Digital Commons Network^™

Agnikarma Therapy In Management Of Plantar Fasciitis (Vatakantaka): A Systematic Review Of Ayurvedic Case Reports, Karishma Sebastian, Nidhin John, Amanda Killeen

School of Podiatric Medicine - Student Research

Plantar fasciitis is a leading cause of heel pain, commonly affecting adults aged 40–60, characterized by microtears and inflammation of the plantar fascia.

Conventional treatments (NSAIDs, corticosteroids, orthotics, surgery) often provide incomplete relief or cause adverse effects.

In Ayurveda, plantar fasciitis corresponds to Vatakantaka, a Vata-dominant condition of the heel region (Khudukapradesha).

Agnikarma, a para-surgical Ayurvedic technique involving therapeutic thermal cauterization using heated metallic rods (Shalaka), is described for disorders involving ligaments, bones, and joints with chronic pain and stiffness.

This review synthesizes clinical case reports evaluating Agnikarma as a treatment for plantar fasciitis to determine its efficacy, safety, and …

The Effect Of Including A Yeast Culture Containing Essential Oils In Receiving Cattle Diets On Growth Performance And Health, Taylor D. Foster, Robin A. Cheek, Elizabeth B. Kegley, Jana L. Reynolds, Alexis J. Harness, Craig M. Looney, Jeremy G. Powell

Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences

Due to the increased risk of bacterial resistance to antibiotics and the endemic incidence of bovine respiratory disease (BRD) among growing and finishing cattle, alternative strategies must be developed to improve the health of cattle. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of a supplement containing a yeast culture and an essential oils blend (YEO) on the health and growth performance of stocker calves at high risk for BRD. Crossbred male beef calves (n = 185) received on two separate dates were used in a 42-d study. Within each truckload, calves were stratified by body weight and …

Do We Really Have The Right To Breathe Clean Air?, Rebecca Bratspies

UC Law Journal

Setting environmental standards involves judgment calls about what level of protection is “adequate,” what technical measures are “feasible” and even what level of pollution is consistent with “clean air, clean water and a healthful environment.” On his first day in office, Trump drove a truck through those judgment calls by repealing all the executive orders related to racial justice, environmental justice, and climate change that had been guiding agency exercises of discretion. Since then, his Administration has done its best to gut environmental protections—repealing long-standing regulations and abandoning customary decision practices. Overall, the Trump Administration has created a regulatory void, …

“The State V. The State:” Feuding Prosecutors And The Battle Over Post-Conviction Concessions, Dana Bazelon

UC Law Journal

One of the persistent questions of criminal law is how prosecutorial authority is allocated among different sovereign entities: Courts and scholars have wrestled time and again with questions of how criminal enforcement power should be divided between federal and state law enforcement. But the balance of power between state and local prosecutors has received far less attention, in large part because, until recently, the allocation of authority has been remarkably consistent: The overwhelming majority of state law enforcement power, by statute and by custom, has been concentrated in the hands of local prosecutors. In most states, state attorneys general have …

Transgender Rights Federalism: Protecting Gender-Affirming Care In State Courts, Julia Hunter

UC Law Journal

In United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court rejected a landmark equal protection challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In doing so, the Court substantially hindered or, at worst, entirely foreclosed federal equal protection challenges to gender-affirming care bans. Many Americans consider the Supreme Court the final arbiter of their constitutional rights. For decades, they would have been correct—when the Court was consistently expanding fundamental liberties, there was little incentive to look elsewhere for protection. But in eras of federal rights retrenchment, state courts have shown a willingness to step forward and interpret their constitutions independently and …

Capital Without Contribution, Saamia Aziz

UC Law Journal

The United States offers immigration pathways based on economic contribution, yet this principle is applied inconsistently across employment-based (EB) visa preference categories. While the EB-1, EB-2, and EB-3 visas require immigrants to demonstrate exceptional ability, advanced education, or labor market necessity, the EB-5 investor visa grants permanent residency solely in exchange for capital. This Note argues that this inconsistency exposes a deeper flaw in U.S. immigration law: an incoherent and unequal definition of “economic value.” By treating capital as a sufficient basis for citizenship—without requiring skill, integration, or verifiable public benefit—the EB-5 program reveals how U.S. immigration policy privileges wealth …

Masthead

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Copyright

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Table Of Contents

UC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Global Tax Decluttering, Shu-Yi Oei, Diane M. Ring

UC Law Journal

Major global players—most prominently the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union—have recently begun advocating that countries “declutter” their tax systems to tidy up, repeal, or eliminate pre-existing domestic anti-abuse tax rules. The reasoning is that these country-level rules are now duplicative or burdensome in light of a new global tax agreement spearheaded by the OECD and G20 and multilaterally agreed upon in 2021 by over 140 countries. Yet, this new multilateral regime is still in the process of being rolled out and is entirely untested.

In this Article, we examine this recently emergent “tax decluttering movement” …

Measurements And Scaling Of Ion Propulsion Impulse During Driven Magnetic Reconnection, Fatima Ebrahimi, Nicholas A. O'Gorman, Kush Maheshwari, Jongsoo Yoo, Alexandre Sainterme, Hantao Ji

Faculty Publications

Impulse scaling during magnetic reconnection, the magnetic energy conversion to kinetic energy, via direct Mach probe measurements in Magnetic Reconnection Experiment is examined. Ion exhaust velocity and impulse scalings with reconnecting magnetic field during the push phase of driven reconnection are presented. The outflows and impulse measurements are compared with global MHD simulations. Both measurements and simulations reveal a favorable scaling, greater than linear, of impulse with reconnecting field. These scaling results establish that magnetic reconnection could be utilized for plasma propulsion.

The Impact Of Framing Effects And Moral Values On Prosocial Engagement, Olajuwon Olagbegi

Dissertations

Framing effects can shape perceptions, beliefs and behavior, particularly in prosocial contexts. The current study examined how language framing (social justice, social activism, volunteerism) and moral values influence interest in prosocial engagement across low- and high-cost helping scenarios. Participants (N = 219) were randomly assigned to one of three framing conditions and reported willingness to help in both low- and high-cost situations. They also completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Replicating prior work (Olagbegi and colleagues, 2024), participants were more willing to engage in low- than high-cost helping. Across conditions, social justice framing elicited the greatest willingness to help. Higher fairness …

Lecture Recital: Josepha Auernhammer, Bonnie Littlejohn

Honors Theses

This lecture recital highlights the work of the classical Viennese composer and contemporary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Josepha Auernhammer (1758-1820). After an introduction to Auernhammer’s life and a brief overview of her compositional output, her Six Variations on “Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja” [I am the birdcatcher] and Harpsichord Sonata in A Major are discussed, diving into the work’s cultural context and intriguing compositional elements. A performance of the compositions concludes the lecture recital.

The Family Torn Apart - Honors Thesis Fall 2025, Hannah M. Zink

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

On July 21^st, 2015, a blast rang out from the RCE research center in St. Alban on Kennedy Island. Radiation infected the citizens in the surrounding neighborhood. For some, it gave them enhanced abilities; for others, it drained their life force. For the Elder family, it did both. After the loss of his sister, Olivia, Blaine Elder struggles with a double life. To most of St. Alban, he is known as Nightfire, the hero accountable for protecting their city. To a select few, he is Officer Elder of the 1^st precinct, a man responsible for raising his …

Responsive Rigor And Strategic Care: Faculty Praxis For Holistic Student Success In The Community College, Jennifer Kelley

Library Scholarship

This qualitative study examines how community college faculty conceptualize, communicate, and enact academic rigor and care in their teaching practice. While post-pandemic debates have positioned rigor and care as opposing forces—evident in the "Rigor Wars" that framed care as performative laxity and rigor as gatekeeping—community college faculty successfully integrate these practices to support holistic student success. This research addresses critical gaps in higher education scholarship, which has studied rigor and care separately, focused primarily on four-year institutions, and overlooked faculty perspectives on how integration occurs in practice. Drawing on a single-case study of 38 faculty members at a large Midwestern …

2025 Fact Sheet, Clemson University

Fact Sheets

No abstract provided.

Gender Identity, Political Alignment, And Views On “Man Or Bear” Trend Among Uconn Undergraduate Students, Erin Tumminello

Honors Scholar Theses

The “Man or Bear” debate, which became wildly popular online in 2024, asks whether someone would prefer encountering a random man or a random bear if alone in the woods. This question is meant to spark conversations around sexual and gender-based violence, and it created considerable discourse. Upon an exploration of the literature, findings include the fact that sexual violence often goes underreported among survivors, and that support of hegemonic masculinity and conservatism among men are associated with lower support for survivors. This study is meant to expand upon these findings, and to examine the ways in which gender identity …

Collaboration And Betrayal: Pius Xi And A Changing World, Nathan B. Higgins

Honors Scholar Theses

From the negotiations over the 1929 Lateran Accords to the start of World War II in 1939, the Holy See delicately navigated a turbulent diplomatic period. In the preceding century, the Catholic Church saw much of its temporal power decline as European states became more secular, and the pope lost the Papal States during the Risorgimento. Amid the decline in station, the rise of atheistic communism in Russia, Mexico, and Spain posed an existential to the Church, which Pope Pius XI would challenge during his pontificate. To confront this threat, he would work alongside Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany …

Ai-Assisted Frame Selection For Sports Photography Using Computer Vision And Multi-Modal Image Metrics, Sahana Ganesh

Honors Scholar Theses

This project focuses on the design and development of an AI-assisted frame selection system that automatically analyzes sequences of sports images and ranks frames based on overall photographic and contextual value. Additionally, we will focus on providing insights into the Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence techniques used to build it.

The application utilizes computer vision and machine learning techniques to evaluate multiple dimensions of image quality and content. These include technical image quality metrics such as sharpness, motion blur, and exposure; compositional metrics such as subject placement and visual balance; and semantic understanding through detection of players, ball location, pose, …

Effects Of Modifications To The Contextual Fear Conditioning Paradigm On Context Discrimination Deficits In Mice, Aditi Malpure

Honors Scholar Theses

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder that can develop following exposure to a traumatic event and is often characterized by impaired contextual discrimination, in which fear responses generalize to safe environments that resemble the original traumatic context. Previous studies have shown that elevated stress hormone levels during traumatic learning can impair memory specificity and promote generalized fear responses. The dentate gyrus (DG) of the hippocampus and adult-born granule cells (abGCs) are thought to play important roles in contextual discrimination and memory specificity. This study used contextual fear conditioning (CFC) paradigm in mice to investigate how enhanced stress and …

Herbivory Of Phragmites Australis Along A Salinity Gradient In Connecticut Wetlands, Sydney H. Kolz

Honors Scholar Theses

Invasive Phragmites australis (common reed) is widely distributed in New England wetlands, where it often outcompetes native plants and decreases biodiversity throughout the food web. Controlling its invasion is a priority, especially in salt marsh habitat, but current management techniques are inefficient. Leveraging natural processes may improve control strategies, but in order to do so, we must first better understand how abiotic and biotic stressors interact and affect Phragmites. This study focuses on herbivory and salinity, two factors limiting Phragmites’ fitness. I measured soil salinity and quantified the damage of three herbivore guilds (i.e. gall-formers and stem-borers, leaf-chewers, and …

Artificial Intelligence: Revolutionizing The Insurance Industry, Taylor Michaud

Honors Scholar Theses

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has evolved dramatically in the past century. It has become a powerful tool that can mimic human intelligence through algorithms that can learn from historical data and feedback. Some forms of AI need human intervention to keep them accurate, whereas others can autonomously refine themselves. The insurance sector will be greatly affected as AI will simplify and automate many processes, resulting in higher accuracy while using fewer company resources. Some key areas of insurance that will be impacted include sales and customer service, underwriting and pricing, claims, fraud detection, risk prevention, and actuarial analysis. However, to be …

Benchmarking Gaslighting Attacks Against Speech Large Language Models, Jinyang Wu, Bin Zhu, Xiandong Zou, Qiquan Zhang

PhD Student’s Publications Collection

As Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) become increasingly integrated into voice-based applications, ensuring their robustness against manipulative or adversarial input becomes critical. Although prior work has studied adversarial attacks in text-based LLMs and vision-language models, the unique cognitive and perceptual challenges of speech-based interaction remain underexplored. In contrast, speech presents inherent ambiguity, continuity, and perceptual diversity, which make adversarial attacks more difficult to detect. In this paper, we introduce gaslighting attacks, strategically crafted prompts designed to mislead, override, or distort model reasoning as a means to evaluate the vulnerability of Speech LLMs. Specifically, we construct five manipulation strategies: Anger, …

Teacher-Student Diffusion Model For Text-Driven 3d Hand Motion Generation, Ching Lam Cheng, Bin Zhu, Shengfeng He

PhD Student’s Publications Collection

Generating realistic 3D hand motion from natural language is vital for VR, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Existing methods either focus on full-body motion, overlooking detailed hand gestures, or require explicit 3D object meshes, limiting generality. We propose TSHaMo, a model-agnostic teacher-student diffusion framework for text-driven hand motion generation. The student model learns to synthesize motions from text alone, while the teacher leverages auxiliary signals (e.g., MANO parameters) to provide structured guidance during training. A co-training strategy enables the student to benefit from the teacher’s intermediate predictions while remaining text-only at inference. Evaluated using two diffusion backbones on GRAB and H2O, …

Mosdef-3d, Natalie Lam, Alice E. Shapley, Ryan L. Sanders, Tuan Do, Tucker Jones, Alison Coil, Mariska Kriek, Bahram Mobasher, Naveen A. Reddy, Brian Siana, Leonardo Clarke

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

We present spatially resolved rest-frame optical emission line maps of four galaxies at z ∼ 2 observed with the Keck/OH-Suppressing Infra-Red Imaging Spectrograph to study the physical conditions of the interstellar medium (ISM) at cosmic noon. Our analysis of strong emission line ratios in these galaxies reveals an offset from the local star-forming locus on the Baldwin–Phillips–Terlevich diagram but agrees with other star-forming galaxies at similar redshifts. Despite the offset toward higher [O iii] λ5008/Hβ and [N ii] λ6585/Hα, these strong line ratios remain consistent with or below the maximum starburst threshold even in the inner ∼1 kpc region of …

Beam-Energy Dependence Of Correlations Between Mean Transverse Momentum And Anisotropic Flow Of Charged Particles In Au+Au Collisions At Rhic, B. E. Aboona, J. Adam, G. Agakishiev, I. Aggarwal, M. M. Aggarwal, Z. Ahammed, A. Aitbayev, I. Alekseev, E. Alpatov, A. K. Alshammri, A. Aparin, S. Aslam, J. Atchison, G. S. Averichev, V. Bairathi, X. Bao, P. Barik, K. Barish, S. Behera, P. Bhagat, A. Bhasin, S. Bhatta, I. G. Bordyuzhin, J. D. Brandenburg, A. V. Brandin, C. Broodo, X. Z. Cai, H. Caines, M. Calderón De La Barca Sánchez, D. Cebra, J. Ceska

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

The correlation between the mean transverse momentum, [p _T], and the squared anisotropic flow, v_n², on an event-by-event basis has been suggested to be influenced by the initial conditions in heavy-ion collisions. We present measurements of the variances and covariance of [p _T] and v_n², along with their dimensionless ratio, for Au+Au collisions at various beam energies: s_NN = 14.6, 19.6, 27, 54.4, and 200 GeV. Our measurements reveal a distinct energy-dependent behavior in the variances and covariances. In addition, the dimensionless ratio displays a similar behavior across different beam energies. …

Jwst Spectroscopic Insights Into The Diversity Of Galaxies In The First 500 Myr, Guido Roberts-Borsani, Pascal A. Oesch, Richard Ellis, Andrea Weibel, Emma Giovinazzo, Rychard Bouwens, Pratika Dayal, Adriano Fontana, Kasper E. Heintz, Jorryt Matthee, Romain A. Meyer, Laura Pentericci, Alice Shapley, Sandro Tacchella, Tommaso Treu, Fabian Walter, Hakim Atek, Sownak Bose, Marco Castellano, Yoshinobu Fudamoto, Takahiro Morishita, Rohan P. Naidu, Ryan L. Sanders, Arjen Van Der Wel

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

We investigate the nature and spectroscopic diversity of early galaxies from a sample of 41 sources at (Formula presented) with James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)/NIRSpec prism observations. We compare the properties of strong ultraviolet (UV) line emitters, traced by intense C iv emission, with those of more ‘typical’ sources with weak or undetected C iv. The more typical (or ‘C iv-weak’) sources reveal significant scatter in their C iii] line strengths, UV continuum slopes, and physical sizes, spanning C iii] equivalent widths (EWs) of (Formula presented) 1–51 Å, UV slopes of (Formula presented) to (Formula presented), and half-light radii of …

Probing Late-Stage Hadronic Interactions At High Baryon Density Via K⁎0 Production In The Rhic Beam Energy Scan Program, B. E. Aboona, J. Adam, G. Agakishiev, I. Aggarwal, M. M. Aggarwal, Z. Ahammed, A. Aitbayev, I. Alekseev, E. Alpatov, A. K. Alshammri, A. Aparin, S. Aslam, J. Atchison, G. S. Averichev, V. Bairathi, X. Bao, P. Barik, K. Barish, S. Behera, P. Bhagat, A. Bhasin, S. Bhatta, I. G. Bordyuzhin, J. D. Brandenburg, A. V. Brandin, C. Broodo, X. Z. Cai, H. Caines, M. Calderón De La Barca Sánchez, D. Cebra, J. Ceska

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

A precision measurement of the K ^⁎0 meson yield is reported in Au+Au collisions at s_NN=7.7,11.5,14.6,19.6, and 27 GeV using the high-statistics data sample collected by the STAR experiment during the Beam Energy Scan II (BES-II) program at RHIC. The transeverse momentum ( p_T )-integrated yield ratios (K^*0+K^*0‾)/(K⁺+K⁻) in central collisions show a suppression relative to peripheral collisions at the (1.7–3.6) σ level, while a thermal model without final-stage rescattering overpredicts this ratio with a deviation of (6.9–8.2) σ . These results indicate a loss of the measured K …

Learn More About The Crown Jewel Of The Mcgovern Historical Center, Katie Prentice

TMC Library Newsletter (2015-)

No abstract provided.

Bridging The Gap: Improving Student Awareness And Use Of Ottercare Supports, Jamie Toborg

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Many students at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) experience food and housing insecurity and remain unaware of available campus resources. This capstone project, implemented through OtterCare, aimed to increase awareness and utilization of basic needs support services, particularly among upper-division and transfer students. The intervention included classroom presentations, faculty outreach, and distribution of informational materials, developed using evidence-based practices and community feedback. Following implementation, survey data from 65 students indicated that 83% intended to visit the Hub and 61% planned to share information with peers, demonstrating increased awareness and engagement. While the intervention did not fully address structural food …