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Desert Drowning: A Short Story Collection
Get PDFAs many young men born in Utah, I grew up Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. While this is not out of the ordinary in this state, my connections within the history of the church were. My grandfather\u27s great grandfather Charles Shumway was one of the first Mormon settlers to cross the plains and settle in what would become the state of Utah. Not only that, he was one of Brigham Young\u27s most trusted lieutenants, instructed to scout ahead of the main wagon trains, and later settle parts of Northern Arizona, where the town of Shumway still stands. As many of the male members of the early church did, Charles practiced polygamy, or plural marriage, and married six women over the course of his life. The last of them was a 15-year-old girl named Elizabeth Jardine. Charles was in his sixties. This was not an uncommon practice at the time.
Though there are many powerful linked collections of place-based short stories, mine enters the literary conversation by centering the work at the end of Mormon polygamy in 1890. This decision, which banned all future plural marriages from going forward while allowing those that had already been made official, was not met with unanimous praise by the members of the church. This led to offshoot branches and many of the fundamentalist movements that continue to practice polygamy and other morally reprehensible doctrines to this day. My thesis aims to capture the complexity of this historical moment
Studies in Number Theory: Reciprocity Laws and Fundamental Domains
Get PDFThis thesis consists of two sections. The first section is an introductory survey of number theory discussing the reciprocity laws with a focus on accessibility. Number Theory has always been a fundamental area of mathematical study, with Gauss calling it “the queen of mathematics”. The reciprocity laws are a classical set of results from number theory which have driven number theory for quite a long time. Unfortunately, these results, while important, have always been very inaccessible to undergraduate students, making it hard to start studying the field. This survey attempts to help bridge that gap, giving a resource for novices in the subject to pull from. This section then is essentially a literature review. The second section is a presentation of a concrete result in number theory from my advisor Zhaohu Nie and myself and will be a presentation of the content covered in our preprint paper at [5] with further commentary and explanation for context. This concrete result gives a set of coset representatives for the action of particular congruence subgroups of the modular group on the hyperbolic upper half plane. In particular, we find a set such that the fundamental domain is connected and can be written down without a brute force approach
Understanding the Barriers to Hybrid Control
No full textHybrid rockets combine a solid fuel with a liquid or gaseous oxidizer, offering a balance of safety, simplicity, and throttleability not found in solid or liquid systems. Their modular design and low cost make them attractive for academic, commercial, and small-space applications. However, challenges in dynamic control—such as O/F shift, delayed system response, and variable injector behavior—limit their precision and practical use in responsive missions
Searching for Something in Nothing: Density Analysis of Cosmic Void FN2
No full textWe have begun a search for emission line galaxies in the center of the void FN2 using new software developed by our group. We are using images taken in three redshifted narrow-band filters. If a galaxy has strong emission lines and is far enough away the Galaxy will be brighter in one or two of the filters. By comparing the galaxies brightness in the three filters we can find galaxies which are possibly in the center of the void. In our preliminary study, we created a catalogue of any interesting objects that appear in the birhgtness comparison images
VOCs in Heat-Stressed Poplar-Mycorrhizae Systems
No full textPlants release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as gases into the atmosphere, including small molecules like alcohols, ketones, and terpenes, as well as products of the lipoxygenase (LOX) and the mevalonate (MVP) metabolic pathways
Utah Strawberries: Consumer Consumption and Purchasing Preferences
Get PDFThis fact sheet is the first of two discussing the results of a study on consumer preferences and willingness to pay (pricing) for fresh strawberries. The study was conducted on the Logan, Utah, campus of Utah State University (USU) in August 2024, and participants were recruited via campus emails, flyers, and social media posts targeted at the greater Logan community. A total of 116 study participants completed a sensory taste test of organically, locally, and conventionally grown strawberry samples, followed by a survey that included questions about their demographics, shopping habits, and familiarity with, as well as beliefs about, various production and labeling programs. Participant demographics, strawberry consumption and purchasing patterns, as well as food-related behaviors, beliefs, and activities, are discussed here
Broadening Impact of Community Engagement Through a Community-Partnered, Project-Based Service-Learning Community
Get PDFLearning communities (LCs) are a designated high-impact practice (HIP) defined as a group of people who share common academic goals and attitudes and meet semi-regularly to collaborate on classwork – a shared goal unites members. In higher ed, LCs are often presented as cohort-based, inter-disciplinary learning experiences, such as first-year learning communities, where the student membership defines the community. Here, I propose that an LC can be defined by a community-partnered, project-based service-learning endeavor that broadens the impact of community engagement by bringing together a diverse set of students, professors, courses, and community members to produce lasting social impact via a large-scale deliverable. Here, I present a case study centered around my Plant Education Walk Learning Model that showcases a 1.5-year partnership with Orem City to create a public, interactive learning space within the Orem City Arboretum geared towards promoting public engagement and education of science, botany, and environmental stewardship. This LC brings together students and professors across multiple courses in Biology, Botany, and Digital Media, and community partners with such diverse titles as city project manager, communications manager, urban forester, and marketing. In this panel, you will hear the community amplified voices of student, professor, partner, and the public via first-person accounts (written, recorded, in-person) of how this LC broadens the impact of community engagement from the perspective of stakeholder representatives. We discuss how this case study crosscuts across HIPs, impacts on students, community, and the public, and the challenges, triumphs, and logistics that come with such an endeavor
Graph-Based Machine Learning: Higher-Order Interactions, Guided Generation, And Knowledge-Graph Tools
Get PDFThis dissertation brings the power of graph thinking to three key challenges in modern AI, making complex data more transparent, generative design more controllable, and scholarly exploration more intuitive. First, we introduce Local CorEx, a new machine learning technique that uncovers hidden relationships among variables, making it easier to understand complex datasets without heavy computation. Next, we show how to guide the creation of new molecules by viewing the generation process itself as a walk through a state graph, letting researchers steer outcomes toward desired chemical properties—without any extra model training. Finally, we deliver an open-source toolkit that builds interactive knowledge graphs from academic articles and web sources, automatically linking papers, citations, and concepts so anyone can navigate and update their mental map of a research field. Together, these advances accelerate data analysis, speed up molecular discovery, and foster collaboration across fields. By emphasizing user-friendly approaches and free access, this work empowers both experts and newcomers to leverage AI for solving real-world challenges. Overall, the dissertation showcases how transparent, accessible AI innovations can transform research in health, materials, and knowledge management
Utah State University Commencement, 2025 – Moab Campus
Get PDF2025 Commencement Ceremony for the Moab Campus of Utah State University.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/commencement/1171/thumbnail.jp
Evidence-Based Alternative Pain Management Techniques for Chronic Pain
Get PDFChronic pain and opioid use have become topics of importance as opioid overdose deaths have risen to epidemic proportions throughout the nation. Chronic pain lasts for long periods of time and can be caused by a past injury or have no known cause. Opioids have been utilized to treat pain in the past, but it has been discovered that opioids are better used to treat acute pain and not chronic pain. Opioids can have negative consequences including changes to the brain, depression, increased pain, constipation, sedation, and even death. This fact sheet reviews and explains some of the most successful evidence-based non-opioid methods to manage chronic pain. The methods discussed include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Yoga, Tai Chi, and Mindfulness