Digital Commons Network^™

Piled Up, Sophia Lebowitz

Capstones

Piled Up is a 10 minute film about Anna Sacks, a dumpster diver in New York City who has recently found viral social media fame for calling out wasteful corporate practices. Meanwhile, the physical build-up of the trash she collects, and the anxiety of the never-ending cycles of waste are weighing her down and keeping her from her goals.

This is a surprising story about a woman who has found overwhelming social media success while simultaneously dealing with the mechanism of that success, waste, building up in her life. Her videos have garnered her thousands of followers and millions of …

The Pandemic Changed The Face Of Retail. Here’S How Center City, Philadelphia — The State’S Leading Job Market — Is Faring On The Road To Recovery, Francisco O. Velasquez-Turcios

Capstones

The pandemic changed the face of retail. Here’s how Center City, Philadelphia — the state’s leading job market — is faring on the road to recovery.

Link to capstone project: https://franvela033.github.io/Capstone/

Maxed Out: How The Pandemic Put The Fitness Industry’S Fate In The Hands Of Its Consumers, Denny Jacob

Capstones

The pandemic's impact on the fitness industry has gone deeper than closing gyms. It has completely reoriented how people workout, where they workout, how gyms will look and run and the new balance between brick-and-mortar gym locations and virtual fitness. The seismic shifts that have taken place over nearly two years have moved the industry to a place that it can't revert from. Everything that has changed since is here to stay in some capacity.

Link to capstone: https://djacob1670.wixsite.com/capstone

“The New Pinkertons”: Anti-Union Consultants And Surveillance Tech Thwart Organizing, Jo Constantz

Capstones

In 2020, just 6.3% of U.S. private-sector workers were union members, despite the fact that 68% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest since 1965, and nearly half of non-union workers say they would join.

After World War II, wage growth kept pace with GDP growth, but then began to diverge in the 1970s, according to a study by the RAND Corporation. After 1975, incomes of the bottom 90% rose more slowly than the economy as a whole, while incomes of the top 10% grew faster. The declining wage growth coincided with and is closely related to a drop-off …

Examining The Recovery Of The Mta In Nyc, Angel Adegbesan

Capstones

My capstone project involved writing codes to scrape and analyze data that isn’t readily available in the format we want. I scraped and analyzed turnstile data and metro card data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority from the periods of Jan 01, 2021 to April 30, 2021 and Jan 01, 2022 to April 30, 2022. The purpose of the analysis is to determine how public transit ridership has changed in New York City and whether the MTA was on track to pre-pandemic levels. For my capstone, I wrote about my findings from the data analysis and did some interactive work to …

Onlyfans Is Booming. But For Whom?, Allison Smith

Capstones

Although the news often reports on the windfalls content creators make on OnlyFans, especially since the start of the pandemic, the reality is that most sex workers on the site undergo hours of unpaid later — from brand building and search engine optimization to video editing and production. Since the passage of SESTA/FOSTA in 2018, a bill that was ostensibly designed to curtail online sex trafficking, it has been harder to get started in the sex industry and the divide between those who are successful versus those who are just scraping by has widened. Link to capstone: https://allisonnicolesmith.github.io/capstone/

New York Is Promising Social Equity In Its Legal Cannabis Market, But Questions Still Loom, Brian D. Evans Jr

Capstones

This capstone will explore how New York can navigate a new landscape that accepts recreational marijuana while also dealing with an illegal pot market that can better serve the state with less arrests and a more seamless rollout. The capstone will also discuss how people of color – already targeted and arrested at a disproportionate rate for misdemeanor non-violent drug related crimes – will navigate this landscape. With less access to capital to start businesses of their own or buy/rent property, will New York perhaps introduce or entertain a program to subsidize such an effort? California has said that the …

Tiktok Has Influenced The Way We Buy Beauty, Keira R. Wingate, Angela Palumbo

Capstones

The purpose of this capstone project is to show how the popular social media platform, TikTok, is influencing and changing the way consumers buy and the companies sell beauty products.

Since the start of the pandemic, a record number of people logged into TikTok, which has become one of the top social media platforms in the world. While the app grew, so did the number of users who made videos reviewing and using makeup products. Soon, TikTok went from an entertainment platform to a marketing opportunity for large companies in the beauty industry.

Now, hundreds of influencers are paid large …

Can You Really Build A Crypto Empire In The Empire State?, Cheyenne Ligon

Capstones

This capstone seeks to describe the cryptocurrency industry in New York City, and explain both the challenges industry participants face and the benefits of setting up shop as a crypto business in New York.

https://celizabethligon.wixsite.com/crypto-in-new-york

Space Opens Its Doors To Unexpected Players, One Of Them Paraguay, Macarena Carrizosa

Capstones

Paraguay successfully sent its first native satellite into orbit in 2021, proving how essential and accessible the industry has become, even for developing countries. This article looks at how knowledge and technology transfer programs combined with a lower cost of entry helped Paraguay reach its first major milestone in the space industry, having its own satellite.