Digital Commons Network^™

Ecologic Factors Contributing To West Nile Virus Hyperendemicity In Central South Carolina: An Integrated Vector–Human–Environmental Study, Elba S. Fridriksson, Ahayla Muraleedharan, Kyndall C. Dye-Braumuller, Madeleine M. Meyer, Kia Zellars, Hiuxuan Li, Melissa S. Nolan Ph.D., Mph

Faculty Publications

West Nile virus (WNV) is an endemic arboviral infection in the United States that has undergone phyloge-netic evolution since its introduction 25 years ago. An integrated vector–human–pathogen study was conducted in the summer of 2023 to unearth contemporary Culex quinquefasciatus habitat patterns and human transmission spillover foci in South Carolina, a state with historically little WNV data. A serosurvey revealed WNV seroprevalence 10 times the national average (22% versus 2%, respectively), with unusual epidemiologic risk factors. Female Culex quinquefas-ciatus WNV positivity was low (2.7%), with viral phylogenetics 100% homologous to the WN02 clade. Mosquito vectors clustered in affluent urban neighborhoods …

General And Special Education Teachers’ Perceptions Of Challenges In Inclusive Secondary College Preparatory Science Courses, Jennifer Wilson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem that was addressed through this study is that secondary coteachers struggle to support students with disabilities in inclusionary college preparatory science classes. Grounded in Bandura’s theory of collective agency and supported by Pratt’s framework for achieving symbiosis, the purpose of this study was to explore secondary coteachers’ experiences and challenges as well as their perceptions of collaboration and professional development opportunities related to coteaching in inclusive college preparatory science classrooms in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For this basic qualitative design, semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 secondary college preparatory science coteachers. The data were analyzed …

Identification Of A Cytokine Biomarker For Prognostic Modeling Of Breast Cancer-Related Lymphedema, Alison J Wu, Neil Lin, Jie Su, Cherie Lin, Madison-Shira Hossack, Wei Shi, Farnoosh Abbas-Aghababazadeh, Wei Xu, Benjamin Haibe-Kains, Simona F Shaitelman, Melissa B Aldrich, Fei-Fei Liu, Jennifer Y Y Kwan

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Lymphedema is a chronic complication of breast cancer treatment, and early intervention is crucial to reduce morbidity. This study evaluated the role of blood-based cytokine biomarkers in the prognostication of breast cancer-related lymphedema (BCRL) to improve risk prediction. A secondary analysis of inflammatory biomarkers for BCRL was performed using a previously published cohort of 147 breast cancer patients who had undergone serum cytokine profiling during their treatment at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre from 2010-2014. Prognostic cytokine variables for lymphedema were selected by regression analysis and independence from known clinical risk factors. Regression-based modeling was employed to integrate prognostic variables …

Exploring The Landscape Of Ai In English Language Teaching: A Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis, Zuliati Rohmah, Aura Bunga Tauhid

Bahasa dan Seni: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Seni, dan Pengajarannya

This study provides a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in English Language Teaching (AI-ELT), focusing on global research trends, influential authors, and emerging themes from 1986 to 2024. The findings reveal a significant surge in AI-ELT publications since 2019, driven by technological advancements, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing integration of adaptive learning systems, natural language processing tools, and AI-driven chatbots. Notably, China leads in research output and citation impact, followed by contributions from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and the United States, underscoring regional disparities and opportunities for global collaboration. Key trends highlight the dominance of keywords like …

Kenyon Collegian - February 5, 2026

The Kenyon Collegian

No abstract provided.

The World's Largest Saddle Dam At Risk: Multisensor Geohazard Analysis And Downstream Impacts, Hesham El-Askary, Hesham Morgan, Surendra Maharjan, Ali Elgendy, Wenzhao Li, Rejoice Thomas, Austin Madson, Cyril Rakovski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) Saddle Dam, which holds approximately 89% of the main reservoir's live storage, is one of the largest and most critical auxiliary dams globally; its construction on Ethiopia's Blue Nile has consequently raised significant regional and international concerns regarding potential environmental impacts and geohazard risks. This study presents a comprehensive risk assessment of the GERD Saddle Dam by integrating high-resolution satellite data (GRACE, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, WorldView-3), hydrological modeling (SWAT), Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI), geospatial analysis, and advanced statistical techniques. The results highlight critical structural vulnerabilities, including groundwater infiltration estimated at approximately 41 ± 6.2 billion …

College Student Perceptions Of Ai Teaching Assistants: Bridging Technology And Human Connection For Effective Learning Support, Sarah Steimel

International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

This study examines college students’ perceptions of AI Teaching Assistants (AITAs) in higher education, focusing on their communication experiences and expectations. Using qualitative data from (n=89) open-ended survey responses, six key themes emerged, spanning differences in information processing, social interaction, and task efficiency. Students appreciated AITAs for their speed, availability, and potential to provide unbiased feedback, yet expressed concerns about accuracy and trustworthiness. While AITAs were seen as approachable for simple or low-stakes inquiries, students emphasized the importance of human instructors for complex, nuanced, or emotional support. The findings highlight a preference for maintaining human connections in education while leveraging …

Sport Im Park, Imad Abu-Ghallous

COD in Lingua

This essay explores the benefits of exercising in the park, emphasizing its health advantages and positive impact on well-being. The author describes weekly workouts with a group of U.S. Marines and personal training routines, highlighting the enjoyment of outdoor activity, fresh air, and natural surroundings. Exercising in the park is contrasted with indoor gym workouts, with outdoor exercise shown to enhance mood, energy, and motivation. The essay advocates incorporating park-based physical activity regularly into daily life for both personal health and social engagement.

Atlantischer Papageitaucher (Fratercula Arctica), Natalie Derewjanko

COD in Lingua

The Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica) is a North Atlantic seabird known for its black-and-white plumage and bright orange bill. It breeds on coastal cliffs and islands, feeding chicks by diving for fish. Although still numerous, populations are declining due to climate change, overfishing, pollution, and predators. Conservation efforts like Audubon’s “Project Puffin” have successfully restored colonies, highlighting the importance of protecting nesting sites and food sources.

From Text To Test: Pre-Lecture Reading Boosts Medical Students’ Comprehension And Retention, Hamad A. Alfahaad, Mohammed Y. Alasmary, Emad M. Masuadi, Mohi Eldin M. Magzoub, Henk G. Schmidt

Saudi Medical Journal

Objective: Medical students frequently attend lectures without prior review of the related literature when preparing for examinations. It raises the question of whether studying the material in advance could enhance their learning outcomes during lectures.

Methods: A total of 102 medical students from a Saudi Arabian university took part in this research. Participants were assigned to one of 2 cohorts: one read a 4-page passage before a 15-minute lecture, while the other attended the lecture before reading the passage. Knowledge acquisition was measured using a test that assessed their ability to recall concepts administered 3 times—prior to the session, post …

Characterizing The Impact Of Hydrodynamic Environments On The Expansion Of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Aggregates In Computer Controlled, Clinically Relevant-Scaled Bioreactors, Tiffany Dang, James Kim, Benjamin Turner, Jeff Hou, Sunghoon Jung, Michael S. Kallos, Breanna S .Borys

Advancing Manufacture of Cell and Gene Therapies IX [2026]

Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

The Hbcu Experience Panel : Why I Chose My Hbcu And How It Helped Me Prepare For My Career, Illinois Math And Science Academy, Angela Richardson

Educational Panels

Dr. Anita Connors White (Dean of Scholarship) - Panel Moderator

Angela Richardson (Information Resource Center, Supervisor)Event and Panel Coordinator

Panelists:

• Justin Alfred : Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge. Civil Engineering / Computer science. Lockheed Martin.
• Joseph Bertrand ‘20 : Alumni : North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Associate Engineer at Caterpillar Inc.
• Darryl Burrell Jr. : Alumni :Morgan State University . Project manager at city of Pearland, Texas engineering and Public Works.
• Dr. Garry J. Kennebrew Jr. ‘04 : MAJ, US Army Reserve. Emergency Medicine Physician . Hospitals of Providence. University Medical Center of El Paso. Studied …

Statistical Guarantees Of Deep Generative Models Involving Diverse Spaces: Generation Consistency And Robustness, Anish Chakrabarty

Doctoral Theses

Generative modeling focuses on the task of producing new data samples that closely resemble those drawn from an original, unknown distribution. Despite being well-known in statistical estimation theory, the approach has gained substantial traction in recent years, driven by groundbreaking results in areas such as image synthesis, natural language generation, and network modeling. The complexity of modern-era data domains and the ensuing adaptations that suitable models must undergo have presented new challenges. These advances raise several fundamental questions, the first of which is: When do generative models accurately approximate the true data distribution? One may also ask: How well do …

Cash Or Crash: Return To Player Percentages And Expected Value Of Crash Games, Robert H. Scott Iii, Mikhail M. Sher, Jonathan Daigle

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Crash games are a new type of casino game offered on some online gambling sites. The first crash game was created by the online cryptocurrency casino Bustabit. Other cryptocurrency casinos started offering their own versions of crash games. Now mainstream online casinos have developed their own crash games—notably Rocket by DraftKings. Crash games are easy to learn and play. They offer the opportunity to increase your bet by many hundreds of multiples—though, as we show when deriving expected values, these outcomes are rare. In this paper, we study the history of crash games and calculate theoretical values of crash game …

Funding Resilience Or Missing The Mark? An Analysis Of Rrf Allocation And Climate Risk Alignment In Italian Municipalities, Giulio Breglia, Mariagrazia D’Angeli, Giacomo Gazzellone

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

Natural hazards are an increasing concern, placing disaster preparedness and mitigation at the forefront of policy agendas. In this context, Italy’s Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) has allocated €3 billion for explicit disaster prevention, with a primary focus on hydrogeological risks such as floods and landslides. This study evaluates the geographical and thematic distribution of resilience-related funding, examining whether financial resources have been effectively targeted toward municipalities with the highest exposure to environmental hazards. Using a clustering classification, we identify substantial disparities in the allocation of resilience funds, revealing that municipalities with relatively low risk levels often receive disproportionately high …

February 4, 2026 Faculty Senate Minutes, University Of South Carolina

Faculty Senate

No abstract provided.

Control-By-Interconnection Beyond Casimirs And Connections To Ida-Pbc, Joel Ferguson, Pablo Borja

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Control by Interconnection (CbI) and Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity-Based Control (IDA-PBC) are two nonlinear design methodologies that exploit passivity to construct stabilising controllers. While CbI is known to be a subset of IDA-PBC, the converse link has remained open. This paper revisits CbI by utilising dynamic invariants beyond Casimirs and a more general control structure. Using this more general structure we show a one-to-one correspondence between IDA-PBC and CbI controllers for the class of mechanical systems without friction.

Flaplet: A Full-Stack Web Platform For End-To-End Time Series Data Processing And Machine Learning In Solar Flare Prediction, Mohammadreza Eskandarinasab, Shah Muhammad Hamdi, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi

Computer Science Student Research

Solar flare prediction is a central challenge in space weather forecasting, with direct implications for satellite operations, aviation safety, and power grid reliability. Machine learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for this task, particularly when applied to photospheric magnetic field parameters. FlaPLeT is an open-source, full-stack web platform that supports end-to-end machine learning workflows for multivariate time-series–based solar flare prediction without requiring any coding expertise. Built with React, Django, Celery, and PostgreSQL, the system integrates dataset preprocessing, data augmentation, functional network (graph) construction, and machine learning model training into modular asynchronous tasks that generate downloadable datasets, trained models, and structured JSON …

Hbcu College Of Education Faculty's Knowledge And Attitudes Of Artificial Intelligence, Felicia Taylor

Tennessee State University Alumni Theses and Dissertations

Abstract The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in K–12 education has rapidly transformed teaching and learning by enabling personalized instruction, automating assessments, and enhancing student engagement. However, the readiness of teacher educators at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to prepare future teachers for AI-enhanced classrooms remained underexplored. This mixed-methods study examined the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and perceived barriers among faculty in the College of Education at an HBCU regarding the integration of AI into teacher preparation programs. Quantitative survey data and qualitative open-ended responses were collected and analyzed to assess faculty understanding of AI tools, their perceptions of the …

On Robust Estimation Of Multivariate Location And Scale With Applications, Soumya Chakraborty

Doctoral Theses

The principal objective of this thesis is, in a nutshell, to provide robust estimators of multivariate location and scale which have reasonable to high model efficiency but avoid high computational complexity so as to be practically useful in real problems. We utilize the minimum density power divergence (DPD) and the related philosophy to invoke robustness. There are some computational issues while minimizing the DPD in different multivariate set-ups. We will work on this problem rigorously and come up with three types of estimation procedures which are explicitly or implicitly related to the minimum DPD methodology, keeping the computational issue in …

Ubiquitination Of Oncogenic Mutant P53 Via Attenuation Of Ribosome Biogenesis Machinery Effectively Inhibits Pancreatic Tumor Growth, Mudassier Ahmad, Sahir Sultan Alvi, Haider Ahsan, Carlos Perez, Andrew Massey, Vivek K Kashyap, Neeraj Chauhan, Emmanuel Anning, Manish K Tripathi, Dae J Kim, Nirakar Sahoo, Tamer Oraby, Murali M Yallapu, Mohammad Moshahid Khan, Manu M Sebastian, Subhash C Chauhan, Bilal B Hafeez

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Dysregulated ribosome biogenesis and p53 mutations are known to play oncogenic roles in various cancers, including pancreatic cancer. In this study, we demonstrated the therapeutic potential of BMH-21, a pharmacologic inhibitor of RNA polymerase I, against pancreatic cancer by uncovering a novel molecular mechanism involving RPA194-mediated ubiquitination of mutant p53 without affecting the ubiquitination of wild-type p53. Our key findings are that (i) BMH-21 selectively induces apoptosis and cell growth inhibition of pancreatic cancer cells with no effect on normal human pancreatic ductal epithelial cells; (ii) BMH-21 degrades RPA194; (iii) BMH-21 inhibits recruitment of both RPA194 and RPA135 on rDNA …

Tuko Pamoja: Climate Perspectives From East Africa And Fulbright-Hays, Casey R. Schmitt

Sustainability Research & Practice Seminar Presentations

Dr. Casey R. Schmitt, Interdisciplinary Studies, presents "Tuko Pamoja: Climate Perspectives from East Africa and Fulbright-Hays".

Silver Bow Creek Conservation Area Final Principles For A Greener Cleanup Report, Woodard & Curran

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Ethical Constraint-Based Mpc With Adaptive Weight Scheduling For Autonomous Vehicles In Diverse Scenarios, Hend Mohammed Aafia`

Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are increasingly deployed in complex and safety-critical environments, raising fundamental questions about how ethical principles should be operationalized within real-time control systems. While existing research has extensively addressed ethical decision-making at the planning and behavioral layers, ethical intent is commonly translated into predefined trajectories and delegated to low-level controllers under the assumption of safe execution. This separation introduces a critical gap between ethical reasoning and physical feasibility, particularly in scenarios involving nonlinear vehicle dynamics, actuation limits, constrained perception horizons, and time-critical interactions with vulnerable road users. This thesis proposes an Ethical Model Predictive Control (E-MPC) framework that …

Pipelined Execution Of Attention And Feed-Forward Network Operations On Heterogeneous Cores For Llm Decode Acceleration, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

The technology described in this paper relates to maximization of resource utilization for transformer based large language models (LLMs), specifically during an autoregressive decode phase. For the decode phase, each layer of a transformer model is primarily composed of two distinct computational blocks, an attention operator block and a feed-forward network (FFN) operator block. The attention operator block is overwhelmingly memory-bandwidth bound. In contrast, the FFN operator block is largely compute-bound, and the computations are dominated by large dense matrix multiplications. A chip architecture may be provided that contains at least two types of specialized co-located cores, a first core …

Time And Water, Sheila Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Time and Water (2026), directed by Sara Dosa.

Drive, J. David Stevens

Creative Nonfiction Magazine

No abstract provided.

Thoughtprints, James Glanz

Creative Nonfiction Magazine

No abstract provided.

Perspectivo Scientifico Or, Where The Rays Convene, I Fix A Point, Susan L. Rose

Creative Nonfiction Magazine

No abstract provided.

Robust 10 Gbps Fso Communication And Up To 70db/Km High-Fidelity Psk Modulation Under Diverse Atmospheric Turbulence, Raghad Zuhair Yousif, Soran Salah Fareeq Aldawoodi, Sirwan Kareem Jalal, Sevan H. Ali

Engineering and Technology Journal

This work introduces a free-space optical (FSO) communication system engineered to operate effectively under diverse atmospheric conditions, specifically addressing attenuation levels of 20, 30, 40, and 70 dB/km at a stable data rate of 10 Gbps. The proposed architecture utilizes advanced Phase Shift Keying (PSK) modulation, combined with a 60 dBm continuous-wave laser, a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM), and optical amplifiers with 20 dB gain, to ensure signals can be transmitted through challenging atmospheric channels. The model performs quite well, even in diverse conditions, and remains effective when the signal is 70 dB/Km weaker. It has a Q-factor of approximately 10.069 …