Digital Commons Network^™

The Genesis Of The Annual Usu Conference On Small Satellites, Rex Ridenoure, Alex Da Silva Curiel, Martin Sweeting

Small Satellite Conference

On this milestone of marking the 40^th SmallSat conference, this paper provides a capsule summary of how it all started in 1987, and why. 

By January 1986, Utah State University was actively involved with NASA’s Space Shuttle program, which from April 1981 through mid-January 1986 had notched 24 successful missions in a row, including nine in 1985. Missions were starting to appear routine, and the manifest was full for many dozens of future missions. 

The Shuttle’s Get Away Special (GAS) secondary payload program had become quite popular within academic, government and commercial sectors, and through 1985 six dozen separate …

Unlocking Multiple Intelligence Skills Among Medical Library Professionals: An Analysis Of Nigeria And Pakistan, Mariym Muhammad Ismail, Naweed-E-Sehar, 3. Kamaluddeen Isa El-Kalash

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Multiple Intelligence (MI) plays a crucial role in comprehending extensive intellectual abilities and aptitudes among individuals. The purpose of this study is to investigate the Multiple Intelligences in medical library professionals in Pakistan and Nigeria by incorporating Howard Gardener's Theory. Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences provided the foundation for the research method implemented in this study. The current study is explanatory in nature. The research employs a quantitative approach and survey as a research method, which involves collecting and analyzing numerical data. A questionnaire with five-point Likert scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), was adopted to …

Nanouhfcomms Mission Overview, Nazia Mozaffar, Salwan Damman, Ryan Hiser, Lizbeth Durbin, Jose Ruvalcaba, Alejandro Castro, David Sadowski, Dmitriy Obukhov, Brendan Hill

Small Satellite Conference

The NanoUHFComms experiment seeks to demonstrate the ability to detect and correct Doppler offsets caused by the relative high velocity between Low Earth Orbit (LEO) spacecraft and terrestrial nodes. The payload includes a Rincon Research Corporation AstroSDR with external Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) for the receive band and an external power amplifier for the transmit band. The uplink and downlink bands are combined with a diplexer before connecting to a common antenna mounted on the spacecraft. The demonstrations planned for the orbit testing include a relay mode which will detect and correct the Doppler offset of an uplink signal, translate …

Monitoring Spoken Language In Infants And Toddlers Who Are Deaf Or Hard Of Hearing Using The Lena Developmental Snapshot, Monika-Maria Oster, Kimberly A. Peters

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

Purpose: This retrospective analysis evaluates the Developmental Snapshot as a language monitoring tool for infants and toddlers with bilateral hearing loss who use listening and spoken language.

Method: Data were obtained from the educational and clinical records of 147 children with bilateral hearing loss. For each child, the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) Developmental Snapshot, a standardized online language assessment that relies on parent report, had been completed at least once. When available, scores from other standardized language assessments (PLS-5, CDI, and DAYC-2) were also obtained.

Results: LENA Developmental Snapshot standard scores were characterized by high variability and mean scores in …

A Survey Study On Physiological Hearing Assessment Practice In The Usa, Malina Mangrum, Hasan Saleh, Sangamanatha Ankmnal Ankmnal Veeranna, Kimberly Ward, Charles G. Marx

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

Background: In the United States, limited information exists regarding the physiological measures and testing parameters used in infant hearing assessments. To address this gap, we conducted a nationwide survey to identify the types of physiological tests and procedures currently employed by audiologists.

Method: A structured survey was distributed to audiologists across the country to gather information about the auditory tests and recording parameters used in infant hearing evaluations.

Results: Most respondents reported using Auditory Brainstem Responses (ABRs) to estimate infant hearing thresholds, primarily relying on traditional stimuli rather than chirp stimuli. The Auditory Steady-State Response (ASSR) was not widely used …

Measuring Family Involvement In Early Intervention Services For Children Who Are Dhh: A Scoping Review, Marie Martinez, Blair Richlin, Kristina Blaiser

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

Background: Family involvement after a child has been identified as deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) is often recommended as “best practice” for Family Centered Early Intervention (FCEI; Szarkowski et al., 2024) and a catalyst for improved outcomes. Defining actions of a family will inform high-quality family support programs. This scoping review aims to explore and document family involvement as well as the current systems of measurement used in early intervention DHH family-centered services.

Purpose: The specific aim of this scoping review was to identify the operational definitions of family involvement and metrics used with families of children who are …

Early Childhood Access To Language Acquisition Services In Arizona, Kendra Benedict, Wendy Steuerwald, Najwa Ghattas, Cheryl Johnson

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

This investigation reviewed existing services and gaps for young children who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) in Arizona and explored community-based approaches to improve access to language development resources. The study was conducted in two phases, each focusing on different approaches for language acquisition based on surveys of parents and providers. Phase I, completed in 2024, addressed listening and spoken language (LSL) as a methodology for language acquisition while Phase II, completed in 2025, focused on the use of American Sign Language (ASL). Findings from Phase I surveys found that 63% of parents reported using LSL as the …

Journal Of Early Hearing Detection And Intervention: Volume 11 Issue 1, Pages 1-80

Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention

No abstract provided.

Towards Designing And Performing Biological Sex: Explorations Of The Cyborg And The Inanimate, Beja Puskas

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

While gender has been largely debunked as a form of performance, biological sex remains an irreducible point of departure. This essay challenges biological sex as a category through the Foucauldian lens of bio-power and technologies of the self. It merges findings from interviews surrounding intersectionally marginalized experiences with menstruation with trans and disability studies. Utilizing Mel Chen’s theory of animacies, and Margrit Shildrick’s human-technology amalgamation theory, this essay blurs the biological-artificial binary. While there are obstacles, limiting what is biologically possible for humans, the body can be significantly augmented through imagination, body modification, and the invention of newly gendered practices.

Unboxing Relations: An Ethnographic Study Of Blind Box Consumption In The U.S., Wendy Zheng

Sociology Honors Projects

Blind box consumption is a format for purchasing packaged toys without knowing the specific item in advance. It has become a global trend and is often viewed as irrational or gambling-like behavior in past literature. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in retail settings, this study examines how consumers make sense of uncertainty through social interaction. This study proposes a two-layer model of consumption. In the first layer, social interaction during the consumption process helps consumers negotiate risk, generate meaning, and become more skilled buyers. In the second layer, consumers engage in moral and value judgments that involve distancing …

Recursive Artificial Intelligence Training And The Homogenization Of Discourse, Sam Hemesath

Political Science Honors Projects

As Large Language Models (LLMs) begin to produce text on the internet, the same repository from which training data for LLMs are scraped, LLMs will start to train on data they produced. What will happen to future models when LLMs are trained on their own text? Scholars have raised concerns about the possibility that LLMs homogenize language and discourse. These concerns are further exaggerated as LLMs begin to infect their own repositories, marking a turn from human-produced training data sets. In this paper I simulate a recursive training loop by prompting a popular open-source LLM with 1000 prompts and using …

Flashpoint: A Narrative Inquiry Of The East Palestine Train Derailment, Three Years Later, Alexandra Hopkins

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

A comprehensive look into the response and recovery of the East Palestine community through three distinctive perspectives.

An Alternative To Human Domination: An Animal Study Of Kate Dicamillo's Because Of Winn-Dixie, 25 Years Later, Brandon Witmer

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

This is an in-depth analysis of how Kate DiCamillo uses the medium of children's literature with "Because of Winn-Dixie" to advocate for equitable treatment of animals in society.

Utilizing Legal Frameworks In Rural Appalchia, Max Baker

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

A thematic coding of various medias surrounding the MTR being done on the Gauley Mountain in WV, searching for legal frameworks available to rural Appalachians.

Determinants Of Competitive Success In Major League Baseball: An Empirical Analysis Of On-Field Performance And Organizational Resources, Cade Williamson

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

The current study examines whether division championships and postseason success in Major League Baseball (MLB) are more closely tied to on-field statistical performance or to organizational resources, such as payroll and fan attendance.

Written By Hyunjin: K-Pop Fandom And Identity Formation, Sarah Campbell

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

This project examines the ways in which fashion, media, and symbolism are used to construct fan identity within the K-Pop fandom.

Silence And Visibility: Media Framing Of Industrial Pollution And Health Risks  In Appalachian And Niger Delta Print Media, Adetola Fajembola

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

Communities living near oil extraction and coal mining sites face serious environmental and health risks, yet these risks are often absent from public conversation. This study examines how print media cover industrial pollution-linked health risks in two regions defined by extractive industries — the Niger Delta in Nigeria and Appalachia in the United States — between 2011 and 2020. Although these regions are geographically and culturally different, both bear the environmental and health costs of extraction while remaining underrepresented in media coverage that shapes public awareness and policy response. Using mixed methods content analysis of eight legacy print newspapers, the …

From Tal-Corset To Tuomeiyi: Inter-Asian Referencing Of Feminist Resistance Against Hegemonic Beauty Standards, Eva Liu

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

How inter-Asian referencing of feminist knowledge shapes everyday feminist resistance against hegemonic beauty standards in contemporary China.

The Bridge, Erin Hale

Student Research and Creative Activity Expo

Community center/ government office that connects legislators to the people they represent.

Covid-19, Politicization, And Vaccine Hesitancy: A Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Non-Medical Exemptions In Minnesota, 2014-2024, Benjamin Arnold

Geography Honors Projects

Vaccination rates have declined due to the growing hesitancy by many parents to vaccinate their children, signified by an increasing amount of non-medical exemptions. While there has been previous spatial analysis of exemption patterns as a threat to herd immunity, there has not been much post-COVID. This analysis provides a modern analysis of changing exemption clustering in Minnesota, while also considering the impact of public health being increasingly politicized. We used kindergarten vaccination data for 1475 elementary schools to analyze the evolution of clustering and predictors of NMEs across space and time in Minnesota, from 2014 to 2024.

The Role Of Civil Society Organizations In Climate Action In Africa: A Case Study Of The “Yle Foundation”, Ahmed Fathy, Kareem Tonbol

Blue Economy

Africa is responsible for a small part of the emissions of greenhouse gases around the globe; however, it is still one of the regions that are most susceptible to the impacts of climate change. Civil Society Organizations (CSO) play an important role in initiating measures that target the reduction of climate change effects in Africa. Nonetheless, existing research in this area is limited and fails to compare findings from CSO initiatives in several countries on the continent. The research presented aims to investigate the role of CSOs in climate action in Africa through a case study of the initiatives implemented …

Artificial Intelligence Driven Insights And Predictions For A Television Application, Neetesh Mittal, Vivek Kushwaha, Vivek Yadav, Saravanan Santhamoorthy Theckyam

Defensive Publications Series

Traditional data analytics for television applications rely on manual, dashboard-centric models that track historical user activity. These traditional data analytics for television applications fail to explain underlying user behaviors or to correlate multiple simultaneously launched features with core business objectives. To address these limitations, the disclosed technology describes an autonomous analytical system that utilizes a distributed client-server architecture that hosts a hierarchical multi-agent backend built on an orchestration framework. A supervisor agent coordinates specialized domain engines to execute targeted statistical, performance, and viewership analysis algorithms over read-only television application databases. Communication under strict End-User Credential (EUC) zero-trust security and under …

Systemic Progress Regeneration Protocol (Sprp), Volodymyr Kotegov

Defensive Publications Series

This protocol defines the mandatory rules for the creation, evaluation, acceptance, and long-term stewardship of engineering work by parties that voluntarily adopt it.

The protocol exists to counteract a fundamental process: the spontaneous decay of civilizationally critical engineering knowledge. Its objective is not the production of superior individual artifacts. Its objective is the sustained growth of the survivable mass of engineering knowledge — the quantity of knowledge that remains comprehensible, reproducible, and extensible after complete institutional rupture, generational turnover, and loss of external infrastructure.

The protocol claims no universal authority. It applies only to nodes and Inheritance Lines that have …

Privacy-Preserving Standard Communication With Network Elements (Scone) Hint Tokens For Traffic Classification, Authorization, And Central Processing Unit (Cpu) Reduction, Dennis Lanov

Defensive Publications Series

A technique is proposed herein for privacy-preserving Standard Communication with Network Elements (SCONE) hint tokens that allow trusted policy systems to pre-authorize and classify encrypted Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) traffic without exposing user identity or raw policy details. A token carries only coarse, non-identifying attributes such as traffic class, entitlement level, validity, and flow binding, allowing downstream SCONE-capable network elements to verify the token quickly and generate appropriate throughput advice. By replacing repeated deep classification and policy lookups with lightweight token verification, the technique reduces central processing unit (CPU) load and improves operational scalability across enterprise, wireless-access, mobile, and …

A System And Method For Outcome-Consequence Weighted Scoring In Packet-Switched Communication Networks, Shubham Shivhare

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure discloses a system and a method for per-packet Outcome-Consequence Weight Scoring (OCWS) in packet-switched communication networks. The system includes a processor and a memory storing instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the system to: for each packet received at the system, compute a per-packet significance score as a weighted combination of five semantic factor values, the five semantic factor values including a meaning density value, a downstream consequence probability value, a synchronization criticality value, a time sensitivity value, and an irreplaceability value. The processor is configured to classify each packet into one of a plurality …

Meaning Of Mentoring For Puerto Rican Diaspora Professionals Seeking Career Advancement, Coralys M. Cedó Negrón

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Hispanic/Latino professionals remain underrepresented in senior leadership positions across industries in the United States. Organizational leaders need to understand this concern as a critical indicator of factors that may shape leadership development and career advancement among underrepresented professionals. Grounded in the mentoring model, the purpose of this qualitative interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) study was to understand the meaning of mentoring for Puerto Rican diaspora professionals seeking career advancement in the United States. The participants comprised 10 Puerto Rican professionals living and working in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area who had participated in formal or informal mentoring relationships. Data were collected …

Sci-Fi And Nursing: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong, And What Is Our Next Frontier, Tara Marko, Matthew Mincey

International Nursing Research Congress (INRC)

Introduction: Science fiction (Sci-Fi) has been imagining advances in human healthcare for over 200 years. With each advancement in technology, we can see parallels to Sci-Fi ideas that have now integrated into all aspects of the nursing profession.

Design: We will visually explore the history of nursing and healthcare depicted in Sci-Fi media, highlight key moments and predictions, and discuss how those predictions translate to technology that nurses use today. We will show the promises of Sci-Fi and how modern nursing is being shaped by technology that was once fantastical. We will also imagine what modern nursing could look like …

Development And Feasibility Of A Community-Based Breast Cancer Prevention Program For Asian American, Jingxi Sheng, Maichou Lor, Lisa Cadmus-Bertram

International Nursing Research Congress (INRC)

Background. Asian American (AsA) women have the fast-growing breast cancer incidence in the United States, yet face persistently low screening uptake, the slowest improvements in mortality, and underrepresentation in cancer prevention research. Building upon a culturally developed cancer screening program for Hmong women, we partnered with a multi-ethnic AsA Community Advisory Board (CAB) to address these gaps and co-develop a culturally tailored breast cancer education and prevention initiative for diverse AsA communities. This abstract provides an overview of the Breast Cancer Awareness and Risk Education for Asian Americans (CARE) Program and describes its iterative refinement during pilot testing.

Methods. CARE …

On The Double: Educating Veterans And Clinicians On Evidence-Based Ptsd Treatment Options, Jacquelyn Baldwin, Beth A. Pratt, Alan Peterson, Cheryl A. Krause-Parello

International Nursing Research Congress (INRC)

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may develop after a traumatic event and may impair cognition, mood, behavior, and increase risk of psychiatric illness and suicide (Mann et al., 2024). The lifetime prevalence of PTSD among United States (US) veterans can reach 29% depending on their period of military service (Judkins et al., 2020; Na et al., 2023). Many veterans still do not seek treatment. In a study of 13,824 veterans, less than 50% received PTSD treatment in the year after diagnosis (Grekin et al., 2021). Limited awareness of PTSD treatment options may be a cause. The aim of this dissemination initiative …

Correlative In Situ Nonlinear Optical Characteriztion Of Plasmonic Colloidal Nanoparticle Growth Dynamics, Stena C. Peterson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Colloidal noble metal nanoparticles are of extreme interest as nanomaterials and for the wide variety of their possible applications in nanomedicine. The unique linear and nonlinear optical processes associated with these nanomaterials can be studied using a variety of spectroscopic techniques including extinction, second harmonic generation (SHG), and two-photon fluorescence (TPF) spectroscopy. In order to better understand and optimize these nanomaterials for their desired applications, it is important to investigate the growth and photophysical dynamics associated with gold nanoparticles, silver-gold core-shell (Ag-Au CS) nanoparticles, and gold-silver-gold core-shell-shell (Au-Ag-Au CSS) nanoparticles in addition to how their size, surface morphology, composition. and …