Digital Commons Network^™

Open Repository @ Binghamton Monthly Additions And Top Downloads - February 2026, Caitlin Holton

Library Created Resources

Newly added work in the Open Repository @ Binghamton (ORB) from 2/1/2026-2/28/2026. Top downloads from same time frame.

Branding Through Semiotics, Minimalism, & Branding Psychology: The Eurekafit Brand, Torri Salem

Theses

This paper examines how the combination of minimalism, semiotics, and branding psychology work seamlessly together to create an inclusive brand with an emotionally resonate visual identity system-- a brand that is cohesive and bridges the sub-brands of EurekaFit and Eureka CrossFit. What initially started as a logo redesign of Eureka CrossFit has now expanded into this dual-branding visual system, that communicates approachability, a sense of belonging and fitness, without being intimated, to its audience. This study investigates visual signifiers like color, typography and imagery, through a semiotic analysis and approach. I reduced clutter and visual noise and was able to …

Petals Of The Mind: A Digital Floral Interpretation Of Mental States, Corine D. Arrington

Theses

Petals of the Mind is an applied studio art project that explores the use of symbolic floral imagery to visually represent internal emotional states, specifically depression, anxiety, and ADHD. This project consists of six large format digital posters created in Procreate. Each emotional category is represented by a pair of flowers selected for their symbolic and structural characteristics: Blue Poppy and Black Rose for depression, Tulip and Aster for anxiety, and Honeysuckle and Wildflower Mix for ADHD. These flowers are intentionally deconstructed through layering, fragmentation, and motion cues to mirror common internal experiences such as emotional heaviness, vigilance, cognitive scattering, …

Exploring Defamiliarization Techniques On Non-Player Characters, Sereen Hamideh

Level Design Theses and Dissertations

This thesis topic explores the cross section between Non-Player Characters and poetic gameplay, a term coined by Dr. Alex Mitchell which is gameplay that is made deliberately strange or defamiliar to invoke reflection. The researcher used three defamiliarization techniques on a recurring Non-Player Character to test the effectiveness of each technique. The researcher created one level with two different, but nearly identical, quests for the game Starfield. One quest, “A Green Thumb,” contained no defamiliarization techniques, serving as a baseline, while the other quest, “A Blue Thumb,” incorporated three defamiliarization techniques. By analysing player feedback, the researcher aimed to explore …

Best Practices For Re-Traversal Using Gating Techniques To Increase Player Engagement, Jonathan J. Murray

Level Design Theses and Dissertations

The thesis explores common gating techniques used in video games to encourage re-traversal. It forms assumptions about effective best practices in level design and applies them to a Dying Light 2 mod that uses gating techniques.

Systemic Design: Adopting A Mechanic And Emergent Uses, Kyle M. Aing

Level Design Theses and Dissertations

Video game designers can use a systems thinking approach to teach a new gameplay mechanic to players. When designers implement best practices of pacing and teaching, players are more likely to adopt and experiment with the mechanic. This methodology leads to a resilient mechanic system within a game and encourages emergent gameplay through the formation of intrinsic motivations.

Long Live The Good King: A Niebuhrian Analysis Of Arthur’S Ethical Kingship In The Once And Future King, Camille Bewley

Tenor of Our Times

The classic The Once and Future King, written by T.H. White, is a selection of four fantasy novels with one, linear plot: the story of Arthur, the mythological King of England. Reinhold Niebuhr’s book Moral Man and Immoral Society details the Christian realism of a world in need of justice without the ability to achieve perfect application. Through good education, Arthur is well endowed with Niebuhr’s requirements for a functional society: knowledge, honor, wisdom, and compassion. Such king-like qualities make him one of the most influential mythological characters in history, and a grand exemplar for maintaining ethical goals and personal …

“Opening Up The Flood Gates:” A Review Of The International Response To The Hungarian Refugee Crisis 1956-57., Jacob N. Anderson

Tenor of Our Times

Following the suppressed Hungarian Revolution in 1956, there was a massive emigration from Hungary to surrounding European nations and the United States to escape oppression under the new Soviet regime. As a result, many of those nations faced large humanitarian debates about accepting refugees from Soviet tyranny and were forced to alter their refugee and immigration policy. Some of these alterations appear to be sincere and reflect popular sentiment, but some appear to be simply a false act of solidarity amidst the international stage, reflecting very conservative ethnic and religious reservations.

Semantic Entanglement In Vector-Based Retrieval: A Formal Framework And Context-Conditioned Disentanglement Pipeline For Agentic Rag Systems, Nick Loghmani

iSchool - All Scholarship

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed in agentic environments depend on the geometric properties of vector representations to retrieve contextually appropriate evidence for autonomous reasoning. When source documents conflate multiple topics within contiguous text regions, standard vectorization pipelines produce embedding spaces in which semantically distinct content occupies overlapping geometric neighborhoods — a condition we term semantic entanglement. This paper formalizes semantic entanglement as a model-relative measure of cross-topic overlap, defines an Entanglement Index (EI) as a quantitative proxy, and argues that higher EI is associated with reduced attainable Top-K retrieval precision under cosine similarity retrieval. We introduce the Semantic Disentanglement …

The Effects Of Body Mass Index On Fertility And In Vitro Fertilization, Morgan R. Kidd

Honors College Theses

In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is the most widely used type of assisted reproductive technology for treating infertility arising from a number of conditions. As obesity rates continue to climb in the United States, infertility has been discovered to have a direct correlation. Individuals that fall below or above the healthy body mass index range are found to have disrupted regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, resulting in diminished reproductive health. Those that are diagnosed as infertile due to conditions caused by the effects of low body mass index or high body mass index may seek assisted reproductive technologies to intervene in achieving …

Measuring Research Impact At Singapore Management University, Pin Pin Yeo

Research Collection Library

Describes the support and services provided by SMU Libraries to the institution for research assessment.

Aligning Reparations And Taxation, Katherine Pratt

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

Rehabilitative reparation remedies advance the important normative goals of intergenerational restorative justice and racial reconciliation. This Article fills a gap in the reparations literature by exploring a critical missing piece of reparations—nontaxation of reparation remedies. Historical examples of reparation remedies show how, in the past, a patchwork of tax rules prevented taxation of reparations and advanced the rehabilitative goals of reparation remedies and procedural fairness in tax administration. Conversely, contemporary examples show how current tax law taxes the receipt of reparation remedies, thereby undermining the rehabilitative goals of reparations and procedural fairness.

This Article proposes a new statutory tax exclusion …

How And Why Hundreds Of Preventable Deaths Continue To Occur Behind America's Prison Walls And Jail Cells, Melody Monssen

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Note examines how the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) came to be and the consequences of its passage. The PLRA was largely a response to the growing movement of prisoners’ rights that began in the 1960s and continued until the 1990s. As the Court grew more conservative, the legal system became less receptive to prisoners’ plights. Consequently, PLRA was enacted in an effort to curtail prison litigation. Consequently, conditions in correctional institutions have continued to worsen, leaving prisoners with little recourse. Although the passage of PLRA was justified by claiming that prisoners were bringing frivolous lawsuits, the continued upward …

Viscosity And Nano-Crystallinity Of Flow-Banded Rhyolite: A Micro-Raman Approach, Charles Long

Earth and Environmental Geosciences Student Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Comparing Potential Soil Organic Carbon Storage Based On Dominant Vegetation Types In Central Texas Riparian Grasslands With Loss On Ignition, Renee Trombley

Environmental Studies Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Smart Waste Management System, Clare Epolite, Mia Tippett, William Yancey, Willem Mccarthy

General Engineering

Improper waste sorting and limited visibility into bin conditions create challenges for waste management operations at Santa Clara University. This project developed a Smart Waste Management System prototype to support improved waste monitoring and provide users with real-time disposal guidance.

The system integrates ultrasonic fill-level sensing, wireless communication through an ESP32 microcontroller, a web-based dashboard, and a mobile waste classification application. Sensor data was transmitted to a dashboard for remote monitoring, while the mobile application used machine learning to classify common waste items and assist users in selecting the appropriate disposal stream.

System performance was evaluated through controlled prototype testing …

Protocol For Non-Invasive Assessment Of Skeletal Muscle Structure And Function In Adolescents With Single Ventricle Heart Disease: A Cross-Sectional, Case-Control Study., Tyler A. Fick, Trent J. Herda, Emily Cramer, David A. White, Daniel Forsha

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND: Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common congenital malformation, and the most severe type, single ventricle (SV) heart disease, requires the Fontan surgical palliation. Fontan palliation minimizes hypoxemia and volume overload by separating systemic and pulmonary circulations, resulting in the absence of a sub-pulmonary pump. Skeletal muscle health may have a greater relative contribution to overall functional capacity of those with SV physiology, via the skeletal muscle (SkM) pump mechanism and oxidative capacity. The purpose of this study is to comprehensively evaluate multiple domains of SkM in this population compared to those with normal cardiac anatomy.

METHODS: Forty …

Determinants Of Toothbrushing Behavior Among 12-Year-Old Children: An Application Of The Health Belief Model, Fitri D. Oktadewi, Riski A. Hidayah, Ryana B. Purnama, Ananda P. Yuliani

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

Objective: Effective toothbrushing behaviors in school-aged children play an important role in preventing dental and oral health problems. At the age of 12, the behaviors constitute a critical phase in the formation of healthy lifestyle habits. Therefore, this study aimed to analyze the factors that influence toothbrushing behaviors in 12-year-old children based on the Health Belief Model (HBM) theory.

Material and Methods: A total of 92 12-year-old children were selected by cluster sampling method at elementary schools in Banyumas, Central Java. The independent variables included perceived susceptibility, severity, barrier, and benefit in accordance with HBM. The dependent variable comprised toothbrushing …

Penforge: On-The-Fly Expert Agent Construction For Automated Penetration Testing, Huihui Huang, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Ting Zhang, Yikun Li, Chengran Yang, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Penetration testing is essential for identifying vulnerabilities in web applications before real adversaries can exploit them. Recent work has explored automating this process with Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, but existing approaches either rely on a single generic agent that struggles in complex scenarios or narrowly specialized agents that cannot adapt to diverse vulnerability types. We therefore introduce PenForge, a framework that dynamically constructs expert agents during testing rather than relying on those prepared beforehand. By integrating automated reconnaissance of potential attack surfaces with agents instantiated on the fly for context-aware exploitation, PenForge achieves a 30.0% exploit success rate (12/40) …

Finding Missing Input Validation In Tees Via Llm-Assisted Symbolic Execution, Chengyan Ma, Jieke Shi, Ruidong Han, Ye Liu, Yuqing Niu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) provide hardware-enforced isolation that protects sensitive code and data from untrusted software. Despite their strong security guarantees, analyzing TEE applications remains challenging due to the high cost and complexity of configuring complete TEE build and runtime environments, as well as the limited observability imposed by hardware isolation. This paper presents SymTEE, a novel large language model (LLM)-assisted symbolic execution framework for detecting missing input validation issues in TEE applications without requiring real TEE setups. SymTEE begins by leveraging Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) analysis to extract TEE code slices that may lack sufficient input validation, and then …

Trust: The Invisible Force Behind Effective Leadership During Times Of Change, Lindsay Atoro

M.S. in Leadership

Workplace change is constant, yet most change management models focus on logistical, financial, and operational factors, overlooking the human aspects. Strategies to support employees often neglect the critical role of trust in effectiveness and success. To more deeply explore the role of trust, this study combined a comprehensive literature review with leader interviews to compare theoretical findings with real-world practices. Results revealed that while leaders acknowledged the importance of trust in leading teams through change, fewer than half explicitly identified it without prompting. Trust was consistently referenced, though often implicitly, reflecting a pattern in the literature where trust was acknowledged …

Gaps In Ghana's Maternal Referral System And Their Impact On Maternal Mortality, Deborah Nyonator

GW Research Showcase 2021-2026

No abstract provided.

Improving Emergency Management Standards In A Community Hospital Emergency Department, Christian Lanphere

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Background: This quality improvement (QI) project used a pre-test/post-test design to evaluate whether targeted emergency management training improved emergency department (ED) nurses’ preparedness for mass casualty incidents (MCIs). A purposive sample of 25 ED nurses with fewer than ten years of experience from a community-level ED participated. The PICOT question examined whether participation in structured emergency management education would significantly improve nurses’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, as measured by the Emergency Preparedness Information Questionnaire (EPIQ).

Aims/Objectives: The project aimed to enhance ED nurses’ preparedness for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) MCIs. Objectives included delivering a comprehensive CBRNE-focused educational …

Enhancing Registered Nurse Handoff And Documentation Adherence With An Acute Stroke Care Handoff Tool: A Quality Improvement Project, Grace Olson

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Background: Inconsistent and nonuniform RN stroke handoffs are a major barrier to meeting quality metrics set by The Joint Commission. Effective RN stroke handoffs enhance communication, documentation adherence, and supports better patient outcomes.

Objectives: The purpose of this QI project was to enhance stroke care by using a structured RN handoff tool. Outcomes for evaluation consisted of two components: 1) increase stroke metric documentation adherence rates and 2) increase RN satisfaction on stroke handoff.

Methods: A pre-implementation and post-implementation design was used for this project on a medical stroke unit at a community hospital in the mid-Atlantic region. Implementation of …

Missional Shepherds: Exploring Development Opportunities For Shepherd Teams In Alaskan Churches Of Christ, Jeff Smith

Harding School of Theology Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Scraping Bad: The Case For A Unified Scraping Framework, Eunchong Moses Park

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

This Note explores the growing legal and regulatory landscapes of web scraping in the United States and argues that web scraping should be regulated through a unified federal framework tailored to its unique technological and economic realities. Web scraping allows organizations to collect massive amounts of data essential to their operational needs—often without the consent of data holders. Thus, web scraping has become a powerful engine of innovation used across virtually every sector of the economy but with a serious risk to privacy and property interests. Yet the current U.S. legal framework lacks a coherent regulating structure. Courts and litigants …

1981, Carliss Chatman

Washington and Lee Law Review

42 U.S.C. § 1981 should have solved a pervasive problem in American capitalism—when white economic interests do not converge with the contract rights of Black people, they are excluded from the market in a way that causes systemic harm. This Article proposes that the failure to enforce 1981 in the past may render it more harmful than beneficial in the present climate of retrenchment. The realities of racism combine with the lack of economic interest convergence to make combatting contract inequality on a contract-by-contract basis legally precarious, nearly impossible to properly evaluate, and difficult to economically incentivize. This is in …

Sanctioning Lawyer-Criminals, Jon J. Lee

Washington and Lee Law Review

Until now there has been relatively little consideration given to disciplinary agencies’ sanctioning of lawyers who commit or are convicted of crimes, so called “lawyer-criminals.” This is likely because most assume that these offenders make up a tiny percentage of disciplinary cases. It also may explain why jurisdictions continue to employ disparate approaches regarding what types of criminal conduct warrant professional intervention, the appropriate sanctions to impose on lawyer-criminals, and whether lawyers convicted of certain offenses should be automatically excluded from practice.

This Article makes three primary contributions to the discourse on reforming professional lawyer regulation to protect the public …

Arbitrary Consent To Arbitration, Charity J. Fort

Washington and Lee Law Review

In the one-hundred-year period since the enactment of the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 (the Act), arbitration in the U.S. has become a battlefield embroiled in a multitude of contract law doctrines and competing arbitration jurisprudence concerning what rights can be contracted away. This battlefield has become particularly grisly with regards to the increased use of arbitration clauses in contracts with adhesive qualities between business entities and consumers. This Article seeks to confront and lay the foundations for resolving a concern raised by many arbitration scholars: scholars who argue that the use of arbitration clauses in contracts of adhesion is …

Drug War Repair Guarantees, Amber Baylor

Washington and Lee Law Review

Drug legalization, especially cannabis legalization, is a critical step forward in states’ willingness to address systemic disparities, privacy intrusions, violence, and other harms of the drug war. Yet, reforms center on legalization and repair through a narrow lens, focused on changes to the penal code. The public has found that narrow forms of legalization cannot serve their purported reparative purpose. Narrowly drawn legalization is illusory. Drug war harms and punishment for legalized substance use continue. Legalization reforms are vulnerable to political trends, resulting in rollback and retrenchment of drug war operations.

Legalization cannot deliver on its reparative terms without guarantees. …