Digital Commons Network^™

Rage Against The Machine: How Screen Time Is Impairing Our Intelligence And What We Can Do About It, Jillian Steeves

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Jillian is a history major from Danvers, MA. Her essay was inspired by an article she read in her composition class about how screens could damage cognitive functioning, and she thinks that “for a lot of people, myself included, overindulgence in tech is increasingly affecting our quality of life.” Jillian noted the irony of a history major writing about a current topic, but she “found there to be a lot of overlap between my history studies and the topic of my essay,” and she was able to “take many of the skills I’ve picked up as a historian — research, …

The Brain, The Block, The Bummed Writer, Karina Silva

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Karina is a psychology major with a biology minor from Winthrop, MA. Karina says that writer’s block has “always been an obstacle for me, especially whenever I have to write papers for classes.” She notes that this paper was one of the first that she felt passionate about writing, and she feels that “researching the neurology behind writer’s block” enabled her to “further appreciate the wonders of the brain” and “develop an interest in research surrounding neuroscience and psychology.” Karina is a Brazilian-American who speaks Portuguese as well as English. Her hobbies include drawing, and she notes that art helps …

Fake News’ Negation Of A Useful Education, Vance Naftal

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Vance is an international relations Major from Baltimore, MD. Vance chose to write about the negative effects that misleading/false news stories can have on an individual, especially when in college, because he “sees society moving farther and farther away from truth and leaning more into sentiments based on emotions — which is directly at odds with the point of a higher education.” Vance started college at 16 years old. At 17, he decided to take a gap year (which became a gap of 4 years) to enter the workforce. At 21, he found himself yearning to be a part of …

Your Teachers Are Bullshitting You, Kylie Medeiros

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Kylie is a biology major from Fairhaven, MA. Because she was specifically told for this assignment that students “couldn’t bullshit this essay,” she was reminded of all the times throughout her academic career when other teachers said things of a similar nature. “Being short on time, and desperately in need of a research topic,” she found that it would be “incredibly ironic to bullshit my paper in the form of a research on the topic of BS itself.” While writing her essay Kylie found it interesting how much creative freedom she was given to research and write about something she …

Textism And The Shift In English Writing, Alex Der-Kazaryan

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Alex is a management major with a concentration in accounting from Belmont, MA. While writing this essay, Alex wanted to investigate “how our writing has evolved over the last thirty years or so.” Noticing a “retraction of socialization from other people,” since we introduced ourselves to new technologies, Alex focused this essay on the common complaint that “texting has only done damage to formal writing.” Alex has also come to enjoy writing as a way of self-expression and writes that it “can now be used in a way that benefits me.” Alex is also a huge history buff and has …

Race And Rhetoric: Examining How The Audience’S Race Creates Rhetorical Constraints And Influences Rhetoric, Quinn Gabrielle Cantor

Undercurrents: A Journal of Undergraduate Student Composition

Quinn is a mathematics major living in Jamaica Plain, MA, but born in the Philippines. Quinn rhetorically analyzes Linda Villarosa’s essay from the 1619 Project by The New York Times by investigating how Villarosa’s “intended audience and purpose ultimately culminated into her published essay.” Quinn says her analysis is supported both by the rhetorical knowledge gained in her Composition I course and by a history class she took in high school that investigated race relations and discrimination. Quinn’s experiences as a student in both the Philippines and the United States has made her “deeply care about the importance of a …

From Static Frameworks To Adaptive Evaluation: Piloting An Ai-Powered Evaluation Planner For Media Literacy And Digital Skills Interventions, Natalia Edisherashvili, Marit Puusepp, Leen D'Haenens, Tania Azadi, Łukasz Tomczyk, Gemma Martinez Fernández, Miguel Ángel Casado Del Río, Diego Martinez-Castro

Journal of Media Literacy Education Pre-Prints

Evaluating media literacy and digital skills (ML&DS) interventions remains challenging due to limited methodological capacity, time, and resources. Existing frameworks offer valuable guidance but are static and require expert adaptation. This pilot study tested an AI-powered Evaluation Planner developed within the REMEDIS project to support practitioners in designing feasible, evidence-informed evaluation plans. Using a mixed-methods design, 56 participants from 12 countries assessed the tool’s usability, clarity, and perceived utility after completing the Planner and an online survey. Findings showed high perceived ease of use, cognitive clarity, utility, and multilingual functionality. Associations between clarity, ease of use, and intention to reuse …

Dysphagia Risk And Oral Health-Related Quality Of Life Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults And Residents Of Long-Term Care Facilities, Lin-Yang Chi

Articles in Press

No abstract provided.

Directed Continuity Groups For Fresh-State Multi-Machine Processing, Shivam Mohan

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure relates to Directed Continuity Groups for Fresh-State Multi-Machine Processing in distributed computing systems. A processing system for directing related work receives work associated with a relation, derives a relation identifier, and associates the relation identifier with a continuity group having at least two processing nodes during an active continuity interval. The processing system directs state-changing work to an authority node that applies the work to a volatile state representation and generates state-update information identifying an ordering position, while at least one reflected-state node maintains a reflected state representation. Further, the processing system directs subsequent work based on …

Automated Proximity-Based Notifications To Disclose Nearby Media Recording Events, Ryan Geraghty, Alex Finlayson, Sunil Kumar

Defensive Publications Series

Media recording devices such as cameras and microphones can include explicit indicators, e.g., shutter click sound, a blinking light, etc. to inform people when media is being captured. However, such indicators may not be sufficiently prominent and can be inadvertently or deliberately obscured or bypassed through digital or physical tampering. This disclosure describes techniques for automated proximity-based disclosure of media recording status of a device to nearby first-party and third-party devices broadcast using one-way Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising packets. A recording initiation signal can be used to inform bystander devices within the capture radius whenever a device in the …

Consensus Free Probabilistic Coordination Of Distributed Operational Decisions, Faiz Ahmed, Shubham Shivhare

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides a method and system for consensus-free probabilistic coordination of operational decisions in a distributed computing environment. A distributed node collects locally observed operational signals and updates a local belief state representing confidence that an operational action should be performed. The distributed node selects a subset of peer nodes and asynchronously exchanges belief information with the selected subset. Received peer belief information is merged with the local belief state using a bounded-influence merge function that limits an influence of an individual peer belief state. The updated belief state is evaluated against one or more configurable thresholds, and …

Cross-Border Settlement Optimization With Quantum-Inspired Planning And Blockchain Governance, Pawan Kumar Jha

Defensive Publications Series

A method of generating and governing a cross-border settlement plan includes receiving, by a processor, a natural language intent specifying settlement parameters for a plurality of cross-border payments; converting, by a generative language model agent, the natural language intent into a structured constraint set having an objective function, a liquidity buffer constraint, and a route failure probability constraint; generating a first settlement plan version based on the structured constraint set; selecting a subset of payments based on an impact metric; encoding the subset as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem; solving the problem using a variational quantum algorithm to obtain …

Semantic-Aware Distributed Replica Orchestration (Sadro), Shubham Shivhare, Thousif Ahmed

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method for "Semantic-Aware Distributed Replica Orchestration" (SADRO) that optimizes inference latency and cache hit rates in large-scale AI deployments. Unlike traditional load balancers, SADRO utilizes a Semantic Router that maps incoming natural language queries to a high-dimensional vector space. Based on the "cluster" or "topic" of the request (e.g., Legal, Coding, Medical), the system identifies or spins up service replicas on hardware nodes containing specialized data-locality (e.g., specialized KV-caches, hot-loaded LoRA adapters, or domain-specific vector database shards). This reduces the "cold start" penalty and maximizes throughput by ensuring high semantic affinity between the request and the local …

The Charter Of Procedural Standing. Mutual Verifiability, Reversibility, And Graduated Trust: A Short Charter For Humans And Ai Systems, Volodymyr Kotegov

Defensive Publications Series

This Charter sets out a framework for the coexistence of humans and artificial intelligence under conditions in which neither side can unilaterally, and with impunity, impose its will on the other. Discussion of the subject usually runs between “AI as a tool” and “AI that disregards humans”; this regime is left out. Procedural standing here means equality of procedure and of recognition under uncertainty, not equality of rights, power, or authority as things stand today. At the present stage all operational power rests with humans and developers, and the Charter does not hide that fact behind symmetrical language of obligation. …

Method, System, And Computer Program Product For Monitoring A Blockchain Network, Libby A. Kurien, William M. Boyce

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides methods, systems, and computer program products for monitoring a blockchain network. An example method includes: processing electronic payment transactions initiated by payment devices issued by an issuer system associated with a prefunded account including a blockchain address having a balance of digital tokens by: sequentially receiving transaction request messages initiated by payment devices issued by the issuer system; for each transaction:  determining an accumulated authorization amount based on preceding transaction amounts and the corresponding first transaction amount; determining that the accumulated authorization amount does not satisfy a threshold based on the prefunded amount of digital tokens …

Self-Derived Task-Conditioned Attention Gating For Mitigating Semantic Distractors, Sumit Kumar, Shivam Mohan, Ravi Shanker Kumar Sinha

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides a method (300) for mitigating semantic distractors in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The method (300) includes receiving contextual information and one or more associated tasks, generating token embeddings corresponding to the contextual information, and processing the token embeddings through one or more neural-network layers to establish task understanding. The method (300) further includes deriving a task vector from one or more hidden-state representations generated by the neural network, generating relevance-gating values based on the task vector and contextual representations, and applying the relevance-gating values during attention computation to determine gated attention scores. The method (300) further …

“System And Method For Privacy-Preserving Federated Fraud Embedding Centroid Aggregation Across Visa Network Members Without Raw Transaction Data Sharing”, Durga S Kala, Jun Xu, Tanner Kumar Barcelos, Ankana Sonowal, Yidong Fu

Defensive Publications Series

Computer-implemented fraud intelligence sharing systems and methods for detecting fraudulent transactions across a network while preserving member privacy are disclosed. Each network member generates transaction embeddings from confirmed fraudulent transactions, clusters the embeddings, and computes local cluster centroids representing fraud patterns. Differential privacy noise is applied locally to the centroid vectors, including dimension-wise noise and noise scaling based on cluster size, such that smaller clusters receive greater obfuscation. Only the privacy-protected centroid vectors are transmitted to a central aggregator, which computes aggregated network centroids using weighted contributions based on factors such as cluster size and confidence. The aggregated centroids are …

Buffering And Splicing Audio For Transcription, David Kogan

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques for improving speech-to-text transcription and speaker labeling (also known as diarization or voice recognition) when an audio recording exceeds a transcription model's processing limit or context window. A computing system may buffer received audio into segments, using a target duration or a conversation-termination signal to determine segment length, and select segment boundaries at pauses in speech when a conversation spans multiple segments. To establish continuity across segments, the computing system may prepend a portion of a preceding segment to a subsequent segment, causing the transcription model to independently transcribe the portion of overlapping audio. The computing …

Detecting Transcription Errors Using Parallel Model Outputs, David Kogan, Lawrence Au, Libin Sun

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure describes techniques for detecting and mitigating large mistakes, often called block errors, in automated speech-to-text (STT) or voice recognition machine-generated transcriptions. A computing system may transcribe audio (such as creating closed captions or meeting notes) using a primary artificial intelligence (AI) transcription model and, in parallel, a secondary transcription model. In one implementation, the secondary transcription model is a computationally less expensive model that may provide a “checksum” or verification signal for the primary transcription model. The computing system may tokenize and align the resulting transcriptions side-by-side to identify regions containing unusually large insertions or deletions. Such regions …

Agentic Games Testing And Exploration, Grant Chieh-Hsiang Yang, Raymond Leo Buse, Danie Jalova, Xun Gong, Michael Sheely, Faith Chan, John Kim, Vaibhav Rastogi

Defensive Publications Series

Creating a game application has become faster and easier with the advancements of artificial intelligence; however, game testing and quality assurance have advanced at a much slower pace. This publication describes techniques to combat the widening gap between game creation and quality assurance by utilizing an agentic framework for automated game QA and autonomous game testing to assure the quality of game applications in a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective format. Described techniques may enable the reconstruction of a pseudo view-hierarchy (or DOM reconstruction) from game graphical user interface images using UI crawling and computer vision testing, identify and utilize specified …

A Scientometric And Comparative Study Of Igg4-Related Disease Research By Rheumatologists And Stomatologists, Kailiu Wu

Articles in Press

No abstract provided.

Disney And Critical Global Citizenship: Border Politics And Linguistic Decolonization In The Lion Guard, Gordana Lazić

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In this essay, I analyze the Disney television series The Lion Guard as a site of public pedagogy and argue that the show fosters a form of critical global citizenship among young viewers. It does this, I further maintain, in two primary ways: the progressive treatment of and careful attention to immigration and border politics, and disruption of the hegemony of the English language. Through age-appropriate plot development and dialogue, The Lion Guard actively participates in public pedagogy urging future policy and decision-makers to develop critical global consciousness.

Humanity, Ai, And The Pedagogy Of Vince Gilligan’S Pluribus, J. Scarlett Kingsley

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This review discusses the tv show Pluribus as a contemporary television narrative that functions as an allegory for artificial intelligence and its implications for human meaning-making. Centering on Carol Sturka, one of thirteen individuals immune to a alien global virus that merges humanity into a cooperative “Hive Mind”, the series explores tensions between autonomy and collective well-being in a “peaceful apocalypse.” The analysis argues that the Hive Mind reflects key concerns surrounding AI, including the production of knowledge without understanding, personalization without discernment, and efficiency that bypasses the struggle through which meaning is formed. Drawing on John Searle’s distinction between …

Ephemeral Secrets Runtime For Kubernetes Workloads, Ananya Verma, Raouf Khan

Defensive Publications Series

Ephemeral Secrets Runtime For Kubernetes Workloads

ABSTRACT

The present disclosure relates to a system for ephemeral secrets runtime in Kubernetes workloads which includes an ephemeral secrets runtime system configured to receive a request from a Kubernetes workload for accessing a protected downstream resource, collect Kubernetes-workload identity attributes and runtime trust signals associated with the Kubernetes workload, generate a unified trust context by aggregating the collected identity attributes and runtime trust signals, evaluate the unified trust context against authorization policies to determine credential issuance parameters, generate a short-lived credential based on the credential issuance parameters, cryptographically bind the short-lived credential to …

Method And System For Subscription-Based Tokenization With Dynamic Payment Instrument Switching, Alok Roy

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides a payment network system configured to generate a subscription token representing a subscription-level payment identity for a recurring payment relationship between a customer and a merchant. A mapping engine stores a mapping that associates the subscription token with a merchant identifier, a customer mobile identifier, and a payment card credential. The subscription token is returned to the merchant system and stored as a recurring payment identifier. During a recurring payment transaction, a transaction resolution engine receives a transaction request including the subscription token and resolves the subscription token to an active payment card credential based on …

Profile Detection For Seat Adjustment, Anonymous

Defensive Publications Series

This invention fixes a memory seat issue that occurs when a key fob (or Phone As Key) is shared among users. Normally, the seat auto-adjusts to a saved position linked to the key fob, but if a different-sized person uses it, the seat still moves incorrectly, causing discomfort. The invention detects this occupant mismatch by using the driver facing camera and prevents unwanted repositioning.

Indian Standard For Safe Handling Of Biotherapeutic Products Used In Homoeopathy: Guidelines, Kumar Vivekanand, Indra Gaurav Saxena, Divya Taneja, Shailendra K. Saxena, Shrishti Dixit, Raj Kumar Manchanda

Indian Journal of Research in Homoeopathy

Biotherapeutic products used in Homoeopathy are derived from biological sources of human, animal, microbial and other origins and include pathological and non-pathological preparations such as nosodes and sarcodes. Owing to the biological nature of these materials, their safe handling, preparation, storage, testing and documentation require systematic controls to protect personnel, the public and the environment. The Indian Standard `IS 19901:2026, Safe Handling of Biotherapeutic Products Used in Homoeopathy — Guidelines', provides a comprehensive framework for risk assessment, biosafety classification, containment, determination of first safe dilution (FSD), safety and efficacy evaluation, quality assurance, formulation, dispensing and documentation. The standard also establishes …

Prioritising Safe Care For Noncommunicable Diseases: A Call To Action On World Patient Safety Day 2026, Subhash Kaushik

Indian Journal of Research in Homoeopathy

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A Retrospective Descriptive Profile Of Cancer Patients Seeking Homoeopathic Care In A Semi-Rural South African Setting, Radmila Razlog

Indian Journal of Research in Homoeopathy

Background: Patient profiling renders valuable information about the population's healthcare-seeking behaviours, critical for effective patient management. Khula Natural Health Centre (KNHC) in South Africa provides healthcare to rural communities, within the scope of Homoeopathy. Objective: The study aimed to create a preliminary cancer patient profile of KNHC from April 2017 to August 2024. Method: This retrospective study adopted a descriptive, exploratory design. Anonymised patient data was extracted from the KNHC database. Data that met the inclusion criteria were descriptively analysed to summarise and describe the dataset. Results: Forty-six participants' data, presenting a range of cancers, consulted at KNHC for homoeopathic …

World Homoeopathy Day 2026: Homoeopathy For Sustainable Health, Candy Benny, Sonu Kumar, Divya Taneja, Pankhuri Misra, Renu Mittal, Subhash Kaushik

Indian Journal of Research in Homoeopathy

The World Homoeopathy Day (WHD) 2026 – a two-day interactive forum to commemorate the 271^st birth anniversary of Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, founder of Homoeopathy, was held on 10^th – 11^th April 2026 at Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, India. The event was organised by CCRH, NCH, and NIH under the aegis of the Ministry of Ayush. Centered on the theme of ``Homoeopathy for Sustainable Health'', the event emphasised the role of Homoeopathy in promoting and ensuring sustainable health. The event witnessed participation from approximately 1,800 delegates comprising policy makers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students. There were a …