Digital Commons Network^™

Decent Work In The Platform Economy Convention, 2026: A Preliminary Analysis, Valerio De Stefano

ILO Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention, 2026 (No. 193), the first international labour standard devoted specifically to platform work. It examines the Convention’s scope, substantive protections, and principal interpretive questions, arguing that its significance lies in the cumulative architecture through which platform work is brought within the reach of international labour standards.

Particular attention is given to the Convention’s broad personal scope. Self-employed platform workers are generally included throughout the instrument, while specific provisions permit protections to be adapted to different employment statuses without excluding workers outside an employment relationship. …

The Impact Of Madden-Julian Oscillation On Rainfall Variability In South Sulawesi And Its Implications For Science Education, Misbahuddin Mansur, Pariabti Palloan, Agus Susanto

Jurnal Pendidikan Sains

This study examined the relationship between the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) and rainfall variability in South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia, using daily rainfall observations from 24 stations during 1990–2020. A quantitative observational design based on long-term climatological time-series analysis was employed. MJO activity was identified using the Real-time Multivariate MJO (RMM) index, while rainfall variability was analyzed through rainfall anomalies, rainfall frequency, and spatial patterns across Seasonal Zones (ZOM). The results indicate that active MJO phases were generally associated with wetter conditions and higher rainfall frequency, whereas suppressed phases corresponded to drier conditions. Rainfall responses varied considerably among regions, with coastal areas …

Assessing Rural Homelessness: A Mixed-Methods Case Study, Matthew J. Lyons

Faculty Articles

Rural homelessness represents a significant public health and human rights challenge, but research on homelessness in the United States has predominantly focused on urban settings. This case study describes a mixed-methods assessment of the prevalence, causes, and consequences of homelessness in a rural county. Through both surveys and interviews with stakeholders from multiple sectors (including both service providers and those experiencing homelessness), we built a rich picture of the scale and experiential dimensions of homelessness within the county. Here, we present our research methods, the main findings of each primary data collection arm, and the actionable conclusions drawn from the …

Integration Of Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies In High School Science Classes, Pamela Chanell Williams

Student Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative case study investigated the integration of culturally responsive teaching strategies in high school science classes. The problem addressed in this study is that teachers are underprepared to employ culturally responsive teaching strategies to facilitate academic success in science courses for culturally and linguistically diverse students. By investigating the integration of culturally responsive teaching strategies during instruction, improvements can be made to the effectiveness of professional development centered on culturally responsive teaching strategies found in the Ready for Rigor framework. The conceptual framework that served as the foundation for this study was Hammond’s (2015) Ready for Rigor framework. Questionnaires, …

If It Doesn't Hurt You Aren't Working Hard Enough: An Examination Of Coach Experience In High School Debate, Rosie Valdez Block

Student Theses and Dissertations

High school debate coaching constitutes a uniquely demanding educational role, defined by emotional labor, extended work hours, institutional precarity, and systemic inequities. Despite their significant contributions to students’ intellectual and personal growth, the professional sustainability of debate coaches remains underexamined. This dissertation investigates the conditions contributing to burnout among high school debate coaches through the theoretical lenses of Maslach’s Burnout Theory, as contemporized by Edú-Valsania et al. (2022), and teacher self-efficacy theory, to understand how emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished professional confidence emerge in this context. The study is further guided by constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014), enabling a bottom-up, …

Quality Improvement Project: Impact Of Formalized Debriefing On Correctional Health Emergency Response, Angel Woody

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Structured debriefing following medical emergencies has been identified as an evidence-based strategy to improve communication, reflective learning, and staff confidence within high-acuity healthcare settings. Inconsistent debriefing practices within correctional healthcare environments contributed to a gap in emergency response support and staff preparedness. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to evaluate whether implementation of a formalized debriefing protocol following medical emergencies impacted staff confidence during emergency response situations within a correctional healthcare setting. The project was guided by Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory and Lewin’s Change Theory. A quantitative one-group pretest-posttest quality improvement design was implemented in a county correctional healthcare …

A Portable Device To Elicit Sensory Trick And Monitor Forearm Muscle Activity In Pianists With Musician’S Dystonia, Josef Franczak

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Musician’s Dystonia (MD) is a condition that can be acquired in professional musicians,causing involuntary contractions and the loss of fine motor control. The most common pharmaceutical treatment, botulinum toxin injections, has been shown to have side effects of muscle weakness and atrophy. The sensory trick, shown to temporarily relieve symptoms of dystonia, has potential to be used as an alternative or alongside current therapies, allowing patients with MD to return to playing music professionally. To systematically deploy the sensory trick and monitor forearm muscle activity, the first prototype of the Wearable Sensorimotor Integrator (wSMI) has been developed.

The wSMI is …

American Sign Language Recognition And Analysis Using Deep Learning, Saurabh Kumar Soni

Master’s Dissertations

In this work I build a system that recognizes isolated American Sign Language (ASL) words, and I use it to ask one fairly direct question: when training data is scarce, is it better to look at the video pixels or at the geometry of the signer’s body? To find out, I train two very different models on exactly the same clips. The first is appearance-based. Every frame is run through standard preprocessing and a ResNet50 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet, which turns it into a 2048-dimensional feature vector, and a Bidirectional LSTM then reads that sequence over time. The second model …

Enhanced Embedding For Multimodal Medical Visual Question And Answering, Akash Suna

Master’s Dissertations

Visual Answering of questions in the field of Medical which is called as (VqA) has grown as a dominant area of research that fuse processing of natural language and vision of computer often known as CV or NLP to assist in medical decision-making. However, effective multimodal fusion between medical images and clinical questions remains a significant challenge. This thesis examines the application of the Perceiver IO architecture as an efficient multimodal aggregator for medical VQA. The work has been carried out in multiple directions. First, a classification-based framework is developed by combining Vision Transformer (ViT) and ClinicalBERT alongside a Perceiver …

An Empirical Study Of Rlvr Fine-Tuning For Mathematical Problem Solving In Llms, Rashmi Konnur

Master’s Dissertations

Large language models have shown immense improvement in coding and math performances thanks to reinforcement learning boosted algorithms. However, its true impact on broadening the reasoning and analytical capacities of an LLM is still contended. In this dissertation, we outline the foundations of Large Language Models, and delve into Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). We discuss various strategies to efficiently manipulate memory during a fine tuning update. We finally perform RLVR fine-tuning techniques on different models with varied use cases and compare their performances, which corroborate the efficiency of RLVR.

From Athens To Jerusalem: Platonism, Richard Owen, And The Road Not Taken In Biology, Michael A. Flannery

Libraries Professional Work

Tertullian provocatively asked (circa 200 AD), “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” The relationship between formal philosophy and religion has been a contentious battleground ever since. It has historically come into sharpest focus in biology generally, and evolutionary theory specifically. Charles Darwin clearly won the day in the short-term. His evolutionary functionalism looked like an inglorious abandonment of time-honored metaphysical realism for positivist empirical reductionism with a concomitant horizontalization of perspective that has secularized and flattened the intellectual landscape. But more recently the rise of evo-devo (evolutionary developmental …

Licensed Professional Counselors’ Experiences Of Treating Youth With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jazzmine Dallas

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Freedom Of Thought And Speech: Charles C. Burleigh And The Refraction Of Quaker Principles In Abolitionist Non-Violence, Jennifer Rycenga

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Charles C. Burleigh (1810-1878), an important American Abolitionist speaker, agent, and theorist, was also an advocate for non-violent resistance. He had many opportunities across his 30+ years fighting slavery to test his non-violent principles, due to mob violence against Abolitionist gatherings. At some of the most significant of these events, such as the destruction of the Abolitionist's Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, Burleigh witnessed the strength and resolve of African-American and white women in upholding non-violence and moral suasion.

While Burleigh never became a member of the Society of Friends, his life and thought run parallel to ideas and practices of …

Sexual Harassment: What Utahns Need To Know, Brie Sparks, Susan R. Madsen

Marketing and Strategy Faculty Publications

Sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination are ongoing challenges that affect individuals, workplaces, and communities across Utah. When individuals experience harassment, unfair treatment, or marginalization due to gender, their sense of safety, confidence, and self-worth are diminished. These experiences disproportionately impact women, particularly in settings where they are underrepresented or face unequal power dynamics. Addressing these issues requires a shared commitment to creating respectful environments that support the well-being and success of all Utahns.

Managing Virtual Work: An Integrative Framework For Human Resource Management, Tobias Blay, Fabian Jintae Froese, Sumita Raghuram, Bradford S. Bell, Agnes Bäker

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Virtual work has become a defining feature of contemporary organizations, yet Human Resource Management (HRM) scholarship lacks an integrated understanding of how it should be managed. We address this disconnect by shifting the focus from individual and team experiences to the organizational management of virtual work through HRM. We conceptualize virtual work and organize prior research along four dimensions: spatial, temporal, technological, and employment relationship. Building on this, we develop an integrative framework based on two axes, the degree of virtuality and the nature of the employment relationship, from which four forms of virtual work emerge and between which organizations …

Scattering From Analytic And Piecewise Analytic Inhomogeneities, Narek Hovsepyan, Michael S. Vogelius

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

We study scattering for the linear Helmholtz operator in two dimensions and develop a technique which can be used to ascertain scattering of a given incident wave from very regular inhomogeneities. This technique is then applied to a number of interesting examples.

Natural Behavior Vs. Subjective Experience In Fish Welfare Assessments, Ronald G. Oldfield

Animal Sentience

Several commentaries on the Oldfield & Bonano (2024) target article proposed that natural behavior should play a larger role in assessing the welfare of fishes in zoos and aquariums. However, the natural-behavior concept of animal welfare has been widely criticized because natural behaviors do not necessarily improve welfare, and unnatural behaviors do not necessarily reduce it. I review the three major concepts of animal welfare — physical health, natural behavior, and affect/feelings — and argue that behavior patterns, whether natural or otherwise, should be evaluated according to their effects on health and subjective experience. Using the affect/feelings concept and the …

Fast Radio Bursts From The Nonlinear Evolution Of Low Frequency Plasma Waves In The Magnetosphere Of Magnetars, Dominic Bernardi

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration radio bursts with applications as cosmic probes. However, their physical origins remain largely unknown. Magnetars are natural candidates for producing FRBs due to their compact size, extremely strong magnetic fields, and intrinsically dynamic nature. In this thesis, I develop a model for FRB production grounded in both a concrete triggering mechanism and a viable emission process. This process begins by launching low-frequency plasma waves into the magnetosphere. I show that energetic fast magnetosonic waves can naturally be produced in the magnetosphere, independent of how these waves are launched. Regardless of whether these waves are …

Reproductive Trends Of Male Atlantic Spotted Dolphins (Stenella Frontalis) Following Two Hurricanes In The Bahamas, Tara Southerland Pedersen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Marine mammals are impacted by hurricanes that may influence reproductive success and genetic diversity. Understanding how populations respond to demographic change is increasingly important as extreme weather events become more frequent. A population of Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) on Little Bahama Bank in the Bahamas has been observed continuously since 1985. In 2004, two hurricanes struck the region within one month, resulting in the loss of approximately 36% of the population. Population declines can alter the operational sex ratio (OSR), social structure, and encounter rates among potential mates, potentially influencing patterns of reproductive success. Previous molecular studies showed that …

Photophysical Behavior Of Ruthenium-Based Complexes: A Study Of Ligand Variation And Encapsulation In Metal-Organic Frameworks, Delaney S. Sellers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ruthenium (II) polypyridyl complexes have emerged as a prominent class of compounds in inorganic photochemistry due to their structural robustness, reversible redox chemistry, and tunable excited-state dynamics. Central to the investigation of these systems is the ability to manipulate the triplet metal-to-ligand charge transfer state (3MLCT). In the context of photoactivated chemotherapy (PACT), the strategic deactivation of this MLCT state to populate a dissociative triplet ligand field state (3LF) can enable the controlled, light-triggered release of caged cytotoxic agents. This work focuses on understanding the caging mechanism of various ligands to optimize the eventual delivery of cytotoxic ligands. In this …

Development Of A Coupled Hydrological-Nitrogen Modeling Framework For Urban Stormwater Pond Analysis, Tione Grant

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Urbanization impacts the hydrological and biogeochemical processes that regulate water quality in downstream ecosystems, leading to increased stormwater volume and nitrogen loads in receiving aquatic environments. Although stormwater ponds are designed as simple hydraulic storage basins, they function more like managed ecosystems within urban drainage systems, offering both hydraulic attenuation and passive nutrient treatment. However, nitrogen removal efficiency varies significantly and depends on interactions between hydrological and biogeochemical factors. This thesis details the development, calibration, validation, and sensitivity analysis of a coupled hydrological-nitrogen model framework for Aaran’s Pond, an urban stormwater pond in Hillsborough County, Florida.

A process-based water budget …

Under Pressure: Effects Of The Hot Docs Behavioral Parent Training Program On Caregiver Blood Pressure, Bria N. Ferera

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chronic stress is heightened for caregivers of children with heightened disruptive behaviors. With chronic stress supported as a major factor leading to maladaptive parenting and caregiving practices, exploring new ways to collect data on parenting stress remains a critical research priority (van der Lubbe et al., 2024). Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) programs are linked to improved parent-child relationships and reduced problem behavior (Armstrong, 2006; Agazzi, 2021; Patrusky, 2025). However, few studies have used physiological biomarkers in conjunction with self-reported measures to explore connections in this area. Similarly, other physiological considerations are rarely considered upon evaluation of the impacts of BPT …

Trophic Structure Of Reef-Fish Assemblages In The Eastern Gulf Of Mexico Varies By Depth And Reef Type, Jessica L. Van Vaerenbergh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Globally, marine ecosystems are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic stressors, leading to reef degradation, changes in reef-fish assemblages, and altered trophic structure. In this study, I investigated reef-fish underwater visual survey data collected over a decade (2013-2023) from paired natural and artificial reefs in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. I applied the novel Normalized Reef Status Index (NRSI) to evaluate how biomass was distributed across the three trophic categories (i.e., Lower Trophic Position (LTP; 2.0-2.9), Central Trophic Position (CTP; 3.0-3.9), and Upper Trophic Position (UTP; ≥4.0). This index is a metric to assess the ecological status of reef systems by investigating …

Development And Evaluation Of The East Florida Coastal Ocean Model (Efcom), Orion B. Scharton-Witmer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Florida’s Atlantic coast has abundant resources in beaches, state parks, aquatic preserves, and wildlife refuges as well as densely populated coastal cities in low lying areas that are all subjected to natural disaster threats from the oceans. There is an urgent need for a high-resolution coastal ocean circulation model for this region. Based on the application of the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model (FVCOM), an East Florida Coastal Ocean Model (EFCOM) is developed, downscaling from the deep ocean, across the continental shelf, and into the estuaries. It employs an unstructured grid with horizontal resolution varying from 3 kilometers at the …

A System Dynamics Perspective Of User Adaptation: The Case Of Exoskeleton Technology, Enzo Novi Migliano

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Technology implementation is a common occurrence in organizations to which workers must adapt. Although research on workers' technology acceptance is widely spread, research on the workers' technology adaptation process is less represented in the literature. The discrepancy in the literature permeates research on new technologies currently being implemented in organizations, such as occupational exoskeletons. As in other technologies, the variance research perspective dominates the literature on exoskeleton implementations. The current thesis aims to foster process research by formalizing the coping model of user adaptation (Beaudry & Pinsonneault, 2005) and exploring research questions regarding workers' adaptation to general technology and exoskeletons. …

In Search Of Protective Factors Against Gun-Carrying For Black Male Youth: A Dissertation- Sectional And Longitudinal Analysis Of Secondary Data, Kevin Edward Antwi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the relationship between risk and protective factors and gun carrying among Black male youth using both individual-level and population-averaged effects. Grounded in the risk and protective factors framework and the ecological systems model, the study explores how protective factors at the individual, peer, school, and community levels influence gun carrying at a single point in time and over time. This research aligns with the Grand Challenges of Social Work by preventing gun violence and informing prevention efforts. Using the baseline and 11 waves of data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, the analysis identifies factors that reduce …

Bridging Cultural Gaps In Enhancing Mental Health Support For The Bhutanese Community, Subash Chandra Majhi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Boundaries Of Belonging: The Role Of Christian Campus Climate In Lgbtq+ Student Suicidality, Madison L. Vaccaro

Clinical Psychology Dissertations

LGBTQ+ students at religiously-affiliated colleges experience unique stressors related to discrimination, campus climate, and stigma, which have been linked to negative outcomes including suicidal ideation. Drawing on sociocultural theories of suicide and minority stress, the present study examined whether internalized LGBTQ+ related stigma mediated the relationships between discrimination, negative campus climate, and suicidal ideation among college students attending religious institutions. Participants (N = 75) included college students who identified as LGBTQ+, recruited mainly within the Pacific Northwest. Participants were majority White, assigned female at birth (AFAB), and diverse in gender identity and sexual orientation. Measures assessed experiences of discrimination, campus …

Analysis And Machine Learning Adaptation Of A Cognitive Model For Human Memory, Trevor Cross, Aihua W. Wood

Faculty Publications

In this paper, we use the Duolingo SLAM dataset to analyze several cognitive models of second language acquisition and develop new approaches for enhanced performance. In particular, we consider the Predictive Performance Equation and some of its underlying power laws. Leveraging insights from machine learning, we develop simple one-feature models as building blocks for combined models that match or in certain cases outperform the existing models at much reduced computational cost. In addition, a neural network with one fully connected hidden layer is constructed that outperforms all other models on sufficiently large datasets.

Boiling Flow Estimation For Aero-Optic Phase Screen Generation, Jeffrey W. Utley, Gregery T. Buzzard, Charles A. Bouman, Matthew R. Kemnetz

Faculty Publications

Aero-optic effects due to turbulence can reduce the effectiveness of transmitting light waves to a distant target. Methods to compensate for turbulence typically rely on realistic turbulence data, which can be generated by i) experiment, ii) high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD), iii) low-fidelity CFD, and iv) autoregressive methods. However, each of these methods has significant drawbacks, including monetary and/or computational expense, limited quantity, inaccurate statistics, and overall complexity. By contrast, the boiling flow algorithm is a simple, computationally efficient model that can generate atmospheric phase screen data with only a handful of parameters. However, boiling flow has not been widely …