ScholarWolf
Welcome to ScholarWolf, the institutional repository for the University of Nevada, Reno. Managed by the University Libraries, ScholarWolf is an open access database and the home of scholarly works by University members, including the electronic theses and dissertations of our graduate students, journal articles, conference presentations, and more.
Learn more about ScholarWolf and the submission process.
Recent Submissions
Item Innovate to Elevate - AIEI in Action: Wisconsin's Asphalt Partnership Pays Off(3/8/2026)This document explains how the AIEI Program helped Wisconsin successfully tackle systemic pavement performance issues costing the State significant resources. The AIEI program's purpose is to address the ongoing challenges faced by the transportation community to adopt new technologies and reduce the time to implement them in business practices, specifications, and construction methods related to the design, production, testing, control, construction, and investigation of asphalt pavements.Item "I Feel Like Revida Is Friendly": Social Presence as a Predictor of Trust and Usefulness in AI Chatbots for Sexual and Reproductive Health(11/13/2025)Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are increasingly being explored as potential and safe tools for delivering sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information, particularly among adolescents who face cultural, social, and systemic barriers to traditional sexual health services. This study investigates how Nigerian adolescents and young adults perceive Revida, an AI powered SRH information source chatbot, focusing on dimensions of trust, competence, usefulness, effectiveness, social presence, and perceived privacy. The study used a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design with 240 participants (aged 15-25) who completed an online survey following an interaction with a simulated chatbot, and 10 participants participated in semi structured interviews. findings revealed high levels of trust (M = 3.90), competence (M = 3.88), usefulness (M = 3.86), effectiveness (M = 3.91), and privacy (M = 3.67). Complementing that, the interview showed that participants valued Revida's clarity, respectful tone, and ability to simplify complex SRH topics. While participants regard Revida for its convenient and trustworthy first point of access for SRH education, they did not consider it a replacement for professional healthcare. Overall, the findings suggest that empathetic, user-centered, and privacy-assured AI chatbots hold promise as accessible entry points for adolescent SRH engagement in Nigeria.Item Thermodynamic Causation Across Scales: Canonical Laws of CP-MP, Antropic Containment, and Time(2026)Modern physics possesses powerful formalisms for thermodynamics, mechanics, and gravitation, yet continues to suffer from persistent conceptual pathologies: projection of macroscopic causation onto microscopic constituents, confusion between scale and ontology, and the treatment of time as a primitive background rather than an emergent physical quantity. This work presents a canonical specification of thermodynamic causation across scales, organized into two complementary sets of laws. The first canon reformulates classical thermodynamics in terms of Caloric Potential (CP) and Mechanical Potential (MP), restoring macroscopic causation and eliminating the misassignment of energy storage to microscopic degrees of freedom. The second canon formalizes entropic containment, scale, and collapse, introducing the concept of conserved entropic capacity and defining mass, inertia, gravitation, time, and radiation as emergent consequences of entropic well structure. Rather than exhaustively deriving all consequences of the CP-MP framework, the present work specifies a minimal set of canonical laws sufficient to generate them. A reproducible training protocol is provided, enabling both human readers and machine reasoning systems to internalize the framework and generate its implications across domains. This paper therefore serves not as a conventional research article, but as a foundational reference standard: a compact, generative ontology for thermodynamic causation across scales.Item Top Down Thermodynamics: Entropy, Form, and the Thermal Turbine(2026)This monograph addresses a persistent conceptual fracture in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics: the gap between what entropy demonstrably does in real physical systems and how it is commonly interpreted. In particular, it shows how decades of experimental and theoretical work on muscle contraction forced a re examination of entropy, causation, and irreversibility - leading not to a rejection of thermodynamics, but to a return from Clausius to Carnot, now equipped with Boltzmann's mathematics. The central claim is simple but disruptive: irreversible function is governed by macroscopic combinatorial structure, not microscopic disorder. Entropy is not an epiphenomenon of molecules; it is a macroscopic physical body that stores and releases energy. One form of stored energy is mechanical. A second form is thermally sourced and is referred to here as caloric potential. What follows is not speculative philosophy. It is a synthesis grounded in combinatorics, statistical mechanics, and experimental muscle physiology.
Communities in ScholarWolf
Select a community to browse its collections.