Digital Commons Network^™

The Low Participation Of Women In The Truck Driving Industry, Aurora Floodine

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Women remain underrepresented in the United States trucking industry, particularly in leadership roles, despite ongoing efforts to increase workforce diversity and address persistent driver shortages. This qualitative phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of female trucking professionals who began their careers as truck drivers and later advanced into leadership positions. The study examined the strategies that facilitated women’s progression into leadership and the systemic barriers that may limit their advancement within the trucking industry. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 11 female trucking professionals, and the resulting data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Six themes emerged from the findings: (a) independence, …

Don’T Let Us Down: A Phenomenological Study Of African American Employees’ Perceptions Regarding The Benefits Of Professional Development In Student Affairs, Courtney Nicole Demings

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The experiences of student affairs professionals are critical to the success of higher education, allowing for a concentrated exploration of African American student affairs professionals who are often employed in 2-year U.S. community colleges. The general problem was that African Americans may leave student affairs in community colleges if they do not perceive supervisory support for professional development and, in turn, career advancement. The purpose of this dissertation was to understand and interpret their lived experiences, illuminate the barriers to their career advancement, and discuss the impact of supervisory support. As such, this action research employed qualitative research through the …

The Coming Health Insurance Transition, Brendan S. Maher

Faculty Scholarship

For decades, the dominant form of private health insurance in the United States—by far—has been employment-based group health insurance. Somewhere in the range of 175 million employees and their families receive health care coverage through a system in which employers serve as financiers, procurers, administrators, and fiduciaries of the health insurance promise. An overwhelming percentage of those health insurance arrangements are governed by ERISA, with little room for state law.

That is going to change.

This Article explains—for the first time anywhere—why and how. Because of the tremendous and as-yet unrecognized power of an obscure-sounding funding arrangement called the Individual …

¿Digno Retorno? De La Ciudadanía Cultural A La Ciudadanía Truncada En El Retorno A México, Nancy Plankey-Videla, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The chapter revisits citizenship by drawing on the findings of the Mexican Reintegration Project that interviewed 333 Mexicans that the U.S. deported or who returned to Mexico, and 18 civil society organizations that were part of the study. Many Mexicans in the United States experience a form of belonging, or cultural citizenship, even while being monitored by immigration and law enforcement. Upon returning to Mexico —whether forcibly or “voluntarily” - they experience a truncated citizenship that also complicates their sense of belonging to their own country of origin. They often do not have all the documentation needed to prove their …

Tennessee Archivist 45, No. 4, Society Of Tennessee Archivists

Tennessee Archivist newsletters

Fall 2026 issue of the Tennessee Archivist, a newsletter produced by the Society of Tennessee Archivists.

Introducing The Math Narrative Project, Liza Bondurant, Sarah Salisbury, Darolyn Flaggs, Belinda Edwards, Uchenna Miles, Daniel Kaufmann

Publications

Whether you teach calculus to engineering students, algebra to future teachers, or developmental math to first-generation college students, the students in your classroom carry narra- tives about mathematics—about whether they belong, wheth- er it matters, and whether asking for help is safe. You carry narratives too. We authors are mathematics educators who work across university classrooms, secondary schools, and teacher preparation programs in Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, and Pennsylvania. In this piece, we introduce the Math Nar- rative Project (2026), a professional development initiative led by the Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity ([BranchED], n.d.) that we participated in as field testers. …

Whose Job Is It To Care For The Poor? Public Support, Private Charity, And Crowding Out In Canada Since 1960, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Executive Summary 

• This study explores whether increased public spending has “crowded out” private donations to charitable organizations. 
• Private charities emerged during industrialization to provide mutually beneficial services to individuals in need. 
• In Canada, government social spending increased both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of GDP after 1961. The percentage of GDP allotted to social spending rose and fell from then until the late 1990s, but rose thereafter, with a spike during the COVID years. It has fallen and risen gradually since 2022. 
• All in all, social benefit spending as a percentage of GDP has roughly doubled, …

Cattle Industry Funding Scheme 2024-25 Annual Report, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Biosecurity published reports

The Cattle IFS addresses pest and disease threats relevant to the biosecurity of the WA Cattle industry and currently operates across the whole of WA. The IFS contribution is paid on the sale of cattle (0.20 cents per head/carcass) produced within WA.

Think Twice Before You Sign! An Experiment On A Cautionary Function Of Contractual Formalities, Monika Leszczynska

Faculty Scholarship

Contractual formalities, such as handwritten signatures, have long been viewed as serving a cautionary function that protects individuals from entering ill-considered agreements. With the rise of digital contracting, it is uncertain whether online forms of assent can play the same role. In an incentivized laboratory experiment, four modes of contract confirmation were compared: clicking “OK,” typing one’s name, entering a PIN code (analogous to a qualified e-signature), and handwritten signing. The study examined how these methods affect choices between smaller–sooner and larger–later rewards. Results show that participants were more impulsive when confirming by clicking “OK” or typing their name than …

Opposition To Renewable Energy Facilities In The United States: September 2026 Edition, Romany M. Webb, Ivonne Norman

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

For the first time in nearly 2 decades, the United States is seeing rapid growth in electricity demand, driven by the data center boom as well as expanding electrification. Total electricity use in the United States reached a record high of 4,430 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2025 — almost 3 percent above 2024 levels — and is expected to continue growing at a similar rate through 2050. Meeting this increased demand, while continuing to advance action on climate change, will require a massive ramp up in renewable energy development. Notable progress was made in 2025, with utility-scale solar generation in …

Organic Pesticides: A General Overview, Marion Murray, Ann Mull

All Current Publications

Organic pesticides are naturally occurring, nonsynthetic, or minimally processed substances that control unwanted organisms in the environment. Categories include insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and miticides.

Deterring Political Deceit: A Constitutional Argument To Defend The People's Democracy (2026), David Chang

Books

More than ever, influencers and politicians communicate political messages that they do not believe to be true. This political deceit is constitutionally valueless, harms public discourse, and impedes effective public decision-making. Yet, under current doctrine, the Supreme Court would invalidate any regulation of deceitful political advocacy as an abridgment of political speech.

In Deterring Political Deceit, David Chang explores why traditional efforts to target falsity in political speech have been rooted in constitutional error. While the Court has determined that the defamation of public officials is unprotected, it wrongly declared that false statements of fact lack constitutional value, and …

Heroclix®: A Multiplayer Chess Game For Teaching The Fundamentals Of Human Capital Management, Chin Heng Low, Jiunwen Wang, Paul Lim, Bernie Koh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article describes the adaptation and use of the HeroClix® board game to teach critical real-world principles for effective human capital management within teams. In a HeroClix® game, players pit their team of miniature figurines against other players’ miniatures in combat. This is akin to organizations striving in the business environment today, with well-structured human capital within their teams as a key competitive advantage. In this article, we suggest how the game can be applied in the classroom for undergraduate students to experience, reflect on, and learn more about the prerequisite considerations in proficient people management, the dynamic nature of …

From Trees To Treewidth: Inventory Management In Complex Supply Chain Networks, Philippe Blaettchen, Andre Calmon, Georgina Hall, Mohit Tawarmalani

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We propose an exact linear programming (LP)-based solution approach to the Guaranteed Service Model (GSM), one of the most widely applied models for optimizing safety stock placement in supply chain networks. Our approach handles any directed acyclic network and any cost function that depends on a stage’s incoming and outgoing service times. It scales polynomially in the number of nodes n in the network, pseudo-polynomially with respect to the bit size of the maximum replenishment time M, and (for fixed M) exponentially in its treewidth, which quantifies how “tree-like” a network is and can be much smaller …

Real-World Testing Of An Artificial Intelligence Conversational Agent As An Early Intervention And Support Tool In The Mental Health Referral Care Pathway: A Mixed-Methods Study, Rohit Shankar, Edward Meinert, Madison Milne-Ives, Emma Taylor, B Inkster, Alina Paik, Ananya Ananthakrishnan, Martin Orr, Ceire Costelloe

Peninsula Medical School

Background: The incidence of mental health concerns is growing, and demand for support is exceeding service capacity.Digital tools can provide additional support but risk causing harm if not delivered safely.Aims: We aimed to establish real-world evidence of the impact of an artificial intelligence-based mental healthconversational agent (Wysa) on depression and anxiety in patients waiting for Talking Therapies treatment.Methods: A mixed-methods randomized controlled trial was conducted with patients referred to Talking Therapies inthe Central and Northwest London NHS Foundation Trust. The primary outcome was change in depression severityover 12weeks between groups; secondary outcomes included anxiety severity, quality of life, safety, engagement, …

Rank, Degrading Treatment, And The Italy-Albania Agreement, Jamal Barnes, Obed Adonteng-Kissi

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

In November 2023, Italy signed a five-year agreement with Albania to transfer asylum seekers intercepted in international waters by Italian vessels to Italian-run detention centres in Albania for asylum processing and deportation. The agreement has been controversial and raises several human rights issues. This article examines these human rights concerns and argues that the agreement is degrading by design. Analysing policy documents, legal cases, speeches, international human rights and refugee law, and philosophical and legal scholarship on the concept of degrading treatment, this article argues that the cumulative effect of subjecting people to unnecessary suffering, discrimination, and dehumanisation creates a …

Assessment Of Glycemic Control Among Patients With Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Attending A Tertiary Diabetes And Endocrinology Center In Sulaymania City/ Iraq, Lina Ali Al-Khafaji, Bahjat Abdulridha Alsaeedy

Muthanna Medical Journal

Introduction: The sociodemographic and clinical factors play a role in type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) glycemic control.
Objectives: To assess glycemic control among T2DM patients and its association with sociodemographic and clinical factors.
Materials and methods: A prospective observational study of 210 patients with T2DM at a tertiary diabetes and endocrinology center in Sulaymania city/ Iraq, from April to November 2024. The study involved sociodemographic data, body mass index, blood pressure, and blood tests for HbA1c, fasting blood sugar, total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, triglycerides, blood urea and creatinine. The performed HbA1c tests were compared with baseline results to identify differences, …

Molecular Detection Of Staphylococcus Aureus: A Performance Comparison Of Colony Pcr And Conventional Pcr Targeting The Icab Gene, Farah Badri Abed, Shahrazad Hazim Muhi, Sahar Mustafa Ibrahim, Riyam Alaa Mohammed

Muthanna Medical Journal

Background: Staphylococcus aureus is an important nursing disease that requires a prompt and effective diagnosis to implement a strategy to curb its transmission and spread. Although the gold standard is the conventional PCR using column-purified genomic DNA, Colony PCR with crude cell lysates saves a lot of time and cost of the test and its performance features have not been well established.
Objectives: This paper will compare Colony PCR (boiling method) and Conventional PCR (ABIOpuretm kit extraction) to amplify icaB gene (141 bp), which is a major determinant of biofilm formation in S. aureus and then assess their application with …

Parental Involvement In An Indonesian Islamic Kindergarten: An Instrumental Case Study Of Mothers’ Voices, Somariah Fitriani, Yessy Yanita Sari, Irdalisa Irdalisa, Hamidah Mohamad

The Qualitative Report

Parental involvement plays a critical role in children’s cognitive, effective, and psychomotor development; however, limited research has explored mothers’ perceptions of parenting and practices of parental involvement and parenting styles. This instrumental case study employed semi-structured interviews with 23 mothers in an Indonesian Islamic kindergarten to explore their understandings, experiences, and beliefs regarding parental involvement. It also aims to identify different kinds of parenting styles. The study revealed three themes, indicating that parenting and parental involvement are understood as an educating process, an interaction process between parents and children, and a mechanism for supporting children’s development. The findings indicate that …

The Application Of Machine Learning And Deep Learning On Demand Forecasting Across Time-Critical Industries: A Systematic Review, Asmaa Seyam, Sujith Samuel Mathew, May El Barachi, Cheng Zhang, Jun Shen

All Works

The applications of machine learning and deep learning in demand forecasting have attracted increasing attention, as they offer remarkable predictive capabilities that help automate forecasting processes and achieve higher accuracy. While numerous review studies have examined solutions within specific industries, there is a lack of comprehensive literature review investigating these solutions across different sectors. Therefore, this study overviews machine learning and deep learning applications in demand forecasting across time-critical industries, including power, tourism, water, transportation, and food. A two-tier classification framework is proposed to categorize demand forecasting studies by both application industry and methodological architecture. In addition, the most popular …

Uncovering Customer Sentiment And Brand Perception By Leveraging Large Language Models: A Case Study In The Automotive Industry, Sujith Samuel Mathew, Kadhim Hayawi, Faseela Abdullakutty, Neethu Venugopal, May El Barachi

All Works

Analyzing customer perceptions has become increasingly important in the automotive industry as it provides actionable insights into consumer satisfaction, preferences, and areas requiring improvement. This study proposes a novel perception analysis framework for automotive reviews using advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), including BERT, FLAN-XXL, and Mistral 7B, leveraging zero-shot learning to categorize reviews without task-specific training data. The framework follows a two-stage evaluation process, beginning with zero-shot perception classification and followed by a detailed topic-wise perception analysis. Model performance was evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score across reviews from five major automotive brands—Toyota, Kia, Honda, Nissan, and Hyundai. While …

Dustmambanet: A Hybrid Inceptionv3–State-Space Network For Robust Solar Panel Dust Detection, Kadhim Hayawi, Sakib Shahriar

All Works

To develop a robust, scalable vision-based model for automatic detection and quantification of dust accumulation on solar photovoltaic panels, overcoming limitations of existing convolutional and attention-based methods and supporting proactive maintenance. We propose DustMambaNet, a hybrid model that consists of a pretrained InceptionV3 convolutional neural network as a feature extractor and two selective state space sequence modules. The state space modules use gated depthwise convolutions to represent long-range spatial dependencies that are of linear complexity, after rearranging spatial features to form sequences. The network provides a binary classification of dust with a severity index (DSI) and a continuous one. All …

The Timing Of Albedo Declines With Reforestation, Christopher A. Williams, Surendra Shrestha, Susan Cook-Patton, Natalia Hasler, Drew E. Terasaki-Hart, Samantha Yeo

Geography

Reforestation is a leading climate solution for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but generally decreases surface albedo, which diminishes its climate mitigation value. Knowing how quickly this albedo effect unfolds relative to carbon removal is critical for planning climate mitigation actions, yet the temporal changes in albedo are poorly described. This study uses satellite observations to characterize temporal changes in albedo with stand development for different forest types and ecoclimatic settings around the world. We find that about half of the climate warming effect from decreased albedo occurs within 40 years, but that it takes anywhere from 50 to …

Towards Human-Centered Digital Health Interventions, Kristin M Kostick-Quenet, Eric A Storch

Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy Staff Publications

This article discusses the potential of digital health interventions (DHIs) in mental health care, emphasizing the importance of designing them to foster genuine humanistic care. It highlights current challenges in measuring engagement and outcomes, advocating for integrating human-centered endpoints such as dignity, autonomy, and therapeutic alliance into evaluation frameworks. The authors call for mechanistic research to identify effective engagement strategies and context-specific implementation approaches. Ultimately, successful DHIs should demonstrate both clinical efficacy and the preservation of humane, person-centered care, ensuring ethical and meaningful mental health support through technology.

Intimate Partner Violence And Emotion Regulation Among Emerging Adults: Investigating The Roles Of Dispositional Mindfulness And Executive Function In The Context Of A Laboratory-Induced Stress Paradigm, Mikell Bursky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a major public health concern that impacts an estimated 10 million men and women in the United States annually. IPV refers to a range of physical, sexual or psychological forms of aggression committed against a current or former romantic partner in the context of a relationship. The highest rates of IPV are observed in emerging adulthood, a developmental period between the ages of 18 to 25 that is significant for the transition from adolescence into adulthood, and the establishment of first meaningful intimate relationships. Although distal risk factors for IPV such as violence in the …

Modeling And Generating Trustworthy Speech, Yuwen Yu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As virtual agents become increasingly integrated into everyday communication, trust has become essential for effective human-AI interaction. Although recent advances in natural language generation and speech synthesis have significantly improved fluency and intelligibility, most systems are not designed to control how trustworthy they are perceived. As a result, a mismatch can emerge between perceived trustworthiness and actual system capability, leading to over-trust or under-trust. While trust is critical for meaningful interaction, current text-to-speech (TTS) systems are primarily optimized for naturalness and intelligibility rather than calibrated trustworthiness.

This dissertation investigates the perceptual foundations of trust in both human and synthesized speech …

Urban Counterpoint (1992–2003): The Piano Music Of Ed Bland, Joseph Vaz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the piano music of Ed Bland, a politically and philosophically vocal composer active in the second half of the twentieth century, whose music draws on both the European and American twentieth-century avant-garde, and on African American vernacular music genres from ragtime to hip-hop. A review of the historical and personal context for these pieces, and a detailed examination of the compositional processes used in this music, work together to demonstrate how Bland thought about the relationship between different musical genres and languages.

Through this combination of theory of musical genre, historical and biographical study, and detailed analysis …

Investigating The Role Of Striatal Cholinergic Interneuron D2 Receptors In Behavioral Flexibility, Janyn J. Alfred

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dopamine (DA) and acetylcholine (ACh) interact within the striatum to shape reward-based learning and choice behavior. DA D2 receptors on cholinergic interneurons (CIN D2Rs) were genetically knocked out to investigate their role in choice allocation using a two-lever matching paradigm. Behaviorally, both knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) mice learned the initial task equally well. When shifted to asymmetric matching schedules (VI-90 vs. VI-180), ideal matching predicts that mice should allocate exactly 67% of their total responses to the rich lever. Neither group matched as predicted by the matching law. Instead, the KO mice showed a pattern where the higher rate …

The Role Of External Factors In Shaping Carbohydrate Conformational Landscapes, Murat Yaman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Carbohydrates (glycans) are among the most structurally diverse biomolecules and participate in a wide range of biological processes, including molecular recognition, cell adhesion, immune response, host-pathogen interactions, and cellular signaling. Their biological functions are governed by a complex interplay between sequence, stereochemistry, conformational flexibility, and environmental factors. However, the structural heterogeneity and dynamic nature of glycans present significant challenges for both experimental characterization and theoretical modeling. In particular, the relationships between glycan structure, conformational dynamics, and the resulting potential energy surfaces remain incomplete.

This dissertation investigates how external factors modulate the potential energy surfaces of carbohydrates through a combination of …

‘A Sense Of The Sea’: Grassroots Culture, Care, And Endurance In Swansea, Cymru, Katy Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that under present conditions, everyday political-aesthetic life is not only about resistance or reproduction but about holding: the work of keeping people, practices, and attachment present and oriented as conditions change. Holding takes the form of care and maintenance; as practices of making, assembling, and imagining; and as the work that keeps open the possibility of renewed attachment to public things and to each other. In the field, this was named as ‘a sense of the sea’, an affective register characterized by wariness, attunement, attentiveness, orientation, and endurance. I am calling this a fragile infrastructure of …