Digital Commons Network^™

Elevation, Demographic Composition, And Suicide Rates: A Municipality-Level Analysis In Colorado And Wyoming, Steven Loader

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Reducing Hospital-Acquired Pressure Injuries In Acute Care Facilities: Evidence-Based Strategies For Improving Patient Safety And Cms Compliance, Hugo Aldhair Lopez

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Staff Education To Enhance Depression Screening Using The Patient Health Questionnaire-9, Thabile Ngcobo

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Rural, Multigrade Kindergarten Through Grade 8 Teachers’ Experiences With Differentiated Instruction In A Northwestern State, Kristi Lynn Borge

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Diabetic Nephropathy Masquerading As Systemic Disease: The Critical Role Of Renal Biopsy In A Young Uninsured Woman With Nephrotic Syndrome, Yolanda V. Gutierrez, Alexis Vargas Del Toro, Cristina Kochi Yamamoto, Jose Loayza Pintado, Andres Suarez-Parraga

School of Medicine Publications

Nephrotic syndrome can have overlapping features across multiple diseases, making diagnosis difficult without tissue confirmation. We describe a 30-year-old uninsured Hispanic woman with type 1 diabetes, hypertension, and CKD3B who presented with nephrotic syndrome, sepsis, and progressive muscle weakness. Her pleural effusions, periorbital changes, elevated free light chains, and dysphagia raised concern for systemic conditions such as amyloidosis or polymyositis, especially given inconsistent outpatient follow-up. Because her management would differ significantly depending on the underlying cause and due to the high risk of loss to follow-up, a renal biopsy was pursued. Serologic studies were unremarkable, and biopsy ultimately confirmed diabetic …

Examining Associations Between Cognitive Factors And Behavior To Promote Culturally Responsive Teaching In Middle School Math: A Conceptual Replication Study, Ashley Struebing

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

The purpose of this research was to examine the association of middle school math teachers’ cognitive processes on their use of culturally responsive teaching (CRT) practices to promote CRT in middle school math classrooms. Specifically, a quantitative, cross-sectional research design was used to conduct a conceptual replication of Comstock et al. (2023), and to extend their research by exploring the association between teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching math and their use of CRT practices. Participants in the current study were urban and rural middle school math teachers who may or may not have been involved in a CRT professional development program, …

Evaluation In Applied Ai: Predictive Modeling, Agent Safety, And Model Validation, Tanmay Sah

Harrisburg University Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation focuses on three applied challenges in machine learning and artificial intelligence: predicting social media content virality, evaluating safety in tool using large language model agents, and standardizing model validation in regulated settings. Across these domains, the dissertation argues that evaluation in applied AI must be matched to context, combining predictive performance with the relevant evidence needed for interpretability, safety, reproducibility, and governance readiness. First, Decoding Reddit Memes Virality extracts and analyzes 16,968 posts using computer vision, natural language processing, and gradient boosting to identify visual, textual, and temporal signals associated with virality. Second, The Verifier Tax designs and …

What Is Happening In Major League Baseball? A Structural Snapshot In An Evolving Economic Landscape: A Case Study, Max K. Shilstone

Business and Economics Honors Papers

This qualitative case study examines the most visible business and economic factors currently impacting Major League Baseball (MLB). Specifically, it analyzes how current labor and collective bargaining issues, the changing media and broadcasting landscape, and the league’s reliance on locally generated revenue are shaping the league’s current and future business environment. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, this case study draws from academic scholarship, contemporary industry reporting, league documents, existing interviews, and six semi-structured interviews with professionals working in or around MLB. The evidence was analyzed through thematic coding and triangulated across sources to identify recurring themes and validate emerging findings. …

Study Finds Major Gaps In Dementia Care Across Mississippi, Clara Turnage

University of Mississippi News

OXFORD, Miss. – Some 80% of Mississippi counties have no adult day service centers, and even counties that do have centers cannot meet the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers, a new University of Mississippi-led study indicates.

Catacombs In Context: Exploring Roman Architectural Influence In The Catacombs Of Rabat, Malta, Emily S.R Hodson

Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Honors Projects

Previously, scholarship on the Mediterranean catacombs has focused on isolated sites or on the religious significance and iconography of regional groups. By contextualizing the archaeological data through comparison and recentering the discussion on architecture, this research offers a contextualized, non-apologetic picture of ancient Mediterranean catacombs. This architectural comparison between the Roman catacombs and those of St. Paul and Abbatija Tad-Dejr in Malta reveals both significant architectural change and the persistence of archaic features, suggesting a high degree of cultural continuity under Roman provincial governance on Malta (218 BCE - c. 5th - 6th centuries CE). This, paired with the emergence …

2025 Nursing Annual Report, Children's Health System Of Texas

2025

No abstract provided.

Ticking Time Bomb: The Economic Ramifications Of Mlb's Pitch Clock, Katie Ciuffreda

Business and Economics Honors Papers

In recent years, Major League Baseball has been challenged with declining engagement and attendance, particularly with younger audiences, with the long duration of games most commonly cited as the reason for disinterest. In response to this, MLB implemented a pitch clock that worked its way through the minor league system until it was introduced to the majors for the 2023 season. The goal for the clock was to reduce game times by increasing pace of play. While early evidence shows that the clock has been successful in that regard, its impact on player performance remains to be explored. This study …

The Impatience Of Winning: An Analysis Of Time Discounting, Predictive Modeling, And The Nba Draft, Alec R. Plante

Business and Economics Honors Papers

This paper examines whether NBA draft decisions can be better explained by incorporating non-geometric time discounting into a model of general manager decision making. Using a dataset of 285 NBA draft prospects over a 12-year period, the impact of college statistics on Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) is determined, and these impact values are then used to create a “predicted” VORP for the first 4 seasons of each player’s career: a projection of what a general manager might think of a prospect’s future value given their college statistics. Following this, geometric and hyperbolic time discounting models are applied to estimate …

Objects In The Sunset, Iskander Guetta

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

This research explores everyday design practices in the Maghreb shaped by economic, political, and ecological struggles amid transnational debates on decolonizing design. To do so, it looks at objects in, through and with the sunset. Taking المغرب — the place where the sun sets — as a conceptual lens, Objects in the Sunset illuminates the savoir-faire born from dispossession, scarcity, and epistemic violence. Working across different scales of the built environment — infrastructures, spaces, objects, and materials — it shifts design away from Eurocentric conceptions: from rationalization to resourcefulness, homogeneity to heterogeneity, optimization to adaptation, disposability to repair, and universal …

Leveraging Information Theory And Ecological Network Analysis To Monitor Communication Networks In A Student Aerospace Team, Christine Sessions

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Effective communication is a critical component of successful collaboration in group projects and team settings. However, systematically tracking and analyzing team communications can be challenging, especially in complex, multi-member teams such as those found in the aerospace industry. This paper explores an information-theoretic approach that leverages encoding techniques and graph theory to analyze communication networks within a university’s multi-year, student-led cubesat design project (Project COMET). By utilizing Shannon Entropy as a measure of information flow, encoding communication patterns, and analyzing Ecological Network Analysis parameters, this research aims to understand how an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University student project team evolves over the …

Data-Driven Physical-Layer Optimization For Rf And Optical Communications: Transmitarray Metasurfaces, Contextual-Bandit Mud, And Coherent Optical Links, Chengtao M. Xu

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This dissertation studies three physical-layer optimization problems that share a common difficulty: the forward model, whether an electromagnetic solver or a statistical channel model, is either too expensive to evaluate at design scale or too unstable to hold across a single processing block. The first two problems are treated in their own right, as problems in antenna design and in multi-user detection over time-variant channels; the third carries the methodology onto a coherent optical link, where size, weight, and power constraints make a small-satellite deployment the natural target.

The antenna work targets a tri-layer pixelated unit cell fabricated on Avient …

Advocating For Healthy Work Environments: Addressing Workplace Violence Against Nurses With Research, Kendrea Lea Todt, Kathleen Kinser, Hannah Grace Shipp, Florence Weierbach, Kimberly Ferguson, Teresa Carnevale

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

Introduction: Nurses globally experience workplace violence (WPV) daily (Kafle, 2022), significantly increasing since the COVID-19 pandemic (National Nurses United, 2024). Nursing is the most trusted profession in the United States of America (USA) (American Nurses Association, 2025) and yet nurses are five times more likely to be assaulted at work than other occupations (Occupational Safety Health Administration, n.d.). WPV creates an unpleasant environment that negatively impacts nurses’ well-being (Kolutek et al., 2024) and perceptions of patient care quality (Shafan Tivka et al., 2024). This highlights the importance of addressing WPV as a workforce and patient care issue.

Background: In Tennessee, …

The Age-Dependent Resident Myonuclear Multi-Omic Response To An Acute Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophic Stimulus In Mice, Pieter J. Koopmans, Ronald G. Jones, Ana Regina Cabrera, Francielly Morena, Nicholas P. Greene, John J. Mccarthy, Ahmed Ismaeel, Yuan Wen, Kevin A. Murach

Physiology Faculty Publications

A detailed analysis of how muscle fiber nuclei (myonuclei) respond to a hypertrophic stimulus could provide a critical step toward understanding compromised skeletal muscle plasticity with age. We used recombination-independent doxycycline-inducible myonucleus-specific fluorescent labelling, tissue RNA-sequencing, myonuclear DNA methylation analysis, multi-omic integration, and single myonucleus RNA-sequencing (smnRNA-seq) to define the molecular characteristics of adult (6–8 month) and aged (24 month) murine skeletal muscle after acute mechanical overload (MOV). In adult and aged MOV muscles, we found that: 1) similarities in the transcriptional response to loading—specifically in metabolism genes – were partly explained by a post-transcriptional microRNA-mediated mechanism that we corroborated …

Mitigating "Weird": How Undergraduate Teaching Assistants Navigate Role Conflict With Ease Through Repertoires Of Action, Emery Teague

Sociology Honors Projects

Research in role theory has generated insufficient knowledge about how role conflict and role strain intersect, leaving questions of how actors navigate and manage these phenomena in real time. Drawing inspiration from cultural sociology and contentious politics, I theorize that individuals use repertoires of action to mitigate role challenges. Empirically, I investigate how undergraduate teaching assistants manage conflicting and contradictory social roles at a small liberal arts college, given their extensive contact with students outside of the classroom. Analysis of over 15 interviews and ethnographic shadowing of key participants of this population demonstrates the multifaceted, yet recurring, ways that teaching …

Learning Through Reading: Confronting Novel Linguistic Forms In Literature, Quinn Doyle

German Studies Honors Projects

How do readers learn to engage with novel forms of written language that fall outside of their established linguistic repertoire? And how do texts themselves facilitate this process? This thesis looks for answers to these questions in literary theory, multilingualism studies, applied linguistics, and a diverse corpus of literary works. I propose a comprehensive descriptive vocabulary of novel language use in literature, and then observe how these frameworks work in concert in an exemplary text by analyzing Christine Brooke-Rose’s multilingual novel Between. I conclude by discussing how the “exceptional” cases explored in this thesis can change our understanding of …

Influences Of Musical Experience On Absolute Pitch Memory, Mia A. Guzman

Music Honors Projects

Absolute pitch (AP), colloquially known as “perfect pitch,” is the ability to identify or recreate any musical note without an external reference tone. While many believe AP is an exceptional, innate musical talent, I argue that AP is a continuous ability influenced by experience. Using a mixed-methods approach that combined behavioral tasks with interviews, I examined AP memory in AP possessors and non-possessors with varying musical backgrounds to understand how experience-based factors, such as language, primary instrument, and the onset and style of musical training, might influence individual performance on established AP measures.

Do Dreams Reflect Our Culture? A Statistical Analysis On Dream Narratives, Michal Kuderski

Honors Capstones

Dreams are often viewed as personal experiences, but they may also reflect cultural influences. This project investigates whether dream content varies across cultures by analyzing written dream reports from American, Japanese, and Peruvian college students using data from DreamBank.net. The study applies text analysis techniques to identify common themes and compares language patterns, including the use of ‘I’ and 'We,' to examine differences in self-focus. Statistical methods for count data are used to evaluate these patterns, along with resampling to address differences in sample size. Preliminary findings suggest that both dream themes and language use may vary by cultural …

Do National Parks Significantly Improve Air Quality?, Xinyi Liu

Honors Capstones

Healthy living has long been a goal pursued by individuals. In an era where PM2.5 concentrations and greenhouse gas levels are steadily increasing, many people prefer to live in areas with relatively lower levels of air pollution. National parks, as well-known protected areas, typically contain more vegetation and water resources, along with lower levels of human activity. This suggests two potential mechanisms: first, pollutant emissions are expected to be lower; second, vegetation, water bodies, and non-urban land may contribute to the removal or deposition of airborne pollutants, including particulate matter. In everyday experience, people often perceive the air to be …

Stemflows And Preferential Flows: A Historical Review And Challenges For The Future, Keith Beven, John T. Van Stan Ii

Biological, Geological, and Environmental Faculty Publications

This paper provides a historically-grounded review and research agenda on a generally neglected issue in hillslope hydrology and hydrological modelling: the role of stemflow in initiating preferential flow in soils. While stemflow typically represents a small fraction of incident rainfall, it can concentrate water fluxes by up to similar to 20-fold at tree bases, creating localised infiltration intensities that exceed those from throughfall. Some new historical context for throughfall and stemflow studies from the 19th Century is presented, including a summary of stemflow research in a wide range of vegetation types and environments. The evidence for preferential flows resulting from …

Illinois Wesleyan Announces Candidates For Graduation 2026, Ryan Gibson

Press Releases 2020-2029

No abstract provided.

Methodology For The Autonomous Deployment Of Capsules From An Underwater Host, Jack Stadtman, Emily Lopez, Matthew Gutekunst, Anthony Caruso, Gianluca Calgaro

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

This project, conducted in collaboration with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), focuses on the design and development of a seafloor-resident system capable of autonomously deploying multiple unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) capsules. The primary objective was to create a low-cost, reliable, and negatively buoyant launcher that can store, select, and deploy capsules in a controlled sequence while maintaining stability and ensuring effective communication from a remote control station.

The final design consists of a tripod-style launcher integrating three main subsystems: a rotating top cap for capsule selection, a cylindrical holding drum for multi-capsule storage, and a bottom electronics and ballast …

Toray Plastics Rigging Project, Adam Lurgio, Benjamin Prew, Brandon Cipolla, Carl Bennett, Jiacheng Kang

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

The Extended Bridge Bar Rotor Removal System was developed to provide a safe, structurally validated, and repeatable method for removing a 1,940lbs grinder rotor within a confined industrial cell at Toray Plastics. The existing removal process relied on vertical lifting and indirect maneuvering methods that increased risk exposure and operational variability. Manufacturer recommendations specified side extraction; however, the current configuration did not provide controlled lateral motion. The objective of this project was to design a lifting system capable of providing controlled three-axis motion while integrating with existing facility I-beams and remaining under a defined cost constraint. The final design consists …

Connection Survivability Under High Stress Situations, Riley Shannon, Alex Araujo, Jerrick Pajimna, Liam Rowland, Joseph Truong

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

This final design report outlines how our team developed a detachable connection mechanism for the "Connection Survivability Under High Stress Situations" senior engineering capstone project. The objective is to design, prototype, and test a mechanical connection that engages four rails with a 21-inch diameter internal cylinder, each component being 3 feet in length. The connection must be able to toggle off and on when needed to secure the cylinder inside of its housing. The connection has to go inside the railing slot with the dimensions of 2.94” wide by 1.5” tall, and 36” long. Ideally this connection doesn’t affect the …

Uuv Recovery System & Test Fixture, Nicholas Dinatale, Zachary Mcbrine, Kenny Sposato, David Ferreira, Connor Theroux

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

This report presents the final design, fabrication, and validation of a Mechanical Securing Arm System (MSAS) and associated test fixture for recovering an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) into a submerged, launch-tube-like structure. Sponsored by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), the project addressed the need for a reliable, low cost, scalable, and mechanically simple UUV recovery method while also reducing hydrodynamic interference caused by the existing tow tank armature setup.

A structured engineering design process was followed, beginning with literature and patent research, customer requirement development, engineering specification generation, and concept evaluation. The team generated 150 total concepts, with 30 …

Adjustable Linear Ratchet Wrench, Nate Babineau, Finn Forrest, Alex Destefano

Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design Projects

This project documents our year-long design and development of the Adjustable Linear Ratchet Wrench, an original mechanical consumer product developed for the Mechanical Engineering Capstone Design course. The goal of the project was to create a new mechanical device that addresses a common user need, has broad consumer appeal, can be produced within a realistic retail price range, and relies on core mechanical engineering principles. After evaluating multiple early invention ideas, our team narrowed the project scope to hand tools and selected the adjustable wrench as the product area because conventional adjustable wrenches are common, mechanically simple, and still limited …