Comparing Local And National Sponsorship Effects On Consumer Behavior, Kathryn Flock

Honors Theses

Sponsorship use has become increasingly important as a marketing strategy for influencing consumer perceptions of the sponsoring company. This, in turn, establishes consumer relationships that result in favorable behavioral intentions. While prior research has examined national and global sponsorships, there is limited research on the differences between national and local sponsorships and how these differences could influence consumer perceptions and behavioral intentions. The purpose of this study was to examine how local or national sponsorship affects consumer perceptions, including sincerity, trust, attitude toward the sponsor, and behavioral intentions.

A mixed-methods approach was employed for this study. Study 1 used qualitative …

Tuning And Performance Of Pid Controlled Low Complexity Systems, Timothy Evans

Honors Theses

Proportional integral derivative (PID) controllers are used for precise position and orientation control in systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). This project supports the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) Robotics Club’s RoboSub AUV effort by developing, troubleshooting, and manually tuning PID controllers to characterize tracking performance and settling time across systems of increasing complexity. Initially, the project hypothesized that tracking performance would be reduced and settling times would increase as system complexity advanced from one degree-of-freedom (DOF) to two DOF. However, prior research was found that suggests that for small disturbances around an equilibrium state, separate PID-controlled DOFs can …

The Effect Of Vibrotactile Sensory Input Devices On Improving Subjective Speech Perception For Those With Normal Hearing, Elizabeth Kalinowsky

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to evaluate how vibrotactile sensory augmentation can improve speech understanding in adverse listening conditions for those with normal hearing by providing auditory speech cues. It aimed to investigate whether there is any value of AVT devices for those with normal hearing in adverse hearing situations, where understanding speech is difficult due to background noise, reverberation, or other factors. This research project is a preliminary case study involving one participant. Tympanometry and distortion product otoacoustic emission (DPOAE) tests were conducted to verify that the participant did not appear to have hearing loss due to middle …

The Impact Of Pp1Β Cancer-Associated Polymorphisms On Pp1Β Protein Abundance And Cell Survival In Humanized Saccharomyces Cerevisiae, Kaylee Martinez

Honors Theses

PP1β is an understudied protein phosphatase that affects the cell’s ability to reproduce. It has been known to be an important part of the cell cycle. Mutations within PP1β have been found to affect that process and influence the development of cancer and disease. In this thesis, different PP1β cancer and disease associated polymorphisms are investigated through the use of humanized yeast. PP1β yeast variants are tested by using Live/Dead cell assay and western blot techniques. Live/Dead analysis was conducted on different strains grown at permissible temperature (room temperature) and non-permissible temperature (37°C) over the course of 6 or 48 …

Investigating The Effects Of Depth And Distance On Jumping Decisions, Ean Fisher

Honors Theses

For an actor to accurately perceive if a gap affords crossing, they must consider environmental constraints, particularly spatial dimensions like gap depth and gap width, and their own physical capabilities, as determined by body/action-scaled information, namely body height and jumping ability. Prior research has examined the gap-crossing affordance across various contexts (real-world, augmented reality, and virtual reality). However, no research has investigated the gap-crossing affordance through performing a standing jump estimation within VR. The present study investigated how depth and width influence the perception of gap-crossing, operationalized as the act of performing a standing jump across a gap within a …

Exploring Student Academic And Grief Functioning After Loss: Perceptions And Influence Of Faculty Responses To Student Bereavement, Vivian Hale

Honors Theses

Bereavement is a common yet underrecognized experience among college students, with many experiencing the death of a loved one during their academic careers. The university environment can present unique challenges that may impede the grieving process. Thus, faculty members may play an important role in shaping students’ academic and emotional outcomes following a loss. Understanding how students are affected by their faculty’s response to loss is critical for identifying strategies to support bereaved students within the academic environment. This study builds on previous research demonstrating that bereaved college students experience academic and emotional challenges while specifically examining the role of …

Competitive Reaction Pathways In The Fully Green Synthesis And Surface Modification Of Silver Nanowires Under L-Ascorbic Acid-Limited Conditions, Finley Neal

Honors Theses

Silver nanowires (AgNWs) are critical building blocks for transparent conductive films (TCFs) in flexible electronics, yet their commercial viability is hindered by environmentally hazardous, energy-intensive synthesis methods and limited intrinsic chemical stability. This study investigated a fully green, room-temperature (25℃) batch synthesis of pristine AgNWs using tannic acid as a biodegradable dual reducing and capping agent under strict kinetic pH control (pH 1.25). To enhance oxidative resistance, a subsequent surface modification protocol was evaluated to deposit a protective palladium (Pd) shell using L-ascorbic acid (LAA) as a secondary reducing agent. The pristine green synthesis yielded one-dimensional Ag nanostructures with a …

Knowledge Distillation From A Large Vision-Language Model To Compact Students For Architectural Floor Plan Understanding, Kiran Silwal

Honors Theses

In this research, the use of a large vision-language model to train smaller, deployable models for architectural floor plan question answering is investigated. Reading a floor plan today requires either a human expert or a paid query to a proprietary model, and neither option is practical for real-estate platforms that must process thousands of units at scale. To address this problem, a knowledge distillation approach is employed in which a large teacher model (GPT-4.1-mini) generates labeled question-answer pairs from floor plan images, and smaller student models learn from those labels. The teacher produced 37,027 labeled pairs from 12,343 floor plan …

Algorithm Performance In The Search For Hamiltonian Cycles, Chance Davis

Honors Theses

The Hamiltonian cycle problem is ubiquitous in both computer science and graph theory: Given a connected graph, a solution would either confirm the existence of a cycle which visits each vertex only once or its nonexistence. The importance of this problem, as well as its difficulty, is described in the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millenium Prize Problems and Karp’s 21 NP-complete problems. Despite its “hardness,” solutions to the Hamiltonian cycle problem are desired in logistics, electronic circuit design, and network routing, among other fields. In this work, we benchmark a promising exhaustive enumeration algorithm on various graphs, including ones derived from …

Ai-Assisted 3d Pre-Visualization: Streamlining Animatics For Filmmakers, Nishit Thapa

Honors Theses

Pre-visualization is a core part of film pre-production. Creators use it to test blocking, lighting, camera movement, and spatial relationships before committing to a shot. Despite this, three-dimensional pre-visualization remains out of reach for many entry-level filmmakers, as the software is expensive and takes substantial time to learn.

Recent AI developments have produced generative systems capable of creating highly re-alistic imagery and video from text prompts. These systems open new possibilities for visual sto-rytelling but are not built for the iterative, hands-on process that pre-visualization requires, where creators must adjust scene parameters, camera logic, and spatial configurations throughout.

This thesis …

Synthesis Of Piperidine Heterocycles With Specific Functional Groups Via Sn2 Reactions, Teyanna Monroe

Honors Theses

Piperidine is a heavily utilized nitrogen containing heterocycle found in numerous pharmaceutical agents, solidifying its importance as a building block in drug development. The focus of this research is to investigate different mechanisms of action for adding and replacing various functional groups utilizing readily available lab materials. These findings would lead to determining the overall influence of substitution patterns and functional groups have on stereochemistry, reactivity, and overall conformation of the piperidine ring. The synthetic approach involves the formation of 3-bromo-5-methoxy-tosylpiperidine intermediate through acid promoted cyclization, followed by nucleophilic substitution reactions to introduce various functional groups. Reaction progress and product …

Digital Preservation Policies In University Libraries: A Content Analysis, Ramsey Mcmanus

Honors Theses

In an increasingly digital world, libraries continue to expand their digital collections. As these collections grow, librarians must work to ensure that these digital materials remain accessible over time. Having clearly articulated digital preservation policies helps libraries define their preservation commitments and establish guidelines for preservation actions. This study examines how university libraries approach digital preservation through their policies, focusing on those that are publicly available and accessible online. The content of these policies is evaluated against commonly recognized elements of digital preservation planning, including preservation scope, metadata practices, integrity checking, storage redundancy, and format migration. These criteria are derived …

Rethinking News Classification Through A Multi-Dimensional Framework, Luana De Jesus Ferreira

Honors Theses

This thesis proposes a multi-dimensional framework for news classification that evaluates articles across three independent dimensions: headline accuracy, language neutrality, and content reliability. These dimensions produce both a continuous reliability score and a five-tier interpretive scale, while additionally classifying articles by genre and topic. To operationalize this framework, a structured annotation protocol was developed and applied to a dataset of 373 news articles drawn from 79 outlets spanning a wide range of contemporary media ecosystem. A binary Logistic Regression classifier trained on the ISOT Fake News Dataset was then evaluated against this dataset to examine how a model trained on …

Southern Miss: The Legacy Of Resilience, Ashley Lewis

Honors Theses

Southern Miss: The Legacy of Resilience is a creative work composed of two components: a short expository styled documentary and a written component primarily focused on the methods and techniques used to film the documentary. On February 10th, 2013, an EF-4 tornado significantly impacted the University of Southern Mississippi’s campus in Hattiesburg. The campus obtained significant damages to eight buildings located near Hardy Street on the southeastern portion of campus. The impact of the tornado left the university with over $20 million worth of damages. At the time, the university was temporarily closed for Mardi Gras break. However, a recovery …

Deep Learning-Based Automated Pneumonia Detection From Chest X-Rays: A Comparative Study Of Custom Cnn And Transfer Learning Architectures, Ahmed Sajim

Honors Theses

Pneumonia is a leading global cause of mortality, claiming approximately 2.5 million lives an-nually and placing exceptional diagnostic pressure on radiologists in resource-limited settings. Manual interpretation of chest X-ray (CXR) images is time-consuming, subject to inter-observer variability, and limited by radiologist availability. This thesis presents a systematic investiga-tion into deep learning-based automated pneumonia detection comparing five convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: a custom-designed 2D CNN and four pretrained transfer learning models—ResNet, DenseNet, MobileNet, and VGG19.

A targeted data augmentation pipeline addresses the severe class imbalance in the Kag-gle Chest X-Ray Pneumonia dataset, expanding the Normal class from 1,583 to 9,495 …

Cultivating Success: The Role Of Self-Determination In Autonomy For Post-Secondary Students With Disabilities, Cloè Knight

Honors Theses

Self-determination is a crucial theoretical framework influencing the post-secondary success and the quality of life for students with disabilities (SWD). A case study mixed-method design was used to investigate the lived experiences of students with disabilities and how their self-determination skills shaped by parent styles and teacher practices, impacted their success in the post-secondary world. Despite the well-researched benefits of self-determination in the lives of students with disabilities, a systematic literature review revealed important gaps in research related to the roles parents and teachers play in facilitating self-determination skills impacting post-secondary success in students with disabilities. The current study sought …

Assessing Tracking Error Of The Municipal Bond Etfs, Maksym Chikin

Honors Theses

Municipal bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provide diversified exposure to state and local government bonds through a single tradable security. They also provide interest that is usually exempt from federal income tax. This thesis examines 31 investment-grade and 3 high-yield municipal bond ETFs from April 2015 to February 2025 and compares them with three passively managed broad-market bond ETFs: BND (investment-grade bonds), SCHR (Treasury bonds), and JNK (high-yield corporate bonds). Using tracking error, volatility, and returns across the pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID periods, the results show that municipal bond ETFs—especially high-yield funds—have higher tracking errors, greater volatility, and more variable returns …

Ethical Attitudes Of Emerging Entrepreneurs: Unethical Business Practices And Informal Entrepreneurship, Reuben Mcdonald

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to analyze the connection between how entrepreneurs’ ethical attitudes impact their intentions in pursuing informal entrepreneurship practices. The research question of this thesis is, “To what extent do the ethical attitudes of pre-venture entrepreneurs affect their willingness to engage in informal business practices?” To answer this question, the researcher utilized both previously validated and developed scales to measure how ethical attitudes impact the informal entrepreneurship intentions of college students. Within this thesis, the researcher discusses the creation of the measurement instrument, the results of the data measured by the instrument, and the impact of ethical attitudes on …

Public Opinion Of And Faith In The U.S. Supreme Court, Allee Gay

Honors Theses

The US Supreme Court has been historically trusted as an impartial arbiter of the Constitution. However, in 2022 the level of public trust in the Supreme Court dropped to a historic low, and faith in the institution has not recovered in the following years. Previous research demonstrated that Supreme Court decisions can influence public opinion and suggested that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic can be blamed for this decline. Further research proved that the President’s role in appointing justices can have an effect on the perception of the Court. This study examines both the reactions to controversial cases …

Icarus’S Fall: Villainization In Wicked, Star Wars, And The Untamed, Laura Renfroe

Honors Theses

When looking back on the most beloved, yet infamous, villains of popular culture, one can note an abundant rise of prequels and backstory-driven media exploring the paths that villain characters take that lead them to their tragic fall. Some of those stories include John M. Chu’s Wicked, George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and Chen Jialin and Zheng Weiwin’s The Untamed, each of which explores protagonists who are labeled as “wicked” and depicted as fallen to the “dark side.” While these characters are often studied in existing literary research, there have yet to be explicit ties …