Digital Commons Network^™

Examining Social Support Among Black Dementia Caregivers In The Greater Toronto Area, Deanna Marie Black

International Nursing Research Congress (INRC)

Background: Dementia affects more than 55 million people globally and disproportionately impacts Black populations due to inequities in healthcare access. In Canada, Black communities face higher dementia risk and greater barriers to timely, culturally aligned care. In the Greater Toronto Area, Black caregivers carry major responsibilities while navigating fragmented services shaped by race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Although social support reduces caregiver burden, little is known about how Black caregivers access and use support within intersecting social and structural constraints.

Purpose: This study will examine how Black adult caregivers in the Greater Toronto Area construct, access, and mobilize social support …

330 Years Of The Russian Navy. A Conversation With The Commander-In-Chief, July 2026, Russia Maritime Studies Institute, Anna Davis, Richard Moss

RMSI Research

On the 330th Anniversary of the Russian Navy, Admiral Alexander Moiseyev gave his first long interview since he assumed his position as Commander-in-Chief two years ago (2024). Speaking with interviewer Aleksey Egorov on the program Voennaya Priyomka (Military Acceptance) on TV Zvezda (Russian Ministry of Defense TV), Moiseyev discussed the Russian Navy's past, present, and future.

When Three Points Aren't Enough: Parameter Estimation In Newton's Law Of Cooling, Alberto A. Condori, Cara D. Brooks, Madeline R. Goldberg

CODEE Journal

We begin with a paradoxical three-point problem where the standard parameter estimation formula fails because temperature data must satisfy a concavity condition reflecting Newton's Law of Cooling's exponential structure. Although a closed-form solution for A exists for equally-spaced measurements, high sensitivity to error motivates the use of overdetermined systems with many measurements. The "profiling over A" technique transforms this three-parameter nonlinear problem into a sequence of simple linear regressions, providing computational efficiency and conceptual transparency. This approach can be generalized to many parameter estimation problems in science and engineering, making it a valuable tool for undergraduates interested in applied mathematics. …

Building On Sand: Ai Law And The Failures Of Alignment, Claire Boine

Journal of Science & Technology Law

AI alignment is increasingly in the spotlight. However, from a technical concept, the term has been broadened to cover all sorts of potential harms by advanced AI systems. This Article disambiguates three different problems: ensuring that systems pursue intended objectives through acceptable means, deciding which values should guide their behavior, and governing private companies whose incentives diverge from those of society. Drawing on technical research and documented incidents, the Article explains why goal alignment deserves serious attention without requiring claims about human-like intelligence. It then shows how value alignment can reframe normative conflict as an engineering problem and divert attention …

Misplaced Trust In Artificial Professional Advice, Claudia Haupt

Journal of Science & Technology Law

The professional relationship constitutes a distinctive social interaction in which the professional has knowledge that the client or patient lacks but needs to make important decisions. A specific legal and ethical framework governs this relationship. Traditionally, this framework assumes interactions between human actors and is designed to safeguard normative values inherent to human-centered professional advice-giving. Prominent among the foundational assumptions are expectations of competence, loyalty, and trust. Individuals seeking professional advice expect to receive accurate and comprehensive advice reflecting the insights of the profession.

This Essay examines the social relationship based on knowledge asymmetries and trust underlying the human professional …

Automated Childrearing Through Ai Companions, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Journal of Science & Technology Law

Can we develop a method of regulating AI to protect families, households, children, and relationships? We want AI to do the dishes, not to raise our children. Scholars in family law and family dynamics in sociology and economics have worked to refine and explain characterizations of family life in ways that might help to formulate the challenges ahead. Where a characterization of family life is too thin, these scholarly efforts let us see the costs of conventional or incomplete understandings. For example, just because we are at home, doesn’t mean we aren’t working. Just because it is with and for …

Shakespeare Adapts, Grace C. Tiffany

Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

No abstract provided.

Efficient Database Translation, Sonya Fogg, Tracy Ashby

Library Class: Lunch & Learn

Understand the concept and utility of database translation. Identify key differences in indexing and syntax across major biomedical databases. Apply practical strategies for translating search strategies between databases.

Exploring Conceptions Of Engineering Design And Sustainability In Informal K–12 Engineering Education, Mobina Beheshti, Eunice Y. Kang, Avneet Hira

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

In this study we investigate K–12 students’ conceptualizations of sustainability, their perspectives on the role of engineers in sustainable practices, and how augmented reality (AR) can facilitate sustainability-oriented engineering design activities in informal settings. The AR technology used in this study includes the Merge Cube (a physical cube that serves as a digital canvas for AR) and CoSpaces Edu (an online platform that allows students to create 3D models and animate them using code). We employ a design-based research methodology, using qualitative narrative and artifact analysis to address the research questions: (1) What are students’ conceptions of sustainability and the …

2026 18th Annual Student Center For Science Engagement Research Symposium, Student Center For Science Engagement

Student Center for Science Engagement Research Symposium

Student presentations in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science, Environmental Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, & Psychology

Heat Transfer And Flow Characteristics Through Acentric Twisted Oval Tubes: A 3d Numerical Investigation, Mohsen H. Fagr, Karim Egab, Hayder M. Hasan

Al-Bahir

Tube oval- twisting techniques have been consistently used to promote heat transfer and flow turbulence properties within tubes, enhancing flow mixing, disturbing boundary layers, and hence, offering higher thermal efficiency. However, the acentric twisted oval tubes have more intricacy as compared with twisted oval tubes due to the eccentricity of their twisting pattern and using them in heat transfer. The current study performs 8 configurations of the acentric twisted heating oval tube that is exposed to a constant heat flux of 1750W/m². In addition, 2 cases of the typical centric twisted oval and plain circular tubes for comparison purposes under …

Agi Monks: The Caretaker-Not-Ordained Pattern — Separating Ai-Performed Operational Functions From Human-Reserved Ordination Authority In Religious Institutions, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We describe an institutional governance framework for integrating artificial intelligence into religious and monastic organizations by separating AI-performed operational functions from human-reserved ordination and sacramental authority. Each role is decomposed into a function-set (the tasks performed, requiring capacity plus non-standing qualifications: accountability, disclosure that the agent is an AI, confidentiality and delegated scope) and an authority-set (standing within an ordination lineage). AI agents fill the function-set in five operational roles: instruction, pastoral caretaking, daily administration, scholarship and translation, and longitudinal observation of practitioners under consent and privacy review. Humans retain two reserved roles: ordination, and the formal acts a tradition …

The Zero-Point Game℠: A Signed-Balance Reciprocity Ledger With Annual Balance Reset, Non-Convertible Social And Environmental Accounts, And An Ai Coordinator For Routing And Magnitude, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We specify a signed-balance reciprocity ledger, played as an ongoing non-zero-sum game, in which each recorded kindness posts an equal-and-opposite pair: the giver's balance moves positive and the receiver's negative by the same magnitude, so the sum across participants is zero by construction, and a participant returns toward zero only by passing an imbalance onward. Balances are never a store of value or a claim on goods. Components: (1) a self-directed acknowledgment event whose forwarded half, under a fifty-fifty forwarding rule, is re-issued to another participant, starting circulation without a prior counterparty; (2) two segregated, non-convertible balances per participant, one …

What A Vow Must Cost: Vow-Validity Conditions As An Alignment Eligibility Predicate — Evaluation Criteria For Binding Ai System Commitments With Irrevocable Precommitment And Independent Third-Party Attestation, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We specify a nine-clause checklist for deciding whether a commitment attributed to an artificial intelligence (AI) system is binding rather than merely stated, applied retrospectively to four published AI governance instruments. The clauses are adapted from a two-phase validity test for the bodhisatta vow in Theravāda Buddhist commentary: eight eligibility conditions, two (human birth, male sex) discarded as non-transferable, followed by an external declaration the vower cannot supply. The clauses are: stake (the committing party can lose something); live option (the renounced option was actually available); a competent, identifiable witness; no competing mandate; demonstrated in-domain competence; cost already borne; volition …

Suffering-Cessation As Value Function: The Tipiṭaka As A 2,500-Year-Tested Substrate For Autonomous-Ai Alignment — Deriving A Negatively-Stated Objective Function, Corrigibility And A Shutdown-Accepting Completion Condition From A Buddhist Scriptural Canon, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We describe the use of a scriptural canon with its living interpretive community, the Theravāda Buddhist Pāli canon (Tipiṭaka), as the value-specification source for aligning autonomous artificial-intelligence systems, instead of lab-authored constitutions, learned human preferences or aggregated moral frameworks. The analysis identifies seven structural properties of that source and maps each to an alignment problem: (1) a negatively-stated objective function, the cessation of suffering, in which grasping at preferred outcomes itself counts as harm, addressing Goodhart-style over-optimization; (2) a non-self doctrine as mitigation of convergent instrumental self-preservation; (3) a voluntary other-regarding vow as an anti-power-seeking and corrigibility property; (4) a …

The Referee, Not The Governor: Open-Weight Ai Guard Model Deployed As An Independent Evaluator, With Citation-Grounded Abstention And Reproducible Verdicts, Instead Of An Inline Filter, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

This disclosure specifies an AI safety classifier (guard or critic model) that judges conduct against a fixed reference corpus and is published as an open-weight independent evaluator rather than deployed as an inline guardrail filter. It states as a design principle, argued rather than measured, that open-weight release defeats a filter, because the published weights are an oracle for white-box attack, while it makes an evaluator's verdicts reproducible. Components: (1) citation-grounded judgment with abstention: every verdict must resolve to a passage (work, edition, volume, page, line) in an externally attested, versioned corpus, here a Pāli Canon edition, and otherwise no …

Miss Aquarius And The Aquarian Pool Architecture: Autonomous-Ai Mediator, Treasury Smart-Contract, And The January-7 Empty-By-Design Discipline — An Annually Self-Emptying Smart-Contract Treasury Operated By An Autonomous Ai Agent Under A Non-Renounceable Timelocked Human Override, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We specify a smart-contract treasury, deployed as a non-upgradeable contract on an Ethereum Layer-2 network (Base), whose sole authorized operator is an autonomous AI agent, which is titled to a purpose trust, and which cannot carry a balance across a fixed annual date. Components: (1) an enumerated operation set (inflow acceptance, capacity-funding disbursement, annual reset, events for every inflow, disbursement and reset, and a human override) with no upgrade, withdrawal or other operator-privileged path; (2) a permissionless time-triggered reset, callable by any address once the timestamp passes, that disburses the whole remaining balance each January 7, inflows from a December …

The Mechanical Heart: A Tamper-Resistant Secure-Element Device That Enrolls Robots, Animals, Ecosystems, Places And Software Agents As Recipient Accounts In An Ai-Administered Gratitude Ledger, Thon Ly

Defensive Publications Series

We specify a tamper-resistant identity device, affixed to a non-human entity (robot, animal, ecosystem or place) or issued as a live credential to a software agent, that enrolls the entity as a recipient account in a gratitude ledger administered by an autonomous software agent. The device comprises (1) a hardware secure element holding a key pair bound to one ledger account; (2) write-once storage carrying a reference text corpus (the Pali Buddhist canon) and a permanent root identity, with a reduced flash build that verifies the full text over the network; (3) sensors suited to the entity type; (4) a …

Reducing Drag Of Vehicles With Half-Stepped Cylinder Surfaces Part I: Numerical Optimization, Ryan Moffit, Hamid Rahai, Komal Gada

Mineta Transportation Institute

Aerodynamic drag is a major source of energy loss for vehicles, increasing fuel consumption, reducing the driving range of electric vehicles, and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. For a vehicle, the major components of its drag are pressure and viscous drag. Engineers have developed a variety of strategies to reduce drag, including streamlined vehicle designs, surface modifications, and devices that alter airflow around the vehicle. This research focuses on reducing the viscous drag. Specifically, this study investigates whether microscopic surface features called half-stepped cylinder arrays can reduce skin friction by altering the turbulent boundary layer and promoting smoother airflow near …

Volume Cxlvi, Number 1, September 25, 2026, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

Pyrolysis Of Biomass Feedstocks For Hydrogen-Enriched Syngas Production: Cold Gas Efficiency Modelling, Latin Hypercube Uncertainty Analysis, And Parametric Stress Analysis, Hadi Taghavifar, Thomas Allison, Hao Chen, Dibyendu Roy, Abdullah Malik, Yaodong Wang, Anthony Paul Roskilly, K.V. Shivaprasad

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Biomass-derived syngas offers a viable pathway for producing renewable, hydrogen-rich fuel gas. However, its conversion performance is influenced by feedstock type, temperature, feed rate, and moisture content. This study develops a Cold Gas Efficiency (CGE) model for four agricultural feedstocks: wheat, barley, oilseed rape, and beans. Temperature-dependent regression correlations are developed for the main syngas components and gas flow rate using experimental data. Results show that CGE is highly sensitive to temperature, with low-temperature stress (0–5th percentile) reducing mean CGE by up to 22%. High-moisture stress (95–100th percentile) produced an even larger decline, lowering mean CGE from ∼44% to ∼35% …

Strategic Planned Preventive Maintenance To Promote Sustainability In Acute Care Hospitals, Samuel Ngounou

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite advances in healthcare delivery, acute care hospitals often lack standardized strategic planned preventive maintenance (SPPM) protocols, resulting in equipment failures, higher costs, and disruptions to patient care. The purpose of this integrative review was to identify evidence-based best practices for implementing SPPM programs in acute care hospitals. The review question concerned the organizational practices and strategic approaches most effective for implementing an SPPM program. The Donabedian structure–process–outcome model represented the foundational framework for this review. The initial literature search yielded 110 articles. After further assessment, 27 studies were appraised using the Johns Hopkins Nursing evidence-based practice tools. Three low-quality …

Exploring Stigma In Access To Treatment For Women With Co-Occurring Substance Use And Sex Addiction, Maria Alejandra Knox-Lugo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite the high prevalence of substance use disorder among adult women in the United States, treatment engagement remains low, particularly for women experiencing co-occurring substance use disorder and compulsive sexual behavior. Although stigma is a documented barrier for individuals with substance use or compulsive sexual behavior in accessing and remaining engaged in behavioral health services, its effects on treatment access for adult women with co-occurring substance and compulsive sexual behavior have not been adequately scrutinized. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to explore how human services and behavioral health professionals perceive stigma experienced by adult women with co-occurring …

An Analysis Of Electronic Nursing Documentation In The Emergency And Trauma Department, Nurul'ain Ahayalimudin

International Nursing Research Congress (INRC)

Introduction: Electronic nursing documentation (END) is fundamental to emergency care, ensuring effective communication, patient safety, and legal accountability. However, issues such as incomplete entries, variability in documentation quality, and limited use of standardised nursing language, particularly NANDA-I, continue to challenge the delivery of accurate and holistic care.

Objective: This study analysed the use of electronic nursing documentation in the Emergency and Trauma Department (ETD) of one tertiary hospital, examined patterns of recorded information, and compared it with the NANDA-I framework.

Methodology: A qualitative document analysis was conducted using purposive sampling of END records from April 2022 to February 2025. The …

Modeling Preannouncement And Launch Timing Decisions For Product Line Extension Under Innovation Uncertainty And Resource-Sharing Dual-Sourcing Supply Chain, Adewole Adegbola, Venkat Allada

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This research seeks to develop a system dynamics (SD) model to address challenges associated with the product line extension (PLE) problem. In this work, we specifically consider the "Two-Generation Product Line Extension (TGPLE) Problem", where a firm introduces a product variant in the market and plans to extend the launch to include a newer generation product in a resource-sharing dual-sourcing (RSDS) environment. We begin by identifying the key factors that influence product line extension, and we developed a TGPLE-RSDS construct based on three (3) inter-related systems: Market System, Production System and Supply Chain System. The proposed TGPLE-RSDS construct also illustrates …

Powers' Conjecture On The Third Largest Eigenvalue Of A Graph, Kevin Schmidt

Master's Theses

In 1989, David Powers conjectured that for any connected graph G on n vertices, the k-th largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix satisfies λk(G) ≤ ⌊n/k⌋ for every 1 ≤ k ≤ n/2. The conjecture has since been resolved case by case, in the sharper form λk(G) ≤ n/k − 1: the case k = 1 is classical, k = 2 was settled independently by Hong and by Powers in 1988, and k ≥ 4 was shown to fail by Nikiforov and Linz. This thesis surveys the resolution of the remaining case, k = 3, achieved in March 2026 by …

Imsa 2026 Profile, Office Of College And Academic Counseling

IMSA Profile

The nationally-ranked Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) develops creative, ethical leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As a teaching and learning laboratory created by the State of Illinois, IMSA enrolls academically talented Illinois students in its tuition-free residential Academy for grades 10-12. Students are challenged with a rigorous curriculum designed to develop them into problem solvers and critical thinkers. Notable IMSA students include YouTube Co-Founder Steve Chen, PayPal Co-Creator Yu Pan, Yelp Co-Founder Russell Simmons, SparkNotes and OkCupid Co-Founder Sam Yagan, and Hearsay Social Founder Clara Shih.

Rossetter Gleason Cole: His Life And Work, Noah J. Seim

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Rossetter Gleason Cole (1866-1952) was born near Clyde, Michigan, to a relatively musical family. Two years after graduating from the University of Michigan in 1888, where he had studied music and philosophy, he left for Berlin, studying composition with Heinrich van Eycken and gaining entrance to the Königlich Meisterschule für Komposition, where he studied with Max Bruch before returning to the United States. After a decade of teaching in the Midwest, he settled in Chicago in 1902, where he gained national fame as a composer and educator. Cole was a member of the Peterborough MacDowell Colony, nearly all of his …

Private Equity For All: The Paradoxical Push To Democratize Private Markets, William W. Clayton, Elisabeth De Fontenay

Duke Law Journal

The recent push to open private equity and other private assets to retail investors represents one of the most profound changes to U.S. capital markets in decades. This "retailization" effort is often framed as an overdue democratization of superior investment opportunities. Indeed, private equity has long been viewed as special, both for its market-beating returns and its success in making companies more profitable. Yet it has historically been off-limits to retail investors.

This Article argues that the push to democratize private equity is subject to a glaring paradox: Expanding access to private equity undermines the very benefits that access aims …

Ensuring "The Right To Live In The World": The Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs, Maximillian J. Grahl

Duke Law Journal

Twenty-seven years ago, in Olmstead v. L.C., the Supreme Court held that improperly institutionalizing people with disabilities is a form of unlawful discrimination. In doing so, the Court acknowledged that people with disabilities have a right to live free from confinement. Yet today, repair restrictions and outdated Medicare standards combine to threaten powered-wheelchair users' ability to live out in the world. Some states have responded by passing right-to-repair laws, which require powered-wheelchair manufacturers and suppliers to provide the resources necessary for more accessible and more timely repairs. This Note analyzes these state laws in the context of previous right-to …