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Recent Advances In Bioethanol Production From Water Hyacinth: A Critical Review, Umuamina A. Matola, Mahir Mohammed Said, Olga-Ioanna Kalantzi, Abraham K. Temu

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Water hyacinth (WH) is a highly invasive tropical aquatic weed with high holocellulose and low lignin content, making it a promising lignocellulosic feedstock for second-generation bioethanol production. Producing bioethanol from WH offers a sustainable approach to simultaneously managing invasive biomass and producing renewable energy. This review critically evaluates recent advancements in bioethanol production from WH by examining pretreatment, hydrolysis, and fermentation technologies reported between 2014 and 2024. A PRISMA-guided literature search was conducted using the Scopus and Web of Science databases, and fifty-nine original research articles were selected for analysis. The reviewed studies were comparatively assessed based on pretreatment strategies, …

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 …

Urban Spatial Development Control In Tanzania: Analysis Of Factors Influencing Gis Application Using Structural Equation Modelling (Sem)., Happiness Protas Mmanda, Nestory Yamungu

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Rapid urbanization in developing countries has intensified urban expansion, creating challenges for sustainable development. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) enhance spatial planning, but empirical evidence on factors influencing their effectiveness remains limited. This study examines determinants of GIS application in Urban Spatial Development Control (USDC). The objectives are to (1) identify and categorize factors affecting GIS use, (2) assess relative strength, and (3) develop a validated structural model explaining GIS adoption in USDC. Data were collected from 103 LGAs by a mixed sampling method. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis classified influencing factors into technology-related (α = 0.869, CR = 0.881), process-related …

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 …

Congenital Nephrotic Syndrome In Oman: A 20-Year Single-Centre Experience, Muzna Al Hashmi, Anisa Al Maskari, Sulaiman Al Saidi, Badria Al Ghaithi, Mohammed Al Riyami, Naifain Al Kalbani

Sultan Qaboos University Medical Journal

Objectives: Congenital nephrotic syndrome (CNS) is a rare, severe disease presenting within the first three months of life, with limited prevalence data from Oman and the Gulf region. This study aimed to report 20 years' experience of congenital nephrotic syndrome (CNS) in a single centre in Oman. Methods: This retrospective study including children diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome in first 3 months of life, from January 2000 to December 2020 at Royal Hospital, Muscat, Oman. Results: A total of 26 patients were included in the study, with no gender predominance. Consanguinity was noted in 61.5% of patients and a …

Shu World Review- September 14th 2026, Diplolab, Seton Hall University

SHU World Review

No abstract provided.

Effect Of Sugarcane Bagasse Ash Incorporated With Limestone Calcined Clay Cement On Geotechnical Properties Of Swelling Soils Relevant To Road Applications, Horris K. Nangulama, Siya P. Rimoy, John E. Elvis

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

This study aims to investigate the use and effect of sugarcane bagasse ash (BA) incorporated with limestone calcined clay cement (LC³) as a sustainable and cost-effective alternative for stabilizing swelling soils. Therefore, BA incorporating LC³ was added to black cotton soil (BCS), known for its high swelling potential. Series of laboratory tests including free swell index (FSI), compaction, California bearing ratio (CBR), and shear strength were conducted to evaluate the performance of BA incorporating LC³ binder-stabilized BCS. Additionally, microstructural analyses using pore size distribution (PSD), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were performed to …

Hydro-Chemical And Bacteriological Assessment Of Zanzibar Groundwater Resources, Subira Munishi, Andrew Kimati

Tanzania Journal of Engineering and Technology (TJET)

Groundwater is the primary freshwater source in Zanzibar, sustaining domest ic, agricultural, and tourism needs. Increasing demand has intensified the pressure on this limited resource and has led to over-abstraction and contamination. Amid the growing demand and contamination pressures, this study examines the quality of groundwater in Zanzibar to clarify current conditions and emerging risks, and inform resource management and public health priority interventions. Particularly, the present hydro-chemical and bacteriological quality and variability was examined for both Unguja and Pemba Islands. A total of seventy-two samples were collected using a stratified random sampling approach, with the first field campaign focusing …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Beyond Thinking Like A Lawyer: Lonergan's Transcendental Method And The Formation Of Ethical Lawyers, Sigrid Vendrell-Polanco

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

Law schools have long promised to teach students to "think like lawyers."1 We teach students to read cases carefully, identify legally significant facts, extract rules from precedent, distinguish adverse authority, construct arguments, and predict how courts are likely to resolve disputes. These are indispensable skills. But they leave open a more fundamental question: What kind of lawyer are we teaching our students to become?2 Legal education is extraordinarily good at teaching students how to determine what the law is and what the law allows. We are perhaps less intentional about teaching them to ask what, as lawyers, they ought to …

Using Lonergan’S Method To Instruct For The Scholar: St. Mary’S Law Review On Race And Social Justice, Mike Martinez Jr

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

The Scholar began in the 2000s to bring light to the social justice issues of the day: Hopwood, Proposition 187 in California, Amendment 2 in Colorado, and the aggressive assault on civil rights laws, immigrants’ rights, and bilingual education. The origins of this publication began as a grassroots effort of six law students working to make a difference and contribute to the legal conversation by advocating for traditionally marginalized groups. The vision of the founding editors provided a voice for ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, immigrants, racial minorities, women, and other disenfranchised groups often silenced in our legal discourse. The concept and …

A Philosophy Of Travel: Lonergan's Transcendental Method Applied To The Experience Of Not Belonging, Andrew Brei

San Jose - Lonergan Chair in Catholic Philosophy

Travel can be an exhausting thing, offering little time for reflection. Often, traveling involves a dizzying assortment of steps: we book flights, pack bags, find accommodations, and move through unfamiliar streets in search of “the sights.” Less often do we stop to ask what we are actually doing when we do this—what cognitive and existential work travel involves. This essay takes up that question by borrowing the structure of Bernard Lonergan’s transcendental method, the four-level account of human cognition and action that runs from experience through understanding and judgment to decision. Lonergan’s method is not a set of external rules …

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 …

Identification Of At-Risk Rail Network Segments And Development Of Fragility-Based Resilience Metrics, Haizhong Wang, Brian M. Staes, Benyamin Ghoreishi

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report presents a multi-hazard risk and resilience assessment of the U.S. rail network. The research identifies at-risk rail segments exposed to flash flooding, riverine flooding, extreme heat, and landslides using historical hazard records, federal accident and incident data, and meteorological datasets spanning 2000–2024. Flood exposure is mapped nationally by linking storm records to rail alignments and estimating the frequency and intensity of events at the segment level. For extreme heat, a fragility analysis of 153 documented thermal buckling derailments reveals that a significant share of failures occurred under relatively mild environmental conditions, pointing to infrastructure and maintenance factors rather …

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

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

God Save The Keen: Designing For Authentic Over Artificial Learning, Heather J. Leslie Phd

Learning Design Center: Staff Scholarship

While AI has put the transactional model of schooling on steroids, I argue that AI is not the only artificial aspect of education. Grades are an artificial barrier towards authentic learning which decades of research have shown negatively impact intrinsic motivation, intellectual risk-taking, and depth of thinking. In this article, I explore what instructors can do to design authentic learning to center the human learner, not the AI.

“I Was Not Wonder Woman And Required Help”: Black, Latina, And White Women’S Recovery From The Covid-19 Pandemic, J. Mitchell Vaterlaus, Colton Pierce, Harry Foster, Alison Brennan, Nicole Wanago

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected women, particularly women of color, yet less is known about their recovery experiences following the end of the public health emergency. This exploratory mixed-methods study examined recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic among Black, Latina, and White women in the United States. Participants (N = 133) completed a survey that included a self-reported recovery measure and open-ended questions regarding their recovery experiences. A chi-square analysis indicated a significant association between race/ethnicity and recovery status, with Latina women more likely to report ongoing recovery than Black and White women. Codebook thematic analysis identified four themes: (1) …

Ndls Communicator: Week Of 09.14.26, Notre Dame Law School

NDLS Communicator

The Latest News

• Religious Liberty Clinic requests emergency relief from U.S. Supreme Court to protect Orthodox Jew's religious exercise

Student News

• J.S.D. candidate Valentina Salazar

Faculty Briefs

• Lloyd Mayer
• Mary Ellen O'Connell
• Paolo G. Carozza
• Carter Snead
• Emily Bremer
• Rick Garnett
• Christine Venter
• Dennis Wieboldt

Events

• Faculty Colloquium - Paul Yowell, University of Oxford
• Faculty and Staff Birthday Celebration
• 2025-26 SCOTUS Recap
• Homecoming 2026: Notre Dame vs. Michigan State game, September 19, 2026

Looking Ahead

• Law & Economics Workshop: Stephan Wernicke, Humboldt University of Berlin Delaware in the European Union? EU Inc. – A New European Corporate Legal Form
• Conversation …

Settlement Trustee's Second Status Report

Catholic Dioceses in Bankruptcy

No abstract provided.

Impacts Of Sprouted Barley On Performance And Carcass Ultrasound Measurements In Angus-Influenced Steers During Backgrounding, Zachary C. Crump, Anthony Fernando Alberto, Bailee L. Brown, Bryce W. Roholt, Lillian L. Okamoto, Ryan A. Spurling, Robert E. Ward, Brady M. Blackett, Robert L. Harding, Sanjeewa D. Ranathunga, Kara J. Thornton

Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Science Faculty Publications

The objective of this research was to determine the impacts of including sprouted barley (SB) in the diets of backgrounding beef steers. Angus-influenced steers (328 ± 6.59 kg) were assigned to one of four diets (n = 15/diet): a control (CON) diet, or a diet containing 5%, 10%, or 20% SB (DM basis)—replacing corn silage and some rolled barley. Individual intake and feeding behavior were monitored using Vytelle bunks. Body weight (BW) and ruminal fluid samples were collected on d 0, 30, and 60, while dry matter intake (DMI), feeding behavior, average daily gain (ADG), and gain-to-feed ratio (G:F) were …

Benefits And Costs For Chattanooga Residents Of Incorporating Training Into Economic Development Strategies, Timothy J. Bartik, Iryna V. Lendel, Sevrin Williams

Upjohn Institute Technical Reports

This report evaluates the benefit-cost tradeoffs of adding a workforce training component to Chattanooga's economic development incentive packages, using the Bartik Benefit-Cost Model of Business Incentives. Focusing on hypothetical projects across seven industries, the analysis compares the present value of training costs against resulting gains in residents' per capita income over a 20-year horizon. Findings show that training, layered onto existing PILOT-based tax incentives, delivers benefits more than 25 times its costs—driven by training's greater cost-effectiveness in inducing business location decisions and its stronger tendency to direct new jobs toward local residents. While training is not self-financing from a city …

Mmu: 09/14/26-09/20/26, Student Bar Association

Monday Morning Update

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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.

[Excerpt From] Evidence-Based Practice Essentials For Nurses & The Healthcare Workforce, 2nd Edition, Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, Lynn Gallagher-Ford, Ellen Fineout-Overholt

Sigma Publications: Book Excerpts

Hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide have worked to build and sustain evidence-based practice (EBP) cultures, yet many still struggle to define what true EBP competency looks like in practice. Evidence-Based Practice Essentials for Nurses & the Healthcare Workforce: A Competency-Based Practical Guide for Improving Quality, Safety, & Outcomes, Second Edition, cuts through the confusion with a clear, actionable road map for making evidence-driven decisionmaking part of an organization’s DNA. Authored by worldwide EBP experts Bernadette Mazurek Melnyk, Lynn Gallagher-Ford, and Ellen Fineout-Overholt, this hands-on resource serves as a practical toolkit for organizations committed to excellence. Whether pursuing or maintaining Magnet® …

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