Digital Commons Network^™

Architectural Specification For Localized Sub-2-Bit Ternary Model Execution Engines On Mobile System-On-Chip Unified Silicon Architecture (Project Caltrop), Christopher L. Eckes

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure specifies a structural, production-ready implementation of an entirely localized, air-gapped, zero-telemetry Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) inference runtime engine. The system is engineered to execute within user-space memory on handheld unified memory System-on-Chip (SoC) microarchitectures, specifically optimizing for the Apple A19 Pro 3nm (N3P) fabric featuring a 16-core Neural Engine and 12 GB of LPDDR5X unified RAM. By enforcing a sub-2-bit ternary weight constraint $W \in \{-1, 0, 1\}$ via BitNet binarization scaling matrix math, this architecture entirely eliminates floating-point General Matrix Multiply (GEMM) hardware dependencies. General matrix operations are instead executed via raw integer bit-shifts and basic accumulator …

Consensus Agentic Protocol For Validating Autonomous Agent Transactions, Adrian Osorio, Rizky Ahmad Pratama, Harshadeep Kambhampati, Blake Bezold, Ryan Chernoff, Aaron Dhillon

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method for validating transactions initiated by autonomous agents before submission to payment processing infrastructure. A consensus agentic protocol operates as a pre-authorization validation layer after agent identity verification by a trusted agent protocol. The consensus agentic protocol includes a CAP gateway that composes a panel of validation agents from a juror catalog based on per-buyer configuration. Each juror returns a normalized score from 0 to 100 with a rationale, or abstains. A vote mapping aggregator compares each score against a per-juror, per-buyer threshold to produce a vote and applies unanimous-veto aggregation where any single rejection cancels the …

Maintenance-Free Solar Generator: A Sun-Tracking Mirror Field And A Zero-Wear Nasa-Heritage Engine, Brett R. Jones

Defensive Publications Series

A concept-stage engineering brief for an unattended, maintenance-free solar generator pairing two components chosen for having no wear-driven failure mode: a sun-tracking field of small, solid-state-actuated mirrors in place of a motorized two-axis gimbal, and a free-piston Stirling engine of the type NASA Glenn has run continuously for 14+ years with zero maintenance and which Qnergy produces commercially today. Sized to match the optical aperture of the Ripasso Energy dish that holds the reported world record for solar-to-electricity conversion, the combination is projected to deliver roughly 20-26 kWe of continuous power. The brief states its central unresolved dependency directly rather …

A Reading-Proof Honest-Scoring Method And Nuisance-Preserving Null Ladder For Analyzing Small, Unlabeled, Damaged Symbol Corpora, Pravin Dhanraj Karde

Defensive Publications Series

We disclose a method and system for measuring genuine structure in a small corpus of short symbol strings (e.g. an undeciphered sign system of a few thousand short inscriptions) in a way that is invariant to any semantic interpretation of the symbols and that requires every claimed pattern to beat a statistical null model preserving the corpus's real nuisance structure. The method comprises: (1) a two-part minimum-description-length "honest score" provably invariant under bijective relabeling of the symbol set, so that proposing a "reading" cannot change the score; (2) a graduated family of maximum-entropy null generators (a "null ladder") that hold …

Bounded-Risk Agility Architecture (Braa), Volodymyr Kotegov

Defensive Publications Series

BRAA is an engineering and cyber-safety framework for autonomous intelligent systems operating under residual risk. Absolute determinism in stochastic Cognitive Cores is mathematically and empirically unattainable. The objective of BRAA is to keep residual operational risk bounded, measurable, observable, and economically controllable — not to promise its complete elimination.

The architecture is strictly Cognitive-Core-agnostic and infrastructure-agnostic. It treats the underlying inference engines (LLMs, VLMs, agentic loops) as untrusted, replaceable, and volatile components. It places all critical invariants, safety boundaries, and transition rules into a deterministic, immutable runtime environment (the Immutable Core) executed completely outside any prompt space or learned representation. …

Finding The Numinous: An Ecocritical Look At “Dune” And “The Lord Of The Rings” (2025), By Willow Wilson Dipasquale, Douglas Charles Kane

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Douglas Charles Kane, of Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at “Dune” and “The Lord of the Rings” (2025), by Willow Wilson DiPasquale

Newsclipping, Does Your Chin Line Suggest Age?

Eartha M. M. White Textual Material

News clipping: Advertisement for Dorothy Gray Preparations available at Gayfer's Toilet Goods Department. Undated. 

Knowledge, Practice And Perceived Barriers Of Healthcare Provider Adherence To The Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (Ndss) In Government Hospitals And Primary Healthcare Centers In Jazan, Saudi Arabia: A Cross-Sectional Study, Moatasem F. Hakmi, Alaa Mathkour, Yousef Zahrani, Rayan I. Binduhayyim, Saad S. Alqahtani, Muhammad Z. Iqbal

Saudi Medical Journal

Objective: To assess and compare healthcare providers' understanding of the Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NDSS), alongside reported and perceived challenges, across public hospitals and primary healthcare centers in Jazan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted between 10 January 2025 and 30 December 2025 among health care providers at Jazan hospitals and primary healthcare centers (PHCs) (n = 420). Data were collected via structured self-administered questionnaire that included the following sections: demographic data, knowledge of the NDSS, reporting practices, competency of the Health Electronic Surveillance Network (HESN) and perceived barriers. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to …

Scoping Review Of Mental Health Outcomes Of Cosmetic Procedures Among The Saudi Population, Hessah Alzahrani

Saudi Medical Journal

Objective: To comprehensively examine the mental health outcomes associated with cosmetic procedures among the Saudi population, with a particular focus on psychological well-being, self-esteem, anxiety, body image, and quality of life.
Methods: This scoping review was conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology and reported following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. A structured search was performed across international databases, including PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar, in addition to national Arabic databases. Studies investigating the psychological outcomes of both surgical (rhinoplasty and body contouring) and …

System And Method For Certainty-Driven Payment Authorization With Adaptive Optimization, Xi Kan, Michiharu Yamashita, Xiaoran Tang, Elisa Warner

Defensive Publications Series

A method (400) for processing authorization decisions in a payment transaction is provided. The method (400) includes receiving transaction attributes, risk scores, behaviour signals, issuer response patterns, and an action space definition from a plurality of data sources. A certainty score is computed based on normalized signals from the plurality of data sources and compared with a threshold value. When the certainty score indicates high certainty, an approval or decline is issued directly based on a weighted mean of the normalized signals. When the certainty score indicates low certainty, a conflict type and conflict severity are determined, expected values are …

2026 September 14 - Faculty Senate Agenda And Minutes, Faculty Senate, East Tennessee State University

Faculty Senate Agendas and Minutes

No abstract provided.

"How Do I Design My Law Course?": A Quick Guide For New Professors, Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

How do professors start teaching law? This question is a particular challenge for new law professors, who often lack resources for course design. Written from the perspective of a recently tenured law professor, this Essay offers four major categories of decisions: semester structure, classroom, final exam, and “professorial personality.” It argues that, for each decision, reasonable minds can differ. This Essay also provides some personal reflections on the decision-making to illustrate how one professor might weigh various considerations in course design. A final Appendix is a checklist for new professors.

Eliciting Information About Teacher Applicants Using Open-Ended Questions, Joseph Aguilar-Bohorquez, Dan Goldhaber, Cyrus Grout, Elton Mykerezi, Prayash Pathak, Aaron Sojourner

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Employers commonly use open-ended questions in hiring, but usually responses aren’t recorded, and knowledge about the usefulness of such responses is limited. This study investigates properties of written responses to open-ended questions collected over many years via an application tracking platform that school districts use to hire teachers. We develop a scalable process to discover topics within the corpus of responses to each question and then to classify each response with respect to the topics while preserving interpretability and transparency. It adapts a traditional qualitative topic modeling approach, Inductive Thematic Analysis, to best combine the strengths of researcher judgment and …

Interrupting The First Story: A Lonerganian Claim Audit For Visual Analytics, Ajaya K. Swain

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

Visualizations can create an impression of immediacy: a pattern appears, an explanation follows, and managerial action can seem warranted before the transitions among observation, interpretation, judgment, and decision have been examined. This conceptual and pedagogical paper develops a Lonerganian Claim Audit for visual analytics, a discipline-specific adaptation of Bernard Lonergan's account of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision. It conceptualizes visual inferential compression as diminished differentiation among these operations, such that confidence generated by a visible pattern transfers to an explanation, an evidential claim, and an action without the distinct warrant required at each transition. The Claim Audit interrupts that movement …

From Literary Encounter To Responsible Action: Adapting Lonergan's Transcendental Method To En2375, Bonita Pfleiger

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

Bernard Lonergan characterizes the transcendental method as the “concrete and dynamic unfolding” of human knowing (Lonergan, 1997, p. 454). This unfolding involves the operations of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision. The operations describe the structure of human knowing, while the transcendental precepts express the standards by which they should be carried out: “Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, and Be responsible” (p. 450). Together, they provide a cognitive framework for examining how students come to understand, make warranted judgments, and act responsibly. Within philosophical hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur describe understanding as an ongoing interpretive process rather than a …

From Consumer Experience To Brand Meaning: Teaching Brand Management Through Lonergan’S Generalized Empirical Method (Gem), Nicole Kirpalani

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

Teaching marketing involves more than helping students learn disciplinary concepts and frameworks. It also involves developing processes of inquiry that prepare students to analyze complex situations, interpret evidence, exercise judgment, and make thoughtful professional decisions. As marketing practice continues to evolve, marketing education must similarly reconsider how courses, assignments, and learning experiences prepare students for professional practice (Grewal et al., 2025). Lonergan’s Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) offers one framework for structuring this process of inquiry. Lonergan, writing as a philosopher, theologian, and educator, initially described the underlying pattern of conscious operations as the transcendental method. In his later work, he …

Exploring Evolution As A Unifying Theme In The General Biology For Majors Course Sequence, While Iteratively Examining Attitudes And Decisions About Learning: An Application Of Lonergan’S Transcendental Method, Christine E. Gray

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

As I reflect upon my journey as an educator, I recognize it has been shaped, in large part, by my own foundational roots in the Catholic Liberal Arts tradition. As I prepare for another academic year, I find myself, once again, considering how my pedagogical practice can better meet my students “where they are” in my General Biology for Majors I and II courses. Since that “place” is shaped by a student’s prior experiences, both in and out of the classroom, I also recognize that “place” is unique for each student. This is precisely why each term pushes me to …

Settlement Trustee's Second Status Report

Catholic Dioceses in Bankruptcy

No abstract provided.

Fifty Years After Estelle V. Gamble—Where Does Carceral Health Law Go From Here?, James René Jolin, Jenean Docter, Benjamin A. Barsky

Faculty Scholarship

Fifty years ago, the US Supreme Court decided Estelle v.Gamble—a landmark case commonly known for establishing a duty on the government to provide health services to incarcerated people, whether before or after conviction. In this column, we offer a brief critical reappraisal of Estelle by reviewing its demanding legal standard and identifying a set of related litigation barriers that stymie the availability of relief in federal court. Given these constraints, we argue for a carceral health law paradigm that moves beyond the current, dominant focus on litigation.We use Medicaid law and policy as a case study to explore the …

Mentorship As A Catalyst For Change Readiness: A Qualitative Study Of How Effective Mentoring Mitigates Burnout And Turnover During Organizational Transformation, Jeffery M. Camp

Journal of Online Mentoring

This qualitative study examined how effective mentorship mitigates burnout and attenuates turnover intention during organizational change, foregrounding the perspectives of experienced mentors. Drawing on Biggs’s presage–process–product (PPP) model, data were collected through semi-structured interviews (n = 12) and two focus group discussions (n = 6 each), engaging 18 unique mentors employed in organizations with 1,000 or more employees. Thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase protocol yielded four themes: (1) mentorship as strategic facilitation of organizational change; (2) mentorship as provision of emotional and psychological support; (3) empowering mentees through relationship-building; and (4) applying adaptive and reflective strategies. …

Rocmoine Linton V. Attorney General New Jersey

2026 Decisions

USDC for the District of New Jersey

Exploring Consultancy-Related Variations In Public Building Projects: A Review Towards A Management Framework, Grayson Bambaza, Ismail W. R. Taifa, George S, Mwaluko

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Consultancy-related variations remain one of the leading causes of cost overruns, schedule delays, quality deficiencies, and contractual disputes in public building projects. Although various studies have been undertaken to document the causes of variations in construction works, the same level of interest has not been shown for consulting services variations across the consulting services spectrum and their consequences for effective management. This study explores variations in consulting services for public works by systematically reviewing the existing literature using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta Analyses) guidelines. Relevant articles published from 2020 to 2026 were retrieved from …

Decision Support Tool For The Maintenance Of Meter Gauge Railway Permanent-Way Infrastructures: A Concept Paper, Hamisi J. Maulid, Beatus A.T Kundi, Juma M. Matindana, Ismail W. R. Taifa Dr

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

A Decision Support Tool (DST) represents a transformative way of modernising maintenance practice on the permanent-way infrastructure of Meter Gauge Railway (MGR). Maintenance practice remains largely reactive, as the MGR plays a strategic role in transporting both freight and passengers, resulting in inefficient resource allocation, high operational risk, and growing Lifecycle expenses. This concept paper explores the potential and the design challenges for a DST that combines fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) modelling, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and predictive machine learning (ML) analytics for evidence-based, future-oriented maintenance management. The paper draws on peer-reviewed studies from …

Extending W-Event Differential Privacy To The Publish-Subscribe Framework, Jacob Jerome Olinger

Dissertations and Theses

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become ubiquitous, permeating both enterprises and homes, and they increasingly rely on publish-subscribe (pub-sub) frameworks that give subscribers real-time, high-fidelity access to device data. For privacy and confidentiality, however, today's pub-sub systems largely stop at channel-level authentication, encryption, and access-control lists. These protect data in transit and restrict who may receive it, but place no quantitative limit on what a subscriber with legitimate access to messages can infer about its publishers.

We close this gap by extending w-event differential privacy to the pub-sub setting. We generalize it from count queries to any aggregate …

“How Do I Design My Law Course?”: A Quick Guide For New Professors, Steven Arrigg Koh

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

God's Not Neutral: Narrative Tropes, Spiritual Warfare, And The Construction Of Evangelical Political Identity In American Christian Fiction, Evelyn L. Mccullough

Dissertations and Theses

Evangelical Christian fiction has reached tens of millions of readers and viewers during the most sustained period of evangelical political mobilization in American history, yet its narrative construction remains largely unexamined. This study asks how recurrent tropes in this genre build the attitudinal and emotional preconditions for political engagement. Combining systematic qualitative content analysis of eight texts spanning four decades (1986–2024) with Critical Discourse Analysis grounded in van Dijk's sociocognitive framework, it traces how storytelling devices connect theological belief to political behavior. The analysis reveals a single organizing logic: the corpus holds one regressive heroic disposition constant while making it …

Iom-Empra: An Exploration Of Adapting Iconic Public Infrastructure For Emergency Cardiac Care Response, Gillian Styring, Andrew Garrett, Robert Martyn Bracewell, Christopher Payette

URGENT Matters

No abstract provided.

Dive In! Oceanographic Engineering, Illinois Math And Science Academy

IMSA Fusion Curricula

Through inquiry-based explorations, students will engineer solutions to aquatic challenges. Engaging in island construction, growing crops through aquaculture, and examining ocean “ownership” will afford learners the opportunity to participate in various aspects of the engineering design cycle.

You Be The Judge, Illinois Math And Science Academy

IMSA Fusion Curricula

Welcome to an introduction of some basic principles involved in chemistry, the application of chemistry as well as practices required to create and carry out meaningful investigations. After students have experienced the concepts in a lab setting, they will have a chance to apply their knowledge and lab skills in a variety of simulations throughout the unit. Students will take the role of experts and identify problems, develop methods of testing, and conduct the tests. After gathering, analyzing, and interpreting results, students will make and share evidence based decisions in a variety of settings.

Medieval Stem, Illinois Math And Science Academy

IMSA Fusion Curricula

This curriculum is an exploration of science, math and technology that was developed, altered or utilized by civilization during medieval times. This time period helped lay the foundation for modern science and mathematics. Technological advances abounded. This curriculum focuses on agriculture, society and epidemiology, engineering, chemistry and textiles, and technological developments that lead civilization into the Renaissance.