Digital Commons Network^™

A Campus Connected: An Analysis Of University Outdoor Spaces, Skylar Wilson

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to analyze the evolution of outdoor renovations on East Tennessee State University’s campus by examining the effects these renovations have had on students and faculty, and then using this data to propose possible successful renovations to the remainder of the University Commons project. To complete this project, data was obtained through East Tennessee State University administrative faculty interviews, surveys of students residing in campus resident halls, and observations. By examining the impact on behavior, designers and developers are then able to successfully determine the factors that aid in positively influencing human behaviors. Design suggestions …

Simulating Polistes Dominulus Nest-Building Heuristics With Deterministic And Markovian Properties, Benjamin Pottinger

Undergraduate Honors Theses

European Paper Wasps (Polistes dominula) are social insects that build round, symmetrical nests. Current models indicate that these wasps develop colonies by following simple heuristics based on nest stimuli. Computer simulations can model wasp behavior to imitate natural nest building. This research investigated various building heuristics through a novel Markov-based simulation. The simulation used a hexagonal grid to build cells based on the building rule supplied to the agent. Nest data was compared with natural data and through visual inspection. Larger nests were found to be less compact for the rules simulated.

May Cvm Library Newsletter

CVM Library Newsletters

May CVM Library Newsletter

Administering Change Orders In Highway Projects, Muaz O. Ahmed, Rayan H. Assaad, Islam H. El-Adaway, Emily Echele, Kyle Govro, John Watson

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Change orders continue to be one of the main challenges faced by the construction industry. Despite many previous research efforts related to managing change orders in the construction industry, there is still a lack of research that investigates the contractual aspects of change orders for transportation projects. This paper tackles this knowledge gap within the context of Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) highway projects. To this end, the authors used an integrated research method comprised of (1) selection and analysis of ODOT case studies; (2) identification of the main change orders aspects that lead to conflicts, claims, and/or disputes in …

Master Of Agriculture Education Graduate Internship Report, Emma Swift

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

This report details the role of an assistant coach with the Cal Poly Rodeo Program and the responsibilities associated with managing rodeo sponsorships.

Aged 539 Internship Report - Maureen Lagrande Photography, Maureen F. Lagrande

Agricultural Education: Graduate Internship Reports

“Maureen LaGrande Photography” is a small business helping to capture images of agriculture, people and events. Specializing in agricultural promotion, Maureen LaGrande Photography’s website and Instagram allow clients to view images as well as design materials that promote and educate others about the agriculture industry. The website is easily accessible for clients to use where they can learn more about their photographer, services offered and choose a price package that best fits their photography needs. The following report details the creation of the photography website, promotional materials, social media pages, business plan and future plans for the small business.

The Determinants Of Banking Regulation In The Mena Region, Hanene Ksiaa Dr, Mohamed Imen Gallali Professor

The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance

Theoretical foundations in banks' response to capital settlement suggest that the systems proposed by Basel are not sound. It is conceivable that regulators will consider alternative approaches to enhance the safety and soundness of the banking system. The regulation includes several decrees and ratios; the areas of interest encompassing the areas are subject to principal component analysis (PCA).The paper aims to present a regulatory framework based on balance sheet ratios, such as Capital requirements (equity ratio; Tier 1 ratio; Total Equity/Net Loans; Total Equity/Deposits); for liquidity needs (liquidity/deposits; liquidity/total assets; liquidity/deposits and loans, and net loans/total assets); for leverage requirements …

Determinants Of The Adoption Of Islamic Finance By Cameroonian Smes: Case Study From A Psycho-Sociological Characteristics Of Managers, Jérôme Gonne, Yaouba Mohamadou

The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) today form the backbone of the African economy in general and Cameroon in particular. However, Cameroonian SMEs encounter many difficulties, one of the most important is the access to so-called conventional financing. Faced with this situation, some of them will seek alternative means such as Islamic finance. Despite its development over the past two decades, Islamic finance is struggling to find a place in the financial decisions of Cameroonian SMEs’ Managers. This study aims at highlighting the psycho-sociological characteristics of policymakers in directing their decision towards the Islamic finance product. Data collected from a sample …

Financial Inclusion And Gender Income Inequalities In Informal Entrepreneurship: The Case Of Cameroon, Faustine Kede Ndouna, Félix Zogning

The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of access to different financial products in reducing income inequalities between men and women working in the informal sector in Cameroon. To this end, we use the World Bank database World Bank Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) dataset 2018 to assess the evolution of access to financial services through a descriptive analysis and the fourth Cameroonian survey conducted by the National Institute of Statistics in 2014 to estimate a probit model and a Fairlie decomposition model. Empirical results suggest that indeed, income inequality between the sexes continues to increase in …

Effects Of Access To Credit On The Performance Of Smes In The Congo, Fabrice-Gilles Ndombi Avouba

The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance

This paper proposes to analyze the effects of access to credit on the performance of SMEs in Congo. To this end, we used the theoretical model developed by Stiglitz and Weiss (1981). From an econometric point of view, we estimated a multiple linear regression model using the ordinary least square technique due to the absence of endogeneity. This application, as well as the statistical and econometric analyses that followed, were carried out using microeconomic data from the survey of very small, small, medium-sized enterprises and artisans in the Congo, which was carried out thanks to the multiple contributions of the …

The Role Of Emotion In Constitutional Theory, J. Joel Alicea

Notre Dame Law Review

Although the role of emotion in law has become a major field of scholarship, there has been very little attention paid to the role of emotion in constitutional theory. This Article seeks to fill that gap by providing an integrated account of the role of emotion within the individual, how emotion affects constitutional culture, and how constitutional culture, properly understood, should affect our evaluation of major constitutional theories.

The Article begins by reconstructing one of the most important and influential accounts of emotion in the philosophical literature: that of Thomas Aquinas. Because Aquinas’s description of the nature of emotion accords …

Stare Decisis And Intersystemic Adjudication, Nina Varsava

Notre Dame Law Review

Interpreting and following precedent is a complicated business. Various reasonable but conflicting methods of ascertaining the legal effect of precedent exist. Differences between practices of precedent or doctrines of stare decisis are particularly salient between legal systems or jurisdictions. For example, a state’s judges might embrace different stare decisis norms than federal judges. This situation presents a major quandary for intersystemic jurisprudence that has been largely overlooked in the scholarly literature.

Are law-applying judges in the intersystemic context bound by the law-supplying jurisdiction’s methods of interpreting precedent? For example, when the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals adjudicates a question of …

Brown, History, And The Fourteenth Amendment, Christopher W. Schmidt

Notre Dame Law Review

Legal scholars and historians in recent years have sought to elevate Reconstruction to the stature of a “second Founding,” according it the same careful inquiry and legitimating function as the first. Their work marks the latest iteration of a decades-long campaign to displace the far more dismissive attitude toward Reconstruction that permeated historical scholarship and legal opinions in the first half of the twentieth century. In this Article, I present the flurry of engagement with the history of the Fourteenth Amendment during the litigation of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) as a key transition point in how historians and …

Beefing Up Skinny Labels: Induced Infringement As A Question Of Law, Garrett T. Potter

Notre Dame Law Review

This Note proposes a novel argument for improving the application of induced infringement by splitting its elements into separate questions of fact and law, incorporating the relevant perception and reasoning of both judge and jury. Part I provides a primer of the Hatch-Waxman Act and interactions (and lack thereof) between the USPTO and FDA in regulating pharmaceutical compositions. Part II assesses the historical landscape that led to the codification of induced infringement. Part III concludes by proposing an alternate approach by treating an element of induced infringement as a question of law, rather than a question of fact, and sets …

Eliminating The Fugitive Disentitlement Doctrine In Immigration Matters, Tania N. Valdez

Notre Dame Law Review

Federal courts of appeals have declared that they may dismiss immigration appeals filed by noncitizens who are deemed “fugitives.” The fugitive disentitlement doctrine emerged in the criminal context with respect to defendants who had escaped from physical custody. Although the doctrine originated out of concerns that court orders could not be enforced against criminal fugitives, the doctrine has since crept into civil contexts, including immigration. But rather than invoking the doctrine for its originally intended purpose of ensuring that court orders could be enforced, courts now primarily invoke it for the purposes of punishment, deterrence, and protecting the dignity of …

Prosecution In Public, Prosecution In Private, Lauren M. Ouziel

Notre Dame Law Review

Criminal procedure has long set a boundary between public and private in criminal enforcement: generally speaking, enforcement decisions at the post-charging stage are exposed to some degree of public view, while those at the pre-charging stage remain almost entirely secret. The allocation of public and private is, at heart, an allocation of power—and the current allocation is a relic. When private prosecutors were the mainstay of criminal enforcement, public court processes effectively constrained them. But those processes do little to constrain the spaces where enforcement power today resides: in decisions by the servants of a state-run, professionalized enforcement apparatus on …

Freedom Seekers: The Transgressive Constitutionalism Of Fugitives From Slavery, Rebecca E. Zietlow

Notre Dame Law Review

In the years leading up to the Civil War, fugitives from slavery put their lives on the line to improve their own status and that of their families in their quest for freedom. Fugitives from slavery, or “freedom seekers,” engaged in civil disobedience, resisting laws that they believed to be unjust and inhumane. In the North, free black people and their white allies supported the freedom seekers by engaging in civil disobedience of their own. The transgressive actions of freedom seekers sparked constitutional controversy during the antebellum era over issues of interstate comity, federalism, citizenship rights, and fundamental human rights. …

The Intent Of The Framer: John Bingham’S Fourteenth Amendment, Michael Zuckert

Notre Dame Law Review

It is not often that a single individual is responsible for constitutional provisions as important as Sections 1 and 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. My project in this Essay is not to engage in a study of original intent, or original public meaning, or however we wish now to characterize the originalist project, but to engage in a quest for John Bingham’s Amendment, for understanding the Amendment as he understood it. Whether this gives us an authoritative reading of the Amendment for the purposes of constitutional interpretation and adjudication is a separate issue. I treat Bingham as an author and …

How Favored, Exactly? An Analysis Of The Most Favored Nation Theory Of Religious Exemptions From Calvary Chapel To Tandon, Luray Buckner

Notre Dame Law Review

In this Note, I argue that Justice Kavanaugh’s most favored nation test for religious exemptions actually differs from the one employed by the majority of the Court in Tandon. The majority’s formulation of the test is vague and explicitly requires courts to engage in a fact-intensive comparability analysis. Practically, lower courts applying Tandon to religious exemption questions have exploited this comparability step to rule against religious claimants generally, but more specifically to deny them strict scrutiny. Because the Tandon test was formulated to apply to all free exercise claims, the test is necessarily framed in more general terms and …

Up In Smoke: Why Regulating Social Media Like Big Tobacco Won’T Work (Yet!), Ian Mckay

Notre Dame Law Review

Lawmakers, pundits, and tech executives’ assertion that social media should be regulated like tobacco in order to protect American teenagers is oversimplistic. While the comparison makes for a good sound bite for the press, the argument disregards the inherent differences between regulating a physical product that has no constitutional protection and a virtual product that can implicate both users’ and social media companies’ First Amendment rights. This paper will identify and analyze some of the main pillars of the tobacco regulatory scheme and apply them to social media products. In Part I, I will define social media and provide a …

The Nebraska Covid-19 Early Care And Education Provider Survey Iii: “Holding It Together—And Hanging By A Thread” May 2022, Alexandra Daro, Kathleen C. Gallagher, Kristen M. Cunningham

Buffet Early Childhood Institute Reports and Publications

In February 2022, the Buffett Early Childhood Institute conducted the Nebraska COVID-19 Early Care and Education Survey III, in collaboration with state agencies, University of Nebraska faculty, and organization partners. This third survey examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Nebraska’s child care professionals and its implications for practice and policy. Results from the previous surveys, released in April and August 2020, indicated that early care and education professionals in Nebraska, who were already vulnerable prior to the pandemic, have been negatively impacted from the start of the pandemic. The first survey elevated providers’ immediate needs, including funding relief, …

Multi-Scale Convolutional Neural Network For Automated Amd Classification Using Retinal Oct Images, Saman Sotoudeh-Paima, Ata Jodeiri, Fedra Hajizadeh, Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh

Research Administration Articles

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of blindness in developed countries, especially in people over 60 years of age. The workload of specialists and the healthcare system in this field has increased in recent years mainly due to three reasons: 1) increased use of retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging technique, 2) prevalence of population aging worldwide, and 3) chronic nature of AMD. Recent advancements in the field of deep learning have provided a unique opportunity for the development of fully automated diagnosis frameworks. Considering the presence of AMD-related retinal pathologies in varying sizes …

Inter-Cell Slicing Resource Partitioning Via Coordinated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning, Tianlun Hu, Qi Liao, Qiang Liu, Dan Wellington, Georg Carle

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Network slicing enables the operator to configure virtual network instances for diverse services with specific requirements. To achieve the slice-aware radio resource scheduling, dynamic slicing resource partitioning is needed to orchestrate multi-cell slice resources and mitigate inter-cell interference. It is, however, challenging to derive the analytical solutions due to the complex inter-cell interdependencies, interslice resource constraints, and service-specific requirements. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that improves the max-min slice performance while maintaining the constraints of resource capacity. We design two coordination schemes to allow distributed agents to coordinate and mitigate inter-cell interference. The …

Ace Newsletter May 2022, State University Of New York At Cortland

Programs

Access to College Education Program Newsletter May 2022

Identifying Motivators, Facilitators, And Barriers To Engaging In An Online Fine Motor Exercise Program, Kristine Ricossa, Kyndra Menefee, Lauren Rally, Mia Do, Charis Chan

Occupational Therapy | MSOT Capstone Projects

Purpose: The aim of this qualitative study was to examine the impact of the motivators, facilitators and barriers for individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) in engaging in a fine motor exercise program given online. Methods: Using a phenomenological design, a purposive sample of 6 individuals with PD were recruited. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews via zoom with follow up member checks. Data were analyzed through an inductive approach by developing generalizations from themes based on the interview data. Results: Three common themes were developed, ‘integrating and forming habits’, ‘acknowledging participation in exercise can fight the disease’, ‘recognizing improvement in …

Research Update - May 2022, Office Of Research

Research Update

No abstract provided.

Daydream’S Innovation Grant: A Year In Review, Janelle Le Roy '23, Julia Tran '23, Ela Gadi '23, Michelle Li '23

IMSA Innovation Grant

IMSA is a residential school with a rigorous math and science curriculum. Students here are ambitious and competitive, taking a variety of advanced classes. With IMSA’s many academic benefits, comes various intense pressures in its high-stress environment. As a part of this community, we have noticed our peers often negatively handle their stress by isolating themselves, staying up late, under and overconsumption, and procrastination. These habits are so normalized that as new students come into IMSA, they start to develop them too.

Political, Racial, And Household Income Barriers For Access To Healthcare In Illinois Counties, Kennedy Bray '23

Student Publications & Research

Access to health care impacts many people throughout the United States, as it restricts their ability to solve their health concerns. People who have the highest risk of a lack of access include people who are uninsured, people a part of a specific social class, or people belonging to a specific political party. In a particular geographical region, these factors could lead to groups of people suffering because of circumstances that they cannot control in their region. In my project, I determine how better access to healthcare and the percentage of people insured are affected by a measurement of the …

Hadron, Lily Song '23, Anisha Kolambe '24, Gautham Anne '23, Samuel Go '23

Hadron Magazine

• Pg 4 : The Impact of a Sip of Coffee
• Pg 8 : Any Ideas About Sonoluminesence?
• Pg 11 : Memory, Memory, and the Brain
• Pg 13 : Climate Change Soon to Be a Thing of the Past?
• Pg 15 : Non Fungible Tokens

Higher Education Housing Professionals And Disability: A Grounded Theory Exploration Of Resident Directors’ Understandings Of Disability, Christopher Toutain

Education (PhD) Dissertations

The residential experiences of students with disabilities in higher education play a pivotal role in their overall campus education. However, little is known about the ways in which the staff who manage and support these residential environments understand and work with issues and concepts of disability. Utilizing constructivist grounded theory, this study examines the ways in which resident directors think about and work with disability within their positions of residential management. The study also explores the ways in which resident directors think about and understand disability as a component of diversity, the steps that resident directors take in working with …