Digital Commons Network^™

From Broken To Becoming: A Phenomenological Study Of Life Purpose Among Christian Adult Survivors Of Childhood Trauma, Chenel M. Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Childhood trauma often disrupts an individual’s sense of meaning, identity, and direction, leaving lasting effects that extend beyond psychological symptoms into how life’s purpose is understood and lived. While existing research has examined trauma, coping, and meaning in life, less is known about how survivors themselves experience and construct life purpose following traumatic experiences. This qualitative phenomenological study explored how Christian adult survivors of childhood trauma describe their lived experiences of trauma and healing, and the development of life purpose in adulthood. Semistructured interviews were conducted with seven Christian adults who self-identified as having experienced childhood trauma and healing and …

A Study On Online Romance Fraud And National Security: A Ghanaian Perspective, Osmond B. Kabah

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

One of the most prevalent cybercrimes is online romance fraud, where the perpetrators prey on individuals looking for love on various platforms. The crime, widespread on dating apps and social media, is typified by scammers starting a relationship and then defrauding the gullible victims of their money. Ghana is one of the countries whose citizens have been victims of these swindlers, and the national security apparatus is increasingly receiving reports of online financial victimization. This qualitative study aims to explore the issue in the country from a national security perspective. This study investigates what motivates the perpetrators of this crime …

The Sword And The Pen: How America’S Way Of War Escaped Constitutional Restraint, Daryl Lee Posey

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation examines how changes in military technology and institutional design shifted practical control over war initiation from Congress to the presidency between the founding era and the end of the Cold War. The Constitution vests the power to declare war in Congress, and the framers rejected proposals to give that authority to the president alone. This study argues that advances in communication, transportation, weapons lethality, and government secrecy compressed the time available for congressional deliberation, concentrated war-relevant information inside executive institutions, and made presidential initiative the default rather than the exception. The study traces this pattern across six chapters, …

Resilient Ethical Governance By Design: Building Resilience For Future-Ready Smart Cities Against Emerging Technology Disruptions In Public Sector – A Case Study Of Dallas Smart City, Emmanuel Asamoah Asare

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation examines how Dallas’s smart city strategic policies foster resilience against disruptions associated with emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and Internet of Things systems. Using a convergent mixed-methods comparative case study, Dallas serves as the primary case, Austin serves as a U.S. municipal comparator, and Barcelona serves as a qualitative benchmark for ethical and trust-centered smart city governance. The study integrates document analysis, broadband and digital equity indicators, stakeholder engagement evidence, and exploratory quantitative comparisons to assess how governance adaptability, preparedness, functionality, equity, and stakeholder trust shape resilience outcomes.

The findings provide partial support for the study’s hypotheses. Dallas …

Exploring Burnout, Isolation, And Support Among Middle School Music Educators In Georgia: A Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Study, Jameson T. Meadows

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This phenomenological study examined the lived experiences of middle school music educators (MSMEs) in Georgia to understand how burnout, professional isolation, support, and advocacy influence their professional experiences and sustainability. These educators navigate instructional tasks, program administration, and responsibilities beyond the classroom. 10 MSMEs, including 5 band directors, 3 orchestra directors, and 2 chorus directors, participated in virtual semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed through an inductive coding process to identify patterns across participants’ experiences. 4 themes emerged from the findings: (a) relational and musical growth sustains the work, (b) burnout accumulates through role overload and personal investment, (c) discipline-specific professional …

Exploring Psychological Capital And Perceived Employability In The Career Experiences Of Military Spouses, Sydney Higginbotham

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Military spouses face distinct employment challenges that stem from the unique demands and disruptions that the military lifestyle can create. These disruptions can create barriers to employment that require military spouses draw on internal and external resources to adapt. Grounded in conservation of resources theory and social cognitive career theory, this study considers how psychological capital and perceived employability, as adaptive responses, contribute to an increase of one’s agency in career management. A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was employed to test hypotheses through regression analyses. Data was collected from an online survey of a convenience sample of 41 military spouses …

The Social Construction Of Firearm Meaning In 2022 Hollywood Films: A Qualitative Content Analysis, Anthony L. Paduano

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This qualitative study investigated how meaning was socially constructed around firearms in mainstream American cinema. The study used Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) social construction of reality as the primary framework, with semiotic analysis and Bandura’s (1977, 1986) social learning theory as supporting lenses, treating firearms as culturally loaded signs whose meanings were encoded and stabilized through narrative convention. A qualitative content analysis of 50 films, 2022 Hollywood films in which firearms were prominent enough to meet the study’s inclusion criteria, was conducted using a two-pool design that combined purposive selection with random selection from a bounded pool of commercially prominent …

September 17, 2026, The Daily Mississippian

Daily Mississippian (all digitized issues)

No abstract provided.

Evaluating The Physical, Digital, And Sovereign Risks To U.S. Data Centers, Kevin Chen, Katrina Mcdermott

Reports, Projects, and Research

This report is intended to inform DHS officials, law enforcement, critical infrastructure personnel, and the wider Intelligence Community on the urgent physical and digital threat landscape confronting domestic data center infrastructure.

The growth of technologies that are reliant on data centers, most notably AI, has transformed these facilities from passive data repositories into multi-dimensional platforms that are attractive targets for hostile state and non-state actors.

Volatile Evidence At Scale: Forensically Sound Preservation And High-Performance Memory Forensics For Containers And Ros-Based Robots, Taha Gharaibeh Ph.D.

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Volatile memory holds evidence that reaches persistent storage rarely or never. Containers and robots destroy that evidence as a matter of routine operation rather than through adversarial action, and memory forensic tooling was built for neither platform. This dissertation develops and evaluates a memory-centered approach spanning acquisition, analysis efficiency, and robot forensics, and demonstrates that volatile evidence can be reliably preserved and analyzed at scale across containers and ROS-based robots.

First, we measure why memory forensic analysis is slow. Benchmarking the Volatility Framework across four Python runtimes on 14 memory samples totaling 173 GB shows that PyPy is 15 to …

Application Of Machine Learning To Discover Dynamical Structures In 4d Poincaré Maps In The Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem, Kevin M. Trigg, Daniel J. Broyles, Robert A. Bettinger, Tyler J. Kapolka

Faculty Publications

The spatial Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP) produces complex orbital dynamics that are difficult to classify at scale using traditional, manual Poincaré map analysis. A Poincaré map simplifies continuous orbital motion by recording the points where a trajectory intersects a chosen surface in phase space, converting a continuous path into a discrete set of crossings that reveal underlying topological structure. These crossings make it easier to characterize trajectory behavior, but interpreting them visually becomes impractical for large datasets and as Poincaré maps evolve from two into four dimensions. To address this challenge, an unsupervised clustering pipeline for discovering dynamical structures …

Nature-Based Activities To Support Mental Ill Health (Greengage): Protocol For A Pilot Randomised Controlled Trial And Process Evaluation, Caroline Jenkinson, Katie Gibbs, Rebecca Lovell, Alison Hurst, Kerryn Husk, Katrina Wyatt, Obioha C. Ukoumunne, Siobhan Creanor, Anne Spencer, Ruth Garside

Peninsula Medical School

Anxiety and depression are among the leading mental health difficulties worldwide. Nature-based interventions are increasingly being used to support mental health and wellbeing. There is growing policy interest in the use of nature as a setting for interventions. However, there remains a lack of robust evidence on their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.

Perceptual Evaluation Of 3d-Printed Typodont Teeth With Comparable Cutting Forces, Alex Cresswell-Boyes, Aylin Baysan, Graham Davis

Peninsula Dental School

Background: Pre-clinical training in endodontics relies heavily on typodont teeth to develop operative skills before patient care, but conventional polymer-based typodonts differ from human teeth in their cutting response, requiring greater force and producing an unrealistic cutting experience that often dissatisfies students. Methods: This study evaluated four alternative 3D-printed typodont materials—15 wt.% carbonated hydroxyapatite, 15 wt.% Puraflake ^® (glass flake filler), 15 wt.% zinc oxide, and a urethane/triethylene glycol dimethacrylate resin composite—based on their cutting force, post-cut surface roughness, and perceived cutting feel relative to extracted enamel, assessed via a five-point Likert scale questionnaire completed by 46 (n = 46) …

Interpretive Flexibility And The Social Construction Of Generative Ai In Education: A Scot Analysis, Elham Mousavidin, Sujin K. Horwitz

Southwestern Business Administration Journal

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools has intensified discussions about their role in education. This study uses the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework to explore how educational stakeholders interpret GenAI and how these interpretations influence its development and adoption. Through an interpretive literature review of research published between 2021 and 2025, we examine stakeholder perspectives using SCOT constructs, including relevant social groups, interpretive flexibility, technological frames, and controversies. Results identify three main interpretive tensions shaping current debates: transformational force versus transactional tool, cognitive augmentation versus cognitive atrophy, and digital empowerment versus digital enslavement. These tensions show …

Comparison Of Gravity Separation And Flotation For Pyrite Recovery From Tailings, Gülay Bulut, Gönül Göksu Gökçe, Dilruba Karamanlı, Oğuzhan Mert Gürkan, Ergin Sarp Zenzirci, Binnur Kırım, Alim Gül

Journal of Sustainable Mining

Tailings generated during the production of lead, zinc, and copper concentrates contain significant amounts of sulfide minerals, particularly pyrite. Pyrite, which remains in tailings after the recovery of other metals, is one of the main contributors to acid mine drainage (AMD). Therefore, recovering pyrite from tailings is environmentally and economically an important issue. In this study, pyrite recovery from tailings was investigated using flotation and gravity separation methods. Mineralogical characterization and liberation analyses were conducted by Mineral Liberation Analysis (MLA), indicating that pyrite is the major sulfide mineral with over 76% liberation degree even in the coarsest fractions. Flotation tests …

A Framework For Teaching Maya Aspect System: Pedagogical Strategies For Maya Grammar, Quetzil E. Castañeda

Journal of Maya Heritage

Abstract. Maya, an Indigenous language spoken primarily in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, remains under-resourced in materials for second-language and heritage-language learners. Its agglutinative morphology, split ergativity, and aspect system pose particular pedagogical challenges, especially when Maya grammar is explained through Spanish or English tense categories. Based on a critical review of existing teaching resources and the author’s more than twenty years of experience teaching Maya, this article proposes a pedagogical framework for understanding its aspect grammar. Rather than organizing verbal morphology around tense, the framework distinguishes four principal conjugational forms: Ongoing Incomplete, Simple Past, Completed Present, and Subjunctive. It also introduces …

Decoupled Agent Architecture For Function-Based Remote Device Automation, Qingfei Tian

Defensive Publications Series

Orchestrating specific, function-level actions across heterogeneous fleets of electronic devices, such as smartphones, wearable devices, or smart home appliances, can present challenges, as methods like user interface scripting may be less reliable and placing complex logic on resource-constrained devices can be impractical. A system using a decoupled agent architecture may address these challenges. A remote agent, operating in a resource-rich environment such as a cloud server, can interpret high-level goals and translate them into a sequence of structured, function-based commands. A lightweight on-device agent may receive these commands via a communication relay and execute them programmatically using local device application …

Refereed Research - Indispensable Yet Not Fully Legitimate: Street Markets As Invisible Subsistence Infrastructure, Raji Srinivasan, Maria C. Merino

Subsistence Marketplaces

Street markets are key provisioning systems across the Global South, supplying fresh food, employment, and retail access absent formal infrastructure. Yet despite street markets’ functional indispensability to millions of low-income consumers, their legitimacy is chronically contested, affirmed by vendors and communities yet challenged by planners, developers, and state authorities who apply formal-economy criteria in evaluating them. We theorize this as a legitimacy paradox and ask what structural mechanisms sustain it? Using composite vignettes grounded in fieldwork, we theorize three mechanisms. First, visibility without recognition: street markets are hyper-visible yet excluded from cognitive templates of legitimate, formal retail. Second, asymmetric essentiality: …

20 Multifunctional Solutions For Hydraulics And Structural Frameworks Of Legged Robots: Self-Diagnostic Cartridge Valves, Mrf And Niti-Based Damping, Parametric Metamaterials, And Predictive Diagnostics, Volodymyr Kotegov

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses twenty technical solutions for hydraulic drives, structural frameworks, and diagnostic systems of legged robots, unified by the design principle of a single physical element performing two or more functions simultaneously. These solutions encompass: self-diagnostic valves and seals utilizing impedance, piezoelectric, and NiTi mechanisms; damping and energy-recuperating structures based on magnetorheological fluids and liquid crystal elastomers; parametric metamaterial cells combining elastic, valving, and resonant functions; architectural designs for hardware-level hydraulic network survivability operating independently of electronics; cartridge interfaces with integrated opto-acoustic and electrochemical diagnostics; and a comprehensive structural joint architecture featuring three-level passive clamping and hydraulic lines routed …

Low Bandwidth Full-Duplex Multimodal Llm Interaction With Contextual Interruption, Longlong Zhu, Weiyue Huang

Defensive Publications Series

Multimodal LLMs implemented on a server can support remote user interaction over a network but require continuous real-time streaming of raw, uncompressed video and/or audio. This can be infeasible due to bandwidth constraints or other reasons, and can prevent real-time feedback in time-sensitive interactive settings. This disclosure describes an asymmetric edge and cloud collaborative architecture that can enable full-duplex and seamlessly interruptible multimodal LLM orchestration at low latency. The architecture decouples sensor processing tasks from cognitive reasoning tasks involved in interaction between a user and a multimodal LLM via modalities such as audio, video, or image. Computationally heavy processing of …

Haptic Feedback To Enable Eyes-Free Capture Of Moving Subjects, Na

Defensive Publications Series

Capturing photos or videos of moving subjects with a handheld camera requires the capturing user to look frequently at a displayed preview of the captured scene to maintain subject framing. This can be difficult in many contexts and also disrupts the user’s ability to experience the event directly. This disclosure describes techniques to provide real-time, eyes-free haptic and/or visual feedback to assist users in framing and following a moving subject when capturing a photo or video. Users can select one or more primary subjects within the live preview. Upon selection, the target subject can be marked with a prominently visible …

Adaptive Semantic Memory Paging, Shubham Shivhare, Faiz Ahmed

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure provides a method (300) for adaptive semantic memory paging in artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. The method (300) includes receiving an AI workload comprising a plurality of memory pages, monitoring semantic execution signals associated with the AI workload, computing semantic relevance scores for the memory pages based on the semantic execution signals, and prioritizing the memory pages according to the semantic relevance scores. The method (300) further includes determining memory-tier assignments for the memory pages, placing higher-priority memory pages in higher-performance memory tiers, identifying lower-priority memory pages for migration or eviction, detecting memory pressure and changes in model …

Representation Of Processor Traces For Machine Learning Models, Sai Akhil Suggu, Anurag Adarsh, Somya Gupta, Zimuzo Ezeozue, Dwipal Desai

Defensive Publications Series

System performance trace data may be represented as a vector to allow the trace data to be efficiently processed by a machine learning model. First, the trace data is preprocessed to generate a hierarchical topology tree that maps software events to specific threads, processes, and processors. Next, an event-driven mechanism generates tokens when a system state change occurs, collapsing idle periods into a single duration attribute to achieve lossless compression and reduce overall sequence length. Each token is then converted into a concatenated input vector that aligns discrete software events and continuous hardware metrics onto a single temporal axis. Finally, …

Distributed Vertical Power Module Building Blocks For Interleaved Power Delivery To Three-Dimensional Stacked Chiplets, N/A

Defensive Publications Series

A vertical power (VPWR) module architecture delivers electrical power to three-dimensional stacked semiconductor chiplets (such as TPU, GPU, xPU) packages using distributed sub-phase building blocks. The architecture divides the phases of a multi-phase power stage, and the voltage outputs those phases feed, into two or more independent power rails, so that a four-phase stage yields two, three, or four independent voltage outputs. These sub-phase units physically map onto interleaved power rails across a ball grid array (BGA) footprint of the semiconductor packages. Positioning the sub-phase units directly beneath corresponding power rail contact locations shortens current travel paths through printed circuit …

Pre-Execution Dollar-Cost Query Router With Policy-Gated Cross-Engine Execution, Pravesh Kumar

Defensive Publications Series

The present disclosure relates to a method and a system for routing a structured query across a plurality of heterogeneous query execution engines. The present disclosure suggests receiving a query execution request including a structured query and parsing the query to generate a canonical representation of the query. The present disclosure also suggests determining an estimated execution cost based on at least scan characteristics associated with the query and a runtime estimation associated with execution of the query. Thereafter, the present disclosure suggests determining a policy compliance condition for each of the plurality of heterogeneous query execution engines based on …

Response To Reviewers — Emancipations Symposium On Profit And Power, Ronen Palan

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

The Age Of Intangible Assets: Thoughts On Palan’S Profit And Power, James K. Galbraith

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

“Don’T Tell Me To Keep Doing What I’M Doing, When I’M Risking My Life Trying To Get You To Do Your Job”: Thoughts On The Politics Of Distance, Anonymous Author

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

Eviscerating The State: An Update, Jean L. Cohen

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

A year after the publication of her article “Eviscerating the State: The New Oligarchic and Authoritarian Project to Undermine American Constitutional Democracy (Emancipations, Vol.4: Iss.2, July 2025) Jean Cohen looks again at the threats to American constitutional democracy posed by new oligarchic and authoritarian actors in the economy, the state, and society.

From Monopoly To Orchestration: The Hilltop And Farm Youth And The Changing Organization Of State Coercion - The Israeli Case, Idan Yaron

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork – as a social anthropologist, studying the Far Right in Israel, on the ground, and through intimate and prolonged relationships with opinion leaders and rank-and-file activists – this essay examines the Hilltop and Farm Youth in the West Bank to reconsider Charles Tilly's influential account of state formation and the organization of coercion. It asks a simple but troubling question: why would a powerful modern state, fully capable of suppressing autonomous violent actors, sometimes allow them to persist? I argue that Tilly's theory should be confirmed, adapted, and amended. His fundamental …