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Informal Caregiving In Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease: A Constructivist Grounded Theory Study And Its Implications For Clinical Translation, Lauren Pourghaderi

Doctor of Philosophy in Translational Health Sciences Dissertations

Background: Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (sCJD) is a rare, fatal, rapidly progressive neurodegenerative dementia that occurs in the absence of a known cause. Due to the rapid neurodegeneration in sCJD, informal caregivers take a sudden leading role in caregiving and decision-making. sCJD differs from other dementias in ways that shape caregiving and increase burden, but support interventions aimed to address caregiver burden in dementia overlook these distinctions, limiting their effectiveness. The scope of sCJD-specific informal caregiving research is limited, and no foundational theory describing the sCJD informal caregiving experience in its entirety exists. A theoretical foundation would provide the basis for …

Against Heaven And Against You: The Puzzle Of Promising On Divine Command Theory, Nathan Dowell

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

No abstract provided.

Frederick D. Aquino And Matthew Levering, John Henry Newman’S An Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Assent: A Critical Guide, Joe Milburn

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

No abstract provided.

Moderating The Meta-Historical Fall: Recent Eastern Orthodox Theodicies Of Evolution, Travis Dumsday

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

No abstract provided.

"One Need Not Hope In Order To Undertake One's Work": Pragmatic Warrant, Existential Arguments, And Accepting Theism, Griffin Klemick

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

No abstract provided.

Against Grounding Trinitarianism, Derek Christian Haderlie, Taylor-Grey Miller

Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers

No abstract provided.

Chapter 4: Untangling The “Legal Vortex”: Transit, Tolls, And Truce In The Strait Of Hormuz, James Kraska

International Law Studies

No abstract provided.

Project Management Frameworks For The Responsible Integration Of Ai In Luxury Interior Design And Ff&E Practice, Jade Alfstad Hachem

Harrisburg University Dissertations and Theses

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into luxury interior design and furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) practice has outpaced the governance structures needed to protect creative authorship, craft traditions, and cultural intelligence. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to examine how project management frameworks could govern the responsible integration of AI in luxury interior design and FF&E specification. The study was grounded in the Adopt a Holistic View principle of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide, Eighth Edition, and addressed three research questions on governance frameworks, tensions between technology and handcraft, and art historical literacy. …

The Impact Of Liquidity On Profitability Of U.S. Commercial Banks: Evidence From Panel Data Analysis Using Fdic Call Reports, Md Shehab Hossain, Saddam Nasir Chowdhury

Student Publications

Maintaining adequate liquidity while preserving profitability remains a central challenge for commercial banks because liquid assets strengthen resilience but typically generate lower returns than loans and other earning assets. This study investigates the effect of liquidity on the profitability of U.S. commercial banks using 8,000 quarterly bank observations for 2010–2024. Profitability is measured by return on assets (ROA), with return on equity (ROE) used for robustness, while liquidity, capital adequacy, the loan-to-asset ratio, and bank size are modeled as explanatory variables. Pooled OLS, fixed-effects, and random-effects estimators are compared, and diagnostic tests support a two-way fixed-effects model with standard errors …

Implementation Of A Standardized Protocol To Improve Provider Documentation And Initiation Of Guideline-Concordant Hypertension Follow-Up Within 14 Days In Primary Care, Stella Williams

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Hypertension is a major modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, yet timely follow-up after elevated blood pressure (BP) readings is not consistently documented in primary care. This Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) quality improvement project evaluated whether a standardized hypertension screening follow-up protocol improved provider initiation or documentation of guideline-concordant follow-up within 14 days. The faculty-approved PICOT population was primary care providers in a primary care clinic; we used eligible electronic health record (EHR) encounters as the analytic records to observe provider performance. We used a quantitative pre/post design and retrospectively reviewed 30 eligible EHR encounters: 15 pre-implementation …

Cardozo Law News Brief: October 2, 2026, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Briefs

Highlights from the September 18, 2026 Cardozo Law News Brief include:

• Professor Luís Calderón Gómez spoke to Tax Notes about tax avoidance through private placement life insurance (PPLI) and the IRS’s treatment of related private letter rulings.
• Professor Sam Weinstein was quoted in Bloomberg Law about an antitrust lawsuit challenging Mayor Mamdani’s city grocery store plan, questioning whether the proposal creates the consumer harm required for an antitrust claim.
• Professor Matthew Wansley spoke to Gothamist about Tesla’s Cybercabs and concerns over the company’s automated driving technology, and also spoke to The New York Times about legal risks associated with self-driving …

De Novo Molecular Design With Agentic Ai: Integrating Tree Search And Iterative Refinement, Yukhe Lavinia, Dony Ang, Hagop S. Atamian

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

Agentic AI frameworks that couple language model generation with iterative tool feedback offer a promising paradigm for automating complex molecular design tasks, yet systematic comparisons of agentic design patterns, such as exploration-focused, refinement-focused, and hybrid, remain scarce. Here, we evaluate three such strategies applied to structure-based de novo molecular design. Language Agent Tree Search (LATS) frames generation as Monte Carlo Tree Search-guided exploration of chemical space. A Reflexion-inspired Self-Improvement (SI) loop critiques and revises candidates using cheminformatics filters and docking feedback. A Hybrid strategy uses LATS to generate diverse, high-quality seeds, which are then refined with SI. We benchmark these …

Muharremi, Robert, And Alisa Ramadani. Transforming A Guerrilla Into A Regular Army: From The Kosovo Liberation Army To The Army Of The Republic Of Kosovo. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024., Besa Kabashi Ramaj

Journal of Peace, Conflict, and Security Studies

Robert Muharremi and Alisa Ramadani’s Transforming a Guerrilla into a Regular Army: From the Kosovo Liberation Army to the Army of the Republic of Kosovo seeks to provide an accessible, academic narrative of Kosovo’s security transformation. It traces the evolution from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), through the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), to the current Kosovo Security Force (KSF). The result of this evolution is a military force which today holds a full-fledged defense mission.

Visoka, Gëzim. The Derecognition Of States. Ann Arbor: University Of Michigan Press, 2024., Aidan Hehir

Journal of Peace, Conflict, and Security Studies

Gëzim Visoka describes the derecognition of states as “a puzzling feature in world politics” (p. 114). This is certainly true. For many decades derecognition was a peripheral concern given it was rarely practiced after the UN was established in 1945; one notable exception being the derecognition of Taiwan, which has been ongoing since the 1950s. In recent years, however, it has become of significantly greater interest as it has become more common; of the five cases Visoka examines – Taiwan, Western Sahara, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Kosovo – four are very definitely products of the post-Cold War era. Despite this, …

Identité Ambiguë, Mémoire Traumatisée, Et Discours Postcolonial Dans Petit Pays De Gaël Faye, Israel Adégòkè Owóṣení

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Les écrits autofictifs et semi-autobiographiques de la littérature postcoloniale francophone sont encore à explorer et à discourir, surtout dans le contexte littéraire du XXIe siècle où apparaissent des motifs récurrents et nouveaux tels que l’ambiguïté culturelle, l’hybridité, l’altérité, l’inclusion, la liminalité, le traumatisme et l’effet négatif souillé du postcolonialisme à la mémoire dans une nouvelle ère. Ainsi, cette étude est conçue pour examiner l’ambiguïté identitaire de Gaby et les legs de la colonisation émanant des conflits intertribaux, de la guerre, du génocide et de la violence, qui ont largement miné la perception psychologique du héros - Gaby.

Cette étude a …

Blending Oral Tradition And New Media In Digital Storytelling In Francophone Africa, Moses Chibueze Opara Odogwu

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

This paper investigates the dynamic convergence of oral tradition and new media within the context of digital storytelling in Francophone Africa. Grounded in age-old practices of communal narratives and cultural transmission, oral storytelling has experienced a resurgence through digital platforms, including social media, Tiktok, podcasts, and multimedia productions. This integration facilitates the preservation, revitalisation, and worldwide dissemination of indigenous narratives while promoting vibrant cultural dialogues across different generations. The study analyses how digital storytelling incorporates traditional African oral forms with modern technologies to develop hybrid narratives that transcend local limitations. It also tackles important issues that influence the changing landscape, …

The French Revolution And Napoleon: The Beginnings Of A Modern World Order, S Trent Dunkin

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, roughly 1789 to 1815, witnessed the fall of the Ancien Régime in France and the foundation of the French Republic. However, this larger period can be divided into three smaller periods: (1) the French Revolutionary Period (1789-1799); (2) the Napoleonic Era (1799-1814); and (3) the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). This article discusses these three periods individually and their respective contributions that helped to usher in a political order more familiar to the contemporary world. Specifically, this article will explore the following things: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the …

Cloud: Between Paris And Tehran: Kiarostami/Corbin/Lacan, Heba Arafa Abdelfattah

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Joan Copjec, Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Kiarostami/Corbin/Lacan (MIT Press, 2025).

Nothing Is As It Should Be: Estrangement, Threshold-Crossings, And Cosmic Struggle In David Lynch’S Blue Velvet And Lost Highway, Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson

Journal of Religion & Film

This article examines estrangement as a structuring existential and aesthetic principle in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997). Through close, plot-attentive readings intended to remain accessible to readers unfamiliar with Lynch, it argues that the films stage three interlocking dynamics: becoming a stranger to oneself, the fracturing of the ‘ground’ of ordinary existence, and life as a cosmic struggle in which human agency is partial and contested. Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be provides the main theological–philosophical lens, clarifying how anxiety, non-being and courage shape scenes of desire, violence and transformation. Film-theoretical work on thresholds and cinematic …

Moving On: Purgatorial Seriality And Unanswered Prayer In Lost’S “Ab Aeterno”, Christian Wilken

Journal of Religion & Film

“Ab Aeterno” (Lost, 6.09) distills the series’ religious logic with unusual explicitness by staging theodicy not as doctrine but as narrative procedure. This article argues that the episode converts Catholic sacramental form (confession, absolution, and penitential address) into a serial ethics of endurance in which closure is structurally deferred. Richard Alpert’s confession establishes a subject who seeks an authorized word that would stabilize suffering, yet the priest’s refusal (“I can’t”) installs a theology of unanswered prayer that becomes the template for Richard’s long durée of waiting. Jacob’s “cork” parable then supplies a katechontic justification of restraint: evil is not abolished …

Between Icon And State: Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible, Milja Radovic

Journal of Religion & Film

Remembering the 80th anniversary of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Иван Грозный (Ivan the Terrible, 1944/1945), it is crucial to re-examine Eisenstein’s work, including his last film that became an unintentional ‘testament’ to cinema. Eisenstein’s mastery has been pivotal for understanding cinema and film language, the way this language operates, constructs and deconstructs and communicates historical realities. This paper focuses on a film that was made in two parts, Part I in 1944 and part II in 1945, to investigate Eisenstein’s approach to the subject of history, nation and religion. The research considers how this master of cinema contemplated intricate ideas and …

Affirmative Transcendence: The Ethics Of Mazu And The Internal Expansion Of The Confucian Moral Imagination, Yu Pei

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper proposes and defends the concept of affirmative transcendence through a systematic analysis of the 2012 Chinese television drama Mazu (38 episodes, CCTV). Affirmative transcendence names a structure in which the protagonist achieves sacred status (shen 神) not by negating her human relationships but by maintaining them while exhibiting a mode of moral perception that exceeds the limits of role-based ethics. The paper argues that what is analytically distinctive about this structure is its internal character: the tradition is not rejected but exceeded, and the exceeding is accomplished through resources the tradition itself provides. The paper identifies two …

A Metaphorical Passage To God: Simone Weil And Robert Bresson, V. G. Voigt Hogg Phd

Journal of Religion & Film

VOIGT HOGG_Abstract (REVISED)_Journal of Religion & Film_30 April 2026

This article contrasts the metaphysical and religious philosopher Simone Weil’s concepts of attachment and detachment with auteur director Robert Bresson’s method of subtraction. It argues for a commonality in their philosophy and cinema, that guides the reader or viewer respectively, to perceive a metaphorical passage to God through the lived experience of suffering. The article considers by what means does Weil and Bresson share a mutual commitment to understanding the state of the soul in affliction, while also acknowledging an opposition in the interpretation of detachment in relation to suicide. The …

Attention-Enhanced Multimodal Fusion Of Elevation And Aerial Imagery For Sinkhole Segmentation, Junfeng Zhu, Desireé Cunningham, Nathan Jacobs

Sinkhole Conference 2026

Image segmentation, the task of assigning a class label to each pixel in an image, has been widely applied in remote sensing to identify surficial geological and hydrological features from data sources such as multispectral satellite imagery, aerial photography, and digital elevation models. UNet is among the most widely adopted convolutional neural network architectures for segmentation, owing to its encoder–decoder structure and skip connections that enable precise spatial localization. UNet has been applied to detect sinkholes using lidar-derived high-resolution digital elevation data; however, existing models still fall short of the accuracy of manual sinkhole mapping. In this study, we aim …

Statewide Sinkhole Susceptibility Mapping In Florida Using Explainable Geoai, Osama M. Altarawneh, Weiwei Zhan, Clint Kromhout

Sinkhole Conference 2026

Sinkholes cause persistent damage to infrastructure, property, and groundwater resources across Florida. Statewide sinkhole hazard mitigation has been constrained by incomplete inventories and the absence of a high-resolution susceptibility map. This study presents a statewide sinkhole susceptibility assessment using an explainable GeoAI framework that integrates the citizen-reported Subsidence Incident Reports (SIR) database and a geologist-confirmed collapse-type sinkhole inventory from the Florida Geological Survey (FGS). Random Forest (RF) is used as the primary learner with ten geologic, hydrologic, topographic, and anthropogenic predictors. The influence of negative-sample buffer geometry on model behavior is evaluated across five annular buffer conditions (100-1000 m through …

Mapping Sinkholes And Closed Depressions In The Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone: Comparison Of Lidar-Based Semi-Automated Detection Methods And Field Validation, Enzo Franceschi Genesi, Horia G. Olariu, Bradford Wilcox

Sinkhole Conference 2026

Sinkholes and closed depressions play a critical role in karst hydrology by facilitating rapid recharge to aquifer systems (Ford & Williams, 2007; White, 1988), yet their spatial distribution is often poorly quantified in large recharge zones, and the automated methods used to detect them vary widely in approach and reliability. This study compares three LiDAR-based automated detection methods to determine their relative performance for mapping sinkholes and closed depressions within the Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone, using a 0.5-meter resolution bare-earth Digital Elevation Model derived from high-density airborne LiDAR point cloud data (12.66 points/m²) obtained from OpenTopography. The three methods evaluated …

Karst At A Potential Construction Site Adjacent To The Delaware River Near The Glacial Terminus, New Jersey, Usa, Ira D. Sasowsky

Sinkhole Conference 2026

The state of New Jersey is not known for extensive karst landscapes, but there are over 100 caves listed in a survey of those features. Numerous sinkholes have also been identified, though no comprehensive database yet exists. Occasional news stories have reported damaging collapses, many of which seem infrastructure related, in several counties. This paper reports on the conditions at a proposed major construction site in a glaciated limestone terrane, Warren County. The area is underlain by the Allentown Dolomite and the Beekmantown Group carbonates (Cambrian/Ordovician age), and covered with a variable layer of glaciofluvial sediments. The area is of …

Production Variability In The Edwards Aquifer, South-Central Texas, Usa, Jennifer Raye (Adkins) Schudrowitz, Linda K. Bevis

Sinkhole Conference 2026

The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) serves more than two million people and is among the largest water utilities in the United States. Much of SAWS’s supply is sourced from the Edwards (Balcones Fault Zone) Aquifer (Edwards BFZA), a major sole‑source karst aquifer in south‑central Texas. The aquifer exhibits pronounced spatial heterogeneity in well performance due to its karstic nature, structurally complex setting, and variable depositional facies. Recent severe drought and pumping restrictions have emphasized the need to understand where within the aquifer to drill and how inter‑station performance differs under stress. This study evaluates production variability across SAWS pump‑station …

A Field-Inspired Investigation Of Conduit Network Impacts On Spring Flow In Karst Aquifers, Jennifer Huang, Jannes Kordilla, Marco Dentz, John Barry, Christian Langevin, Peter Kang

Sinkhole Conference 2026

Effective management of karst aquifers necessitates accurate characterization of flow and transport. However, modeling these highly heterogeneous systems is challenging due to the complex partitioning of recharge between bedrock and the embedded conduit network. The properties of conduit networks impact flow and transport, but there has not been a systematic, quantitative study of how conduit network structure and geometry impact spring hydrographs in naturalistic field conditions. In this field-inspired modeling study, we attempt to identify key geometric and structural properties of conduit networks that control flow in karst aquifers and use these insights to constrain our understanding of a nitrate …

Documenting The Ineffable: A Comparative Analysis Of Mystical Representation In Kimiavi’S The Garden Of Stones And Western Sufi Documentary, Hessam Abedini

Journal of Religion & Film

This article examines how documentary film attempts to represent mystical experience through comparative analysis of Parviz Kimiavi's The Garden of Stones (1976) and American documentaries featuring Samuel Lewis, particularly Sunseed (1973). Rather than assuming terms like "sacred" or "authentic," the study grounds its analysis in empirical definitions from William James, historical scholarship by Carl Ernst and Annemarie Schimmel, and literary theory from Fatemeh Keshavarz. Through detailed examination of specific scenes—Darvish Khan hanging stones from dead trees, Lewis leading ecstatic dances—the article demonstrates how different cinematic strategies approach documentary's epistemological limits when confronting ineffable experience.

The analysis corrects historical misunderstandings about …