Digital Commons Network^™

Life Cycle Costing Of Modular Timber Residential Construction, Logan Micah Hammel

Construction Management

This study examines the economic feasibility of modular residential construction using life-cycle costing (LCC) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) approaches to assess the sustainability and maintenance costs of modular construction. Using the structures and documents from the Gateway Decathlon project as the subject, we applied LCC formulas and programs to assess their economic performance. These calculations were conducted manually in Excel and modeled using the OpenLCA platform to compare traditional and software-based approaches. The study aims to identify cost drivers across building scopes, such as building materials and electrical and mechanical systems, and to evaluate how modular construction performs over its …

Sb 21-25/26: Resolution Amending Asum Bylaws, Chase O'Brien

Senate Resolutions, 2007-Present

SB21-25/26: Resolution Amending ASUM Bylaws. This resolution passed by a roll-call vote [16-0-0] during the April 1, 2026 meeting of the Associated Students of the University of Montana (ASUM).

Inexcuseable? Building An Artificial Intelligence Microexpert On Contract Excuse Doctrine, Mark Edwin Burge

Faculty Scholarship

This article details and advocates for a general methodology for creating a "microexpert" grounded in a user-defined set of legal sources and widelyaccessible tools for integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into legal analysis. The study focuses particularly on background contract excuse doctrines of impossibility, impracticability, and frustration of purpose, which are collectively a methodologically challenging area of law to rationalize due to factintensive variables that undermine their predictability. Particular challenges include assessing the foreseeability of the event that led to the contract's nonperformance, the extent of the hardship or burden on the party seeking excuse, and the purpose of the …

Dirges Of Hope, Manasseh Azure Awuni

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Among the varied themes that African fiction explores, politics and governance remain the most dominant across generations. Writing under oppressive and exploitative colonial administrations, the first generation of African storytellers used fiction to highlight the injustice of colonial rule. With fidelity to the African proverb that says the tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter until the lion learns to tell its own stories, African writers also used fiction to push back against one-sided, toxic narratives about the continent. After independence, when rulers of the new republics continued the colonial legacies of oppression, inflicting untold hardships on their citizens, …

Rhetorical Violence: The Rhetorics Of Women's Counter Political Violence, Kylie Rowland

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Protest is omnipresent, and yet not much is known about the efficacy and impacts of its different rhetorical strategies—particularly so for marginalized populations, whose available means of protest are already limited by both material realities and assumptions that govern who and what can make waves. This bind is further exacerbated by gendered and racialized civility politics that determine which bodies can be disruptive and which already are considered “violent.” To address this gap, I turn toward the under-researched rhetorical potentials of marginalized people’s—specifically women and queer folks’—use of symbolic protest “violence,” which works to strategically make evident the larger ongoing …

Detection And Quantification Of Allergen Cross-Contact In Shared Frying Oil Using Targeted Mass Spectrometry, Francisca Asigri

Department of Food Science and Technology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Cow’s milk and egg allergies are prevalent IgE-mediated food allergies that pose significant public health concerns worldwide. Although strict avoidance remains the primary management strategy, unintended exposure can still occur through allergen cross-contact, particularly in commercial and industrial food operations that utilize shared frying oils. The objective of this study was to identify and quantify allergen transfer in shared frying oil and assess the robustness of existing targeted mass spectrometry methods (LC-MS/MS) for detecting milk and egg proteins in heated oil matrices.

Heated oil spikes were developed by incorporating non-fat dry milk (NFDM) and whole egg powder (WEP) into oil …

Late-Onset Legg-Calvé-Perthes Disease Treated With Varus Derotation Femoral Osteotomy: A Case Report, Mark Gamadia, Sami Habboub, Bianca Gamadia, Himanshu Panchal

Student Publications

Introduction: Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease (LCPD) is categorized as idiopathic avascular necrosis of the femoral head, most common in children between the ages of 5 and 7. Prognosis is strongly influenced by age and lateral pillar classification, with children older than 8 years and those with Herring Group C disease typically experiencing poor outcomes. Delayed diagnosis represents a significant barrier to care, often limiting treatment options and worsening prognosis. This case highlights such a scenario while demonstrating that favorable functional and radiographic results remain achievable through meticulous surgical containment in late-presenting, severe disease.

Case report: An 11-year-old boy with no history of …

The Ten Commandments, Stripped Of Slavery, Exodus & Jubilee, Christopher D. Hampson

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

The Ten Commandments are back on public classroom walls and in federal court, after several states passed new laws requiring school districts to post the text. As attorneys, judges, and amici debate whether First Amendment law has changed enough since Stone v. Graham in 1980 to allow the posting of the ancient religious text, this Essay comes at the situation from an entirely different angle. The precise text proposed by the states might be a good example of “ceremonial deism,” but it removes biblical law from biblical narrative – and, in doing so, unsets the Ten Commandments from their original …

Scraping Bad: The Case For A Unified Scraping Framework, Eunchong Moses Park

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

This Note explores the growing legal and regulatory landscapes of web scraping in the United States and argues that web scraping should be regulated through a unified federal framework tailored to its unique technological and economic realities. Web scraping allows organizations to collect massive amounts of data essential to their operational needs—often without the consent of data holders. Thus, web scraping has become a powerful engine of innovation used across virtually every sector of the economy but with a serious risk to privacy and property interests. Yet the current U.S. legal framework lacks a coherent regulating structure. Courts and litigants …

Sustainability In Concrete: Decision-Makers, Dismissal Points, And A Framework For Implementation, Max Dennison

Construction Management

Concrete is essential to modern infrastructure, but is also one of the largest sources of embodied carbon, with cement production alone responsible for a significant share of global CO₂ emissions. Although low-carbon and otherwise “sustainable” concrete technologies are growing, their use in everyday projects remains limited. This research investigates why sustainable concrete options are most often dismissed during the project lifecycle, who drives these decisions, and what conditions are needed to enable broader adoption. Using a combination of literature review and semi-structured interviews with professionals in contracting, life-cycle assessment, sustainability consulting, and materials production, the study maps decision points from …

Curating Black Knowledge In Academic Libraries: A Qualitative Study, Monique Christian-Long

Education Policy and Leadership Theses and Dissertations

Academic librarians play a critical role in shaping access to scholarly information. However, the intellectual contributions of African American scholars have often been marginalized in academia through structural inequities, archival gaps, and historical patterns of exclusion. This qualitative study explores how academic librarians understand and use their roles to advance access to African American scholarly contributions. This study is guided by Black Critical Race Theory (Dumas & Ross, 2016) and Ray’s (2019) Theory of Racialized Organizations, and examines how institutional structures, professional norms, and resource allocation influence librarians’ efforts to curate, preserve, and promote Black knowledge. The data was collected …

Birthdate Phaseout To A Nicotine Free Generation, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the Nicotine Free Generation ("NFG") policy, an emerging endgame strategy for tobacco products that employs a completely novel legal design. Tobacco remains the leading cause of preventable death, killing almost half of its users and imposing $600 billion in social costs each year. We see two basic choices for regulating sales: prohibition or a legal age-gate, such as twenty-one, for retail sales. NFG charts a third way. Recognizing the dire harm of tobacco and the serious consequences of abrupt prohibition, NFG lays the groundwork for a gradual transition to a sales sunset. In place of the twenty-one …

The Human Right To A Healthy Environment: Corporate Responsibility In Critical Mineral Extraction, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

This paper argues that the emerging human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment should guide the governance of critical minerals by incorporating the corporate responsibility to respect human rights throughout supply chains to ensure a racially just energy transition. It frames the climate crisis within the history and political economy of racial capitalism, contending that without rights-based guardrails, mineral supply chains risk reproducing the extractive harms and racialized disparities of the fossil fuel era, including labor abuses, displacement, water depletion, and violence disproportionately borne by racialized and Indigenous communities. Methodologically, the paper combines doctrinal analysis of international norms …

The Territorial Continuum: American Samoa, Criminal Adjudication, And Territorial Administration, Emmanuel Hiram Arnaud

Faculty Scholarship

The standard account of American territorial expansion posits that territorial acquisition moved along a spectrum of sovereignty. The federal government acquired new inhabited land through conquest or purchase, and the Constitution tasked Congress with organizing and administering the new territories until they were ready to become states. That pattern came to an abrupt halt in 1898 when, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the Supreme Court, fearing the extension of citizenship to, and the permanent integration of, non-White populations into the American polity, suddenly pronounced that the Constitution authorized the holding of colonies. The Court thus sentenced new territories, …

Comprehensive Profiling Of The Human Tear Fluid Mirnome Using Small Rna Sequencing, Garrett Jones, Drew Mayernik, Saleh Ahmed, Eliza Williams, Jeremy Altman, Tae Jin Lee, Amy Estes, Cintia S De Paiva, Pamela Martin, Shruti Sharma, Ashok Sharma

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Purpose: To generate a comprehensive profile of microRNAs (miRNAs) present in human tear fluid using next-generation sequencing (NGS), establish a reference miRNome for healthy human tear fluid, and investigate whether miRNA expression varies by sex, race, or age.

Methods: Tear samples were collected from 32 adults using Schirmer strips. RNA was isolated using the miRNeasy Serum/Plasma Kit, and cDNA libraries were prepared using the QIAseq miRNA Library Kit. Barcoded libraries were sequenced on the NovaSeq 6000 platform. Bioinformatic analyses included adapter trimming, alignment to miRBase, normalization with DESeq2, and functional annotation using multiMiR and clusterProfiler. Differential expression analysis was performed …

Wharton's Duct Injury As A Complication Of Oral Surgery And Its Management: A Clinical Case Report, María Paulina Araneda, Zabiel A. Faundez, Martin A. Sanchez, Pablo Romero, Ramon A. Rivera

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

Introduction: Oral surgery may be associated with intraoperative complications, such as nerve injury, hemorrhage, and other procedure-related adverse events. Wharton's duct laceration is an uncommon but significant complication involving the floor of the mouth. Owing to the region's anatomical complexity, unrecognized injuries may affect gland function and patient well-being.

Case Report: A 69-year-old female patient presented with left submandibular swelling associated with a prior Wharton's duct injury. Initial management included local interventions and marsupialization; however, clinical symptoms recurred, which required submandibulectomy. The postoperative course was favorable.

Discussion: Early diagnosis is key to managing submandibular duct injuries. Up to 32% of …

Caries Risk Assessment As The Strongest Predictor Of Oral Health–Related Quality Of Life: A Cross-Sectional Multivariate Study Of Adolescent Students, Fadil Abdillah Arifin, Mila Febriany, Husnah Husein, Eva Novawaty

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

Objective: This study aimed to determine the factors associated with oral health–related quality of life (OHRQoL) among adolescent students, with a particular focus on identifying the strongest predictor using a multivariate analytical approach.

Material and Methods: A cross-sectional study with 249 adolescent students in Sekolah Menengah Pertama Negeri 54 Makassar, Indonesia, was conducted. Clinical examinations were performed to assess dental caries experience using the Decayed, Missing, and Filled Teeth index (DMF-T), oral hygiene status using the Oral Hygiene Index–Simplified (OHI-S), Body Mass Index (BMI), sex, and caries risk level using the Caries Risk Assessment (CRA) tool, categorized into low, medium, …

Immediate Antibacterial Effect Of Sargassum Binderi-Based Mouthwash: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Andre K. Ruslim, Nisrina E. Nasrun, Muhammad I. Rasul, Nurlindah Hamrun, Lenni Indriani, Muhammad H. Chandha, Vera Julia, Muhammad Ruslin

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

Objective: The current randomized controlled trial evaluated the immediate effect of a Sargassum binderi-based mouthwash on the reduction of cultivable oral bacteria compared with control.

Methods: In the current randomized controlled trial, 30 individuals were screened for eligibility, of whom 14 met the inclusion criteria and were randomly assigned to receive either a Sargassum binderi-based mouthwash or chlorhexidine 0.2%. Immediate post-rinse sampling was performed; however, residual antimicrobial carryover could not be entirely excluded. The total cultivable oral bacterial load was quantified at baseline and following intervention using standard culture-based techniques. Baseline bacterial composition was characterized using the analytical profile …

Comparative Evaluation Of Mechanical And Chemo-Mechanical Methods Of Caries Excavation In Permanent Teeth: A Randomized Clinical Trial, Rahul Rao, Neha Pol, Ashish Jain, Pooja Shah, Amit Patil, Sanpreet S. Sachdev

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

Objective: To compare excavation efficacy and pain perception among air-rotor (carbide bur), polymer bur, and chemo-mechanical excavation (Carie-Care™)  in adult permanent posterior teeth as a confirmatory, population-specific evaluation.

Materials and Methods: A single-center, single-blind, randomized split-mouth clinical trial was conducted in 29 adults with three permanent posterior teeth each (total = 87 teeth) presenting with occlusal caries and an ICDAS score of 4 or 5. The trial was registered with the Clinical Trials Registry of India (CTRI Ref No.: REF/2025/07/109637). Each participant received all three interventions in the same session under standardized conditions. Excavation efficacy was assessed using a caries …

Effects Of Ethanol On Opg Expression, Osteoclasts, And Osteoblasts During Orthodontic Tooth Movement In Wistar Rats: An Experimental Study, Nadia Setiawati Widjaja, Ardiansyah S. Pawinru, Nasyrah Hidayati, Eddy Heriyanto Habar, Eka Erwansyah, Baharuddin M. Ranggang, Ita Purnama Alwi

Journal of Dentomaxillofacial Science

Objective: This research sought to assess how ethanol influences the expression of osteoprotegerin (OPG) and the number of osteoclasts and osteoblasts during alveolar bone remodeling associated with orthodontic tooth movement.

Materials and Methods: A laboratory-based experimental study was conducted using 30 male Wistar rats. Palatal movement of the maxillary incisors was induced using a nickel–titanium (NiTi) closed coil spring applied to the maxillary arch. Rats were randomly divided into two groups: a control group (CG) receiving orthodontic force only, and an experimental group (EG) receiving both orthodontic force and ethanol administration. Observations were conducted on days 0, 3, and 14. …

Stacked From One: Multi-Scale Self-Injection For Context Window Extension, Wei Han, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a primary bottleneck for their broader application across diverse domains. Although continual pre-training on long-context data offers a straightforward solution, it incurs prohibitive data acquisition and computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose SHAREDLLM, a novel framework based on multi-grained context compression and query-aware information acquisition. SHAREDLLM comprises two stacked short-context LLMs: a lower model serving as a compressor and an upper model acting as a decoder. The lower model compresses long inputs into compact, multi-grained representations, which are then forwarded to the upper model for context-aware processing. …

Bridging Bug Localization And Issue Fixing: A Hierarchical Localization Framework Leveraging Large Language Models, Jianming Chang, Xin Zhou, Lulu Wang, David Lo, Bixin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated issue fixing is a critical task in software debugging and has recently garnered significant attention from academia and industry. However, existing fixing techniques predominantly focus on the repair phase, often overlooking the importance of improving the preceding bug localization phase. As a foundational step in issue fixing, bug localization plays a pivotal role in determining the overall effectiveness of the entire process. To enhance the precision of issue fixing by accurately identifying bug locations in large-scale projects, this paper presents BugCerberus, the first hierarchical bug localization framework powered by three customized large language models. First, BugCerberus analyzes intermediate representations …

Evolution Of Antibiotic Responses During Chronic P. Aeruginosa Infections In The Human Lung, David Frank Ritz

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Typical antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) of microbial samples is performed in homogeneous cultures in batch environments, which does not account for the highly heterogeneous and dynamic nature of antibiotic responses. The most common mutation found in P. aeruginosa lineages evolved during chronic cystic fibrosis infections in the human lung, a loss of function of repressor MexZ, increases basal levels of multidrug efflux MexXY, but does not increase resistance by traditional minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) assays. Here, we use single cell microfluidics to show that P. aeruginosa’s response to aminoglycosides is highly heterogeneous, with only a subpopulation of cells surviving exposure. …

Moral Repair, Forgiveness, And Collective Minds, Songzhi Wu

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Human lives are increasingly shaped by collective entities (e.g., corporations, governments, nonprofits) that make consequential decisions and evoke trust, blame, and praise. Yet how people perceive and relate to these non-individual agents remains underexplored. This dissertation investigates collective mind perception, moral repair, and forgiveness across three chapters using experimental, neuroimaging, and corpus-based methods.

Chapter 1 examines how collective entities repair their moral standing after wrongdoing. Across four studies, agentic cues such as responsibility-taking and corrective plans consistently outperform experiential expressions such as remorse in eliciting forgiveness toward organizational transgressors. Agentic apologies also reshape memory: participants recall the apology content more …

Behavioral-Centric Team Evaluation Via Consistent Rewards, Clement Kudakwashe Nyanhongo

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Across human domains ranging from sports to business and organizational settings, complex tasks are often solved by teams rather than individuals, leveraging benefits such as interaction, mutual support, complementary skills, cohesion, and task allocation. Evaluating team effectiveness, however, is inherently challenging due to the subjectivity of many existing techniques and the limitations of outcome-driven metrics that primarily focus on performance scores while overlooking the team processes that generated the scores. To address these challenges, this dissertation proposes a behavioral-centric, end-to-end framework for team evaluation grounded in reward functions that model sequential team behavior. Reward functions offer compact and interpretable representations …

Mitochondria Dynamics In Microglia During Health, Inflammation, And Aging, Alicia Nicole Pietramale

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Microglia continually surveil the brain, allowing for rapid detection of tissue damage or infection. Microglial metabolism is linked to tissue homeostasis, yet how mitochondria are subcellularly partitioned in microglia and dynamically reorganize during surveillance, injury responses, and phagocytic engulfment in the intact brain has remained unclear. In this dissertation, I combine intravital imaging, ultrastructural analyses, and metabolic and cytoskeletal markers to investigate how mitochondrial organization relates to microglial function across health, inflammation, and aging.

I first show that microglial processes diverge in their mitochondrial content, with some containing multiple mitochondria while others are completely void. This heterogeneous partitioning is conserved …

Uncovering Ethical Values In Information Systems Development Methodologies, Zahidah Zulkifli, Noor Hayani Abd Rahim, Tahmid Alam, Fakhrul Hazman Yusoff, Mohammad Masudur Rahman

Malaysian Journal of Computing (MJoC)

Information system development involves a lot of tools, infrastructures, and humans. The many phases in system development need humans to interact and work with each other to obtain the goal: to complete information system development. These interactions of humans require the right ethics to ensure that the information system development can be successful. For example, ethical leadership is a vital component in determining the success of any project related to information system development in organizations. The aim of this study is to identify the ethical values which are important in information system development methodology phases. This systematic literature review (SLR) …

Textual Adversarial Example Generation Using Bigram Unigram-Semantic Preservation Optimization Algorithm, Noor Adam Noor Azmi, Haslizatul Fairuz Mohamed Hanum

Malaysian Journal of Computing (MJoC)

The vulnerability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to adversarial attacks remains a critical challenge in the field of cybersecurity and AI robustness. While deep learning models have achieved high performance in sentiment analysis, they are susceptible to subtle input perturbations that induce misclassification. This study presents the design and practical implementation of a web-based system (Proof of Concept) that automates the generation of textual adversarial examples using the Bigram Unigram-Semantic Preservation Optimization (BU-SPOF) algorithm. Rather than proposing a novel attack algorithm, our primary contribution is the architectural integration of a dual-source candidate generation strategy (WordNet and OpenHowNet) and a …

Lru Caching Policy Based On Naïve Bayes Ml Algorithm In Collaborative Peer-To-Peer Systems For Network Bandwidth Utilization, Waheed Yasin

Malaysian Journal of Computing (MJoC)

Web caching offers several advantages, such as increasing cache hit rates, lowering the workload on origin servers, and minimizing network traffic. Nevertheless, limited cache capacity poses a major challenge in web caching systems. Moreover, repeatedly fetching same media objects from origin servers leads to unnecessary bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, traditional caching policies, including Least Recently Used (LRU), are vulnerable to cache pollution. This study introduces a collaborative caching policy based on the Naïve Bayes (NB) Machine Learning (ML) algorithm. The proposed policy exploits structured peer-to-peer architectures, allowing cache contents to be shared among peers to improve the efficiency of LRU web …

Examining The Relationship Between It Project Risk Management And Benefits Realized From It Project Implementation Within The Public Sector, Fredick Bitta, Robert Oboko, Christopher Chepken

Malaysian Journal of Computing (MJoC)

Information technology (IT) has become increasingly critical in today's digital world, supporting, sustaining, and driving growth in public organizations. The board of directors and senior management have traditionally delegated, disregarded, or avoided IT decisions. The majority of public sector organizations have realized that such a mindset is outdated and must be avoided. Being a foundation for effective enterprise governance, the IT risk management domain seeks to guarantee that a structure exists for identifying, analyzing, mitigating, monitoring and communicating an organization's IT risk to ensure successful IT project implementation. This research, therefore, sought to examine the relationship between risk management of …