Digital Commons Network^™

Crying In Public, Sarah Mullen

Honors Theses

Crying in Public is the culmination of a deeply personal body of work that has acted as a sort of diary documenting my journey of growing up and self-discovery. Over the last few years, I have found that there is meaning to be found in the parts of ourselves that we seek to hide, as well as in the constructions that we build to conceal them. This work seeks to move outside of the binary of one’s “true inner self” to explore the tensions found in the space between who we are and who we wish we were. This work …

Oer In University Language Courses, Jenny Ceciliano

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer incredible advantages in language teaching and learning. Implementing an OER curriculum can result in benefits that go far beyond controlling costs for students, which is itself a significant step toward improving equity. Drawing on your own experience and expertise as language educators, as well as the contributions of collaborators around the world, it is possible to build a curriculum customized for your unique student group. With thoughtful design, your program can help students achieve desired learning outcomes not just in language acquisition, but also in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In this talk, I will …

Fort Hays State University Tiger Weekly, May 06, 2022, University Relations

Tiger Weekly Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Autonomous Planetary Rover Team Final Project Report, William Whitfield, Jason Guenther, Jackson Robison, Davis Tucker

Engineering Senior Design Reports

This design team was tasked to develop autonomous movement, sensing, and navigation capabilities on a rover platform developed by a summer research team working under Dr. Kevin Nickels. The rover is comprised of four subsystems that strive to meet the requirements by establishing movement capabilities through power delivery and control, odometry feedback of the wheels, obstacle detection, and navigation. This report evaluated each design against the requirement they were intended to meet. The following report describes the final design of each of these subsystems, explains the testing performed on each subsystem, and evaluates the results of these tests against the …

Emergency Water Station 3.0 Final Project Report, Winona Menezes, Elyse Reynolds, Robert Swallow, Jacob Thweatt

Engineering Senior Design Reports

The South Texas Human Rights Center (STHRC) tasked our team, The Emergency Water Station 3.0 (3WS), with designing and implementing an emergency water station for migrants and refugees crossing the border between Mexico and Texas. The objectives of this project are to design, build, and test a prototype that can safely provide water to these migrants and refugees while communicating the water amount within the station back to the STHRC without hindrance due to weather or remote location. The following report outlines the features of our complete design, and details the primary functions of the main three subsystems that comprise …

Final Report On Humidification-Dehumidification Desalination Prototype, Kelli Jackson, Simon Jernigan, William May, K. Maui Oyala

Engineering Senior Design Reports

Freshwater available across the globe is decreasing daily due to population growth, climate change, and pollution. The growing scarcity of freshwater affects more than a billion people worldwide and has prompted increased research into desalination processes. Large desalination plants are already in operation but are very expensive to build. Not every community has the means to implement these large systems, advancing the need for smaller, more economical, and efficient desalination plants.

The Desalinators researched and designed a humidification-dehumidification (HDH) desalination prototype that will convert saline water into potable water at a household scale (approximately 5-10 gal/day of freshwater). The sponsor, …

Monitoring And Alert System For The Mabee Organic Waste Solution Final Project Repory, Conner Terry, Evan Sturdivant, Emily Rosenbaum, Krishnan Castillo López

Engineering Senior Design Reports

Mabee Dining Hall at Trinity University has tasked the Mabee Organic Waste Solution team with the design and implementation of an in-vessel monitoring and alert device to monitor and report on the status of compost. This device is intended to provide running updates on important parameters - temperature, relative humidity, and oxygen concentration - in order to ensure production of successful, aerobic compost. If action must be taken by Mabee employees as a result of the values of these parameters falling out of an acceptable range, our device is capable of alerting the user and providing instruction to keep the …

Formula Sae, Carlos Bucheli, Patrick Hensley, Tristan Arias, Max Ulmer

Engineering Senior Design Reports

The Formula SAE senior design project was truly unique. This project had been a 5 year long process to design, build, and test a raceable car. The car was this team's prototype. While the original plan for the team was to develop an energy recovery system (ERS), this scope was altered because of the state of the car the team was left with. Upon examination, the car needed a lot of work before it was even going to start. Therefore, without a running car, there was no way of appropriately testing an ERS. Furthermore, had we developed a prototype for …

Remote Heart Diagnosis, Emma Miller, Edward Armitage, Gerald Daniels, Michael Marquez

Engineering Senior Design Reports

For those in impoverished communities or remote regions, obtaining adequate healthcare can be a burden. Furthermore, limited access to specialists like cardiologists can make curable conditions a death sentence by leading them to be identified too late. An essential factor in the identification of heart conditions is the use of an electrocardiograph to measure the signal of the heart. In this project, the Remote Heart Diagnosis Team endeavored to design and build a prototype capable of remotely collecting and analyzing an electrocardiogram and displaying the results to a cardiologist in any location for review.

The prototype is composed of five …

Solar Panel Sun-Tracking System For Home Use Final Project Report, Sasha Litvinov, Sofia Rascoe, Yushan Liang, Nicholas Younkins

Engineering Senior Design Reports

Team 2 of the Sun-Tracking Solar Panels for Home Use seeks to design a residential solar panel system that has the ability to track the sun. The main objectives of this project are to design and construct a sun-tracking solar panel system that is able to maximize the amount of sunlight captured throughout a day. The following report covers the features of our complete design and its three subsystems that combine to accomplish the requirements of the sun-tracking system. The primary functions of the three subsystems are as follows: the sun-tracking sensor will read photoresistor values that determine whether the …

Are People In Federal Territories Part Of “We The People Of The United States”?, Gary Lawson, Guy Seidman

Texas A&M Law Review

In 1820, a unanimous Supreme Court proclaimed: “The United States is the name given to our great republic, which is composed of states and territories.” While that key point is simple, and perhaps even obvious, the constitutional implications of interpreting “the United States” to include federal territories are potentially far reaching. In particular, the Constitution’s Preamble announces that the Constitution is authored by “We the People of the United States” and that the document is designed to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” to the author and its “Posterity.” If inhabitants of federal territory are among “We the People of the …

Protecting Video Game Gameplay Creators: A Two-Pronged Copyright Approach, Dakota D Foster

Texas A&M Law Review

The video game industry continues to grow into a behemoth, yet the players fueling its rise lack sufficient copyright protection. While the Copyright Act protects video games’ copyrightability as audiovisual works, it lacks clear protection for the gameplay created by gameplay content creators. These secondary creators increasingly build careers out of their gameplay yet lack clear copyright protection over the videos they create because the video game developer typically owns the video game’s exclusive rights over public performance and derivative works. The status quo relies on a “gentleman’s agreement” where video game copyright holders ignore their rights in the copyright …

Stroke Recovery During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Position Paper On Recommendations For Rehabilitation, Suzanne Perea Burns, Talya K. Fleming, Sam S. Webb, Alice Sau Han Kam, Jaimee D P Fielder, Grace J. Kim, Xiaolei Hu, Mary Thelander Hill, Emily A. Kringle

Pediatrics Research and Scholarship

Health care delivery shifted and adapted with the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Stroke care was negatively affected across the care continuum and may lead to poor community living outcomes in those who survived a stroke during the ongoing pandemic. For instance, delays in seeking care, changes in length of stays, and shifts in discharge patterns were observed during the pandemic. Those seeking care were younger and had more severe neurologic effects from stroke. Increased strain was placed on caregivers and public health efforts, and community-wide lockdowns, albeit necessary to reduce the spread …

Assessment Of Traffic Accidents In Japan During The Covid-19 Pandemic Vs. Previous Years: A Preliminary Report, Kazuki Shimizu, Peter Ueda, Cyrus Ghaznavi, Haruka Sakamoto, Shuhei Nomura

Open Access Publications

Beginning in April 2020, social distancing measures were implemented to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. We assessed whether traffic accident rates had decreased from April 2020 to December 2021 as compared with previous years. The analysis included 2,934,477 traffic accidents, and the trend of decreasing rates of traffic accidents in recent years and seasonal fluctuations in traffic accidents were considered. The yearly change in the traffic accident rate between 2015 and 2019 was estimated, and the traffic accident rate in 2020 and 2021 was predicted. This was followed by the comparison of observed vs. predicted traffic accident rate. In …

Heat Pumps And Smart Hvac Technologies, Brian Higgins

Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Independent Study

As it stands, public, residential, and commercial properties account for 30 % of the total energy consumed around the globe. This is expected to increase significantly in the next generation, with an additional 5 billion people requiring cooling by 2070, due to the fact that more areas are experiencing higher temperatures that up to this point did not require cooling technologies. With such a large area requiring cooling, there exists an opportunity to make the new generation of areas requiring cooling a more environmentally friendly one. Technologies such as the heat pump, that can work both as a heating and …

Und Strategic Planning Focus Group Notes: Graduate Students, University Of North Dakota

LEADS Development Documents

Notes from a May 6, 2022 UND strategic planning focus group with graduate students. The notes capture graduate student perspectives on choosing UND, campus identity, online student engagement, communication, funding transparency, faculty and departmental relationships, diversity, and visions for UND’s future.

Hipersexualización E Infrarrepresentación: La Representación De Las Latinas En Jane The Virgin Y Modern Family, Laura Zarate

Honors College Theses

The Latinx community is one of the fastest growing groups in the United States and accounted for half of the total population growth from 2010-2019. Despite the increasing numbers, the statistics for Latinx representation in the media continue to be low. Numbers for Latinx writers, producers, and actors are significantly lower than their non-Latinx counterparts and Latinas, in specific, are one of the most underrepresented groups on television and often being portrayed as hypersexual in comparison to other groups of the same gender. While this underrepresentation has been researched in relation to women, there is limited discussion regarding the lack …

Integrating Mental Health Into Primary Care, Lori Hopwood, April Schmidt

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this project was to examine the effects of a newly integrated collaborative mental health care model. The primary goal of the integrated behavioral health program was designed to increase the ability of primary care providers to provide mental health services with the support and expertise of a consulting psychiatrist and behavioral health specialist. Additional goals were to improve access to care and improve mental health outcomes.

AIMS: The aim of this project was to evaluate a new way of integrating mental health services in a rural health, primary care practice in central Illinois.

METHODS: Measures …

The Use Of Point Of Care Ultrasound To Assess Gastric Contents And Determine Aspiration Risk In The Obese Patient Presenting For Elective Surgery, Harry Senaldi, Mary Zerlan

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Pulmonary aspiration of gastric content is a potentially injurious and fatal complication of anesthesia. Obese patients with a BMI ≥ 35 presenting for elective surgery are at an increased risk of aspiration due to increased gastric pressure, delayed gastric emptying, and higher gastric volumes. Point of care ultrasound (POCUS) is a tool that allows the nurse anesthetist to assess gastric content and assign aspiration risk based on the scan results. A knowledge improvement project in the form of a lecture and hands-on tutorial focused on using POCUS to assess gastric content and assign aspiration risk was designed. This project was …

Physician Use Of The Rapid3 To Guide Rheumatology Follow-Up: A Retrospective Examination, Karen Howard

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Abstract

The Quality Improvement Team of a rheumatology clinic was seeking ways to deal with the long intervals for an available follow-up appointment. The use of standardized disease activity assessment tools as a part of patient care is an evidence-based practice that is not employed by over one third of rheumatologists. One of the many uses of these tools is to guide treat-to- target care. Treat-to-target care uses the disease assessment tool score to guide treatment decisions and follow up interval. This project examined the use of a standardized disease assessment tool, the Routine Assessment of Patient Index Data 3 …

Introduction Of Enhanced Recovery After Cesarean Section (Erac) Protocol, Kwame Adu-Affum

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Cesarean section is one of the most performed in-patient surgeries worldwide (Wilson et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2020). Births by cesarean section have been increasing globally. Cesarean birth rate has remained above 31% in the United States, even with the consistent two percent decrease in birth rate per year (Martin et al., 2019). Illinois has also maintained a high cesarean birth rate above 30% (Hamilton et al., 2021). Cesarean patients experience inflammatory and neurohormonal changes with many adverse effects in direct response to surgical stress (Mullman et al., 2020). The post-cesarean physiological effects, including pain, reduced gastric motility, pulmonary …

Computer-Based Learning Module: Local Anesthetic Systemic Toxicity, Nhan Nguyen

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Local anesthetic systemic toxicity (LAST) is the result of rapid absorption of local anesthetics (LAs) into the systemic circulation resulting in toxic plasma levels of the drugs. With the advent of ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia and improvements in injection techniques, the incidence of LAST has decreased significantly over the years. Even though LAST is rare, it is a potential, life-threatening complication associated with any administration of LAs. Providers and staff members taking care of patients receiving LAs should be astutely aware of potential complications so that LAST signs and symptoms can be recognized, and treatments can be implemented as swiftly as …

Difficult Labor Epidural: Intrathecal Catheter Management, Andrew Screnchuk

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Labor epidural analgesia is the most common method used to control pain associated with labor and vaginal delivery in the United States. However, the epidural catheter placement can cause accidental dural puncture in about 1 to 6% of laboring patients. Initiation of continuous intrathecal analgesia provides a good alternative to another attempt of epidural placement in certain types of the laboring population. While other countries have published referral guidelines of managing accidental dural puncture, the United States lacks such practice standards. The application of Accidental Dural Puncture Management with Intrathecal Catheter (ADPMIC) guidelines, used in other countries for difficult epidural …

Perioperative Tube Feeding Guidelines For The Pediatric Burn Patient, Jordan Swanberg

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Pediatric burn patients require an astronomical amount of nutritional support to promote wound healing and prevent unwanted side effects. These patients often require multiple surgeries, and consequently, when following standard NPO guidelines, these patients go for hours without any nutritional support. For this reason, a protocol was implemented on how to administer tube feedings throughout the perioperative process safely. The purpose of this project was to give a PowerPoint presentation to the providers that tested their current knowledge on how to manage tube feedings in the operative setting best. A single group design consisting of CRNA’s and an anesthesiologist was …

Improving Healthcare Team Communication With Limited English Proficiency Families In The Nicu, Ivonne Mandell

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Language barriers are common in healthcare settings, creating disparities in care between individuals with limited English proficiency and those with English proficiency. In the NICU setting, professional medical interpreters have been shown to improve parent/staff communication and increase parent satisfaction by allowing parents to ask questions and form trusting relationships with staff. Solid parent-provider communication can result in better health outcomes by increasing parental empowerment and participation in their child’s care. Despite the acknowledged advantages of using professional interpreters in healthcare settings, they are frequently under-utilized, even when readily available. The purpose of this project was to improve communication with …

Implementation Of Depression Screening In A Nursing Home, Titilayo Raji

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Abstract

Background/Introduction

Unidentified and untreated depression among nursing home residents leads to poor quality-of-life and substantial healthcare dollars are utilized for care management. Use of validated instruments and routine screening provides opportunity for early detection and treatment.

Purpose

The purpose of this project was to educate employees of a nursing home on the use of the Geriatric Depression Screening (GDS) tool, implement it on two units of the nursing home, and evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of this quality improvement project.

Method

An educational presentation was delivered to introduce the implementation plan, GDS screening tool, and protocol for data collection. …

Pediatric Distraction Methods For The Perioperative Period, Jennifer L. Ashton, Katherine M. Rosner

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Abstract

Most pediatric patients will experience anxiety to some degree during the perioperative period. Unrecognized and untreated anxiety can lead to complications during induction of anesthesia and may manifest as maladaptive behaviors that can last up to 6 months postoperatively. Multiple modalities are typically utilized to provide the greatest amount of anxiety relief with minimal side effects. Nonpharmacological methods of distraction have been proven effective when used in combination with pharmacological agents, as well as when used alone. The goal of this project was to create and present an educational resource tool regarding pharmacological and nonpharmacological distraction methods for pediatric …

Improving Staff Education On Lung Cancer Screening At The Illinois Correctional Facilities For The Justice-Involved Individuals, Natalie Bethel, Jillian Youngquist

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Justice-involved individuals are at an increased risk of developing chronic health conditions, including lung cancer. Literature supports the practice of using an annual low-dose CT scan to screen for lung cancer. Illinois Correctional Facilities lacked a lung cancer screening protocol for justice-involved individuals. Lung cancer screening guidelines were approved for the facilities, however, the time frame for implementation was unclear. This DNP project focused on evidenced based guidelines for lung cancer screening with education tools for staff members to prepare them for implementation. Staff was presented with a pre-test, PowerPoint presentation, and a post-test to evaluate lung cancer screening knowledge. …

Establishing Care With A Primary Care Provider, Ashley Whitlatch

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Established primary care leads to continuity of care, improved patient outcomes, and increased quality of life. There is also an improvement in the unnecessary usage of urgent care resources. The purpose of this project was to pilot a new process within the urgent or emergent care setting to ensure that patients who are not established with a primary care provider (PCP) have an appointment set before they are discharged. Staff were educated and trained in how to schedule primary care appointments for at-large patients. There are a high number of individuals who do not have a primary care provider. When …

Identifying Facilitators And Barriers For A Successful Student Registered Nurse Anesthetist’S Clinical Experience, James Clancy, Adam Bruinius

Doctor of Nursing Practice Projects

Student registered nurse anesthetists experience a wide variety of barriers and facilitators to their clinical education; often rotating through several clinical sites during their nurse anesthesia educational program (NAEP) tenure. Existing evidence suggests SRNAs must be proficient in seeking, accepting, and utilizing feedback from clinical preceptors (Algiraigri, 2014). Accepting constructive criticism may be challenging for SRNAs as they are highly skilled, competent nurses who are now entering rigorous NAEPs as novices. Reverting from preceptor to preceptee can be a difficult transition for SRNAs. This project aimed to identify barriers and facilitators to a successful SRNA clinical education through a literature …