Digital Commons Network^™

Five Corridors: A Community Health Needs Assessment Of Horry County, Stephen Borders, Hayley Bilko, Molly Craig, Olivia Guthrie, Ashley Mcconnell, Emily Mcgowan, Anna Quick, Abigail Rike, Makayla Wilson

Public Health

This report presents a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) of Horry County, South Carolina. Its central analytical contribution is a five-corridor framework derived from k-means cluster analysis of the county's 76 residential census tracts, drawing on social and economic indicators from the American Community Survey and health estimates from the CDC PLACES program. The analysis organizes the county into five distinct community types — Affluent Coastal Retirement, Moderate Coastal Retirement, Inland Rural/Suburban Transitional, Concentrated Disadvantage, and Hispanic Hospitality Worker — each with a characteristic profile of social and health conditions.

Within this framework, the assessment examines a range of social …

What Complexity Costs: Growth, Productive Capability, And The Vulnerability Of Interconnectedness, Pete Mcniff

Master's Theses

Growth depends on the sophistication of what an economy can produce, but economies that have specialized more deeply depend on the market access that sustains it. I test whether this dependence makes complex economies more vulnerable when access is disrupted, computing the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) from firm-level records in the U.S. Census of Manufactures (1850--1880) and using the Panic of 1873 as a natural experiment to measure county-level market access shocks from railroad bond defaults following Dutta (2024) and Donaldson and Hornbeck (2016). ECI predicts production and employment growth across all three decade windows, with the association strengthening as …

Climate-Driven Maritime Hazards And Marine Fuel Oil Spill Risk In The Northwest Passage, Emily Grace Parker

Master's Projects and Capstones

Shipping activity across the Northwest Passage has increased by 46% since 2011 as climate forcing drives sea ice decline, but associated risks to vessels and the environment are underestimated and rarely examined together. A literature review conducted in this study indicated that by 2070, a 5-month navigation window will expose vessels to increasingly unpredictable hazards as the region transforms from an ice- to wave-dominated regime, with wave heights increasing by 10-13% per decade. Ice hazards persist, and vessels operating in early summer and late fall will be exposed to elevated ice accretion risk that can cause capsizing and marine fuel …

Comparative Analysis Of Transportation Emissions And Policy In Lahore And Los Angeles, Laiba Rehman

Master's Projects and Capstones

In 2023, exposure to air pollution killed 7.9 million people globally, becoming the second leading cause of death worldwide. Transportation emissions are among the primary drivers of this burden especially in rapidly urbanizing cities where vehicle fleets are growing faster than regulatory frameworks respond. This study examines the contribution of transportation emissions to urban air quality, public health and climate change in Lahore, Pakistan and Los Angeles, California. First, it employs a secondary data analysis of PM_2.5 and ozone concentrations and vehicle fleet composition in each city, followed by an analysis of emission inventories. Second, it evaluates the regulatory …

Cyberspatial Cartographies: Mapping Digital Nationhood Within The California-Punjabi Diaspora., Saihajpratap Singh Bajwa

Master's Theses

This research investigates the phenomenon of digital nationhood, the idea that a new form of community is actively produced through interactions taking place within digital social networks and forums. These spaces function as more than repositories of information or cultural archives; they are living ecosystems in which identity is constructed through mutual encounters among members of a diaspora, where shared references, meanings, and concepts proliferate across multiplex networks. The central questions animating this inquiry are: can a nation exist without a territory, and are these encounters producing what we might conceive of as a digital nation?

The Punjabi people serve …

Spatial Analysis Of Maize Yields And Household Dietary Diversity In Sub-Saharan Africa: Causal Evidence From A Machine Learning Instrument, Addi Joof

Master's Theses

MAIZE YIELDS AND HOUSEHOLD DIETARY DIVERSITY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: EVIDENCE ON THE CAUSAL EFFECT FROM A MACHINE LEARNING INSTRUMENT

Addi Joof, University of San Francisco, May 2026

This paper provides estimates of the effect of maize yield on household dietary diversity across seven Sub-Saharan African countries, using data from 36,474 maize-growing households in the Living Standards Measurement Study Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) panels for the period 2008--2021. OLS estimates which include district and country-by-wave fixed effects yield a positive and significant coefficient of 0.070 (SE = 0.006, p < 0.001), implying that a 10 percent increase in maize yield raises the Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) by approximately 0.007 food groups. Because self-reported yields are subject to classical measurement error and unobserved household characteristics confound the OLS estimate, we construct an instrumental variable using a Random Forest model trained on satellite-derived agro-environmental features including the Enhanced Vegetation Index, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, Growing Degree Days, precipitation, and soil moisture obtained from Google Earth Engine at the GPS-coordinate-by-year level. Our preferred 2SLS specification, which adds region fixed effects to absorb persistent sub-national geographic variation, returns a positive point estimate of 0.217 (SE = 0.206; 95% CI: -0.19 to +0.63, p = 0.294) larger than OLS and consistent with downward attenuation bias, but imprecisely estimated and statistically indistinguishable from zero at conventional levels. We interpret the OLS estimate of 0.070 as a credible lower bound on the true effect, with the IV evidence pointing to a moderately larger but uncertain magnitude. Heterogeneity analysis reveals a declining gradient across consumption quintiles the effect is strongest among the poorest households (Q1: 0.055, p < 0.01) and diminishes with wealth (Q5: 0.015, not significant) while showing no gradient across market-integration levels. These patterns are consistent with own-consumption, rather than market income from surplus sales, as the primary pathway from yield to dietary diversity. OLS estimates are positive and significant in five of six estimable countries. The findings suggest that maize yield improvements can serve as a nutrition co-investment, particularly for subsistence-oriented smallholders, though the available data do not permit a sharp causal quantification of the effect size.

Keywords: dietary diversity, maize yields, instrumental variables, Sub-Saharan Africa, LSMS-ISA, satellite …

Trust, Civic Institutions, And Crisis: A Study Of Civic Culture In Italy, Nolan Joseph Sherwood

Master's Theses

This paper examines whether cultural familism — the orientation of trust toward family at the expense of strangers and civic institutions — shapes civic institutional engagement in Italy across three levels of analysis. The first analysis links four familism indices constructed from the European Values Study (2017) to pre-COVID municipal 5 per mille tax allocation rates across approximately 7,700 Italian municipalities, finding that higher Trust Gap and Institutional Distrust robustly predict lower baseline civic giving, both nationally and within each region. The second analysis uses a Regression Discontinuity in Time design exploiting the sharp onset of COVID-19 in 2020, finding …

Crop Yield Shocks And Conflict In Sub-Saharan Africa: Subnational Evidence From Satellite-Based Yield Predictions, Benson I. Adomako

Master's Theses

This paper examines whether crop yields affect violent conflict at the subnational level across seven Sub-Saharan African countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, and Tanzania, over the period 2010 to 2024. A central identification challenge is that observed yields are endogenous to conflict: armed violence disrupts planting, cultivation, and harvest. To address this, I train a machine learning model on observed maize yield and satellite and environmental features to generate predicted yields for 1,338 second-level administrative districts annually. These predictions serve as the key regressor in a two-way fixed-effects panel with district and year fixed effects. I find …

Urban Green Space As Climate Infrastructure, Wyatt W. Del Valle

Master's Theses

This thesis estimates the causal effect of urban parks on land surface temperature in the

American Southeast using a geographic regression discontinuity at park boundaries. The

result is null. Within a CCT-optimal 257-meter bandwidth across five cities, park interiors

are not detectably cooler than the land immediately outside them:−0.023 °C, p = 0.926.

A two-way fixed effects panel across 20 cities and 39 years confirms the well-documented

NDVI–LST relationship—a 0.1-unit increase in NDVI is associated with 3.4 °C lower surface

temperature—while a park size heterogeneity model runs directly into the siting endogeneity

problem, showing why naive distance gradients cannot be …

Evaluating Optimal Capacity And Investment Strategies For Renewable Energy Projects: A Combined Technical And Financial Approach, Helen Josephine, Indhumathi Shanmugasundaram, Sharad Gupta, Manjari Sharma

Northeast Journal of Complex Systems (NEJCS)

The global shift toward clean energy is accelerating, and by 2050 renewable sources are expected to supply more than 85% of the world’s electricity. This transition, however, introduces new layers of complexity. Wind and solar energy behave as interconnected subsystems whose output fluctuates with weather, season, and geography. Their interaction with fixed hourly demand, capital-intensive investments, and financing structures creates a multi-dimensional system in which small changes can trigger significant operational and economic consequences.  This study presents a simulation-driven framework designed to understand and optimize this complex behaviour. The framework models hourly wind and solar generation alongside projected demand to …

Words Matter: The Rhetoric Of National Security And The Reality Of Individual Rights, Christopher J. Borgen

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

While the meanings of words can be flexible or contested, they are not infinitely pliable. These limits on words and their uses help define the outer bounds of legitimate state action. However, even the written law is only as stable as our interpretation of what those words mean. There is the risk that a deliberate and persistent misuse of words by states and other actors can eventually change our understanding of the law it.

Some of my work has analyzed the use of words and phrases such as “self-determination,” “sovereignty,” and “secession.” But, in this Essay, I focus on …

Perceptions Of Care: An Exploratory Case Study On Residents’ Perceptions Of Neighborhood And City Maintenance, Taylor Coats

Transforming Communities

Where one lives impacts both their physical and mental well-being. Though one’s builtenvironment is an important factor, the perception of one’s environment influences mental well-being. This qualitative study examines what influences residents’ perceptions of theirneighborhood and local governmental efforts to maintain and improve their community. Thisstudy utilized a case study methodology to interview residents, stakeholders, and politicians intwo neighborhoods in a mid-sized urban city in the Midwest (N = 16). This study identified threecore aspects that influence participants' perceptions of their neighborhoods and city efforts tomaintain and improve their community: 1) history with the city; 2) geographic location withinsegregated neighborhoods; …

A Training Needs Analysis For A Sustainable Tourism Destination Management Programme: A Practitioner’S Perspective, Catriona Murphy Dr., Shane O'Sullivan, Nicola Orio, Ilaria Doimo

Irish Journal of Tourism, Hospitality, Leisure and Event Research

While sustainable tourism practices have long been acknowledged for their potential to reduce negative impacts and enhance positive outcomes, their effectiveness is often hindered by several challenges. These include a considerable gap in skills and inadequate collaboration between practitioners and educators. To meet these pressing challenges, it is essential to strengthen awareness, enhance collaboration between industry and educators, and develop the critical skills needed to champion responsible and sustainable tourism in European regions. As the principles of sustainability advocate for equitable management of tourism destinations combined with the upward growth in tourism activity in Europe post pandemic, there is an …

Rethinking Luxury In Tourism: Slow Travel, Signature Experiences, Alternative Accommodation And Policy Interaction In The Irish And Eu Context, Maria E. Murphy, James Hanrahan Dr, John Carty

Irish Journal of Tourism, Hospitality, Leisure and Event Research

Over the past number of years, luxury tourism is changing as sustainability concerns, shifting consumer values, and new policy frameworks challenge older ideas of extravagance and exclusivity. This paper explores how modern luxury tourism is being shaped by slow travel, meaningful experiences, and stronger connections with local communities, focusing on Ireland and the wider European Union. Using an action-research approach, the study is based on the creation and running of Within the Village, a village-based luxury tourism accommodation in the west of Ireland, founded on the principles of the Italian Albergo Diffuso (scattered hotel) sustainable model. Through repeated cycles of …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

"The Appearance Of The Confederate Flag In These Seas:" The Css Sumter, Neutrality, And The International Dimensions Of The American Civil War, John Macisaac Coleman

History Undergraduate Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Soft Bodies, Hard Frames, Emily Zhang

Masters Theses

Silk is delicate yet strong, responsive to light and air, dependent on living processes and careful labor. These qualities position silk not only as a material object, but as an instrument capable of organizing space. Rather than functioning solely as a surface or decorative textile, silk can operate as a spatial generator, shaping enclosure, movement, and environmental conditions.

For centuries, domestic courtyard houses in the Jiangnan region, located south of the Yangtze River, evolved alongside sericulture, forming spaces that were attuned to the environmental and material requirements of silk. Architectural elements such as courtyards, screened openings, flexible interiors, and canal-directed …

My Mother The Mountain, Ricky Vasan

Masters Theses

Teach me How to Write a Love Song

I catch a glimpse of my mother sitting on her bed in her bedroom from the bathroom mirror. What a rare occurrence! One I am not fortunate enough to witness as often as I would like. A moment that I know —even before it has occurred—will one day become my dearest desire for wanting to turn back time. This moment is a mirage. Once I return to my senses, after the passing of a twelve-hour lag, it will already be too late.

This is the place where I wish to work from. …

Dead Reckoning, Jeremy A. Grail

Masters Theses

For over a century, conceptual, social, and legal frameworks have governed human relationships with technology by dematerializing data and personal information. From the early twentieth century, when human speech was converted into electrical pulses through telephone wires, to today’s pressure to integrate sensing, computation, and automation into every facet of contemporary life, electronic communications have become increasingly detached from the body and systematically defined as a weightless, immaterial asset.

This thesis refutes the industry-led myth of the “immaterial cloud” by revealing the presence and transmission of data to be a series of physical, tectonic, and spatial events that are woven …

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Post-Mining Narratives In Asbestos, Qc Val-Des-Sources, Qc, Rasha Lama

Masters Theses

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Social Narratives in Asbestos, QC Val-des-Sources, QC proposes the ‘landscape repository’ as a tool for landscape literacy and cultural legitimacy that integrates histories, geographies, and social narratives to inform grounded and place-based post-mining futures.

Val-des-Sources, Québec (formerly Asbestos, QC) is a place whose extraction legacies and material histories are deeply interwoven into its contemporary economy and cultural landscape. The centre of town is the Jeffrey Mine, once the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine that is deep enough to hide the Eiffel Tower entirely. Ceased in 2012, the 130-year-old Jeffrey Mine and sixty-one other Québec asbestos sites once …

Echándole Ganas: Pláticas Of Belonging + Resistance In Art + Design, Itzanya Bravo

Masters Theses

This thesis centers the experiences of Mexican American students, alumni, faculty, and community-based artists navigating art and design higher education in the United States. Grounded in the question ¿Dónde está la gente latina?—where are the Latino people?—this research examines how representation and culturally sustaining practices shape Mexican American students' sense of belonging and creative agency in a country with systems built on white supremacy

Using pláticas as the primary methodology—a relational, conversational approach rooted in community and storytelling traditions—alongside autohistoria-teoría and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, this study draws on eight in-depth pláticas with Mexican American creatives across art + design higher …

Studio Archeology: Uncovering Pedagogical Potential In Artist Spaces, Julia I. Ambros

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates artist studios and their potential for pedagogical application, focusing specifically on grounding the abstract act of making an inspiring studio in the identification and analysis of tangible creative methods used by artists in their studios. This project combines the thinking of four authors–Eisner (1979); Sullivan (2005); Sjöholm (2014); and Bennett (2010)–into a theoretical framework that characterizes the studio space as an art practice research site that reflects the artist’s values, provides readable evidence of thinking and making processes, and influences the future trajectory of one’s art-making. Treating the studio space like an archaeological dig, this project conducted …

A Thesis By An Art Student Trying To Find Meaning In Simulation Games, Yichuan Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a strange question: what happens if meaning is no longer written by an author, but emerges from the behavior of a system itself?

Beginning with observations of the Providence River and inspired by Conway’s Game of Life, information theory, and artificial life research, the project investigates simulation as a space where language, memory, and collective meaning can evolve without central control. Rather than treating video games as vehicles for storytelling, this research approaches them as dynamic systems capable of generating unpredictable forms of organization and perception.

The thesis proposes a closed spherical computational world populated by simple …

A Body Stitched In Traces, Youyun Shang

Masters Theses

.

Commodity Beyond Price: A Visible Database Of Free Objects, Yifei Cai

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how value is constructed and circulated outside of traditional monetary exchange systems. During two years of living in Providence, I collected hundreds of "free objects." For each item, I wrote a brief description detailing its physical characteristics, provenance, or emotional significance, and measure it according to four parameters: price, cost, weight, and value. Of these, "value" is subjectively defined by memories, emotional attachments, and it presented as relational equivalencies established within the collection itself.

It presented as an open-ended archive, this project functions simultaneously as an installation, an exchange system, and a visual database. The thesis proposes …

Soft Power, Arab Media And Sports Mega Events: Coverage Of Fifa 2022 And Lessons For Future Arab Hosting, Lynne Kennedy, Maaira Shahbaz, Ala Al Rajabi

All Works

Sport mega-events (SMEs) increasingly transcend athletic competition, functioning as strategic instruments for national identity formation, statecraft, and soft power projection. This dynamic is particularly pronounced in the Gulf, where Qatar’s successful hosting reignited regional rivalries and attracted unprecedented global scrutiny. While existing scholars have extensively examined Western media portrayals of SMEs, a notable gap remains for academic engagement with Gulf media. Dismissed as state-controlled and analytically lacking, we contend that such media offer a rich site for exploring how small states use media as soft power, to construct and contest legitimacy, identity, and global influence. This analysis suggests how state-aligned …

Student Learning Outcomes In Online Learning Settings: Online Learning Outcomes, Ashraf Bany Mohammed, Yaping Zhu, Ra'ed Masa'deh, Mahmoud Maqableh, Hazar Hmoud, Enas Musa Al-Lozi, Viswanath Venkatesh

All Works

Online learning has become prevalent across the globe since the COVID-19 pandemic. With this change and continuing growth of online learning, understanding its impact on student learning outcomes is critical. This paper focuses on different learning outcomes in online learning. The authors extend the online learning effectiveness literature by investigating the role of quality on student online learning outcomes. Further, the impact of quality is examined on various dimensions of student outcomes, including cognitive outcomes (engagement), psychological outcomes (flow), affective outcomes (satisfaction), and academic outcomes (learning performance). They conducted an online survey among students (N=910) to examine the impact of …

The Right To Withdraw: Soft Boundaries And Material Refuge In The Workplace, Zhihao (Sky) Xing

Masters Theses

Traditionally, architecture has provided physical protection through solid structures and defined boundaries, while modern interior spaces have evolved further to serve function, efficiency, and the operational needs of society. These include open-plan offices, art school studios, and other public spaces like libraries. Although physical rigidity and operational efficiency have been well served by the modern built environment, the psychological experiences of those within it remain largely overlooked - a lack of privacy, emotional support, and space for emotional withdrawal.

This research explores why contemporary workplaces often expose individuals to sensory overload and why people often retreat to stairwells, restrooms, or …

After Yellow Horse: From Passive Shelter To A Self-Sustaining Cycle, Xinyuan Liu

Masters Theses

Spatial flexibility—specifically, the ability of a single building to shift between therapeutic and productive use—offers a critical alternative to the institutional passivity of conventional care facilities, repositioning architecture as an active agent in both the financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations and the social recovery of their patients.

During my time volunteering at Yellow Horse Equine Therapy Center in Ashaway, Rhode Island, the core contradictions of the traditional equine therapy model became visible firsthand. Yellow Horse had operated for years on goodwill and volunteers. The daily reality of the facility was one of persistent understaffing: barn chores, groundskeeping, and routine maintenance …

Sites Of Departure, Kevin Tomas

Masters Theses

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: The story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth. …