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Volume 48, 2025 Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal
No full textComplete digitized volume (volume 48) of Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal
Elephant Presence Detection for Early-Warning in Kenya: A CNN Transfer-Learning Approach
No full textIn Kenya, conflicts between humans and elephants often lead to destruction of crops, lower family income, and put people and elephants at risk at the border of developing farms. Fences, patrols, and manual camera inspection are all expensive and take too long to be useful. This research creates an affordable early warning system that uses transfer learning with convolutional neural networks to find elephants in images. There are two label of elephant and non-elephant wildlife which are a public wildlife corpus of approximately 40,000 photographs of binary task. Cleaning of the dataset was done to ensure high quality and consistency. To deal with class skew, we oversampled elephants in the training split while keeping the natural imbalance in the validation and test sets to reflect real-world conditions. Five ImageNet-pretrained backbones (VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, Xception, MobileNetV2) are tested using a single two-phase regimen: first, a new binary head is trained with the base frozen, and then the upper layers are fine-tuned using early stopping and learning-rate scheduling. Performance is provided using accuracy, precision, recall, F1, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, and confusion matrices. The recall-first threshold is set to minimize missing elephants. All transfer models have almost ideal ranking quality (ROC-AUC=1.00, PRAUC \u3e 0.99). When the recall-first operating point is reached, recall becomes close to 1.0 and accuracy stays around 0.56–0.59, which is a good balance for safety-critical warnings. Xception has the best overall separation and is exported as the main service model. MobileNetV2 has the same recall but reduced latency for edge cases. A FastAPI service standardizes inputs, sets calibrated thresholds, makes warnings that can be audited, and adds Grad-CAM overlays for transparency. It gives early-warning information that can be used to help coexist and preserve crops
Baghdad Dispatches: The City of Peace in World War One
No full textFraming the U.S. consulate as a central point of analysis, Baghdad Dispatches highlights the experiences of refugees, prisoners of war, and foreign nationals stranded in Ottoman Baghdad.Jameel Haque examines the history of Ottoman Baghdad during the First World War, drawing on U.S. archival sources to explore the economic, political, and social transformations that shaped the city. It details the humanitarian efforts of Charles Brissel, the U.S. consul who worked between 1914 and 1916 to distribute aid and manage the interests of seventeen different nations. Additionally, the book investigates the challenges faced by American businesses, including Standard Oil, Singer Sewing Company, MacAndrews & Forbes, and Hills Brothers of New York, all of which struggled with wartime requisitions, loss of influence, and financial setbacks. By examining this period, Baghdad Dispatches reevaluates the extent of U.S. imperial engagement in Baghdad before the war, arguing for a more substantial American presence than has previously been recognized.https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/university-archives-msu-authors/1509/thumbnail.jp
Volume 45, Number 3, September 2025 OLAC Newsletter
No full textDigitized September 2025 issue of the OLAC Newsletter
Intercultural Competence among Emerging South Asian Leaders: Preliminary Results of the 2025 YSALI Cohort Study
No full textIn today\u27s connected world, young leaders need more than just technical skills—they must be able to work effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds. This study examines intercultural competence (the ability to interact respectfully and effectively across cultures) among participants in the first Young South Asian Leadership Initiative (YSALI) program. Using the Intercultural Development Inventory and follow-up interviews, investigators considered how well these emerging leaders from seven South Asian countries were prepared to lead in multicultural environments. This article presents a preliminary report, based on early survey returns from 15 of 82 participants. This research will provide important insights into youth leadership development in South Asia and offers recommendations for improving cultural exchange programs
Temporary Marriage in Iraq: Views and Perceptions
No full textIn July 2024, the Shia Muslim Parliament members proposed an amendment to the Personal Status Law. This amendment was passed on February 11, 2025. Per the amendment, the Shia Ja’afari School of Islamic jurisprudence has four months from the time the amendment was passed to submit a Personal Status Code for approval. It is speculated that this new Code will legalize mut’ah marriage, which is a type of temporary marriage. Temporary marriage within Islam is a heterosexual marriage that does not convey long-term commitment and usually has an end date. While scholarly written work in this field exists in other communities and countries, in Iraq, there is no literature on the topic of temporary marriage. This research aims to analyze the factors that are possibly influencing the rise of the practice of temporary marriage, identify factors influencing the views and perception of temporary marriage in Iraq, and analyze the perceived reasons influencing involvement in temporary marriage. To achieve this aim, this study utilizes both qualitative and quantitative research methods through surveys. The Qualtrics online survey was used to reach out to people who live in Iraq, are at least 18 years of age, and know about temporary marriage. This research is timely, especially now that a new Code is being drafted to legalize temporary marriage in Iraq. I hope this research will offer the Iraqi people valuable insights to navigate discussions on temporary marriage and the upcoming Code proposal, while also paving the way for further scholarly exploration of temporary marriage in Iraq
A Feminist Evaluation of the Joint Programme: Assessing the Cultural Sensitivity of UNICEF and UNFPA\u27s Strategies on Female Genital Cutting/Circumcision in Senegal and Nigeria
No full textFemale Genital Cutting/Circumcision (FGC) encompasses procedures involving the partial or total removal of female external genitalia or other genital injuries, performed for non-medical reasons. Typically carried out on young girls, often between infancy and age 15, FGC is widely condemned in global discourse as a harmful and barbaric practice. However, within certain cultures, it is viewed as a rite of passage or a necessary tradition. I argue that to effectively address FGC, organizations must adopt a culturally sensitive approach. This research examines the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) initiatives in Senegal and Nigeria. The research questions I address are, which intervention type do these initiatives fall under: system, service, or community-level? Do these interventions centralize the voices and perspectives of girls and women who have experienced FGC? Are these interventions culturally sensitive? By analyzing current approaches we can gain valuable insights into how to enhance future interventions and adopt more culturally sensitive methods to combat FGC
Brittle Joints [book review]
Get PDFBrittle Joints is a graphic novel that chronicles author Maria Sweeney\u27s experience with brittle joints and extreme chronic pain
Plate 09: Crow Wing River Sheet 2
No full texthttps://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/maps-mn-river-surveys-volume1/1010/thumbnail.jp
Plate 14: Crow Wing River Sheet 7
No full texthttps://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/maps-mn-river-surveys-volume1/1015/thumbnail.jp