Digital Commons Network^™

Workers Authoring Assessment: Play And Power In Early Childhood Education, Phoebe M. Gilpin

Theses and Dissertations

Researchers assert that play-based pedagogy is an effective approach to teaching young children, but there is less consensus on the specific methods of play-based teaching. This mixed-methodology exploratory case study investigated early childhood (EC) educators’ conceptualizations of play-based pedagogy in three phases: Phase 1’s quantitative measure testing found a mismatch between researchers’ conceptualization of play-based pedagogy and EC educators’ (n=183) understandings. In Phase 2, EC educators (n=3) articulated their perspectives about teaching through play and co-authored a new tool, the Teacher-Authored Play and Teaching Scale (TAPTS). Within Phase 3, EC educators (n=60) completed the TAPTS, which I interpreted through a …

Improving Interdisciplinary Healthcare Staff Confidence And Competence In Screening, Brief Intervention, And Referral To Treatment Through Standardized Sbirt Training In A Behavioral Health Facility, Grace Kakie Awo Aidoo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) is an evidence-based approach for the early identification and management of substance use concerns. However, inconsistent implementation may occur when healthcare staff lack confidence and competence in applying SBIRT in clinical practice. This Doctor of Nursing Practice staff education project addressed a practice gap related to low confidence and competence among interdisciplinary healthcare staff implementing SBIRT in a behavioral health facility. The purpose of the project was to implement and evaluate a standardized SBIRT education and competency-based training program. Guided by the Johns Hopkins evidence-based practice model, the educational intervention incorporated evidence-based …

Texas Teachers’ Perspectives On Work Experiences That Influenced Their Decision To Leave Their District Or Profession Following The Onset Of The Pandemic, Rose Pham Tran

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The problem that was addressed through this study is the over 10% departure of K-12 teachers following the onset of the pandemic, contributing to widespread teacher shortages in the classrooms in Texas. Guided by Bakker and Demerouti’s job demands and resources framework, the purpose of this study was to explore K-12 teachers’ perspectives on the demands and responsibilities as well as their reasons to leave the district or profession following the onset of the pandemic. For this case study, semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 teachers from the same district who voluntarily left between 2020 and 2025. Additional data on …

Effective Strategies To Sustain Small And Medium-Sized Businesses From Cybercrime For More Than 5 Years After Startup, Sumeet Singh

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Cybercrime and data breaches pose a serious threat to the long‑term sustainability of small and medium‑sized enterprises (SMEs), especially those with limited cybersecurity capabilities. Leaders of these firms recognize that inadequate cybersecurity resources significantly increase the risk of instability and reduce the likelihood that their businesses will survive beyond the first 5 years. Grounded in Schumpeter’s entrepreneurship theory and Keynesian economic theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to identify and explore effective strategies that SME owners used to protect their businesses against cybercrime and data breaches to sustain their businesses beyond the first 5 years of …

Southeastern Michigan Firefighters’ Experiences With Their Organization’S Employee Assistance Program, Angela Patricia Johnson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Mental health challenges among first responders require coordinated stakeholder efforts. Although employee assistance programs (EAPs) are commonly offered as workplace benefits, little is known about firefighters’ experiences with these programs and how they can be tailored to meet their unique needs. Existing literature suggested that EAP utilization among firefighters is influenced by program awareness, confidentiality concerns, organizational support, stigma, and the extent to which services are tailored to first responders’ needs. Using a generic qualitative design and policy feedback theory, this study explored southeastern Michigan firefighters’ experiences with EAPs. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 11 firefighters for semi structured …

Some Contributions To Inference And Model/Variable Selection In High-Dimensional Problems, Sayantan Paul

Doctoral Theses

In today’s world, we often come across situations where we need to infer about several parameters simultaneously based on a single dataset. This is known as the problem of simultaneous statistical inference and the need for such inference arises for data from the fields of biology, astronomy, genomics, bioinformatics, medicine, economics, finance, and image processing, just to name a few. As the name suggests, instead of being concerned about the optimality of inference for the individual parameters, the main interest here is in proposing procedures which can provide satisfactory results in the overall inferential problem involving all parameters of interest. …

Spartan Daily, August 19, 2026, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2026

Volume 167, Issue 01

Denaturalization's Missing Limit, Cassandra Burke Robertson, Irina D. Manta

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Aeroradio-Spectrometric Geothermal Analysis Of Abeokuta, Southwestern Nigeria, Fidelis O. Ogunsanwo

Tanzania Journal of Science

Weathered basement terrains of Precambrian origin are increasingly recognized as important targets for geothermal assessment and renewable energy exploration; yet systematic assessments integrating airborne radiometric data remain limited in south-western Nigeria. This study applies an aeroradio-spectrometric approach to evaluate and quantify the radiogenic heat production, geothermal gradient, and lithospheric heat flow associated with the diverse lithological assemblages of the Abeokuta area, southwestern Nigeria. The study area comprises of six lithological units, namely; biotite–garnet gneiss and schist, porphyroblastic gneiss, migmatite, pegmatite intrusions, and sedimentary successions of sand-clay-shale and sandstone–limestone. The concentrations of uranium (238U), thorium (232Th), and potassium (40K) were extracted …

Analysis Of Application Of The Tod Concept In The Istora Senayan Area, Herika Muhamad Taki, Salsabila Dhania Wibowo, Muhammad Zaydan Bethaziarennur, Kelvin Erlangga

Jurnal Geografi Lingkungan Tropik (Journal of Geography of Tropical Environments)

TOD (Transit Oriented Development) is a concept of developing a mixed area that is integrated with transportation modes. This article aims to analyze the application of the TOD concept in the Istora-Senayan area. Research of The Application of the TOD concept in Istora Senayan area generally combines primary and secondary data. Primary data consists of field observation: recording real conditions of pedestrian paths, cycling infrastructure, transit access, land use, and connectivity. Spatial mapping/GIS analysis: mapping walking distance radius (400-800 m from station), measuring accessibility, block permeability, and connectivity (74,4% of the area within 800m walking distance to transit). Surveys: researchers …

Bridging Content, Practice, And Pedagogy In K–12 Computing Education: A Review Of Computer Science In K–12: An A To Z Handbook On Teaching Programming, Matthew Priem

Essays in Education

This book review examines Computer Science in K-12: An A to Z Handbook on Teaching Programming, a resource designed to support K-12 computer science educators. Bringing together contributions from forty authors, the book integrates content knowledge, computational practices, and pedagogical strategies for teaching programming across grade levels. The review highlights the text’s emphasis on addressing student misconceptions, connecting research to practice, and balancing teacher guidance with student autonomy. Although the alphabetical organization may not always reflect pedagogical progression, the modular structure allows for flexible use. Overall, the handbook is a valuable professional resource for both aspiring and practicing computer …

Measure By Measure: Reflections On Building A Quiz Map For Critical Caribbean Digital Pedagogy, Ra Bacchus, Medardo G. Rosario, Alexander S. Butler

archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis

This article reflects on the web development of a digital quiz map designed to help students critically engage with the representation of the Caribbean in digital space. Emerging from workshops organized by Visiones del Caribe—a digital humanities initiative using digitized maps and archives to teach Caribbean history, culture, and cartography—this tool responds to students’ inquiries about the region’s spatial boundaries. The quiz invites students to select on a map those countries and territories they consider part of the Caribbean, prompting reflection on the diversity of perspectives shaping Caribbean identity. Drawing from the discourse of critical cartography and digital pedagogy, we …

Acervos Documentales De Puerto Rico Y El Caribe @ Upr-Río Piedras: On Designing Digital Strategies For Preservation And Access Of Unique Puerto Rican And Caribbean Studies Collections, Mirerza González-Vélez, Mila Aponte-González

archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis

This paper documents Acervos Digitales de Puerto Rico y el Caribe @ UPR-Río Piedras, its origins, goals, activities and participants. It reflects on the team engagement with fundamental discussions regarding the use of Omeka in a Caribbean context, that resulted in the articulation and enactment of ethical principles for digital curation, as well as in its commitment for fundamental digital preservation efforts based on minimal technology requirements. The paper also provides an assessment of its continuity as a DH initiative committed to preserving, improving open access, and building capacity for the effective use of unique digitized humanities collections, and poses …

Digital Research Tools, Newspaper Texts, And Enslaved Fugitives In The Atlantic World, Gunvor Simonsen, Natacha Klein Käfer, Heather Freund, Felicia J. Fricke

archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis

This article demonstrates the benefits and pitfalls of utilizing Natural Language Processing to structure a large corpus of newspaper adverts on fugitive enslaved people from the Atlantic World between 1766 and 1821. We evaluate a model for multilingual event extraction trained specifically for fugitive ads and jail lists in its capacity to extract correctly the attributes relevant for historical analysis. Finally, we discuss how the current model may be used to expand and qualify databases concerning enslaved fugitives in the eastern Caribbean.

Agreements And Disagreements About The Roll Of Leadership Team Diversity In Strategic Change: A Critical Review Of Measurement And Empirical Inconsistencies, Amy C. Horner

Engaged Management ReView

Research examining the relationship between leadership team diversity and strategic change has produced inconsistent and often contradictory findings. This dissertation digest synthesizes prior research through a meta-analytic review of twenty-five studies representing more than 500,000 observations across multiple industries and countries. The results indicate that relationships between leadership team diversity characteristics and strategic change are generally small in magnitude and highly variable across studies.

Rather than reflecting a clear directional effect, these patterns point to a fundamental challenge in the existing literature: inconsistency in how key constructs are defined and measured. Strategic change is operationalized through a wide range of …

Optimizing Cannabinoid Exposure In An In Vitro Alzheimer's Disease Model: A Dose- And Time-Dependent Analysis Of Δ9-Thc, 11-Oh-Thc, And Thc-Cooh, Janiellys Brito, Chuanhai Cao

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the accumulation of amyloid-β plaques and neurofibrillary tau tangles, leading to progressive cognitive decline and synaptic dysfunction. Because current disease-modifying therapies for AD are extremely limited, there is a pressing need to investigate compounds that may influence underlying disease-related cellular processes. This study investigated the dose- and time-dependent effects of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC), 11-hydroxy-Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (11-OH-THC), and 11-nor-9-carboxy-Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC-COOH) to identify cannabinoid exposure conditions and to establish a framework for future AD research. N2a-APP cells, a mouse neuroblastoma cell line genetically modified to overproduce human amyloid precursor protein (APP) and serve as an …

Temporal Graph Networks With Dynamic Mode Decomposition For Iomt Threat And Risk Detection, Thinh Pham

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

The growing use of interconnected medical devices expands the attack surface of healthcare networks and creates the possibility that a compromise affecting one device, gateway, or communication channel may propagate through connected systems, producing cascading operational and patient-safety consequences. This research investigates whether temporal graph learning can improve intrusion detection and dynamic cyber-risk assessment in Internet of Medical Things networks. A Temporal Graph Network represents network flows as time-ordered interactions between communicating devices, uses each interaction to update their evolving behavioral profiles. The model jointly supports attack-type classification, anomaly detection, and dynamic risk scoring. The design also explores Dynamic Mode …

An Information Processing Framework For Lean Intervention Design In Nonprofit Food Bank Operations, Thanh Danh Nguyen

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Nonprofit food banks rely on rotating, minimally trained volunteers to make complex food sorting decisions, yet lean operations research rarely accounts for the cognitive limits these volunteers face on their first shift. This study proposes a Volunteer Information Processing Framework, grounded in memory and cognitive load theory, arguing that sorting errors stem from an “encoding gap”: volunteers have no prior long-term memory of category or expiration rules and must decide from scratch under working-memory constraints. Combining literature synthesis with field observation at Feeding Tampa Bay, the study evaluates two zero-cost interventions, dedicated group sorting and laminated visual guides, as external …

Digitizing An Assessment Protocol To Screen Bilingual Children For Developmental Language Disorder Risk, Ava De La Cruz, Anna Soares M.S., M. Adelaida Restrepo Phd

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

By integrating technology into assessment protocols, administration becomes more streamlined and scores become quicker to calculate. It opens doors for portable evaluations and data, efficient result analysis, and easily searchable records. To take advantage of these benefits, this project developed a digital version of the form used in the Spanish Screener for Language Impairment in Children (SSLIC). SSLIC screens Spanish-English bilingual children for the risk of DLD, utilizing subtests focused on morphology, sentence repetition, and other language-specific measures. Through the survey and database management tool REDCap, each section of SSLIC’s protocol was converted into a digital survey for researchers to …

Open-Source Software For Computing Code Automorphisms, Mateo Fernandez-Tyson, Gianna Baker

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

An error-correcting code is a mathematical structure that models the flow of information through a noisy communication channel and seeks to mitigate errors through redundancy. These codes have a wide range of uses spanning from satellite transmissions to cryptographically secure communication schemes. An automorphism of a code is a permutation of the coordinate positions that preserves the code, and these symmetries are useful in helping to answer questions of code equivalence, classification, and decoding. Our work focuses on implementing and testing algorithms for code automorphism computation using GAP and the GUAVA package. We present an efficient algorithm for generating all …

Ladbench: A Benchmark For Logical Fault Detection In Images, Sahasra Kondapalli, Lara Radovanovic, Mingyang Mao, Aadi Palnitkar

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation …

Computational Modeling Of Electrospinning For Predicting Nanofiber Fabrication And Process Optimization, Jadon J. Orr, Rhidita Rahman Khan

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Electrospinning is a widely used Fabrication technique for producing continuous polymeric nanofibers with application in designing more efficient optoelectronic devices, sensors, producing filtration systems, wound healing, tissue regeneration, drug delivery , forming advanced  functional nanomaterial structures. The successful formation of electro-spun fibers depends on complex interaction among polymer concentration, solution viscosity, molecular chain entanglement, solvent properties, applied voltage, tip-collector-distance, and solution flow rate. Determining the optimum electrospinning condition traditionally achieved through repeated experimental trial and error, makes the process time consuming, costly, and difficult to reproduce across different polymer-solvent systems. Developing computational tools capable of predicting fiber formation can significantly …

Oaat: Omla-Like Approach Against Tlglock​, Antonio P. Ruiz, Joshua N. Lam

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Due to the rise of outsourced chip manufacturing, methods to protect chip designs and Intellectual Property (IP) are necessary to prevent theft and piracy by malicious actors within these intermediate firms. One such method is Logic Locking (LL), which adds circuitry that “locks” the design with a key so that the circuit only gives the correct output when provided with the correct key. The development of various attacks have allowed older LL methods, which rely on changing the placement policy of XOR/XNOR or MUX key-gates, to be broken. A newer LL solution to address this problem is TLGLock, which simplifies …

Smartphone-Based Profiling Of Industrial Control Systems Using Magnetic Side Channels, Michelle Mcaveety, Rylan Pietras, Robert Karam

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have increasingly been subject to malicious cyber attacks, thus threatening the operational safety, stability, and reliability of critical infrastructure. While existing research has utilized electromagnetic, timing, and audiovisual side channels for ICS attacks, the offensive utility of magnetic side channels in these environments has yet to be explored. Utilizing the magnetometers present in modern-day smartphones, the magnetic fields produced by the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), Human-Machine Interface (HMI), Linear Actuator Controller, and AC-to-DC Power Converter are recorded. Magnetic field data then undergoes signal processing coupled with machine learning classification on extracted feature vectors to determine the …

Side-Channel Protection Through Threshold Implementation: A Case Study Of Poseidon, Siddhartha Tamma, Madison Daniella Eissayou

OneUSF Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium

As systems grow complex, side-channel attacks pose severe threats by exploiting physical leakage, including power consumption, timing variations, and electromagnetic emissions, to infer sensitive data. To counter this, threshold implementations mask sensitive data by splitting it into randomized shares and performing intermediate computations so that no individual share reveals meaningful information. We aim to achieve a side-channel resistant architecture that eliminates statistical leakage across millions of evaluation traces. To minimize hardware overhead on the FPGA, we can time-multiplex a single protected S-box core across the cipher’s partial rounds. By decomposing the non-linear x^5 operation into cascading steps, we also aim …

Refusing Artificial Coherence: Christopher Tolkien's Philology And His Editorial Practice On His Father’S Legendarium, Nicholas Birns

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper was given at The Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference sponsored by the Tolkien Society, held online on 23/24 November 2024.  The paper was given on Zoom on November 24, 2024.

This paper argues that Christopher Tolkien’s 1950s philological essay “The Battle of the Goths and the Huns” anticipates the editorial principles that later governed his presentation of his father, J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium. Analyzing Christopher’s treatment of early medieval legend alongside his handling of the Celeborn and Galadriel materials, the essay argues that he consistently resisted imposing artificial coherence on fragmentary evidence. Whether confronting speculative Gothic history, or …

Complete Liturgical Requiem Mass And Absolution, Joseph A. Murphy

William J. Marsh Papers

Liturgical missalette for a Requiem Mass and Absolution by Joseph A. Murphy.

Gpu Ray Tracing And Di!Erentiable Multi-Physics Innovations, Xavier Pillet

Defensive Publications Series

This document, produced with the assistance of GPT-5.2 Thinking and Gemini 3 Reasoning, is released under the Apache License 2.0. It is a voluntary defensive publication (prior art) and therefore enters the prior art upon release under the applicable patent statutes : EPC Art. 54(2) (European Patent Convention), French IPC Art. L 611-11 (French Intellectual Property Code), 35 U.S.C. §102(a) (United States Patent Act), Chinese Patent Law Art. 22(5) (両匡丢氡儡吡嘡丣刡氢), and Japanese Patent Act Art. 29(1) (闘旧避). Description: defensive publication covering enabling inventions around GPU/RT-core ray tracing, differentiable simulation, experimental validation, interoperability (standards), operational security, sustainability, and cross-domain applications (RF/LiDAR/IR/acoustics/seismology/climate/nuclear/biophotonics/medical), …

Model-Agnostic Search-Augmented Llm Pipelines For Production-Scale Company Data Validation, Enrichment And Normalization, Hp Inc

Defensive Publications Series

This paper presents a vendor-agnostic, search-augmented large language model (LLM) pipeline that validates, enriches, and normalizes company records using grounded information from public web sources. The pipeline addresses enterprise requirements for official names, addresses, tax identifiers, revenue, industry classifications, and related compliance metadata where manual validation, database lookups, and rule-based integration pipelines struggle with incomplete, inconsistent, multilingual, and region-specific inputs. The architecture uses a central control framework to orchestrate native-search and tool-calling web-enabled LLM providers under production constraints, including context limits, tokens-per-minute (TPM), requests-per-minute (RPM), maximum batch size, concurrency, incomplete outputs, safety filtering, and provider-specific response formats. It combines batch-admission …

Method And Apparatus For Reducing Semiconductor Package Warpage During Reflow, N/A, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

The technology generally relates to controlling package warpage during reflow soldering using a temporary support structure. The structure, composed of a glass carrier and a high-coefficient of thermal expansion balance film, is applied to the top surface of a package substrate before the reflow process. As temperature increases during reflow, the high-coefficient of thermal expansion balance film expands or shrinks, inducing a controlled downward deformation that acts as a counter-stress. This action balances the internal stresses that cause package warpage, maintaining a flat profile throughout the reflow cycle. The flat package profile facilitates accurate alignment and bonding of its ball …