Digital Commons Network^™

Self-Reported Confidence Of Dpt Students In Assessing And Treating Different Body Regions Within Musculoskeletal Physical Therapy Practice, Scott W. Lowe, Jennifer Wiley

The Journal of Integrated Primary Care

Introduction

This study examined Doctorate of Physical Therapy (DPT) students' self-reported confidence in assessing and treating musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions based on body regions. We hypothesized that there would be identifiable differences in self-perceived confidence across the different body regions. Most literature assessing DPT students' readiness for clinical practice has come from the perspective of educators and clinicians, whereas student perspectives have not been reported.

Methods:

The study is a descriptive, observational online survey.  Participants were final-year DPT students in the United States. Participants rated their comfort level in assessing and treating patients with MSK complaints, both in general and specifically …

A Mixed-Methods Pilot Investigation Of Act Workshops In Integrated Primary Care, Katherine Buckheit, Kyle Possemato, Mara Sindoni, Luke Mitzel, Niranjala Yogaratnam, Allyson Smith, Lilian Dindo

The Journal of Integrated Primary Care

Mental health symptoms are prevalent and associated with considerable disease burden. However, most individuals who would benefit from mental health treatment do not receive appropriate care. Barriers such as logistical challenges and stigma often prevent access to traditional services. Alternative delivery modalities and settings may reduce these barriers. This pilot study evaluated the acceptability and preliminary effectiveness of single day Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) workshops delivered in a non-traditional setting, integrated primary care. Acceptability was operationalized as  treatment engagement and treatment satisfaction. Preliminary effectiveness was operationalized as within-condition change in mental health symptoms. Participants were 32 Veterans Affairs (VA) …

Small Cell Lung Cancer In A Never-Smoking Patient: A Case Highlighting Diagnostic And Screening Gaps In Primary Care, Edward Hamilton, Alexandra She, Francis Jenney

The Journal of Integrated Primary Care

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is best known in relation to tobacco exposure and tends to be seen in advanced disease. Contemporary guidelines in lung cancer screening demonstrate a strong emphasis on smoking exposure, which may serve as a barrier to recognition in never-smokers who lack conventional risk factors. As a result, SCLC in never-smokers remains an important but underrecognized consideration in general and primary care settings. The current case involves a 65-year-old African American man who has never been a smoker but who presented with progressive thoracic pain, shortness of breath, and unintended weight loss, leading to the discovery …

Ambient Agent Swarm With Soft Contract Negotiation For Proactive Network Monitoring, Ryan Holland, Elango Ganesan

Defensive Publications Series

Proposed herein is a hybrid cloud-edge ambient agent swarm for network operations, where specialized agents coordinate through soft capability contracts rather than rigid interfaces. The proposed approach enables continuous proactive monitoring and interactive troubleshooting in one system, while reducing latency and bandwidth through edge-local diagnostics with cloud-level synthesis. It is designed for enterprise-scale operations where platform teams need independent agent evolution, graceful fallback behavior, and consistent multi-domain triage with bounded deep-dive analysis.

Graph-Constrained Code Generation For Deep Metadata Environments, Pradeep Shankara, Anil Nagalla, Richard Yang, Vinay Anand

Defensive Publications Series

Generative artificial intelligence models may face challenges generating source code for languages that rely on deep, nested metadata stored in data repositories, which can result in functionally limited or non-compilable output. A graph-constrained code generation framework can address this by extracting metadata from a target system and translating it into one or more knowledge graphs that model structural dependencies. An automated agent may traverse these graphs to perform a multi-hop context retrieval based on a developer's request. This collected context can then be used to construct a detailed, constraint-enforcing prompt for a large language model. This process of grounding the …

System For Serving A Pre-Compiled User Interface To A Host Environment Using A Local Bridge Server, Jack Livingston

Defensive Publications Series

Development in text-centric environments, such as for large language models, can present challenges in rendering complex user interfaces (UI) for simulation and debugging, which may lead to inefficient workflows. A system can integrate a pre-compiled graphical user interface application within a host development environment. This can be accomplished using a local bridge server that serves a UI application bundle to the host environment via a communication protocol. The host environment may then render the UI, for example, within a sandboxed inline frame. This approach can reduce workflow fragmentation and latency by embedding an interactive simulation and debugging tool into the …

System For Diagram Generation With Decoupled Logical Interpretation And Deterministic Rendering, Timothy Jabez, Arindam Sirohia, Stenal P. Jolly, Shreya Prabhu

Defensive Publications Series

A system for diagram generation can address potential limitations where logical interpretation and visual rendering are coupled, which could lead to inconsistent outputs. The system can employ a decoupled, multi-stage pipeline. For example, a first processing stage using artificial intelligence can transform an unstructured user input into a platform-agnostic intermediate logical artifact that defines a diagram's components and connections without spatial or visual information. Subsequently, a separate layout and rendering engine can process this logical artifact to calculate spatial positions and generate a visual diagram. This separation of logical interpretation from visual rendering may improve the reliability and accuracy of …

Plant And Process For Methanol Production Using High-Pressure Electrically Heated Reforming, Martin Baumgaertl, Gianluca Pauletto

Defensive Publications Series

The present technical disclosure relates to a plant and to a corresponding process for the conversion of a feedstock comprising methane and/or other hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide into methanol. The plant and process integrate an electrically heated reforming reactor within a methanol synthesis loop. The electrically heated reforming reactor is configured to discharge the syngas stream at a pressure equal to or higher than an operating pressure of the methanol synthesis reactor, and the main syngas flow path is free of an intermediate synthesis-gas compressor configured to raise the syngas stream to the operating pressure of the methanol synthesis reactor.

System And Method For Zero Copy Machine Learning Inference Using Non Owning Shared Memory Model Views, Faiz Ahmed

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method are disclosed that eliminate model loading in machine learning inference by enabling inference processes to operate directly on a shared, already‑resident model representation, wherein trained model parameters are stored as native binary structures in operating‑system managed shared memory and are accessed by inference processes through non‑owning typed memory views that require no allocation, copying, or deserialization; the shared memory region serves as the authoritative representation of the model and includes a control header and a plurality of model slots arranged in a double‑buffered configuration, wherein model updates are performed by writing a model into an inactive …

Reference-Model-Equivalent Weekly Utilization Cap Computed Directly From The Billing Ledger, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, as enabling public prior art, a method and system for enforcing a periodic utilization cap over heterogeneous large-language-model (LLM) usage without maintaining a separate rate-limit counter store. The consumption of models with different price/performance profiles is normalized onto a single synthetic currency — base-equivalent tokens — by assigning each model a drain weight pinned to the ratio of that model's provider output price to a chosen base model's output price. The cap for a given account is enforced before each call by computing the account's current-window utilization on demand, as a query-time SQL CASE aggregation over the …

Usage-Row-Gated Exactly-Once Prepaid Debit Protocol For Metered Llm Turns, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, as enabling public prior art, a computer-implemented protocol for debiting a prepaid credit wallet exactly once for a metered large-language-model (LLM) turn, and for doing so without ever producing either of the two well-documented failure classes of naive metered billing: the double-debit (a retried turn charged twice) and the free turn (a completed provider call that never bills, or that records usage telemetry without a matching charge). The core mechanism is an ordering invariant executed inside one database transaction: after acquiring a row-level exclusive lock on the wallet row, the system performs the metered-usage telemetry INSERT first, …

---

Go to article

A System And Method For Data Replication With Agentic Timestamp-Based Conflict Resolution In Rdbms Cluster, Ravi Shanker Kumar Sinha

Defensive Publications Series

A system and method for autonomous data replication with conflict resolution in a distributed relational database management system (RDBMS) cluster includes a plurality of RDBMS nodes arranged in a mesh topology, wherein each RDBMS node maintains a local database, a logical clock, and a node identifier. A replication agent associated with each RDBMS node monitors change logs and propagates record modifications to other RDBMS nodes through bi-directional replication links. A conflict resolution module detects concurrent updates to a same record from different RDBMS nodes and resolves detected conflicts by comparing logical timestamps and selecting an update having a higher timestamp …

Media-Baked Convergent First-Boot Network Bring-Up, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, enables, and dates a method and system for driving a freshly imaged bare-metal server from power-on to a single-homed, remotely reachable management state without any console interaction, any human network operator, and — critically — without any cloud or on-network metadata source. A generator bakes a per-node convergence agent directly into the operating-system install media under the vendor-supplement ($OEM$) payload path. During installation the OS setup engine copies that agent onto the target file system. A tiny first-boot script then registers a privileged (SYSTEM) scheduled task that re-executes an idempotent convergence agent on every subsequent boot until …

---

Go to article

Verify-First Phase Autopilot With Out-Of-Band Differential Diagnosis, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, in enabling detail, an autonomous and self-healing bare-metal deployment autopilot. The system drives an end-to-end deployment pipeline through a single uniform per-phase contract — attempt(phase, max, work, verify, heal) — that verifies the desired state before performing any work, performs the phase's work at most once, and on continued failure either remediates and retries or hard-escalates to a human. Verifying first makes every phase idempotent and turns an interrupted run into a resumable one at no extra cost. The defensible element of this disclosure is the mechanism by which the autopilot remediates a node whose in-band control …

---

Go to article

In-Process Live T-Sql-To-Postgresql Transpiling Driver Facade With Ddl/Dml-Differentiated Idempotency Tolerance And Tri-Backend App Namespacing, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This publication discloses, enables, and dates a mechanism by which application code written against a Microsoft SQL Server (T-SQL) client driver is executed unchanged against a PostgreSQL server by an in-process driver facade that transpiles each SQL statement to PostgreSQL dialect at query time, inside the application process, with zero additional infrastructure. The facade reproduces the driver's object model — the pool, the request object with fluent input().query(), the { recordset, rowsAffected } result shape, and the named-parameter binding convention — so that the swap is invisible to callers. The transpiler performs, per statement: MERGE→INSERT … ON CONFLICT with source-alias …

---

Go to article

Self-Wiping Winpe With A Parked Shell: A Fail-Closed Single-Disk Clean Injected Into Boot.Wim For Unattended Remote Re-Image, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, in enabling detail, a fail-closed mechanism for unattended, fully-remote re-imaging of bare-metal servers whose primary disk already carries an operating system, controlled only through an out-of-band management controller that exposes no remote keystroke channel. A user-mode edit of the Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE) boot image injects a shell manifest (winpeshl.ini) and a launcher script that cleans the partition table of Disk 0 only before the OS installer runs, then parks the shell forever in a sleep loop because the installer entrypoint is a stub that returns before the operating system has been applied. The build step re-extracts …

---

Go to article

Traffic-Quiescence Virtual-Media Eject: Inferring Bare-Metal Os-Install Progress From Bmc Iso-Fetch Telemetry, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, as enabling public prior art, a method and system for driving an unattended bare-metal operating-system (OS) installation to completion by inferring install progress from the network traffic that a server's out-of-band management controller (BMC) generates while it streams the installation image over virtual media. A range-capable HTTP ISO server instruments every byte-range request per served file into a compact {bytes, requests, last-read} record. A dual-threshold traffic-quiescence rule — a primary rule (image byte floor reached AND read activity quiet for a short window) plus a low-water/long-quiet fallback and a hard-timeout safety fallback — concludes that the image-apply …

---

Go to article

Structural Review-Gate Stubs: Security Capabilities Shipped As Typed Fail-Closed Throwing Stubs Activated Only By Vetted-Handle/Key Presence, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This publication discloses Structural Review-Gate Stubs, a software design in which a security-critical capability ships to production as a typed, fail-closed throwing stub whose activation gate is the presence of a vetted provisioning artifact — an injected cryptographic handle, a parseable asymmetric signing key, or a genuine payment secret — and not a boolean feature flag or an environment toggle. When the artifact is absent, malformed, or a deploy-time placeholder, the capability's dangerous operation is not merely disabled; the safe-looking fallback branch does not exist in the code. Attempting the operation raises a single typed gate error carrying a stable …

---

Go to article

Email-Transported Vlm Telemetry Loop, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

Many vendors expose per-user consumption in a web console but provide no programmatic metering endpoint, or gate that endpoint behind an enterprise agreement that a small operator does not hold. This disclosure describes a durable, low-friction mechanism for turning such API-less consumption into a first-class metric time series. A designated human periodically screenshots each monitored entity's vendor-console usage page and forwards it, one message per entity, into a shared mailbox — placing the entity's identity in the message subject. A scheduled ingester (1) searches the mailbox for the designated sender through a standard mail API, (2) admits only subjects matching …

---

Go to article

Pre-Rated-At-Emit Admin-Immutable Metering Ledger With Unconditional Immutability Trigger And Writer-Role-Only Append, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This publication discloses, enables, and dedicates to the public a mechanism for maintaining a usage-metering ledger — the "money record" of a licensing or metered-billing platform — whose immutability and tamper-evidence are properties of the database schema and its privilege grants rather than of an application-level audit trail. The mechanism rests on a single design inversion: each usage event is pre-rated at emit, meaning its final billable monetary amount is computed in application memory and written into the inserted row, so that the row is born final. Because a correctly rated row never needs a legitimate later edit, the ledger …

---

Go to article

Erasable-Subject Proof-Of-Authorship Vault, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, as enabling public prior art, an erasable-subject proof-of-authorship vault. The vault records who conceived what, when in a form that a third party can verify offline, that stays provable after the creator's identity has been erased, and that is honest on its face about the evidentiary strength of every timestamp it carries. The mechanism does not claim the underlying transaction-coupled single-writer append-only ledger — that primitive is treated here as previously disclosed prior art (referred to throughout as Disclosure A, the single-writer baseline). Instead, this publication claims, strictly above that baseline, the composition of four techniques: (1) …

---

Go to article

Counts-Only Entitlement Metering For Client-Encrypted Local-First Stores With Entitlement-Namespaced Dedupe And Bounded-Outage Fail Policy, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, enablingly and in full, a method and system for metering and billing a digital resource that is stored only on an end-user's own device, while the authoritative meter, entitlement checks, and invoice-generation remain on a server-side billing spine that never receives the resource's plaintext or ciphertext. The server persists, per usage event, exactly one artifact: an idempotent usage row whose quantity is a COUNT (a number of documents, ingest units, or retrieval units), never bytes of content, never a title, never an embedding. Exactly-once accounting under retries and cross-tenant safety under untrusted client input are obtained by …

---

Go to article

Monotonic Deploy Guard Via Git-Dag Ancestry Against A Cluster-Recorded Live Commit, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses a deploy-time admission mechanism that decides whether a candidate build artifact may be applied to a running service by reasoning over the source-control commit graph (the Git directed acyclic graph, or DAG) at the moment of deployment, rather than over pipeline serial numbers, build clocks, image push order, or semantic version strings. A candidate commit is admitted only when two independent DAG relationships both hold: (1) the candidate is an ancestor-or-equal of the integration-branch HEAD (i.e. it is genuinely merged, not divergent or unmerged work), and (2) the candidate is not strictly behind the last-successfully-deployed commit that …

---

Go to article

Outage-Window Minimization Choreography: Prepull-Before-Maintenance With Daemonset Readiness As An Image-Present Barrier, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document discloses, as enabling public prior art, a unified control loop that minimizes the user-facing outage of a Recreate-class Kubernetes rollout when the workload image is large (on the order of one gigabyte) and the cluster's nodes cold-pull that image slowly (tens of minutes on constrained on-premises hardware). The core insight is choreographic: the two operations that dominate a naive maintenance-window outage — building the image and pulling it onto the node that will run the new pod — are moved outside the user-facing window and executed while production traffic still flows. The warm-up is performed by a purpose-built …

---

Go to article

Transient Cordon-Fence Pinning Of Recreate Rollouts To The Readwriteonce-Volume-Holder Node, Gustavo Matthew Assuncao

Defensive Publications Series

This document establishes public, dated prior art over a deployment-orchestration mechanism that eliminates the ReadWriteOnce (RWO) "Multi-Attach" deadlock during a Recreate-strategy rollout of a Kubernetes workload that mounts a single-attach persistent volume. At deploy time, the mechanism discovers the volume-holder node from the running pod's spec.nodeName, then cordons every other node in the workload's scheduling pool for the rollout window only, so the replacement pod can schedule onto exactly one node — the holder — making Multi-Attach structurally impossible rather than merely unlikely. Bookkeeping is ownership-aware: only nodes this run cordoned are recorded in a ledger; nodes already cordoned by …

---

Go to article

Cybersecurity Governance And Bank Performance In Tunisia: An Exploratory Mixed-Methods Analysis Of Iso/Iec 27001 Certification, Asma Redissi

Arab Economic and Business Journal

This study contributes novel difference-in-differences evidence on ISO/IEC 27001 certification and bank performance in an emerging market. Using a sequential mixed-methods design combining CISO interviews and panel data from twelve Tunisian banks (2016-2023), we document a cybersecurity performance paradox: certification is operationally indispensable yet financially invisible in the short run. The DiD coefficient is non-significant for profitability (ROE: β = +0.0046, p = 0.827), while a significant delayed revenue effect emerges post-certification (NBI: β = +0.123, p = 0.036). Institutional voids and low stakeholder cyber-literacy may weaken the signaling mechanism, suggesting mandatory certification frameworks in emerging banking markets.

Distributed Computation Of Graph Structures By Mobile Agents, Prabhat Kumar Chand

Doctoral Theses

This thesis investigates how mobile agents with no centralised control can be employed in anonymous networks to perform efficient distributed graph computations. The network is modelled as a simple, undirected, anonymous graph with n nodes and m edges, where nodes are memoryless and indistinguishable, and edges represent bidirectional communication links or traversal paths for the agents. The mobile agents are uniquely identifiable, possess limited local memory, and operate under a local communication model, in which communication is restricted to agents colocated at the same node. Under this computational model, we explore how mobile agents can collaborate effectively to solve global …

Design And Development Of A Novel Lxrβ/Pparδ Dual Agonist For Memory Impairment And Pathology In 3xtg-Ad Animal Model Of Alzheimer's Disease, Meenakshi Singh, Ian Steinke, Vishnu Suppiramaniam

Faculty Articles

The rising prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) underscores an urgent need for neuroprotective strategies that modulate cholesterol metabolism, neuroinflammation, improve pathology, and cognitive function. While Liver X receptors (LXRs) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are validated targets for enhancing amyloid-β and tau clearance, clinical translation of first-generation LXR agonists has been hindered by LXRα-mediated hepatic steatosis and hypertriglyceridemia. Here, we report the structure-based design of AU403, a potent, isoform-selective LXRβ/PPARδ dual agonist designed to bypass LXRα-driven hepatotoxicity. Molecular modeling indicates that AU403 achieves LXRβ selectivity by engaging residues Phe329 and Leu330 while avoiding the corresponding LXRα residues Arg305 and Leu316. …

Lowland Tropical Forests Remain A Methane Sink Under Warming And Long-Term Hurricane Disturbance Recovery, Gabriele Larocca Conte, Lucia Zuvela, Rachel Cruz-Pérez, Tatiana Barreto-Vélez, Nibia Becerra-Santillan, Sophia F. Campbell, Molly A. Cavaleri, Et Al.

Michigan Tech Publications

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas, and tropical forests account for roughly one–third of global atmospheric CH4 uptake by soils. Projected warming and more frequent hurricanes in these ecosystems may alter soil CH4 sink strength, as warmer and wetter soils enhance methanogenesis activity. We measured soil CH4 and CO2 efflux during the calendar summer months of 2023 and 2024 alongside continuous records of soil moisture, soil and air temperature, and precipitation in an in–situ warming experiment (TRACE) located in a lowland tropical forest in Puerto Rico, six to seven years after Hurricanes Irma and Maria (2017). The realized warming …

Language Proficiency And Moves In Turkish And English Research Abstracts, Engin Evrim Önem

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The primary function of the abstract within a research article is to convince readers of the study's significance, encapsulating specific details such as its purpose, methodology, results, and discussions and/or conclusions. Notably, scholarly attention has been directed towards the rhetorical structures employed in abstracts found in scientific journals, as authors are believed to employ diverse structures to present their articles in an engaging manner that captures readers' interest. The varied rhetorical structures used in research article abstracts are often referred to as ``moves''. This study investigated the impact of language proficiency and translation on these moves. Six Ph.D. students from …