Digital Commons Network^™

Beneath The Waves, Meredith Bol

Interior Design Capstones

In an age marked by technological advancements and a growing need for meaningful human-nature connections, aquariums and conservation programs stand as unique platforms for enhancing both education and human wellbeing. This design will dive into the conceptualization of interactive exhibits within aquariums, focusing on their potential to enrich visitor experiences and contribute to human wellbeing. By blending innovative technology, immersive environments, and educational narratives, aquariums can transform into dynamic spaces that not only showcase marine diversity but also actively engage visitors through these elements.

Intellectual: The aquarium space is meticulously designed to cater to varying intellectual levels, achieved through a …

From Healing To Happiness, Lauren Hannah

Interior Design Capstones

Animal shelters play a crucial role in providing care and rehabilitation for stray or abandoned dogs. However, there is a growing understanding that rethinking the conventional role of animal shelters can lead to significant improvements in the lives of dogs through specialized behavioral therapy and rehabilitation programs. By implementing these programs, shelters have the potential to regenerate and transform dogs’ lives, enabling them to overcome behavioral challenges and increasing their chances of finding loving adoptive homes.

The focus of these initiatives is to heal and nurture the dogs’ behaviors, addressing underlying issues that may have contributed to their arrival in …

Eduscape Shaping Tomorrow’S Leaders Through The Lens Of Neuroarchitectural Design, Viktoryia Shauchuk

Interior Design Capstones

Interior spaces hold undeniable significance; hence, the project advocates for a design rooted in well-being. The “EduScape” project seeks to redefine the design of K-8 schools by integrating an applied approach that prioritizes student well-being, safety, and the seamless blending of indoor and outdoor spaces. In an era where there is a heightened awareness of comprehensive wellness the physical environment cannot be ignored as it significantly influences a child’s emotional, mental, and physical development. Because the physical environment plays a pivotal role in shaping a child’s emotional, mental, and physical development, it is necessary to transform the landscape of educational …

Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2024, Office Of Communications, Illinois Wesleyan University

Illinois Wesleyan University Magazine, 2018-present

VOLUME 33 | NUMBER 1 | Spring 2024

ON OUR COVER:

Ryan Jumper '00 has been an associate judge in Madison County, Illinois, since 2018 and was retained in 2023. Four other IWU alumni became judges in 2023, including two federal judges.

16 The Titan Judges IWU's legal minds are shaping the judiciary in the state of Illinois and beyond. Three of these judges share the stories of their careers within criminal and civil justice.

22 The Lawyer and the Punk Dave Rossi '07 started his career as a famous punk rocker. Now he's a lawyer creating the newest recording …

An Analysis Of Novel Yeasts And Their Brewing Potential, Hannah Murray

Research Honors

Within the brewing community, there is a race to discover new ways to brew beers to create new flavor and smell profiles. Scientists across the globe are searching for novel species of yeasts which have the potential to enhance the flavor and smell of their beer. While most beers are brewed using one of a handful of domesticated yeast strains -- also known as pitching yeasts -- finding “wild” yeasts is one way to change fermentation products. Experimentation has been started on this front due to the wide array of properties that a wild yeast can change in a brew. …

Effects Of Paternal Heat Exposure And Parental Care On Development Of Offsring In Gasterosteus Aculeatus, Emma R. Borgert

Honors Theses

Humans are profoundly altering the abundance and distribution of organisms via climate change. Warming temperatures are affecting marine and freshwater ecosystems by increasing physiological stress, limiting growth, and decreasing dissolved oxygen. With all this change occurring, an understanding of how organisms are going to cope is crucial. Transgenerational plasticity – when parental experiences alter offspring traits - can allow organisms to rapidly adapt to environmental change. Previous literature has focused on the role of maternal experiences on offspring traits, but paternal experiences are just as important. Fathers can influence their offspring in multiple ways, including changes via both sperm and …

Improving Methods For Enantioselective Organophosphorus Synthesis By A Chiral Nucleophile-Metal Bifunctional Catalytic System, Jackson T. Shuman

Honors Theses

The use of benzotetramisole (BTM) as a catalyst is a promising strategy for enantioselective organophosphorus synthesis since the reaction has been previously reported by Numan and Brichacek and has been tested in Dr. Erb’s research laboratory. However, the yields are only moderate (46-58%) and the enantiomeric excess (ee) of the purified product are poor, with 62% being the highest reported ee. Preliminary computational data performed in the Erb lab has revealed that the cause of the lower ee (and possibly yield) could be the ability of the intermediate to adopt different conformations that are similar in energy and would therefore …

Anti-Predator Behavior In Response To Conspecific Visual, Olfactory, And Damage Cues In Three-Spined Sticklebacks, Claire E. Vanmeter

Honors Theses

Predation is a major source of mortality for prey, which creates a selective pressure to avoid predators whenever possible. By using alarm cues produced by conspecifics, individuals can be alerted of nearby predators without coming into direct contact with them. However, whether individuals can distinguish between different conspecific cues or whether some cues might indicate a more severe predation threat than others is not known. Studied was the three-spined stickleback’s ability to distinguish between environmental cues by exposing conspecifics to four different treatments in a randomized order: 1) Control (control olfactory cues with an unexposed demonstrator), 2) Visual Only (control …

Clinical Improvisation In Music Therapy For Children And Adolescents: A Scoping Review, Pui-Shan Yung,

Capstone Projects

Clinical improvisation is frequently used in music therapy sessions, as a nonthreatening means to facilitate free expression and address various non-musical goals. Among the existing research on the effectiveness of clinical improvisation in children and adolescents, there was lacking a specific implementation process. This scoping review identified 5 articles on the Western Michigan University library search engine, investigating the use of clinical improvisation with children and adolescents. The studies were summarized to include participant characteristics, improvisation intervention/ methods, themes, and outcomes. The quality of intervention reporting in each article was assessed using the music-based intervention reporting criteria and listed each …

Consideration For Expanding The Audiology Scope Of Practice To Include Prescription Medication Authority, Erin Grace Gill

Doctoral Scholarly Projects & Capstones

The demand for medical professionals rises in conjunction with the rise of prescriptions written annually in the United States, but there are not enough physicians to meet the demand for patient prescriptions (Mohamadloo et al., 2019). In the United States, 2.4 million healthcare visits for acute otitis externa were recorded in 2007; approximately half were between the ages of 5-14 years old. Healthcare providers were estimated to have spent about 600,000 hours treating acute otitis externa.

Prescriptive authority is the ability of healthcare providers to prescribe specific medications, including controlled substances. Prescriptive authority is legally allocated by federal and state …

Dementia Implications For Audiology: Cognitive Screening In Clinical Practice, Kelsey May Harris

Doctoral Scholarly Projects & Capstones

Dementia is a progressive, debilitating cognitive disorder recognized as one of the greatest challenges to global health in the 21st century. In recent years, dementia has gained significant importance in the international health agenda due to the increasing aging population, longer life expectancies, and the substantial socioeconomic burden. Global concern has led to increased efforts to understand, manage, and alleviate its impact. Considering the lack of curative treatments, dementia research and awareness campaigns have intensified with a focus on early detection, prevention strategies, and collaborative healthcare. Prevention has focused on identifying risk factors and modifiable aspects of lifestyle closely linked …

Fostering Faith: Religion And Inequality In The History Of Child Welfare Placements, Elizabeth D. Katz

Fordham Law Review

Each year in the United States, approximately 700,000 children live in foster care. Many of these children are placed in religiously oriented homes recruited and overseen by faith-based agencies (FBAs). This arrangement—as well as the scope and operation of child welfare services more broadly—is at a crucial moment of reckoning. Scholars and advocates focused on children’s rights and family integrity maintain that the child welfare system, increasingly termed the “family policing system,” harms children, families, and communities through unnecessary and racist child removal that is partly motivated by perverse financial incentives. Some call for abolition. Meanwhile, in a largely separate …

Enlivened Worship With The Divine: Evaluation And Innovative Application Of The Liturgical Arts For Worship Renewal, Nicole Sikora Gray

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

Liturgical arts are meaningful resources and vessels for reclaiming and renewing the storytelling abilities of dynamic worship. This thesis explores a strategic evaluation of liturgical arts through the foundational and relational subjects of theology, ritual studies, and liturgical theology. Through the Holy Spirit, liturgical arts have formative powers that lead congregations into a deeper meeting with God—sending them forth as renewed signposts of Christ’s transcendence. They provide the space where pain and brokenness meet hope and grace for the renewal of the world.

This thesis examines those powers in combination with a foundational and contextual evaluation to restore and apply …

The Intrusive State: Restrictions On Gender-Affirming Healthcare For Minors, Exceptions To The Doctrine Of Parental Consent, And Reliance On Science And Medical Expertise, Lois W. Weithorn

UC Law Journal

The provision of gender-affirming medical care to transgender or gender diverse (“TGD”) youth is currently the subject of substantial controversy despite an overwhelming consensus in the healthcare community as to the safety and potential benefits of recommended treatments. Much of the debate is fueled by misinformation and inaccurate characterization of research and practice. Against this backdrop, twenty-three states enacted restrictions or complete prohibitions on access to gender-affirming medical care for adolescents between 2021 and the time of this writing in early 2024. The policies typically place healthcare practitioners who provide such services at risk of license revocation. Some statutes create …

Identification And Characterization Of Chitinase Producing Marine Microorganism: Unleashing The Potential Of Chitooligosaccharides For Bioethanol Synthesis, P. V. Atheena, K. M. Rajesh, Keyur Raval, Subbalaxmi Selvaraj

Open Access archive

The dwindling supply of the petroleum product and its carbon footprint has initiated search for a sustainable fuel and alternate feed-stocks. One such underexplored feedstock is chitin, a waste derived from sea food processing. The limitation of insolubility and crystallinity inherent in chitin is addressed with the chitin hydrolysates. In the present study, a chitinases producing marine isolate was isolated from the sediments of Arabian Sea from a depth of 20 m. In order to increase the expression of the chitinases, sequential optimisation using one factor at a time and Taguchi experimental designs were employed which resulted in a yield …

A Consistent Transversely-Isotropic Hyper-Viscoelastic Model: Finite Element Implementation And Mechanical Characterization Of Biological Tissues, Manu Hegde, K. Karthik, Vishwanath Managuli, Subraya Krishna Bhat

Open Access archive

Soft tissues like skeletal muscles, ligaments and tendons exhibit transversely-isotropic hyper-viscoelastic (VE) behavior. Simulating the mechanical response of such soft tissues under various types of loading scenario requires accurate constitutive models. Several models have been proposed towards this goal. Although these models successfully capture the deformations under different kinds of loadings, they offer limited description of the shear behaviour. The reason for this discrepancy is found to be the absence of few of the required strain invariants corresponding to the transversely-isotropic VE solids. We attempt in this work to develop a transversely-isotropic VE model that is capable of capturing the …

Elizabeth Gibson Drinko Honors Convocation, Honors College

Honors Convocation

The Elizabeth Gibson Drinko Honors Convocation Awards Program for Spring 2024, Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia.

Water Current, Volume 56, No. 1, Spring 2024

Water Current Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Adapting Seasonal Water Rights, Karrigan S. Börk, John Mensik

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Climate change is shifting seasons. Spring comes earlier, fall comes later, rainy seasons are shorter and more intense, and summers are hotter and longer. In the American West, winter precipitation increasingly falls as rain, leading to a smaller snowpack and an earlier, more intense runoff followed by a longer and drier dry season. For irrigators— the highest volume water users—growing seasons are shifting earlier, weather is less predictable, and precipitation is increasingly inconsistent. The end of a relatively static climate marks the end of static water rights. The shifting seasons pose serious challenges to our ability to manage water systems. …

Achieving Gender Equality In Venture Capital: The Case For Federal Regulatory Intervention, Janhvi Patel

William & Mary Business Law Review

Gender inequality is a pervasive issue in venture capital financing, with studies consistently revealing the severe disadvantage female entrepreneurs face when raising private funds for their companies. Research has shown that female founders receive only a fraction of the total venture capital dollars invested each year, despite launching companies that outperform those founded by men. Gender bias among investors, a lack of diversity in decision-making teams, and regulatory inaction are major contributors to this inequality. The consequences of gender inequality in venture capital financing extend beyond the financial impact; such inequalities perpetuate systemic gender stereotypes and impede the full realization …

Teenage Blues: Predictors Of Depression Among Adolescents In Nigeria, Adefunke Dadematthews, Chukwuemeka Nzeakah, Lucky Onofa, Oluwagbemiga Dadematthews, Temitope Ogundare

Faculty Publications

Background Depressive disorders, with a prevalence of 15-21%, are among the most common disorders in children and adolescents, and increases the risk of suicide, the second leading cause of death in children aged 10 to 19. Aim To determine the prevalence and correlates of depressive disorders among senior students attending secondary schools in Abeokuta. Method The study was conducted in five schools randomly selected from a representative sample and was carried out in 2 phases. In the first phase, students were selected via systematic random sampling and given consent forms and GHQ-12 to administer to the parents. In the second …

Kicking Up Dust On Utah's Off-Road Vehicle Trails: Pi-Swerl Assessment Of Anthropogenic Dust Emissions, Wyatt A. Wiebelhaus

Honors Thesis

Upward trends in the use of off-highway vehicles (OHV) and the creation of new OHV trails facilitate an increase in soil disturbance and dust emissions in Utah. Anthropogenic destruction of soil crusts and the removal of vegetation by OHVs exposes soil and destroys soil structure, making the soil easier to erode by the wind. We used the PI-SWERL (Portable In Situ Wind Erosion Laboratory) to measure dust concentrations of disturbed and undisturbed soil. We tested soils at several popular OHV areas with landforms composed of sand dunes, playas, and Lake Bonneville sediments. Soil crust strength, grain size, and salinity were …

Comparison Of Perceived Stress In First-Year Pre-Med Students And First-Year Medical Students At Usd, Maggie Derner

Honors Thesis

Stress can be caused by many factors, including money, relationships, promotions, grades, and responsibilities. In college, these stressors can be exacerbated. This research dives into stress in both undergraduate students as well as medical students. Previous literature has indicated that high levels of stress are present in students, and it is likely to have negative effects on the students, whether that is their mental or physical well-being. Schools have put interventions in place to help combat the stress levels present in their students. At the University of South Dakota (USD) and USD Sanford School of Medicine (USD SSOM), perceived stress …

Russia In A Changing Climate, Debra Javeline, Robert Orttung, Graeme Robertson, Richard Arnold, Andrew Barnes, Laura Henry, Edward Holland, Mariya Omelicheva, Peter Rutland, Edward Schatz, Caress Schenk, Andrei Semenov, Valerie Sperling, Lisa Mcintosh Sundstrom, Mikhail Troitskiy, Judith Twigg, Susanne Wengle

Political Science

Climate change will shape the future of Russia, and vice versa, regardless of who rules in the Kremlin. The world's largest country is warming faster than Earth as a whole, occupies more than half the Arctic Ocean coastline, and is waging a carbon-intensive war while increasingly isolated from the international community and its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Officially, the Russian government argues that, as a major exporter of hydrocarbons, Russia benefits from maintaining global reliance on fossil fuels and from climate change itself, because warming may increase the extent and quality of its arable land, open a new …

Evaluation Of Dietary Probiotic Supplements On Methamphetamine-Induced Impulsive Action In Rats Maintained On A Differential Reinforcement Of Low Rate Schedule, Kaitlyn Steck

Masters Theses

Substance Use Disorder (SUD) is a chronic, debilitating condition often comorbid with anxiety and depression. Both SUD and affective disorders are characterized by cognitive dysfunction, including impaired decision-making and impulsivity. A mounting body of research implicates gut microbiome alterations as a contributing factor to the pathophysiology of affective disorders. No published studies have assessed behavioral effects of dietary interventions targeting psychostimulant-induced gut microbiome changes. The present study utilized a differential reinforcement of low rate responding schedule (DRL 18 s) as a behavioral index of drug-induced impulsive action to determine if a dietary probiotic supplement alters the behavioral effects of (+)-methamphetamine …

The Extension Newsletter, Issue 114, Spring 2024, Wright State University Retirees Association

The Extension Newsletter

An eight page newsletter from the Wright State University's Retirees Association.

{Re}Considering Illustration | Risd Mfa Illustration Anthology 2024, Illustration Department, Illustration Mfa, Jenine Bressner, Emilia Miekisz, Simone Nemes, Simone Khanyi Hadebe, Ananya Parekh, Ariel Wills, Irene Chung, Nellie Geraghty, Nina Martinez, Reem Al-Ani, Lingyi Kong, Courtney Mckracken, Deanne Fernandes, Mara Menahan, Ji Zou

Illustration MFA Anthologies

The essays in this volume have been created by the candidates of the inaugural cohort of the Masters of Fine Arts in Illustration Practice at the Rhode Island School of Design. The writings provide an overview of some of the ideas, research methods and artistic concerns addressed by the candidates through their art over the two-year span of their graduate studies.

Mechanistic Empirical Design Of Flexible Pavements For Biopolymer Treated Soils, Vishweshwaran M

Theses and Dissertations

Cognizing the contamination effects of chemical soil modifiers on soil and groundwater, the assessment of the ability of biopolymers to improve the engineering properties of soils has gained attention in the last decade. As a soil additive, biopolymers have the potential to solve the trilemma of sustainability, price and soil suitability. Two polysaccharides and two protein biopolymers have been adopted in this study to enhance the geotechnical properties of fine-grained soils.

Design thickness catalogues were developed for a three-layered flexible pavement using 3D finite element analysis (FEA) and layered elastic analysis. The catalogue aims to provide structurally reliable thickness values …

Experimental, Computational, And Machine Learning Methods For Prediction Of Residual Stresses In Laser Additive Manufacturing: A Critical Review, Sung Heng Wu, Usman Tariq, Ranjit Joy, Todd Sparks, Aaron Flood, Frank W. Liou

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In recent decades, laser additive manufacturing has seen rapid development and has been applied to various fields, including the aerospace, automotive, and biomedical industries. However, the residual stresses that form during the manufacturing process can lead to defects in the printed parts, such as distortion and cracking. Therefore, accurately predicting residual stresses is crucial for preventing part failure and ensuring product quality. This critical review covers the fundamental aspects and formation mechanisms of residual stresses. It also extensively discusses the prediction of residual stresses utilizing experimental, computational, and machine learning methods. Finally, the review addresses the challenges and future directions …

Modeling And Numerical Analysis Of The Cholesteric Landau-De Gennes Model, Andrew L. Hicks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis gives an analysis of modeling and numerical issues in the Landau-de Gennes (LdG) model of nematic liquid crystals (LCs) with cholesteric effects. We derive various time-step restrictions for a (weighted) $L^2$ gradient flow scheme to be energy decreasing. Furthermore, we prove a mesh size restriction, for finite element discretizations, that is critical to avoid spurious numerical artifacts in discrete minimizers that is not well-known in the LC literature, particularly when simulating cholesteric LCs that exhibit ``twist''. Furthermore, we perform a computational exploration of the model and present several numerical simulations in 3-D, on both slab geometries and spherical …