Digital Commons Network^™

Updates On The Conversion Of Nanosuspensions To Solid Oral Dosage Forms, Anastasia Tsiaxerli, Elisavet Vardaka, Christos Moutroupidis, Kevin M.G. Taylor, Kyriakos Kachrimanis, Maria Malamatari

Journal of Food and Drug Analysis

Pharmaceutical nanosuspensions, also called nanocrystals, are heterogeneous mainly aqueous dispersions of insoluble drug particles stabilised by surfactants and/or polymers. Nanosuspensions as liquid formulations suffer from instability. Solidification of nanosuspensions to solid dosage forms is a way to combine the advantages of nanocrystals with the advantages of the solid state. In this review, advances regarding stabilisation and production of nanosuspensions are briefly covered. Updates on the methods used to convert nanosuspensions to solid oral dosage forms (e.g., powder, granules, pellets, tablets, and films) are presented in depth. From these methods, spray drying and freeze drying are widely used. Granulation and hot-melt …

Mechanobactericidal Nanotopographies For Food Industry: A Promising Strategy For Eradicating Foodborne Pathogens - Progress And Challenges, Deepak Patil

Journal of Food and Drug Analysis

Nowadays, food preservation, quality maintenance, and safety are major emerging concerns in the food industry. Methods for removing pathogens from the outside surfaces of food products would be an effective way to prevent bacterial contamination. Nanotopographies found on natural surfaces have been shown to mechanically damage the membranes of foodborne bacteria. Thus, using bioinspired mechanobactericidal nanostructures in food packaging and processing materials has the potential to lower surface bacterial contamination while increasing food safety. However, putting this concept into practice remains a challenge. This review discussed recent advances in understanding mechanobactericidal mechanisms, issues concerning the durability of nanotopography under external …

Integrating Image Data Fusion And Resnet Method For Accurate Fish Freshness Classification, Yahya Layth Khaleel, Mustafa Abdulfattah Habeeb, Ghadeer Ghazi Shayea

Iraqi Journal for Computer Science and Mathematics

Fish freshness classification is critical for protecting public health and ensuring efficient economic, regulatory and environmental sustainability. Classifying accurately reduces the risk of foodborne illness, protects product quality, builds consumer trust and supports sustainable resource conservation through waste minimization. However, the traditional methods for determining fish freshness are variable, time consuming and subjective, precluding practical use. This research presents an improved framework that integrates image data fusion and a deep learning ResNet model to differentiate fresh and nonfresh fish. From multiple sources, a comprehensive dataset including 16,640 samples was curated, and data fusion was used to increase the diversity and …

Why Must Japan Be A "Normal Country": Reconsidering Article 9 Of The Japanese Constitution In Inoue Hisashi's Kirikirijin, Te-Gyung Kim

Kritika Kultura

Japan has been pursuing the status of a “normal country” by amending Article 9 of its Constitution, and this long-held desire gained momentum in December 2022 when Kishida Fumio’s cabinet introduced the concept of “counterattack capability.” Considering Japan’s political and historical background, its desire to become a “normal country” should be seriously examined and discussed. As one way of this examination, this article posits that Inoue Hisashi’s Kirikirijin serves as a strategic and critical tool, challenging and subverting Japan’s pursuit of becoming a “normal country.” Notably, the fictional town in the novel, Kirikiri, adopts a constitution almost like Japan’s Article …

Why Should We Care About Care? Popular Care-Narratives And The Dependency Critique, Jay Hee-Jeong Sohn

Kritika Kultura

This essay analyzes representations of care and dependency in popular narratives from the Global North, re-appropriating Eva Feder Kittay’s “dependency critique” as an analytical lens. Through examinations of films like Plan 75, I Care a Lot, The Bacchus Lady, Her, I’m Your Man, and La Maison de Himiko, it explores how these narratives engage with contemporary care issues, including the commodification and gendering of care work, fantasies of automated care, and alternative care models beyond traditional family structures. The analysis reveals how popular culture both reflects and shapes societal attitudes towards care, dependency, and human dignity. By interrogating these representations, …

Caliban Discourse From Shakespeare To Java's Baron Sekeber, Paulus Sarwoto

Kritika Kultura

Caliban discourse, marked with the arrival of a white man on a non-European island, is also found in the Javanese babad or semi-historical narrative of Serat Babad Pati (1925), a rewriting of the older text Serat Baron Sakendher (1600s). Both texts depict the arrival of European aristocrats on a foreign island. If Prospero in The Tempest (1610) is an exiled Italian duke, Baron Sekeber in Serat Babad Pati is a Dutch aristocrat traveling to Java to conquer the Mataram kingdom. Considering the possibility that both texts were produced in the same time period, at the beginning of both English and …

Liminal Childhood: Survival And Working-Through The Trauma Of Syrian War In A Land Of Permanent Goodbyes, Arya Priyadarshini, Suman Sigroha

Kritika Kultura

Set amidst the tragedy of Syrian war and the gruesome reality of the refugee crisis that followed, A Land of Permanent Goodbyes (2018) by Atia Abawi is a tale of finding hope within the darkness through the liminal state of survival. This essay explores forms of coping mechanisms present in contemporary children’s and young adult trauma narratives through the lens of object- relation theory in psychoanalysis to expand the understanding of the process of working- through trauma and loss. This study, rooted in the survival strategies adopted by children and adolescents trapped in the war in the Middle East, incorporates …

Filipina Domestic Workers As Contemporary Working-Class Poets: Writing As A Transformative Force, Luka Lei Zhang

Kritika Kultura

In recent years, there has been a surge in the publication of poetry collections written by Filipina domestic workers across various locations, including Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Notably, these poets have elected to publish their work through small independent presses, such as Poetry Planet Book Publishing House in the Philippines, rather than the more prevalent trend of migrant worker writings appearing in literary competitions and anthologies. The emergence of these poetry collections represents a unique and timely literary and cultural landscape that merits academic attention. This paper begins by contextualizing them as part of contemporary working-class literature and introducing …

Against Social Abjection: Offred’S Empowering Narration Of The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Saeedeh Esmailzadeh, Maryam Soltan Beyad

Kritika Kultura

This scholarly investigation explores how Offred, the central character in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, endeavors to undermine the abjectifying apparatus of Gilead through the utilization of her narrative as a form of resistance. Drawing inspiration from Imogen Tyler’s concept of social abjection, the initial segment of this study will concentrate on the implementation of policies aimed at abjection within the society of Gilead. It will elucidate that the Gileadean regime employs tactics such as fostering disgust consensus, enforcing social hierarchies, propagating territorial stigmatization, and asserting control over language to execute the mechanisms of social abjection. This procedure serves to …

Alikhan Bokeikhan’S Literary Preservation Of Kazakh Identity Against Colonial Ideology, Assem Osken, Dikhan Qamzabekuly, Bekarys Nuriman

Kritika Kultura

In the history of the world, imperialist countries happened to pursue a policy of colonization to destroy ethnic consciousness, culture, language, and knowledge. This article comprehensively analyzes the literary works of the national leader Alikhan Bokeikhan, who opposed the policy of the Russian Empire in the 19th century and its successor, the Soviet government in the 20th century that was aimed at gradually destroying the Kazakh people as a distinct group of Kazakh people. The research shows that literary translations, critical articles, and folklore samples of Bokeikhan greatly contributed to the preservation of Kazakh language, religion, culture, national education and …

Abide With Me: A Social Ecological Perspective In Selected Pandemic Poetry, Amany Abdullah Abdelaziz Eldiasty, Eman Ebeida Mansour

Kritika Kultura

This article traces the core principles of the social ecological approach, namely, the interconnectedness of social communities and their integration into the natural world in selected poems written by contemporary poets during the coronavirus pandemic and collected in Poetry in Response to the Pandemic, published in 2020 by St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Arlington, VA. Applying a qualitative approach that integrates interpretive and analytical readings of the selected poems based on Daniel Stokols’s views on social ecology, it argues that although social networks facilitated community engagements during the pandemic (particularly during the lockdown), virtual reality failed to sustain the social …

Broken Bengal: Tropes Of Conviviality And Fracture In Bangla Fiction, Maurice O'Connor

Kritika Kultura

This essay examines how Bangla fiction employs the trope of conviviality as a means to provide an affective understanding of the partition of Bengal. Of principal concern is how Bengali writers, regardless of their religious affiliation, insist upon the existence of a common Bengali across the religious divide. I open my essay with a brief historiographic introduction to the fracturing of Bengali society, contextualizing the backstories that are rarely fleshed out within Bangla fiction yet are elliptically present. Conviviality is the term I use to frame a common Bangla culture, and I explore the concept through Ivan Illich, Thomas Erikson …

Dancing Into Oblivion: The Pilipino Cultural Night And The Narration Of Contemporary Filipina/O America, Theodore S. Gonzalves

Kritika Kultura

How have performances developed by Filipino Americans over the twentieth century conveyed important lessons about culture, nation, and community? In other words, what do Filipino American cultural performances have to say about the formation of “national identity” and “community”? I select three contexts to highlight these changes: the postindustrialization of the US economy; the reaction to race, taxes and education in the Bakke vs. UC Board of Regents decision; and the political realignment of the Reagan democrats. We see the continued immigration of Filipino so-called “professional” families to the United States. Their children seek senses of themselves amidst attacks on …

Two-Part Invention: A Response, Theodore S. Gonzalves

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

The Day The Dancers Stayed: Expressive Forms Of Culture In United States, Theodore S. Gonzalves

Kritika Kultura

How have performances developed by Filipino Americans over the twentieth century conveyed important lessons about culture, nation, and community? In other words, what do Filipino American cultural performances have to say about the formation of “national identity” and “community”? I select three contexts to highlight these changes: the postindustrialization of the US economy; the reaction to race, taxes and education in the Bakke vs. UC Board of Regents decision; and the political realignment of the Reagan democrats. We see the continued immigration of Filipino so-called “professional” families to the United States. Their children seek senses of themselves amidst attacks on …

Anti-Us Imperialism As Assertion Of Black Subjectivity At The Turn Of The Last Century, Lorenzo Alexander L. Puente

Kritika Kultura

US imperialism of the Philippines at the turn of the last century raised difficult and painful issues for African Americans struggling to gain justice and equal rights in American society. Kelly Miller, an African American academician and active polemicist for Negro rights, wrote in 1900, at the beginning of the Philippine American War, his essay “The Impact of Imperialism on the Negro Race” to exhort his fellow black Americans to oppose the US colonization of the Philippines and to support Philippine independence. Miller saw through the American government’s policy of “benevolent assimilation” toward the Philippines and recognized its racist underpinnings. …

Challenges For Cultural Studies Under The Rule Of Global War, Neferti X. M. Tadiar

Kritika Kultura

Based on a lecture delivered not long after the US launched its so-called war on terror in Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, the paper addresses the challenges for cultural studies in the midst of “the emergence of a global network of quasi military states in tributary relations to the US super security state” and “the emergence of a global counter public or constituency.” With a note of urgency and particular attention to the Philippine context, the paper expresses the need “to interpret, articulate, and participate in the social struggles taking place in and through cultural practice” which begins with …

Tribute To Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, Baltazar N. Endriga

Kritika Kultura

No abstract provided.

Conflicts Over Heritage: The Case Of Quiapo, Victor S. Venida

Kritika Kultura

Quiapo is one district marked out as a heritage district under the proposed Comprehensive Land-use Plan for the City of Manila. The plan aims at rationalizing land-use of the city, redesigning the property tax system and creating livelihood activities to promote economic development and create a livable, attractive city. As a heritage district Quiapo can realize substantial economic activity as this generates tourist interest, retail activities and outlets for local crafts and small-scale manufacturing. But the question looms as to whose heritage will be preserved, as Quiapo was once known as an upper class residential area, home to many famous …

Research In The Highways And Byways: Non-Traditional Sources For Literary And Other Research, Doreen G. Fernandez

Kritika Kultura

Fieldwork may well be the oldest research method on earth, but in this day of libraries, the internet, and other kinds of information storage and retrieval systems, it is new again. Going out and talking to individuals—and each person knows something he can talk about, usually something unique and valuable—is non-traditional now. Aspects of fieldwork include oral history (brief questions and interviews which may lead to conversations that are so rich, so deep, often so intimate), sightings (or research that makes use of anything that comes to hand, which may consist of materials ranging from newspapers, lists of movie theaters, …

Support Early Childhood Educators Need To Strengthen Teacher Retention, Anne Zimpel

Graduate Teacher Education

Early childhood educators (ECEs), referring to professionals who work with young children in various settings, often face feelings of isolation and lack of a 'sense of community/belonging.' These connections are essential to providing high-quality care for young children (NAEYC 2020). Feelings of isolation and lack of connections lead educators to burnout and emotional exhaustion. This research paper focuses on how ECEs can engage as professionals to build confidence in current practices, lessen isolation, and increase retention to reduce burnout and emotional exhaustion. It is essential to support early childhood professionals so that they can offer quality care for children. A …

How Can Research And Advocacy Support Play-Based Early Learning Environments That Foster Whole Child Development To Advance Equity?, Emily E. Schlemmer

Graduate Teacher Education

This paper examined research about the lack of play in early childhood and how early childhood educators and others could bring play back into classrooms equitably. Play was a developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood classrooms. “We have in us a natural innate built-in drive designed to push us to learn and experience important principles of creativity, things like; curiosity, discovery, exploration, experimentation, communicating, and socializing. This instinctive drive is called play” (Skaggs and Twede, 2023, p.167). Play allowed learners to grow academically, socially, emotionally, and physically. Bendixen-Noe (2010) stated that the importance of play in learning was known and …

The Joy Of Learning, Leah Graczyk

Graduate Teacher Education

Early childhood education has undergone significant changes in recent years (Harmon & Viruru, 2018). The increasing focus on academic success and the rising use of technology have somewhat overshadowed the joy of learning in young children (Przybylski & Weinstein, 2019). However, it's important to remember that play, often sacrificed in favor of structured academic activities, is a crucial aspect of developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood. These playful learning experiences are essential in sparking the joy of learning in young children (Friedman et al,, 2021). The research indicates that factors such as academic push-down, excessive use of technology, lack of …

The Benefits Of Inquiry-Based Learning In Mathematics Across All Grade Levels, Rachel Nehls

Graduate Teacher Education

This paper examined research indicating the negative effects the conventional learning model has on mathematical instruction. It suggests a new way of teaching math known as inquiry-based learning, or IBL. The research analyzed how inquiry-based learning in mathematics effects student content knowledge, and critical thinking skills, which can lead to lucrative STEM based careers. The research analyzed was qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods. The studies addressed how inquiry-based learning effects various populations of students who have historically struggled in mathematics and are lacking in representation in STEM based careers such as women and diverse populations. Research indicated that inquiry-based learning increases …

Nurturing Motivation And Engagement In All Students, Elizabeth Rosales, Elizabeth Ann Rosales

Graduate Teacher Education

This paper examined varied interpretations of student engagement in school and analyzed its impact on students' success across multiple dimensions. Using a range of research methods—surveys, classroom observations, and mixed-methods approaches—the study investigated how engagement manifests in classrooms, how it's shaped by various internal and external influences, and its effects on academic performance as well as students’ social and emotional well-being.

The studies considered different perspectives on motivation and engagement, examining how these contribute to a better learning experience. They also looked at what these insights mean for teachers and others involved in education. The research highlighted how crucial student …

The Broken System Of Child Care: A Workforce In Crisis, Lynn M. Ouellette

M.S. in Leadership

Child care is a business system that does not work to support its sustainability. The biggest issue facing the industry is the lack of ability to pay its workforce competitively. Literature suggests that child care has always faced workforce challenges and suffered from low wages and benefits. This project looks at the history of child care and the issues that have plagued the industry since the beginning. Reasons for these problems include inability to charge the true cost of care, lack of business and state federal leaders understanding and support, and the lack of societal change in how early education …

Application Of Digital Rock Physics And Machine Learning To Improve The Understanding Of Fluid Flow Behavior Through Porous Media, Md Irfan Khan

Mechanical Engineering Theses

Accurately estimating reservoir rock properties and understanding capillary trapping mechanisms are crucial for fluid storage and flow modeling in porous media, particularly for applications such as carbon dioxide sequestration (CCS) and underground hydrogen storage (UHS). This thesis presents a comprehensive workflow that combines machine learning techniques and pore-network modeling approach to predict petrophysical properties and assess the impact of microscopic pore structures on capillary trapping. In the first part, a convolutional neural network (CNN) framework is used to predict rock properties—such as porosity, throat area, and pore surface area—from micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) X-ray images. It has been observed that incorporating …

Winter Commencement, 2024, Marshall University

Marshall University Commencement

Program for the Commencement of Marshall University, Saturday, December 14, 2024 held at the Mountain Health Arena in Huntington, West Virginia.

The Helpfulness Of Accommodations From The Perspective Of College Students With Disabilities, Jana Zhu

Honors Theses

This research study aimed to determine the helpfulness of support services at the Accessibility Resources Center (ARC) at the University of New Haven (UNH) from the point of view of college students who were affiliated with ARC. Students were recruited by the researcher, who reached out to the ARC director by email and met with the director in person. The ARC director sent out a survey to the students using the ARC email list. The survey consisted of 17 questions and used a combination of Likert Scale questions as well as open-ended questions. The results showed that some students found …

Humanizing The Mexican Migrant, April Guevara Espinoza

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Given the past election season and craze about the “immigration crisis,” it is of paramount importance to reflect on how and why migrants, particularly Mexican migrants, are positioned as “less than” in our society. Immigration is more than a political platform issue; it concerns real people whose real lives are affected. Mexican migrants are used as political scapegoats for any and all issues in the United States whether it be increased crime rates, a lack of available jobs, or overall poor economic conditions. They are dangerously mischaracterized and stereotyped as “criminals” and “national security threats.” These labels are inextricably tied …