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"My People Is A People On Its Knees": Mexican Labor Migration From The Montana Region And The Formation Of A Working Class In New York City, Rodolfo Hernandez-Corchado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the contemporary proletarianization via migration of the indigenous and mestizo people from the Montaña region, in the Mexican southern state of Guerrero, to New York City. The dissertation demonstrates how the region was transformed since the 1980s into a migrant labor supplier and how its inhabitants became proletarians, and a major pool of labor supplying the North American transnational migrant labor market.

Far from being homogenous, the people of the Montaña region are ethnically and class diverse. Based on the oral narratives of an indigenous Mixteco, and a mestizo teenager dweller of the city of Tlapa, the …

Can All Religions Live In Peace?, Antony Das S. Devadhasan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Can All Religions Live In Peace?

Religion is identified as one of the main factors that divide humanity. Pluralists like, John Hick identify the conflicting truth claims or the doctrines of different religions as the basis for religious exclusivism. Hick accuses the exclusivists of being epistemically arrogant and morally oppressive. His remedy for eradicating exclusivism is that every religion with conflicting truth claims should reinterpret these claims so as to share an outlook with other religions. Alvin Plantinga, a critic of Hick, contradicts Hick on behalf of a believer or an exclusivist.He argues that for a believer his beliefs are …

The Computational Complexity Of Some Games And Puzzles With Theoretical Applications, Vasiliki Despoina Mitsou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subject of this thesis is the algorithmic properties of one- and two-player

games people enjoy playing, such as Sudoku or Chess. Questions asked about puzzles

and games in this context are of the following type: can we design efficient computer

programs that play optimally given any opponent (for a two-player game), or solve

any instance of the puzzle in question?

We examine four games and puzzles and show algorithmic as well as intractability

results. First, we study the wolf-goat-cabbage puzzle, where a man wants to transport

a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage across a river by using a …

The Influence Of Advanced Cognitive Ability On The Development Of Psychological Defenses And In Understanding And Managing Affect: A Study Of Latency-Aged Gifted Students, Kahlila Ife Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the influence of advanced cognitive ability on the development of psychological defenses and in understanding and managing affect, using the lens of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Theories of psychological defense maturity state that defense mechanisms are influenced both by the cognitive level of the individual and by the cognitive complexity of the defense itself (Cramer, 1999; Cramer, 2009). Individuals with exceptional cognitive ability may therefore show a corresponding "match" with complex defense use. In addition to defense use, how well one is able to identify, understand, manage and use emotion to facilitate thought, abilities often labelled Emotional …

Consonantal Voicing Effects On Vowel Duration In Italian-English Bilinguals, Ylana Beller-Marino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project reported in this dissertation analyzes phonetic details of the speech patterns in one of New York's bilingual communities, asking whether a bilingual speaker can attain native-like proficiency in both languages and the extent to which authenticity — maintenance of language-specific settings — is sustainable. Researchers have established that Italian and English differ strikingly in their characteristic time settings for vowel durations: durations are greater for vowels preceding voiced consonants, e.g., cab, rather than voiceless, e.g., cap. This duration difference, termed the consonantal voicing effect (CVE), is notably greater for English than for Italian. The greater magnitude …

The Historic Inability Of The Haitian Education System To Create Human Development And Its Consequences, Patrick Michael Rea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to evaluate the role that a lack of literacy and education has played in Haiti's historic and presently low level of human development. The pedagogical philosophies of two educationists, Paolo Friere and Maurice Dartigue, are used throughout the study as lenses from which to read and interpret the history of Haitian education -its many failed attempts, and recurrent challenges- in creating a literate and educated population. The author concludes that mass literacy is prerequisite if the Haitian people are to achieve self-realization and actualization, which essentially equates to what the United Nations Development Program calls "Human Development". …

Occupy Wall Street's Challenge To An American Public Transcript, Christopher Neville Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the rhetoric and discourses of the anti-corporate movement Occupy Wall Street, using frameworks from political ethnography and critical discourse analysis to offer a thick, triangulated description of a single event, Occupy Wall Street's occupation of Zuccotti Park. The study shows how Occupy achieved a disturbing positionality relative to the forces which routinely dominate public discourse and proposes that Occupy's encampment was politically intolerable to the status quo because the movement held the potential to consolidate critical thought and action. Because the "soft" means of re-capturing public consent were weak in 2011 because of the 2008 economic collapse, …

Systematics And Evolution Of Leandra S.Str. (Melastomataceae, Miconieae), Marcelo Reginato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Phylogenetic studies in the Melastomataceae have demonstrated the need of taxonomic rearrangements in the current classification. Melastomes are among the most diverse groups of plants and several cases of known artificial taxa are observed and awaiting further resolution. One example is the Leandra s.str. clade, which includes the majority of the taxa traditionally treated in the genus Leandra. Some attempts have been made to infer the relationships of Leandra s.str., but the sampling in these earlier studies was sparse and the resolution low inside the clade. The main objective here is to propose a comprehensive phylogenetic framework for this group …

"Women Have The Right To Fight!": The Contested Legacy Of Second-Wave Feminism And Anti-Rape Politics In The Trials Of Inez Garcia, 1974-1977, Megan Elizabeth Feulner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My paper takes as its central focus the trials of Inez Garcia, a woman who was charged with the murder of a man who helped rape her in Soledad, CA in 1974. Garcia's trial in 1974, in which she was convicted of second-degree murder, and her retrial in 1977, in which the ruling was reversed, is often remembered as a cause célèbre of the second-wave women's movement that united diverse activists and yielded a major feminist legal victory. However, I argue that close examination of the trial and the feminist activism around it reveals a more paradoxical legacy. First, I …

Todesfuge, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Todesfuge (2008-2010) is a setting, for tenor and chamber orchestra, of Paul Celan's poem of the same name. Celan wrote his landmark work on the Holocaust in the years after he himself was freed from internment in a Romanian forced labor camp in 1944, though its imagery is drawn from accounts of the death camps in Poland. From the outset, I was ambivalent about setting this text to music, but felt compelled, and my response was to frame it with idiomatic references to German music from Wagner to Weill, exploring the discomfort of using aesthetic artifice to represent unspeakable atrocities. …

A Role Of Yeast Adhesin Amyloids In Force-Dependent Adhesion And Biofilm Formation, Cho Xiao Juan Chan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Candida albicans adhesins have amyloid-forming sequences (Ramsook et al. 2010, Otoo et al. 2008). Similarly, Tango and Waltz predicted that amyloid-forming sequences are also present in Saccharomyces cerevisiae flocculins, Flo1p and Flo11p. The cell surface of Flo1p- and Flo11p-expressing cells have ordered domains that are thioflavin T fluorescent and Congo red birefringent, two hallmarks of amyloids. Flo1p and Flo11p amyloids were important for activities of the flocculins including cell-to-cell adhesion, cell-to-substrate adhesion, and agar invasion. In addition, amyloid-perturbing dyes thioflavin S and Congo red inhibited aggregation, biofilm formation and agar invasion.

Force-induced formation and propagation of adhesion nanodomains in Als5p-expressing …

Telework And Organizational Citizenship Behaviors: The Underexplored Roles Of Social Identity And Professional Isolation, Lauren Mondo Kane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although telework--a flexible work arrangement in which employees work from a remote location at least some of the time--has been increasing in practice, little research has investigated its implications for employee behaviors and performance. The main focus of this study was to identify the mediating processes that explain the relationship between telework frequency and OCB performance, and to determine whether personality moderates the psychological consequences of teleworking. Survey data were collected from 286 teleworkers and 62 of their coworkers across organizations from a range of industries, jobs, and locations. Coworkers were recruited in order to assess teleworkers' OCBs, but OCBs …

Different Placements Of Spirit: African American Musicians Historicizing In Sound, Casey Hale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines two recent projects by African American musicians that enact critical and historiographic agency by reconstructing the music of the past: William Parker's project The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield, dedicated to re-imagining the works of the soul music icon with an ensemble featuring the poetic recitation of Amiri Baraka; and Marcus Roberts's reinvention of the Jazz Age rhapsodies of George Gershwin and James P. Johnson, Rhapsody in Blue and Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody. Rooted in African American interpretive traditions, and working both within and against such discursive categories as "jazz," "black music," and "American music," these artists …

Control Of Light-Matter Interaction Via Dispersion Engineering, Harish Natarajan Swaha Krishnamoorthy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis describes the design, fabrication and characterization of certain nanostructures to engineer light-matter interaction. These materials have peculiar dispersion properties owing to their structural design, which is exploited to control spontaneous emission properties of emitters such as quantum dots and dye molecules. We will discuss two classes of materials based on the size of their unit cell compared to the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation they interact with. The first class are hyperbolic metamaterials (HMM) composed of alternate layers of a metal and a dielectric of thicknesses much smaller than the wave- length. Using a HMM composed of silver …

Systematic Comparison Of Cross-Lingual Projection Techniques For Low-Density Nlp Under Strict Resource Constraints, Joshua Waxman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The field of low-density NLP is often approached from an engineering perspective, and evaluations are typically haphazard - considering different architectures, given different languages, and different available resources - without a systematic comparison. The resulting architectures are then tested on the unique corpus and language for which this approach has been designed. This makes it difficult to truly evaluate which approach is truly the "best," or which approaches are best for a given language.

In this dissertation, several state-of-the-art architectures and approaches to low-density language Part-Of-Speech Tagging are reimplemented; all of these techniques exploit a relationship between a high-density (HD) …

The Perceived Religiousness Of The Repertoire Of The Muslim Minority In France, Brian Mawyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is a secular society with a deeply rooted Catholic tradition. This environment affects the acceptability of demonstrations of Muslim religious identity. Muslim immigrants to France are often ghettoized into rent controlled housing in suburbs around the cities. Rejected from French society, these immigrants cling to what links them together, which is their religion. By the third generation, fluency in heritage languages declines greatly, yet the youth of the banlieues re-appropriate Arabic words into their French speech, leading to the emergence of a Muslim repertoire that is not always accepted by speakers of standard French. This thesis surveys French people …

The Radical Possibilities Of Being Human: Exploring The Risk, Violence, And Rewards Of Knowing And Being Known (A Survival Guide For Liminal Feminists), Parvoneh Shirgir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within this liminal feminist survival guide I present a collection of personal experiences and analysis of these moments in order to elucidate how and when violence occurs. I foreground my thought process and the ideas and figures that keep me hopeful, help remind me that our world is not concrete but instead changing, shifting, and malleable. What follows is a necessarily partial (and somewhat useless, somewhat useful) survival guide for liminal feminists, those who exist on the edges of boundaries and encounter all of the possibilities and fears that come with such a position. I present not so much a …

Martingales For Uniformly Quasisymmetric Circle Endomorphisms, Yunchun Hu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main subject studied in this thesis is the space of all uniformly quasisymmetric circle endomorphisms preserving the Lebesgue measure. Although many of our arguments work for any degree d≥2, our proof will be mainly written for degree 2 maps.

We will introduce a sequence of Markov partitions of the unit circle by using preimages of the fixed point of such circle endomorphism f. The uniform quasisymmetry condition is equivalent to the bounded nearby geometry condition of the Markov partitions. In Chapter 2 of this thesis, for each f, we use the Lebesgue invariant condition and the …

Assessing Young Males' Perspectives On The Cultural Competency Of Juvenile Justice Staff And Predicting Psychosocial Functioning, Crystal Catherine Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The theory of symbolic interactionism explains how social interactions influence behavior. In this study, it is reasoned that culturally sensitive interactions may be associated with adjudicated youth behavior. The purpose of this project is to (1) examine the differences in adjudicated male youths' perceptions of the level of cultural competency in juvenile justice staff members and (2) to identify whether staff members' cultural competency is related to self-restraint, distress, and delinquent behavior in adjudicated male youth. Utilizing a cross-sectional design, adjudicated youths enrolled in a variety of re-entry and transitional programs were surveyed. Youths retrospectively assessed the cultural competency of …

Facial Affect Recognition And Social Functioning In Individuals At Risk For Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders, Marta Ewa Statucka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Facial affect recognition (FAR) is impaired in schizophrenia patients and to a lesser extent in individuals at familial/genetic, clinical, and psychometric risk for psychosis. Reduced FAR reaction time and negative bias are present in patients; however, their role is less clear in at-risk samples. Impaired social functioning, a hallmark of schizophrenia, is also impaired in at-risk individuals and is associated with FAR impairment. Given FAR deficits in schizophrenia, the current study aimed to elucidate the nature of FAR and social functioning impairments among individuals at high psychometric risk for psychosis and to examine whether FAR acts as a mediator in …

Science Identity Transformations Through Place-Based Teaching And Learning In The Natural World, Amy Defelice

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation includes three main components related through a sociocultural lens of identity transformation. The first component describes the Field Studies program for ninth grade students at Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment (BASE High School), and explores how outdoor settings and place-based pedagogies can be used to enhance urban students' science identities. Student researchers took digital photographs of their Field Studies experiences and met in cogenerative dialogues with me, their teacher, where we shared our reflections. The second component explains students' experiences and reactions to a week-long place-based geoscience program held over spring break at Prospect Park. This …

The Shadow Banking System In The United States, Bhakti Joshi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 2008 the United States suffered a devastating economic collapse. Millions of Americans were unemployed; families lost their homes; and long time businesses were forced to shut down. These events put the United States into an economic depression so deep that the country has yet to fully recover. The crisis was not a natural disaster but varieties of private sector agents such as banks and hedge funds were responsible for its efficient cause. Even though the housing and stock bubbles were generated largely by market forces rather than by government policies, the US government policies and institutions also played a …

The Jacob A. Riis-Theodore Roosevelt Digital Archive, Jonathan Conrad Maxwell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Jacob A. Riis-Theodore Roosevelt Digital Archive is a digital archive focused on the Progressive Era in US history, which lasted from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. During the Progressive Era, reformers from the American middle class made significant strides in addressing social issues in urban areas and among the working and lower classes. These social issues included tenement housing, prostitution, and other forms of corruption. Some well-known reformers include Jacob Riis, the photographer and author of How The Other Half Lives, Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, and Jane Addams, founder of Hull House. The …

Essays On Savings Behavior Of Low-Income Households In Colombia, Luz M. Salas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I designed and implemented a Randomized Controlled Trial to study whether relatively simple modifications to how a commitment savings product was framed and labeled could affect savings accumulations and other outcomes of low-income individuals in newly formed Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in Colombia. Motivated by hypotheses from behavioral economics, the experiment tests hypotheses that behavioral responses should vary depending on whether subjects are led to label and create `mental savings accounts' in private or public ways. Individuals in the private-labeling treatment groups were led to label their savings as earmarked for a particular purpose and to state savings …

Exploring The Illusion Of Transparency When Lying And Truth-Telling: The Impact Of Age, Self-Consciousness, And Framing, Jason Mandelbaum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals often overestimate the ability of others to accurately determine their internal states. This illusion of transparency has been shown to manifest itself in everyday scenarios, including when people are asked to estimate if others can tell when they are lying. Yet it has not been observed when truth-telling, nor investigated developmentally. The current experiments tested for an illusion of transparency when individuals were truth-telling and lying and investigated how a participant's age, dispositional self-consciousness, situational self-awareness and how questions were framed impacted the strength and prevalence of the illusion of transparency.

In Experiments 1 and 2, children and adolescents …

Bicultural Social Identity: Do Biculturals Assess Workplace Deviance Differently Across Different Ethnicities?, Andy Y. Chiou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research on biculturals has informed us much regarding their cognition and identity integration, however little as to the bicultural perception of in- and out-groups, and whether it can be primed. I examined this question in a workplace setting using the black sheep framework, specifically: Given the activation of one of a bicultural's specific cultural identities, will he or she allocate punishment to deviant employees of different cultural backgrounds differently based on whether he or she views them as an in-group or out-group member? In Study 1, I show that Asian-American biculturals do assess deviant employees of different cultural backgrounds differently …

Randomized Search Of Graphs In Log Space And Probabilistic Computation, Wen-Ju Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reingold has shown that L = SL, that s-t connectivity in a poly-mixing digraph is complete for promise-RL, and that s-t connectivity for a poly-mixing out-regular digraph with known stationary distribution is in L. Several properties that bound the mixing times of random walks on digraphs have been identified, including the digraph conductance and the digraph spectral expansion. However, rapidly mixing digraphs can still have exponential cover time, thus it is important to specifically identify structural properties of digraphs that effect cover times. We examine the complexity of random walks on a basic parameterized family of unbalanced digraphs called Strong …

Factlessness & Faultlessness: Individual Differences & Dimensions Of Philosophical Dispute, Geoffrey Scott Holtzman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project addresses the question of why philosophical disputes persist, and tackles the problem of how we might better approach them. I demonstrate empirically several ways in which personality, gender, and other factors are associated with specific philosophical beliefs. Typically, one might assume that these individual difference factors are irrelevant to philosophy, and can only serve to bias philosophical disputants. Against this view, I present four case studies, which collectively highlight the different ways in which individual differences in lived experience may be inseparable from philosophical concepts themselves.

Policy Partners In The Neoliberal Age: Corresponding School And Prison Reforms Since 1970, Jeremy Paul Benson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a comparative policy study of changes in education and incarceration of the past 40 years. Following national and global trends, New York City saw public school and carceral policies converge as the city experienced massive deindustrialization and governmental cutbacks while its political economy shifted to one driven by finance, investment, real estate, and the growth of a low-wage service sector. These changes dramatically increased economic inequality across racial lines, and spurred the intimate linkage of public education and state incarceration as institutional tools for the mass management of low-income communities of color. Following from a growing policy …

A Derivation Of The Tonal Hierarchy From Basic Perceptual Processes, David Smey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades music psychologists have explained the functioning of tonal music in terms of the tonal hierarchy, a stable schema of relative structural importance that helps us interpret the events in a passage of tonal music. This idea has been most influentially disseminated by Carol Krumhansl in her 1990 monograph Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch. Krumhansl hypothesized that this sense of the importance or centrality of certain tones of a key is learned through exposure to tonal music, in particular by learning the relative frequency of appearance of the various pitch classes in tonal passages. The correlation of pitch-class …