Digital Commons Network^™

Karstic Cavities Underground Investigation: Gpr And Geotechnical Data Correlation, Mehrez Jamei, Mabrouk Abdelkader, Anwar Ahmed, Yahya Alassaf

Journal of Sustainable Mining

This paper focuses on the methodology involving ground penetration radar (GPR) for detecting and localizing random cavities in underground limestone soil, in conjunction with geotechnical data. A GPR survey was conducted alongside field and laboratory geotechnical tests at a field where mining activities are now promoted (Saudi Arabia Northern Borders Province). The paper presents correlations between the instantaneous amplitude of the reflected electromagnetic (EM) waves and rock quantification distributed (RQD), recovery rock parameter (REC), and uniaxial compressive strength (UCS). The GPR investigation proved to be an efficient nondestructive geophysical method for determining: 1) the …

“The New Normal”: California’S Escalating Wildfire Crisis, Alexandra Vasquez

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the current state of California's wildfire epidemic and how the increasing effects of climate change have worsened the fires, harming residents' health and the state's economy. The wildfires are shaped by factors such as climate change, land-use choices, and policy designs. California wildfires have worsened substantially in the 21st century, with the worst burns in the 2020 season setting a record of 4.2 to 4.5 million acres destroyed. Given current policies and the administration's disinterest in combating climate change, understanding wildfire history and data is essential to improving California's wildfire resilience, creating sustainable land management practices, and …

Green Building Certification And Global Warming: Between Environmental Performance And Greenwashing, Marcel Michalak

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper addresses the role of green building certifications in addressing global warming. The growing trend of pursuing certificates, such as LEED or BREEAM, can be perceived as a great symbol of resilience and desire to improve the quality of our environment. Unfortunately, in the majority of cases, developers or companies use sustainable labels more as a marketing tool than a real commitment to environmental effectiveness. This paper explores whether green building certifications effectively reduce global warming and how they may serve as tools for greenwashing. Chapter One lays the foundation for why green building certifications exist and why they …

Climate Change Mitigation And Resilience In Jamaica: How Nature Based Solutions In Eco Tourism Can Enhance Environmental Sustainability, Rynola O. Fraser

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper explores the impacts of climate change in Jamaica and seeks to identify ways in which the country can mitigate and adapt to it. It addresses this issue of serious climate change effects on the island and how the country can try to put two specific practices into effect. Using quantitative and qualitative, chapter one provides data on the historical damage of climate change by natural disasters throughout the Caribbean’s history and specifically in Jamaica. The paper also explores the discipline of environmental economics in chapter two and of the country within tourism and how eco-tourism can improve our …

Undertaking Short-Term Finance Transactions In Brazil - An Historic And Modern Look At The Brazilian Economy And Associated Risks, Shawn M. D'Aversa

Student Research

The following report discusses the risks and construction of a hypothetical short-term trade finance transaction involving the five parties: Citibank N.A., Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), Banco Do Brasil, Paracatu Gold Mine and EXIM Bank. Fair warning: this is a long paper for a short-term transaction.

For the deal, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) has approached Citibank N.A. in New York regarding a financing transaction for five 797F-400 short-ton haul trucks. The trucks are worth $5mn each, including the costs of training and spare parts, for a total of $25mn. Put simply, the trucks are beasts for mining. They will then be shipped to …

Carrying Home Across Oceans: Embodied Adinkra Memory, Decolonial Resistance, And Diasporic Life Of Sankɔfa And Gye Nyame, Anthoniet Essien Christian

Theses - ALL

In this thesis, I explore how Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, particularly Sankɔfa and Gye Nyame, function as living expressions of memory, spirituality, and belonging within diasporic life. Drawing on autoethnography, story circles conducted at Pentecost International Worship Centre (PIWC) in Syracuse, New York, and embodied experience, the study examines how these symbols move beyond decoration to become active tools for remembering, resisting, and reconnecting with ancestral knowledge. Through everyday practices such as dress, ritual, worship, and digital expression, Sankɔfa and Gye Nyame carry memory across generations and geographies, shaping how diasporic subjects understand home, identity, and faith. The research shows that …

Community Art Therapy: Opportunities Of Accessibility In Spaces And Materials, M Mahoney

Theses - ALL

Community art therapy offers opportunities to address inequities in access to therapeutic services by locating creative practices within shared, non-clinical spaces, and using nontraditional and everyday materials. This qualitative phenomenological study examined how community-based eco-art therapy, using found, foraged, recycled, and low-cost materials in a community studio, shapes participants’ experiences of accessibility, connection, and creativity. Eight adult participants attended two community-based workshops that included open-ended artmaking, a mindfulness-oriented material walk, and individual semi-structured interviews with response art. Data from interviews, field notes, and artworks were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicated that participants conceptualized accessibility as multi-dimensional, encompassing cost, transportation, …

Interdisciplinary Practices In The Band Room: Repertoire As A Tool To Enrich Student Learning, Ainsley L. Brouse

Theses - ALL

Interdisciplinary learning is an educational theory approach that emphasizes the importance of incorporating content from different subject areas into the teaching of one’s own topic of study. Research has presented that the use of interdisciplinary teaching practices can have several benefits on students' learning outcomes and overall academic success. Music has deep and rich historical roots that can provide students a more hands-on experience with the concepts and events they are learning in their history classes. The use of interdisciplinary practices through specific repertoire selections will not only provide students with a deeper, more meaningful experience with the music they …

Brief Candles: Memory, Degradation Of Time, Indices And Activation, Jared A. Dominique

Theses - ALL

This thesis explores the relationship between landscape, memory, and image-making through a multidisciplinary practice spanning photography, painting, and collage. Rooted in early experiences with skateboarding as a framework, the work adopts a subcultural way of seeing that reinterprets urban space as fluid, contingent, and open to reconfiguration. This perspective informs an ongoing investigation of post-industrial and altered environments as sites marked by both physical and historical violence. The project frames these landscapes as “spectral,” holding traces of human activity, memory, and absence. Alongside this external mapping, it examines an internal landscape shaped by visual memory, personal experience, and mediated imagery, …

Feminization, Fetishization, And Gender Hierarchy: How Trans Women Are Represented In Porn For A Cishetero Audience, May Van Linden

Theses - ALL

Trans people, especially trans women, are a highly-targeted minority group and suffer rapidly-increasing discrimination, often predicated on the notion that trans women are dangerous sexual deviants. Further, trans women are often fetishized in their day-to-day lives, regularly manifesting as abuse. At the same time, demand for porn featuring trans women has skyrocketed, but literature about trans women in porn remains extraordinarily lacking in both quantity and quality. My research critically examined how trans women are represented in mainstream internet pornography consumed by a cishetero audience. I performed textual analysis of internet porn featuring trans women through a theoretical lens of …

Sage: Contention-Aware Sensitivity Adjustment For Spin Lock Exiting In Vms, Sam Thomas Stowers

Theses - ALL

To address the severe multi-threaded performance degradation caused by lock contention in oversubscribed cloud environments, this thesis examines and improves on the Pause Loop Exit (PLE) mechanism used by hypervisors to deschedule unproductive virtual CPUs (vCPUs). These oversubscribed environments introduce contention which frequently leads to Lock Holder Preemption (LHP), where a hypervisor preempts a vCPU holding a critical spinlock, causing waiting vCPUs to waste cycles spinning. To mitigate LHP, hardware mechanisms trigger PLE events to inform hypervisors of spinning vCPUs, relying on a PLE_gap parameter to differentiate spinlock instances. The PLE_gap dictates spinlock detection sensitivity—a component of the virtualization stack …

Silence After Freedom, Md Minhajul Abedin

Theses - ALL

The project examines how the 1947 Partition of Bengal and India and its fraught legacies continue to shape communal identities and lived experience in Noakhali, Bangladesh. I have used photography as a tool to construct historical memory and to examine how memory and violence are inscribed in place, while visual practice can revisit histories and engage with contemporary lived experience, which official narratives have ignored. I chose Noakhali as a site to understand the regional realities of the Indian subcontinent in a post-colonial era. Noakhali is a southern district of Bangladesh, where I was born and raised. This area has …

Cruising The Unseen: Queer Semioerotics And The Aesthetics Of Denial, Carl Voss

Theses - ALL

My art practice is rooted in the body—its pleasures, longings, limits, and shared vulnerabilities. I work across painting, printmaking, and drawing, utilizing a strategy coined Queer Semioerotics. My process starts with lived experience in queer communities, particularly within nightlife, the Pup Play community, and other intimate spaces of connection. My work traces how desire, memory, and care take visual form through documentation, material play, and modes of denial. These works explore how joy and intimacy continue despite anti-Queer sentiment, social isolation, and state violence. Through gestures of withholding, redaction, and illegibility, the works create openings for longing and recognition rather …

Drowned, Pleasured And Veiled, Taylor Simone Gearhart

Theses - ALL

Drowned, Pleasured and Veiled explores how societal ideas around romantic passion can mask manipulative and violent behavior. It examines historical and pop cultural representations of romance that give cover to the everyday violence that patriarchy visits on women within intimate relationships. ​This body of work explores themes of shame, control, desire, and the ways physical and emotional violence can be threaded throughout those experiences. Through photography and performance, the artist visualizes and interrogates the ways power pervades intimate relationships.

Who Gets Better Buses? Studentification, Bus Geographies, And Transit Privilege In Postindustrial Upstate New York, Carlos Jose Gonzalez

Theses - ALL

Decades of deindustrialization have forced several American cities to seek other sources of economic life for their shrinking populations and increasingly impoverished populations. One sector that has shown much potential for revitalization has been the “meds and eds” of hospitals and universities. The growth of higher education is fueled by a rise in enrollment that has transformed the demographic, economic, and social atmospheres of university neighborhoods. Yet an important transformation missed by these “studentification” scholars are the accompanying reconfigurations of public transit. Given that students, and young people generally, are less likely to own their own car, universities have to …

Sexual Identity And Sleep Health In Adolescents: The Role Of Parenting Practices, Alexa Grace Deyo

Theses - ALL

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened vulnerability to insufficient sleep, which contributes to adverse emotional, cognitive, and physical health outcomes. Evidence indicates that adolescents who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) are at an increased risk for poor sleep relative to their heterosexual peers. However, little is known about which dimensions of sleep health differ by sexual identity or modifiable factors that may underlie these differences. This study examined whether adolescent sleep duration, sleep efficiency, and daytime sleepiness differed by sexual identity, and investigated whether parental acceptance and parental monitoring helped explain these differences. Participants were 5,919 …

Blue-Collar Belonging: How An Analysis Of Identity, Epistemics, And Stance Reveal Fluid Community Membership In Rural Upstate New York, Kennedy Reed Jones

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how community membership is constructed in everyday conversations amongst rural blue-collar people in Upstate New York. Through a sociolinguistic approach, the data from this project was collected by recording naturally occurring conversations of rural blue-collar community over a year. These conversations were then transcribed and coded, seeking out pockets of blue-collar topics in the conversations. When doing this, blue-collar/blue-collar experiences were understood as manual work, typically not done in an office, and that does not often require a degree. Therefore, by drawing on sociolinguistic scholarship on identity, epistemics, and stance, this project argues that membership in this …

Assessing The Impact Of Land Use Land Cover Change On Habitat Quality In Onondaga County, New York: A Thirty-Year Spatial Analysis., Favour Nkwando Sedwaa

Theses - ALL

The Earth's terrestrial surface is experiencing rapid and unprecedented transformation driven by human land use activities. An estimated 75% of the global land area has been altered, and land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) is widely recognized as the largest contributor to biodiversity loss worldwide. Habitats, the ecological spaces that sustain biodiversity, are particularly vulnerable to the compounding pressures of habitat loss and fragmentation associated with urbanization and agricultural intensification. This study investigates the impacts of LULCC on landscape fragmentation and habitat quality in Onondaga County, New York, over a 30-year period from 1994 to 2024. Using Annual National Land Cover …

Beyond The Policy - Designing A Healing Campus For Xinhua's Children, Katharine Massey

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

To some people children are seen as a blessing, but for China, they were considered detrimental to the economy status of the country. For 35 years China implemented a policy that limited families to one child so they could curb their rapid population growth and keep their image of being an economic leader of the world. This thesis will look at the lasting impact the one-child policy had on the population of China and the results that have emerged since the law has ended, along with the 2024 stop on foreign adoption programs and who was most impacted by it. …

Women In Literature And Their Ephemeral Bodies, Madeline Zafon-Whalen

English Honors Theses

This thesis is a comparative analysis of women writers from the twentieth to twenty-first century. Works by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, and Otessa Moshfegh, contain an emerging pattern and relationship linked through an ephemeral bodied aesthetic which depicts women's bodies as deconstructed, intangible, and undefined.

The first chapter analyzes works by Woolf, including To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own. Starting in the modernist age we see the body coming into question, becoming denaturalized while the institution of the "novel" is renewed through women's contributions to the literary canon. Women’s productivity, and the potential to …

The Impact Of Stress On Selective Attention Among College Student Athletes, Jayla K. Mcgaffin

Honors Theses

Student athletes face unique stressors from balancing academic and athletic demands (Lopes Dos Santos et al., 2020), which may deplete cognitive resources and impair focus. The present study examined the relationship between perceived stress and selective attention among college student athletes. Stress was conceptualized as the interaction between external pressures and individual coping responses (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Twenty undergraduate student athletes from the University of New Haven completed the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14) and a computerized Flanker task measuring selective attention, but only eighteen were used in the final correlation analysis. It was hypothesized that higher levels of perceived …

Addressing Childhood Obesity In Low-Income Communities In Massachusetts, Alexa Thomas

Capstones

No abstract provided.

Affective Labor And Deservingness In Global Care Economies: A Comparative Film Analysis In Brazilian And U.S. Cinema, Débora Ferreira Leite

Theses - ALL

This thesis examines how contemporary cinema constructs narratives of migration, care labor, and social mobility through representations of Latina caregivers. Focusing on two films, Knives Out (2019), directed by Rian Johnson, and Diários de Intercâmbio (The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student, 2021), directed by Bruno Garotti, the project explores how cinematic narratives shape cultural understandings of care work, migration, and the American Dream. Although these films emerge from different national industries and genres, both center Latina women navigating transnational labor arrangements and aspirations for social mobility in the United States. Drawing on scholarship on the global care economy, transnational …

Talking To The Eyes: Paradoxes Of Ineffability And Effusivity In Mark-Making, Theodore Xavier Berg

Theses - ALL

Redefining mark-making as an active form of material signification has helped me understand my experience of the paradox of ineffability. This experience is as accurately described by the term effusivity as it is by ineffability, because it is not a matter of what cannot be expressed, but rather of what cannot not be expressed; of the experience that inescapably accompanies expression and signification. As our material means of expression and signification evolve digitally, the consequences of their contradictions become more discernible.

The Trouble With Being Human, Sam Bray

Theses - ALL

Grief, Trauma and the Invisible Spaces We Cannot Leave

Effects Of Combined Action Observation, Motor Imagery, And Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation On Muscle Strength And Size During Short-Term Upper Limb Immobilization, Zahra Pourhatami

Theses - ALL

Short-term limb immobilization induces rapid declines in muscle strength that exceed reductions in muscle size, suggesting a dominant role of neural mechanisms in early functional decline. Interventions capable of simultaneously targeting central neural and peripheral muscular pathways may therefore offer superior protection during disuse, yet such combined approaches remain unexamined in upper limb immobilization models. To investigate the effects of combined action observation with motor imagery (AOMI) and neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) (AOSTIM) on muscle strength, size, and quality during 7 days of upper limb immobilization, we conducted a study in healthy young adults. Forty-three healthy young adults were randomly …

Polymer Concentration Driven Tuning Of Drug Release In Nano-In-Microparticle Systems For Immunomodulation, Jason Bae

Theses - ALL

Osteoarthritis (OA), a disease caused by the wearing and tearing of articular cartilage, affects over 32.5 million Americans. Synovial inflammation is now recognized as a major contributor to OA progression and pain. Activated synovial macrophages in an OA joint are believed to play a major role in low-grade inflammation found in OA. Bisphosphonates such as zoledronic acid (ZA) are known to induce apoptosis specifically in macrophages and several of them are being evaluated as a disease-modifying osteoarthritis drug in clinical trials. Zolendroic Acid (Zol) is a biphosphonate that is most commonly used for treatments in bone-related diseases. Previous research reported …

Going Live: How Twitch Appearances Shape Voter Perceptions Of Political Candidates, Leah H. Ross

Theses - ALL

This paper examines the persuasive power of political candidates appearing on livestreaming platforms as a campaign strategy for targeting younger, politically disengaged voters. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of platform affordances, parasocial interaction, celebrity endorsement, and source credibility, it argues that the unique digital architecture of livestreaming sites creates media conditions distinct from traditional broadcast media and other social media. These conditions amplify parasocial experiences, telepresence, and flow, making audiences potentially more receptive to political messaging. The paper then situates livestream appearances within the broader tradition of celebrity endorsements and the growing influence of social media in campaign communication. It …

Kitchen As An Archive: Konkani Food, Memory, And Identity In India, Sanjana Sharma

Theses - ALL

The Konkani community has often struggled to find an effective way to preserve its culture. Colonial conflict, regional division, and diasporic migration have stood in the way of creating a unified identity. My thesis argues that Konkani cooking traditions comprising heirloom ingredients, conventional cooking tools, ceremonial food practices, and adaptable diaspora recipes constitute a vibrant and evolving repository. This makes the kitchen an essential yet overlooked space for cultural memory. Concentrating specifically on the Konkani communities in Karnataka, I explore how ingredients such as Kokum underscore an understanding of plant ecologies; how seafood sheds light on coastal traditions; how gendered …

Assessing Knowledge And Decision-Making In Basic Genomics Among Adolescents And Adults, Sidharth Masarur

Honors Scholar Theses

Background

Genetic testing and genomic sequencing are increasingly part of pediatric care, yet many adolescents and parents lack the knowledge needed to make informed decisions. Prior studies show gaps in understanding, even among highly educated families, raising concerns about the adequacy of consent and assent. Little is known about when youth begin to comprehend genomic sequencing and how this impacts their own genetic and genomic decision-making.

Objective

To assess baseline genomic knowledge among adolescents and parents, examine its influence on decisions about genetic testing and sequencing, and identify opinions on appropriate age thresholds for youth participation in testing decisions.

Methods …