Digital Commons Network^™

Focal Choroidal Excavation Associated With Resolved Central Serous Chorioretinopathy, Loren W. Bennett Od, Katherine M. Mehalik Od

Optometric Clinical Practice

Background: Focal choroidal excavation is a localized concavity of the choroid within the macula defined by its appearance on optical coherence tomography. The condition is typically nonprogressive and often an incidental finding. It may not impact vision, although it can be associated with other visually significant macular pathologies.

Case Report: A 48-year-old male patient presented with a recent history of blurred vision in the left eye. A dilated fundus examination revealed a discrete area of pigment mottling in the macula; both the history and clinical appearance were consistent with resolved central serous chorioretinopathy. Optical coherence tomography did not show residual …

A Word From The Writing Team (April 2026), Pam Walter, Mfa, Laura Deloretta, Phd

A Word From the Writing Team (Newsletter)

No abstract provided.

Library & Knowledge Services Newsletter - Spring 2026, Maria Roman

Library Newsletters

Library & Knowledge Services Newsletter - Spring 2026

Backlash: How Racial Justice In Higher Education Is Being Trumped By Politics, Aaron N. Taylor

AccessLex Institute Research

This article discusses contemporary social and political backlash to racial justice and how it has overshadowed and flouted higher education antidiscrimination law and principles of racial justice. The first three parts chart the evolution of U.S. Supreme Court precedent in higher education affirmative action cases. Part I interrogates the Court’s fallacious detachment of affirmative action from its racial justice origins in Defunis and Bakke. Part II discusses how the Grutter majority tacitly departed from Bakke, using the vague concept of critical mass to seemingly empower schools to engage in affirmative action as a racial justice tool. Part III explains how …

Hls–Phenocam Land Surface Phenology: Code And Data Release. Data Supporting The Manuscript Enhanced Land Surface Phenology Detection In Western U.S. Drylands By Fusing Harmonized Landsat And Sentinel-2 Observations With Near-Surface Phenocam Time Series., Yuxia Liu, Xiaoyang Zhang, Y. Shen, Yongchang Ye, Shuai An

Global Land Surface Season Data Sets

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.62812/CEEX1495

The data is for the paper "Enhanced land surface phenology detection in western U.S. drylands by fusing Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 observations with near-surface PhenoCam time series."  which has been submitted to the journal Remote Sensing of Environment.

The downloadable file contains: 

README file that provides an overview of all all supporting files.
Data code description for reviewers
Three folders containing data

File type : zip/application 
File size :  1.3MB

People's Upr Written Record: Compiled By The International Human Rights Clinic At The University Of Illinois Chicago School Of Law And The Human Rights At Home Litigation Clinic At The Saint Louis University School Of Law, Sarah Dávila A., Lauren E. Bartlett

Faculty White Papers

This written record compiles the lived experiences of directly impacted persons. Directly impacted persons include people who have personally faced the conditions, policies, or practices documented in this written record in the United States and who have chosen to share their testimonies. The testimonies in this written record include those provided in-person, via video recording, which have been transcribed, or in writing. Testimonies are presented anonymously with ▊ sign as names and identifiable information has been redacted. Their accounts provide first-hand evidence of how these human rights issues operate in practice, offering essential context and depth that cannot be captured …

The Offshore Origins Of Regulatory Arbitrage, Ian J. Murray

William & Mary Business Law Review

Especially since the 2007–08 financial crisis, commentators have seized on the term “regulatory arbitrage” to describe a sprawling range of strategic compliance behavior spanning diverse sectors of the contemporary economy. Despite the term’s prevalence, there is scant agreement on the scope of activities it describes. To some, it has become a catch-all for legal avoidance from time immemorial. Such an expansive understanding obscures the context that led the term to acquire salience and fosters a fatalist view that all regulation is futile. Resisting this trend, this Article answers calls to situate regulatory arbitrage in a richer socio-historical context. Tracing the …

Jase 6.1 Table Of Contents

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

No abstract provided.

Journal Of The Arts And Special Education: Volume 6, Issue 1

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

No abstract provided.

Let’S Dance!: A Community Partnership Fostering Movement, Connections, And Inclusion, Michelle J. Cook, Michele Dunleavy, Carrie A. Payne, Sarah E. Whitney, Matthew Levy, Jack M. Mcbride, Ella Garrity

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

Despite the many documented physical and social benefits, dance is frequently not accessible to individuals with and without disabilities. We share an inclusive dance community partnership called Let’s Dance! that was developed to foster movement, connections, and inclusion. To increase awareness and inclusive dance opportunities, this community partnership involved (a) a workshop on inclusive dance practices for preservice teachers and (b) a community-based inclusive Let’s Dance! dance event. Following a review of the literature outlining the benefits of dance and the barriers that need to be dismantled to make dance more inclusive for students of all abilities, we share inclusive …

Artful Instruction: Making Art Accessible For Individuals Who Are Blind Or Have Low Vision, Bradley J. Czaplewski

Journal of the Arts and Special Education

This review critically examines Artful Instruction: Making Art Accessible for Individuals Who are Blind or Have Low Vision (Bettes et al., 2024), a comprehensive guide aimed at art educators working with students who are blind, deafblind, or have low vision. The book’s central thesis emphasizes the artistic process over the final visual product, fostering self-expression, confidence, and independence among visually impaired learners. The authors integrate the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) framework to highlight the development of critical life skills alongside artistic development. This review discusses the book’s broad coverage of diverse art media, the thoughtful inclusion of technological adaptations to …

Interprofessional Perspective: Development Of The National Academies Of Practice Joint Health Literacy Position Statement, Teresa Wagner, Vincent Salyers, Bich Nguyen, Tanya Sudia, Kate Taylor, Devora R. Winkfield, Nancy Colletti, Felicia Chew, Sarah Manspeaker

Department of Occupational Therapy Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Dnp Final Report: An Evidence-Based Project To Decrease Stress In Undergraduate Nursing Students, Elaine Wallace

DNP Final Reports

Stress among undergraduate nursing students is a well-documented concern that negatively affects academic performance, clinical readiness, well-being, and program retention. Stress levels are often heightened before clinical skills check-offs, highlighting the need for practical, evidence-based interventions. This Doctor of Nursing Practice quality improvement project examined whether mindfulness-based mandala coloring could reduce perceived stress in undergraduate nursing students. Using the PICOT framework, the project evaluated whether undergraduate nursing students (P) who participated in mindfulness-based mandala coloring (I), compared with no intervention (C), experienced reduced perceived stress levels (O) over a 12-week implementation period (T).

A comprehensive search of the literature supported …

Super Lidar Intensity For Robotic Perception, Wei Gao, Jie Zhang, Mingle Zhao, Zhiyuan Zhang, Shu Kong, Maani Ghaffari, Dezhen Song, Chengzhong Xu, Hui Kong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conventionally, human intuition defines vision as a modality of passive optical sensing, relying on ambient light to perceive the environment. However, active optical sensing, which involves emitting and receiving signals, offers unique advantages by capturing both radiometric and geometric properties of the environment, independent of external illumination conditions. This work focuses on advancing active optical sensing using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), which captures intensity data, enabling the estimation of surface reflectance that remains invariant under varying illumination. Such properties are crucial for robotic perception tasks, including detection, recognition, segmentation, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). A key challenge with …

Learning Feature Inversion For Multi-Class Anomaly Detection Under General-Purpose Coco-Ad Benchmark, Jiangning Zhang, Chengjie Wang, Xiangtai Li, Guanzhong Tian, Zhucun Xue, Yong Liu, Guansong Pang, Dacheng Tao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection (AD) is often focused on detecting anomaly areas for industrial quality inspection and medical lesion examination. However, due to the specific scenario targets, the data scale for AD is relatively small, and evaluation metrics are still deficient compared to classic vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. To fill these gaps, this work first constructs a large-scale and general-purpose COCO-AD dataset by extending COCO to the AD field. This enables fair evaluation and sustainable development for different methods on this challenging benchmark. Moreover, current metrics such as AU-ROC have nearly reached saturation on simple datasets, which …

Can Financial Literacy Enhance Esg Disclosures?, Xiaoran Jia, Kiridaran Kanagaretnam, Kiat Bee Jimmy Lee, Chee Yeow Lim

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Using an international sample of firms and two country-level measures of financial literacy, we find robust evidence of a positive relation between financial literacy and firms' Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosures. In cross-sectional analyses, we find that the effect of financial literacy in enhancing ESG disclosures is more prominent in poorer information environments, weaker legal institutions and weaker ESG reporting environments. Lastly, we find that financial literacy also enhances ESG performance. Our study contributes to and extends the literature by providing strong evidence that citizens' financial literacy enhances firms' ESG disclosure and the associated ESG performance.

Corporate Response To The Black Lives Matter Movement: Determinants Of Speaking Out In Support Of Social Causes, A. J. Yuan Chen, Patricia M. Dechow, Samuel T. Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We document that firms vary in their timeliness of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, and that timeliness is an indicator of authenticity. We predict that firms that speak out quickly in support of BLM (via Twitter or their websites) have made more investments in diversity and inclusion, relative to firms that speak out slowly (via conference calls or annual reports) or that remain silent. Consistent with this prediction, quick-disclosing firms have greater workforce diversity, have boards with greater ethnic diversity, and are more likely to tie executive compensation …

Causality-Aware Safety Testing For Autonomous Driving Systems, Wenbing Tang, Mingfei Cheng, Renzhi Wang, Yuan Zhou, Chengwei Liu, Yang Liu, Zuohua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulation-based testing is essential for evaluating the safety of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs). Comprehensive evaluation requires testing across diverse scenarios that can trigger various types of violations under different conditions. While existing methods typically focus on individual diversity metrics, such as input scenarios, ADS-generated motion commands, and system violations, they often fail to capture the complex interrelationships among these elements. For instance, identical motion commands can produce different collision risks in varying scenes, and the same collision may result from different commands under different scenarios. This oversight leads to gaps in testing coverage, potentially missing critical issues in the ADS …

Developing Blockchain-Based Transparent E-Commerce Solutions For Danish Smes To Promote Sustainable Design Products, Somnath Mazumdar, Robert John Kauffman, Thomas Jensen, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Jan Damsgaard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Typically, a firm's objectives include establishing consumer confidence, preserving its brand image, and developing a profitable business strategy. Consumers now place greater emphasis on the sustainability and transparency of their purchases. Given environmental and economic limitations, firms are often compelled to implement sustainable production methods. This is especially a struggle for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with new technology, as it can increase their risk of failure. This has led to a problem for consumers, who must cross-check the sustainability-related claims of the firms they buy from. This is challenging because of limited process trace data and restricted enforcement capabilities. …

From Spatial To Actions: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Model In Spatial Foundation Priors, Zhengshen Zhang, Hao Li, Yalun Dai, Zhengbang Zhu, Lei Zhou, Chenchen Liu, Dong Wang, Francis E. H. Tay, Sijin Chen, Ziwei Liu, Yuxiao Liu, Xinghang Li, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing vision-language-action (VLA) models act in 3D real-world but are typically built on 2D encoders, leaving a spatial reasoning gap that limits generalization and adaptability. Recent 3D integration techniques for VLAs either require specialized sensors and transfer poorly across modalities, or inject weak cues that lack geometry and degrade vision-language alignment. In this work, we introduce FALCON (From Spatial to Action), a novel paradigm that injects rich 3D spatial tokens into the action head. FALCON leverages spatial foundation models to deliver strong geometric priors from RGB alone, and includes an Embodied Spatial Model that can optionally fuse depth, or pose …

Thinktank-Me: A Multi-Expert Framework For Middle East Event Forecasting, Haoxuan Li, He Chang, Yunshan Ma, Yi Bin, Yang Yang, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event forecasting is inherently influenced by multifaceted considerations, including international relations, regional historical dynamics, and cultural contexts. However, existing LLM-based approaches employ single-model architectures that generate predictions along a singular explicit trajectory, constraining their ability to capture diverse geopolitical nuances across complex regional contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce ThinkTank-ME, a novel Think Tank framework for Middle East event forecasting that emulates collaborative expert analysis in real-world strategic decision-making. To facilitate expert specialization and rigorous evaluation, we construct POLECAT-FOR-ME, a Middle East–focused event forecasting benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of multi-expert collaboration in handling complex temporal geopolitical forecasting …

On Autopilot? An Empirical Study Of Human-Ai Teaming And Review Practices In Open Source, Haoyu Gao, Peerachai Banyongrakkul, Hao Guan, Mansooreh Zahedi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly automate software engineering tasks. While recent studies highlight the accelerated adoption of “AI as a teammate” in Open Source Software (OSS), developer interaction patterns remain under-explored. In this work, we investigated project-level guidelines and developers’ interactions with AI-assisted pull requests (PRs) by expanding the AIDev dataset to include finer-grained contributor code ownership and a comparative baseline of human-created PRs. We found that over 67.5% of AI-co-authored PRs originate from contributors without prior code ownership. Despite this, the majority of repositories lack guidelines for AI-coding agent usage. Notably, we observed a distinct interaction pattern: AI-co-authored PRs …

Simulation-Based School Safety Leadership: Practicing Early Warning Sign Recognition And Response, Daniel W. Eadens

Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository

This entry describes the effectiveness of a simulation involving safety.

Daily Eastern News: April 01, 2026, Eastern Illinois University

Daily Eastern News: 2025-2026

No abstract provided.

Exchange Rate Volatility And Colombian Export Performance: A Comparative Product-Level Time-Series Analysis, Sebastian Pedraza

Theses & ETDs

This thesis examines the effects of nominal exchange rate volatility on Colombia’s export volumes to the United States, with emphasis on sectoral heterogeneity across agricultural and energy products. While exchange rate movements are widely recognized as an important determinant of trade performance, empirical evidence on the role of exchange rate volatility remains mixed, particularly for developing economies. This study contributes to the literature by distinguishing between exchange rate uncertainty and exchange rate level effects and by adopting a product-level time-series approach. Using monthly data from 2016 to 2024, the analysis focuses on four major Colombian exports: coffee, cut flowers, crude …

Habitat Preference Of Invasive Lionfish (Pterois Spp.) In The Gulf Of Mexico, River Barnett

Theses & ETDs

Lionfish (Pterois spp.) are an invasive species in the Gulf of Mexico that originated from the Indo-Pacific. They have no natural predators within this area and are known to prey on anything they can fit into their mouths, as well as having a high fecundity rate. This thesis investigated the habitat preferences of the invasive lionfish (Pterois volitans and P. miles) in the Gulf of Mexico, focusing on depth distribution and substrate preference. Specifically looking at quantifying depth-related patterns in lionfish abundance across shallow (< 20 m), intermediate (20–40 m), and mesophotic (>40 m) zones, assessing the influence of habitat structure, including artificial and natural habitats, on …

Voting The Bums Out Or Echoes Of Weimar?: The Fdp, Greens, Afd, Left Party, And Bsw In The 2025 Bundestag Election, David F. Patton

Government and International Relations Faculty Publications

In all likelihood, Germany’s 2025 federal election has driven a final nail in the coffin of a party system marked by two traditional catch-all parties and several small parties. The FDP, Greens, AfD, Left Party, and BSW together received a record vote share. However, not all of them were electoral winners. Led by the AfD, smaller opposition parties on the ideological extremes surged, while hinge parties in government lost ground. A clear pole position offered an edge in a polarized and fragmented field. This article examines pre-election developments, manifestos, candidates, results, and outlooks of five parties that have emerged as …

Efficacy Analysis In Clinical Trials: A Comprehensive Review Of Statistical And Machine Learning Approaches, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Samhita Pal

Faculty Articles

Efficacy testing is a cornerstone of clinical trials, ensuring that medical interventions achieve their intended therapeutic effects. Over the decades, a wide range of statistical methodologies have been developed to address the complexities of clinical trial data, including parametric, nonparametric, Bayesian, and machine learning approaches. Parametric methods, such as t-tests, ANOVA, and LMMs, have traditionally been the foundation of efficacy testing due to their efficiency under well-defined assumptions. Nonparametric techniques, including the Friedman test, Brunner-Munzel test, and modern extensions like nparLD, have emerged as robust alternatives, particularly for skewed, ordinal, or non-normal data. Bayesian methodologies have enabled the incorporation of …

Detecting And Managing Plant-Parasitic Nematodes On Grain Sorghum In South Carolina, Alex Coleman, Michael Marshall, Jay Crouch, David Dewitt, Shelby Hammond, John Mueller

Grain Sorghum

Several species of nematodes can infect and reproduce on grain sorghum. However, unlike damage to cotton or soybeans, damage to grain sorghum is often minimal. This is because grain sorghum has a fibrous root system with multiple growing points, allowing it to rapidly compensate for damaged roots. Therefore, it can withstand higher nematode populations before exhibiting reduced plant growth or yield. Symptoms of nematode damage include stunting, nutrient deficiencies, and premature drought stress. Nematodes are not uniformly distributed in a field and symptoms of damage from nematodes are often more common in sandier areas of a field. Symptomatic plants have …

Who Is A Champion Teacher? A Comparative Longitudinal Analysis Of Teacher Practices In Teacher Professional Development Programmes In East Africa, Jane Rarieya, Esther Kibga, Omari Abunga, Fredrick Mtenzi, Nyagwegwe Wango

Institute for Educational Development, East Africa

This comparative mixed-methods study defines and profiles the “champion teacher” by synthesising primary longitudinal and cross-sectional data from two complementary teacher professional development (TPD) initiatives implemented across East Africa (Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda): the long-term, pre-service teacher-oriented Foundations for Learning (F4L) programme and the short-course, in‑service teacher Strengthening Education Systems East Africa (SESEA) programme. The champion teacher construct is operationalised through a Champion Teacher Index (CTI) comprising three integrated domains: head (cognitive pedagogical knowledge), hands (psychomotor instructional practice), and heart (affective, leadership, and gender-responsive dispositions). Quantitative analysis revealed statistically significant longitudinal differences between the programmes. F4L teachers demonstrated higher mean …