Digital Commons Network^™

Merritt-Putnam Symposium | Developmental And Epileptic Encephalopathies-Current Concepts And Novel Approaches., Rodney C Scott, Jenny Hsieh, Amy Mctague, J Matthew Mahoney, Catherine A Christian-Hinman

Faculty Research 2025

Developmental and epileptic encephalopathies (DEEs) are among the most severe and difficult to treat epilepsies. Two broad strategies for understanding the etiology and impacts of DEEs include genetic and complex adaptive systems approaches. This review, inspired by the 2024 Merritt-Putnam Symposium, describes current perspectives of DEE, identifies limitations of current views, and discusses potential novel ways forward. First, we discuss the rationale for a reevaluation of the role of seizures in the pathogenesis of cognitive and behavioral impairments in DEE. Second, we discuss newly emerging methods employing neural organoids to study brain development and DEE in vitro. Third, we present …

A Feasibility Study Of Enzymatic Methylation Sequencing Of Cell-Free Dna From Cerebrospinal Fluid Of Pediatric Central Nervous System Tumor Patients For Molecular Classification., Aaron M Taylor, Jody T Lombardi, Areeba Patel, Ariella Tamariz, Jonathan Martin, Markus J Bookland, David S Hersh, Evan Cantor, Xianyuan Song, Felix Sahm, Patrick Ks Ng, Joanna J Gell, Ching C Lau

Faculty Research 2025

BACKGROUND: Array-based DNA methylation profiling is the gold standard for central nervous system (CNS) tumor molecular classification, but requires over 100 ng input DNA from surgical tissue. Cell-free tumor DNA (cfDNA) in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) offers an alternative for diagnosis and disease monitoring. This study aimed to test the utilization of enzymatic DNA methylation sequencing (EM-seq) methods to overcome input DNA limitations.

METHODS: We used the NEBNext EM-seq v2 kit on various amounts of cfDNA, as low as 0.1 ng, extracted from archival CSF samples of 10 patients with CNS tumors. Tumor classification was performed via MNP-Flex using CpG sites …

Capstone Research On Missoula, Montana, Rental Market Impact On Undergraduate Students’ Well-Being, Alysa Curry, Aidan Rasmussen, Halston Witt, Tristan Clifford, Sadie Arnold

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This research project examined how rental housing challenges in Missoula, Montana, impacts the well-being of students at the University of Montana and Missoula College. With rising rent prices and limited affordable housing options, students face growing stress related to finances, housing stability, and academic life. To explore this, we created a survey asking students about their living situations, financial pressures, social support, and mental health. We calculated a Well-being Score based on housing stress, social support, and future confidence to identify the biggest factors affecting student well-being.

Despite facing challenges in distributing the survey and gathering responses, the results revealed …

The Laramie Project, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2024-2025 Season Productions

No abstract provided.

Llm-Guided Multimodal Information Fusion With Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Graph Network For Sentiment Analysis, Yujie Jin, Yong Wang, Yuzhe Wang, Qiyang Chen, Bin Hu, Yanling Han, Chaoyin Ma, Witold Pedrycz

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to attain a precise comprehension of emotions by integrating complementary textual, visual, and audio information. However, issues such as sentiment discrepancies between modalities, ineffective integration of multi-modal information, and the intricacy of order dependency significantly constrain the models' efficacy. The authors propose an LLM-guided Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Graph Network (L-HSTGN). By multimodal large model feature enhancement, bidirectional spatio-temporal joint modeling, and dynamic gate fusion mechanism, they effectively address the aforementioned problems. Firstly, they produce cross-modal emotion pseudo-labels based on the multimodal large model, and the single-modal representation was optimized by combining adversarial regularization. Secondly, they develop a …

Prepared To Protect: Improving Cardiac Emergency Response Through Education And Action Planning In Youth Club Sports, Melissa Garcia

Nursing | Senior Theses

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is the leading cause of death in youth sports, illuminating the essential demand for adequate emergency response, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), automated external defibrillator (AED) usage, and comprehensive emergency action plans (EAPs). Research shows that despite the importance of prompt intervention, the majority of youth club sports programs outside of the school setting lack the training and resources needed to respond effectively to SCA incidents. This study will evaluate the effectiveness of an educational seminar that includes CPR/AED training and EAP simulation exercises in improving participants’ knowledge, skills, and confidence in managing cardiac emergencies. A quasi-experimental …

Madawaska Ballots: Ralph Owen Brewster's Contested Elections In The St. John Valley, Tyler Wolanin

Original Research

When Ralph Owen Brewster was narrowly defeated in the 1924 Republican gubernatorial primary (initially) and 1932 congressional election, he attempted to have votes from the towns and plantations on the St. John River thrown out on various pretexts. Brewster, a populist who had opposed power company interests as governor, alleged in 1932 that these interests had conspired to defeat him by arranging illegitimate votes in the Francophone border region. Investigation of voting trends, however, shows that the vote against Brewster was likely the result of more routine political partisanship, as well as a rejection of his Ku Klux Klan support …

A Vascular Flora Of Ladd Canyon, Santa Ana Mountains, Orange And Riverside Counties, California, Daniel P. Donovan, Amanda E. Fisher

Aliso: A Journal of Systematic and Floristic Botany

The Santa Ana Mountains are a coastal range on the border of Orange and Riverside counties in southern California. Ladd Canyon, covering 18.2 km² in the Cleveland National Forest, is a botanical black hole relative to the rest of the Santa Ana Mountains because of limited access. It is dominated by chaparral and coastal sage scrub and includes significant knobcone pine (Pinus attenuata) stands and riparian woodland. Features that make it an intriguing area to study include the only serpentine soil in the Santa Ana Mountains, large tracts of habitat that have no recorded fire history, steep …

The Rare, Endangered And Endemic Plants Of The California Floristic Province Portion Of Baja California, Mexico, Bart C. O'Brien, Jon P. Rebman, José Delgadillo-Rodríguez, Kanchi Natarajan Gandhi, Steven A. Junak, Thomas A. Oberbauer, Hugo Riemann, Sula E. Vanderplank

Aliso: A Journal of Systematic and Floristic Botany

The California Floristic Province (CFP) is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, known for high levels of plant endemism. The CFP extends from southwestern Oregon, through cismontane California, south to northwestern Baja California, Mexico. The flora of the California Floristic Province portion of Baja California (CFP Baja) has historically been poorly documented and understood. This study provides data to address this deficiency by inventorying and assessing the native flora of CFP Baja from a conservation perspective: evaluating the rarity, endangerment and endemism of its native taxa. A total of 2392 taxa were assessed to determine this listing of rare, endangered …

Mistrust Among Injured Immigrant Workers: A Conceptual Framework, Maude Arsenault, Daniel Côté, Jessica Dubé

Revues de littérature, synthèses de connaissances

Background

In Quebec, injured workers have access to medical assistance, wage replacement indemnities, and rehabilitation measures, with most injuries resolved easily. However, a small percentage of cases require a lengthy rehabilitation process, which is particularly complex when involving immigrants. The therapeutic alliance is at the heart of the process, involving mutual trust and confidence and a degree of consensus about the therapeutic interventions to be used and, ultimately, the return to work.

Objective

This article delves into the concept of mistrust as more than the absence of trust, and sheds light on its role in the rehabilitation process of immigrant …

Deconstructing The Digital Sentence: A Call For The Protection Of Privacy, Identity, And Rehabilitation In The Age Of Ai, Noah Baumgaertel

Student Work

As our society has transitioned into the digital age, we have found ways to implement technology and more efficiently capture criminal suspects. Under the guise of transparency, many former offenders and mere suspects have had their personal information shared publicly on the internet. It follows, then, that many perceived ‘criminals’ are judged by society even after being exonerated or having served their time, largely as a result of this data. Inevitably, we must attempt to address the concerns at hand: How can criminal justice data be effectively safeguarded to support ethical AI and the successful reintegration of individuals in the …

Support Vector Machine Optimization For Predicting Bio  Polymer Gel Effectiveness In Fracture-Dominated  High-Temperature Reservoirs, Farhad A. Bina

Petroleum Engineering Student Publications

This paper presents a data-driven framework for evaluating the effectiveness of bio-polymer gel treatments in fracture-dominated, high-temperature geothermal reservoirs. Laboratory core-flooding experiments were conducted on samples from the Deadwood Formation under reservoir-representative conditions, including temperatures up to 160 °C and salinity levels up to 17% TDS. Key physical, thermal, and flow-related parameters—such as porosity, permeability, fracture width, heat retention, and gel extrusion pressure—were integrated into a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification model to predict treatment success, defined by a residual resistance factor (RRF) threshold of 1000. To extend the applicability of the model beyond available core material, geologically informed synthetic …

A Conceptual Replication Of An Implicit Test Of Grammatical Gender Effects On Inanimate Concepts, D. Mahajan, Frank H. Durgin

Psychology Faculty Works

It has been argued that the incidental and arbitrary use of gender markings for inanimate concepts in language may affect the conceptualization or semantics of those inanimate concepts. The present article sought to replicate the findings of a classic paper that made this argument. Konishi used the potency dimension of the semantic differential method as an implicit measure of perceived gender. He reported that words for inanimate concepts of masculine grammatical gender were rated as higher in potency than words for the same concepts that had feminine grammatical gender. Two preregistered replication studies are reported here. The first was a …

Figurative Language Is (Implicitly) More Dynamic And Emotionally Deeper Than Literal Language, Tshering Yangzom Dorji , '23, Frank H. Durgin

Psychology Faculty Works

Two experiments investigated the nature of the emotional differences between figurative language and literal counterparts. The semantic differential method was used with principal component analysis as a data-driven implicit method for distinguishing emotional variables. The first experiment found that metaphoric stories were reliably different in emotionality than their literal counterparts along three different data-defined dimensions. The second experiment extended the conclusions to the evaluation of individual words used figuratively (including simile and metaphor). In both studies, principal component analysis revealed three distinct underlying sources of variance implicit in the ratings of experimental items including the dimensions of dynamism and depth, …

Modeling Deductive Inference: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction To First-Order Logic, David J. Buller

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

This book is a companion text for lectures on first-order logic and its elementary metatheory (used in Intermediate Logic at Northern Illinois University). It covers the basic concepts of set theory necessary for a mathematical development of first-order logic; develops a formal language of first-order logic; presents a classical Tarskian semantics for the language and the “semantic” conception of logical consequence; presents a Gentzenian proof system and the “syntactic” conception of logical consequence; develops a partial decision procedure for logical consequence in the language; demonstrates applications of the formal system to modeling deductive inference expressed in natural language; and extends …

"We Must Cultivate Our Garden" Interpreting Voltaire's Candide (1759), Aner Schuyler

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Voltaire wrote Candide in 1759. This philosophical tale tells the story of a naïve and optimistic youth who travels the Old and New Worlds, encounters cruelty and atrocities everywhere, wonders how they fit into a world created and overseen by a benevolent God, and gradually becomes disabused with optimism and the world. At this time Voltaire's book was considered heretical by the French Monarchy and Catholic Church for speaking plainly and critically about world tragedies and injustices. Voltaire critiques the abuse of power, injustice, intolerance, oppression, and autocracies through satire and tragedy. This essay interprets the last line of Voltaire’s …

Mesonephric-Like Carcinoma Of The Endometrium In A 73-Year-Old Female, Cameron Summers-Powell, Carina Ferraris, Zoyla Almeida, Susana Ferra, Mirza Baig

East Florida Division GME Research Day 2025

Introduction: Mesonephric-like carcinoma (MLC) is a newly described malignant tumor that represents 1% of endometrial cancers. The etiology of this disease is currently unknown but immunohistochemical expression with GATA-3, PAX-8 and TTF-1 and lack of ER/PR positivity can aid in correct diagnosis.

Case Summary: A 73-year-old female presented to the hospital with post-menopausal bleeding, an initial hysteroscopy identified a lesion suggestive of endometrial cancer. Ultimately, the patient underwent a hysterectomy and a bilateral salpingectomy/oophorectomy. Chemotherapy ensued due to metastatic disease. At 7 months post-op, the patient appeared to be doing well.

Results: Grossly, the lesion was 5.5 cm and appeared …

​Cd10 Positive Mantle Cell Lymphoma Masquerading As Follicular Lymphoma​, Matthew Lee, Jennifer Barker, Fatemeh Mousavi

East Florida Division GME Research Day 2025

No abstract provided.

Lipoleiomyoma Of The Uterus, A Benign Metastasizing Tumor, Munira Malik, Mohtashim Naeem, Susana Ferra

East Florida Division GME Research Day 2025

No abstract provided.

The Silicon Valley No-Poach Conspiracy, Eric A. Posner, Ruth Zheng

Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

The Silicon Valley no-poach conspiracy is the most important cartel no one has heard of. It is rarely discussed in the cartel literature and is lost to public memory. More than forty tech firms, including Apple and Google, agreed not to poach employees from one another over three decades, causing an estimated $3.1 billion in lost wages. The Justice Department discovered and broke apart the cartel in 2010, but did not punish the cartel members, who quickly settled with employees and never admitted guilt. However, the case foreshadowed, and perhaps helped spur, two major developments in antitrust law a decade …

Crop Insurance And Weather Risk: Decision Tools And The Effects Of Rising Temperatures In Kentucky, Enil Serrano

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

This thesis investigates how rising temperatures and climate variability affect crop insurance decisions and premium rates for corn and soybean farmers in Kentucky. It introduces a new decision-support tool, the "Crop Insurance Decision Maker" (CIDM), which helps producers evaluate the financial trade-offs of various crop insurance products under different risk preferences. The first chapter details the tool’s development, function, and potential to improve farmer understanding of insurance options. The second chapter quantifies how +1°C and +2°C warming scenarios impact yield risk and crop insurance premium rates using 73 years of corn yield data, 51 years for soybean yield, and weather …

The Intersection Of Broadband And Health: Exploring Rural-Urban Disparities In Colorado, Hunter Anderson, Kristen Paradine

Scholarship in Medicine - All Papers

Modern healthcare infrastructure and progression depend on robust and reliable broadband access. Many areas of the U.S., however, still face limited access which exacerbates access to care and healthcare inequities. These trends can be observed in rural counties across the country, where resource constraints and reduced access to infrastructure remain limited. The correlation however between different health outcomes and broadband access in Colorado has not been widely explored in literature.
This study examines the relationship between broadband availability and different healthcare outcomes for rural and urban counties of Colorado by utilizing data from the County Health Rankings and Roadmaps for …

Pay To Plead: Finding Unfairness And Abusive Practices In California Debt Collection Cases, Claire Johnson Raba

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Curriculum Vitae Of Matthew Lipman (2025), Matthew Lipman, Maughn Gregory

Scholarship

This curriculum vitae of Matthew Lipman was prepared by Maughn Rollins Gregory over the course of many years, and completed in November 2025.

Cybersickness & Susceptibility In An Exterior Preflight Inspection Simulation, Nathan A. Sonnenfeld, Alexis Sanchez, Blake Nguyen, Fiona Duruaku, Alex Alonso, Florian G. Jentsch

International Symposium on Aviation Psychology - 2025

Cybersickness may impact the use of virtual reality (VR) in training, as anytrainee group, including those interested in aviation careers, may includeindividuals highly susceptible to cybersickness. We therefore examinedrelationships among cybersickness and susceptibility, under varying conditions ofimmersion and interactivity, during a simulated exterior preflight inspection task.Using a non-pilot, but demographically similar trainee group (undergraduatecollege students), we found a high prevalence of susceptibility (79.4%) amongparticipants, with a high incidence (70.3%) of cybersickness in VR. Susceptibilitywas a significant predictor (R2=0.176) of cybersickness severity. Profiles ofcybersickness symptoms (Disorientation, Oculomotor, Nausea) were consistentwithin, but not between, conditions of immersion. This research further detailsrelationships among …

A Comparative Content Analysis Of The Standard, Nation And People Daily Newspapers In The Coverage Of Covid-19 Pandemic In Kenya, Sarah Kamande

Master of Arts in Digital Journalism

When the first cases of coronavirus infection emerged in Kenya, the focus of print media moved to cover COVID-19 pandemic stories. This study aimed to analyze how the print media framed the stories for the first 30 days since the discovery of patient zero. The study analyzed 3 dailies; The Standard, Nation and The People Daily. The study adopted the framing, priming and the agenda setting theories. This study employed a descriptive survey design using a quantitative research method. The population of the study was the 3 newspapers. Target population was The Standard ,The Nation and The People Daily newspapers. …

Analysing Government Communication Strategies In Combating Information Disorder On Social Media: A Study Of Uganda’S Tax Monitoring System, Simon Tumwine Mugisha

Master of Arts in Digital Journalism

This research provides an analysis of the communication strategies that government communicators are utilising in a bid to counter wrong narratives on the Ugandan social media space, using the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). The study focuses on the nature of information disorder that revolved around the Electronic Fiscal Receipting and Invoicing Solution (EFRIS), introduced in January 2021 by Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and how it was stemmed. Through extensive content analysis of social media posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, 2 Key Informant interviews (KIIs) with key URA officials and 2 two In-depth interviews (IDIs) with tax and …

Investigating Media Relations Strategies Used By Ugandan Universities To Enhance Corporate Image: A Study Of Four Higher Education Institutions, Walter Wekongo Washika

Master of Arts in Digital Journalism

A strong corporate image is crucial for organization's to thrive in a competitive market. Discrepancies between corporate image and corporate identity can lead to confusion among stakeholders, potentially resulting in crises that harm the institution's brand. Effective media relations strategies are essential for shaping stakeholder perceptions and strengthening corporate image. This study aimed to investigate how four universities (two public and two private universities) in Uganda use media relations to enhance their corporate image, focusing on the media relations strategies used, their effectiveness, and the challenges faced. Using Grunig's Excellence Theory from 1985, it employed a qualitative approach with in-depth …

Examining Ethics In New Media, Anthony Irungu Mwangi

Master of Arts in Digital Journalism

Podcasting has become a popular form of new media in Kenya, providing a platform for sharing diverse topics. However, the minimal regulatory oversight in podcasting and the involvement of individuals with limited journalistic training have raised ethical concerns. This study, guided by Social Responsibility Theory, explores ethical awareness among Kenyan podcasters, the relationship between ethical practices and audience engagement, and the prevalence of ethical breaches in podcast content. A quantitative research design, specifically descriptive design, was adopted. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire, and podcast episodes were examined online. Only podcasters who are journalists and have worked or currently …

Individual Determinants Of Premium Content Subscription Decisions In Kenya: A Case Of Nation Media Group, Lisa Wagethi Kamau

Master of Arts in Digital Journalism

The transformation in the media industry from traditional platforms of TV, radio and print to digital media platforms had necessitated a shift in business models. Traditionally, media organizations depended on circulation and advertising to generate revenues and fund their journalism, however, the revenues from these models have been dwindling, leading to massive layoffs and company closures. Many media organizations are now adopting the subscription model as a possible revenue earner, but this move has been difficult to implement. The main challenge facing the news subscription business model is that audiences have become used to free news content on the internet …