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How Elementary School Principals Equitably Support Mexican Indigenous Students Using The Cultural Proficiency Essential Elements, Veronica Hernandez

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify and describe how elementary principals used the essential elements of cultural proficiency (i.e., assessing culture, valuing diversity, managing the dynamics of difference, adapting to diversity, and institutionalizing cultural knowledge) to provide equitable access for Mexican Indigenous students in California. A second purpose was to identify what elementary principals recommended as best practices for implementing the essential elements of cultural proficiency. Methodology: This ethnographic qualitative research study utilized the elements of cultural proficiency to identify and describe the practices of California elementary school principals in equitably supporting Mexican Indigenous students. Using …

Annual Reports Town Of Marlow, N.H. For The Year Ending December 31, 2025 And Marlow School District For The Year Ending June 30, 2025, Marlow Town Representatives

Marlow, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

2025 Annual Report, Lincoln's Homes: If These Walls Could Talk, Lincoln Town Representatives

Lincoln, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Remembering Courtney Cazden, 1925–2025, Kris D. Gutiérrez, Allan Luke, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Sarah Michaels, James Paul Gee

Education

Here we remember and honor Courtney B. Cazden (1925–2025), whose scholarship, mentorship, and moral clarity profoundly shaped the study of language, literacy, and learning. Drawing on our shared experiences as colleagues, collaborators, students, and friends, we reflect on Courtney's enduring contributions to classroom discourse analysis, bilingual and Indigenous education, sociocultural theories of learning, and the pedagogy of multiliteracies. Across the personal and professional reflections gathered here, we recount how Courtney's work consistently foregrounded classroom discourse as a site of learning, identity formation, and educational justice, while refusing false binaries between theory and practice, immersion and explicit instruction, critique and care. …

Conditional Admission And The Hazards Of Lawyer Assistance Programs Operating Without Transparency Or Oversight, Paula Schaefer

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Qualitative Case Study On Pacific Northwest K-12 Christian School Administrators’ Perceptions Of Critical Thinking As Part Of Their Schools’ Missional Fulfillment, Shawn Lorenzen

Doctor of Education (EdD)

This qualitative case study examined how K–12 Christian school administrators in the Pacific Northwest perceived critical thinking (CT) as part of their schools’ missional fulfillment and the extent to which those perceptions aligned with school mission statements and related missional outcome documents. Guided by a conceptual framework focused on administrator perceptions of CT and the missional language of institutional documents, the study used multiple sources of evidence, including open-ended surveys, document analysis, and follow-up interviews. The bounded sample included Christian schools in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho affiliated with ACSI, ACCS, and/or SCL in which CT appeared in public mission-related language. …

Reflective Observations Of Instructional Approaches In Job Coaching: A Personal Perspective On Student-Centered Strategies For Students With Disabilities, Cailey R. Piekarski

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project is a reflective case study exploring my personal experiences as a job coach for students with disabilities at Total Education Solutions. The research focuses on my own observations, interpretations, and emotional responses while alternating between student-centered and teacher-directed instructional approaches during workforce readiness sessions. By journaling daily, I will analyze how I perceive student engagement, task completion, and session flow under different coaching styles. The consistent student group, task structure, and session format will allow for focused, qualitative reflection without collecting any student-specific data. The study aims to deepen my understanding of instructional decision-making in real-world coaching settings …

Optimizing Urban Green Space Interventions And Their Coordination Across Communities, Jan Anderson

Theses & ETDs

Urban green space interventions are increasingly being implemented around the world in order to mitigate the negative environmental and social impacts of urban living through the positive role green spaces can have on overall public health. The current study begins with an exploration of the common applications of urban green space, followed by an overview of approaches towards green space interventions in recent years. The latter provides recommendations to improve green space interventions by addressing negative outcomes observed and highlighting potential solutions referenced from recent examples, with a particular focus on interventions in Miami, Florida. The thesis culminates in an …

The Crisis In U.S. Cancer Care: Law, Markets, And Privatization, Daniel G. Aaron

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Cancer is surging among youth and young adults in the U.S., yet instead of public regulation addressing its root causes, we have outsourced the management of cancer to the private sector.  A suite of laws, embodying faith that corporations will cure cancer, has subsidized the cancer biomedical enterprise and transformed quasi-public institutions into marketized, profit-seeking entities.  These changes, across patent law, healthcare law, innovation law, and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) law, have privatized cancer. 

The market failures I describe in U.S. cancer care raise larger questions about who we entrust with managing critical social problems.  This Article provides theoretical …

Helping The Helpers: Addressing Burnout In Mental Health Providers In Schools, Julianna Calapai

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

Burnout is a significant challenge for many in the helping professions, particularly those who support others to create positive change. One field where this is acutely felt is education-related occupations. While research has examined how stress impacts teachers, less is known about how burnout affects mental health providers working in schools. These professionals face increased challenges, including role confusion, limited control over workloads, and empathy burnout. This Intervention Science Dissertation in Practice employs a mixed-methods design to address burnout among school-based mental health providers by creating a community of practice (CoP). The CoP incorporated the sense of coherence and socio-ecological …

Undemocratic: Antiabortion Politicians’ Attacks On Direct Democracy, Deborah Machalow

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

This Article will highlight examples of antiabortion politicians abusing their positions throughout the initiative process to maintain their preferred antiabortion status quo during the 2024 election cycle, before Election Day—despite broad and increasing support for legal abortion. Ultimately, in only Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota, antiabortion politicians succeeded; in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada citizens voted to expressly protect abortion in their state constitutions through the citizen-led initiative process.

Bodily Autonomy After Dobbs: A Queer Black Perspective, Eliot T. Tracz

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

This article considers the impact of the Dobbs ruling from a black, queer perspective. It argues that the ripple effect of the Dobbs decision threatens the safety of queer black people in ways which, due to poor data collection, may not be widely understood or analyzed. It then suggests several ways in which the state and federal government can avoid these outcomes. Section II discusses the concept of bodily autonomy and the impact of the Dobbs decision. It begins by defining bodily autonomy as a concept with emphasis on the cases upon which it is founded. It then moves on …

A Stable Isotope Comparison Of The Biogenic Carbonate Of Mammalian Tooth Enamel From The Modern Ohio River Valley And Fort Ancient Buffalo Sites, Sara Elizabeth Slack

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

δ¹⁸O and δ¹³C values change in response to anthropogenic factors (Ghosh & Brand, 2003). Little is known about the effects of anthropogenic climate and land use change on the ecology of the Ohio River Valley. The goal of this research was to quantify the effects of European colonization on the native ecology of the region. The specific questions of this research were: (1) How have mammalian tooth enamel δ¹⁸O and δ¹³C compositions shifted over time within the Ohio River Valley in response to anthropogenic climate change and vegetation? (2) Are there differences …

Session C: You’Re Using Ai – But Is It Actually Making You More Productive? Research, Thoughts & Tips, Julie Darling

Learning Together at the Forefront of Change: GenAI Summit 2026

In this interactive workshop, we'll review current research about worker productivity using AI, examine prompting techniques for determining chatbot strengths and weaknesses, and we will explore several generative AI tools from a lens of productivity. Topics covered will include lateral prompting, daisy chaining, different generative modalities, and challenging the idea that productivity is paramount.

Goal-Driven Shared Control In Eeg-Based Brain Machine Interface For Freewill Reaching And Grasping With Movement Intention Detection And Goal Position Decoding, Bhoj Raj Thapa

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Upper limb motor impairments can severely limit a person’s ability to perform everyday reaching and grasping tasks. Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain machine interfaces (BMIs) offer a non-invasive approach for translating neural activity into control signals for assistive devices such as robotic arms. However, traditional EEG-based BMI studies have generally focused on externally cued paradigms, where both movement timing and target selection are specified by the experimenter rather than freely chosen by the user. In addition, shared control offers a practical framework for assistive BMI operation by dividing responsibility between the user and the intelligent robotic system. However, in many EEG-based shared …

Impact Of Vague State Tax Collection Alternatives On Low-Income Taxpayers, Sakinah Tillman

Journal Articles

Benjamin Franklin stated, “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” While death is inevitable, navigating the complexities of state tax laws and procedures for paying state tax debt is far from straightforward. State tax laws are unnecessarily complex, disproportionately burdening low-income taxpayers, especially Black and Brown individuals. These taxpayers face systemic inequities and ambiguous collection alternatives that trap them in perpetual cycles of debt and noncompliance. ...

applies to state tax collection procedures and analyzes how state tax systems disproportionately impact low-income taxpayers, particularly Black and Brown individuals.36 Part II of this Article addresses how vague statutes, …

Collaborative Nullification: Bending Or Ignoring The Law To Free The Over-Punished, David A. Singleton

Journal Articles

The United States accounts for about 25% of the world’s prisoners but only about 5% of its population. It has the fifth highest imprisonment rate—higher than China and Russia—with people of color disproportionately impacted. This racialized mass incarceration, and the lack of political will to meaningfully address it, demands bold remedies. ...

So, what should attorneys do for clients like Pat when no viable release mechanisms remain: concede defeat and move on, or collaborate with those who are willing to ignore the law and grant release anyway?

This article proposes that the second option, which I call “collaborative nullification,” can …

Ai-Driven Network Orchestration: Adaptive Routing For Federated Learning Over Software-Defined Hybrid Wans, Osama Abu Hamdan

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Modern wide-area networks increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine high-capacity wired backbones with flexible wireless links to extend connectivity to remote and underserved locations. However, the bandwidth variability inherent in wireless segments creates routing challenges that traditional protocols, designed for static link capacities, cannot adequately address. Simultaneously, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm in which geographically dispersed clients collaboratively train shared models without exchanging raw data. When deployed over wide-area networks, FL training is severely bottlenecked by communication overhead, particularly in cross-silo settings where model payloads reach hundreds of megabytes and synchronous aggregation protocols …

Towards Multimodal Guideline-Aligned Agentic Systems, Wenliang Zhong

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

I present my work on building multimodal guideline-aligned agentic systems designed to enable AI agents to solve complex real-world tasks. My research addresses two critical perspectives: (1) Instruction-Aware Embedding Models for flexible and universal embedding tasks, and (2) Guideline-Driven LLM Agents that leverage domain-specific guidelines to perform expert-level tasks. These components address embedding and generation tasks, respectively, and lay the foundation for a hybrid agent capable of tackling challenging real-world applications.

From the embedding perspective, I first address the instruction-following capabilities of embedding models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at instruction following, they are primarily designed for generation rather …

Rope Cutting Task Module, Rebecca Usher

Engineering Theses

This project focuses on the design and evaluation of a rope-cutting module for use with robotic platforms developed by New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation Center (NERVE) and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The system is designed to cut nylon rope using a specialized robotic cutting arm that can be attached to the robot.

The system consists of a module task box that has two pegs that hold two arms to each one. One arm where the spring- mechanism inside of the task module and the second arm the one on top of the box hold the string in place …

Moisture Performance Of Coated Cross-Laminated Timber Under Coastal Conditions In Vertical And Horizontal Orientations With And Without Weather And Vapor Resistive Barriers, Mia Raley

Engineering Theses

Rhode Island is experiencing sea level rise, and more flooding and erosion during storm events due to climate change. The Rhode Island construction industry wants to adopt mass timber, but have concerns with the changing coastal environment on cross-laminated timber (CLT) wall and slab panels. This research aims to understand how coastal conditions affect CLT under different protection conditions, panel orientations, and structure type, by collecting moisture and temperature data on two structures, one commercially-fabricated and one laboratory-fabricated, located on Shell Path from early-July to early-April. Results found that all layers of horizontally-oriented panels benefitted from an additional protective weather-resistant-barrier …

Improving Ground Penetrating Radar Calibration For Chloride Assessment In Reinforced Concrete Bridge Decks, Camila Silva Wendland

Engineering Theses

This study investigates how ground penetrating radar (GPR) can be used to estimate chloride content in reinforced concrete bridge decks. Chloride buildup at the rebar level can lead to corrosion and structural damage, but current testing methods are destructive and limited to small sample areas. GPR offers a non-destructive alternative, but interpreting reflection amplitudes is challenging because they are affected by multiple factors, including moisture content and rebar depth. To address this, a simulation-based calibration method was developed. Finite-difference time-domain simulations were used to study how chloride, moisture, and rebar depth influence GPR reflection amplitudes. A depth correction method was …

Accelerator Based Fusion Reactor With Magnetic Mirror, Keh-Fei Liu

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

We consider an implementation of the novel accelerator-based fusion reactor scheme using a setup in which ion and electron beams are injected into the end openings of an axisymmetric magnetic mirror. While the magnetic mirror ensures transverse confinement of the plasma, the injected beams contribute to axial confinement, thereby extending the overall plasma lifetime. The ion beam energy is initially set above the resonance region of the fusion reactions, allowing fusion to occur both via resonance and thermal mechanisms as the beam slows down to the plasma temperature. Beam energy loss (stopping power) contributes to plasma heating, offsetting radiative losses …

Dynamical Phases Of Higher Dimensional Floquet Cfts, Diptarka Das, Sumit R. Das, Arnab Kundu, Krishnendu Sengupta

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the dynamical phases of Floquet Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) in space-time dimensions greater than two. Building upon our previous work which introduced quaternionic representations for studying Floquet dynamics in higher-dimensional CFTs, we now explore more general square pulse drive protocols that go beyond a single SU(1,1) subgroup. We demonstrate that, for multi-step drive protocols, the system exhibits distinct dynamical phases characterized by the nature of the eigenvalues of the quaternionic matrix representing time evolution in a single cycle, leading to different stroboscopic responses. Our analysis establishes a fundamental geometric interpretation where these dynamical phases directly correspond to …

1340–1345: Ibn Qayyim Al-Ǧawziyya On The Question Of Permanent Truce, Suleiman A. Mourad

Middle East Studies: Faculty Publications

This article analyses Ibn Qayyim al-Ǧawziyya’s discussion of permanent truce (al-hudna al-muṭlaqa) in his “Legal Judgements about the People of Protected Status” (Aḥkām ahl al-ḏimma). Focusing on Ibn al-Qayyim’s method and arguments, the article examines the content of a relevant section from the work, situating it within the broader discussion of “truce” in the Sunnī legal tradition. Ibn al-Qayyim manages to ground permanent truce in the Prophetic tradition. Both his argument and its justification do not conform to anything we find in Sunnī law, including Ibn al-Qayyim’s own Ḥanbalī school. The article thus underscores the creativity …

Computational Clinical Judgment: Predicting Risk With Large Language Models, Hannah Laqueur, Ryan W. Copus

Faculty Works

For seventy years, research has shown actuarial methods outperform clinical judgment. Yet actuarial approaches have limitations: they generally rely on structured data; cannot exploit rare case-specific details; have limited accuracy where outcome data are scarce or incomplete; and cannot offer case-level justifications. Large language models (LLMs) offer a different approach. Like actuarial methods, they aggregate information algorithmically, but like clinicians, they bring general knowledge and can provide case-level justifications. We prompted seven LLMs to assess rearrest risk from 113 parole hearing transcripts and compared their predictions to a machine learning model trained on 4,000 cases with 91 administrative variables. GPT-5 …

Part Em: Classical Electrodynamics, Konstantin Likharev

Essential Graduate Physics

Includes: Electric Charge Interaction; Charges and Conductors; Polarization of Dielectrics; DC Currents; Magnetism; Time-Dependent Electromagnetism; Electromagnetic Wave Propagation; Radiation, Scattering, Interference, and Diffraction; Special Relativity; Radiation by Relativistic Charges

First Amendment Protection For Unlicensed Wellness Coaches, Barbara Zabawa

Faculty Works

This article examines the constitutional implications of state efforts to license unregulated wellness practitioners, particularly wellness coaches. As occupational licensing expands, wellness services—ranging from nutrition counseling and life coaching to mindfulness and holistic practices—face increasing scrutiny. The paper argues that most wellness coaching involves speech rather than conduct and therefore qualifies for First Amendment protection. Drawing on Supreme Court and lower court precedent, it distinguishes between professional judgment that may justify state regulation and speech-based coaching practices that pose minimal risk of harm. The analysis situates wellness coaching within broader debates over professional regulation, consumer empowerment, and the marketplace of …

Geometric Effects Of Warfighters On Body Armor Fit And Protective Capabilities Against Shock Wave Energy, Melissa Lynn Sutter

Doctoral Dissertations

Body armor is a vital piece of protective equipment for warfighters to defend against threats, necessitating continued development to improve comfort, weight, and protection. However, female warfighters often wear unisex body armor, designed primarily for the male torso. Current research has evaluated the short- and long-term detriments of female warfighters wearing these armors, focusing on comfort and performance. However, these studies do not comprehensively consider how a non-form-fitting armor compromises warfighter safety from battlefield threats. This research examines the geometric effects of female warfighters on armor protection level when defending against shock threats by evaluating the energy distribution on a …

How Should The Law Treat Future Ai Systems? Fictional Legal Personhood Versus Legal Identity, Heather Alexander, Jonathan Simon, Frédéric Pinard

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

The law draws a sharp distinction between objects and persons, and between two kinds of persons, the ''fictional'' kind (i.e. corporations), and the ''non-fictional'' kind (individual or ''natural'' persons). This paper will assess whether we maximize overall long-term legal coherence by (A) maintaining an object classification for all future AI systems, (B) creating fictional legal persons associated with suitably advanced, individuated AI systems (giving these fictional legal persons derogable rights and duties associated with certified groups of existing persons, potentially including free speech, contract rights, and standing to sue ''on behalf of'' the AI system), or (C) recognizing non-fictional legal …