Digital Commons Network^™

Global Tax Decluttering, Shu-Yi Oei, Diane M. Ring

UC Law Journal

Major global players—most prominently the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union—have recently begun advocating that countries “declutter” their tax systems to tidy up, repeal, or eliminate pre-existing domestic anti-abuse tax rules. The reasoning is that these country-level rules are now duplicative or burdensome in light of a new global tax agreement spearheaded by the OECD and G20 and multilaterally agreed upon in 2021 by over 140 countries. Yet, this new multilateral regime is still in the process of being rolled out and is entirely untested.

In this Article, we examine this recently emergent “tax decluttering movement” …

Responsive Rigor And Strategic Care: Faculty Praxis For Holistic Student Success In The Community College, Jennifer Kelley

Library Scholarship

This qualitative study examines how community college faculty conceptualize, communicate, and enact academic rigor and care in their teaching practice. While post-pandemic debates have positioned rigor and care as opposing forces—evident in the "Rigor Wars" that framed care as performative laxity and rigor as gatekeeping—community college faculty successfully integrate these practices to support holistic student success. This research addresses critical gaps in higher education scholarship, which has studied rigor and care separately, focused primarily on four-year institutions, and overlooked faculty perspectives on how integration occurs in practice. Drawing on a single-case study of 38 faculty members at a large Midwestern …

Collaboration And Betrayal: Pius Xi And A Changing World, Nathan B. Higgins

Honors Scholar Theses

From the negotiations over the 1929 Lateran Accords to the start of World War II in 1939, the Holy See delicately navigated a turbulent diplomatic period. In the preceding century, the Catholic Church saw much of its temporal power decline as European states became more secular, and the pope lost the Papal States during the Risorgimento. Amid the decline in station, the rise of atheistic communism in Russia, Mexico, and Spain posed an existential to the Church, which Pope Pius XI would challenge during his pontificate. To confront this threat, he would work alongside Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany …

Ai-Assisted Frame Selection For Sports Photography Using Computer Vision And Multi-Modal Image Metrics, Sahana Ganesh

Honors Scholar Theses

This project focuses on the design and development of an AI-assisted frame selection system that automatically analyzes sequences of sports images and ranks frames based on overall photographic and contextual value. Additionally, we will focus on providing insights into the Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence techniques used to build it.

The application utilizes computer vision and machine learning techniques to evaluate multiple dimensions of image quality and content. These include technical image quality metrics such as sharpness, motion blur, and exposure; compositional metrics such as subject placement and visual balance; and semantic understanding through detection of players, ball location, pose, …

Streamlining Client Information For Post-Conviction Relief In Monterey County, Selena Lopez Arizmendi

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This capstone project addresses barriers to record clearing services that impact recidivism and reentry outcomes in California. Individuals with criminal records often face challenges in securing employment, housing, and stability, increasing the likelihood of continued justice system involvement. The Clean Slate Program at the Monterey County Public Defender’s Office provides post-conviction relief services to help reduce these barriers. Although Proposition 47 funding ended in February 2026, program services have continued. This project identified a need for a standardized, client-friendly informational resource, as key information has historically been communicated verbally, limiting understanding and retention. To address this gap, a concise Clean …

Understanding Challenges Faced By Refugee Women And Women With Experiences Of Forced Migration In Entrepreneurship In The Midwest Region Of The United States, Ritu Jadwani

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The labor market participation of refugee women was only 6%. The United States had the maximum employment rate for the refugee women population, which was 40%, as compared to 6% in Germany, Lebanon, and Jordan (Kabir & Klugman, 2019). Refugee women faced many challenges in labor force participation and especially in entrepreneurship. As demonstrated by Desai, Naude, and Stel (2020), refugees faced challenges like cultural integration, language barriers, level of education, and acceptance of education merits. This eventually led to disparities in income generation. Thus, many either remained in low-paying jobs or started their own business (Desai et al., 2020). …

Cynthia Alkon, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty CVs

No abstract provided.

Cynthia Burress, Cynthia M. Burress

Faculty CVs

No abstract provided.

Lisa A. Goodman, Lisa A. Goodman

Faculty CVs

No abstract provided.

William M. Sage, William M. Sage

Faculty CVs

No abstract provided.

Insimul: A Hybrid Ai System For Social Immersion, Daniel Dekerlegand

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Creating believable, socially intelligent virtual characters that are culturally and historically grounded requires more than any single artificial intelligence paradigm can provide. Symbolic social physics systems such as Ensemble offer interpretable, human-authored representations of social norms and relationships but produce linguistically stilted interaction. Statistical approaches---particularly large language models---generate fluent dialogue but lack behavioral coherence and cultural grounding. Virtual reality provides embodied presence that transforms abstract social computation into experiential engagement but contributes no social intelligence of its own. This dissertation argues that the integration of all three technologies---symbolic AI, statistical AI, and virtual reality---is necessary for producing socially coherent, linguistically …

Understanding The Lived Experiences Of Title Ix Coordinators At Higher Education Institutions In Louisiana, Amanda Robbins

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Higher education professionals employed as Title IX Coordinators in Louisiana are tasked with managing their university’s response to sexual misconduct occurring within their campus community. The role’s responsibilities have increased with guidance from every presidential administration since 2014 and often include case management, training of investigators, hearing board members, and mandated reporters as well as completing reports, community education and more (U.S. Department of Education, 2020; Exec. Order No 14021). Scholarly research over the past two decades has informed a body of literature about the experiences of survivors (Baker et al, 2016; Bolger, 2016), the experiences of the accused (Cruz, …

Unveiling Embodied White Supremacy: Therapists’ Experiences And Its Imprint On Therapeutic Relationships In Dance/Movement Therapy, Melody E. Gamba

Counseling and Psychology Dissertations

This qualitative, arts-informed research study explored how White-identifying dance/movement therapists experience and articulate their awareness of embodied White supremacy within therapeutic relationships. Grounded in critical race theory, relational-cultural theory, and embodied critical transformation theory, the study addressed a gap in dance/movement therapy literature concerning how White supremacy is not only cognitively understood, but also somatically felt, relationally enacted, and professionally navigated. The purpose of the study was to understand how White-identifying dance/movement therapists perceive, kinesthetically experience, and make meaning of embodied White supremacy in therapeutic practice, and to explore how these embodied experiences influence therapeutic presence, attunement, and the potential …

From Data Digitization To Personalized Care: Deep Learning And Decision Analytics In Healthcare Systems, Ahla Ko

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation traces a progression from foundational data infrastructure to individualized clinical decision-making, developing and evaluating three computational frameworks that advance healthcare efficiency and personalization through deep learning and decision analytics. The first study presents an end-to-end pipeline for automated recognition of handwritten medical forms, addressing persistent challenges in health data digitization. Integrating a YOLO-based field detection model, a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) for text transcription, and a confidence-based human-in-the-loop quality assurance framework, the system achieved 99.75\% Exact Match Accuracy and a 0.13\% Character Error Rate on medical forms collected from a tuberculosis research project in Moldova. A GPU-accelerated …

Training With Orthographic Stress And Rhythm Markers Improves Adult Readers’ Prosodic Sensitivity, Jennifer Gross, Michelle Roldan, Tanner Kiessel, Madison Esselink, Lucretia Dunlap

Peer Reviewed Articles

Across alphabetic writing systems, orthographies provide only partial cues to prosody, making prosodic sensitivity an important component of skilled reading. In English, readers must infer lexical stress and rhythm from opaque spelling patterns while silently constructing an inner voice. Two independent replications of the same randomized active control experiment (N=528 undergraduates) evaluated an orthographic prosody training in which passages were annotated with stress and rhythm markers and practiced with feedback, after which cues were reduced to a single marker to evaluate transfer. Prosodic sensitivity was measured using a forced-choice meter judgment task in which readers selected the metrically …

Ncaa Revenue Sharing: Implications For University Financial Reporting And Sustainability, Cal Dunham

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

The NCAA's House v. NCAA settlement, finalized in June 2025, allowed Division I universities to directly share athletic revenue with student-athletes for the first time, resulting in up to $20.5 million in new annual costs per institution. This thesis explores how this model affects the athletic department's financial reporting and long-term sustainability. Using historical financial data, legal documents from the first year of revenue-sharing litigation, and relevant accounting standards, it addresses three key questions: how revenue-sharing obligations should be recognized and disclosed under nonprofit standards, how breach-of-contract disputes influence financial reporting obligations, and whether the model is sustainable across different …

The Final Edit: Strategies For Legislative Success Of The Press Act And Strengthening The Protections Of Freedom Of The Press, Tess Theisen

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

Intellectual Property Is A Drag [Queen], Brianna Pruitt

Barry Law Review

No abstract provided.

2026 Spring Commencement Program, The University Of West Alabama

Commencement Programs

No abstract provided.

The Dual Erosion Of Political Identity: Nationalism And Cosmopolitianism In Transition, Jaylen Turner

Theses & ETDs

This thesis examines how nationalism and cosmopolitanism have changed as political identities under intensified globalization, treating them not as opposites but as overlapping, variably activated networks of belonging. Drawing on constructivist theory and debates on universalism, it analyzes World Values Survey data from Waves 5–7 (2005–2022) using repeated-measures ANOVAs on indicators such as national pride, willingness to fight for one’s country, national-citizenship identification, immigration attitudes, world-citizen identification, cross-national trust, and confidence in the United Nations. The findings show a dual erosion of both national and world-citizen identifications in the late 2010s and early 2020s, alongside stable or improving pragmatic orientations …

Inflation Determinants In Brazil, Mariana Andrade Da Rocha Saba

Theses & ETDs

This thesis examines the determinants of Brazilian inflation in the context of demand-pull and cost-push dynamics. The study aims to assess whether inflation in Brazil is primarily driven by demand-side pressures, supply-side factors, or a combination of both. For the empirical analysis, three ARDL models are estimated using quarterly data from 2006 to 2025. The first model includes only demand-side variables, the second focuses on supply-side variables, and the third incorporates both demand and supply factors. The results indicate that inflation in Brazil cannot be fully explained by either demand or cost pressures in isolation; rather, it arises from the …

Enhancing Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Efficiency Through Thin-Layer Chromatographic Fractionation Of Calathea Kennedy Dyes, Anthony Nong

Theses & ETDs

Natural Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (NDSSCs) derived from various plant sources have garnered attention for their simple, cost-effective, and eco-friendly extraction methods, which are more scalable than those of their synthetic counterparts, which often utilize rare or toxic inorganic metals. NDSSCs utilize the photosynthetic properties of the plant extracts to generate electricity. Raw Delonix regia flower pigments are rich in carotenoids, anthocyanins, and polyphenols. However, the direct use of the flower extract that contains so many pigments could reduce the capacity of the dye molecules to bind with TiO2 due to the aggregation of pigments. Calathea Kennedy extracts are also …

The Integrity Paradox: Reflections On Epistemic Substitution And The Ethical Failure Of Plagiarism Detection Systems, Elliott Ostler, Jeanne Surface

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

This article critiques the ethical authority granted to AI plagiarism detection systems, using humor to expose a serious contradiction in these algorithms. Through a case in which an original ethics manuscript is labeled 40.7% “non-original,” the authors argue that similarity scores are mistaken for judgments of misconduct. They introduce the concept of “epistemic substitution” to describe how tools that both judge originality and offer AI rewrites replace human authorship while mandating human accountability. The paper contends that this collapse of roles undermines scholarly integrity, conflates disciplinary fluency with plagiarism, and shifts ethical responsibility from humans to procedures. The authors call …

Promises, Pitfalls, And Paths Forward For The Pediatric Research Equity Act., Alexa L. Pagano, Danielle J. Green, Jennifer Goldman, Anjali Deshmukh

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

IMPORTANCE: Since its enactment in 2003, the Pediatric Research Equity Act (PREA) has significantly increased the number of pediatric drug studies performed and expanded pediatric drug labeling. Despite these advancements, many drugs used in children still lack pediatric-specific US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeling, even when pediatric studies are required by law. Recent legislative changes strengthened the FDA's enforcement authority over PREA. As these changes are implemented, persistent gaps in pediatric drug development warrant examination. Addressing these gaps may help ensure that children are systematically included in clinical research and that medications used in children are supported by rigorous …

Calibration Refinement Of Aashto Paveme For Kentucky Asphalt Overlays, Clayton S. Cook, Kean H. Ashurst Jr., Clark Graves

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) uses AASHTOWare’s Pavement ME Design Version 3.0 (PaveME) to develop mechanistic-empirical designs for new and reconstructed pavements. Transfer functions used for estimating pavement distress in PaveME rely on national calibration values derived from the Long-Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database. However, these often fail to reflect Kentucky’s local conditions, materials, and practices. To address this issue, Kentucky Transportation Center (KTC) researchers completed local calibrations for several key transfer functions (rutting, reflective fatigue cracking, and roughness (IRI)) to improve the predictive accuracy of and reduce bias in pavement performance models developed for rehabilitation projects that involve placing …

A Covalent Allosteric Molecular Glue Suppresses Nrf2-Dependent Cancer Growth, Nilotpal Roy, Ilah Bok, Harit Panda, Dhaval P Bhatt, Emily M Wilkerson, Soma Saeidi, Paul Zolkind, Michael B Major, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

UNLABELLED: The NRF2 transcription factor is constitutively active in cancer, in which it functions to maintain oxidative homeostasis and reprogram cellular metabolism. NRF2-active tumors exhibit NRF2 dependency and resistance to chemotherapy/radiotherapy (RT). In this study, we characterize VVD-065, a first-in-class NRF2 inhibitor that acts via an unprecedented allosteric molecular glue mechanism. In the absence of stress or mutation, NRF2 is rapidly degraded by the Kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (KEAP1)-cullin3 (CUL3) ubiquitin-ligase complex. VVD-065 specifically and covalently engages Cys151 on KEAP1, which in turn promotes KEAP1-CUL3 complex formation, leading to enhancement of NRF2 degradation. Previously reported Cys151-directed compounds decrease KEAP1-CUL3 interactions …

Antidistillation Sampling For Classification Models, Khawaja Abaid Ullah

Theses

Knowledge distillation enables adversaries to replicate the functionality of proprietary machine learning models by querying their APIs and training surrogate student models on the returned soft-label distributions. Antidistillation Sampling (ADS), recently proposed for large language models, perturbs the output distribution of a teacher model at inference time to degrade the quality of the resulting distilled model while preserving utility for legitimate users. We adapt ADS to the supervised classification setting and identify a structural obstacle to its direct transfer: the high-confidence, near-one-hot output distributions characteristic of well-trained classifiers leave insufficient probability mass on non-target classes for the additive penalty to …

The Efficacy Of Ethical Data: An Analytical Study By, Lamar Gebara

Theses

As artificial intelligence and machine learning models become increasingly embedded in decision-making systems across industries, questions about the ethical sourcing of data have grown more pressing; model performance relies heavily on vast, diverse datasets, many of which are harvested without consent, transparency, or equitable representation. This study aims to compare analytics outcomes (accuracy, bias, fairness, and explainability) between ethically sourced and unethically sourced datasets. Using CRISP-DM methodology, the study will develop matched classification models on both dataset types, evaluate their performance and fairness using open-source tools such as Fairlearn and AIF360, and assess broader implications for trust, accountability, and regulatory …

Bio-Based Materials In Adaptive Reuse: Assessing Durability, Disassembly, And Reuse Potential, Gloria Barry

Theses

This study evaluates the performance of bio-based and conventional wall assemblies in relation to their ability to be disassembled and reused after exposure to environmental stress. While durability is often prioritized in construction, this research examines whether materials that resist change are also those most suitable for reuse. Four wall assembly types, two conventional (CMU with EPS insulation) and two bio-based (compressed earth blocks with hemp insulation), were constructed, each with two specimens to establish control and test conditions, using different connection strategies, including 1/2-inch mortared systems and a combination of thin mortar-slip joints with mechanical fasteners. Assemblies were subjected …

Perceptual Evaluation Of Deep Learning Models For Hdr Reconstruction Under Severe Overexposure, Alireza Rabbanifar

Theses

Overexposure in imaging systems leads to irreversible loss of scene information due to sensor saturation, resulting in degraded perceptual quality and limited dynamic range. While recent deep learning approaches have shown promising results in correcting mild to moderate overexposure, their performance under severe overexposure and their perceptual quality in HDR image generation remain less understood. In this work, a comparative evaluation of four representative models—Multi-Scale Exposure Correction (MSEC), Illumination-Adaptive Transformer (IAT), LEDiff, and X2HDR—is conducted across multiple scenes and levels of overexposure, with particular emphasis on severe overexposure conditions. The evaluation focuses on the perceptual quality of the reconstructed HDR …