Digital Commons Network^™

The Golden Rule: An Msw Portfolio Narrative, Russell Jared Jacobs

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

The experiences and research behind Russell "Jared" Jacobs' MSW journey that showcases his abilities in the field of social work.

¡Salud! Sacrificing The Sacred Sip: A Critical Analysis Of The Impact Of The Spiritual Conquest On Alcohol Traditions In Central México, Elizabeth Vilchis

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

By thoroughly investigating the available primary sources, this thesis will convey the importance of the Mesoamerican inebriating drink pulque in both the ethos and mythos of ancient Nahua society, examining how the ritual use of pulque became problematic in the eyes of the Spaniards, by investigating the cultural and ideological contradictions or double standards that enabled the tensions, struggles, and violence with which the Spanish colonial regime repressed the ritual use of pulque. This thesis compares the Nahua ethos and mythos of pulque to the Christian ethos and mythos of wine, highlighting the parallels perceived by Spaniards in Central México …

Characterization Of The Effects Of Atp On Primary Brainstem Glial Cells, Donovan J. Aardema Faigh

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Migraine and temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) are debilitating orofacial pain disorders that negatively impact one’s quality of life. These disorders are characterized by elevated levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and activation of central nervous system glial cells that promote and maintain central sensitization and enhance pain signaling in response to inflammatory stimuli. The goal of my study was to characterize the effects of the pro-inflammatory signaling molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) on intracellular calcium levels, mRNA levels, and protein expression in astrocytes, microglia, and oligodendrocytes to better understand the role of ATP in promoting central sensitization. To address this goal, primary …

Genomic Signatures Of Decline And Recovery In An Endangered Bat, Myotis Grisescens, Marxe Altman-Orbach

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Tremendous population declines may result in the loss of genetic diversity, which can, in turn, lead to reduced adaptive potential, overexpression of deleterious phenotypes, and further population declines. In this way, genetic drift from a severe demographic decline may ultimately lead to an extinction vortex. However, populations that avoid the loss of genetic diversity may remain viable, despite demographic crashes. Therefore, understanding genetic diversity is vital for assessing the conservation status of species that have undergone declines, and can even reflect the effectiveness of management actions. I investigated signatures of genetic bottlenecks in the gray bat (Myotis grisescens), …

Inherited Sins: Essays, Claire Ellerman

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Joan Didion said of her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, that, “the reason I had to write it down, is that no one had ever told me what it was like.” She was trying to make sense of her grief following the death of her husband, and in doing so, wrote a piece of creative nonfiction (CNF) that explores her own life in and around the larger ideas of mourning, connection, and moving forward. This is the ultimate aim of creative nonfiction: writing to make sense of our lives in relation to the world around us. In this …

United States Mainstream Meat Market Entry: An Analysis On Speciality Goat Meat Products, Madison Raye Schmitz

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Understanding consumers' perspectives and motivations is key when looking into making goat meat more accepted in the mainstream meat market. Previous research has shown there is a demand for goat meat from different populations in the US. Consumers also care more about the quality of the food they purchase. Understanding that goat meat has lower cholesterol and is leaner than other red meat is important to incorporating goat meat in niche consumer markets. Providing consumers with a product that is familiar to them is more acceptable than giving consumers a cut of meat they are unfamiliar with. Standard products like …

Experimental Diegetic Thresholds: A Study Of Adapted Carceral Narratives [The] Nickel Boys And Sing Sing, Leslie D. Muench

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The diegesis is the storyworld of a film, including all the characters, settings, events, and other elements. At certain times, though, that threshold is permeable, particularly when the fictional source material involves lived experiences. Two carceral films model an experimentation with adapted material and the palimpsestuous layering effect that is a result of real-life narratives being transposed into fictional ones. Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross (2024), and Sing Sing, directed by Greg Kwedar (2023), endeavor to humanize a stereotypically ostracized community: Black boys and men who are incarcerated. Through the screenwriting, casting, producing, filming, and sharing of their films …

Herp Count 2025, Camryn Gulledge

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Herp Count 2025 is a process-based project in which I log and document every herp (reptile or amphibian) I encounter in the wild while investigating the realities of human impact on ecosystems. During 2025, I observed 1,406 individual herps, most of which appeared not in remote wilderness but in the compromised margins of human spaces. When I observe them in a littered area, I collect nearby trash and bring it back to my studio to combine it with a detailed drawing of that specific individual. In my Contact series, I use a clean-touch printmaking process that involves a stretched plastic …

The Effect Of Sex On A-To-I Editing In Skeletal Muscle During Inflammation, Skyler Lee

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing is a post-transcriptional mechanism mediated by ADAR enzymes that can alter RNA sequence, protein function, and gene regulation. Because ADAR1 is upregulated during inflammation and plays a critical role in innate immunity, previous studies investigated the effects of acute inflammation on RNA editing in male and female mice. Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was used to induce inflammation, and RNA editing levels were examined in the heart, brain, and skeletal muscle. While editing levels in the heart and brain remained unchanged, skeletal muscle exhibited tissue- and sex-specific differences in editing. In this thesis, LPS treatment affected selective editing, increasing …

2026-2027, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Student Handbooks

No abstract provided.

Pettus Family Papers - Accession 1731, Pettus Family

Manuscript Collection

The Pettus Family Papers document the history, genealogy, landholdings, and daily life of multiple generations of the Pettus family, with roots in Indian Land, South Carolina, and branches extending throughout the southeastern United States and abroad. The collection spans the nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries and includes family histories, genealogical research, correspondence, legal and financial records, photographs, reminiscences, literary works, and artifacts. Together, these materials provide a comprehensive record of family relationships, agricultural and commercial enterprises, property ownership, and historical memory.

A significant portion of the collection is devoted to genealogical research and family history, including compiled genealogies, correspondence …

Luckett Davis Lecture Notes Collection - Accession 1846, Luckett Vanderford Davis

Manuscript Collection

The Dr. Luckett Davis Lecture Notes Collection documents the teaching and academic work of Luckett Vanderford Davis, Professor of Biology at Winthrop University, where he served from 1964 until his retirement and later held the title of Emeritus Professor of Biology. The collection consists primarily of lecture notes, seminar materials, laboratory manuals, and instructional aids used by Dr. Davis in teaching a wide range of undergraduate biology courses.

The bulk of the collection contains handwritten and typed lecture notes prepared for courses in zoology, genetics, evolution, ecology, and marine biology. These materials document Dr. Davis’s approach to teaching biological sciences …

The (Non) Numeric Truths Behind College And Career Aspirations: A Quantcrit Analysis Of The Precarious Pathways For Secondary Students Of Color, Norma A. Marrun, Danielle Mireles, Jori S. Beck, Christine Clark

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

This article explored the college and career choices of 963 students across six urban secondary schools in a large public school district in the Southwestern United States. A Quantitative Critical Race Theory, or QuantCrit, analysis was applied to expose the false narrative of number neutrality and the systemic racism that belies it. Findings demonstrate how the myth of meritocracy through education (as ‘the great equalizer’) is perpetuated when educators hold onto racist and ableist beliefs about who can pursue college, and ignore the structural disadvantages underlying the college and career aspirations of students of Color juxtaposed with the reality of …

Methodological Insights And Trends: Participatory Positioning Of Children And Youth In Visual Art Education Research, Angela Eckhoff

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

Participatory research methods have a focus on facilitating research processes that engage with participants and, as such, aim to promote individual voice, facilitate richer reflection and dialogue, and enable the articulation of participants' unique experiences. To explore the degree to which participatory practices are enacted in visual art education research, the present study critically examines the agentic positioning of children and youth in school‐based, visual arts experiences through a systematic, methodological literature review. Findings from this review serve to ground proposed recommendations for the inclusion of supportive research practices that carefully attend to the unique considerations that arise during participatory …

"Art, Esthetics, Ideal": An Ethics For Literary Translators In The Age Of Translating Machines, Gabriel González Núñez

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

The advent of effective machine translation has raised several issues for translators, including the question of how a human translator ought to translate in this age of translating machines. In this context of new ethical questions, the present essay argues that an answer may be found in Pedro Figari’s (1912) philosophical essay on esthetics. Following Figari, the current essay argues that literary translation is art, that as such it can produce an esthetic emotion on readers and that the purpose of such art and esthetics is an ideal in the form of the continuous betterment of the human condition.

Unsafe2safe: Controllable Image Anonymization For Downstream Utility, Minh Dinh

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Large-scale image datasets frequently contain identifiable or sensitive content, raising privacy risks when training models that may memorize and leak such information. We present Unsafe2Safe, a fully automated pipeline that detects privacy-prone images and rewrites only their sensitive regions using multimodally guided diffusion editing. Unsafe2Safe operates in two stages. Stage 1 uses a vision--language model to (i) inspect images for privacy risks, (ii) generate paired private and public captions that respectively include and omit sensitive attributes, and (iii) prompt a large language model to produce structured, identity-neutral edit instructions conditioned on the public caption. Stage 2 employs instruction-driven diffusion editors …

From Physical Correlation To Emotional Connection: The Role Of Passive Haptics On Empathy In Virtual Reality, Jemely Robles

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Virtual reality is increasingly explored as a tool for cultivating empathy, and haptic feedback as a tool for enhancing immersion. This paper investigates the effects of combining the two.  Fifty-two participants experienced a custom-built VR scene in which a character was shown packing up a room. Participants were assigned to either a haptic condition, receiving passive haptic feedback corresponding to the character's actions, or a non-haptic control condition that did not receive any haptic input. Trait empathy was measured beforehand, and state empathy and engagement were measured after the experience. Thematic analysis was conducted on post-study interviews, and headset recordings …

110% Asset Disruption, Bradley W. Fish

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

110% Asset Disruption is a satire of the modern workplace set in a lightly dystopian near- future United States. Written as a feature length film, it follows Ethan Martens, a citizen and employee of Calcudyne. Ethan has a contentious relationship with his manager Douglas Farview, who performs a series of hostile actions towards Ethan in order to attempt to force him out of the company. The conflict between the two men escalates until Ethan is put in the position of having to prevent Calcudyne's President & CEO from starting a global thermonuclear war. 110% Asset Disruption is influenced and inspired …

Participation, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

What does it take to participate in direct, naturally occurring social interaction? Conversation analytic (CA) studies reveal that “participation”—who participates, when, and how—is dynamic and locally, multimodally achieved by the people involved. Particularly in social situations when people are concurrently accessible to one another’s naked senses (Goffman, 1964), co-participation is enabled and performed through embodied and vocal resources including talk, gaze, facial displays, body orientation/posture, proximity, and gestures (e.g., M. H. Goodwin, 1999; C. Goodwin & M. H. Goodwin, 2005; Pillet-Shore, 2010; Sidnell, 2009). Using a multimodal CA lens, this chapter illuminates how “participation” is achieved in real-time, naturally occurring …

Digital Technologies And Calculus: Students’ Peaks And Pits, Ricela Feliciano-Semidei, Kevin A. Palencia Infante, Alcibiades Bustillo-Zarate

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Understanding calculus students’ perspectives can provide valuable insights into their learning needs and help develop strategies to enhance persistence in STEM programs. Numerous studies have shown that the use of digital technologies (DT) influences student engagement, motivation, and mathematics achievement. In this project, we explored students’ perspectives on using DT in calculus. We interviewed eight calculus students from a midwestern doctorate-granting institution in the United States and used thematic analysis informed by the didactical tetrahedron, accounting for internal and external factors that may influence the teaching and learning process. Students reflected on their use of technology, identifying various benefits, including …

Geriatric Comfort Cart Implementation In The Emergency Department, James Benson, Robert Anderson, Jake Simon, Doris Meehan

MaineHealth Maine Medical Center

Background: As emergency departments (ED) increasingly serve aging populations, evidence-based approaches to improve geriatric care are essential. The Mayo Clinic’s Geriatric Comfort Cart received strong provider endorsement, but little was known about item choices. Understanding these differences is critical for patient centered care. This project examined whether items chosen by ED staff differed from those chosen by patients and tracked selection rates.

Trading Places With The ‘Other’: Octavia Butler’S “Bloodchild” And “Amnesty”, Katie Zamora-Godinez

Research Papers

No abstract provided.

If You Build It, Will They Stay? Fish Communities Continue To Utilize Restored Habitat A Decade Following An Instream Restoration, Alexis L. Vandenberg

Masters Theses

Lotic ecosystems are degraded at an alarming rate due to anthropogenic activities. In order to combat these changes, stream restorations are implemented to improve conditions such as water quality, habitat heterogeneity, and bank stability. However, the impacts of these restorations are often understudied and long-term impacts are unknown. Restorations are typically designed to be ‘fish attractors’; this idea is known as the ‘Field of Dreams hypothesis’ – ‘if you build it, they will come’. This study uses data collected in Kickapoo Creek, Coles County from 2009 to 2015 and again in 2021 and 2022 to assess the long-term impacts of …

Compositional And Functional Shifts In Fish Community Structure In Response To Low-Head Dam Removals, Joshua D. Bruegge

Masters Theses

Low-head dams serve as intermittent barriers to aquatic connectivity and directly alter both upstream and downstream habitats and biotic communities. In 2018 and 2019, two low-head dams in the Vermilion River watershed of eastern Illinois were removed, reconnecting over 1,700 kilometers of upstream habitat within the basin. To determine the impacts of these dam removals, fish community surveys were conducted at 12 fixed sites across three reaches in two rivers from 2012-2022. This study assessed reach-specific temporal responses of the fish community and habitat characteristics. I linked trait expressions within the fish community to abiotic variables using the co-inertia RLQ …

Artificial Light At Night Extends Pollen Season And Elevates Allergen Exposure, Brandt Geist, Lin Meng, Daniel S W Katz, Huidong Li, Franz Hölker, Qian Xiao

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Artificial light at night (ALAN), a growing environmental stressor in urban ecosystems, disrupts natural light-dark cycles and alters plant phenological events such as leaf-out and flowering. However, the extent to which ALAN influences airborne pollen season timing and exacerbates allergy-related health risks remains largely understudied. This study investigates how ALAN influences the timing and duration of the airborne pollen season across the Northeastern United States from 2012 to 2023 and the consequences of allergenic pollen exposure. Using daily pollen concentrations from the National Allergy Bureau, ALAN data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite product, and gridded Daymet climate data, …

Plasma Proteomic Profile Of Dietary Potassium And Incident Ckd, Jiaqi Yang, Lauren Bernard, Jingsha Chen, Valerie K Sullivan, Bing Yu, Eugene P Rhee, Paul A Welling, Casey M Rebholz

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background:: There is a need for objective biomarkers of dietary potassium. The mechanisms through which dietary potassium influences kidney health are incompletely understood.

Methods:: Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study participants at visit 3 (1993–1995) with dietary and proteomics data were randomly divided into discovery (N=6,814) and replication (N=3,380) sets. We examined associations between dietary potassium and 4,955 aptamers using multivariable linear regression, adjusting for sociodemographic factors, health behaviors, and estimated glomerular filtration rate, with a false discovery rate of 0.05. Then, we tested the prospective associations between potassium-related proteins and incident chronic kidney disease (CKD).

Results:: …

Relationship Between Foraminiferal Assemblages And Cassiopea Coverage Across A Gradient Of Human Influence In Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Puerto Rico, Nylah Barber, Angelique Rosa Marín, Natalia López-Figueroa, Darma Ramos-Negrón, Xiomara Cruz-De León, Andrea Acevedo Colón, Pamela Hallock

Making Waves REU

Ecological Relevance: Foraminifera and Cassiopea (upside down-jellyfish) are symbiont-bearing organisms that respond rapidly to environmental changes in tropical systems, hence potential candidates as bioindicators to support ecological monitoring at JBNERR. Purpose: By using foraminiferal assemblages and Cassiopea as potential bioindicators, we can assess environmental conditions and contribute to management needs in the reserve. Hypothesis: Foraminiferal assemblages and the percent coverage of Cassiopea will reflect the habitat conditions of sites with varying levels of human influence at JBNERR.

Investigation Of Succinylated Zwitterionic Polyethylenimine/Dna Complexes: Performance In Serum, Internalization, And Intracellular Fate, Levi Lampe

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Gene therapy has promised to revolutionize medicine since the earliest clinical trials, but a lack of delivery methods that are both safe and efficient has hampered progress. Gene therapy with viral vectors is effective at delivering nucleic acids to cells, but is associated with dangerous immunogenic responses and cancer-causing insertions into the genome. Viral vectors are also among the most prohibitively costly therapeutics in medicine. Polymeric vectors avoid these dangers and are made from inexpensive, off-the- shelf materials, but have been hindered by poor efficiency compared to viral vectors.

A benchmark polymer for in vitro nucleic acid delivery has been …

An Interdisciplinary Approach To Understanding The Social Ministry Of The Orthodox Church Of Ukraine In The Context Of Christian Theology And Socio-Humanitarian Sciences, Rostyslav Didukh

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article presents a comprehensive interdisciplinary scientific and theological analysis of the social ministry of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in the context of Christian theology and socio-humanitarian disciplines. Modern approaches of Orthodox theology to the social mission of Christianity ensure the integrity of the development of the human and society. The need to ensure the coherence of theological concepts of the Orthodox Church social teaching with the existing church and parish life, church educational mission, theological education, and social work is emphasized. Special attention is paid to the interdisciplinary connections of Orthodox theology, religious studies, psychology, pedagogy and …

Demographic Characteristics In Patients With Heart Failure And Iron Deficiency, Ahmed Alaa Eldin Abd Elazeem, Abdul Razek Abdul Lateef Maaty, Hanan Ahmed Azzam, Ahmed Mohamed Reda

Mansoura Medical Journal

Background: Iron deficiency (ID) is a major and prevalent comorbidity among heart failure (HF) patients. It is associated with poor exercise tolerance, recurrent hospitalization and higher mortality. Studying patients’ demographics helps to determine vulnerable groups to ID, risk factors and associated comorbidities to be considered during screening and management.

Aim of the Work: To study the demographic characteristics of heart failure patients with iron deficiency.

Patients and Methods: A cross sectional observational study was conducted at a tertiary care university hospital at Delta region of Egypt between year 2024 and 2026. Among 117 HF patients, 100 HF patients …