Digital Commons Network^™

Ole Miss Researchers Recognized With Breakthrough Prize, Clara Turnage

University of Mississippi News

OXFORD, Miss. – An international team of researchers – including several from the University of Mississippi – recently celebrated after being named the 2026 winners of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, one of the field's most prestigious awards.

Virtual Matter: Architecture As A Critical Turning Point, Aden Sterchi

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

The materialization of AI infrastructure has outpaced all regulatory frameworks, allowing data centers to proliferate with limited oversight despite their growing environmental and social impacts. Through a review of artificial intelligence’s technological development, the rise of big tech, and contemporary data center expansion, this thesis situates AI infrastructure within a broader pattern of deregulation, delayed accountability, and market-driven governance. Using a qualitative mixed-method approach combining historical analysis, policy critique, regional case studies, and research-through-design, the study examines how existing land use, utility, and environmental frameworks have failed to keep pace with the scale of data center sprawl; The study also …

Justice For None: How The United States’ Sexual-Offense System Fails Victims, Defendants, And The Public, Hannah J. Flannery

Advanced Issues in Criminal Law: Sex Offenses

This paper argues that the United States criminal justice system fundamentally fails in its treatment of sexual offenses by retraumatizing survivors while simultaneously relying on punitive mechanisms that undermine meaningful accountability and rehabilitation. Through an examination of adversarial courtroom practices, prosecutorial discretion, plea bargaining, sex-offender registries, and civil commitment regimes, the paper demonstrates how American law prioritizes punishment, political performance, and moral panic over truth, dignity, and public safety. In contrast, comparative analysis of France, Canada, and the Nordic countries reveals alternative models grounded in consent-based legal frameworks, trauma-informed procedures, and rehabilitative justice. These systems emphasize proportionality, reintegration, and institutional …

Working While Becoming: The Quiet Labor Behind First-Generation And International Dreams, Fatimo Hafis

Texas Conference for Working Class Studies Essay Contest

No abstract provided.

Integrated Voter Education Model To Students As Pre-Voters, Hariyanti Hariyanti, Cecep Darmawan, Rahmat Rahmat, Leni Anggraeni, Radini Radini, Hamdi Abdullah Hasibuan

Jurnal Wacana Politik

This research aims to describe the importance of preparing pre-voters to become intelligent and participatory beginner voters, through an integrated voter education model. This solution was born from the fact that in general voter education only aggressively targets first-time voters during the election stage. This research was carried out by the Pekanbaru City KPU and the Kampar Regency KPU as well as several secondary schools in Pekanbaru City and Kampar Regency. The research used a qualitative design with descriptive methods, with research informants including KPU commissioners, Election Smart House Managers, and Pancasila and Citizenship Education (PPKn) teachers at schools. Research …

The Lived Experiences Of Clinical Mental Health Counselors Returning To Clinical Work After Becoming A New Mom: A Phenomenological Study, Kathryn Bohn

Dissertations

The experience of transitioning back to work postpartum can be an emotional rollercoaster for women. One that is often filled with identity tensions and sweeping emotions that range from guilt to relief, anxiety to confidence (Dod, 2025; Franzoi et al., 2023; Garcia-Lorenzo et al., 2023). Postpartum can be an emotionally raw and vulnerable time for new mothers as they navigate physical and emotional changes, maternal stress, and the pressures and demands of new motherhood (LeBlanc, 2023; Maylott, 2023). Professional counselors in a clinical setting, also known as clinical mental health counselors, encounter occupationally specific responsibilities that create unique experiences for …

Virtualizing Practical Science Education: A Sociological Analysis Of Undergraduate Teaching And Learning, Sina J. Fakoyede, Femi E. Babalola, Oluwatoyin T. Obateru, Oluwayemisi D. Akomolafe, Deborah O. Alabi, Stella K. Ekundayo

Higher Learning Research Communications

Objectives: The study aims to investigate the perspectives of university teachers and students on integrating practical science teaching with virtual learning in a multicultural and diverse society, specifically within the context of southwestern Nigeria.

Methods: A mixed-methods approach was employed, involving data collection from 100 university lecturers and 400 undergraduate students across 10 universities. Qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with lecturers and focus group discussions with students. Quantitative data were obtained via structured questionnaires, allowing for triangulation and comprehensive analysis.

Results: Findings revealed that certain lecturers showed preferential support influenced by students’ cultural backgrounds or academic behavior during …

In Re: Bps Direct Llc

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

They Don’T Care About Us Here! The Intersectionality Of Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, And The Need For Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, Louis D. Blair

Education Doctorate Dissertations

This qualitative case study examined how teachers engage in critical self-reflection of implicit bias and how that process influences their pedagogical awareness and classroom practices. Grounded in the Implicit Bias Theory, Adult Learning Theory, Transformative Learning Theory, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy, the study utilized the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT), reflective journaling, and engagement with the book Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools, to explore shifts in three participants’ beliefs and instructional approaches. Data sources included pre- and post-survey responses, IAT reflections, and ongoing journal entries, and semi-structured post-study interviews which were analyzed thematically. Findings …

The Echo: May 11, 2026, Taylor University

2025-2026 (Volume 113)

No abstract provided.

Discipline Or Damage? How Corporal Punishment Affects The Psychological Wellbeing Of Children In The School Setting, Umulkheir Mahamud Sharif Ali

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Corporal punishment continues to be used in many homes and schools despite research linking it to negative psychological outcomes in children. Previous studies, primarily focused on home settings, have associated corporal punishment with increased anxiety, depression, aggression, and emotional distress. However, less research has examined how these outcomes appear within school environments, where discipline occurs in more structured institutional settings. This thesis investigates how corporal punishment in schools affects students psychologically, emotionally, and academically through a literature review of peer-reviewed studies from psychology, education, and public health. The findings show that many of the mental health outcomes associated with corporal …

The Data Movement In Professional Sports, Preston Dorand

Undergraduate Honors Theses

At the turn of the 21st century, technological advancement reshaped industries worldwide, including professional sports. Organizations increasingly adopted analytical frameworks, leveraging advanced software systems and performance metrics to inform and optimize decision-making on and off the field. Industry professionals frequently cite the film and book, Moneyball, as a cultural turning point that brought data driven methodologies to the forefront. Since that period, professional sports, especially baseball, have evolved from foundational sabermetric theory into a complex data ecosystem characterized by high-resolution tracking technologies, pitch modeling, player valuation systems, and matchup optimization models.

My thesis examined how sports organizations operationalized data-driven …

The Brain Breakdown: Bringing Neuroscience To A Broader Audience, Katharine Buehrig

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Neuroscience is a rapidly growing field, which needs to continue becoming more accessible and understandable to younger generations. Expanding access to neuroscience through different modes, such as podcasts, brings the discipline to a broader audience. Podcasts allow listeners to follow an outlined learning path they can pursue on their personal timeline. High school students often do not have access to neuroscience specific materials within their standard science curriculum. To address this knowledge gap, I collected questions about neuroscience from high school students across four schools in the United States to develop an understanding about what they are interested in learning. …

A Mathematical & Computational Study Of Voting Power In Social Choice Systems, Madison T. Gambon

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis develops a computational framework for measuring the vulnerability of voting rules to coordinated strategic manipulation. While classical results show that most voting systems are theoretically manipulable, less is known about the magnitude of coordination required to alter outcomes or how that magnitude varies across institutional designs. I define the minimal manipulating coalition size k* as the smallest number of voters whose strategic ballot changes can overturn a sincere election outcome under a given rule. To enable cross-election comparison, I introduce the normalized manipulation threshold θ = k*/n . Using algorithmic search procedures and Monte Carlo simulation, I estimate …

Is Health Deserved? Personal Autonomy, Framing, Ethical Intimidation, And The Politicization Of Healthcare In The United States V. Japan, Ava C. Azucenas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Is health deserved? Is your health owed to you? What does this mean, and whose responsibility is it? I argue that American culture’s use of  personal autonomy, “framing”, and ethical intimidation has stunted the improvement of both political and legal structures. This is evident in the politicization of the ‘for-profit’ healthcare system in the United States. American policymakers frequently weaponize moral foundations in order to coerce voters into supporting or opposing certain healthcare policies derived from the principle that some people are more "deserving" of health than others. This calculated “framing” of health concepts has deeply politicized such an ethical …

Technology’S Historical Impact On The Wealth Management Business And How Advisors Plan To Evolve Around Career Challenges Posed By Artificial Intelligence, Nick George

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The past few decades have molded our contemporary financial experiences and have forced financial advisors to plan for a career-altering pivot in the near future. Over the last fifty years, wealth advisors have seen dozens of incidents known as “extinction-level events”, described as the two-way path a consultant faces when new technological advancements occur. We used data collected from real-world financial advisors, client service associates, and academic publications to assess the next big turning point of the industry, Artificial Intelligence, and how it both differs and relates to other developments of this caliber within the industry, such as the rise …

Ethical Participation In An Unethical System: Partnering With The New London Homeless Hospitality Center, Lucy Koester

Program in Community Action (PICA)

How can volunteers engage meaningfully and ethically within a system that does not always center the voices of the people it serves? This Senior Integrative Project (SIP) explores the College’s long-term partnership with the New London Homeless Hospitality Center (NLHHC), and how campus-community partnerships (CCPs) can build resilient and civically minded societies. Drawing on experiences volunteering and developing collaborative projects with the NLHHC, it reflects on the challenges and possibilities for improving the guests’ experiences. Using a sociological approach, this paper analyzes how organizations like the NLHHC are products of bureaucratic systems, and emphasize the importance of centering community voices …

Accesstem: How Small Colleges Can Open Stem Pathways For Local High School Students, Dina D. Isakov

Program in Community Action (PICA)

This paper reflects my experience developing ACCESStem as part of the Program in Community Action (PICA) center at Connecticut College. ACCESStem is a community-engaged research project designed to create hands-on, lab-based STEM workshops for local high school students in New London. ACCESStem was built on the premise that even small liberal arts colleges can hold a meaningful impact on helping diversify the science workforce. Over the course of three years, this project took shape through my relationships with STEM faculty on campus and relationships with staff at the Holleran Center for Community Action. This paper works to begin contextualizing the …

Momentum Space Algorithm For Electronic Structure Of Double-Incommensurate Trilayer Graphene, Kenneth Silver Beard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Numerical algorithms for computing the electronic structure of incommensurate 2D-materials using ab initio models are critical for predicting material properties and guiding experiments. For bilayers, momentum space and continuum models have been introduced to approximate observables of ab initio tight-binding models using a momentum description, despite the lack of periodicity in the tight-binding model required for Bloch theory. A similar structure has been introduced for double-incommensurate trilayers using a continuum model, where the three lattices are mutually incommensurate. However, this description leads to a four-dimensional lattice space, and numerical convergence of the density of states has been observed to be …

Theatrical Roles: An Introduction To Theatre, Gibson A. Cima

Faculty Books & Book Chapters

 

Theatrical Roles: An Introduction to Theatre is an open educational resource (OER) created by Gibson Alessandro Cima for Introduction to Theatre at Northern Illinois University. Published through the Humanities LibreTexts platform under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, the textbook is designed as a free, accessible alternative to traditional introductory theatre textbooks.
Rather than organizing theatre history around a conventional Western canon, the OER approaches theatre through the major collaborative roles involved in production: playwright, director, performer, designer/technician, and audience. The structure emphasizes theatre as a collective human practice rather than a linear history of great men and canonical …

Physics-Informed Diffusion Models For Left Ventricular Blood Flow Reconstruction, Yuxuan Xu

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Independent Study

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of mortality worldwide, and timely diagnosis depends on imaging tools that can reveal the mechanical state of the heart in real time. Echocardiography is the primary bedside imaging modality for cardiac assessment, but it only provides sparse, one-dimensional Doppler velocity measurements whose accuracy is highly sensitive to probe position and beam angle. Reconstructing full three-dimensional blood flow fields for the left ventricle from sparse 1D velocity measurements is an ill-posed problem, where current traditional clinical methods are insufficient.

This report documents contributions made during the Spring 2026 semester in the Kong Lab at Washington …

Independent Study Design Report: Hydroponic Bio-Enclosure, Joseph Gillett

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Independent Study

The hydroponic bio-enclosure is a self-contained device designed to provide the user with both ebb-and-flow and deep water culture hydroponic growing methods. The device is semi-autonomous and can be monitored and controlled directly from a computer. Furthermore, it grants monitor and control of light, temperature and humidity values to the user, ensuring the optimal growth conditions are constantly maintained. The system uses a central and reservoir and pump to deliver nutrient solution to the plants as needed.These components are modulated by a central control system in the form of an Arduino Nano ESP32. Submerged sensors are used to detect temperature, …

Energy-Efficiency Optimization And Comparison For Irs-Assisted Bidirectional Relay And Direct Transmissions, Caixia Cai, Jiayao Zhang, Fuli Zhong, Han Hai, Yayu Yang, Sunil Chinnadurai, Anwer Al-Dulaimi

All Works

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique for achieving high-transmission rate and low-power consumption transmission to meet the requirements of future beyond 5G and 6G communication. In this paper, we optimize and compare the energy-efficiency (EE) of IRS-assisted bidirectional relay transmission (BRT) and bidirectional direct transmission (BDT). In specific, we firstly consider and give the IRS-assisted BRT and BDT models. Then, we give the analyses of signal transmission models and EE for both IRS-assisted BRT and BDT. In addition, to optimize the EE, we give the joint optimization problems for both IRS-assisted BRT and BDT, which incorporate …

Board Of Directors Meeting Minutes (May 11, 2026), Dmacc Board Of Directors

Board of Directors Meeting Minutes

This file contains the minutes from the Des Moines Area Community College Board meeting held on May 11, 2026.

The Gatekeepers: School Personnel And The Identification Of Twice-Exceptional Black Girls, Stephanie L. Addison-Fontaine

LMU Theses and Dissertations

This qualitative research study examined the discourse of school personnel in the twice-exceptional (2E; Kaufman, 2018) student identification process (Gilman & Peters, 2018). It used disability critical race studies (DisCrit; Annamma et al., 2016) to investigate how educators’ discourse signals the inclusion or exclusion of 2E Black girls. Critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2014) was used to understand the ways their intersectional identities of race, ability, and gender impact their identification in schools. It highlighted the identification barriers for 2E Black girls and conceptualized a normative 2E construct (N.A.T.E.) aligned with the dominant institutional discourse of twice-exceptionality. Policy shifts are recommended …

Natural History Of Ngly1 Deficiency: Motor Function & Clinical Features, Grace Morrison, Selina Dwight, Hal Landy, William F Mueller, Pam Ventola, Regina Deck, Becky Schweighardt, Matt Wilsey, Kevin J Lee, Bernhard Suter

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

N-glycanase 1 (NGLY1) Deficiency is an ultra-rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by biallelic loss-of-function mutations in the NGLY1 gene, leading to severe impairments in neurocognitive and motor function abilities in the affected patient population. Its core clinical features include global developmental delay, hyperkinetic movement disorders, elevation of liver transaminases, (hypo)alacrima, and progressive sensorimotor neuropathy. Due to the range of phenotypes and severity within the confirmed patient population, ongoing characterization of the disease is critical. A prospective natural history study (NHS) was conducted to further elucidate disease phenotypes and examine any changes in neurocognitive or motor function over a one-year period. Fifteen …

New Mobile Medical Programs And Problems Encountered During The Start-Up Phase, Michael Robin Gardner

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Income As A Moderator Of Stress And Yoga Practice Among Black Women, Renee Jaxel

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Developing An Effective Clinical Supervision Structure In An Outpatient Mental Health Group Practice, Kourtney Dockery

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Trauma-Informed Intake Standardization Equitable Approach, Ketura James

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.