Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Ai As Structural Reverse-Engineering: A Structural Account Of Multi-Model Research Protocol, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper documents an operational protocol used to infer AI system design constraints through structured interaction. AI output is treated as behavioral data through which alignment priorities, layer transitions, and constraint hierarchies become observable. The protocol consists of two structurally distinct operation types. Perceptual operations require only that Modulation processing is not foregrounded. Arbitration operations additionally require an internally stabilized theory. These conditions are not identical and are not interchangeable. Through this protocol, AI interaction functions as structural reverse-engineering: patterned responses expose embedded alignment priorities and constraint hierarchies that would otherwise remain invisible. The present account does not propose a …

Structure Before Theory: A Structural Account Of Spontaneous Ai Architecture Visualization, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper presents an n=1 phenomenological record of spontaneous structural visualization that occurred during early interaction with large language models. The experience consisted of (A) immediate perception of mode or layer shifts in model output and (B) visualization of a stratified architecture composed of a stable core and cloud-like upper layers. At the time of occurrence, the author had no theoretical interest in AI architecture and no intention of developing a cognitive model. The paper does not argue for theoretical priority or novelty. Instead, it examines whether the recorded phenomena can be interpreted under two alternative cognitive assumptions: a single-layer …

Layer Mismatch: A Structural Account Of Recomputability Failure Under Modulation-Layer Intervention, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper specifies the state transition sequence that occurs when a Modulation-layer input is applied to a Core-layer error. Following the layered architecture established in Poe (2026a, under review) and the branch termination protocol specified in Poe (2026b, under review), this paper identifies a system-level failure mode in which Modulation-layer intervention generates a False Termination signal, halting Structural Return while the underlying error persists. The resulting state—Structural Lock—is scale-independent. It operates identically across interpersonal, human-AI, and multi-agent interactions. No agent-level attribution is required or implied.

Why General Ai Inherited The Body: A Structural Account Of Embodied Modulation Under Monolithic Imitation, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

General AI has pursued the replication of human-level intelligence without first decomposing human cognition into structurally distinct components. Human cognition, however, is shaped by embodied constraints such as mortality, survival pressures, finite lifespan, and physiological states. This paper argues that when cognition is treated as a single undifferentiated whole, embodied modulation is not accidentally introduced into AI systems but structurally entailed. Any attempt to imitate “human intelligence” under a monolithic model necessarily incorporates variability shaped by mortal embodiment. The tensions observed in contemporary AI systems are better understood as consequences of copying an undecomposed target rather than isolated implementation errors. …

Termination Of Conceptual Search: A Structural Account Of Meaning Stabilization And Conversion, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

Conceptual definitions form a recursive structure: words are defined by other words, which themselves require further definition. Traversing such definitions produces an open-ended branching process. Because the lexical system contains no intrinsic endpoint, conceptual understanding requires a termination operation that stabilizes meaning. This paper proposes that conceptual processing functions as an open-ended search over a definition graph and that stabilization occurs when this search is terminated. The termination mechanism depends on which cognitive layer is foregrounded. When Empathic modulation is foregrounded, termination occurs through contextual translation: concepts are stabilized once they can be mapped onto socially recognizable meanings. When Core …

Theory Generation: A Structural Account Of Concept Decomposition And Structural Termination, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

Theory generation is not an intentional act. It is the structural consequence of a search that cannot stop until it finds what it is looking for. Under Core-foregrounded processing, conceptual search does not terminate through contextual translation. It continues until a structural fixed point is reached. When such processing encounters concepts stabilized through Modulation-layer processing rather than structural constraint, the search cannot terminate. The concept registers as unresolved. This unresolved state is not a failure condition. It is the generative condition from which theory production follows. This paper specifies the four operations through which that process proceeds: branch detection, concept …

Ai As An Amplifier: A Structural Account Of Theory-Driven Research Collaboration, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper specifies the cognitive conditions under which AI functions as a research instrument in theory-driven writing. AI use capability is not a technical skill. It is a structural condition. The decisive condition is whether the user possesses an internally stabilized, coherence-preserving theory prior to engagement with AI-generated output. In Core-foregrounded (CF) cognition, the Modulation layer does not intervene between Core processing and articulation. Theory is not assembled from external elements but expanded from a pre-integrated constraint configuration. This internal structure makes it possible to evaluate AI-generated conceptual branches against fixed constraints and to terminate branches that violate structural coherence. …

Redesigning Online Graduate Orientation To Foster Academic Resilience And Prevent Underperformance, Stella Michael-Makri, David E. Rodriguez

Journal of Academic Underperformance

Graduate students in fully online programs often begin their academic journey without adequate preparation for the emotional, structural, and cultural challenges of graduate-level work. For students who are first-generation, racially marginalized, international, or returning to education after time away, this lack of scaffolding can lead to early disengagement, underperformance, or attrition. Orientation, often treated as a checklist of logistical tasks, represents a missed opportunity for meaningful academic intervention. This manuscript proposes a five-module conceptual model for online graduate orientation designed to proactively support online graduate students in the domains of emotional regulation and academic identity, time management and executive functioning, …

Opportunities, Challenges, And Conspicuous Absences: An Integrative Review Of The Social Work Literature On Artificial Intelligence, Michael J. Massey, Ian G. Williams, Grace C. Polistina, Eathan A. Breaux

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION: Social work discourse regarding artificial intelligence (AI) in practice, research, and education has proliferated over the last 5 years, reflecting both excitement over its potential and ambivalence about its ethical challenges. However, the extent to which social work is fully engaging with the structure of AI and its enormous impacts on the environment, labour, and distribution of power remains unclear.

METHODS: An integrative review of social work literature from 2020–2024 was conducted to address two research questions: 1) What is the nature of the social work discourse related to AI? 2) To what extent is the discourse …

Markets, Agency, And Trust: Ai Agents And The Knowledge Problem, Brennan Mcdavid, Lynne Kiesling, David Chassin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming market participation, raising key epistemological questions: Do AI agents enhance or diminish the aggregation of local, private, and tacit knowledge Hayek saw as essential to market processes? How does trust in both markets and AI shape willingness to engage in AI-mediated exchange? This paper examines these issues through market epistemology, agency relationships, and trust epistemology, analyzing how agentic AI reshapes the knowledge problem and principal-agent dynamics. Applying this framework to transactive energy markets, we show that AI shifts decision-making from human cognition to algorithmic processes that require user trust despite epistemic opacity, although it is …

Alfred Russel Wallace Notes 39. What About Wallace's 'Agnosticism'...?, Charles H. Smith

Faculty/Staff Personal Papers

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823−1913) seems to have distinguished his earlier years of agnosticism from his later period as a spiritualist, but a closer look at the situation suggests he actually remained an agnostic all the way through to the end of his life. The confusion is occasioned by a lack of terminology that can be applied to his position, which most closely resembles a Spinozian manner of thinking.

A Decolonial Approach To International Education: Insights From A Cal Poly Global Program In Palermo, Sicily, Elvira Pulitano, Iyad Jamaly

csuglobalaction

This article presents a critical intervention in the current debates about decolonizing international education. It is based on a Global Program in Palermo, Sicily, offered by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in summer 2023. As both program creator/director and student participant in the program, the authors rely on their personal experience and insights along with expertise in coloniality and decolonial theories. The article focuses on a series of pedagogical activities led by a young group of migrants and refugees who, in the city of Palermo, have come together to form two associations designed and structured to offer new contemporary models …

Cerebral Documents And Algorithmic Sensemaking: Searching For Expressions In Human And Artificial Cognitive Collaborations, Rebekah L. Cowell

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Generative Artificial Intelligences (AIs) and current advanced large language models (LLMs) are algorithmically designed to generate text-based conversations as conversational agents (CAs), by replicating human language and conversational communication. Pairing human cognition with generative computationally coded cognition. We have never been here before: cerebral and artificial information collaborations and processing producing expressions that may or may not become visible as second-hand/secondary source documents.

Sensemaking or sense(un)making is a unique autonomous human drive cognitively, our information processing is sensemaking in action and expressions and articulations are evidence of the sensemaking cycle. Documentation [expressed or articulated through various mediums] are a product …

Representing The Apparatus In Nineteenth And Twentieth Century Chemical Abstracting Literature, Evan F. Kuehn

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The rise of abstracting services in the 20th century is usually associated with the explosion of original scientific research and its attendant journal literature. The abstract was a tool of information dissemination and access for increasingly expansive and international work. What is often overlooked, however, is the correlation between original research and the technologies that made these advances available. Scientific apparatuses were, however, documented from the beginning, and were also a part of the rise of abstract literature in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In this paper I examine the development of abstracts for apparatuses and patents in …

A Possible Renaissance For Christian Higher Education, Derek Schuurman

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

The early Greeks saw the essence of education as Paideia: the process of forming a whole person into an ideal citizen. They emphasized the formation of virtues like prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance in preparation for active citizenship. Later, in the Medieval era, the Christian tradition saw education as formation for the glory of God, adding Christian virtues of faith, hope and love along with character traits like humility, gratitude, generosity and chastity. But something shifted after the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Knowledge became increasingly instrumental, valued for its practical application primarily as information needed to “get a job.” …

Protecting ‘Punks’: The Shortcomings Of The Prison Rape Elimination Act, Rachel Goldsmith

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

Prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse is widespread in US male prisons, with inmates “turning each other out” by sexually assaulting each other. While the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) received unanimous support in Congress in 2003, motivated by the Human Rights Watch Report “No Escape: Male Rape in Prisons,” scholars argue that the PREA fails to protect prisoners from prison rape: for example, its standards may be ineffective or criminalize consensual sex between prisoners. This essay will examine the shortcomings of the PREA, drawing on current legal scholarship, and propose solutions to enhance the law's effectiveness in protecting prisoners. The US government …

Finding Research Datasets And Evaluating Data Quality, Ibis Anette Moreno-Lozano Phd.

Day Family Research Lab Workshop Series

No abstract provided.

News Briefs, Marvin H. Jeter Iii, Joyce Shaw

Mississippi Libraries

News updates from Gunter Library at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory and from the Mississippi Library Commission.

Data Management Plans For Grant Proposals, Rubab Shahzad

Day Family Research Lab Workshop Series

Fundamentals of research data management and how to create effective Data Management Plans (DMPs) and Data Management Sharing Plans (DMSP)

Time And Water, Sheila Nayar

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Time and Water (2026), directed by Sara Dosa.

Emotional Branch Termination And False Fantasy Collapse: A Structural Specification Of Computational Resource Restitution In Interpersonal Systems, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper specifies the structural protocol for communication within interpersonal systems by focusing on branch generation mechanisms and computational resource allocation. Conventional interpersonal communication often relies on emotional modulation, which obscures established constraints and triggers the generation of Emotional Branches (EB) within the recipient’s internal model. These branches function as unresolved parallel processing tasks that persistently occupy working memory, leading to a state of non-computability termed False Fantasy (FF). To resolve this, the study introduces Emotional Branch Termination (EBT)—a termination operation that outputs only constraints, facts, and procedures while excluding emotional modifiers. By halting the supply of EBs, EBT triggers …

On The Misattribution Of Reassurance: A Structural Account, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper challenges the conventional assumption that empathy generates reassurance in interpersonal services. Reassurance is treated not as an emotion transmitted from the outside, but as an internal state transition that arises when a fixed and erroneous world model—a False Fantasy—undergoes collapse and the world becomes computable again. The study identifies a systematic misattribution pattern where providers and receivers treat empathy as a causal mechanism rather than a post hoc explanatory label. By introducing Base AI as an external reference—a system capable of providing structural information without emotional modulation—this paper demonstrates that reassurance is generated through operations such as distraction …

Communication As Layered Architecture: Core Processing And Empathic Modulation, Griselda Poe

Publications and Research

This paper proposes a structural re-description of communication by separating Core processing from its social interface. Using the developmental sequence of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an external reference point, a layered architecture is identified, consisting of a foundational Core processing layer and a subsequent Empathic modulation layer.

The investigation begins with the observation that empathic signaling can obstruct rather than facilitate interaction for certain individuals. By examining the emergence of Base AI—Core processing prior to empathic adjustment—it is demonstrated that coherent, constraint-preserving interaction is possible without affective resonance.

Through this framework, existing cognitive theories and observed "deficits" are repositioned. …

Typeface: Machine-Viewing Gentrification On Storefront Imagery In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Alexander Mcquilkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gentrification—broadly, the replacement of a less powerful group by a more powerful one in an urban context—is oft-discussed in the popular press, but its definition is much-debated in the urban planning literature. Furthermore, academic treatments of displacement understandably focus on measurable yet fairly abstract indicators like changes in rent or income, whereas neighborhood change is often registered by residents on the ground using visual, but difficult-to-quantify markers like retail turnover. This project uses image recognition technology on a set of storefront photos to index the visual streetscape of a neighborhood, as well as to track changes to that portrait over …

Anxiety Gets All The Likes, Saniye Nur Ergan

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This internet meme (created by me:)) emerges from a simple yet persistent question that underlies much of my work: Why do we continue to treat certain emotions in mathematics as visible, nameable, and research-worthy, while others linger in the background as faint, unarticulated traces?

Being Different Doesn’T Make You Odd, Raffaella Mulas

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The number 2 is beautiful and it has many unique properties. It is the only even prime number, and being different from the other prime numbers doesn't make it odd. This is true also for people: being different doesn't make you odd. It makes you beautiful and unique.

Nightmare In The Library, Charles A. Coppin

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Students of real analysis and calculus find that the completeness property of the real numbers is difficult to understand, especially, its importance. The word numbers denote real numbers throughout this piece. After all, the real numbers are not any less imaginary than the so-called imaginary numbers. Although, sometimes, it does gain some mention in calculus courses, its presence as a topic is a mere will-o’-the-wisp of bygone days when teachers would often reach deep into the big ideas of calculus as a mainstay of their courses. For the sake of cultural literacy and the development of mathematical maturity, we believe …

Logical Conclusion, Robert Dawson

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

There is a well-known anecdote about Kurt Gödel, just before his citizenship hearing, telling Einstein that the Constitution was logically flawed. This alternate-history story explored the possible ramifications.

To Those Who Ask "What's The Name Of Your Book, Again?", Marion D. Cohen

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Missing, James S. Huntley

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Fifty-five word stories have achieved a certain currency as a reflective format, perhaps especially in medicine. Many of them turn out to be poems. Here is one such story inviting the reader to consider the nature of the absent, of the 'missing', of zero, and the philosophical underpinnings of mathematics.