Digital Commons Network^™

Reforming Academic Publishing To Support The Sustainable Development Goals: A Call For Leadership, Seán Lacey

Publications

Paywalls and high article processing charges in academic publishing restrict access to scientific knowledge, limiting who can produce, use, and benefit from research. These barriers disproportionately affect researchers and institutions in low- and middle-income countries, reinforcing global inequalities in research capacity and evidence-informed policymaking. Addressing these challenges requires determined system leadership to reform funding models, expand equitable open access pathways, and ensure publicly funded research is freely available. Without coordinated action, the promise of inclusive, globally shared scientific progress central to the Sustainable Development Goals will remain unrealised.

Montana Kaimin, April 23, 2026, Students Of The University Of Montana, Missoula

Montana Kaimin, 1898-present

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.

Nh Senate Race: Sununu Increases Gop Primary Lead, Pappas Leads General Election Matchups 4/23/2026, Unh Survey Center

All UNH Survey Center Polls

Former Senator John E. Sununu has increased his lead over former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. A majority of likely Democratic primary voters support Congressman Chris Pappas. Pappas leads both Sununu and Brown in general election matchups. In the race for Governor, incumbent Kelly Ayotte leads prospective Democratic challenger Cinde Warmington. Granite Staters strongly oppose a proposal to levy an income and statewide property tax but less than half support a constitutional amendment to prohibit ever enacting a state income tax. Housing, taxes, the cost of living, and education are mentioned …

Markey Maintains Lead Over Moulton In Democratic Senate Primary In Massachusetts 4/23/2026, Unh Survey Center

All UNH Survey Center Polls

Incumbent Ed Markey continues to lead Representative Seth Moulton in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Both candidates are popular among Democratic voters and both are favored over prospective Republican challenger John Deaton in the general election. Governor Maura Healey leads prospective Republican challengers in November. Massachusetts voters favor proposed ballot questions to enact same-day voter registration, decrease state income taxes, and institute rent control, while most oppose repealing laws that legalized the use of marijuana. Most support a proposed bill regulating the use of social media by children and half say the cost of living or housing …

Lamont Maintains Lead In Dem Primary For Governor; Connecticut Residents Favor Proposed Election Law Changes 4/23/2026, Unh Survey Center

All UNH Survey Center Polls

Just over half of likely voters in the race for the Democratic nomination for governor of Connecticut support incumbent Ned Lamont but challenger Josh Elliott is becoming more well-known among likely primary voters. Connecticut residents are split over Lamont's job performance and give him low marks on his handling of taxes, housing, and the cost of living. Majorities of state residents support proposed laws banning firearms at polling sites and prohibiting federal agents from arresting people or checking voter eligibility at polling sites. The cost of living, taxes, or housing are mentioned by just more than half of state residents …

How Ai-Enabled Hiring Affects Organizational Health? Challenges And Future Direction, Shiza Hirani

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

In today’s competitive landscape of hiring, organizations are responsible to not only maintain ethical integrity, ensure fairness, and protect job applicants' privacy, but also uphold a more data-driven and streamlined approach to save time per hire. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the workplace presents opportunities such as enhanced productivity, efficiency, and creation of new roles. However, the widespread implementation of AI also raises ethical and privacy challenges that can deteriorate organizational health. AI-driven systems can inadvertently introduce biases and black box properties in hiring decisions which can erode trust and transparency, compromise employee privacy, and increase psychological stress …

Psychological Safety In The Classroom: Effects On Nursing Student Well-Being And Academic Success, Erica Frost, Kelli D. Whittington, Glory Omole, Chloe Birchett

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

In nursing education, fostering psychologically safe learning environments may support student well-being and academic achievement. Edmondson's Psychological Safety Framework (1999) provides the theoretical foundation for this study, framing classroom psychological safety as an environmental factor that influences student well-being and academic outcomes through its impact on learner engagement and interpersonal risk-taking. There is limited research exploring the relationship between classroom psychological safety and nursing student well-being, particularly in undergraduate face-to-face classroom settings.
The purpose of this study is to examine nursing students' experiences, perceptions, and academic outcomes to better understand how instructor behavior and the classroom teaching environment influence student …

Advancing Appropriate Staffing: One Element Of A Healthy Work Environment, Kiersten Henry

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

The session provides an update on the outcomes of recommendations made by The National Nurse Staffing Task Force. These include AACN’s Standards for Appropriate Staffing and the incorporation of appropriate staffing as a National Performance Goal by The Joint Commission. The inextricable link of appropriate staffing to the Healthy Work Environment standards will be discussed. Resources and exemplars for appropriate staffing are included, and audience questions and participation encouraged.

Empirical Modeling Of Magnetic Braking In Millisecond Pulsars, Sophie Dore Vanderwaal

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Global Health Partnerships: A Global South Perspective, Patricia J. Garcia

Grand Rounds

At the conclusion of this activity, learners will be able to:

1. Maintain and advance knowledge and skills related to pediatric conditions seen in our region.
2. Increase collaboration across professions of the healthcare team.

Reed Comfortably Leads In U.S. Senate Election, Foulkes Expands Lead In Ri Gubernatorial Primary 4/23/2026, Unh Survey Center

All UNH Survey Center Polls

Incumbent Senator Jack Reed is the clear favorite in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and leads prospective Republican challenger Raymond McKay in a general election matchup. Helena Foulkes has increased her lead over incumbent Governor Dan McKee in the race for the Democratic nomination for Rhode Island governor. Three-quarters of Rhode Islanders disapprove of McKee's job performance, with particularly low marks given to his handling of roads and bridges, the cost of living, and the economy. Rhode Islanders have a generally poor understanding of two possible ballot measures which would create new constitutional rights in the state. Housing, jobs …

Usa V. Julio Otero

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvania

Jane Doe V. Pine Richland School District

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Inc V. Eighth Judicial Dist. Ct., 142 Nev. Adv. Op. 31 (April 23, 2026), Randolph Anderson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Prior restraints or gag orders may be imposed only if they are narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means available to prevent a clear and present danger.

Factors That Affect African American Representation In Cybersecurity Academic Programs In The United States, Damon Walker

Dissertations

The U.S. cybersecurity workforce continues to experience a critical talent shortage alongside persistent inequities in racial representation, particularly at the faculty level within higher education. This mixed-methods dissertation examines African American representation among faculty in cybersecurity academic programs designated by the National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity (NCAE-C) and investigates the factors that influence recruitment, retention, and advancement. Grounded in a transformative research framework, the study integrates quantitative analysis of national institutional data with qualitative interviews to illuminate structural patterns and lived experiences shaping representation.

Quantitative findings revealed pronounced underrepresentation: African American faculty comprise 2.57% (130 of 5,051) of …

Kenyon Collegian - April 23, 2026

The Kenyon Collegian

No abstract provided.

Optimizing Quality Of Service In Cloud Computing: A Performance-Aware Task Classifier For Heterogeneous Big Data Workloads, Pawan Bhaker, Sophiya Sheikh, Rintu Nath, Ajay Nain

Baghdad Science Journal

The Big data originates from various heterogeneous sources worldwide. Due to the diverse origins of data generation, big data involves a variety of tasks. Some require storage resources, while others need computational resources. Additionally, cloud computing provides centralized storage and computational resources for executing these tasks. However, resource optimization and efficient task scheduling remain challenging. Moreover, accurately categorizing tasks and effectively allocating resources based on their nature pose challenges for cloud computing, especially when assigning tasks to heterogeneous resources to minimize task completion time. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Performance-Aware Task Classifier (PATC) algorithm that classifies tasks …

An Informative Analysis Of Applying Feature Reduction Methods To Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms, Mustafa S. Abd

Baghdad Science Journal

Feature reduction techniques are fundamental to enhancing machine learning (ML) algorithms by reducing the number of features in a dataset. The study here explores the impact of Principle Component Analysis (PCA) on ML algorithms within an unbalanced classification framework, in partnership with feature selection techniques like Cluster Variation Attribute Evaluator (CVAE) and Correlation Attribute Evaluator (CAE). In addition, the research introspects a comparison analysis evaluating the effectiveness of several ML methods, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Tree J48, k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO). The informative analysis of results signifies that the MLP technique with PCA minimized the …

Family-Based Gwas Of Cognitive Endophenotypes Reveals Genetic Architecture Of Memory And Executive Function In Alzheimer’S Disease, Kesheng Wang, Xueying Yang, Gayenell Magwood, Chun Xu, R. Osvaldo Navia, Jean Neils-Strunjas, Xiaoming Li

Health & Biomedical Sciences Faculty Publications

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common cause of dementia, is characterized by progressive memory and cognitive decline. Conventional genome-wide association studies (GWAS) comparing AD cases and controls may miss genetic influences that act along a continuum of cognitive function. Using data from 3007 participants in the National Institute on Aging Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Family Study (NIA-LOAD GWAS), we conducted a family-based GWAS of eight quantitative cognitive phenotypes encompassing episodic memory (Logical Memory IA and IIA), working memory (Digit Span Forward, Backward, and Ordering), and semantic fluency (Animal, Fruit and Vegetable, and Vegetable Fluency). Family-based association testing in PLINK v1.9 identified …

Weight Concerns And Body Image Dissatisfaction Elicit Maternal Psychological Control Through Escalating Appearance Anxiety Behaviors, Madeleine Guillont

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

The current study examines bidirectional associations between adolescent body-related concerns and maternal psychological control, and the behavioral mechanism through which these associations operate. Participants were 723 sixth- through ninth-grade students (350 girls, 373 boys; ages 11–15) attending all public middle and secondary schools in a mid-sized Lithuanian community. Self-report surveys were collected at three time points across the course of a school year. Results from full longitudinal mediation models indicated that higher body image dissatisfaction and weight concerns at the beginning of the school year predicted increases in maternal psychological control at the end of the school year, through increases …

Llm For Clinical Named Entity Recognition: A Study On Rag With Pubmed And Umls, Apoorv Tripathi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2020 - Present

The first step of biomedical NLP is recognizing clinical named entities, which consist of identifying and categorizing a variety of clinical entities such as diseases, symptoms, genetics, diagnostic tests, procedures, etc. from a body of unstructured clinical text. This study presents a PubMed and UMLS based Retrieval Augmented Generation framework which improves the performance of the Large Language Models to identify clinical entities by providing context. In particular, the framework consists of a two-stage pipeline, where candidate tokens are identified from initial LLM-based classification and refined with retrieved context from either PubMed or UMLS. The proposed framework is assessed across …

Differentiable Objectives For 3d Scene Relighting Via Gradient Descent On Olat Basis Coefficients, Anson Savage

Theses and Dissertations

Designing effective lighting is an iterative and often time-consuming process. This work contributes to automatic lighting design research by presenting a render-engine agnostic optimization routine: gradient descent on RGB multipliers of one-light-at-a-time (OLAT) basis images. We compare several objective functions to accomplish lighting tasks and show that our method is capable of quickly and effectively exploring different lighting styles using either text prompts or reference images. We also present several datasets specific to lighting tasks and show that fine-tuning on these datasets can improve performance.

Latent Class Patterns Of Medication Attitudes And Their Correlates Among Older Adults In The United States, Jiaming Liang, Min Ji Kwak, Mona Shirvani, Alexander Testa, Rafael Samper-Ternent, Zhigang Xie, Jack Tsai

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

No abstract provided.

April 23, 2026, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

Understanding Alleyways Of The Early Bronze Age Southern Levant: A View From Tell Eṣ-ṢÂfi/Gath, Israel, Haskel J. Greenfield, Jeremy A. Beller, Sarah J. Richardson, Shira Albaz, Tina L. Greenfield, Aren M. Maeir

'Atiqot

Public passageways enable people, animals and goods to navigate a built environment, allowing access to residences, shops and public buildings, and also demarcate the spheres of society: economic versus social, sacred versus profane and public versus private. Passageways also mark the arrangement of neighborhoods and typically reflect a purposeful organization for settlements. This paper explores the nature of passageways at early urban settlements in the Southern Levant, and particularly their placement and maintenance in Early Bronze Age domestic neighborhoods. To this end, it summarizes the architecture, stratigraphy and artifactual remains associated with an alleyway in the recently excavated domestic neighborhood …

April 23, 2026, James Madison University

The Breeze, 2020-

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Predicting Telecom Customer Churn: A Statistically Validated Kpi Framework With Machine Learning And Revenue Impact Modeling, Moeez Islam Malik '27, Amy Ehinomen Eremionkhale

Student Research

This capstone project addresses a core business problem in the telecommunications industry: how to detect, measure, and prevent customer churn before it occurs, using a KPI framework validated by statistical analysis and machine learning. Applied to 7,043 customer records across 37 variables from a California-based telecom operator, the analysis integrates descriptive KPI computation, Pearson correlation analysis, chi-square tests of independence, and logistic regression churn prediction. The research confirms that customer tenure (r = −0.352, p < 0.001) and contract type (Cramér's V = 0.410, p < 0.001) are the dominant predictors of churn, and that a logistic regression model achieves AUC-ROC = 0.8307 — sufficient for proactive deployment. A 5-percentage-point churn reduction preserves $273,670 in annual revenue and $1.55M in customer lifetime value. The project delivers an integrated analytical framework, a predictive retention model, a 16-chart visualization suite, and a 12-page Power BI executive dashboard.

Creating Sustainable School And Home Gardens: Gardening With Native Plants, Kathy Cabe Trundle, Lawrence Krissek

All Current Publications

Native plants form the foundation for healthy local and regional ecosystems. By adding native plants to your gardening and landscape plans, you will contribute to nature’s best hope for the soil health, habitat resilience, and biodiversity we need for a brighter, more sustainable future.

What Happens After Oil And Gas Decommissioning? A Global Systematic Review Of Marine Environmental Effects, Anaelle Lemasson Lemasson, Antony M. Knights

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

The thousands of oil and gas (OG) platforms placed at sea for fossil fuel extraction have introduced new hard substrate to the marine environment. Over time, these structures can become colonized by a diversity of marine life, fostering novel ecosystems. However, an increasing number of OG platforms are reaching decommissioning age and decisions regarding their fate must be made. Some view these artificial structures as litter that ought to be removed; others view them as valuable contributors to marine biodiversity worth preserving. Evidence of the environmental effects of these structures following different decommissioning strategies is needed to identify the potential …

Optimization Of Pediatric Multidetector Ct Imaging Parameters Using A Machine Learning–Based Monte Carlo Simulation Model, Ali O. Masoud, Adithya Rajnaryanan, Khamis O. Amour, Ahmed M. Jusabani, Justin E Ngaile, Manoj Kumar, Mwingereza John Kumwenda Dr

Tanzania Journal of Science

This study utilized Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to optimize radiation doses in pediatric multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) head scans by analyzing key parameters like tube current (mA), tube voltage (kV), pitch, and slice thickness. The findings indicate that reducing tube current significantly lowers the Computed Tomography Dose Index (CTDIvol) and Dose Length Product (DLP), effectively minimizing patient radiation exposure. Higher pitch values (0.7–0.9) further reduced radiation by decreasing beam overlap, while using a thinner slice thickness (0.6 mm) improved dose efficiency. A comparison highlighted the effectiveness of optimization: simulated parameters kVp 100, mAs 81, pitch 0.98 yielded a CTDIvol of …