Digital Commons Network^™

Energetic And Economic Aspects Of Rebound, Part I: Foundations Of A Rigorous Analytical Framework, Matthew Kuperus Heun, Gregor Semieniuk, Paul E. Brockway

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Widespread implementation of energy efficiency is a key greenhouse gas emissions mitigation measure, but rebound can ‘‘take back’’ energy savings. However, the absence of solid analytical foundations hinders empirical determination of the size of rebound. A new clarity is needed, one that involves both economics and energy analysis. In this paper (Part I), we advance foundations of a rigorous analytical framework for consumer-sided rebound that starts at the microeconomic level and is approachable for both energy analysts and economists. We develop foundations of a framework that (i) clarifies the energy, expenditure, and consumption aspects of rebound, (ii) combines embodied energy …

Bibliography Of Scholarship From 2025, University Of San Diego

Annual Bibliography of USD Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Development Of Some Neural Network Models For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization: Dimensionality Reduction, Prasun Dutta

Doctoral Theses

Recent research has been driven by the abundance of data, leading to the develop- ment of systems that enhance understanding across various fields. Effective machine learning algorithms are crucial for managing high-dimensional data, with dimension reduction being a key strategy to improve algorithm efficiency and decision-making. Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) stands out as a method that transforms large datasets into interpretable, lower-dimensional forms by decomposing a matrix with non-negative elements into a pair of non-negative factors. This approach addresses the curse of dimensionality by dimensionally reducing data while preserving meaningful information. Dimension reduction techniques rely on extracting high-quality features from …

M.S. Applied Artificial Intelligence - Capstone Chronicles 2025, Daniel Arday, Will Kencel, Ksenia Kold, Elan Wilkinson, Parker Christenson, Gabriel Emanuel Colón, Dominic Fanucchi, Arin Deloatch, Kenneth Devoe, Jabali Shah, Philip Felizarta, Ned Kost, Pawan Tahiliani, Kim Vierczhalek, Ethan Schmitt, Jeevan Gullinkala, Laxmi Sulakshana Rapolu, Subhabrata Ganguli, Rene Ortiz, Seema Mittal, Prema Mallikarjunan, Aaron Ramirez, Outhai Xayavongsa, Vivian Perng, Brett Payton, Douglas Code, Matt Purkeypile, Tyler Clinscales, Geoffrey Fadera, Edwin Merchan, Andy Malinsky, Christopher Alleyne, Devin Eror, Jory Hamilton, Gurleen Virk, Victor Hsu, Kevin Pooler, Priscilla Marquez, Aktham Almomani, Laurentius Von Liechti

Capstone Chronicles

No abstract provided.

Uso Da Modelagem Baseada Em Agentes No Estudo De Sistemas Complexos, Eric Araújo

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

A modelagem baseada em agentes (MBA) é uma metodologia poderosa e acessível para explorar sistemas complexos, onde interações simples entre indivíduos podem gerar comportamentos coletivos emergentes. Este artigo apresenta a MBA de maneira didática e fluida, utilizando a interface NetLogo para exemplificar como a metodologia pode ser aplicada em diversas áreas, como ecologia, saúde pública, economia e sociologia. Com uma abordagem prática, mostramos que não é necessário um conhecimento avançado em computação para começar a usar a MBA, mas que sua versatilidade permite investigar questões complexas do mundo real. Ao final, o leitor será capaz de entender os fundamentos da …

Self-Efficacy And Stem Education: A Study Of Family And Consumer Science Teachers In Pennsylvania, Charlene Smith, Philip A. Reed

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has become widely promoted. Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) uses science to improve home life while reinforcing technology, engineering, and mathematics principles. However, FCS is not usually recognized as a STEM subject. The purpose of this study was to determine what factors may affect FCS teachers’ level of self-efficacy in teaching STEM to provide supports that improve teaching practices. This quantitative study surveyed secondary FCS teachers in Pennsylvania using the T‐STEM Survey for Elementary Teachers. Results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and simple linear regression analysis was performed to determine the predictive …

Employers' Perceived Value Of High School Industry Recognized Credentials, Teri Harris, Mickey Kosloski, Philip A. Reed

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study was to determine whether industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) earned in secondary school led to quality employment and which IRCs should be integrated into career and technical education (CTE) high school courses. Using survey data from business leaders across the 14 nationally recognized Career Clusters (Advance CTE, 2024a), credentials were ranked by importance within five program areas (n = 257). Pareto analysis revealed 80% of respondents rated health sciences, family and consumer sciences, and agricultural sciences credentials highest, while business/marketing and skilled/technical sciences/STEM credentials did not rank in the top 20%. This research provides empirical evidence for …

Feel Bad To Discard A Fashion Product: How Ai Designers Influence Individuals' Sustainable Consumption, Ha Kyung Lee, Dooyoung Choi

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

This study explores how AI technology in fashion design influences consumers' sustainable consumption behaviors, focusing on emotional attachment to products. By comparing AI-generated and human-designed fashion items, the study examines how designer type impacts negative emotions about discarding products, mediated by emotional attachment. Results from two experimental studies reveal that designer type significantly affects negative emotions toward discarding human-designed items, but emotional attachment was not influenced by designer type in the first study. This lack of difference may be due to personal characteristics that moderate the effect. The second study found that individuals who perceive AI as human-like form stronger …

Artificial Intelligence In Health Care: Business Opportunities And Ethical Challenges, Ankita Srivastava, Marco Marabelli, Jeffrey Moriarty

Computer Information Systems Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular generative AI (GAI), are making incredible progress toward automation. The pervasive and invasive nature of these technologies are affecting every industry, and health care is no exception. This paper summarizes insights derived from a panel that the Hoffman Center for Business Ethics and the Center for Health and Business at Bentley University hosted in March 2024. The panel invited three qualified health care professionals: Evan Carey, Susan Persky and John Torous. The panelists are all active in multiple aspects of AI in health care but represent a focus on the key areas of policy …

Numerical Modeling Study Of Coastal Impacts From Extreme Storms And Sea Level Rise In Southern New England, Deborah Crowley

Open Access Dissertations

Coastal areas in southern New England are vulnerable to a range of impacts from extreme storms and sea level rise. The most frequent extreme storms are extratropical storms, commonly referred to as nor’easters, named for the direction of the strongest winds, though these storms also have strong winds from other directions.

Storm winds generate large waves and push water up along the coast in the form of storm surge. The combined impacts of increased water levels and waves include flooding and morphological change. Sea level rise (SLR) will exacerbate these processes, amplifying the associated impacts, which may pose increasing threats …

Dynamics Of Metal-Coordinated Coumarin Dyes For Photoswitching Applications, Danielle Jacoby

Open Access Dissertations

Optical transient absorption spectroscopy is a fundamental pump-probe technique that is used to analyze the photophysical and photochemical properties of molecules. Our research group specifically utilizes both a femtosecond and nanosecond set up to probe dynamics of molecules on time scales ranging from 100s of femtoseconds to approximately 50 microseconds. Chapter 2 is a standard operating procedure for the nanosecond transient absorption instrument.

Photoacids are molecules that undergo a change in the acidity of one of their protons when exposed to light. Utilizing this phenomenon, we have designed a series of dyes that, when bound to divalent first row transition …

Development And Characterization Of Polysaccharide-Based Controlled Drug Delivery Platforms, Amanda Pepler

Open Access Dissertations

Drug delivery research focuses on overcoming challenges in patient treatment. Most therapeutics are delivered systemically through oral or intravenous routes. However, these administration methods are often inefficient due to therapeutic hydrophobicity, poor bioavailability, and liver metabolic clearance, necessitating frequent dosing. When treatment plans require frequent dosing, patients experience significant fluctuations in therapeutic concentration in the bloodstream, which can increase adverse side effects. These factors contribute to low patient compliance. Therefore, the core focus of drug delivery research is to develop new administration routes for therapeutics. Drug delivery systems (DDS) that can target therapeutics to a localized region offer advantages over …

Textual Sediments: Genre And The Planetary Novel, William Bowden

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how twenty-first-century prose fiction navigates the ecological and temporal dimensions of planetary crisis. In response to accelerating pressures - climate change, ecological collapse, and the intensification of capitalist modernity - literary studies has turned increasingly to the planetary as a conceptual frame. Yet this shift has often outpaced the development of adequate critical vocabularies and narrative methodologies. By drawing on ecocriticism, narrative theory, phenomenology, and related fields, Textual Sediments proposes a new framework for reading what it terms the planetary novel: a sedimentary genre characterized by temporal layering, formal hybridity, and a recursive engagement with scale. Through …

Quantifying Mixotrophy Potential As A Function Of Environmental And Biological Drivers In Coastal And Estuarine Plankton Communities, Erica Ewton

Open Access Dissertations

The discovery of mixotrophic plankton has bridged gaps in nutrient cycling budgets and altered the understanding of food webs and energy transfer. Mixotrophic plankton are capable of simultaneous or sequential photosynthesis and heterotrophy, providing multiple avenues of nutrition and thus reducing limitations that affect specialists. These energy dense cells provide increased biomass for higher trophic levels, which may increase organism sizes throughout the food web. Additionally, they may be physically denser, which alters biogeochemical cycling including carbon sequestration. The work presented here uses LysoTracker Green, an acidotropic stain that attaches to phagocytic vacuoles within potentially phagotrophic small (< 20 µm diameter) phytoplankton communities (‘mixoplankton’), to better understand their abundance, relative abundance, and growth rates in relation to the matrix of natural conditions they inhabit. Understanding the prevalence and drivers of mixoplankton is vital to better parameterize biogeochemical cycling and energy transfer in the ocean and for models that predict the fate of future oceans.In the first study, I compared the abundance of mixoplankton in the Northeast U.S. Shelf (NES) and Coastal California Current System (CCS) during two cruises in the NES in summer 2021 and one cruise in the CCS in summer 2022. These two contrasting coastal systems span the breadth of environmental conditions observed in temperate marine ecosystems and thus provided an opportunity to examine indicators of mixoplankton across temperate coastal regions. I discovered higher mixoplankton abundance in the NES than CCS yet similar population sizes of nanoeukaryotic photosynthesizers, resulting in higher relative abundance of mixoplankton in the NES than CCS. Across both systems, I found increased mixoplankton abundance associated with decreasing temperature and combined nitrate + nitrite concentrations (N+N), and increasing light intensity and Synechococcus abundance …

Investigating The Photophysical Dynamics Of Anthracene And Acridine Derivatives Using Time-Resolved Spectroscopy, Sophia Tiano

Open Access Dissertations

Anthracenes and acridines are among the simplest visible light absorbing heterocyclic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and as such are extensively used in a variety of applications including photosensitizers and fluorescent sensors. Although the photophysics of some derivatives have been studied in the past, there is still a lot of unknown fundamental information that is vital in order to optimize these molecules for particular applications. Transient absorption spectroscopy was used to study the photophysics of the 9-substituted methyl, hydroxymethyl and formyl derivatives of acridine and anthracene. The growth and decay of the triplet-triplet absorption peak were quantified for each dye in …

Stability And Global Dynamics Of Autonomous And Nonautonomous Discrete Population Models With Stocking, Harvesting, And Cooperation, Sam Habach

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the local and global behavior of several classes of discrete population models involving stocking, harvesting, and cooperation. The study is divided into three major manuscripts, each offering new theoretical in sights, bifurcation results, and applications to real-world data.

In Manuscript 1, we study the Beverton-Holt population models with constant and proportional stocking and harvesting, as well as sigmoid Beverton-Holt models under constant stocking and harvesting, both in autonomous and non-autonomous settings. We analyze stability and explore global dynamics using established local and global dynamics theorems, bifurcation theory, and explicit solutions when available. Special attention is given to …

Ultra-Rapid Electrophilic Cysteine Arylation Using Pyridinium Salts, Bradley M. Lipka

Open Access Dissertations

Small molecule-based bioconjugation enables in vitro and in vivo functionalization of proteins and peptides, significantly expanding the chemical space of biomacromolecules. Among these transformations, nucleophilic aromatic substitution (S_NAr) of cysteine residues is a widely employed strategy for protein bioconjugation.

Although many reagents facilitate cysteine arylation, they are disadvantageous in two crucial aspects - limited synthetic modularity and undesired hydrophobicity. First, conventional cysteine arylating reagents are frequently activated by multiple electron-withdrawing groups (EWGs) on a single aromatic ring, leaving few synthetic handles to derivatize the reagents for advanced applications. Second, these labeling reagents are generally hydrophobic in nature and …

International Students’ Perceptions And Experiences Of Institutional Diversity Initiatives And Self-Authorship Attainment: A Mixed Methods Study, Sandra Ayivor

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Higher education institutions in the United States have responded to years of discrimination through several diversity initiatives. Although research has indicated the merits of such initiatives on student development, the outcomes are not uniform across all student populations. Moreover, student development discourses have often excluded the experiences of international students. Employing a convergent mixed methods approach, this study investigated the perceptions and experiences of international students at a flagship land-grant higher education institution in the Appalachian region of the United States regarding institutional diversity initiatives and their self-authorship based on some demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, age, marital status, religion, continent, …

Microbial And Plant Biodiversity In Appalachian Agroecosystems And Their Implications For Soil Health, Kinsey Reed Close

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The sustainability of agricultural landscapes depends on understanding the complex interactions between plants, soil, and microbes. In Appalachia, a region shaped by complex terrain and long histories of human and ecological interaction, small family farms produce hay, livestock, and row crops. These agroecosystems, though often treated as “artificial” by many ecologists, have the potential to support both food production and biodiversity conservation if managed with an understanding of ecological complexity. This dissertation examines how plant and microbial diversity interact with soil and management to influence nutrient cycling, soil health, and long-term resilience in Appalachian agricultural systems. A literature review revealed …

Suffolk University Academic Catalog, College Of Arts And Sciences And School Of Management, 2025-2026, Suffolk University

College of Arts and Sciences and Sawyer Business School Academic Catalogs

This catalog contains information for the day, evening, and graduate programs.

What Is Copywritable In Software?, Charles Duan

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Do Plea Bargains Advance Justice? A Content Analysis Of Judges’ Perceptions Of Plea Bargaining, Nathan W. Prager, Teyah S. Giannetta, Janice L. Burke, Monica K. Miller

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Common Data Set 2024-2025, Clemson University

Common Data Sets

No abstract provided.

Ideas For Papers Or Term Papers On John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy Of Dunces, The Occasional Series, Final Version, H. Vernon Leighton

Library Faculty Works

This document lists thirty-three ideas that the reader might use for the basis of a literary study of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, or its author, John Kennedy Toole. Some ideas, such as the first few, are minor and might warrant a five-page undergraduate paper. Others, such as the final one, might warrant a peer-review article or a graduate thesis. These ideas were originally posted between 2010 and 2025 on the John Kennedy Toole Research blog by H. Vernon Leighton.

Development And Application Of New Method And Platform For Correlated Oxides, Zheting Jin

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Strongly correlated oxides, including high-temperature superconductors such as cuprates and nickelates, exhibit complex quantum phenomena that can challenge conventional electronic structure theories. This thesis develops and applies advanced computational methods to study these systems, aiming to provide a comprehensive first-principles description of their structural, spin, and electronic properties. First, a novel cluster slave-particle method is introduced to improve the treatment of electron correlations in extended Hubbard models, capturing strong correlation effects with high computational efficiency and benchmarking well against established many-body techniques. This method is then combined with density functional theory calculations and applied to cuprates, where we demonstrate how …

Generative Artificial Intelligence: Legal Ethics Issues, Kincaid Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming nearly every sector of society including the practice of law. Legal professionals are increasingly using AI tools for research, drafting, contract review, and even predicting judicial outcomes with as many as one third of respondents to a survey using GenAI daily. But with this rapid adoption come questions that go beyond efficiency and instead point to the core of legal ethics including issues such as competence, confidentiality, and professional judgment.

Representation Theory, Geometry And Combinatorics Associated To Springer Fibers, Do Kien Hoang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation explores various aspects of Springer fibers and their deep connections to geometric and combinatorial representation theory. It combines the works of [H24a], [H24b], and [H24c] by the author during his PhD. Throughout these works, we explain sophisticated roles of Springer fibers in modern topics like modular representation theory and symplectic duality. Additionally, we resolve several classical questions concerning the Springer correspondence and the cohomology of Springer fibers.

The first project centers around a discretization of a Springer fiber Be. This discretization is a finite set Ye that has appeared in various contexts in representation theory. …

Ergodic Switching Control For Markov-Feller Processes Ii, Jose L. Menaldi, Maurice Robin

Mathematics Faculty Research Publications

This is the continuation of Part I [14], where we considered control problems with long term average (or ergodic) cost for Markov switching processes (zt , nt ), nt being a discrete component with values in a finite set N . The control acts only on this discrete component and consists of immediate switching actions. We solve the ergodic problem in several situations extending previous works, mainly when zt is a reflected diffusion with or without jumps and when the set of control values is strictly smaller than N . In this Part II, we conclude our theoretical analysis with …

Ergodic Switching Control For Markov-Feller Processes I, Jose L. Menaldi, Maurice Robin

Mathematics Faculty Research Publications

We consider control problems with long term average (or ergodic) cost for Markov switching processes (zt, nt ), nt being a discrete component with values in a finite set N . The control acts only on this discrete component and consists of immediate switching actions. We solve the ergodic problem in several situations extending previous works, mainly when zt is a reflected diffusion with or without jumps and when the set of control values is strictly smaller than N .

Approaches To Advancing Human Rights, Carina Van Vliet, Avidan Cover, Sara Ghebremusse, Brian Gran

Canada-United States Law Journal

A panel discussion on approaches (or lack thereof) by the United States and Canada to advance human rights. Also, whether or not human rights produce wellbeing.