Digital Commons Network^™

Two New Non-Parametric Item Selection Methods For Cd-Cat, Li Junjie, Zheng Huijing, Kang Chunhua, Yimu Zhang

Chinese/English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation | 教育测量与评估双语期刊

Computerized adaptive testing for cognitive diagnosis (CD-CAT) is a method that combines cognitive diagnosis testing and computerized adaptive testing. Compared with traditional cognitive diagnostic tests, it is more efficient and offers more tailored insights into examinees’ knowledge state. As a core part of CD-CAT, the item selection method directly affects the accuracy and efficiency of the overall assessment. This study aims to construct two nonparametric item selection methods based on the Hamming distance nonparametric difference index (HD-NDI) and the general Hamming distance nonparametric difference index (GHD-NDI). Subsequently, the performance of the two proposed item-selection methods in CD-CAT is examined through …

‘There Is No Continuity’: Assessment Of Pre-Service Teachers' Ability To Analyse Historical Sources In Two Ghanaian Public Universities, Anitha Oforiwah Adu-Boahen

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

The paper examined student-teachers’ understanding of change and continuity in History. Using a convergent parallel mixed method approach, one hundred and thirty-five (135) student-teachers from two public universities examined images depicting classroom settings in Ghana’s educational system from different periods. Respondents were expected to show and explain the continuities and changes in the different periods in Ghanaian history. They were to focus on the disparities in ‘change’ and ‘continuities’ in classroom settings in the Ghanaian educational system over time. Again, student-teachers were expected to transform their knowledge of these changes into historical understanding by writing an interpretation from the sources. …

Using The Past To Better Understand The Present: Contextualizing Today’S History Wars, For Ourselves And For Our Students, Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

This essay considers our contemporary moment in the context of the long history of the so-called "history wars" in the United States. It identifies four historical moments with ties to the present, and makes use of primary documents to discuss each time period. It also considers the ways in which historical activists such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois advocated for honest history in the past, and the ways in which we might argue for nuanced historical thinking in the present. Teachers may find the documents of use for their own classrooms, and a brief appendix at …

Research

Appalachia

Twice in Bloom: The Mystery of Diapensia’s Late-Season Flowers.

Scientists study why the tiny alpine flowers sometimes bloom again in the all.

Climbing As Healing: In War-Torn Ukraine, An American From Pennsylvania Leads A Climbing Program For War-Affected Children, Natalie Berry

Appalachia

A journalist gets to know young climbers and their families as they explore rock in Ukraine.

Proactive Generation And Interface-Binding Of Parameterized Executable Prompts From Backend State Events, Jayant Sharma

Defensive Publications Series

Conversational assistant interfaces are reactive. No processing is performed until a session has been opened and a well-formed request has been typed into an open input field. Operational problems must therefore be found first on separate monitoring surfaces. Described here is an asynchronous technique by which unstructured backend state events are converted into pre-parameterized, executable natural language prompts. A remote procedure call is issued against a decoupled state database, and returned anomalies are mapped to category and priority constants. A fully formed prompt string is then compiled for each anomaly, with live record variables injected during compilation. Each compiled string …

Metric-Affine Engineering (Mag) And Complex Continuum Physics: Global Invention Portfolio, Xavier Pillet

Defensive Publications Series

This document, produced with the assistance of Gemini 3.6 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) (中华人民共和国专利法), and Japanese Patent Act Art. 29(1) (特許法). This comprehensive portfolio discloses 48 enabling technical innovations derived from metric-affine engineering (MAG), covering odd-viscosity micropolar fluids, hyper-shear metamaterials, Weyl semimetals, quantum/cryogenic instrumentation, healthcare applications, software …

The Incommensurability-Preserving Coupler: A Non-Purchasable Recognition Balance Sized Only From The Thank-You Message, Beside Money Gifts, Time Pledges And Prepaid Item Gift Codes, With The Merchant's Own Item Price As The Only Exchange Rate And One Payment Type Per Gift Message, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This defensive publication's revision adds a third gift cargo and claims 8–11 to a dual-currency gift system in which peer-to-peer money gifts and non-transferable, expiring time pledges run as one economy with no exchange rate. The system also carries prepaid item gift codes, bought at a shop's own price, beside per-person recognition balances that cannot be bought, transferred or cashed. Each thank-you message's recognition amount is computed only from the message (its words, a sender-chosen sentiment marker, its recorded length, the parties it names, and a model's refinement within a fixed band), never from any money amount, item, price, length …

The B-Tag Recommendation Function: Privacy-Preserving Methodology For Ai-Mediated Commercial Tip Recommendation — Suggested Tip Amounts With Stated Reasons From Confidential Merchant Costs, Without Customer Tracking, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This paper discloses a method by which an AI agent recommends a voluntary payment amount, a suggested tip in a pay-what-you-want sale, and shows it with stated reasons, without tracking the customer and without revealing the merchant's costs. Six components are specified. (1) The merchant confidentially discloses a cost breakdown by category (materials, labor, a skill premium, overhead, regulatory cost and margin) to the recommender; the customer never sees it. (2) The recommended amount is a non-binding anchor: paying it, more, less or nothing completes the sale, and whether a customer accepted or overrode past suggestions is not recorded. (3) …

Stakes-Adaptive Verification And Origin-Traced Rollback In Autonomous Agent Workflows, Glen Messenger

Defensive Publications Series

In autonomous agent workflows, agents can produce plausible-but-wrong intermediate outputs that are syntactically valid and pass local validation checks but semantically diverge from a requester's intent, and subsequent steps can compound the error. The described technology may establish, from the initial request, a machine-checkable intent contract that the agent cannot modify, may checkpoint workflow state after each verified step, and may evaluate agent-produced artifacts using a tiered detector. Upon detecting a divergence, the system may attribute it to the earliest step whose artifact diverges from the intent contract (the origin step), which may precede the step at which the divergence …

Causal Set Theory, The Growing Block, And The Buddhist Debate On The Three Times: What The Earliest Vibhajjavādin Records Say — Presentism, Eternalism And Beginningless Time In Abhidharma Texts Compared With Sequential-Growth Models, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This study reads the Buddhist debate on whether past and future things exist (the "three times") against the growing-block view of time that causal set theory's sequential-growth models are offered to support. Rafael Sorkin (2007) remarked that the "accretive time" of these models seems close to C.D. Broad's and to the "Vibhajavadin" school's; Fay Dowker (2022) invited a scholar to determine that school's view of time from the earliest records. The records give no single view under the name. In the northern Abhidharma, the Vibhajyavādins hold that the present and past action whose fruit is not yet given exist, but …

Machine-Checked Consistency Of A Buddhist Classification: Lean Theorems For The Abhidhamma's 89 And 121 Types Of Consciousness — Formal Verification Of A Class–Feature Incidence Structure Against Both Stated Projections, With Mutation Testing, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This paper reports a machine-checked consistency test of a classification that its source states twice, once feature by feature and once class by class. The source is chapters 1–3 of the Abhidhammattha-saṅgaha, a standard manual of the Theravāda Buddhist Abhidhamma, which classifies consciousness into 89 types (121 when the supramundane types are reckoned by meditative absorption) and states which of 52 mental factors combine with each type. In the Lean 4 theorem prover, a nine-clause generator builds the types as a product of chapter 1's classification axes, and eighteen rules over those axes, none naming an individual type, assign each …

Fingerprint Enrollment Guidance Using Stitched-Island Outline Feedback And Dynamic Touch-Count Reduction For Narrow-Aspect Sensors, Justin Eltoft, Eddie Lan

Defensive Publications Series

A fingerprint sensor with a narrow sensing area, for example a side-mounted sensor on a mobile device, images only a small slice of a finger with each touch, so an enrollment process stitches a series of touches into a composite template.  A user who repeatedly touches the sensor with the same part of the finger fills one region of the template while leaving other regions uncovered, which can cause authentication failures after enrollment.  This document describes an enrollment guidance method that receives per-touch stitching metadata from a fingerprint matcher and presents each contiguous stitched region on a display as an …

Measuring The Lens Distortion Of A Fixed Tracking Camera From Operator-Traced Straight Lines, With Edge Snapping, An Uncertainty-Based Coverage Rating And Grid-Side Correction, Michel Honold, Paul Hermann

Defensive Publications Series

A method measures the lens distortion of a camera that maps image positions onto a surface, such as a fixed camera tracking performers on a stage, without a calibration target. The operator indicates a feature that is straight in reality, for example a stage edge, tape, truss or LED-wall edge, by clicking its two ends. The software places sample points between the clicks and snaps each one across the line onto the strongest image edge, using one edge polarity for the whole line so that both edges of a strip of tape are never mixed. The operator can correct individual …

Brand Identity As Architecture: The B-Heart Logo, B-Prefix Naming, Heartbeat Animation As Display Of A Proof-Of-Humanity Attestation, And Aura-Color Two-Ledger State Primitive — Rotated-Heart Bistable Logo, Single-Letter Product Prefix, Logo Animation Bound To Proof-Of-Personhood Attestation, And Avatar Ring Color From Balance Zero-Crossing Frequency, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This paper discloses a brand-identity system in which each element of a logo does functional work beyond recognition. (I) A logo made by rotating an unmodified heart silhouette 45° clockwise, so that it reads at once as a heart and as the capital letter B — a reading that survives at favicon size because it depends on no internal whitespace. (II) A product-naming convention in which every product takes a one-letter prefix that is the logo's own letter reading, so the prefix cannot come apart from the mark. (III) A logo animation with a cardiac morphology — two pulses, the …

Closed-Loop Refinement Of Generative Ai Using Claim Decomposition And A Hierarchical Evidence Ledger, Susanta Biswas

Defensive Publications Series

Large language models operating in multi-turn agentic workflows can generate unverified statements or struggle to resolve conflicting information across disparate session sources. This disclosure describes systems and methods for a closed-loop refinement architecture to address these challenges. A system can programmatically decompose generated text into atomic claims and verify them against an evidence ledger. This ledger can organize session-specific information and use a configurable source-of-truth hierarchy to resolve potential conflicts. Based on the verification, a machine-readable correction prompt can be generated and sent to the model, enabling automated self-correction. This process can improve the verifiability and factual grounding of the …

Factual Verification Of Generated Content Using Iterative Refinement And Incremental Processing, Susanta Biswas

Defensive Publications Series

Systems that can use large language models to generate content may inefficiently re-evaluate entire documents during iterative editing. A disclosed technology may address these issues through a verification and refinement process where a system can decompose generated text into atomic claims and validate them against a prioritized evidence ledger. For iterative workflows, the system can cache verification results and use incremental processing to re-evaluate primarily the modified portions of the text. This approach can improve the factual grounding of generated content while reducing latency and computational overhead associated with full re-evaluation, which may be beneficial in complex, multi-turn agentic systems.

Transparency As Enforcement: Anti-Abuse Without Legal Contract Machinery — Community Disclosure In Place Of Terms-Of-Service Enforcement, Limited To Incurred Obligations, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This paper discloses a design pattern for abuse prevention in online platforms and shared-fund applications that replaces terms-of-service enforcement, dispute resolution and account termination with disclosure: the conduct to be policed is made visible to the bounded community it affects, and that community's own response is the sanction. Three properties make disclosure work as enforcement: the visibility itself is the mechanism, the response is proportioned by the community rather than by a binary rule, and participants join knowing what will be visible. Two deployments are specified: disclosure to a family of every reward its steward receives from the family's shared …

Fractal Three-Level Architecture For Reciprocity Economies: Self-Similar Family-And-Global Layering With A Single Mental Model — A Shared Three-Level Account Hierarchy (Pooled Fund, Give-Forward Account, Individual Account) For Family And Peer-To-Peer Payments, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This paper discloses an account architecture for a reciprocity platform — software through which people give one another money as thanks — designed to operate at two scales, within families and between strangers peer to peer, with one three-level account hierarchy at both, so that a participant who has learned the family-scale system recognizes the planetary-scale one. The three node types are a pooled fund that aggregates contributions and disburses them under published rules; a give-forward account, whose balance can only be passed on to other people; and an individual's own account. Four transfer conventions apply identically at each scale: …

News Publishers And Platforms: Mandated Payment And Its Limits, Abhiram Nitin

Indian Journal of Law and Technology

Falling advertising revenues of news media in the digital age have precipitated regulations that require payments by ‘Big Tech’ companies to news publishers for content. This paper reviews three approaches – the press publishers’ right in the European Union (‘EU’), Big Tech Regulation in Australia and Canada and the competition-enforcement proceedings in India. The experiences in the EU, Australia, and Canada reveal an incentive-incompatibility in mandating payments for news, owing to the asymmetric structural dependence of publishers on platforms – publishers cannot afford to lose platform traffic while platforms can drop news at little cost. Competition law, while subject to …

Effect Of Obliquity On Metaphyseal-Diaphyseal Ratio And Anterior Humeral Line Alignment In Pediatric Supracondylar Fractures: A 3d Radiographic Study, Mason T. Chimenti

Summer Research Program Abstracts

No abstract provided.

Strafford & Rockingham County 4-H 2026 Favorite Fall Foods Festival, Cooperative Extension

UNH Cooperative Extension

No abstract provided.

Madmen And Piantados: The Vindication Of Irrationalism In Cortázar´S Essays And Short Stories, Eunice Rojas

INTI: Revista de literatura hispánica

No abstract provided.

2026-10-08 American Association Of University Professors Calls For Reinstatement Of Former Professor Carmen Rivera, Dylan Berman

The Spectator Online

No abstract provided.

Spartan Daily, October 8, 2026, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily, 2026

Volume 167, Issue 21

2026-10-08 Faculty Senate Newsletter, Morehead State University. Faculty Senate.

Faculty Senate Records

Faculty Senate newsletter from October 8, 2026.

An Exploratory Study Of The Effects Of 8 Weeks Of Nonlinear Periodization Within Tactical Athlete Populations, Stephen Hudgins

Doctorate in Kinesiology

Tactical athletes, including military personnel, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and security professionals, must maintain high levels of physical readiness despite unpredictable schedules, demanding occupational requirements, and elevated injury risk. Traditional training models may not adequately address the need to simultaneously develop multiple components of fitness while remaining adaptable to irregular work demands. Nonlinear periodization has been proposed as a flexible training strategy capable of improving several fitness characteristics concurrently. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an eight-week nonlinear periodized training program on tactical athlete performance across multiple domains of physical fitness. A repeated-measures quantitative design …

Montana Kaimin, October 8, 2026, Students Of The University Of Montana, Missoula

Montana Kaimin, 1898-present

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.

October 8, 2026, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

The Verney Family And Their Guitars In France And England, 1643–53, Christopher Page

Soundboard Scholar

The five-course guitar was a fundamental resource for the Verney family from 1643 to 1653 as they sheltered in France, avoiding their creditors and escaping the state of civil war at home in England. Their papers from that period, comprising many thousands of letters and financial accounts, show them hiring a guitar-master, ordering new guitars in Paris and debating the relative benefits of lessons for their eldest son on the guitar as opposed to the lute. This article reproduces the key documents and considers the music that the Verneys may have played. The papers particularly show how an instrument often …