Digital Commons Network^™

Town Of Dummer, Nh Annual Report Of The Town Officers For The Year Ended December 31, 2024, Dummer Town Representatives

Dummer, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Symptoms Tachycardia, Patricia Weinstein

Quill & Scope

No abstract provided.

At The Border, Ivan Dominguez

Quill & Scope

View of the wall at the US/Mexico border. Arizona, 2024

A Program To Improve The Efficiency And Quality Of Patent Examination, N. Hylton, Keith, Lynn Richards, Madisyn

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

In this article we suggest three novel amendments to U.S. patent law to increase efficiency and decrease costs. We first contend that while the assertion of invalid patents is detrimental because of anticompetitive effects, such competition concerns should place no duty upon applicants to disclose prior art at the outset. Additionally, we argue that to avoid resource waste, the USPTO should outsource prior art searches for certain applications, as in Japan. Finally, we propose a system where patentees have the option to elect to a patent box regime that reduces their taxes on patent profits substantially (e.g., from 21% to …

Development Of A Drone-Assisted Pavement Management Framework Based On The Pavement Condition Index For University Parking Lots, Omesh Pasuluru

Civil Engineering Theses - Archive

Efficient pavement management is essential for keeping university parking lots in good condition. At the University of Texas at Arlington, parking areas experience heavy use and environmental wear, which can cause damage if not addressed early. Traditional methods for assessing pavement conditions are time-consuming, interrupt daily activities, and are expensive. Hence, there is a need for better solutions. This study introduces a drone-based pavement management approach that uses the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) system. The PCI is a numerical scale from 0 to 100 that rates pavement quality based on surface condition. A high PCI score (85-100) indicates the pavement …

Structural Performance Of High-Rise Rc Buildings With Sfrc Columns And Shear Walls Subjected To Seismic Loading, Ali Azzawi

Civil Engineering Theses - Archive

To investigate the seismic performance of high-rise RC buildings with steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) columns and shear walls, a detailed numerical analysis was established using RISA-3D software on twelve-story RC buildings subjected to earthquakes. The variables included in this research are steel fiber volume fraction (SFVF), number of stories with SFRC columns and shear walls, and concrete strength grade. The mechanical properties of the concrete for each mix are evaluated experimentally. Three types of concrete mix designs were performed in the Civil Engineering Laboratory Building (CELB) using different dosages of steel fibers (0, 25lb/cy, and 70lb/cy). The properties of …

Navigating Uncertainty In Global Auditing: Institutional Barriers, Coordination Challenges, And Auditor Responses, Eric P. Krause

2025

Enhancing transparency and coordination in global auditing is increasingly critical as financial markets become more interconnected. My dissertation examines how regulatory fragmentation and uncertainty shape cross-border audit practices and outcomes. Through three related studies, I explore the effects of economic and political uncertainty, regulatory tension, and global audit network structures on audit-related decisions and consequences. The first paper is a literature review that synthesizes findings from over 40 empirical studies on how economic and political uncertainty affect financial reporting, capital markets, and auditor behavior. Motivated by the rise of uncertainty indices—such as the Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) Index (Baker et …

Watchdogs Or Lapdogs: How Audit Committees Influence Financial Reporting Quality And Cybersecurity, Yanru Yang

2025

With the increasing complexity of the business environment, the role of corporate governance and oversight is expanding continuously. Grounded in archival research, my dissertation consists of three studies that explore the features of audit committees in monitoring both financial reporting and broader areas, such as cybersecurity.

The first paper, co-authored with Gopal Krishnan and Wei Yu, examines the implications of audit committee (AC) director departure for financial reporting quality and audit risk. We find that the departures in the firms with most concerning AC departures are associated with a higher likelihood of a future “Big R” restatement announcement and auditor …

Digital Platform Transitions In The Finance Industry: Three Essays, Cheryll-Ann Wilson

2025

This three-paper dissertation is motivated by an emerging dichotomy in the financial sector: an increasing use of an open-source digital platform—the Python platform—in an industry that historically has been wedded to proprietary systems.

Chapter 1 is a qualitative pilot study to ascertain which factors are likely to motivate investment professionals to select Python versus other tools and/or technologies. I find that efficiency and access to industry-specific libraries—notably Pandas and NumPy—are significant motivators in their selection of Python over Excel. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the issues through a sequential, exploratory mixed methods approach.

Chapter 2—the qualitative field study—investigates how and …

Essays On Political Violence And Democratic Competition In Western Democracies, Moritz Emanuel Bondeli

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation sheds new light on the causes of political violence as well as its consequences for democratic competition, focusing on Western democracies. My first essay examines the interplay of policing, political violence and democratic backsliding in Weimar Germany. It establishes that the preferences and incentives of law enforcement officials are central to understanding variation in political violence in this context. The essay combines original quantitative data on law enforcement staffing and party mobilization efforts with secondary data on incidents of lethal political violence and electoral outcomes to build an original county-level panel dataset for the German state of Prussia, …

Chromatin Architecture And Dynamics In Native Folding States, Tianyu Yuan

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The central question in chromatin architecture and dynamics is how meter-long DNA strands are organized within a micrometer-sized nucleus while maintaining regulation of all genomic activities. While some organizational principles have been identified and validated through both theoretical models and experiments, controversies between alternative mechanisms persist,continually refining and enriching our understanding of chromatin architecture and dynamics. At the intermediate length scale, chromatin architecture is characterized by topologically associating domains (TADs), revealed through experimental Hi-C contact maps. This organization can be explained and modeled using loop extrusion factor (LEF) models, which rely on the correlation between TAD boundaries and the genomic …

Games In A High-Dimensional World: An Interplay Between Machine Learning And Game Theory, Anargyros Oikonomou

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Motivated by the growing number of applications at the intersection of game theory and machine learning, including alignment, AI agents like automated bidders, training generative models, and high-dimensional mechanism design, this dissertation explores the interplay between the two fields. Specifically, we show how machine learning can gain insights from game-theoretic multi-agent optimization techniques and how game theory can benefit from machine learning techniques. The first part of this work focuses on leveraging game-theoretic insights to improve optimization algorithms in multi-agent machine learning. Traditional methods, such as gradient descent, often fail to converge when training multi-agent systems with competing objectives. This …

Chk2 Sustains Mitotic Plk1 Activity To Promote Proper Chromosome Segregation, Elizabeth Maureen Black

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1) protects against genome instability by ensuring timely and accurate mitotic cell division, and its activity is tightly regulated throughout the cell cycle. Although the pathways that initially activate PLK1 in G2 are well-characterized, the factors that directly regulate mitotic PLK1 remain poorly understood. Here, I identify that human PLK1 activity is sustained by the DNA damage response kinase Checkpoint kinase 2 (Chk2) in mitosis. Chk2 directly phosphorylates PLK1 T210, a residue on its T-loop whose phosphorylation is essential for full PLK1 kinase activity. Loss of Chk2-dependent PLK1 activity causes increased mitotic errors, including chromosome misalignment, chromosome …

Resource-Aware Distributed Machine Learning: Unified Approaches For Private And Efficient On-Device Intelligence, Yeshwanth Venkatesha

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The widespread integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into everyday life is driving a paradigm shift towards deploying machine learning models on a massive, distributed ecosystem of edge devices. While this decentralization offers opportunities for data-driven applications, it introduces a fundamental trilemma: the concurrent pursuit of high performance, operational efficiency, and stringent data privacy. State-of-the-art AI models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), demand computational and memory resources that far exceed the capabilities of typical edge devices, creating significant bottlenecks in training and inference. Furthermore, the distributed nature of data gives rise to challenges of statistical heterogeneity and communication overhead, while the …

Multinomial Trees And Multinomial Percolation, Michele Tienni

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

We study multinomial percolation, which is bond percolation on a family of graphs ("blow-up graphs") defined in terms of a fixed graph G. We compute connection thresholds in terms of distances on G. Moreover, if the percolation probability is inversely proportional to the blow-up multiplicity, there is a phase transition above which a giant component emerges. We show that many properties of the giant component can be computed using an analytic function with variables indexed by the vertices of G. Moreover, we find that the giant component gives rise to a natural field on G. As the blow-up multiplicity grows, …

Intestinal Mast Cell Control Of Behavioral And Oral Anaphylactic Responses, Nathaniel Dale Bachtel

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Organisms are challenged on a day-to-day basis with the decision of what, when and how much of a given food source to eat. These fundamental decisions require sensory mechanisms that evaluate the relative quantities of desired nutrients and harmful toxins present in each food source and integration of these factors with the current organismal state. In mammals, this sensing is accomplished by a diverse array of cells types, including epithelial cells, neurons, and immune cells which communicate the value of ingested food with the brain. Moreover, the immune system can store memory of past harm a given food source was …

Regulation Of Pre-Mrna Processing Through Nascent Rna Folding, Leonard Schaerfen

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

RNA sequence determines the formation of intramolecular base pairs. Together with tertiary contacts, base pairs define every RNA's structure, or fold. The catalytic, regulatory, or coding potential of an RNA strongly depends on its folding pattern. Because base pairing occurs much faster than RNA synthesis (transcription) in cells, early structural states can govern RNA processing events and dictate the formation of functional conformations. These co-transcriptional structural states remained largely unknown. To address this gap, I developed CoSTseq, a chemical probing and enrichment method to measure nascent RNA base pairing upon exit from RNA polymerases (Pols) transcriptome-wide in living Saccharomyces cerevisiae …

Vocational Ministry Leader Burnout: Exploring The Effects Of The Spiritual Discipline Of Resting In Solitude On The Mitigation Of Burnout For Vocational Ministry Leaders In South Florida, Sandra L. Ives

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vocational ministry leaders are at an increased risk of burnout due to the demands of their roles in ministry, which can result in burnout. The problem this project addressed was the mitigating effect of the spiritual habits of resting in solitude and the disciplines of prayer, fasting, study and meditation of Scripture, and Sabbath to aid in mitigating incidents of burnout for vocational ministry leaders within South Florida church communities. The timeline for this project started in 2007, with continuing incidents of burnout occurring through the present day. The Researcher used a mixed methods approach and conducted quantitative and qualitative …

2025 Crummer Truist Portfolio, Cole Cecconi, Esperanza Dickson Reyes, Gustavo Fernandez, Conner Jones, Michael Kozinski, Emily Quezada, Cristian Ramos, Polina Vlasova

Crummer Truist Portfolios

SunTrust (now Truist) endowed this portfolio to provide scholarships for future Crummer students and to give current students a practical, hands-on learning opportunity. This year, we are pleased to be able to disburse $50,000 to be used for scholarships. We are extremely grateful for this generous investment in higher education. We have all learned a great deal from this experience and the responsibility of managing real money. Our first challenge is to establish a portfolio position that takes advantage of economic opportunities while avoiding unnecessary risk and conforming to the Crummer Truist Investment Policy Statement (IPS). We are also tasked …

A Systematic Review And Evaluation Of The Tools Measuring Work-Related Psychosocial Factors In Prospective Research On Sickness Absence Of Health Care Workers, Laurent Corthésy-Blondin, Simona Margheritti, Samantha Vila Masse, Andrea Gragnano, Alessia Negrini

Revues de littérature, synthèses de connaissances

Purpose:

This systematic literature review aims to list the validated tools measuring work-related psychosocial factors (WRPFs) influence health care workers’ (HCWs) sickness absence (SA), and to evaluate their psychometric and practical properties.

Methods:

Using the PsycINFO, Medline, and Web of Science databases, the search targeted prospective studies on WRPFs and SA in HCWs published between 2012 and 2023. The validated, self-report tools that measured WRPFs and that yielded at least one significant predictor of SA in HCWs were identified. An evaluation of the psychometric and practical properties was performed.

Results:

Based on inclusion criteria, three prospective studies on HCWs were …

At Home Camp Programming To Improve The Quality Of Life In Children With Disabilities And Medical Illnesses, Megan R. Boyleston

Entry-Level Occupational Therapy Doctorate - Doctoral Capstone Symposium

In the state of South Carolina, more than 58,000 children living with a disability or serious medical illness are not being served with the opportunity to participate in a summer camp (Denton, 2023). Summer camps encourage children to interact with their peers, experience play, and engage in enjoyable activities. These are all skills that children with disabilities and medical illnesses tend to struggle with (Makaroff et al., 2013). Lack of these skills can contribute to a lower overall quality of life for these individuals.

A quality improvement capstone project was completed in collaboration with a nonprofit organization that creates overnight …

Home Activity Resources In Senior Activity Centers, Skylar B. Hayes

Entry-Level Occupational Therapy Doctorate - Doctoral Capstone Symposium

Due to the growing population of older adults in both our local community and in the world, the need for promotion of healthy aging is essential. The literature shows that community support and resources are critical to aging in place, which helps maintain independence as older adults age. A doctoral capstone project was conducted to address the need for support and resource to increase the quality of life of senior citizens attending community day centers. The project goals were to design and implement educational resources that increase older adult’s overall level of activity physically, cognitively, and socially. Through a mixed …

Introductory Lectures On The Study Of Christian Theology, John Hannah

Heritage Material

No abstract provided.

Not Forgotten: Mission To Women Amid Global Crisis, Sue Russell, Rochelle Scheuermann, Amanda L. Allen

Heritage Material

No abstract provided.

Criterion, Volume 43, 2025, Loyola Marymount University English Department

Criterion

Faculty Advisor: Michelle Bitting

Co-Editor-in-Chiefs: Taylor Crowell & Eriana Muñoz

La Voz 2025, Loyola Marymount University, Modern Languages & Literatures Department

La Voz Student Journal

LA VOZ is published by the Modern Languages & Literatures Department, Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA.

The Sociological Eye 2025, Loyola Marymount University, Sociology Department

The Sociological Eye Student Journal

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Stacy Burns

Editor: Aliza Davis

Characterization Of Municipal Solid Waste Using Machine Learning Based Imaging And Chemical Analysis, Enyonam Ahadzi

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2023-billion-ton report, the United States generates nearly 300 million tons of municipal solid waste every year. More than 50% of that waste is underutilized and ends up in landfills. This poses serious public health and environmental risks. But beyond the environmental and health implications, this is also a wasted opportunity. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that, for every 100 lbs of waste we throw away, about 85% can be used as fuel or for electricity generation. However, its complex and heterogeneous nature poses challenges for efficient sorting and valorization in waste to …

Valorizing Municipal Solid Waste For Sustainable Aviation Fuel And Polyhydroxyalkanoate Bioplastics: Pyrolysis And Microbial Pathways, Emon Das

Theses and Dissertations--Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

The escalating global burden of municipal solid waste (MSW), projected to reach 3.88 billion tons annually by 2050, calls for innovative valorization strategies to mitigate environmental impacts and promote a circular bioeconomy. This thesis investigates the conversion of MSW into two high-value products: sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) bioplastics. Chapter one presents comprehensive physicochemical characterization and pyrolysis-GC/MS analysis of MSW feedstocks. The physicochemical results reveal that densification enhances handling and storage properties, while pyrolysis-GC/MS analysis indicates that plastic-rich MSW streams produce bio-oils with favorable hydrocarbon profiles suitable for SAF production, potentially contributing to decarbonization efforts in the aviation …

The Effects Of Timbre On Melodic Dictation In Advanced Placement Music Theory Students, William Thomas Ardrey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of varying timbres on melodic dictation accuracy. Melodic dictation is used not only in collegiate music curricula but also in high school Advanced Placement Music Theory (APMT) courses. Studies examining the effects of varying timbres on dictation are limited (Gephardt, 1978; Gonzalez et al., 2015), and further investigation was needed. Subjects in this study (N = 52) were APMT students who completed melodic dictation tasks in four timbres: Bb clarinet, Bb trumpet, piano, and marimba. A repeated-measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed a significant difference in melodic dictation accuracy across …