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Meeting Where Students Are: Stump the Librarian
Full text linkFor two years, librarians Beth, Sara, and Chris, have been holding \u27Stump the Librarian\u27 events in Willard Hall. Gamifying the reference interview, Stump the Librarian events allow students to ask librarians silly, niche, or complex questions in the quest to \u27stump\u27 us. By meeting the students in their own space, it allows for more recognition for what librarians can offer students, lowers library anxiety, and allows better understanding of students\u27 interests and research. This presentation offers insight into thinking outside of the box for engaging with students and gives faculty an opportunity to step outside of their comfort zone
Baseball’s Color Line in Kansas and the Chanute Black Diamonds of 1904–1906, Revised
No full textThe major and minor leagues excluded black baseball players for most of their history until Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1946 and 1947. However, at the local level, the color line was not always so absolute. Town teams were occasionally integrated, and segregated teams played each other, sometimes with the local championship on the line. Among the small towns where this occurred was Chanute, Kansas, where a black ball club named the Chanute Black Diamonds was first organized in 1900. From 1904 through 1906, the Black Diamonds assembled a team of the best players from Chanute and nearby Humboldt and Iola that was competitive against both black and white teams in the region. They also earned the city’s championship in 1905. In addition, several members of the team were occasionally sought by white ball clubs wanting to bolster their rosters. Although they never had the opportunity to play in any of the local minor leagues or in the Negro National League (which was not organized until 1920), the Black Diamonds were so well known throughout the region that the team sometimes drew more fans, black and white, than their white counterparts. This monograph summarizes the baseball experiences of the Black Diamonds during this period. This essay was originally published in 2020 and has undergone revisions and corrections for its release in 2025 as part of the five-volume anthology Peeking through the Knothole. The open-access, digital version of this essay is available through the “Download” button on this webpage. The print-on-demand version is available through the “Buy this Book” button for volume three of the anthology (Essays on Crossing Baseball’s Color Line, 1874–1946)
Enhancing Care for Psychiatric Patients Boarding in the Emergency Department
Full text linkPsychiatric boarding in the emergency department has become a common phenomenon in emergency departments throughout the United States. The purpose of this DNP Scholarly Project was to create a quality improvement project to enhance the care that psychiatric patients receive while they are boarding in the emergency department (ED). This quality improvement project consisted of an educational PowerPoint module for ED nursing staff and the dissemination of a care plan that nursing staff utilized while caring for psychiatric patients in this specific ED. The target population for this scholarly project was emergency department nursing personnel in a 40-bed metropolitan ED. Data was collected using a pre-intervention and post-intervention survey and the completion of retrospective chart audits. SPSS software was used to analyze the data collected to evaluate the results of the pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys and to analyze the boarding times obtained from the chart audits to evaluate if the care for psychiatric patients was enhanced with statistical significance
SPATIOTEMPORAL CHANGES IN THE IMPERILED AND DIVERSE MUSSEL ASSEMBLAGE OF THE SPRING RIVER IN KANSAS IN RESPONSE TO KNOWN AND EMERGING POLLUTANTS
Full text linkKansas was historically home to 50 species of freshwater mussels, of which 42 remain extant. The Spring River of southeastern Kansas is home to 34 of the remaining 42 mussels, many of which are imperiled. Elevated metal concentrations that resulted from past lead and zinc mining in the Tri-State Mining District historically imperiled Spring River mussels, but this threat has abated over the last 20 years. Ammonia pollution may have replaced the threat of metals, however, with potentially severe consequences for Spring River mussels. Our objectives were to evaluate contemporary mussel assemblage structure, in addition to spatiotemporal trends in the density and richness of Spring River mussels, in relation to changing concentrations of metals and ammonia. We accomplished these objectives by performing quantitative mussel surveys across twelve Spring River sites during the summers of 2023 and 2024, and we then compared our data to surveys performed over the past four decades. We also performed widespread and frequent monitoring of ammonia concentrations in the Spring River during 2023-2024. We found that metal concentrations no longer appeared to be a major factor structuring freshwater mussel assemblages in the Spring River of Kansas, as species richness and densities were relatively comparable both above and below historical sources of heavy metal contamination. However, temporal trends suggested that mussel assemblages above and below historical metal inputs have been trending divergently over the past 40 years. Species richness remained relatively stable in the upper Spring River, but densities have drastically declined in this reach. In contrast, both richness and densities substantially increased in the lower Spring River below historical metal inputs. These patterns were consistent with ammonia as the causative agent behind mussel declines in the upper reach, as concentrations were highest near the Missouri border and decreased downstream. Furthermore, likely due to reduced metal concentrations, the Bleufer (Potamilus purpuratus), Fawnsfoot (Truncilla donaciformis), Fragile Papershell (Leptodea fragilis), and Threehorn Wartyback (Obliquaria reflexa) have expanded their ranges to occupy all reaches in the Spring River of Kansas. In the 1990s, all four focal species were absent or scarce in the Spring River of Kansas. This research has critical conservation implications considering the numerous imperiled species of freshwater mussels in the Spring River
THE EFFECTS OF REPROCESSING, POST-PROCESSING CONDITIONS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE ON THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF POST-INDUSTRIAL AND POST-CONSUMER POLYETHYLENE
Full text linkTHE EFFECTS OF REPROCESSING, POST-PROCESSING CONDITIONS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE ON THE PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF POST-INDUSTRIAL AND POST-CONSUMER POLYETHYLENE
An Abstract of the Thesis by
Grant Howard
Plastic pollution is a rapidly growing problem. Globally, millions of tons of plastic waste are produced, and that amount is projected to increase each year. To address this, recycling of commodity thermoplastics like polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyethylene terephthalate, have become a point of emphasis in industry. Companies have started to investigate the use of recycled plastics instead of virgin plastics in their products. The advantages of using recycled material are to receive tax breaks, to increase a company’s reputation, reduce material costs, and to reduce environmental impact. There are several tax breaks for companies using recycled material such as the IRS recycling tax credits, grants offered by the Department of Energy, and state tax incentives. As more consumers of plastic products are becoming more aware of sustainability, the image of companies that use recycled materials and highlight that use in their product marketing tends to rise for the general public. When a company uses recycled material, they are reducing their material costs, like using a small percentage of scrap material, which allows them to produce their products more inexpensively and decrease their material overhead. When producing virgin plastics, there are significant environmental impacts including water pollution, global warming, resource depletion, and microplastics pollution. By using recycled plastic, carbon emissions are reduced compared to virgin materials.
A recycled material undergoes size reduction when being recycled, which applies stress and shear that may affect the physical properties of the material. Changes in the physical properties of a plastic as a result of recycling could impact the ability of that company’s product to function as intended. In order to maximize the use of recycled material, companies must research the effects of mechanical recycling, environmental exposure, and successive rounds of reprocessing and ensure that the materials still have the desired mechanical, thermal, and chemical properties required for the products application.
After being processed, products undergo several different conditions. These conditions could be intentional and are made by the plastic manufacturer for the purpose of modifying final crystallinity. By controlling the rate of cooling in an ice bath, crystallization can be slowed or stopped, while annealing at the crystallization temperature enhances crystallization and ensures greater dimensional stability in the finished part, due to reducing the shrinkage. Some of the conditions in which a recycled plastic has been exposed are not intentional, but a result of typical wear and tear that a product may experience in its normal service life. A product that is exposed to the weather can experience a wide variety of exposure conditions such as moisture, UV radiation, chemical exposure, and extreme temperatures. These hazards could have negative impacts on the recycled plastic’s physical properties, making it unsuitable for reprocessing into products for certain applications.
To gain a more comprehensive understanding of recycled materials, we must investigate how reprocessing post-industrial and post-consumer materials changes physical properties when compared to virgin materials. We will examine how post-processing conditions, will impact the physical properties of the plastic material. Post-industrial materials are plastics that are scrap (including flash, part trimmings, sprues, start-up parts, purgings, and runners) or sub-standard parts which cannot be sold, but can be reprocessed. Post-consumer materials have been subjected to similar processing conditions to the post-industrial materials, but have also been exposed to environmental conditions. These exposures over time lead to additional changes in a plastic’s physical properties that exceed those experienced by post-industrial plastics.
The goal of this study is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how recycled material properties are affected by different conditions and exposures. To study how these materials’ properties have been changed, we will use post-industrial and post-consumer materials to injection mold samples and compare them to a commonly used polyethylene material and to virgin material supplied by an industrial partner. We will demonstrate how post-industrial and post-consumer materials are affected by being re-processed, post-processing conditions, multiple rounds of reprocessing, and accelerated weather testing. Samples will then be subjected to mechanical testing (tensile, impact, and flexural testing), thermal analysis (differential scanning calorimetry and thermogravimetric analysis) and rheological characterization by melt flow indexing. When analyses are completed, we will be able to guide industry recommendations on how recycled plastics can be implemented to a much wider degree in consumer goods without sacrificing product performance
Weede - Exterior
No full textBlack and white photo of a man walking into the Weede building.https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/weede_gym/1080/thumbnail.jp
AI in Theatre: AI as a Component in the Stage Production of Mrs. Dalloway
Full text linkFor the 2024 production of Pitt State Theatre\u27s Mrs. Dalloway , our production team made the decision to include AI as part of the design of the production, and incorporated it\u27s use throughout the process with image and video projection. The AI enhanced and expanded our reach to convey the story and impact of our production in new avenues for our theatre company and design team. Since this initial foray, we have continued to use AI as an effective tool for various tasks in recent productions. We hope to continue to use AI in the future for new creative outlets and solutions. Included in this presentation are examples of how AI processes were used for this production.https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/ai-posters-2025/1006/thumbnail.jp
Neural network curriculum development and student research in Electronics Engineering Technology
Full text linkThe development of neural network curriculum in the Electronics Engineering Technology (EET) program began as project for the Kansas National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program – Opportunities in NASA STEM FY 2020-2024 grant. In this grant, NASA funds supported curriculum development and research in affiliated universities. In the project, faculty and students met to explore online resources and participate in online courses on neural networks that focused on the Keras application programming interface (API).
A portion of the developed curriculum was first used in Spring 2022 in EET 549 Advanced Microcontrollers and EET 745 Advanced Microprocessor Systems and Applications. The topics of regression, classification, convolutional neural networks, and recurrent neural networks were covered. In EET 549, students were assigned a final project in which a line follower robot was programmed using a neural network.
In 2023 and 2024, EET faculty and students became involved in a NASA Rapid Response Research (R3) grant. In this grant, it was proposed that neural-symbolic neural networks could be used to augment physics-based predictions of the aurora borealis with sightings made by citizen scientists. Neural-symbolic neural networks are those that implement logic predicates.
As part of the R3 grant, curriculum was developed for predicate logic and neural-symbolic neural networks. This was used in EET 549 and 745 in Spring 2024. In addition, curriculum on tiny machine learning (TinyML), the implementation of neural networks on memory and speed constrained devices such as microcontrollers, was also introduced.https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/ai-posters-2025/1003/thumbnail.jp
AI Symposium Opening
No full textMichelle Hudiburg addresses the crowd during the symposiumhttps://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/aisymp-photos-2025/1002/thumbnail.jp