Digital Commons Network^™

An Energy- And Area- Efficient Two-Stage Latch Comparator Using Common-Mode Reset, Larry Yu

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an energy-and-area-efficient two-stage comparator implemented in TSMC 65 nm CMOS that incorporates a Floating Inverter Amplifier (FIA) followed by a latch using a common-mode reset scheme. The FIA improves input sensitivity and reduces kickback noise by isolating the input nodes from large latch voltage swings. The proposed latch resets its output nodes to a common-mode voltage rather than one of its supply rails, thereby reducing switching energy during the reset phase. The comparator can resolve differential input voltages as small as 2 mV with a clock period of 500 ps, achieving 74.33 μV input-referred noise while consuming …

Softmax Expressiveness With Linear Complexity By Investigating The Linear-Softmax Attention Accuracy Gap, Gabriel Mongaras, Eric Larson

Computer Science and Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Softmax attention Vaswani et al. [2017] Bahdanau et al. [2015] has gained traction as one of the most important parts of most modern machine learning models. Despite being the most adopted modern machine learning algorithm, exploration of softmax attention itself has been neglected. While softmax attention is a very powerful architectural component, it has a major drawback of being quadratic in sequence length. More specifically, softmax attention has quadratic complexity during training and linear complexity (when using a KV cache) during inference, which limits the sequence length it can model due to system memory constraints. Linear attention was proposed, (proposed …

Place, Democracy, Law, And The Necessity Of Local News, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 2025, the painter Amy Sherald pulled her show American Sublime from the Smithsonian after the museum considered removing a painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid angering President Trump. The Baltimore Museum of Art stepped in, and it was important that it did. American Sublime needs to be seen in person. It comprises dozens of portraits of Black Americans—a farmer, a bicyclist, a balloon-holder, a child on a playground slide. The portraits are dignified, beautiful, warm, and alluring. They are, in a word, human.

In the gallery, the paintings were hung low on the walls to increase …

Bluebook Bites: Practicing Citation One Day At A Time, Heather Kolinsky

UF Law Faculty Publications

Seeking student feedback in a tangible manner during the semester has inherent value. Ongoing student feedback can help a professor gauge what is (and what is not) working in the classroom. The professor can take the temperature of the class and get a decent read on how things are going.

This article discusses how student feedback in my Fall 2024 class birthed a practice of delivering a daily question (sometimes with subparts) to students about creating or editing Bluebook citations. I call it “Bluebook Bites.” In Part I of this article, I explain how I gather student feedback and how …

Cornerstones And Keystones: Confronting Stealth Attacks On The Regulatory State, Michael Allan Wolf

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article is the first to identify the Roberts Court’s pattern of stealth overruling of several takings precedents by neutralizing or ignoring essential language from prior decisions. The Article explores six examples of this phenomenon and proposes a framework for identifying when a subsequent Court’s critical assessment of key language from a prior decision, whether it technically qualifies as a “holding” or not, necessitates consideration of the stare decisis factors used in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Rather than focusing on the sometimes-arbitrary distinction between holding and dictum, the Article introduces two other indicia of precedential language that …

Against The Single-Subject Rule For The Citizen Initiative, Jonathan L. Marshfield

UF Law Faculty Publications

The citizen initiative allows voters to bypass state legislatures and propose laws for a statewide referendum. It exists in twenty-four states but has national significance because initiatives drive reform on contested issues. Recently, courts have begun to clamp down on the initiative. One significant trend is the strict enforcement of the single-subject rule to strike initiatives when they are considered too broad. Although courts are notoriously inconsistent with the rule, they assert two reasons for aggressive enforcement. First, they claim the rule’s historic purpose is to prevent any form of “logrolling”—including any imaginable aggregation of public-regarding voting blocs. Second, courts …

Targeting The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex With Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation To Improve Depression And Anxiety In Parkinson's Disease, Brock Renicks

Honors Theses

The aim of this study is to observe the outcomes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a treatment for Parkinson’s Disease (PD). This study will primarily look at changes in depression and anxiety, as these symptoms are often comorbid with Parkinson’s Disease. Transcranial direct current stimulation is a non-invasive, very low-intensity form of electrical stimulation of the brain. It is being increasingly used as a form of treatment for Parkinson’s Disease and depression and anxiety, however the literature is ambiguous, showing mixed results throughout various studies, with no standardization of tDCS administration. To determine the effect of tDCS on …

Social Bonds And Dynamic Risk In Predicting Juvenile Recidivism Among Florida Probation Youth, Shadrach Sackey

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Juvenile recidivism remains a persistent challenge within the United States juvenile justice system, particularly among youth supervised in community-based probation programs. This study examines how family context, school engagement, peer associations, antisocial beliefs, and overall dynamic risk are associated with recidivism among juvenile probation youth in Florida. Drawing on social bond theory and social learning theory, the analysis uses administrative data from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (FDJJ) Juvenile Justice Information System, including 6,215 youth who completed community-based probation supervision between 2015 and 2018. Recidivism was measured using two outcomes within a 365-day follow-up period: rearrest and readjudication. Descriptive …

Optimization Of The Baffle Geometry Of A Circular Culvert Outlet Structure To Maximize Energy Dissipation, Kiarash Shirmahi

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

High-velocity flow at culvert outlets can lead to significant soil erosion and damage to downstream infrastructure, particularly in agricultural regions where land protection is critical. Circular culverts, commonly used in transportation systems, are especially susceptible to this issue due to flow acceleration caused by geometric constraints and installation angles. Despite extensive research on energy dissipation in rectangular culverts, limited attention has been given to circular configurations. This study addresses this gap by evaluating the hydraulic performance of baffle systems designed to reduce outlet energy in circular culverts.

A series of laboratory experiments was conducted using a scaled physical model of …

Immersive Visualization Of Cardiac Segmentation And Analysis, Brandon Norman

Theses and Dissertations

Coronary artery disease remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide, making early detection and treatment critical to reducing mortality. While coronary angiography remains the gold standard procedure for diagnosing coronary artery disease, less invasive methods such as coronary computed tomography angiography and virtual fractional flow re-serve continue to improve. However, taking full advantage of volumetric coronary computed tomography angiography data requires extensive post-processing before the data can support geometric modeling, hemodynamic simulation, and analysis. Existing Open-Source Appli-cations provide powerful tools for these tasks, but their interaction models remain largely desktop based, restricting users to 2d manipulation and hindering …

Permit Management Guide For Sanitation Projects In Rural Alaska, Cooper Arend

Student Projects for Graduate Degrees

This project examines the permitting management process currently used for rural sanitation infrastructure projects executed by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) Division of Environmental Health and Engineering (DEHE). These projects are large-scale, federally funded projects requiring numerous permits from federal, state and local agencies with varying requirements and timelines. Despite this complexity, the permitting process relies heavily on informal, experience-based knowledge rather than any formal documentation. A qualitative research approach was used to examine the existing ANTHC workflows, review past project documentation, analyze regulatory materials, and incorporate staff interviews and feedback. Findings from this project indicated that while …

Side Of The Road, Jacob Van Langeveld

Bachelor of Fine Arts Theses

Artist Statement:

“Side of the Road” is a body of work about the local area and the places and objects I’m drawn to while driving. I aim to form a connection with Upstate New York, repurposing the elements that shape my visual and emotional experience into paintings that, in turn, mark moments in my life—similar to journal entries. These mostly medium-sized paintings are rooted in plein air practice. I drive, find an interesting subject, pull over, set up my gear, and begin working. In some cases, instead of painting on-site, I take a photograph and bring it back to the …

Examining The Differences Between The Experience Of Audiobooks Vs. Reading, Mia K. Floriani

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

There are a variety of opinions regarding whether listening to audiobooks counts as real reading, but very limited research examining the topic in depth. The current study investigates the differences between audiobooks and reading, specifically examining how the two modes of story experiences effect mind-wandering, enjoyment, absorption, and comprehension. We predicted that listening to the story would lead to increased mind-wandering and decreased comprehension and raised the research question of how the modes would affect enjoyment and transportation. Undergraduate students (n = 76) were divided into a reading or a listening condition, where they experienced a short story. During …

Social Media Usage And Motives In Socially Anxious Individuals, Emma Eddy

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Social media use (SMU) has grown rapidly in recent years, alongside the rate of social anxiety. Plenty of research has been previously conducted exploring the relationship between SMU and social anxiety, as well as potential motivations for using social media which may explain the recent incline in usage. However, this study combines the two relationships together to test the association between social anxiety and problematic SMU as well as to investigate motives of SMU as potential mediators of problematic SMU. Problematic social media usage, social anxiety, passive vs active SMU, and four different motives of SMU were all looked at. …

How Schema Knowledge Affects Memory, Sarah Waller

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Schemas are a type of semantic knowledge that are formed from generalizations about the world. Schemas are essentially expectations about how we expect the world to be, and they are helpful for understanding and categorizing information we encounter. Prediction errors, which occur when our predictions are violated, are caused by events that are inconsistent with our schemas. Current findings on prediction error’s effects on memory are contradictory, with some studies stating that the presence of a prediction error enhances memory for a context, while other research disagrees. A popular theory proposes that prediction error causes a boost in memory for …

Place, Democracy, Rule Of Law, And The Necessity Of Local News, Erin C. Carroll

University of the Pacific Law Review

No abstract provided.

Plasma Constituents Promote Endothelial Thromboinflammatory Dysfunction After Hemorrhagic Shock, Kelly E Sanders, Marissa D Pokharel, Baron K Osborn, Yao-Wei Wang, Charles E Wade, Lucy Z Kornblith, Mitchell J Cohen, Jessica C Cardenas

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: Hemorrhagic shock (HS) following traumatic injury is hallmarked by innate immune activation, hypercoagulability, and thromboinflammatory complications. To date, the direct link between HS, injury severity, and endothelial cell (EC) contributions to thromboinflammation remains poorly understood. The goals of this study were to determine the impact of injury severity and HS on endothelial-mediated thromboinflammation and examine whether these changes increase the propensity for thrombosis.

Methods: Plasma from 89 male trauma patients, stratified by HS and injury severity, and 10 healthy subjects were assessed for inflammatory mediators by BioPlex. Human lung microvascular endothelial cells were exposed to patient plasma for 4 …

Lateral Thinking In Large Language Models: Benchmarking And Fine-Tuning For Puzzle Solving And Generation, Ashish Khadka

Master's Theses

Recent progress in large language models has produced reasoning-oriented systems that allocate additional computation at inference time (e.g., deliberation, verification, and self-correction), raising the question of whether these gains can solve tasks requiring creative and lateral thinking. In this thesis, we study such capabilities using two popular word-association games—LinkedIn Pinpoint and New York Times (NYT) Connections—which require identifying non-obvious patterns or relationships. We first benchmark some light-weight open models and analyze their performance trends with respect to puzzle release dates and approximate model knowledge cutoffs to distinguish memorization effects from genuine inference. Our results show that accuracy of traditional embedding-based …

Exploring Google Trends In Assessing Personal Finance Needs For Cooperative Extension Service Programming, Megan Wells

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Cooperative Extension Service (CES) relies on systematic needs assessments to guide program development; yet, traditional approaches often depend heavily on stakeholder input and professional judgment, offering limited insight into consumer level needs. This mixed methods study explored Google Trends as a complementary, consumer driven data source for assessing Family Resource Management (FRM) needs within the Arkansas CES. Grounded in Witkin and Altschuld’s three level needs assessment framework and Uses and Gratifications Theory, the study integrated three data sources representing stakeholders, service providers, and consumers: (1) Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) advisory committee reports, (2) survey of Family Consumer Science …

Exploring Policy Change To Support Early Diagnosis Of Congenital Heart Defects (Chd) In New Mexico, Kelsey Carson Leibenhaut

Doctor of Nursing Practice Scholarly Projects

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is not a new or rare problem; it has likely always been a leading cause of childhood morbidity and mortality and clocks in today as the most frequently occurring birth defect, affecting an estimated 1 in 100 newborns (CDC, 2025). Prior to the middle of the 20th century, there was little to be done about CHD, as no treatments existed. Everything changed with the advancement of options for surgical repair of CHDs, significantly prolonging lifespans and improving quality of life for affected individuals. Despite these incredible advancements, babies are born with CHD every day, leading to …

The Conditions For The Possibility Of Goodhart’S Law In Educational Assessment And The Subversion Of Learning, Marty Kalas

University Honors Program Senior Projects

The essential aim of education is learning, and our assessment practices have the potential to subvert that aim. In the United States, assessment has become ubiquitous in education. Students are presented with exams and assignments that are judged by their teachers and returned to them, usually graded and occasionally with feedback. Taking and passing these assessments has become a central focus of our educational system. However, Goodhart’s law – “when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure” – warns us there may be a problem with using grades as a target (Strathern, 1997). This problem …

Community Resilience In The Absence Of Aid: Recovery After The 2018 Father’S Day Flood In Houghton County, Michigan, Abby Heggem

University Honors Program Senior Projects

Community networks influenced resilience and recovery after the 2018 Father’s Day Flood in Houghton County Michigan, particularly in the absence of strong institutional support. The flood caused widespread damage to homes, roads, and infrastructure, forcing residents to rely on immediate local action before state or federal aid arrived. Rural locations like Houghton County are often neglected by government funding and support during disasters and are forced to rely on themselves. Community networks matter in disasters because neighbors, volunteer groups, and local leaders respond faster than formal institutions. This project uses a qualitative case study approach that includes content analysis of …

Fear Of Crime, Intolerance Of Uncertainty, And Trait Worry: A Mediation Model Of Perceived Risk And Victimization Concerns, Nicholai N. Chasseau

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined psychological vulnerability and fear of crime in 538 adults from Trinidad and Tobago. Perceived risk was the strongest predictor of fear, while prospective intolerance of uncertainty predicted fear directly. Mediation was supported among Afro-Trinidadians but not Indo-Trinidadians, suggesting sociocultural differences in cognitive pathways linking vulnerability to fear.

Hannah, Nora Brigid Monahan

Theses and Dissertations

Hannah is a contemporary adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, which reimagines Ibsen's heroine as a "stealth" (or undetected) transsexual woman living among the American conservative elite in Washington D.C. Newly married to George Taylor, a charismatic but financially strained far-right media personality, Hannah struggles to maintain the façade she has constructed when Eliot Loving, a volatile political streamer and figure from past, reappears in her life. Their collision, orchestrated by the manipulative power-broker Judge Brock, upends Hannah's sense of self and forces her into a desperate struggle for her own autonomy and security. In a deliberate subversion of …

Emotional Working Memory Across The Visualization Spectrum, Jae Fast

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In 2015, the term “aphantasia” was coined to describe a small group of individuals who lack the ability to voluntarily produce visual mental imagery. This caused a rising interest in aphantasia and its associated neural, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional features. Understanding the role of visual mental imagery in both emotional and cognitive processes, it is reasonable to question whether aphantasia may result in importantly unique experiences that may require improved therapeutic practices to account for these differences. Previous studies have found that aphantasics experience reduced emotional responses to recalled emotional events, reduced affective processing, poor autobiographical memory, and other cognitive …

"Some Women Make It Look So Easy": An Analysis Of Jenny Offill's Fragmentary Novels And Their Critique Of Postfeminist Sensibility, Kimberly Crooks

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Jenny Offill’s novels Dept. of Speculation and Weather are each narrated by a woman who exists in a postfeminist era that insists upon the achievability of a happy work-life balance. Despite the lofty career aspirations now afforded to women, the protagonists find themselves burdened by the gendered responsibilities that disproportionately hold them responsible for domestic duties, childcare, and emotional labor. Both protagonists use a fragmented narrative style to convey their consciousness, and the texts are composed of hundreds of short fragments that include memories, self-reflections, philosophical musings, lines of poetry, fun facts, questions, and more. While the narratives do not …

Corporate Social Responsibility, Prosocial Behavior, And Control, Jennifer Fin

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The purpose of this study was to better understand how an organization's prosocial behaviors, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), shape an individual member's private, prosocial behavior. This study examined whether an individual’s locus of control (LOC) works as a moderator to shape the CSR-behavior relationship. Participants were recruited through Montclair State University’s SONA pool and assigned into a High CSR, Neutral, or Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSiR) condition. Each participant completed self-report measures to assess internal LOC before the experimental manipulation. Each participant reviewed a news article to match their CSR condition and then had an opportunity to donate their compensation, which …

Interview Format And Job Pursuit Intention, Pallavi Nimbappa Honkanadavar

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This study examined how interview format influences job pursuit intentions (JPI) in the context of increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in hiring. Specifically, it compared human-led, AI-led, and AI-assisted scenario interview formats, and tested whether perceived procedural fairness and anticipated interview success mediated these relationships, as well as whether AI familiarity moderated the effects. Preliminary results from a sample of 72 participants indicated that, although the overall effect of interview format on JPI was not statistically significant, the pattern of means suggested highest JPI in human-led interview formats, followed by AI-assisted interviews, and finally completely AI-led interviews. Mediation analyses …

Impostor Thoughts At Work: Examining The Relationship Between Impostor Thoughts, Employee Well-Being, And Coworker Support, Nikitha Sara Mohan

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Most individuals experience impostor thoughts; however, limited construct clarity has hindered efforts to effectively examine their relationship with employee outcomes (Gullifor et al., 2021). To address this limitation, the present study adopts a sociocognitive perspective, conceptualizing impostor thoughts as beliefs that others overestimate one’s competence at work (Clance & Imes, 1978; Tewfik, 2022). Specifically, this research investigates workplace impostor thoughts and their associations with indicators of employee well-being, including job-related negative affect, burnout, physical symptoms, and perceived self-competence. Additionally, the study examines coworker support as a potential moderating factor in these relationships. A mixed-methods approach was employed. Quantitative data were …

Shape Variation In The Mandible Of The Borophagine Canids And Implications For Predatory Behavior, Benjamin Neavear

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

The borophagines are an extinct lineage of canids that inhabited North America for more than 20 million years. This group included genera such as Aelurodon, Borophagus, and Epicyon. Borophagines are commonly referred to as “bone-crushing dogs” because their skull morphology converged with that of extant hyenas, predators capable of consuming bone. The purpose of this study was to determine whether convergence was present in the mandible, an anatomical structure strongly correlated with feeding behavior, particularly in the genera Aelurodon and Borophagus. It was hypothesized that most borophagine taxa possessed mandibular shapes similar to those of hyenas. Numerous mandibular characters were …