Digital Commons Network^™

Oil Exploration In Guyana And Its Impact: A Closer Look At The Labor Sector & The Environmental Policies, Camilla Leonard

Ohio Northern University International Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Co-Created Learning In Auditing Education: Transforming Case Studies Into Collaborative Learning Experiences, Jun Wang

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education

No abstract provided.

Co-Creating Authentic Assessments For Undergraduate And Postgraduate Event Management Students: Developing Sustainable Communities And Enhancing Social Awareness, Karen Radcliffe, Janine Priest

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education

No abstract provided.

Shackles Or Safeguards?: Tailoring Ndas And Noncompetes To Protect Interests Without Imposing Uniform Restraints, Nadia Brenden

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

To better understand the implications of the FTC’s sweeping proposal and the need for a state-by-state approach, the following sections dive into the legal, historical, and comparative foundations of restrictive covenants, trace their evolution across jurisdictions, and explain why states—not federal agencies—are best positioned to strike the right balance. Part II provides an overview of legal doctrines governing the transmission of proprietary information, a history of the early applications of employment contracts, and a comparative analysis of international noncompete standards. Part III describes how different jurisdictions apply trade secret, contract, and employment law to protect business interests through enforceable agreements. …

Cybersquatting: Does Re-Registering Trademarks Fall Under The Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act?, Taylor Heath

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

This paper will explain the arguments whether the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA) prevents cybersquatting from re-registering a domain name, or if the ACPA only prevents cybersquatters from being the first to register a domain name, and concludes that due to the clear intent of the Act and the definition of register, the Act should be interpreted to cover all registrations. Part II provides relevant background including the pre-ACPA laws. Part III provides a detailed explanation of the ACPA, including Congress’s intent, the Court’s breakdown, and the existing law. Part IV provides the relevant case history prior to the circuit …

A Review Of Trends And Contributing Factors In Tick-Borne Disease Surveillance In Maine, 2001–2024, Sara Robinson, Haris Sohail, Megan Porter

Journal of Maine Medical Center

Importance: Tick-borne diseases have a major health impact in Maine. There are 5 endemic diseases: anaplasmosis, babesiosis, hard tick relapsing fever, Lyme disease, and Powassan virus disease. Cases of these 5 diseases have increased dramatically over the past 15 years.

Objective: The objective of this review is to summarize tick-borne disease data in Maine. This summary includes showing trends and identifying factors that may be contributing to the trends.

Review: There is a long history of publications about tick-borne diseases in Maine, with articles first appearing in the 1980s. We analyzed tick-borne disease surveillance data collected by Maine Center for …

Tick-Borne Diseases: New Territory, New Agents, Robert Smith, Sam R. Telford Iii

Journal of Maine Medical Center

Importance: The incidence of tick-borne diseases is on the rise across North America as the ranges of tick vectors, such as the blacklegged or deer tick and the lone star tick, expand. In addition, 8 new agents of human tick-borne disease have been discovered in North America in the past few decades.

Objective: Our objective is to provide a current overview of tick-borne diseases, including recently described pathogens, in North America for public health professionals, researchers, and clinicians. Our focus is on the importance of regional epidemiology and the clinical spectrum of tick-borne diseases to increase their recognition.

Review: …

Factors Impacting The Variability Of Post-Fire Forest Regeneration In Central European Pine Plantations, Florent Jouy, Maren Schüle, Yojana Adhikari, Anja Binder, Danica Clerc, Werner Gerwin, Thilo Heinken, Thomas Raab, Frank Repmann, Susanne Rönnefarth, Marina Schirrmacher, Marie-Therese Schmehl, Jens Schröder, Pierre L. Ibisch

Aspen Bibliography

Fire is increasingly posing a risk to forests and plantations, even in the temperate latitudes of central Europe. Little is known about fire ecology in this region, and therefore, appropriate approaches for the management and reforestation of burned sites are mostly lacking. In a Scots pine plantation region in Brandenburg (northeast Germany), the early tree regeneration of two nearby areas that burned 1 year apart was investigated. We observed that 3 years after the fire events, the forest in one study area showed a relatively high regeneration with a mean density of 7765 saplings/ha, clearly dominated by European aspen (93%); …

System And Method For Controlling Electromagnetic Radiation In A Geographical Area, Kwang-Cheng Chen, Mehmet Mert Sahin, Huseyin Arslan, Gokhan Mumcu

USF Patents

System and method for controlling electromagnetic spatial radiation over a region by coordination the utilization of multiple ambient backscatter (ABC) nodes and repositionable dynamic reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). Multiple coordinated ABCs are used to protect the region of primary use against the radiation due to the secondary users. Repositionable dynamic RISs provide more robustness to shadowing and power fluctuations in short time frame.

Prohibitive Factors Of Successful Completion In Rural Drug Courts: A Quantitative Study, Travis Zimmerman

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Drug courts have been heralded as largely successful alternative sentencing programs for criminal drug offenders. While these programs demonstrate their ability to be effective with clients, little insight has been gained into the factors that impact client success and failure. The study utilized data from the Multi-site Adult Drug Court Evaluation (MADCE) to investigate the factors that lead to program failure for participants in drug court. Borrowing from the tenants of generalized strain theorists, the study batched together raw data into four “strain factors,” which were then analyzed to discern any corollary effect between the presence of these strains and …

The Election Of Pope Leo Xiv: A Reformed Perspective, Kyle J. Dieleman

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Reformed Christians should wisely, carefully, and prayerfully discern the Spirit’s work within our own tradition and within other Christian traditions, including the Catholic Church."

Posting about the implications of a new pope from In All Things, an online hub that offers insight into maintaining and faithful and orthodox Reformed Christian worldview while fearlessly engaging in every aspect of contemporary life – until all is made new.

The Election of Pope Leo XIV

Fulfilling Purpose, Calling, And Commissioning Through Boundary Spanning, Stephanie Sheehan Phd

The Journal of Biblical Foundations of Faith and Learning

Increased efforts to normalize calling within diverse professions have been successful at generating more mainstream acceptance of its premises and purpose, especially in the context of career. Though recognition that calling extends to vocations other than ministers and missionaries bring wider acceptance of the construct, it is often misconstrued as one’s best temporal job fit, rather than a divine purpose through which God intends to accomplish His purposes. From the very acts of creation, God demonstrates that it is only through Him that divine purposes are accomplished. Only God spans the boundary between emptiness and fulness, sinfulness and holiness, humanity …

Illinois State University Salaries Fy2025 Update, Illinois State University

Illinois State University Salaries

Includes two sections: administrative professional and civil service salaries, and non-tenure track, tenure track, and faculty associate salaries.

Creating Space For Climate Justice In Library And Information Science, Tami Oliphant, Tyler Youngman, Dan Hackborn, Lisa Nathan, Beth Patin

The Lender Center for Social Justice

This article explores the role of LIS in promoting climate justice, advocating for inclusive and sustainable information practices that address environmental inequities.

Understanding The Delivery Of Music Learning In Nsw Public Schools: Primary Teachers' Survey - New South Wales, Rebecca Taylor, Daniel Edwards

School and system improvement

The Music Education: Right from the Start Primary Teachers’ Survey New South Wales was conducted to understand the delivery of music education in NSW Department of Education (the department) public primary schools and to provide baseline data for policy and program development. This broad-ranging survey of teachers and representatives from 706 New South Wales public primary schools. The results highlight the status of music education in NSW public primary schools, demonstrating teachers' need for better resources, improved preparation in Initial Teacher Education (ITE), increased access to quality professional learning, and integration of music into the broader curriculum.

Crystal Clear Disparities: The Failure Of Sentencing Guidelines And How They Repeatedly Contribute To Systematic Racism In The United States, Makayla Perez

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Family Cohesion On The Relationship Between Trauma And State-Level Social Policy Provision In The United States, Brandon Kendall Ross Fielding

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation examines how childhood trauma and family cohesion interact to shape state-level social policy generosity in the United States. The study begins with a multilevel quantitative analysis using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health and the State Safety-Net Generosity Index to assess how individual-level experiences of trauma and family support relate to state-level welfare generosity. Two trauma indices--one focused on adverse childhood experiences and bullying, and the other on food-related hardship--are used to explore how trauma influences attitudes toward public assistance, and whether family cohesion moderates this relationship. Results from marginal effects analyses indicate that family cohesion, …

Introduction: Mother Tongue As Global Politics, Jessica Chandras, Joshua Babcock

UNF Faculty Research and Scholarship

For racialized speakers living in the wake of colonial modernity, “mother tongues” persist as perilous, precarious terrain. Far from being a straightforward linguistic resource or a totalizing, self-evident identity marker, “mother tongue” is always positioned, partial, and political. As a category, “mother tongue” encompasses projects across disparate sites, histories, and interactional grounds beyond South Asia, where the concept has been most extensively elaborated. Articles in this collection trace the links among collective national identities, individuated personhood, and the denotational codes that get made to refract language-community attentions—not just a group's language, but more essentially, their “mother tongue.” What transformations, investments, …

Evaluation Of Challenges In The Open Data Services Industry Under Uncertainty: A Methodology Based On Artificial Intelligence And Digital Transformation, Eman Sayed, Gawaher Soliman Hussein

Sustainable Machine Intelligence Journal

This paper proposes a novel multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework based on Triangular Linguistic Neutrosophic Cubic Fuzzy Sets (TLNCFSs) integrated with the COBRA method to evaluate strategic alternatives addressing key challenges in the Open Data Services (ODS) industry. In the era of digital transformation and artificial intelligence (AI), open data initiatives face multifaceted obstacles, including regulatory compliance, data interoperability, public engagement, and sustainable governance. To assess effective strategies, this study considers five potential alternatives aligned with AI and digital transformation, evaluated against fourteen critical criteria spanning policy, technical, governance, strategic, economic, and human-centric dimensions. Expert assessments are collected using TLNCFSs to …

Labor Monopsony And Antitrust Enforcement: A Distorting Mirror, Geoffrey A. Manne, Brian C. Albrecht, Dirk Auer

DePaul Law Review

No abstract provided.

Political Polarization And Voter Turnout: A New Political Paradigm?, Kyle Thaller

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Political polarization has characterized most recent U.S. elections through further widening the gap between the two parties to the point that many people fear a second U.S. Civil war is approaching. This begs the larger question of how polarization impacts the electorate? Does it turn voters off or push them to vote? Does it have a negative impact on American elections, or is it merely a next step in the grand experiment we define as American democracy? This paper uses Logistic regression (via SPSS Statistics) with data from American National Election Studies (ANES) to address these questions by analyzing the …

Pollinator Plant Communities Within Restored Montane Longleaf Pine Ecosystems, Hanen Van Rossem

Master's Theses

Historically the fire-dependent and biodiverse longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) ecosystem was the dominant ecosystem of the Southeastern US. This ecosystem’s range was massively reduced due to land conversion and fire exclusion, causing the decline of many native species. Efforts to restore and protect longleaf pine stands are now ongoing with the goal of expanding habitat and refuge for threatened species. Differences in restoration practices and prior land use may influence the extent to which restored habitat patches can support pollinators and their plants. This study compared pollinator plant biodiversity between restored neighboring montane longleaf pine stands that differed in …

Exploring The Experience Of Embodiment Of Diverse Leaders, Susan Lynn Flaming Yeats

Dissertations

The experience of embodiment is a complex phenomenon that spans a range of feelings: a sense of connection to one's physical body, a sense of capability to accomplish certain physical acts, an attunement to self-care behaviors, a connection to desire, and inhabiting the body as a subjective site (Piran, 2016). This can be a complicated experience for leaders who hold multiple intersecting identities (Hill et al., 2016). As new medical therapies promise radical weight loss possibilities, the experience of embodiment has taken on a new layer of complexity (Giorgis, 2024). For fat leaders who are also women of color, sexual …

Reimagining Pedagogies Of The Prison Yard: Using Ethnotheatre To Embody Transcarceral Conocimiento, Mabelle Reynoso

Dissertations

Latinxs make up 40% of California's population but account for 45% of the prison population and 47% of the jail population (Sawyer, 2023). Their overrepresentation in carceral custody not only impacts the individual but also affects families and communities by limiting access to social, political, and educational capital and agency. In response to gaps in research specific to the collateral impact, this interdisciplinary arts-based qualitative study highlights the experiences of five formerly incarcerated Latino men who participated in an Arts in Corrections playwriting class during their time in a California state prison. This study foregrounds their knowledge as cuentistas (storytellers), …

So Much More Than Summer Camp: The Importance Of Environmental Education At Nature Centers, Olivia Upton

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Education in the U.S. currently faces a deficit in the promotion and proper teaching of climate change curriculum. Obvious gaps are created by a lack of clear teaching standards for environmental education, the American political machine stirring up controversy over the legitimacy of climate change, or teacher preferences. As climate change is considered one of the greatest threats facing humanity today, there is a need to educate people, especially younger generations, in order to navigate future challenges and make informed decisions. Nature centers offer the ideal location for the promotion of climate change education based on their direct connection to …

Analyzing The Use Of Quantifying Patient Acuity On Medical Surgical Units And Its Impact On Nursing Care, Molly Silva

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

Using existing data, qualitative research and quantitative research, this paper is an analysis of the literature regarding the use and effects of assessing patient acuity within the medical surgical population. A patient acuity tool is a system used in health care to determine the complexity of a patient. Current methods and studies of implementing a patient acuity tool are presented and their results are analyzed to determine aspects that have improved, as well as negatively impacted, the delivery of nursing patient care. The need for a standardized patient acuity tool is linked to better patient outcomes, yet a protocol is …

A Phylogenomic Investigation Of The Historical Biogeography Of Livebearers (Cyprinodontiformes: Poeciliidae), Sheila Rodríguez Machado

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Neotropics contain several biodiversity hotspots and harbor the highest diversity of freshwater fishes globally. Yet, recognizing the patterns and processes driving this richness remains a challenge. Similarly, all groups and subregions have not received the same attention, especially in the genomics era. Addressing these knowledge gaps will help us to better understand the region’s evolutionary and biogeographic complexity. The goal of this dissertation is to examine phylogenetic and biogeographic patterns of Neotropical freshwater fishes, with emphasis on the Greater Antilles, across multiple taxonomic and geographic scales. To achieve this goal, I generated a genomic dataset of hundreds of ultraconserved …

Quest For Purpose In Education: An Autoethnographic Study Of A Chinese Student’S Cross- Cultural Journey Through Logotherapy And Culturally Relevant Leadership, Bingsheng Chen

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

This autoethnography examines a Chinese student's search for meaning while transitioning between Chinese and U.S. academic systems, shaped by the interplay of cultural values, societal pressures, and personal agency. Guided by Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy and Culturally Relevant Leadership (CRL), the study uses reflexive narrative analysis to explore how this personal quest for purpose intersected with institutional structures and cultural contexts (e.g., St. John's College, University of New Mexico). Illuminating profound challenges—including cultural shock, systemic inequities, and the emotional toll of adaptation—the research reveals a transformative journey of navigating dissonance, reframing adversity, embracing a dual cultural identity, and ultimately finding meaning …

Commercial Pressures And Editorial Independence: Egyptian Journalists' Perceptions Of Advertiser Influence In Contemporary Media, Mohamed Ahmed Salem

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the complex interplay between commercial imperatives and editorial autonomy in Egypt’s contemporary media landscape, focusing on journalists’ perceptions of advertising influence. Drawing on Cognitive Dissonance Theory (CDT) and informed by Political Economy and Institutional Theory, the study investigates how Egyptian journalists navigate ethical tensions arising from advertiser demands—both state-linked and private—within a hybrid media system marked by economic precarity, political control, and digital disruption. Through 20 in-depth interviews with journalists, alongside insights from PR professionals, media managers, and academic experts, the research reveals a pervasive erosion of the editorial-commercial boundary. Journalists report widespread self-censorship, blurred content labelling, …

Transnational Methodological Engagements With Artistic Narratives: Challenging Hierarchies And Building Community, Lauren Stetz

The Qualitative Report

Through the analysis Violence Against Women Art Map Project, a publicly accessible online platform that utilizes data visualization to understand the contextual complexities of violence against women (VAW), this article explores how comics and narrative artworks can be utilized to provide voice on sensitive or controversial subject matter, challenge accepted societal hierarchies and norms and build community. Considering social media as a transnational dialogic space, graphic works within online spaces can provide qualitative researchers with the potential to expose the multilayered and entangled experiences of individuals across cultures and to interrupt frequently silenced issues that often go unwitnessed and unspoken. …