Digital Commons Network^™

Spns 101.50: Elementary Spanish I, Michaela O. Downey

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Spns 101.51: Elementary Spanish I, Michaela O. Downey

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Musi 132l.50: The History Of Rock And Roll - Online, Jeffrey D. Brandt

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Design And Assembly Of A Variable Buoyancy System For An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Evan Brown

Master's Theses

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a vital role in the surveillance and mapping of our oceans, often requiring extensive travel in extreme environments. These data-gathering missions benefit from extended durations, making the minimization of power consumption a key consideration in AUV design. One effective strategy to reduce energy use in AUVs is to implement a variable buoyancy system (VBS) for depth control. The purpose of this work is to design, develop, test, and model a variable buoyancy system to enhance the efficiency and capabilities of a high-speed, long-range AUV.

After evaluating various VBS designs, a piston-cylinder buoyancy system was selected …

The Impact Of Video Assistant Referee (Var) On The English Premier League, Jack Kenyon Brown

Master's Theses

The aim of this study is to examine how the introduction of the Video Assisted Referee (VAR) system influenced the English Premier League (EPL). Since its implementation in the English Premier League in 2019, VAR has been a constant source of debate and controversy. Many studies have been done on the immediate impact of VAR on other elite professional soccer leagues, but the scope of results is very limited and due to be updated. The data for the ensuing analysis consists of 3800 matches played in the English Premier League during the five seasons before (14/15, 15/16, 16/17, 17/18, and …

Semantic Structuring Of Digital Documents: Knowledge Graph Generation And Evaluation, Erik E. Luu

Master's Theses

In the era of total digitization of documents, navigating vast and heterogeneous data landscapes presents significant challenges for effective information retrieval, both for humans and digital agents. Traditional methods of knowledge organization often struggle to keep pace with evolving user demands, resulting in suboptimal outcomes such as information overload and disorganized data. This thesis presents a case study on a pipeline that leverages principles from cognitive science, graph theory, and semantic computing to generate semantically organized knowledge graphs. By evaluating a combination of different models, methodologies, and algorithms, the pipeline aims to enhance the organization and retrieval of digital documents. …

Effective And Sustainable Strategies For Federally Qualified Health Centers To Engage Young Adults, Olivia Mcnulty

Master's Theses

Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) are instrumental in providing top tier healthcare and other resources to underserved populations. Whether they administer services in house or refer patients to other providers, FQHCs aim to provide comprehensive primary and preventative care services to people of all ages. They offer a range of services, from doctor and dental appointments to mental health and substance abuse counseling, regardless of a patient’s insurance status. To receive funding, FQHCs must follow the regulations and quality standards set forth by groups like the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Health Resources and Services …

Jorge Ricardo Masetti: Journalist, Guerrilla, Cold Warrior, Brooks C. Martin Mr.

Master's Theses

The following thesis describes the life and activities of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentinian journalist who was assigned to interview Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution against dictator Fulgencio Batista. Masetti was responsible for broadcasting interviews with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara to the rest of Latin America for the first time, allowing people to understand what was happening in Cuba through the words of the Revolution’s leaders. Masetti returned to Cuba to found the first international Latin American news agency, Prensa Latina, which still exists today. However, ideological factionalism within Prensa Latina drove Masetti to resign in …

Kgscore-Open: Leveraging Knowledge Graph Semantics For Open-Qa Evaluation, Nicholas Hausman

Master's Theses

Evaluating active Question Answering (QA) systems, as users ask questions outside of the original testing data, has proven to be difficult, due to the difficulty of gauging answer quality without ground truth responses. We propose KGScore-Open, a configurable system capable of scoring questions and answers in Open Domain Question Answering (Open-QA) without ground truth answers present by leveraging DBPedia, a Knowledge Graph (KG) derived from Wikipedia, to score question-answer pairs. The system maps entities from questions and answers to DBPedia nodes, constructs a Knowledge Graph based on these entities, and calculates a relatedness score. Our system is validated on multiple …

Impacts Of The Dispensing Program (Mydispense®) On Pharmacy Students’ Learning Outcomes With Relevant Perceptions: A Quasi-Intervention Study, Chamipa Phanudulkitti, Nattawut Leelakanok, Tulakarn Nakpun, Tanattha Kittisopee, Karen Bell Farris, Sarah E. Vordenberg

The Thai Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Objectives: The dispensing program, MyDispense®, is useful for improving students’ dispensing skills, but its effectiveness has remained unassessed in Thailand. This study thus aimed to evaluate the program’s impacts on pharmacy students’ learning outcomes, i.e., knowledge, confidence levels in dispensing skills, deep approaches to learning (DAL), and their perceptions, along with the instructor’s views, of the program. Materials and Methods: A quasi-intervention study with two rounds was conducted with the 4th-year pharmacy students enrolling in the 2021 Pharmacotherapeutic I course. Initially, they were randomly allocated to Group 1 (n = 68), receiving an online lecture plus MyDispense® scenarios and exercises …

Standing And Probabilistic Injury, Curtis A. Bradley, Ernest A. Young

Michigan Law Review

Standing to sue often turns on questions of probability. For example, public law plaintiffs must show that they are likely to be affected by allegedly unlawful government surveillance or environmental policies, and consumers may wish to sue private defendants over false credit reporting or data breaches that may or may not cause them financial or reputational harm in the future. This Article offers a framework for resolving a wide range of these “probabilistic standing” issues. Our core claim is that courts and commentators ask too much of standing doctrine in probabilistic cases. First, scholars sometimes seek a unified theory of …

Umbrales (Thresholds), Maureen Scally

Masters Theses

Umbrales is Spanish for Thresholds.

Thresholds are by nature ambivalent spaces, inviting two distinct realities into play. As an artist, I materialize my experiences as a migrant into an architectural form. A series of textile walls shape a space that is simultaneously interior and exterior so that the audience circulates in the negative space in between. It is in the construction of this threshold condition — a simultaneous placement, neither here nor there — that a complex narrative of place unfolds.

Frontier: Land, Architecture, And Abstraction, Jacob Boatman

Masters Theses

The abstraction of land is a colonial process by which physical land is transformed into a conceptual or symbolic entity. This transformation occurs through various economic, architectural, and cultural practices that imbue land with abstract values, meanings, and functions beyond its physicality. This includes the division of land into parcels for economic transactions, the design and construction of built environments that shape human interactions with the land, and the cultural narratives and representations that ascribe significance to particular landscapes. Through abstraction, colonial powers devalue indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land, reducing them to mere obstacles in the path of …

The Future Is Over, Dotan Appelbaum

Masters Theses

History is constructed out of the narratives by which we organize the substance of all that has ever happened. Our understanding of the contemporary moment is determined by how we shape our history. The future is a promise that emerges from how we contextualize our place in time.

This thesis starts by acknowledging that the futurity promised by enlightenment liberalism is inconceivable in the face of contemporary horrors and climate catastrophe. Given this reality, what are we doing as designers? With a Benjaminian understanding of and a Foucauldian approach to history, this thesis constructs a history of design that follows …

Graphic Desire, Michelle Belgrod

Masters Theses

Before I knew about design, I knew about desire. A desire for the new, the beautiful, the promising. A desire that lives on a surplus of surfaces. On packaging, social media, on websites. A desire that makes the job of a graphic designer an object of desire itself. A practice that prioritizes aesthetics over meaning. Expectations over reality.

In Graphic Desire, I complicate the ways that desire affects both designers and consumers. Caught up in our own need for creative fulfillment, we often overlook our impact as the arbiters of desire. Under capitalism, we create work that over-promises a …

Industrial Tenderness, Elbert Girón

Masters Theses

Industrial Tenderness surveys the relationship between visual language, cultural expression, and diasporic practices through the design of functional sculptures. These designed objects seek to communicate cultural legibility, or intuitive cultural belonging, to Mexican-American peoples by challenging legacy notions of design language. Through a proposed design language framework and designed objects, Industrial Tenderness seeks to affirm a pluriversal practice of industrial design.

Legacy industrial design confines design language to a heavily prescriptive canon, resulting in a stark monocultural language that is unrepresentative of perspectives outside of a legacy dominant white eurocentricity founded in thinking from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools. Through …

Life Of Things, Things Of Life, Shiyue Wang

Masters Theses

In a world often captivated by the grand and explicit, my thesis, Life of Things, Things of Life explores the quiet yet profound narratives hidden within everyday objects. Drawing on my background in data design, I adopt a methodology that intertwines subjective narrative with rational analysis and challenges traditional hierarchies of value. Through processes of observation, collection, archiving, and re-contextualization, I elevate what is often overlooked as mundane and fleeting. This thesis not only uncovers the narrative potential of ordinary objects but also repositions them as protagonists in their own right, urging viewers to reconsider their conventional roles not as …

Dimensional Dialogues, Farida Abousteit

Masters Theses

Dimensional Dialogues, a multi-installation series, offers us a place to interact with language in a way that is whimsical and transcends our need to understand and comprehend language. We remove the tensions of language barriers by finding beauty and personal connection to typography, now scaled up to a human scale and reacting in real time to our movements. A process begins from ancient practices of designing Arabic Calligraphy, to creating Graphic Outputs of that calligraphy, to technologically heavy and new works in creating 3D models of these works that can be projected and respond to human movement. These installations, in …

The For-Profit Immigration Surveillance State: How Surveillance Capitalism Took Over Ice, Maurizio Guerrero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the emergence of the for-profit immigration surveillance state within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the U.S. By analyzing the roles of key tech corporations like LexisNexis Risk Solutions and B.I. Inc., a subsidiary of GEO Group, the largest private prison company in the U.S., this research exposes the intricate mechanisms through which personal data is extracted, repackaged, and sold, perpetuating a cycle of surveillance and control. Using the framework of surveillance capitalism, it examines how surveillance corporations have significantly influenced immigration enforcement, transforming ICE into a vehicle for profit-driven surveillance. The for-profit immigration surveillance state …

Beyond The Rational: Exploring Transrational And Embodied Knowledge Through Ceremony And Nature, Dimitris A. Alexakos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores transrational and embodied knowledge gained through my experience within ceremony and nature. This thesis uses transrational to mean “information and experience that does not readily fit into standard cause and effect logical structure” (Bernstein, 2005, p. xv). By reflecting on personal experiences and embodied sensations during ceremonies in nature, the thesis outlines a framework for exploring transrational and embodied knowledge within nature. I offer heuristics, a phenomenological tool to “explore, focus, and raise awareness” (Alexakos, 2015) to provide context for my experience in nature, ceremonies and ceremonies in nature.

The research investigates transrational and embodied knowledge through …

Sexual Selection And Mate Preference In Astatotilapia Burtoni, Anastasia Martashvili

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Social systems provide robust frameworks for the division of labor and the allocation of resources that improve the fitness of a community. These social systems are pervasive across the animal kingdom and are seen in various species of insects, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish. Within social hierarchies, rank can be dynamic and modulated by changes in molecular and/or physiological substrates. These changes can shape various behavioral outcomes that lead to the reorganization of hierarchies and their communities. Specifically, the role of social behavior in African cichlids has been salient for their adaptive radiations in the East African Great Rift Lakes …

Looking For A Better Chair: The L Word And Learning How To Sit, Beans Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 20 years since the initial airing of Showtime’s The L Word, the series has garnered a massive following among the sapphic and queer community and has cemented itself as a staple of queer media canon. Beyond the basic queer plotlines, though, The L Word captures lesbian and queer identity, politics, and livelihoods while using a seemingly superficial medium to portray queer bodies in a way that brings it to mainstream and cisheteronormative culture. Further, queer media like The L Word is able to guide members of the LGBTQ community into a queer consciousness and existence.

Stolen Valor: Mapping The Style Subcultures Of The Left, Lydia Mokdessi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"Stolen Valor: Mapping the Style Subcultures of the Left'' performs an analysis of three observed style subcultures prevalent in American fashion between the 2000s and the 2020s and demonstrates how these distinct style languages each draw from the aesthetics of various 20th and 21st century Leftist political movements, discussing the extent to which each style subculture undergoes a process of appropriation by the dominant culture and subsequent subsumption into the mainstream compared to the extent to which the subversive communicative power of each subculture remains intact for the original adopting population. The three style vernaculars this text identifies will be …

Machine-Learning Qsar-Based Novel Drug Identification To Inhibit Retinoblastoma Extracellular Vesicle Release And Metastatic Signaling, Kunhui Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are lipid-enclosed particles that are generated by most types of cells and have been identified as an important mechanism for cell communication aside from cell direct contact. EVs contain a variety of functional macromolecules including proteins, lipids, RNA, which can be transferred from the host cells to target cells at a distance. The molecular pathways of EV biogenesis have been studied intensely in recent decades and the process involves several key genes and proteins. Cancer cell released EVs target distant tissues and upregulate signals that are attractive to cancer cell homing, playing a role in tumor progression …

Wuwei Praxis, Zachary L. Gelnaw-Rubin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The question of how to change the world is answered in the concept of praxis. For structural change to occur a “revolution in motivation or feeling,” - a paradigm shift - is needed. I argue that this requires the adoption of feminist liberation praxis, which involves a negativistic political stance, nonideal theorizing, and an openness to self-transformation. This entails a transformation of the concept of praxis itself within the Leftist idiom, a transformation which could be the linchpin of the needed paradigm shift in the larger culture.

The three parts of this thesis elaborate upon the different aspects of this …

A Comparison Of Temporary Threshold Shifts In Dentists, Hygienists, And Dental Assistants, Sabina E. Ciaccio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: The purpose of this study is to compare the temporary threshold shifts (TTS) in dentists, hygienists, and dental assistants. The specific aim of this study is to compare the differences in temporary shifts caused by the different dental equipment and the proximity to the equipment. The current literature does not compare the change in hearing thresholds of dental personnel.

Methods: Dentists, dental assistants, and hygienists from Hermann Dental Associates will be given a case history form to determine inclusion status for this study. Exclusion criteria will include known hearing loss and significant noise exposure the day prior. …

K-12 School Shootings: A Visualization Throughout History, Elizabeth T. Garrison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

School shootings have been a persistent problem in America for many years, causing enormous grief and loss. This project represents this critical issue through the use of data visualizations to provide a better understanding of the occurrence and spread of school shootings from 1966 to 2023. With the overarching goal of improving awareness and responses to K-12 school shootings, this project is aimed at educators, policymakers, and researchers involved in school safety and violence prevention.

This project can be viewed at https://schoolshooting.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

What Exactly Does Identity Have To Do With Teaching? Exploring The Connection Between A Teacher's Racialized Identity And Their Teacher Identity, Lizette Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explores the relationship between race and teacher identity, specifically understanding how the two concepts intersect and (re)present themselves within the classroom environment. This study analyzes six teachers’ narratives of identity, race, and teaching to explore themes of race and identity as they traverse from their earliest experiences with race into their experiences as teachers. Findings conclude that, first, teachers’ narrative identities are a composite of key narratives—important moments of deep impact in the process of identity building—that accumulate over time to form what Dan McAdams (1993) calls personal myths. Since key narratives are continually shaping one’s personal myth, …

Examining Book Banning Trends In The U.S., Amanda D. Filchock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a web application for users to explore book banning trends across the United States. It is intended to serve as a resource for students, parents, educators, librarians, and authors who are interested in understanding the ways that book banning attempts have changed between 2021-2023 in the United States. These audiences will be able to interact with data visualizations to inform their own research and deepen their understanding of this current topic. Interactive features include: the ability to search by the title or author of a book to learn where, when, why, and by whom the book …

Depression And Its Associated Factors Among People Living With Hiv In The Volta Region Of Ghana, Jerry John Nutor, Robert Kaba Alhassan, Rachel G.A. Thompson, David Ayangba Asakitogum, Henry Ofori Duah, Tiarney D. Ritchwood, Nkothula Nkosi, Ntombifikile Klaas, Sampson Opoku Agyemang, Akua O. Gyamerah

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Depression among people living with HIV/AIDS in higher-income countries is associated with suboptimal adherence to antiretroviral therapy and though counterintuitive. Yet, less is known regarding how depression, social support, and other sociodemographic factors influence outcomes among people living with HIV, particularly in resource-limited settings like Ghana. In view of this gap, this study investigated factors associated with depressive symptoms among people living with HIV in the Volta region of Ghana. A total of 181 people living with HIV from a local antiretroviral clinic was purposively sampled for the study. The questionnaire included the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, the …