Digital Commons Network^™

How Semiflightless Birds Adapt: A Survey From Barú, Costa Rica, Eli P. Laloudakis

Scripps Senior Theses

When we think of birds, we think of flight. Because of this, scientific research often focuses on how birds evolved flight and how their wings function during flight. However, not all birds can fly or fly well, as wings wax and wane on developmental, seasonal, and evolutionary time scales (Dial and Heers 2021). Consequently, rudimentary wings can be found in developing birds, secondarily flightless or semiflightless birds, birds that undergo simultaneous molts, and extinct theropods with “protowings” (structures that preceded fully functional wings). Secondarily flightless and semiflightless birds often evolve where there is no/low predation, abundant year-round food supply, and …

L'Affaire Baby Loup : Nouvelle Laïcité Ou Laïcité Coloniale ?, Grace Gorden

Scripps Senior Theses

La saga juridique de la crèche Baby Loup, où une directrice-adjointe était licenciée pour avoir porté le voile au travail, est souvent proclamée comme l'instauration de la « nouvelle laïcité » en France.  L'arrêt Baby Loup fait partie d'une série de changements sur la laïcité depuis les années 1980 en France, où le principe de laïcité devient de plus en plus associé au domaine privé. Le jugement final de la saga Baby Loup établit que la discrimination religieuse doit être jugée selon des normes de proportionnalité et de justification. Ce renoncement au principe de laïcité dans les tribunaux et ensuite …

Just War Theory In The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’S Critique Of Violence, Power, And Rebellion, Laila Hannum

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis applies just war theory to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy, arguing that while the districts' rebellion satisfies the principles of jus ad bellum (justice in going to war), it systematically violates jus in bello (justice in the conduct of war) and jus post bellum (justice after war), and ultimately replicates the oppressive structures of the Capitol it sought to overthrow.

Drawing primarily on Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars and on Brian Orend's ideas on post-war justice, this thesis traces the rebellion's moral arc across all three novels. Chapter One shows that the rebellion meets the criteria …

Real Interpolation: An Approximate Introduction, Madeline Anderson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis provides an introduction to real interpolation. We establish

relevant notions in functional analysis first, and use these concepts to study

real interpolation using J. Peetre’s 𝐾-functional in some detail. We also

explore the basics of approximation theory, in particular the connection

between approximation and interpolation results.

The Benefits And Challenges Of Digital Technology In Smes, Amanda Rux

Integrated Studies

Small organizations play a vital role in global economic stability. While their continued growth is essential, the majority fail within the first few years of operation. These organizations face multiple challenges that are difficult to overcome but can be mitigated by digitalizing their processes. The digitalization process also comes with its own set of challenges, and many of these organizations' attempts to digitalize fail. This paper will describe the types of technology these organizations may use to achieve their digitalization goals, the challenges and benefits that come with these technologies, and how organizational culture can affect their digitalization efforts. The …

Potential Of Crispr/Cas9 Genome Engineering For Biofuel Production From Economically Relevant Algae, Sundram Kumar, Ankur J. Phillips, Bashir Adelodun, Francesco Di Maria, Suresh Sundaramurthy, Tarun Pal

Arusha Climate and Environmental Research Centre

The worldwide energy demand continues to rise, while reliance on fossil fuels remains unsustainable due to global warming, declining reserves and rising oil prices. This has intensified the search for renewable alternatives. Among these, microscopic algae have emerged as a promising feedstock for third-generation biofuels. Owing to their rapid biomass productivity, high lipid content and ability to generate diverse bioproducts, microalgae offer distinct advantages over terrestrial plants. Lipids derived from algae can be converted into biodiesel, while their biomass yields valuable co-products such as carbohydrates, proteins and polyunsatu- rated fatty acids (FAs). These attributes position algae as critical contributors to …

From Professional Learning To Classroom Impact: Continuous Professional Development And Student Learning Outcomes, Nyagwegwe Wango, Jane Rarieya

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

Purpose: This study examines how Teacher Continuous Professional Development (TCPD) initiatives implemented through the Strengthening Education Systems in East Africa (SESEA) and Foundation for Learning (F4L) projects influence teaching practices and foundational learning outcomes in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda.

Methodology: The study employed a mixed-methods research design using longitudinal data from classroom observations, teacher questionnaires, student assessments, and key informant interviews. Data were collected from trained teachers, teacher educators, school leaders, and learners across selected project regions to evaluate changes in instructional practices and learning outcomes.

Findings: The findings indicate that TCPD significantly improved teachers’ adoption of child-centered, play-based, …

Stress-Strain Behavior Of Saturated Clays From Vane Shear Test Results: A Numerical Approach, Gustavo Rodrigues De Avila Oliveira

Master’s Theses

The vane shear test (VST) is widely used to estimate the undrained shear strength of soft cohesive soils; however, it does not directly provide constitutive information such as the stress–strain response. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), a mesh-free numerical method, offers an attractive alternative for modeling the large deformations involved in the VST and extracting additional information from the test.

This study develops and calibrates a two-dimensional SPH model to simulate the field vane shear test and investigate the stress–strain behavior of soft soils. The VST was implemented within an SPH framework, while field and laboratory data were used to define …

Dokdo/Takeshima And Maritime Delimitation Between The Republic Of Korea And Japan: A Comment On Icj Dispute Resolution, Katherine Angell

Celebrating WCL Student Authors

The Republic of Korea (Korea) should agree to submit the issue of sovereignty over Dokdo/Takeshima and the issue of maritime delimitation in the East Sea/Sea of Japan to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) because the ICJ is likely to decide that Dokdo/Takeshima is Korean territory and the tensions in the East Sea/Sea of Japan can be resolved to allow further cooperation between the two nations. The ICJ is the primary avenue for peacefully resolving territorial and maritime delimitation disputes between nations, and the ICJ has developed a substantial body of case law analyzing these issues. The ICJ considers various …

The Garden Of The Machine: Simulated Wildness And Digital Domestication In American Literature 1970-2020, Cameron Netland

Doctoral Dissertations

Studying American literature produced during the Information Age, from 1970 to 2020, reveals an evolution of wild human resistance to the increasing powers of digital technology. These increasing powers include capturing attention, fostering dependence, and training behavior through a process I call digital domestication. Digital domestication distances people from wildness, and as William Cronon writes in “The Trouble with Wilderness”, “Learning to honor the wild—learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions.” (20). Through this framework of wildness, one reads characters in fictional narratives resisting non-coercive new technologies as …

The Intertemporal Law Doctrine’S Application To The Acquisition Of Colonies In The Americas, Kent Mcneil

All Papers

The intertemporal doctrine provides that international disputes have to be resolved in accordance with the international law that existed at the time the events giving rise to the dispute took place, not at the time the matter is adjudicated.1 It is thought to be impermissible to apply current standards to events that occurred in the past when different legal principles and rules were the norm. This doctrine applies as much to acquisition of colonies as to other international issues.2 So in order to determine whether a European nation acquired sovereignty over an overseas territory, it is necessary to determine and …

An Application Of Molecular Dynamics To Hed Plasma Physics: Point And Group Defect Diffusion In Coulomb Crystals, Levi Webb

Theses and Dissertations

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are used to explore the microscopic behaviors of complex systems that cannot be easily studied experimentally. In particular, the microphysics of high energy density (HED) astrophysical plasma environments remain inaccessible by modern experiment---even in laser facilities, these plasmas exist only on short timescales that do not lend easily to investigation. The diffusion of point and group defects through crystallized plasmas in the cores of white dwarfs and neutron star crusts, called Coulomb crystals, has potentially macroscopic implications for the evolution of these bodies. Thus, I employ the widely-used MD code LAMMPS to simulate small Coulomb crystal …

The Impact Of Sports Betting Legalization On Marital Status, Hosea Gitonga Njogu

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the causal Impact of sports gambling legalization on marital stability in the United States using data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASEC) and the American Community Survey (ACS) from 2013 to 2024. The analysis leverages variation in the staggered adoption of state-level sports gambling laws and applies two-way fixed effects, event-study, and the Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) difference-in-differences estimators, controlling for geographic and individual characteristics. Legalization increases divorce rates by 0.42 percentage points in the CPS and 0.51 percentage points in the ACS, corresponding to increases of 2.4% and 2.6%, or approximately …

Escaping The Crash? The Protective Power Of Liquidity In The Pakistan Stock Market, Sana Saleem, Muhammad Usman, Amna Rafique

The Indonesian Capital Market Review

This study investigates the effect of stock liquidity on the risk of stock price crashes, taking sample of non-financial firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange, from 2009 to 2024. A two-step system GMM estimation is applied to test the hypotheses. The results reveal that greater stock liquidity significantly reduces crash risk, whereas illiquidity amplifies it. Two underlying channels explain this relationship; first, liquidity strengthens block holders’ capacity to intervene, discouraging managerial tendencies to withhold adverse information, second, liquidity enhances price informativeness, limiting managerial discretion to manipulate prices through delayed disclosure of bad news. The findings imply that liquid stocks …

The Quantifiable Effects Of Constitutional Interpretation, Carter Ridgway

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Constitution of the United States is a document that has been for centuries the focus of academic inquiry and scrutiny from a range of differing methodological approaches. Among these factions vying for supremacy in the realm of constitutional interpretation have risen to predominant methodologies. On one side lies the originalist method which is formed around the core principle that the best way to protect the constitution and the rights granted therein is to interpret from the perspectives and values of those who constructed it. Alternatively, those who prefer the doctrine of living constitutionalism, sometimes referred to as constitutional realism, …

A Digitized History Of Undergraduate Student Government At The University Of Akron, Samuel Stillion

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The digitization process of a representative sample of the physical records of the University of Akron's Undergraduate Student Government held in the University Archives and Special Collections, including notes for future archive projects with the larger records of Undergraduate Student Government

04 Dielectrics I, Gerhard Müller

Electromagnetism (2026)

Part 4 of course materials for Electromagnetism taught by Gerhard Müller at the University of Rhode Island.

09 Electrodynamics Ii, Gerhard Müller

Electromagnetism (2026)

Part 9 of course materials for Electromagnetism taught by Gerhard Müller at the University of Rhode Island.

A Child On Stand: The Impact Of Experiencing Trauma On Children’S Testimonial Efficacy In Legal Proceedings, Morgan Sweger

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Children who are victims of physical, sexual, emotional, or verbal abuse are nearly always left deeply traumatized by such events. In extreme cases, abused children may be asked to testify against their abuser(s) in legal proceedings, recounting their trauma in front of a room full of strangers. For some, the trauma of abuse may influence a child’s ability to effectively recall and describe their experiences and for others, the process of participating in legal proceedings creates deeper wounds. Research has aimed to understand whether children lack the ability to contribute sufficient testimonies during investigations of abuse and how these investigations …

Ceramics And Trade In Mesoamerica: Identity And Resistance In The Maya Culture, Mason A. Swanson

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The region of Mesoamerica has been researched extensively by archaeologists over the past decades. There are numerous cultures and civilizations that occupied Mesoamerica over thousands of years. This paper will focus on the Maya, one of the most researched and examined of the cultures of Mesoamerica. By examining the ceramics and trade of the Maya one can reconstruct how the Maya identity was viewed in the past. Often the Maya are suggested to have experienced a collapse at the end of the Classic period around (AD 900). This, however, is an oversimplification of the events that occurred. The goal of …

Ohio Redistricting And The Meaning Of Fairness, Elena G. Klingler

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The failure of Ohio’s Issue 1, a redistricting reform amendment to the state constitution proposed in 2024, has been a topic of significant discussion. Though the controversial change to the language of the amendment made by the Ohio Ballot Board has often been identified as the consequential factor, the full implications of this change – why it was made, what it says about the meaning of ‘gerrymandering’ and ‘fairness,’ and why different groups define those words differently – have not been fully explored. This project will qualitatively assess whether the failure of Issue 1 was affected by definitional disagreements based …

The Paradox Of Matriliny: Cultural Authority And The Political Marginalization Of Women In Meghalaya, Kasturi Bharadwaj

Journal of International Women's Studies

The global discourse on gender equality gained momentum after the 1975 United Nations World Conference on Women. It continued through a series of international initiatives and culminated in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which emphasized women’s rights and their participation in political, social, and economic life. Despite these normative commitments at the international level, women’s political participation and representation within administrative and decision-making structures continue to be uneven, limited, and structurally constrained across many societies. In this context, the study investigates the political participation and representation of women in Meghalaya, a tribal state in Northeast India characterized by …

Private Prosecution And The State, Anna Arons

Faculty Publications

The modern family regulation system is paradigmatically public. In the common account, the state plays a monopolistic role. It decides which families to investigate and which to prosecute, which families to surveil and which to separate, and which services and benefits to provision for families entangled in the system. Yet, this public family regulation paradigm obscures the role of private prosecution. Nearly half of states permit private individuals to initiate dependency prosecutions. In these cases, private prosecutors allege that parents have neglected or abused their children and seek state intervention on the fundamental right to family integrity.

This Article surfaces …

The Right To Seek Joy, Tyler Rose Clemons

Faculty Publications

Within the past three years, roughly half of American states have restricted access to gender-affirming medical treatment for children. In this article, I argue that these bans violate transgender children’s right to liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. I do so by excavating the Framers’ understanding of liberty as the right to seek joy. Rooted in the philosophies of John Locke and Epicurus, the Framers understood liberty as the right to make important life decisions according to one’s subjective preferences without undue interference from the government. Based on this understanding, I develop a new framework for substantive …

Abuse Of Contract: A Proposal For A New Cause Of Action, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

With the growth of online commerce and the platform economy, many companies are including provisions in their online terms and conditions that extend far beyond what reasonable consumers would expect. Some terms and conditions purport to bind customers to separate contracts in future transactions that have little to do with the first contract. Other boilerplate purports to cover family members of the customer who created an account. Some retailers have argued that people shopping in their brick-and-mortar stores are subject to terms and conditions because those shoppers had at some point previously created an online account. For example, Disney argued …

Style And Substance: A Review Of Jill Barton's The Supreme Guide To Writing, Christina Frohock

Articles

No abstract provided.

Dysregulation Of Alternative Splicing Patterns In The Ovaries Of Reproductively Aged Mice, Adnan T. Alsamaraee, Vanessa L. Correll, Julius O. Nyalwidhe, Pavla Brachova, Nehemiah S. Alvarez

Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences Faculty Publications

Female reproductive aging is characterized by progressive deterioration of ovarian function, yet the molecular mechanisms driving these changes remain incompletely understood. Here, we used long-read direct RNA-sequencing to map transcript isoform changes in mouse ovaries across reproductive age. Comparing young and aged mice after controlled gonadotropin stimulation, we identified widespread alternative splicing changes, including shifts in exon usage, splice site selection, and transcript boundaries. Aged ovaries exhibited increased isoform diversity, favoring distal start and end sites, and a significant rise in exon skipping and intron retention events. Many of these age-biased splicing events altered open reading frames, introduced premature stop …

Presidential Slaves: The Story Of Black People In The Lives Of Antebellum U.S. Presidents, Nika Davis

History Dissertations

The historical narrative about American slavery included many topics such as the African slave trade, the Middle Passage, slave culture, rebellions, religion, and abolition.  This study revealed more information to be examined in the record of American slavery relating to the presidents of the United States and their enslaved laborers.  This oversight proved prevalent during the years leading to the American Civil War from 1820-1860.  Therefore, this dissertation focused upon the enslaved and free Black people who intersected with the presidents and their friends, political acquaintances, and family.  By studying their lives, this dissertation revealed that the slaves associated with …

Perceptions Of Prek-Eighth Grade School And District Administrators On The English Language Learner Reclassification Criteria, Impacting Long-Term English Learners, Elma Adelina Rodriguez

Doctor of Education (EdD)

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of school and district administrators regarding English Language Learner (ELL) criteria that affect the academic trajectories of Long-Term English Learners (LTELs). ELL criteria differ across states and are used to demonstrate not only English language proficiency but also ELL students' academic performance. While English-only students are not required to demonstrate their academic use of English, ELL students are required to demonstrate English-language academic reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills to be reclassified as English proficient. If ELL students remain classified as ELL for multiple years, they are labeled as LTEL. …

Accountability For Lawyers And Lawyer-Bashers: Reflections On Wendel's Canceling Lawyers, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article is part of a symposium on W. Bradley Wendel’s Canceling Lawyers: Case Studies of Accountability, Toleration, and Regret. I agree with Wendel’s two fundamental claims: first, and contrary to the reigning conception, lawyers can be held accountable for choosing to represent a particular client (assuming they have a choice), and therefore that they cannot use their professional role as a “magic shield or force field” (Wendel’s term) to deflect all criticism. Second, however, there is also an ethics of blaming, and critics who blame lawyers irresponsibly can themselves be blamed. One of Wendel’s examples is lawyers who …