Digital Commons Network^™

Incentives, Evidence, And Reminders For Bureaucrats: Overcoming Barriers To Policy Scale Up, Patrick Agte, Daniel R. Morales, Christopher Neilson, Sebastian Otero, Guatam Rao

Discussion Papers

Scaling up effective policies often requires the attention of frontline bureaucrats with many competing responsibilities. Even when policymakers adopt effective programs, implementation may not follow. In a nationwide experiment in the Dominican Republic, we test interventions to increase school principals' implementation of an educational program proven effective in a previous RCT. Only 37% of control schools verifiably implemented the intervention when ordered to by the Ministry of Education, compared with 83% in the original trial. Implementation was no higher among schools that previously implemented the program in the RCT, suggesting that fixed costs of adoption do not explain non-adoption. We …

"Health" In Hems Means Complete Well-Being, Claudia E. Tordini, Richard S. Franklin

ACTEC Law Journal

This article focuses on the definition of “health” as used in the ascertainable standard exception of Internal Revenue Code § 2041(b)(1)(A), most frequently articulated in trusts as “health, education, maintenance and support” (HEMS). It is clear that a discretionary power to distribute for one’s own health is permitted without causing a taxable general power of appointment, but there is a dearth of authority indicating the meaning of health for this purpose. This article provides the research and foundation for understanding that health as used in HEMS is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the …

2025 Highlights From The Home And Community Department: Strengthening Utah Families And Communities, Heidi Leblanc

Outcomes and Impact Quarterly

USU Extension’s Home and Community Department addresses challenges affecting family and community wellbeing, including financial instability, food insecurity, chronic disease risk, and relationship strain. In 2025, the department implemented an integrated, statewide approach combining financial education, relationship programming, nutrition education, and community wellness initiatives delivered through accessible, research-based formats. Programs produced outcomes across multiple domains. Participants reported increased financial knowledge, confidence, and adoption of behaviors such as budgeting, saving, and debt reduction. Relationship education improved communication, connection, and commitment among couples and families, while parenting and coparenting programs promoted healthier family dynamics. Nutrition initiatives led to improved dietary behaviors, increased …

Report On The Ethical Use Of Ai For Participatory Planning, Sahana Kotha, Blythe Wilson

City and Regional Planning

This report provides an overview of key considerations for using artificial intelligence for community engagement in urban planning. As interest in AI adoption in the public sector increases, an understanding of ethical issues is needed to guide responsible AI implementation. Informed by a literature review and interviews with urban planning practitioners and academics, this report describes and analyzes different AI-supported community engagement methods, explores case studies, and outlines key concerns and opportunities for using AI. We recommend that AI use for community engagement prioritizes transparency, human oversight and accountability, intentional AI implementation, and community involvement.

Faculty List

Washington Law Review

No abstract provided.

Disability And Constitutional Legitimacy, Katherine A. Macfarlane

Washington Law Review

Disability classifications can take one of two forms. The more familiar form targets people with disabilities on account of their disability and harms them. This type of government classification receives deferential rational basis review and is therefore difficult to challenge. But government action that benefits people with disabilities also classifies on the basis of disability and receives rational basis review. This Article focuses on classifications that provide preferential treatment to disabled people precisely because of their disability—through disability affirmative action programs—and argues that their legitimacy is bolstered, not weakened, by the rational basis standard. It does so by distinguishing the …

The Canons Fell Silent: An Analysis Of The Supreme Court's Failure To Use Statutory Interpretation Tools In Sackett V. Epa, Lauren Carlsen

Washington Law Review

In 2023, the United States Supreme Court denied decades of precedent, agency action, and the proper use of canons of interpretation in its decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (Sackett). This case adopted the “continuous surface connection” test, which requires an indistinguishable surface water connection between a wetland and a navigable water to assert Clean Water Act jurisdiction over the wetland. This limitation on agency authority under the Clean Water Act was created through a statutory analysis that failed to apply the “Plain Meaning” and “Whole Act” canons of statutory interpretation. The Court narrowly applied the meaning of …

"Speech Swept Up"—The Constitutionality Of State Prohibitions Of Conversion Therapy For Lgbtq+ Youth, Lauren A. Chivers

Washington Law Review

Since 2012, individual states have passed laws prohibiting state-licensed mental health professionals from engaging in conversion therapy with minor clients. Despite the breadth of research undermining its efficacy and documenting harms, the practice of conversion therapy persists. State regulation of conversion therapy—and thereby licensed professionals’ conduct with their clients—has emerged as a contentious issue for the judiciary. Most significantly, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the matter for the first time in 2026. In Chiles v. Salazar, the Court addressed a challenge to Colorado’s conversion therapy ban, confronting fundamental questions about this unsettled area of First Amendment law. …

Deaf In Prison: The Courts' Failure To Remedy Ada Violations In Prisons, Ruby Grossman

Washington Law Review

The carceral system is one of the many institutions that fails to adequately accommodate individuals with disabilities. D/deaf individuals specifically face a severe lack of resources and accommodations, pervasive mistreatment, and inadequate services while incarcerated. While the Supreme Court has recognized that individuals necessarily do not retain all their constitutional rights while incarcerated, there are constitutional rights and statutory protections with which prisons are required to comply. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one such statute. When it comes to D/deaf incarcerated individuals, the ADA requires that prisons provide reasonable accommodations so those individuals are not deprived of programs, …

Evidence Brief: Shifting Attitudes And Social Norms On Fgm Through Community-Based Interventions In Somaliland, Stella Muthuri, Dennis Matanda, Francis Obare, Stephen Kizito, Chi-Chi Undie

Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Choices

This study, conducted in Sool and Sanaag regions of Somaliland within the context of The Girl Generation Support to the Africa-Led Movement (TGG-ALM), provides insights into how community-based, dialogue-driven interventions influence attitudes, social norms, and behavioural intentions related to FGM and gender.

Findings show that while personal opposition to FGM is relatively high, this does not consistently translate into perceived or collective opposition. Individuals tend to view their own attitudes as more progressive than those of their families and communities, pointing to a critical “norms misalignment” that constrains behaviour change. This gap suggests that entrenched social expectations – particularly around …

Making Better Use Of Data For Improved Health Service Delivery In Punjab: Transforming Data Into Action Evidence, Population Council Pakistan

Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Choices

Strong health systems depend not only on collecting data, but on using it effectively for planning, monitoring, and decision-making. To strengthen evidence-based management across Punjab's health sector, the Population Council partnered with the Health and Population Department, Punjab, particularly the Health Information and Service Delivery Unit (HISDU), to improve the utilization of routine health information. This brief summarizes the collaboration's focus on three complementary areas: (1) Development of the ASET (Analytics for Service Efficiency and Tracking) platform to transform routine data into actionable information; (2) Strengthening the Capacity of Data Users through specialized training in data analytics, visualization, and use …

Leading With Emotional Intelligence: Strengthening Leadership Effectiveness In Early Childhood Education, Christy L. Martin

Dissertations

This study examined the role of emotional intelligence (EI) in leadership effectiveness within early childhood education settings. Leadership in these contexts involves navigating complex relationships, staff stress, and organizational demands, yet leadership preparation often emphasizes technical skills over emotional competencies. The study explored how EI influences leadership effectiveness and how reflective practices support leadership development. Guided by the question How does emotional intelligence impact leadership effectiveness?, the study used a mixed-methods design. Quantitative data were collected through an EI Inventory of Practices self-assessment measuring four EI domains, and qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. Findings suggest emotionally intelligent …

Cut And Cultivate: Process And Practice, Kailey Atkinson

Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

Using a candy-coated, flower-ridden, bright palette and maximalist sense of composition, my artwork builds community through narrative collage, photography, painting, sculpture, poetry, and social practice. Through a feminist lens, these bright works explore body image, gender roles, and social issues. Obsessively collecting and repurposing an archive of vintage imagery, my work draws parallels between traditional and contemporary topics through the language of collage and redaction.  My nascent social practice has led me to engage with narratives outside my own experience and offer my process as a healing modality to other women.

In a tumultuous political climate where art can serve …

Trim-Transfer: A Transfer Learning Approach For Cross-Trim Level Can Intrusion Detection, Baylor J. Whitehead

Master's Theses

Modern vehicles contain many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that communicate through CAN. While CAN enables efficient data communication, it lacks built in authentication and encryption, allowing adversarial actors to inject malicious CAN messages. This limitation has motivated the development of CAN intrusion detection systems (IDS). However, deploying IDS across a vehicle lineup requires collecting large labeled datasets and retraining models, increasing development cost and limiting scalability.

This thesis investigates the use of transfer learning with LSTM-based deep neural networks to reduce retraining cost while maintaining model detection performance. A baseline LSTM model is trained using CAN data from a base …

Exploring Regenerative Vegetable Systems On The Central Coast Of California, Una S. O'Connell

Master's Theses

As climate change and current agricultural practices place pressure on the long term sustainability and resilience of food production systems, there is growing interest in whether existing agricultural systems can adapt to maintain productivity while improving environmental outcomes.

This study evaluated the effects of regenerative versus standard organic vegetable production systems on yield, insect communities, and weed suppression across three field trials conducted on California's Central Coast. In addition, I collected baseline soil health data for all trials. Trials 1 and 2 were carried out at the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Organic Farm using cabbage and broccoli as cash …

A Comparative Study Of Model Predictive Control And The Stanley Method For Vehicle Path Tracking Applications, Noah S. Fitzgerald

Master's Theses

This thesis compares a model predictive controller (MPC) and a lateral Stanley controller for vehicle path-tracking applications under simulation-based and perception-driven operating conditions. Both controllers were evaluated in simulation using a nonlinear dynamic bicycle model executing single and double lane change maneuvers. Following simulation-based evaluation, both controllers were implemented on hardware within a perception-driven steering-control pipeline. This pipeline utilized recorded sensor data from the MXcarkit 1/8^th-scale autonomous vehicle platform, incorporating lane instance segmentation and homography-based roadway estimation.

Under idealized simulation conditions, the MPC demonstrated improved trajectory-tracking performance during aggressive maneuvers while requiring greater steering activity and computational effort …

Discrete S-Band Low-Noise Amplifier Designs For High Data-Rate Cubesat Uplink, Alejandro Martin Cosper, Alejandro Cosper

Master's Theses

In the world of small satellites, there is growing interest in higher-data-rate systems and the technologies that enable them. Due to limitations in the extremely reliable and proven Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) systems, the current CubeSats developed by the Cal Poly CubeSat Laboratory operate at 9600 Baud. However, the low Baud rate is rooted in decades of proven flights and is very resistant to many forms of signal degradation. While a slow but simple system was critical to past successes, future satellite payloads may require higher data rates to drastically reduce the number of passes needed to transfer large amounts of …

How Human Vs. Ai Chatbots Support Psychological Needs Of Students, Tymon T. Vu

Master's Theses

AI auto graders and virtual assistants are increasingly prevalent in educational set- tings. Although current literature demonstrates that AI chatbots can positively im- pact student motivation, there is little definitive evidence exploring whether these systems can replicate the effective motivational methods used by human teachers. Thus, in this experiment, we investigate how the perception of the identity of a tutor (AI versus human) impacts the psychological needs of students. 27 undergraduates taking introductory computer science courses were asked to explain code in plain English (EiPE). Participants received feedback from two tutors in within-subjects fashion: one human and one labeled as …

A Study On Quantization And Hardware Cost Tradeoffs In A 5g Nr Ldpc Decoder On Fpga, Giancarlo Acosta

Master's Theses

The fixed-point implementation of a 5G New Radio LDPC decoder forces a tradeoff between precision and hardware cost, governed by the variable node word length W_L, the check node message width W_R, and the normalized min-sum correction factor α. This thesis characterizes how these three parameters affect both error correction performance and FPGA resource utilization for an LDPC decoder on an established LDPC decoder architecture. A bit-accurate MATLAB core model records bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) while a verified HDL Coder model generates synthesizable VHDL for Vivado synthesis, and both are swept …

Deep Learning For Affect Recognition: A Comparative Study Of Physiological Sensor-Based And Facial Image-Based Approaches, Ravi Panchal, Ravi Panchal

Master's Theses

This thesis investigates deep learning approaches for affect recognition using wearable physiological signals and facial image data. The sensor-based component evaluates stress and affect recognition on the WESAD dataset using wrist-based physiological windows and examines multiple temporal modeling strategies, including convolutional, recurrent, hybrid CNN-LSTM, attention-based, ensemble, and time-frequency approaches.

The image-based component evaluates hard-label facial expression recognition on AffectNet+ using pre-trained ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B3, and ConvNeXt-Tiny architectures across Easy, Challenging, and Difficult subsets representing different levels of expression ambiguity.

Experimental results show that the proposed Multi-Branch Attention CNN-BiLSTM (MBA-CNN-BiLSTM) model achieves the strongest wearable stress- and affect-recognition performance among the evaluated …

Movement And Space Use Of Weaned Northern Elephant Seal (Mirounga Angustirostris) Pups During Their First At-Sea Foraging Migration, Katie Saenger

Master's Theses

The northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) is a marine mammal known for engaging in long foraging migrations at sea. Adult male northern elephant seals follow pathways along the western coast of North America towards Alaska and adult female northern elephant seals follow pathways to open ocean in the North Pacific. However, there is little information on weaned northern elephant seal pup foraging behavior during their first foraging migration. This lack of knowledge is significant because northern elephant seals have a mortality rate of >50% in the first year. This project aimed to better understand the at-sea migratory movement …

Reproducing And Evaluating Charger Surfing: Robustness Of Smartphone Charging-Line Side-Channels, Colby M. Watts

Master's Theses

Smartphones are frequently connected to external, untrusted charging hardware, creating opportunities for side-channel attacks that do not require malware or direct access to device data. Charger Surfing, a recently proposed charging-line power analysis side-channel attack, reported high accuracy in inferring touchscreen input from voltage measurements collected from a smartphone’s charging cable; however, the reproducibility and robustness of these results under different conditions remain unclear. This thesis presents an independent replication and evaluation of Charger Surfing, including the development of an end-to-end data collection pipeline consisting of a modified charging cable, oscilloscope-based recordings, custom Android app, automated trace processing, and convolutional …

Improving The Reliability And Performance Of A Supersonic Indraft Tube Wind Tunnel, Christian J. Kaml

Master's Theses

Access to supersonic testing is increasing in demand, and wind tunnels remain one of the safest and most cost-effective methods for gathering high-speed flow data. Despite being more economical than alternative options, supersonic wind tunnel facilities often require substantial investment to construct, operate, and maintain.

The novel indraft tube tunnel architecture was conceived as a high-speed flow testbed that incorporates features of both Ludwieg tubes and indraft wind tunnels to maintain costs low enough to be accessible even to small universities. This design was first developed and tested in 2018 at California Polytechnic State University, featuring a cost per test …

Preserving Structural Alias Information Across The Mlir-To-Llvm Lowering Boundary, Shravan Sheth

Master's Theses

Machine learning training and inference workloads run at massive scale, where the efficiency of generated machine code directly affects throughput and energy consumption. The compilers that lower model specifications to hardware instructions rely on optimization passes that can only exploit information visible in the representations they operate on. MLIR, the intermediate representation framework underlying production machine learning compilers such as IREE and Triton, is designed so that each abstraction level can encode semantics that lower levels cannot represent. One example is memref.subview, which partitions a buffer into typed regions with explicit offsets and sizes, making structural non-overlap provable from the …

Praxsmith: An Actor-Centric Domain Specific Language For Emergent Narratives In Video Games, Jacob C. Kelleran

Master's Theses

The video game industry is rapidly growing, and interest in game development is growing alongside it. Among this growing interest is a desire to include branching and emergent narratives in games. This subject is understood to be difficult, as every possible trajectory within the story creates exponential complexity. Large studios are sometimes able to create convincing implementations, but that is often with hundreds of developers and writers. Over the years, various solutions have been proposed to create frameworks and languages that aim to tackle this problem, with varying degrees of success. Some frameworks attempt this by placing the focus on …

Building And Facility Asset Inventory Assessment And Maintenance, Catherine Keathley, Bethany Paris, Jon Wilcoxson

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) manages approximately 1,500 buildings statewide, including facilities such as office buildings, maintenance and equipment garages, and storage sheds. Because managing buildings and properties requires considerable effort, agency decision makers need reliable monitoring and management tools that generate and organize data which can be used to determine the best course of action for facility maintenance and replacement. In addition to assessing the Cabinet’s building inventory, this report advances recommendations to improve the collection, management, and reporting of facility-related data. Assessment of the inventory managed by KYTC included geolocation of all properties and the buildings therein. Once …

Improving The Clinical Trial Landscape For Patients With Atypical Variants Of Alzheimer's Disease, Nick Corriveau-Lecavalier, Neus Falgàs, Deepti Putcha, Jonathan Graff-Radford, Keir X.X. Yong, Baayla D.C. Boon, Rosaleena Mohanty, Eric Westman, Colin Groot, David T. Jones, Lea T. Grinberg, Gil D. Rabinovici, Jennifer L. Whitwell, Liana G. Apostolova, Melissa E. Murray, Dustin B. Hammers, Suzanne E. Schindler, Inga Atonsdottir, Elizabeth K. Rhodus, Jonathan M. Schott, Ignacio Illán-Gala, Ogbuagu Chukwuanugo, Jorge J.Llibre Guerra, Ruth Peters, Erin L. Abner, Carla Abdelnour, Albert Lladó, Renaud La Joie

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Patients with atypical variants of Alzheimer's disease (AD) often present at a younger age with predominantly non-amnestic impairments and a more aggressive disease course. Historically, individuals with atypical presentations have not been included in large-scale clinical trials, which typically focus on late-onset, sporadic amnestic-predominant AD. Consequently, treatment options and research efforts specific to atypical AD remain limited. The emergence of amyloid-targeting therapies that slow disease progression underscores these challenges, as evidence supporting their efficacy in early-onset amnestic and non-amnestic AD variants is scarce. This perspective article argues that atypical AD represents an excellent disease model for clinical trials and proposes …

Transportability Analyses In Comparative Effectiveness Research, Blythe Adamson, Wei Liu, Stephen Duffield, Anouk Déruaz-Luyet, Dimitri Bennett, Montse Soriano Gabarró, Mehmet Burcu, Daniela Claudia Moga, Sarah Welby, Tianze Jiao, Xuerong Wen, Grammati Sarri

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

The Problem: Transportability considerations are increasingly important to answer research questions in comparative effectiveness research (CER) to support the transfer of evidence on medicinal products across countries or settings. As drug development costs rise and healthcare systems and professionals face economic and resource pressures, leveraging existing data and evidence generated across borders or settings can improve efficiency and inform decisions in product development and decision-making (regulatory, health technology assessment [HTA] and clinical care). Differences in population characteristics, healthcare systems, and data availability, including coding discrepancies, may present significant challenges to the transportability of CER evidence. Without rigorous methodological approaches, the …

Research Project Management: A Case Study On File Organization, Melanie S. Brasher

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Presentations

Poster was presented at the International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST) Annual Conference, Virtual, June 2-5, 2026.

Increasing attention is being paid to not just research data management but also research project management. This refers to the myriad of organizational, administrative, and metacognitive tasks needed to manage research projects from beginning to end (Noy, 2024). One overlooked aspect of research project management is collaboration in shared digital workspaces. For example, are files named and organized in such a way that it is easy for new collaborators to get up to speed?

We have access to tools …

2026 June, Morehead State University. Office Of Communications & Marketing.

Morehead State Press Release Archive, 1961 to the Present

Press releases for June of 2026.