Digital Commons Network^™

Estate Of Justin Paul Smith V. City Of Philadelphia

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

The Chapman University Pennant Is Going On The Inca Trail To Machu Picchu, Essraa Nawar

Library Articles and Research

"If you’ve spent time at Chapman University , you likely know the story of the Chapman pennant—carried by President Emeriti James Doti and @Daniele Struppa along with students and fellow adventurers, to some of the world’s highest peaks. It represents endurance, curiosity, and a deep sense of connection to place.

When it’s not packed alongside climbing gear and on its way to a summit, this well-traveled pennant is typically on display in the The Chapman University Pennant at the Dahlem-Doti-Struppa Climbing Alcove in the Library.

That’s because it’s currently on a new journey.

This time, the journey looks different. …

Predicting Telecom Customer Churn: A Statistically Validated Kpi Framework With Machine Learning And Revenue Impact Modeling, Moeez Islam Malik '27, Amy Ehinomen Eremionkhale

Student Research

This capstone project addresses a core business problem in the telecommunications industry: how to detect, measure, and prevent customer churn before it occurs, using a KPI framework validated by statistical analysis and machine learning. Applied to 7,043 customer records across 37 variables from a California-based telecom operator, the analysis integrates descriptive KPI computation, Pearson correlation analysis, chi-square tests of independence, and logistic regression churn prediction. The research confirms that customer tenure (r = −0.352, p < 0.001) and contract type (Cramér's V = 0.410, p < 0.001) are the dominant predictors of churn, and that a logistic regression model achieves AUC-ROC = 0.8307 — sufficient for proactive deployment. A 5-percentage-point churn reduction preserves $273,670 in annual revenue and $1.55M in customer lifetime value. The project delivers an integrated analytical framework, a predictive retention model, a 16-chart visualization suite, and a 12-page Power BI executive dashboard.

Usa V. Mychael Saunders

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Understanding Hospital-Based Nurses’ Perspectives On Workplace Well-Being, Frankie B. Hale, Holly B. Fontenot

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

Purpose: Uncover nurses’ perspectives related to factors associated with well-being and garner opinions for interventions in the workplace.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted nurses and has led to a potential crisis in staffing. Poorer mental health and well-being stemming from personal and organizational issues have driven nurses to leave the profession. In a recent survey of nurses in Hawaii, individual factors such as working 36 hours or more per week, reports of burnout, having primary caregiving responsibilities outside of work, and lower self-reported physical health, along with organizational factors like the experience of workplace violence, all contributed to an …

Impact Of Stress On Novice Nurses During The Transition To Practice: A Literature Review, Ilona L. Ilyayev

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

Background: The transition from being a student to a registered nurse is a challenging and stressful period for novice nurses. Stress is a universal human response to difficult situations, and it is important to recognize early on, as failure to do so can negatively impact nurses' well-being and decrease their long term ability to effectively function.

Purpose: The purpose of this literature review was to examine the impact of stress on novice nurses during the transition to practice.

Methods: An analysis of peer-reviewed literature from 2021 to 2025 was conducted using databases such as PubMed and CINAHL. The research studies …

Cupid And Psyche: How Stories Reflect Cultural Norms, Maia Porter

Honors Projects

Stories, as a whole, are retold time and time again, changing slightly with each retelling and interpretation. The story of Cupid and Psyche follows this pattern, changing as it is retold to fit the norms and values of the culture it is told within. This project examines three versions of the story: Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche” which is told within his larger novel Metamorphoses, Till We Have Faces (1956) written by C. S. Lewis, and Luna McNamara’s Psyche and Eros (2023). This project examines Psyche’s characterization and how much autonomy or agency she is given, how the inequality inherent in …

A New Reinforcement Learning Agent Framework For Digital Image Forgery Detection Using Prioritized Experience Replay, Muthana S. Mahdi, Saad N. Alsaad, Hasanen S. Abdullah

Baghdad Science Journal

Digital image forgery detection has become an urgent and complex problem in an age when powerful editing tools can easily alter photographs. The familiar maxim ``a picture is worth a thousand words'' can no longer be taken at face value, since even subtle manipulations may conceal or fabricate critical details. Conventional detection methods frequently suffer from highly imbalanced datasets and narrow feature representations that fail to capture the diverse artifacts introduced by modern editing techniques. In response, this work presents a novel framework that casts the forgery detection task as a reinforcement learning problem, enabling an agent to learn a …

An Informative Analysis Of Applying Feature Reduction Methods To Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms, Mustafa S. Abd

Baghdad Science Journal

Feature reduction techniques are fundamental to enhancing machine learning (ML) algorithms by reducing the number of features in a dataset. The study here explores the impact of Principle Component Analysis (PCA) on ML algorithms within an unbalanced classification framework, in partnership with feature selection techniques like Cluster Variation Attribute Evaluator (CVAE) and Correlation Attribute Evaluator (CAE). In addition, the research introspects a comparison analysis evaluating the effectiveness of several ML methods, including Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Decision Tree J48, k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO). The informative analysis of results signifies that the MLP technique with PCA minimized the …

Mandibular Landmark Determination Based On Statistical Features Of Panoramic Radiograph Images Using Multi-Output Neural Network, Nur Nafiiyah, Agus Harjoko, Kang-Hyun Jo, Rini Widyaningrum, Eha Renwi Astuti, Alhidayati Asymal

Baghdad Science Journal

The mandible is crucial in orthodontic treatment, forensic identification, and clinical diagnosis. However, manually identifying mandibular landmarks is time-consuming and highly dependent on expert skill, necessitating a more reliable automated prediction method. Previous research has used linear and nonlinear regression methods, in which each model predicts a single landmark point, resulting in inefficiency. In addition, these methods only use the centroid of the binary image of the mandible as input. This research proposes a multi-output neural network model that is able to predict multiple mandibular landmark points simultaneously. The proposed neural network architecture in predicting mandibular landmark points is 11 …

Van Horn Metz & Co Inc V. Jp Morgan Chase & Co

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Re: Approval Letter For The Butte Priority Soils Operably Unit (Bpsou) Revised Draft Final Quarterly Operations And Maintenance Report: Butte Treatment Lagoon System (Btl) Second Quarter 2025 (Dated April 10, 2026), Emma Rott

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

How Ai-Enabled Hiring Affects Organizational Health? Challenges And Future Direction, Shiza Hirani

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

In today’s competitive landscape of hiring, organizations are responsible to not only maintain ethical integrity, ensure fairness, and protect job applicants' privacy, but also uphold a more data-driven and streamlined approach to save time per hire. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the workplace presents opportunities such as enhanced productivity, efficiency, and creation of new roles. However, the widespread implementation of AI also raises ethical and privacy challenges that can deteriorate organizational health. AI-driven systems can inadvertently introduce biases and black box properties in hiring decisions which can erode trust and transparency, compromise employee privacy, and increase psychological stress …

Psychological Safety In The Classroom: Effects On Nursing Student Well-Being And Academic Success, Erica Frost, Kelli D. Whittington, Glory Omole, Chloe Birchett

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

In nursing education, fostering psychologically safe learning environments may support student well-being and academic achievement. Edmondson's Psychological Safety Framework (1999) provides the theoretical foundation for this study, framing classroom psychological safety as an environmental factor that influences student well-being and academic outcomes through its impact on learner engagement and interpersonal risk-taking. There is limited research exploring the relationship between classroom psychological safety and nursing student well-being, particularly in undergraduate face-to-face classroom settings.
The purpose of this study is to examine nursing students' experiences, perceptions, and academic outcomes to better understand how instructor behavior and the classroom teaching environment influence student …

Advancing Appropriate Staffing: One Element Of A Healthy Work Environment, Kiersten Henry

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

The session provides an update on the outcomes of recommendations made by The National Nurse Staffing Task Force. These include AACN’s Standards for Appropriate Staffing and the incorporation of appropriate staffing as a National Performance Goal by The Joint Commission. The inextricable link of appropriate staffing to the Healthy Work Environment standards will be discussed. Resources and exemplars for appropriate staffing are included, and audience questions and participation encouraged.

Celebrating Ancillary Staff Achievement In The Hospital Setting, Lori Ischinger

Creating Healthy Work Environments (CHWE)

Clinical ladder programs have been available for decades to promote bedside nursing recognition and retention. They have been proven to increase the perception of being valued by an organization, which in turn increases job satisfaction and performance. There is limited research to support the use of these same types of programs for ancillary clinical staff. These staff are essential members of the care team and deserve recognition for the work that they do. The objective was to successfully develop, implement and maintain a clinical ladder program that is specifically tailored to recognize and reward the clinical excellence of this staff. …

Mitigating Non-Kinetic Asat Threats To Dual-Use Commercial Satellites: A U.S.-Japan Framework, Parker J. Brumleve, Tessa Leverman

Student Contributions

This policy brief examines vulnerabilities to ASAT weapons and their threatening effects on dual-use satellites. The brief highlights the currently lacking legal framework regarding ASAT weapons and proposes implementing a joint U.S.-Japan framework to coordinate legislation and enforce mandatory cybersecurity and resilience standards for dual-use satellite operations.

Mcgehee Blow Up And Collision Manifold Of Planar (2+2)-Body Problem, Nathaniel Scott Sill

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the dynamics of the Planar (2+2)-Body Problem which consists of two asteroids moving under the gravitational force of each other and of two larger primaries. We use the McGehee blow up technique to remove the singularities in the dynamics associated with a triple collision with one of the primaries by introducing a new set of variables. Additional variables are introduced to reduce the dimension of the problem. We then derive the dynamics for these new variables. We then use the energy relation that comes from the original Hamiltonian to describe the collision manifold which is pasted in …

Cross-Attention Mechanism For Medical Visual Question Answering, Nada Fadhil Mohammed, Israa H. Ali

Baghdad Science Journal

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a machine learning task that aims to create systems capable of answering natural language questions based on given images. Medical VQA systems, a domain-specific application of VQA, assist in understanding clinically relevant information from medical images. These systems leverage deep neural techniques to generate accurate answers to questions, which can be closed-ended or open-ended. This paper proposes a Cross-Attention Mechanism-based Medical VQA system. The proposed Medical VQA system achieves good performance through the integration of three-key components, each addressing critical challenges in medical visual question answering: The biomedical domain-specific pretraining of BioBERT enables extracting powerful …

Optimizing K-Nearest Neighbor Based On Dragonfly Algorithm For Diabetes Retinopathy Classification, Ahmed Subhi Abdalkafor, Alaa Abdalqahar Jihad, Esam Taha Yassen

Baghdad Science Journal

The K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) has been proven to be an effective method for addressing classification problems. The performance of the KNN algorithm is heavily dependent on the value of parameter K, which represents the number of nearest neighbors. Choosing an inappropriate value for K can affect the classification accuracy because a smaller chosen K can lead to overfitting and vice versa. So, the appropriate selection of the K value has a significant impact on the performance of KNN. Manually, adjusting the value of K is a very difficult process because the appropriate choices for this value depend on the status …

A Multi-Model Ensemble Framework For Assistive Image Captioning With Voice Interaction For The Visually Impaired Users, Alaa Noori Mazher, Ghadah K. Al-Khafaji

Baghdad Science Journal

Visual impairment greatly restricts an individual's ability for perception and interaction with the environment, making everyday activities challenging without the availability of appropriate assistive technologies. One major barrier is the inability to perceive visual scenes, which are essential for spatial awareness, wayfinding, and situational knowledge. This study aims to address this gap through the proposal of an intelligent assistive image captioning system specifically designed for visually impaired individuals. The system employs the best available computer vision and natural language processing techniques in generating context-oriented text captions for an image infused with interactive voice responses. Here, four models of Convolutional Neural …

Optimizing Quality Of Service In Cloud Computing: A Performance-Aware Task Classifier For Heterogeneous Big Data Workloads, Pawan Bhaker, Sophiya Sheikh, Rintu Nath, Ajay Nain

Baghdad Science Journal

The Big data originates from various heterogeneous sources worldwide. Due to the diverse origins of data generation, big data involves a variety of tasks. Some require storage resources, while others need computational resources. Additionally, cloud computing provides centralized storage and computational resources for executing these tasks. However, resource optimization and efficient task scheduling remain challenging. Moreover, accurately categorizing tasks and effectively allocating resources based on their nature pose challenges for cloud computing, especially when assigning tasks to heterogeneous resources to minimize task completion time. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Performance-Aware Task Classifier (PATC) algorithm that classifies tasks …

Empirical Modeling Of Magnetic Braking In Millisecond Pulsars, Sophie Dore Vanderwaal

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Optimization Of Pediatric Multidetector Ct Imaging Parameters Using A Machine Learning–Based Monte Carlo Simulation Model, Ali O. Masoud, Adithya Rajnaryanan, Khamis O. Amour, Ahmed M. Jusabani, Justin E Ngaile, Manoj Kumar, Mwingereza John Kumwenda Dr

Tanzania Journal of Science

This study utilized Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to optimize radiation doses in pediatric multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) head scans by analyzing key parameters like tube current (mA), tube voltage (kV), pitch, and slice thickness. The findings indicate that reducing tube current significantly lowers the Computed Tomography Dose Index (CTDIvol) and Dose Length Product (DLP), effectively minimizing patient radiation exposure. Higher pitch values (0.7–0.9) further reduced radiation by decreasing beam overlap, while using a thinner slice thickness (0.6 mm) improved dose efficiency. A comparison highlighted the effectiveness of optimization: simulated parameters kVp 100, mAs 81, pitch 0.98 yielded a CTDIvol of …

Rethinking Global Health Partnerships: A Global South Perspective, Patricia J. Garcia

Grand Rounds

At the conclusion of this activity, learners will be able to:

1. Maintain and advance knowledge and skills related to pediatric conditions seen in our region.
2. Increase collaboration across professions of the healthcare team.

Van Horn Metz & Co Inc V. Pnc Financial Services Group Inc

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Usa V. Julio Otero

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvania

Jane Doe V. Pine Richland School District

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Western District of Pennsylvania

Usa V. Donald Scott

2026 Decisions

USDC for the Middle District of Pennsylvania

What Happens After Oil And Gas Decommissioning? A Global Systematic Review Of Marine Environmental Effects, Anaelle Lemasson Lemasson, Antony M. Knights

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

The thousands of oil and gas (OG) platforms placed at sea for fossil fuel extraction have introduced new hard substrate to the marine environment. Over time, these structures can become colonized by a diversity of marine life, fostering novel ecosystems. However, an increasing number of OG platforms are reaching decommissioning age and decisions regarding their fate must be made. Some view these artificial structures as litter that ought to be removed; others view them as valuable contributors to marine biodiversity worth preserving. Evidence of the environmental effects of these structures following different decommissioning strategies is needed to identify the potential …