Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Intersectional Stigma And Social Anxiety In Black, Latino, And Multiracial Young Sexual Minority Men, Jorge L. Cienfuegos Szalay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Black, Latino, and Multiracial YSMM are at disproportionate risk of acquiring HIV despite engaging in similar or less HIV risk behaviors when compared to their White YSMM counterparts. While over two decades of research have highlighted minority stress theory as a potential explanation as to why this disparity exists, increased efforts are being made to infuse this body of work with an intersectional framework. Intersectionality posits that individuals with multiple, interlocking social identities that are continuously affected and impacted by various forms of marginalization and stigmatization are at an increased risk of negative psychological and physical health outcomes. Current data …

Characterization Of Pathological Tau Mutants, Charles J. Mcdonald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Tau is a protein expressed exclusively in glia and neurons in the central nervous system and implicated in several neurogenerative diseases called “tauopathies”. Among all the tauopathies, one third is characterized by the presence of genetic mutations leading to the synthesis of tau proteins with single amino acid substitutions at specific locations and affecting protein function. While most of the initial studies have emphasize the functional role of tau as modulator of the axonal cytoskeleton, it has recently been well accepted that tau is also an intrinsically disordered protein that tends to form membraneless organelles called coacervates, due to a …

Ways Of Silence And Other Absences In The Music Of George Crumb, Jean-Patrick Besingrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) is undeniably singular in the musical landscape. His aesthetic is often characterized by his exploration of timbre, his graphic scores, his use of quotation, his theatricality, and his interest in unusual instruments. This study proposes to take a different approach to Crumb’s aesthetic through the spectrum of silences and other absences. The concept of silence will be broken down and reconstructed through the Japanese concept of ma (間) and of empty spaces. Multiple types of silences and absences will be considered throughout this dissertation, expanding thus the concept of silence not only …

Evaluating The Effect Of Cctv On Crime Occurrence And Case Clearances In Fayetteville, North Carolina: A Microsynthetic Control Quasi-Experiment, Amanda L. Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras have become widely accepted as a traditional crime prevention measure used by law enforcement agencies across the globe. The proliferation of CCTV technology as a crime reduction mechanism has led to a corresponding growth in the evidence base of its effect on crime. While CCTV is generally associated with a moderate reduction in crime, these evaluations have suffered from certain limitations. First, rigorous quasi-experimental designs using advanced matching techniques have not been used enough in CCTV research and second, these evaluations remain largely one-dimensional, as additional outcome measures and other camera-specific features have gone …

Justice, Pandemics, And Museums In Cyberspace: Archaeology Museums’ Decolonization Projects During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Samuel Besse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explores three Archeology Museums (Historic St. Mary’s City, James Madison’s Montpelier, and the American Museum of Natural History), their attempts at addressing the colonial narratives that museums are built on, and how the Covid-19 pandemic and protests over George Floyd’s death affected these projects. I place a special effort on the online presence of these museums, as this is the main way visitors interacted with the museums during the pandemic. After discussing the origins of museum’s decolonization efforts and their efforts to make an online presence, I talk about the Covid-19 pandemic and the events around George Floyd’s …

Epistemic Virtue And Receptivity To Science In Policing, Braden L. Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the underexplored relationship between character epistemology and its potential to explain behavior, decision-making, and culture within the criminal justice system, particularly the police. Building on the existing theoretical framework of evidence-based policing (EBP) and the recognized gap in understanding police receptivity to science, this study hypothesized that intellectual character at personal and collective levels positively correlates with science receptivity.

Epistemic character was defined through the aggregation of four traits: open-mindedness, defensiveness, insouciance, and groupthink. Science receptivity was measured by openness to change, desire to learn, reliance on intuition, and mistrust of science. Data were collected through surveys …

Colonial Geographies Of Gendered Violence And Mental Health In The United States And Puerto Rico, Lorraine Lizbeth L. Torres Colon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As of January 2021, after years of community organizing and protests, the Puerto Rican island government announced a state of emergency due to the high rates of gendered violence on the island. At the same time, within the field of psychiatric epidemiology, consistent findings have indicated higher frequencies of mood disorders and substance abuse disorders among Puerto Ricans both on and off the island, relative to all other US Latinx ethnic groups. This dissertation frames Puerto Ricans experiences with psychological distress and gendered violence as public health issues nested within differing geographies of colonial divestment. I explore the relationships between …

Posthuman Lessons For Writing And Well-Being: Reparative Practices, Anna A. Larsson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The influence of post-humanist interdisciplinary theories on Writing Studies has displaced its conventional preoccupation with the cultivation and management of subjects via First-Year Writing (FYC), to productive but at times artificially divisive ends. This project aims at an inclusive, anti-racist first-year writing ecology through theories of networked consciousness and digital “making.” I reread and recuperate earlier variants of posthumanist writing theory and draw from feminist materialism and mindfulness studies to establish a vision of well-being that I call networked reparative practices. To bring the abstract into the tangible, an often-valued endeavor in a field historically defined by teaching, I introduce …

Diagnosis And Management Of Adults With Hidden Hearing Loss: A Scoping Review, Chana Flohr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Adults reporting speech in noise difficulties yet have audiometrically normal hearing is a common finding in the audiology clinic and are a subject of a recently popular and expanding area of research. Yet, there is still no clear and decisive test battery to diagnose, validate, and manage this disorder in the adult population. The lack of a clear protocol can cause dissatisfaction for both the patient and the clinician.

Objective: The objective of this study is to comprehensively review the existing literature on Hidden Hearing Loss (HHL) in audiology. The study aims to address the lack of consensus and …

Regulating The Care Boom: Labor Standards Enforcement And Paid In-Home Care Work, Isaac Jabola-Carolus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, population aging has driven explosive growth in care-sector occupations, especially among low-wage home care aides who provide long-term assistance to older adults. These aides, predominantly women and disproportionately people of color, now represent one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing occupational groups. In recent decades, economic inequality and meager social policies have also spurred demand for nannies, housecleaners, and other domestic workers—occupations heavily reliant on immigrant women, many undocumented. While scholarly and public discourse has addressed labor shortages and job quality in such occupations, a related problem is the widespread violation of labor standards, including minimum …

You Hurt My Feelings: Autonomic And Behavioral Responses To Social Exclusion And The Moderating Effect Of Psychopathic Traits, Liat Kofler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Humans have a fundamental need to form and maintain social connections, and thus experiencing social exclusion is extremely distressing as it threatens this basic human need. Individuals who are socially excluded often respond aggressively, not only towards their ostracizers but also towards innocent bystanders, with ostracism being implicated in extreme acts of violence such as school shootings. However, individual differences in behavior exist within the context of social exclusion as not everyone responds aggressively after being ostracized. Identifying risk factors for retaliatory aggressive behavior following experiences of social exclusion may facilitate the development of targeted interventions aimed at mitigating such …

The Effects Of Isolated Affordances On Preschool Counting Improvement When Using A Digital Coloring App, Katherine Papazian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Counting is an important preschool math skill that is necessary for building a strong foundation in mathematics. Previous research has demonstrated that guided counting activities can improve counting ability in preschoolers and that drawing on paper while learning can deepen processing, but research has not included digital drawing as a potential means of deepening processing while children count. This study developed a novel touch-screen app, which used a guided coloring activity to encourage effective counting skills and serve as a home numeracy tool that could be employed by all parents, including those with math anxiety. To evaluate the benefits of …

Losses And Gains Of Teletherapy: The Impact Of The Pandemic On Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Dan-Bi Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This qualitative phenomenological research investigates various therapeutic aspects of the transition from in-person interaction to teletherapy that began in March 2020. A semi-structured interview was conducted with each of the seventeen participants practicing in the New York City metropolitan area between the Fall of 2022 and the Spring of 2023. The questions aimed to explore changes in the psychoanalytic concepts of therapy as experienced by the therapists, including transference, enactment, fantasies, the commute, transitional space, zoom fatigue, and more. Results and discussion offer interesting insights on zoom fatigue, an ever-broadening scope of the therapeutic environment and the comparable changes in …

New York City Yoga Studios Archive (Nycysa), Allison Daugila

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

NYC Yoga Studios Archive is a digital archive meant to preserve the histories of yoga workers participating in the NYC Yoga industry in the years before, during, and following the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020–July 2023). In March 2020, the World Health Organization commissioned that gathering in groups in indoor settings was one of the highest risk activities anyone could participate in, which almost immediately cast fitness venues as a COVID-19 hotspot. The circumstance of New York City being the United States’ most populous city per square mile meant that most yoga establishments in the five boroughs remained closed for in-person …

Kinetics Of Photochemical And Mechanochemical Organic Reactions On Surface, Yerzhan Zholdassov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Solvents used in traditional chemical processes account for a large percentage of reaction mass and waste and can pose significant environmental and health risks. The environmentally friendly nature of mechanochemistry, in addition to other benefits, makes it a promising approach for sustainable chemistry over traditional solvent-based methods. However, it is still not a widely adopted method for performing chemical reactions on an industrial scale. This is partially due to the significant challenge associated with understanding the reaction kinetics under mechanochemical conditions. Many variations of scanning probe lithography (SPL) techniques are able to manipulate the organic molecules with precise control over …

Centrality Effects On Heavy-Flavor Quark Production And Invariant Yield In Phenix Proton–Gold Collisions At Center-Of-Mass Energy 200 Gev, And Assembly, Testing, Calibration, And Installation Of The Sphenix Hadronic Calorimeters, Daniel Richford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hadrons created in heavy-ion collisions interact with the open color-charge of the quark-gluon plasma through their constituent quarks. The medium imparts substantial modifications to heavy-flavor hadrons' momentum spectra. For collisions of small systems, the centrality of those collisions affects both the production of heavy-quarks and the medium modifications that the heavy-quarks experience. This analysis uses the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which collected data from proton--gold collisions in 2015, with a trigger to preference the collection of the five-percent most-central collisions. This analysis uses the distance-of-closest-approach of electron tracks to study semileptonic decays from charm and bottom …

Settling Into Inequality: Resettled Afghans In The Washington Dc Metro Area, Harry Frey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August of 2021, nearly 90,000 Afghans who had fled their country have been resettled in the United States, constituting one of the largest groups of refugee arrivals in the U.S. in recent history. Working from a database I created from the administrative records of a non-profit refugee aid group, I use data and spatial analysis to examine the demographics of Afghans resettled in the DC metro area, the characteristics of the census tracts and counties in which they have been resettled, and their access to public transportation. I find that the …

Quality Management And Oversight Of Texas Forensic Science Service Providers, Sarah P. Chu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Forensic science oversight in the U.S. largely relies upon voluntary third-party forensic laboratory accreditation programs. Without a national system of regulation and given the highly fragmented local systems of control, few forensic science service providers (FSSPs) are subject to regulatory oversight beyond their third-party accreditors. Texas is unique in its establishment of a robust statewide oversight system and a strong governmental culture of transparency, permitting this study of forensic quality management. This study consisted of two parts. The first part of this dissertation characterized and analyzed quality incident reports (QIRs) published by the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory …

How Smoking Became A Moral Issue: A Complex Systems Perspective On Moralization, Matthew Vanaman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When something is morally wrong, it is in the moral domain; when something becomes morally wrong, it is moralized. But how do we know when something is in the moral domain, and how can we tell whether something is becoming moralized? The empirical study of morality, or a given person’s judgment of what constitutes moral virtue or vice, has historically approached these questions through one of three theoretical perspectives: cognitivism, which argues that people primarily or mostly use effortful thought to judge right from wrong; emotivism, which sees these judgments as flowing from emotion; and dual-process models, which …

Navigating The Unprecedented: A Behavioral Theory Of The Firm's Perspective On Covid-19'S Impact On Workplace Practices, Jeffrey Augugliaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the influence of COVID-19 induced uncertainty on the implementation and effectiveness of workplace practices, using the behavioral theory of the firm as the theoretical lens. Employing the Cube One framework as the set of practices to test, it hypothesizes that pandemic-induced uncertainty would reduce the frequency of management practices enacted, decrease variability across organizations, and diminish the relationship between enacted practices and organizational performance. Furthermore, the study posits that these relationships will be moderated by industry, given their variable levels of exposure to pandemic disruptions.

Contrary to expectations, the initial results revealed no overarching reduction or convergence …

André Mocquereau's Theory Of Rhythm, Charles Weaver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the theory of rhythm developed by Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930), a French Benedictine monk. Mocquereau’s theory was originally conceived as a method for performing Gregorian chant and has been the source for numerous publications and recordings since the beginning of the twentieth century. This dissertation places Mocquereau’s theory in the context of both the evolving performance practice of medieval monophony and the history of music theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 surveys the history of the notation of Gregorian chant, introducing the problem of constructing a rhythmic practice from historical sources. Chapter 2 examines …

On The Order-Type Complexity Of Words, And Greedy Sidon Sets For Linear Forms, Yin Choi Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work consists of two parts. In the first part, we study the order-type complexity of right-infinite words over a finite alphabet, which is defined to be the order types of the set of shifts of said words in lexicographical order. The set of shifts of any aperiodic morphic words whose first letter in the purely-morphic pre-image occurs at least twice in the pre-image has the same order type as Q ∩ (0, 1), Q ∩ (0, 1], or Q ∩ [0, 1). This includes all aperiodic purely-morphic binary words. The order types of uniform-morphic ternary words were also studied, …

Examining Metacognitive Access To Low-Level Ensemble Representations, Vladimir Mudragel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ensemble perception is a process that allows our sensory systems to rapidly extract summary information about the stimuli in the environment. For example, we are able to get a sense of the average number of items in a group of similar items (Burr & Ross, 2008; Halberda, Sires, & Feigenson, 2006) or the average size of a group of similar shapes of different sizes (Ariely, 2001). It is theorized that the qualitative result of ensemble perception is that it provides a gist impression of the current environment, which then enables attentional processes in the brain to determine which parts of …

Effects Of Genes And Gene-Environment Interactions On Work-Family Conflict And Enrichment, Peter Yu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how macro-level issues can influence how we manage work and family responsibilities. Yet, work-family (WF) research at different levels of analysis is relatively scarce. To address this, I take a multilevel lens to study WF conflict and enrichment in the context of micro-level factors (in the form of genes), macro-level factors (in the form of family and community-level demands), and their cross-level interactions (i.e., gene–environment interactions). To study genetic main effects, I drew from the work-home resources model to identify four candidate genes associated with conditions that could impact the ability to accrue WF resources …

Out-Of-Distribution Generalization Of Deep Learning To Illuminate Dark Protein Functional Space, Tian Cai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark protein illumination is a fundamental challenge in drug discovery where majority human proteins are understudied, i.e. with only known protein sequence but no known small molecule binder. It's a major road block to enable drug discovery paradigm shift from single-targeted which looks to identify a single target and design drug to regulate the single target to multi-targeted in a Systems Pharmacology perspective. Diseases such as Alzheimer's and Opioid-Use-Disorder plaguing millions of patients call for effective multi-targeted approach involving dark proteins. Using limited protein data to predict dark protein property requires deep learning systems with OOD generalization capacity. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) …

Extreme E-Service Learning: Remote Learning For Undergraduate Students And Telehealth Intervention For Children With Autism, Madiha S. Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extreme e-service learning courses in higher education, in which all components of the course including the instruction and service is provided online (Waldenr et al., 2012), offer rich educational experience as well as mutual benefits to the students, community and the higher education institutes. Very few studies have examined extreme e-service learning. We examined an undergraduate extreme e-service learning course in psychology; students learned through a virtual class and provided telehealth behavioral intervention services to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Utilizing mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative measures including student observations, assignments, and self-reports) and a mixed design (single subject …

Ejercicios De Sí: Escritura, Cuerpo Y Deporte En El Cono Sur (1964–2019), Pablo Yankelevich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation studies the work of three performative figures from Latin America for whom physical practice is a fundamental issue of their artistic inquiries. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which writers and athletes Leonor Silvestri (Argentina), Héctor Benjamín Viel Temperley (Argentina), and Paulo Leminski (Brazil) problematize the body as the site of social and political experimentation over the last fifty years. By examining how these figures challenged liberal and neoliberal normative dictums about the place of the body, particularly in times of political repression, my research reflects on unauthorized exercises of bodily freedom and considers sport and physical …

Electrophysiological Signatures Of Stress Adaptability In The Bnst-Vta Pathway, Yuka Miura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chronic stress has detrimental effects on psychological and physiological health. Incapability to adapt to chronic stress can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and addiction. The brain regions critical for reward processing share diverse physiological and molecular changes linked to depressive-like behaviors as a result of chronic stress. Cumulative evidence shows that counteraction or prevention of these alterations in neurons, occasionally in a projection-specific manner, can enhance stress adaptation or resilience.

Chronic stress induces various changes in the brain, including in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The neural projections from the BNST …

Phase Transitions And Thermal Stability Of The Magnetic Dual Chiral Density Wave Phase In Cold, Dense Qcd, William G. Gyory

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The correct description of strongly interacting matter at extreme densities and low temperatures remains poorly understood. We analyze the magnetic dual chiral density wave (MDCDW) phase, an inhomogeneous chiral condensate that arises in cold, dense quark matter in a magnetic field. We first review the background theory and derive the free energy of the condensate. Then we show how the phase transitions can be studied using a generalized Ginzburg-Landau expansion, and we derive a convenient all-orders formula for the coefficients. Using these tools, we compute the order parameters, critical temperature, and threshold temperature over a range of chemical potentials and …

Optimization And Application Of Graph Neural Networks, Shuo Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely recognized for their potential in learning from graph-structured data and solving complex problems. However, optimal performance and applicability of GNNs have been an open-ended challenge. This dissertation presents a series of substantial advances addressing this problem. First, we investigate attention-based GNNs, revealing a critical shortcoming: their ignorance of cardinality information that impacts their discriminative power. To rectify this, we propose Cardinality Preserved Attention (CPA) models that can be applied to any attention-based GNNs, which exhibit a marked improvement in performance. Next, we introduce the Directional Node Pair (DNP) descriptor and the Robust Molecular Graph …