Digital Commons Network^™

Play And Adverse Possession, Norman P. Ho

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Chimes: November 25, 2024, Calvin University

Chimes

Survey finds that sexual harassment, other crimes on campus often go unreported by Maya Oeverman

Student advocates concerned about continuing disruptions to campus recycling by Sarah Sparling

“A whole world below”: Outdoor Rec holds first caving trip by Ethan Meyers

What Is Dressember? by Ashley Hamons

Student Senate set to invest $5,000 in Morren Fitness Center weight room by Ian Tjoelker

Men’s and women’s cross country teams both punched their tickets to nationals by Dillion Baumchen

Homosexuality in the Bible: A Q&A with scholars who disagree by Elisabeth Stephens

Narratives Of Resilience: The Power Of Creative Expression And Community Support During Familial Incarceration, Alana Alexander

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Existing literature stresses that the far-reaching effects of mass incarceration extend beyond prison walls, profoundly shaping familial experiences. Despite this, families remain consistently overlooked in criminal justice discourse, leading to heightened stress and diminished resilience. This thesis is a program review of a community-based program, referred to here as the Storytelling, Creativity, and Care (SCC) program, to protect the confidentiality of its participants and activities. The SCC program integrates neuroscience and narrative theory to explore how storytelling influences cultural perceptions, shapes lived experiences, and supports psychological and physiological healing. Additionally, this work investigates the socio-political narratives that perpetuate stigma and …

Difficult To Treat Depression: Focus On Approach, Algorithms, And Access, Jordan F Karp, Roberta D Brinton, Jay C Fournier, Lisa Harding, Manish K Jha, Eric J Lenze, Sanjay J Mathew, Samantha Meltzer-Brody, David C Mohr, Patricio Riva-Posse, Ilse Wiechers, Nolan R Williams

Staff and Researcher Publications

The pandemic refocused interest on the burden of depression across the lifespan; the increased efforts to prevent and treat depression are now a priority of health care systems, insurers, patient advocates, digital therapeutic engineers, telemedicine platforms, and community health agencies. However, the challenges of treating depression to remission in adult patients who do not respond to first, second, or third levels of oral pharmacotherapy remain. The increased prevalence of these conditions is at odds with the shrinking psychiatric workforce. Since addressing difficult to treat depression is situated in a rapidly evolving treatment landscape, The University of Arizona College of Medicine-Tucson …

3d Reconstruction And Comparative Anatomical And Kinematic Analyses Of The Foot Of Archaeopteryx, Alexander M. Kirk

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on the evolution of dinosaur flight has long been dominated by the wing, often overlooking the foot. The foot of Archaeopteryx, the “icon of evolution”, thus offers a unique opportunity to investigate this critical evolutionary stage. Chapter I of this dissertation integrates advanced 3D reconstruction techniques, combining photogrammetry with X-ray data, to create a high-resolution model of the foot of the Thermopolis specimen of Archaeopteryx for visualization and analysis. Driven by 3D coordinate axes derived from joint surface topology, the analyses in Chapter II reveal terrestrial adaptations -- such as a medially oriented hallux (81°), serially shorter phalanges on …

“It’S Essential We Learn How To Grow For Ourselves”: The Legacies Of Black Gardening In Racialized Food Systems., Funmi Odumosu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I aim to investigate the impact of food racism on Black communities, with a specific focus on the importance of gardening in combatting food apartheid and fostering holistic connections to nature and community in school-aged children. Inequitable access to major retail supermarkets and unequal distribution of healthy food options are intentionally occurring patterns in the food spaces of predominately Black communities. These food system inequities exacerbate a lack of consumption and potential consequences on the health and well-being of children of color particularly during critical physical and cognitive developmental periods.

Many solutions to these inequities entail implementing …

Are You Who Ai Says You Are? Exploring The Role Of Natural Language Processing Algorithms For “Predicting” Personality Traits From Text, Mukhunth Raghavan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Advances in text analytic approaches to measuring personality traits from text and speech have shown great promise for automating the assessment of personality. While a lot of effort has gone into developing robust algorithms for predicting personality ratings, more work is needed in understanding the function and theoretical relationships of these algorithmic ratings. This study proposes a novel application of the Trait-Reputation-Identity model (McAbee and Connelly, 2016), wherein, algorithm-generated ratings form the Reputation factor and are assumed to resemble learned observer ratings, the original self-report ratings form the Identity factor, and the total set of ratings form the consensus Trait …

Ecological Epidemiology Of The Fungal Pathogen Ophidiomyces Ophiodiicola In Southeastern U.S. Snake Populations: Distribution, Drivers, And Anthropogenic Risk Factors, Shivam Shukla

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Studying wildlife diseases is an important conservation measure, as many pathogens are a critical threat to biodiversity worldwide. Ophidiomycosis is an emerging infectious disease caused by the invasive fungal pathogen Ophidiomyces ophiodiicola that affects a wide variety of snake species, often causing mortality. There has been limited surveillance for ophidiomycosis in the southeastern United States’ (US) snake populations and research into the effects of anthropogenic disturbance on disease spread is also lacking. Thus, this project aimed to quantify the distribution and drivers (taxonomic, anthropogenic, and morphological) of ophidiomycosis in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi’s free ranging snakes as well as study …

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 9

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 9.

Towards Human-Machine Collaboration In Autonomous Material Handling On Construction Sites, Jyrki Oraskari, Lukas Kirner, Marit Zöcklein, Sigrid Brell-Cokcan

Human-Machine Communication

In the contemporary construction industry, the shortage of skilled labor has prompted the exploration of automation as a remedy and machine autonomy as a potential solution to the environmental conditions at the site. This research explores the balance between human oversight and the independent decision-making capabilities of robots for material delivery on construction sites. Using a scenario-based approach, autonomy in construction robotics is evaluated across four human-machine interaction cases with spatial and temporal dimensions. The expected outcomes revolve around improved safety through better human-machine communication and establishing an interoperable data model to enhance robot autonomy. This aims to automate tasks …

Accomplishing Robotic Autonomy: The Complexities Of Sociotechnical Care And Agency In The Laboratory, Yifan Xu, Elliott Hauser

Human-Machine Communication

Effective ethical interventions in emerging technologies such as robotic autonomy demand situated understandings of the practices that shape them. Drawing upon a year of participatory ethnography, this study examines the sociomaterial practices used to accomplish robotic agency in an engineering research laboratory. Ironically, the robot was often a helpless, even pathetic, figure. Roboticists displayed an attitude of surprisingly genuine, diligent, and self-effacing care toward the robot as they helped enable it to perform basic competencies such as picking up a bottle. Using a practice theory, we show how roboticists’ care practices, motivated and sustained by anticipatory narratives of robotic agency, …

Four Notions Of Autonomy. Pitfalls Of Conceptual Pluralism In Contemporary Debates, Roman Wagner, Bert Heinrichs

Human-Machine Communication

The concept of autonomy is indispensable in the history of Western thought. At least that’s how it seems to us nowadays. However, the notion has not always had the outstanding significance that we ascribe to it today and its exact meaning has also changed considerably over time. In this paper, we want to shed light on different understandings of autonomy and clearly distinguish them from each other. Our main aim is to contribute to conceptual clarity in (interdisciplinary) discourses and to point out possible pitfalls of conceptual pluralism.

From Automation To Autonomy: Human Machine Relations In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Caja Thimm, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Maximilian Mayer, Frank T. Piller

Human-Machine Communication

The shift from automation to autonomy marks a new chapter in human-machine relations, especially in the context of the expanding and diversifying applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As machines gain capabilities that resemble autonomous agency, the boundary between human and machine autonomy blurs, challenging traditional concepts of agency, control, and independence. This special issue examines the multidisciplinary perspectives on autonomy in the digital age, addressing the complexities of attributing autonomy to machines and AI systems. Philosophical, sociological, and technical approaches converge to explore how emerging forms of machine autonomy impacts human agency, freedom, and decision-making, with applications spanning from autonomous …

Roger Haight, S.J., Christian Spirituality For Seekers: Reflections On The Spiritual Exercises Of Ignatius Loyola, And Spirituality Seeking Theology, Pasquale T. Giordano

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Roger Haight, S.J., Christian Spirituality for Seekers: Reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, and Spirituality Seeking Theology

Good Soil: Bernanos And Kierkegaard On Overcoming Despair, Roy Allan B. Tolentino

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

In The Christian and Anxiety, Hans Urs von Balthasar praises Søren Kierkegaard’s description of anxiety while criticizing the Danish thinker for remaining under the influence of German Idealism. For Balthasar, the lacuna found in Kierkegaard’s philosophy of anxiety can be addressed by turning to literature; for example, the work of French novelist Georges Bernanos. This paper proposes that contrary to Balthasar’s critique, there is much overlap between the work of Kierkegaard and Bernanos, particularly in examining the human experience of overcoming despair. By reading Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest alongside Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, this paper will …

Undamaged Intersubjectivity As The Irreducible Beginning: JüRgen Habermas On Resolving The Paradox Of The Constitution Of A Democratic Community, Maria Lovelyn C. Paclibar

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

This article constructs Habermas’s response to the debate in political theory on the problem of the boundaries of a democratic community. A newly constituted democratic community cannot legitimately account for its own boundaries of inclusion without resorting to an arbitrary source of constitutive power. Using a deliberative model for interpreting the founding act of communities, Habermas argues that the source of legitimacy is not an external arbitrary power, but the internal counterfactual ideal of mutal recognition in communicative processes. I argue, however, that Habermas’s model stands on a too robust sense of autonomy of democratic actors, one that cannot fully …

Giorgio Agamben's Analysis Of The Mechanism Of Exclusion Or The Logic Of Sovereign Power, Georges De Schrijver

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

In Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben extends Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to include life, stripped bare, that is placed completely at the mercy of the powers that be. For him, the biopolitical paradigm is no longer the asylum but the concentration camp. Agamben drew the inspiration for this shift from Walter Benjamin, who decades ago had observed that the state of exception favored by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt had become the rule. Certain strata of the population, in this case the Jewish citizens in Germany, were abandoned by the law while continuing to fall …

Clarifying Pascal's Wager: Charity As Decided, Earl Allyson P. Valdez

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Most of Blaise Pascal’s commentators see his famous wager as an argument on the practicability of faith, according to which, given the absence of certainty about the existence of God, one must believe in God because it is the most beneficial action. However, this interpretation of the wager fails to see it as a part of Pascal’s philosophical thought, which is centered on the primacy of charity through which the human being can find the happiness and fulfillment he seeks. This essay, in contrast, presents an interpretation of the wager that sees it as the culminating point of Pascal’s philosophical …

Derrida And The "Death Of God", Mark Joseph T. Calano

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Jacques Derrida’s understanding of the death of God is rooted in but goes beyond Nietzsche’s and Hegel’s understanding of the concept. On the one hand, Nietzsche’s view of the death of God is related to two concepts: a closing horizon (which is the death of God) and an emerging horizon (which is the eternal recurrence); on the other hand, Hegel understands the death of God as the Absolute’s confrontation with its negation (death), and Aufhebung (the negation of negation). While Derrida’s notion of the death of God cannot be reduced simply to either a Nietzschean or Hegelian interpretation, it draws …

How Are We To Think About The Knowledge That We Should Know?, RaúL Fornet-Betancourt

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

As a precondition of philosophical dialogue among different cultures, this essay forwards a series of questions regarding the epistemological presuppositions of the current dominant knowledge culture, which is characterized by a capitalistic, technological, and colonial ethos. By stating its presuppositions, situating these in the historical context of its development, and drawing their consequences, the essay opens up the possibility of overcoming this dominant ethos of knowledge through the recuperation of epistemological plurality by way of exchanges among a multiplicity of knowledge cultures. The essay proposes that it is philosophy’s task today to resist the dehumanization of knowledge by asking what …

How Does A Foreign Religion Thrive In An Indigenous Culture? A Comparative Study Of The Spread Of Foreign Religions In The Chinese-Speaking Cultural Sphere, Wei-Ding Tsai

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Religion can be considered, on one hand, to be a human practice dependent on its own culture. On the other hand, religion is also a system of beliefs with a dogmatic character. Because religion has the tendency to preserve its cultural form, it therefore encounters a paradoxical problem of adaptation when it spreads within a foreign cultural area: How can an extending religion retain both its own cultural core as well as be adaptable and modifiable, in order to be accepted by other foreign cultures? Through a comparison of the history of the spread of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam within …

Pusong Mamon: Nel Noddings's Care Ethics In The Filipino Educational Setting, Noelle Leslie Dela Cruz

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

This paper evaluates Nel Noddings’s view of moral education in the context of teaching in a Philippine university. It first presents the key aspects of Noddings’s ethical theory, identifying her three strategic moves as follows: the dissolution of the public/private split, the replacement of justice-based punishment system with a caring system, and the promotion of care work as the core of education itself. Through a discussion of two cases of academic dishonesty, the author assesses the merits of these strategies and recommends a re-conceptualization both of care ethics and the existing educational paradigm.

Dwelling Near In Mountains Farthest Apart: A Conversation, Remmon E. Barbaza

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

In November 2012, Amsterdam-based Spanish visual artist Paloma Polo came to the Philippines for the initial phase of her project on land use and vulnerability. She was hosted by the Department of Philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University, with some of whose members she began collaborating, including Remmon E. Barbaza, an associate professor of philosophy who is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on disaster risk management. Polo is currently based in Manila to develop a research project and to work on a film project on the topics mentioned earlier, and is collaborating and teaching as an adjunct professor …

Philosophy And Transformative Learning: Lessons In Natural Resource Management From Cordillera Communities, Julius D. Mendoza

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

In this paper, the objects of philosophical reflection are the important lessons learned from a participatory action research program conducted by the Cordillera Studies Center of UP Baguio in Sagada, Mountain Province, in Northern Luzon, Philippines, which ran from March 1997 to February 2001. This research program used the Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) approach. Concepts of philosophy are made to re-describe “second order” concepts of theory, as well as “first order” concepts of community-based natural resource management research, planning, testing, implementation, and monitoring. Concepts used in the context of field work are given philosophical re-descriptions in the form …

The Search For Authentic Understanding And The Birth Of Radical Hermeneutics, Tran Van Doan

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

This paper argues that it is the human search for authentic understanding that gives birth to radical hermeneutics, and not the reverse. Radical hermeneutics in the "contemporary" sense begins with Martin Heidegger's critical reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant's answer to the question of "What is the man?" (Was ist der Mensch?), and continues with his reflection on Being as the foundation of hermeneutics. Hans-Georg Gadamer has developed Heidegger's thesis into what he termed philosophical hermeneutics, while Jacques Derrida seized Heidegger's Kehre as the momentum to launch a typically Nietzschean interpretation, that is, to "return" to understanding in its genetic stage. Despite …

Becoming-Religion: Re-/Thinking Religion With A.N. Whitehead And Keiji Nishitani, Kenneth C. Masong

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

For Whitehead and Nishitani, a rethinking of religion necessitates a rethinking of the metaphysics that underlie one’s concept of religion. The dynamism of religion is unveiled only within the metaphysical grounding of an ontology that accommodates the philosophical preference of “becoming” as an ultimate category of reality. The novelty of Whitehead’s theory of religion lies in the process metaphysics that is presupposes. For him, religion, like the whole of reality, is inherently developing and evolving. What Nishitani offers is a rethinking of Western understanding of religion by way of an Asian speculative approach grounded in Zen Buddhism. He argues that …

Preface, Luis S. David

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Preface

Development Of A Web-Based Information System For Student Leave Permission At Dar Al-Raudhah Islamic Boarding School: Iso Quality Standards Analysis, Bonita Destiana, Priyanto Priyanto, Rahmatul Irfan, Muhammad Gus Khamim, Muhammad Yusuf Ridlo, Muhammad Iqbal

Elinvo (Electronics, Informatics, and Vocational Education)

Dar Al-Raudhah Entrepreneur, Islamic Boarding School, has adopted digital technology by upgrading hardware and software also investing in reliable internet infrastructure. However, this school still faces issues with students’ leave permission process due to reliance on manual bookkeeping and Excel, which leads to potential errors. Based on those problems, this research aims to create a web-based student leave permission system called SIPERSAN. The SIPERSAN system was developed with a Waterfall development model, which includes requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, and deployment. The database is managed with MySQL, and the system is developed using PHP with the Laravel framework. Based on …

Creating A Homemade Mobile Augmented Reality Game In A Community College Library: An Open Source Approach, Carrie Jedlicka, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

Librarians at Kingsborough Community College created a mobile augmented reality activity for new students, to orient them to the library space and to provide a fun, welcoming experience. Rather than using a commercial app, the librarians built the activity using open source tools and resources already at-hand, specifically AR.js and A-Frame (both JavaScript libraries), and LibGuides. Based on student feedback, librarians found that participants enjoyed the activity and that it helped familiarize them with library locations and services. This project demonstrates that librarians have the capacity to build their own open source augmented reality activities in-house.

What Works When Working Together?: Cross-Sector Collaboration Barriers & Facilitators Of A Built Environment Health Impact Assessment In Southern Nevada, Maxim Gakh, Courtney Coughenour, Bertille Assoumou, Emily C. Strickler, Timothy J. Bungum, Jennifer R. Pharr, Pashtana Usufzy, Megan Mcdonough, Nicole Williams Bungum, Mindy Meacham

Environmental & Global Health Faculty Research

Purpose: Cross-sector collaboration can improve community health because decisions made across sectors influence health. Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) and other health-focused, cross-sector collaborations encounter challenges. This case study uses a completed HIA to explore factors impeding and supporting health-related cross-sectoral collaboration.

Methods: Semi-structured key informant interviews with 10 of 12 HIA working group participants were conducted and analysed using a content analysis approach.

Results: Analysis generated 48 codes across seven themes in three primary groups: HIA as a collaborative tool; logistical and systemic barriers; and benefits and logistical, interpersonal, and sectoral facilitators. Recognizing the importance of knowledge, analysis, and …