Digital Commons Network^™

Shadowrunning The Human: Harebrained Schemes' Shadowrun Series And Transhumanism, Alexander P. Orelup

English Theses & Dissertations

I argue that Harebrained Schemes’ video game series Shadowrun critiques transhumanism in three distinct yet related ways: in terms of religion, political control, and identity capitalism. In doing so, Shadowrun attempts to counter claims that video games are an inherently transhumanist medium and provides an opportunity for players to resist a potential transhuman future. This further elucidates the trends and perceptions of transhumanism within American culture around the time period. I utilize a variety of methodologies in my argument, ranging from cultural studies, narratology, ludology, and close reading in order to grasp all of the audio-visual and gameplay elements that …

Women's Displacement And The Reclamation Of Identity: Navigating Landscapes Of Contestation In The Postcolonial Novel, Carol P. Harvest

English Theses & Dissertations

Landscapes affected by colonial domination are contested landscapes—places not only in danger of environmental destruction through colonial and neocolonial violence but also landscapes of struggle for people who survive in these precarious spaces. Historically, separate postcolonial and ecocritical literary analysis addressed contested landscapes; postcolonial critique centered on the lasting devastation of colonial violence on people and place, while ecocriticism, in its infancy, enjoyed the privilege of ignorance, focusing on endangered species and the preservation of land, but it did not consider the impact of landscapes on the very people who were largely forced to either leave or cross “natural” spaces. …

The Intersection Of Social Desirability And Cultural Competence In Counselors: Broaching Sexual Topics With Sexually Minoritized (Lgb) Clients, Jareb Kinney

Dissertations

Mental health counselors increasingly work with sexually minoritized clients, yet limited understanding exists regarding how social desirability shapes counselors' perceived cultural competence and their willingness to broach sensitive sexual topics in therapeutic settings. This gap can obscure the subtle ways personal conditioning and professional performance pressures influence clinical practice. This qualitative phenomenological study aimed to explore how social desirability influences mental health counselors' experiences and perceived cultural competence when discussing sex-related topics with sexually minoritized clients. Guided by symbolic interactionism, the study employed a purposive and snowball sampling strategy to recruit ten mental health counselors with direct clinical experience serving …

Trade Liberalization Under Safta And Bimstec: Evidence From A Cge-Gtap Case Study Of A Small Open Economy, Gita Bhushal, Pankaj Lal

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Regional trade liberalization via preferential agreements increasingly shapes economic outcomes in small open economies embedded in overlapping regional frameworks. This study evaluates the short-run economy-wide effects of tariff and non-tariff measure (NTM) reforms under the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) and the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model calibrated to the GTAP 10 database. Gravity-based estimates of ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) of NTMs are integrated into the CGE framework, enabling explicit modeling of regulatory barriers alongside tariff reductions. Policy simulations examine scenarios involving a 90 percent tariff …

Workforce Resilience In Public Transportation Agencies, Kristal D. Metro

Civil Engineering ETDs

A strong, resilient public workforce is necessary to keep the United States’ infrastructure system running smoothly. Across the public sector, hiring is lagging behind increasing retirement rates, leaving public agencies facing the loss of institutional knowledge at unprecedented levels. Combined with above-average retirement rates, low unemployment rates, and below-average salaries, workforce shortages are expected to become critical, putting the resilience of the public transportation workforce, and by extension, the United States public infrastructure and services at risk. The purpose of this research is to determine the best practices for recruiting and retaining employees at public transportation agencies, thereby positively influencing …

The Physiology Of The Work: Chronic Stress, Allostatic Load, And Faculty Wellness In Counselor Education, Ajayla S. Evins

Counseling & Human Services Theses & Dissertations

Counselor educators embody multifaceted professional roles across teaching, supervision, research, leadership, and service, exerting a profound influence on the formation of counselors and the ongoing development of the profession (CACREP, 2024; Calley & Hawley, 2008). While wellness is recognized as a core professional value in counseling (ACA, 2014), research has focused almost exclusively on emotional and psychological dimensions, leaving the physiological consequences of chronic stress largely underexplored (Bovee, 2024; Faheem et al., 2025; Lewis et al., 2022). In neighboring fields, such as public health and medicine, chronic stress has been linked to dysregulation in cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, immune inflammatory, and metabolic …

The Effects Of Covid 19 Job Demands On Public Sector Employees’ Organizational Commitment: The Mediating Roles Of Work Engagement And Job Burnout, And The Moderating Role Of Supervisor Support, Benjamin R. Kaufman

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

United States citizens rely on state government employees to provide essential public services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these employees responded by administering both routine and novel procedures to protect public health, often placing them on the frontlines and at increased risk of contagion. Concurrently, the pandemic-driven economic downturn created budget shortfalls that threatened the job and financial security of the state workforce. Together, these conditions substantially increased job demands for state government employees.

Guided by the Job Demands–Resources (JDR) Model, this study examined how COVID‑19-related job demands influenced state employees’ work engagement, job burnout, and organizational commitment, and whether supervisor …

Back Yard Lingo: Language As Cultural Identity In American Circus, Aíne Norris

English Theses & Dissertations

This project is an exploration of the deeply insider language of American circus and identifies meaningful patterns and connections between language, identity, and community. Drawing upon the theoretical lenses of cultural studies and community of practice, the study offers a thorough examination of how circus people use insider language for business, performance, and community purposes that enhance belonging, share knowledge, gatekeep, and protect their group identity.

The research employs a mixed-methods, scaffolded design that integrates both qualitative and quantitative data approaches, examining the cultural importance of circus language as written and spoken by the insider community. The design begins with …

Extending The Fuzzy-Trace Theory Informed Model Of Guilty Plea Decision Making: Accounting For Factual Guilt And Innocence, Rebecca K. Helm, Tina M. Zottoli

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Objective: Understanding how sentence differentials influence plea decision making is vital to identifying when plea offers might lead to convictions that conflict with normative goals (e.g., avoiding wrongful conviction). We clarify previous findings by introducing and testing predictions of a Fuzzy-Trace Theory informed model relating plea discount to plea acceptance in mock guilty defendants and extend the work to mock innocent defendants.

Hypotheses: We expected plea rates in guilty defendants to increase with increases in plea discount but to change more steeply when a change in plea discount created a categorically distinct change in sentence (vs. a less meaningful reduction). …

Behavioral Practice And Homework Completion As Predictors Of Outcome In A Transdiagnostic Brief Behavioral Therapy For Anxiety And Depression In Youth., Araceli Gonzalez, Pauline Goger, Melissa Escobar, Michelle Rozenman, Megan Jeffreys, Giovanna Porta, David A. Brent, Frances L. Lynch, John F. Dickerson, V. Robin Weersing

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Exposure and behavioral activation have been identified as key therapeutic components in evidence-based treatment for youths with anxiety and depression, respectively. The current study expanded this work to transdiagnostic treatment for youths with anxiety and depression and examined links between (a) amount of in-session exposure/behavioral activation, (b) out-of-session homework completion, and (c) anxiety, depression, and functioning outcomes of youths following a brief behavioral therapy. Therapy data were examined from 95 youths (ages 8-16; 56.8% female; 74.7% non-Hispanic White) with anxiety and/or depressive disorders who completed a transdiagnostic Brief Behavioral Therapy (BBT) as part of a randomized effectiveness trial. Observers recorded …

Wildfires, Smoke Pollution, And Household Purchasing Behaviors, Tamara Sheldon, Crystal Zhan

Faculty Publications

In this paper, we investigate households’ behavioral responses to wildfires in California to understand their mitigation and adaptation strategies. We combine daily household-level consumer purchase data from the NielsenIQ Consumer Panel with detailed wildfire incident and smoke exposure data from various sources. Our analysis reveals that wildfires reduce retail trips and overall spending, both in-store and online, likely due to evacuations. However, wildfire-driven smoke increases purchases of essential goods, indicating adaptive behavior. More experienced households tend to respond more cautiously, and we observe heterogeneity in responses based on income, age, and pre-existing health conditions. These findings highlight the complexity and …

A Novel Nudt16-Based Strategy For Producing Defined Phosphoribosylated Substrates To Study Nampt Antiviral Activity Against Hsv-1, Steph Nivaggioli

Bioengineering Master's Theses

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) is a highly prevalent human pathogen whose symptoms are characterized by the formation of painful blisters and ulcers. There are two major families of HSV: HSV-1, primarily transmitted through oral contact, and HSV-2, predominantly spread through sexual contact. Periodic reactivation of the virus enables continued transmission and recurrent disease. Antiviral drugs that suppress viral replication are available to the public; however, no curative therapy exists.

Recent studies suggest that HSV reprograms host cellular metabolism to support its replication. Notably, this includes the manipulation of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD⁺) homeostasis. Under standard physiological conditions, NAD⁺ is consumed …

Gregor Samsa’S Pagkagimata (Awakening) In Bikol: A Becoming-Minor In Translation, Victor John M. Loquias

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Kristian Cordero’s translation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis instantiates what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call minor literature. Preferring the Bikol term Pagkagimata—the literal event of Gregor Sama’s becoming-animal in the novel as title of the translation and the utilization of the Rinconada Bikol language for the transformed Samsa—Cordero has typified a perspective of translation that challenges the popular view of fluent translation from the source text to the target language. Exemplifying the concept of becoming-minor of Deleuze and Guattari and deploying Lawrence Venuti’s notion of the “remainder,” An Pagkagimata ni Gregor Samsa exhibits a deterritorialization of Bikol …

Narratives Of Dis-Ease: A Genre Study Of Pathography, Sylvelyn Jo A. Almanzor

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This essay establishes pathography as a distinct genre of creative nonfiction, tracing the development, form, and cultural significance of this body of literature. I have broadly defined it as narratives on personal experiences of Gabriel Marcel's "dis-ease"—covering and critiquing the human understanding and experience of sickness, pain, and grief—which has evolved from autobiographical narratives and life-writing of patients and medical professionals to a recognized form of creative nonfiction. This study will analyze the genre's structure, themes, and rhetorical strategies with consideration to cultural significance and how it negotiates the human understanding of suffering, healing, and societal attitudes toward existence and …

Comparative Kinetic And Thermal Characterization Of A Full-Length And Truncated Variant Of Endo-Β-1,4-Glucanase From Bacillus Subtilis, Cara Giordano

Bioengineering Master's Theses

The enzyme Endo-β-1,4-Glucanase from Bacillus subtilis, commonly known as BsCel5A, catalyzes the hydrolysis of β-1,4-glycosidic bonds in cellulose aiding in biomass deconstruction and its conversion into fermentable sugars. Efficient, thermostable cellulases are critical for reducing the cost and energy demands of lignocellulosic bioprocessing. Unfortunately, many naturally occurring enzymes are limited by activity rate and stability in bioprecessing conditions, especially high temperatures. In this study, we compared the catalytic and thermal properties of wild-type BsCel5A (BsCel5A‑WT) and a truncated catalytic core variant (BsCel5A‑CC) to evaluate their efficiency and thermostability. The catalytic and thermal properties were investigated through the hydrolysis of …

Treating Maternal Mental Health Problems With An App-Based Program, Leslie E. Roos, Anna L. Mackinnon, E. Bailin Xie, Kaeley M. Simpson, Charlie Rioux, Kristin A. Reynolds, Ryan J. Giuliano, Jennifer Harrington, Jennifer L.P. Protudjer, Shannon Sauer-Zavala, Gerald F. Giesbrecht, Catherine Lebel, Dana Watts, Madeline Belows, Lara Penner-Goeke, Makayla Freeman, Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen

Psychology Faculty Publications

OBJECTIVES: Exposure to maternal mental illness in the first 3 years of life is associated with poor child outcomes. Many mothers experience mental health problems and few have access to evidence-based treatments. Mobile health treatments show promise for mood and anxiety disorders but rarely include parenting strategies. This study evaluated the efficacy of Building Emotional Awareness and Mental Health (BEAM), a 10-week app-based therapist-guided program, which responds to maternal mental health and parenting needs. METHOD: A two-arm, Phase III randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the BEAM intervention compared to unrestricted services-as-usual. Participants completed self-report measures at eligibility, prior …

Evaluating Mindfulness Training As A Cognitive Performance Enhancement Tool, Ekaterina Denkova, Taylor K. Tardibuono, Anthony P. Zanesco, Catalina Sanchez Montenegro, Joshua D. Rooks, Scott L. Rogers, Amishi P. Jha

Psychology Faculty Publications

Objectives: Special Operations Forces (SOF) must maintain cognitive and operational performance under extreme conditions. This pragmatic trial aimed to assess whether integrating a mindfulness training (MT) program into SOF Professional Military Education (PME) through a train-the-trainer approach could enhance these critical capabilities. Method: Using a cluster-randomized design, groups were assigned to MT or training-as-usual (TAU). After a 10-week trainer practicum, trainers delivered a 4-week, 6-hr variant of a validated 8-hr MT program in person across two PME courses (Rounds 1 and 2). In Round 1 (n = 122), MT was implemented at the start of the course, with out-of-class mindfulness …

The Dynamics Of Eeg Microstates Covary With Spontaneous Thoughts, Anthony P. Zanesco, Shirley Pandya, Ekaterina Denkova, Amishi P. Jha

Psychology Faculty Publications

Brain activity continuously fluctuates alongside the spontaneously co-occurring mental events that comprise our spontaneous thought. Understanding the functional relevance of this intrinsic activity requires investigation of the covariation between ongoing brain dynamics and spontaneous thought. The large-scale electrophysiological events known as electroencephalographic (EEG) microstates provide an important window into the activity of neuronal networks at the millisecond time scale, and sequences of microstates are thought to reflect cognitively relevant mental operations. Yet, attempts to link momentary thoughts to the dynamics of microstates through more temporally precise experience sampling methods have been limited. We address this gap by asking participants to …

Learning Through Practice: Reflections From My Teaching Placement, Kacy L. Dabbs

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This presentation reflects on professional growth during the undergraduate teacher preparation program and clinical teaching experiences in an elementary education classroom. It highlights instructional practices developed through coursework and field experiences, including lesson planning, formative assessment, and responsiveness to diverse learners. The presentation also identifies goals for continued professional growth as an educator and reflects on the role of clinical practice in preparing future teachers.

Sapientia Ex Machina: Engaging Ai As A Meaning-Making Tool For Philosophical Practice, Austin M. Pritchett

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This paper sets out to examine whether a Large Language Model can serve as a genuine interlocutor in philosophical inquiry. With a grounding in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in conversation with other works in philosophy on AI, language, and the mind, the author determines the extent to which an AI's contributions to conversation can be said to participate in understanding and meaning-making rather than merely simulate it, thereby making evident the extent to which it is useful in philosophical practice.

When Are Two Polygons Fold Congruent?, Elena Ruiz, Benjamin Walden Philippi, Lucy Watson, Adam Cartisano

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Hilbert's Third Problem, presented in 1900, asked: given two polyhedra of equal volume, are they scissors-congruent? That is, can one always be cut into a finite number of pieces and be reassembled into the other?  In two dimensions, it is clear that two polygons have equal area if they are scissors congruent, but the converse was proved in 1807. The parallels between flat origami and polygonal decomposition suggest a common framework, which motivates us to define a notion of fold-congruence. We pose the question: are two polygons of equal area always fold-congruent? In this talk, we discuss preliminary investigations into …

Cedarstone Arts Foundation Marketing And Media, Emmy-Kate Arnett, Amelia Bailly, Charlie Condra, Lorelai Lysaght

SPARK Symposium Presentations

For our project, we collaborated with Cedarstone Arts Foundation, a non-profit centered on providing free music education and instruments to childhood cancer patients. Our goal was to create social media platforms for the foundation and develop a key marketing strategy via said platforms, with the desired outcome of increased exposure and donations. To achieve our goal, we researched the most relevant media outlets for advertising. We helped create high-quality content that would raise awareness for their cause. We developed a general template for posting so that the foundation could confidently continue this strategy for the foreseeable future. We consulted with …

Dirges Of Hope, Manasseh Azure Awuni

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Among the varied themes that African fiction explores, politics and governance remain the most dominant across generations. Writing under oppressive and exploitative colonial administrations, the first generation of African storytellers used fiction to highlight the injustice of colonial rule. With fidelity to the African proverb that says the tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter until the lion learns to tell its own stories, African writers also used fiction to push back against one-sided, toxic narratives about the continent. After independence, when rulers of the new republics continued the colonial legacies of oppression, inflicting untold hardships on their citizens, …

Detection And Quantification Of Allergen Cross-Contact In Shared Frying Oil Using Targeted Mass Spectrometry, Francisca Asigri

Department of Food Science and Technology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Cow’s milk and egg allergies are prevalent IgE-mediated food allergies that pose significant public health concerns worldwide. Although strict avoidance remains the primary management strategy, unintended exposure can still occur through allergen cross-contact, particularly in commercial and industrial food operations that utilize shared frying oils. The objective of this study was to identify and quantify allergen transfer in shared frying oil and assess the robustness of existing targeted mass spectrometry methods (LC-MS/MS) for detecting milk and egg proteins in heated oil matrices.

Heated oil spikes were developed by incorporating non-fat dry milk (NFDM) and whole egg powder (WEP) into oil …

Arrival Is Not Access, Emmanuel Asamoah

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis presents a group of sculptures and installations that explore how material, labor, and communication shape unequal access in diasporic life. It questions the common belief that movement, visibility, or relocation automatically leads to stability, care, or belonging. In my experience, arrival does not guarantee access. Using clay, steel and found materials, I create tension between softness and control. Many of these materials are worn and discarded. I cut and rebuild them, leaving marks of strain and repair visible rather than hiding them.

Repetition appears through rows of cast faces and a collection of telephones. These forms suggest shared …

Assessment Of Precision Rangeland Management Tools In The Nebraska Sandhills, Hannah K. Allen

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The objective of this thesis is to evaluate tools and management strategies that contribute to rangeland monitoring and livestock distribution in heterogeneous grassland systems of the Nebraska Sandhills. Chapter one reviews relevant literature related to precision livestock management, the Nebraska Sandhills, biomass estimation, and pyric herbivory. The second chapter evaluates the use of fractional green canopy cover (FGCC) derived from the Canopeo mobile application as a rapid method for estimating aboveground biomass in Sandhills rangelands. Biomass samples were collected across topographic positions in both early and late growing season, and relationships between FGCC and clipped biomass were assessed using generalized …

Sustainability In Concrete: Decision-Makers, Dismissal Points, And A Framework For Implementation, Max Dennison

Construction Management

Concrete is essential to modern infrastructure, but is also one of the largest sources of embodied carbon, with cement production alone responsible for a significant share of global CO₂ emissions. Although low-carbon and otherwise “sustainable” concrete technologies are growing, their use in everyday projects remains limited. This research investigates why sustainable concrete options are most often dismissed during the project lifecycle, who drives these decisions, and what conditions are needed to enable broader adoption. Using a combination of literature review and semi-structured interviews with professionals in contracting, life-cycle assessment, sustainability consulting, and materials production, the study maps decision points from …

Semat: Semantic Enhanced Natural Image Interactive Matting, Ruihao Xia, Yu Liang, Peng-Tao Jiang, Hao Zhang, Qianru Sun, Yang Tang, Bo Li, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent approaches attempt to adapt powerful interactive segmentation models, such as SAM, to interactive matting and fine-tune the models based on synthetic matting datasets. However, models trained on synthetic data fail to generalize to complex and occlusion scenes. We address this challenge by proposing a new matting dataset based on the COCO dataset, namely COCO-Matting. It selects real-world complex images from COCO and converts semantic segmentation masks to matting labels. The built COCO-Matting comprises an extensive collection of 36,980 human instance-level alpha mattes in complex natural scenarios. Furthermore, existing SAM-based matting methods extract intermediate features and masks from a frozen …

A Conceptual Framework For Robust Few-Shot Learning: Integrating Unbalanced Optimal Transport And Self-Supervised Transformer Representations, Hayati Abd Rahman, Pang Yun

Malaysian Journal of Computing (MJoC)

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to enable deep models to generalise from extremely limited labelled data, yet unstable metric matching, distribution imbalances, and weak structural representations in low-data regimes often constrain its performance. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that unifies metric-based similarity learning, Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) via Unbalanced Sinkhorn Distance (USD), and self-supervised Transformer representations to conceptually address the theoretical and structural limitations of existing FSL approaches. The framework theoretically unifies distribution-aware USD matching, SSL-enhanced ViT/Swin feature representations, and metric-based inference within a coherent pipeline. This work aims to provide a theoretical foundation and research roadmap for future empirical …

Hybrid Portfolio Optimization With Pca, Clustering, And The Barzilai-Borwein Method, Shin Chiew Kai, Yeing Pan Wei, Seng Sim Hong, Hou Chin Jia, Jia Lee Yap

Malaysian Journal of Computing (MJoC)

Portfolio optimization aims to balance risk and return by identifying an effective mix of assets. In this study, we integrate principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering for stock selection with the Barzilai–Borwein (BB) gradient method for portfolio optimization. Forty-eight U.S. stocks from the Kaggle fundamental stock dataset were initially collected, and 42 stocks were retained after preprocessing. Financial ratios from 2006 and adjusted closing prices from 2016–2017 were analysed, with one representative stock from each cluster selected using the Sharpe ratio. The BB method was then applied to determine optimal weights, ensuring full capital allocation without short selling. Among …