Digital Commons Network^™

The Rise Of The Nondelegation Doctrine And The Decline Of Our Oceans, Stephanie Reifenberg

Colorado Environmental Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Befriending Your Anxiety Through The Polyvagal Lens By Utilizing Embodied Imagery, Cassandra Lacroix

Art Therapy | Master's Theses

Many individuals experience anxiety disorders, which can significantly impact their well-being if not properly addressed. Recognizing the need for effective tools to support people with anxiety, this research aligns the key pillars of self-control and present focus awareness of physiological responses through art to harness emotional regulation. This research uses the lens of the polyvagal theory, and looking at embodied imagery, breathwork, and transitional objects to conceptualize ways to help decrease anxiety and enhance body perception and autonomic awareness will be witnessed in participants. The aim of this study was also to establish a strategy that individuals could turn to …

A Generative Approach For Document Enhancement With Small Unpaired Data, Mohammad Shahab Uddin, Wael Khallouli, Andres Sousa-Poza, Samuel Kovacic, Jiang Li

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Shipbuilding drawings, crafted manually before the digital era, are vital for historical reference and technical insight. However, their digital versions, stored as scanned PDFs, often contain significant noise, making them unsuitable for use in modern CAD software like AutoCAD. Traditional denoising techniques struggle with the diverse and intense noise found in these documents, which also does not adhere to standard noise models. In this paper, we propose an innovative generative approach tailored for document enhancement, particularly focusing on shipbuilding drawings. For a small, unpaired dataset of clean and noisy shipbuilding drawing documents, we first learn to generate the noise in …

Factors Influencing Physical Therapist Career Choice For U.S. Pre-Profession Undergraduate Students: Implications For Recruitment And Admissions, Ryan M. Babl

Health Professions Education

Purpose: To explore the relationships between factors influencing healthcare career choices, demographics, select financial factors, and individuals' self-predicted likelihood of applying to an entry-level DPT program. Additionally, it seeks to identify perceived facilitators and barriers for students who have yet to apply. Methods: An embedded mixed methods research design was employed, utilizing a modified version of an existing survey instrument. A total of 182 responses were collected from college students ages 18-45 at two- and four-year private and public higher education institutions in the east south-central U.S. Following casewise diagnostics, 169 responses were included in the final multiple-regression analysis. Relationships …

Recovering The Nium Trail: A Journey Through Collaboration And Multidisciplinary Mapping, Crystal West

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study explores and maps an ancient, historic, and contemporary travel corridor that follows the San Joaquin River in the Central Sierra Nevada of California. It is called the Nium or People’s Trail by the North Fork Mono Tribe, the French Trail in historic archives, and the Mammoth Trail on contemporary US Forest Service maps. When I agreed to the request by Chairman Ron Goode of the North Fork Mono Tribe to map the Nium Trail, I was saying yes to a different, more broad and inclusive approach than I had previously taken as an archaeologist documenting archaeological sites and …

Teacher Perceptions Of Social-Emotional Learning Program Implementation In Rural Georgia Middle Schools, John Kraig Howell

Theses and Dissertations

Social emotional learning (SEL) refers to a set of skills and competencies that allow students to effectively establish, develop and maintain interpersonal relationships with others, as well as to manage their intrapersonal feelings, emotions and responses to social situations. Students who receive SEL instruction have shown higher academic achievement levels and improved behavioral and social competence. Though an increasing demand is being placed on schools and teachers to address the social emotional needs of students, little guidance exists regarding implementation. Research indicates that teacher perceptions of SEL have a direct impact on the implementation of and outcomes associated with SEL. …

School-Based Educators’ Perceptions Of Professional Development And Its Impact On Their Ability To Improve Literacy Instruction For Underperforming K-2 Students, Monica Mcdaniel

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to examine school-based educators’ perceptions of professional learning and its impact on their ability to improve literacy instruction. The perceived role of the principal in the implementation, monitoring, and sustaining professional learning was also explored. A total of eight teachers, two media specialists, two instructional coaches, and five school leaders at two elementary schools in the Southeast United States participated in the study. Findings include the importance of quality, ongoing professional development, the leader’s role in planning, participation in, and supporting teachers through the professional development process, and everyone’s role in …

Branding & Marketing Strategies For Silver Linings Personal Care Home Llc., Kalicia R. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

What Does It Mean To Be A Human In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence?, Campbell R. Eubanks

Theses and Dissertations

Campbell Eubanks’ artwork reflects ideas surrounding the ever-growing complexities of human nature in the context of our growing world. She uses ceramics to investigate human purpose in a digital world by employing artificial intelligence along with her own skills and craft. Her work aims to challenge viewers to contemplate the intricate relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. During her research, Eubanks has looked towards other artists who invite AI into their traditional practices. Sougwen Chung is one example of this. Chung has trained AI robots to learn her style and works alongside them in performances to create collaborative gestural drawings. …

K-12 Teacher Perceptions Of Online Learning And Information Technology Support Post Covid-19 Pandemic, Michael Wayne Carraway Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines K-12 teacher technology acceptance through their perceptions of the learning management system Google Classroom, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. This correlational research study is conducted through a survey adapted from the Technology Acceptance Model, Information technology support analysis, and a functionality usability survey. This study examines the relationships between functionality, usability, IT support, perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), attitudes towards use (ATU), behavioral intention to use (BI), and actual usage (AU). Structural equation modelling is conducted at the construct level in order to determine relationships between constructs. Additionally, this study explores assessment …

The Effect Of Transformational Leadership On Teacher Burnout: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed Methods Study, Jessica Grace Watson

Theses and Dissertations

The teaching field is a depleting workforce and more teachers are experiencing burnout, which is causing them to leave the profession (Marken & Agrawal, 2022; Nguyen et al., 2022). However, transformational leadership can improve job satisfaction, which can potentially reduce teacher burnout (Barnett et al., 2001; Erkutlu, 2008; Tian et al., 2021). The purpose of this study, grounded in Bass’ (1985) transformational leadership framework, was to examine the effect of transformational leadership on teacher burnout and to analyze the teachers’ perceptions of transformational leadership support. The study answered the following research questions: What is the relationship between transformational leadership and …

Teacher Perceptions Of A Literacy Intervention Implementation In Middle School: A Case Study, James E. Maye Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the perspectives of teachers at Oakridge Middle School regarding the implementation of a literacy intervention and evaluate its impact on students’ literacy achievement. The study was guided by the social learning theory, which posits that a literacy intervention program would enhance students’ literacy skills. The study findings indicated that the program improved students’ reading and writing confidence and comprehension abilities. The successful implementation of the literacy intervention was facilitated by teachers’ collaboration and the use of data trackers, despite challenges, such as student buy-in and motivation issues. Technology-based programs, such …

Barriers Secondary Special Education Teachers Face When Developing Transition Plans For Students With Disabilities, Charles Joseph Baima

Theses and Dissertations

The process of transitioning from high school to adulthood is an intimidating one for disabled students. It is also cumbersome for the individuals that work with these students. Transition planning and services for students with disabilities differ across schools across the United States. By the time they turn sixteen, students with disabilities must have a transition plan created within their individualized education program in accordance with federal and state laws. These mandates present challenges to educators as they develop plans for a disabled student’s postsecondary life. Success for disabled students should focus on their interests and strengths while considering their …

Deep-Learning Approaches To Predict Remaining Useful Life Of Hard Disks, Rohan Mohapatra

Master's Projects

On a daily basis, data centers process huge volumes of data using inexpensive hard disks. Data stored in these disks serve a range of critical functional needs from financial, and healthcare to aerospace. As such, premature disk failure and consequent loss of data can be catastrophic. To mitigate the risk of failures, cloud storage providers perform condition-based monitoring and replace hard disks before they fail. By estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of hard disk drives, one can predict the time-to-failure of a particular device and replace it at the right time, ensuring maximum utilization whilst reducing operational costs. We …

The [Object, Me, Symbiote, Other] In The Machine: Insights From Video Game Psychology For Teleporter-Robot Relations, Nicholas David Bowman, Jaime Banks

Media Studies - Open-Access Faculty Scholarship

Avatars serve as embodied representations of user agency in physical, digital, and mixed realities, extending our physical, cognitive, and perceptual abilities into those spaces. From this perspective, there is a tendency to presume that as users assume control of an avatar, they necessarily psychologically merge with and identify as that entity. Borrowing from video game psychology research into player-avatar relations (PAR) and player-avatar interactions (PAX), we present an argument for considering a broader range of sociality regarding user relations with avatar robots: Seeing avatar robots as Object, Me, Symbiote, and authentically social Others. We extrapolate from PAX measurements to tentatively …

Datafication, Power, And Publics In India's National Digital Health Ecosystem, Ramya Chandrasekhar

Socio-Legal Review

While evident for a long time, the COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated the need to strengthen India’s public healthcare system. But since 2017, the solution to India’s public health woes takes the shape of the National Digital Health Ecosystem (‘NDHE’) – a digital system for the generation, use, and “frictionless” circulation of health data across healthcare actors through the use of artefacts such as health IDs, electronic health records, data standards, and federated computing architectures. These artefacts are not neutral technological systems. Rather, together with social practices, they constitute a “data infrastructure.” Seeing the NDHE as a data infrastructure allows us …

“Continuity Without Cultivation”?: The Student Figure, Legal Education, And Writing Pedagogy In India, Diya Deviah, Ammel Sharon

Socio-Legal Review

This paper reconstructs the historical figure of the student in India through the intertwined trajectories of writing pedagogy and legal education. Moving beyond the socio-political portrayal of students as agents of resistance or nation-building, it examines how the classroom can function as a dynamic site for meaning-making. Drawing on archival materials, including syllabi, composition manuals, and legal reform reports, the paper traces the role of English language education in shaping legal pedagogy from the colonial period to the establishment of contemporary National Law Universities. Situating these developments within broader debates in writing and composition studies, the paper proposes alternative pedagogical …

The Violence Of Numbers: A Critical Appraisal Of The Justice Capabilities Framework, Abhineet Maurya

Socio-Legal Review

Systems of indicators and international rankings have today become a new mode of evaluating social, political, and economic life. In the context of measuring the rule of law and justice delivery systems at a local as well as a global level, such indicators enable empirically grounded solutions to justice reform issues. However, scholars like Siddharth Peter de Souza argue that the existing discourse concerning the rule of law and access to justice indicators promote a specific vision of a well functioning justice system grounded in western normative considerations. de Souza, in his book Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World …

Full Issue, Socio-Legal Review

Socio-Legal Review

No abstract provided.

Fingerprints And Fragments: Reflections On The Challenges And Contributions Of Socio-Legal History, Elizabeth Lhost

Socio-Legal Review

To narrate law’s past, legal history depends on archives. Yet law’s archive, developed to serve law, necessarily dictates history’s terms. Critical legal history challenges this relationship. Inspired by trends in subaltern and postcolonial studies, critical legal historians push back against the dominance of doctrine. They bring the complexities of context and the vagaries of society, economy, and politics to bear on law’s story, framing law as part of, not separate from, history. To do this, critical legal historians challenge law’s archive. They interrogate what is said and what remains unsaid in the written record. They articulate the role that bureaucracy …

Socio-Legal Enquiry On A Global Scale: Legal Intermediation, The Geography Of Extraction, And The (Re)Negotiation Of Africa’S Relationship With The World Economy, Sara Dezalay

Socio-Legal Review

This paper asks: what does socio-legal enquiry tell us about one of the most pressing problems of our time— climate change? Can (and should) socio-legal enquiry provide a meaningful critique of the so-called green transition? Law’s ubiquity in the ongoing phase of capitalism—from the predominance of private contracts in the regulation of relations between states and transnational corporations to the formidable growth of transnational dispute settlement mechanisms since the turn of the 1990s raises a challenge for socio-legal enquiry. Where do we put the cursor of law’s empowering potential as opposed to its enabling role in reproducing patterns of inequality …

Increasing Reading Fluency In Ell Learners, Jennifer N. Patton

Graduate Research Papers

I am creating a project on how to effectively teach fluency to ELL students. To do so, I had to first research. Recent researches have revealed that English Language Learners (ELLs) face certain challenges that threaten their academic success, especially their reading fluency, and as a result, make learning difficult. To achieve the purpose of this research, this chapter is focused on providing a deeper analysis into the problem of fluency and how it affects ELLs. The target with this is to review shared knowledge around reading fluency development in ELLs. This chapter, therefore, entails reviews of the literature on …

Accelerating L-Shaped Two-Stage Stochastic Scuc With Learning Integrated Benders Decomposition, Fouad Hasan, Amin Kargarian

Faculty Publications

Benders decomposition is widely used to solve large mixed-integer problems. This article takes advantage of machine learning and proposes a variant of Benders decomposition to tackle two-stage stochastic security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC). The problem is decomposed into a master problem (MP) and subproblems (SPs) corresponding to individual load scenarios. The primary objective is to mitigate computational expenses and memory consumption associated with Benders decomposition by generating tighter cuts and reducing the MP's dimensions. A regressor reads load profile scenarios and predicts objective function proxy values for the SPs, enabling the creation of tighter cuts for the MP. The numerical difference …

Optimizing Privacy And Utility Tradeoffs For Group Interests Through Harmonization, Bishwas Mandal, George Amariucai, Shuangqing Wei

Faculty Publications

We propose a novel problem formulation to address the privacy-utility tradeoff, specifically when dealing with two distinct user groups characterized by unique sets of private and utility attributes. Unlike previous studies that primarily focus on scenarios where all users share identical private and utility attributes and often rely on auxiliary datasets or manual annotations, we introduce a collaborative data-sharing mechanism between two user groups through a trusted third party. This third party uses adversarial privacy techniques with our proposed data-sharing mechanism to internally sanitize data for both groups and eliminates the need for manual annotation or auxiliary datasets. Our methodology …

Communication-Efficient Admm Using Quantization-Aware Gaussian Process Regression, Aldo Duarte, Truong X. Nghiem, Shuangqing Wei

Faculty Publications

In networks consisting of agents communicating with a central coordinator and working together to solve a global optimization problem in a distributed manner, the agents are often required to solve private proximal minimization subproblems. Such a setting often requires a decomposition method to solve the global distributed problem, resulting in extensive communication overhead. In networks where communication is expensive, it is crucial to reduce the communication overhead of the distributed optimization scheme. Gaussian processes (GPs) are effective at learning the agents' local proximal operators, thereby reducing the communication between the agents and the coordinator. We propose combining this learning method …

Initial Exploration Of Zero-Shot Privacy Utility Tradeoffs In Tabular Data Using Gpt-4, Bishwas Mandal, George Amariucai, Shuangqing Wei

Faculty Publications

We investigate the application of large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, to scenarios involving the tradeoff between privacy and utility in tabular data. Our approach entails prompting GPT-4 by transforming tabular data points into textual format, followed by the inclusion of precise sanitization instructions in a zero-shot manner. The primary objective is to sanitize the tabular data in such a way that it hinders existing machine learning models from accurately inferring private features while allowing models to accurately infer utility-related attributes. We explore various sanitization instructions. Notably, we discover that this relatively simple approach yields performance comparable to more complex …

The Economics Of Privacy And Utility: Investment Strategies, Chandra Sharma, George Amariucai, Shuangqing Wei

Faculty Publications

The inevitable leakage of privacy as a result of unrestrained disclosure of personal information has motivated extensive research on robust privacy-preserving mechanisms. However, existing research is mostly limited to solving the problem in a static setting with disregard for the privacy leakage over time. Unfortunately, this treatment of privacy is insufficient in practical settings where users continuously disclose their personal information over time resulting in an accumulated leakage of the users' sensitive information. In this paper, we consider privacy leakage over a finite time horizon and investigate optimal strategies to maximize the utility of the disclosed data while limiting the …

Performance Optimization Of Software-Defined Industrial Internet-Of-Things (Sd-Iiot), Jehad Ali, Celestine Iwendi, Gaoyang Shan, Hsiao Chun Wu, Mohammed J.F. Alenazi, Zaid Bin Faheem, Cresantus N. Biamba

Faculty Publications

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a centralized network management approach that can effectively address the complex and varied traffic demands characteristic of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments by decoupling the control plane from the data plane. The centralized control architecture of SDN necessitates the performance optimization of controllers to manage diverse traffic efficiently within IIoT applications. This paper explores the criteria for selecting controllers in SDN-enabled IIoT (SD-IIoT) environments, utilizing the Less Complex Analytic Network Process (LC-ANP) to establish their prioritization. A ranking system for SD-IIoT controllers is formulated using LC-ANP, and experimental validation of this method underscores its effectiveness …

Measuring Decision Aid Effectiveness For End-Of-Life Care: A Systematic Review, M. Courtney Hughes, Erin Vernon, Chinenye Egwuonwu, Oluwatoyosi Afolabi

Faculty Articles, Papers, and Other Scholarship

Objective

Methods

Results

Stable Isotope Analysis Of Manatee Vibrissae To Investigate Individual Patterns Of Resource Use In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico, Levette Tucker, Mackenzie L. Russell, Elizabeth E. Hieb, Ruth H. Carmichael, Carl S. Cloyed

Gulf and Caribbean Research

No abstract provided.