Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

African Land Mammal Ages, John Van Couvering, Eric Delson

Publications and Research

We define 17 African land mammal ages, or AFLMAs, covering the Cenozoic record of the Afro-arabian continent, the planet’s second largest land mass. While fossiliferous deposits are absent on the eroded plateau of the continent’s interior, almost 800 fossil genera from over 350 locations have now been identified in coastal deposits, karst caves, and in the Neogene rift valleys. Given a well-developed geochronologic framework, together with continuing revision to the fossil record—both stimulated by the story of human evolution in Africa—and also to compensate for the variation in fossil ecosystems across such great distances, the AFLMAs are biochronological units defined …

Variation In Personality Among Semi-Wild Myanmar Timber Elephants, Sateesh Venkatesh

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines two personality traits: exploration and neophobia, which could influence human-elephant conflicts. Thirty-one semi-wild elephants were tested over two trials using a custom novel puzzle tube containing three tasks and three rewards. Our studies show that elephants do vary significantly between individuals in both exploration and neophobia.

Applying The Food-Energy-Water Nexus Approach To Urban Agriculture: From Few To Fewp (Food-Energy- Water-People), Silvio Caputo, Victoria Schoen, Kathrin Spect, Baptiste Grard, Chris Blythe, Nevin Cohen, Runrid Fox-Kämper, Jason Hawes, Joshua Newell, Lidia Poniży

Publications and Research

Many studies examine the correlation between the use of resources such as water, energy and land, and the production of food. These nexus studies focus predominantly on large scale systems, often considering the social dimensions only in terms of access to resources and participation in the decision- making process, rather than individual attitudes and behaviours with respect to resource use. Such a concept of the nexus is relevant to urban agriculture (UA), but it requires customisation to the particular characteristics of growing food in cities, which is practiced mainly at a small scale and produces not only food but also …

Nyc Communities Battle Flooding, But Not From Coastal Storms, Danielle C. Cruz

Capstones

A look at the impact high-tide flooding and inland flooding has on various communities in New York City. This article also looks into what city officials are doing and not doing to address the concerns of residents who have had to deal with recurring flooding in their community.

Link to Capstone: https://danielle-cruz.format.com/nyc-communities-battle-flooding

Understanding Of Aerosol Transmission Of Covid 19 In Indoor Environments, Adama Barro, Cathal O'Toole, Jacob S. Lopez, Matthew Quinones, Sherene Moore

Publications and Research

Our reason for discussing severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) or 2019 novel corona virus (Covid-19), is to understand its aerosol transmission characteristics in indoor spaces and to mitigate further spread of this disease by designing a new HVAC system. The problem that we are tackling is the spread of covid-19 droplets through aerosol transmission by looking at potential engineering solutions to the existing HVAC systems. The purpose is to eradicate the spread of the COVID-19 by testing indoor spaces in an effort to understand the effectiveness of ventilation controls. We believe that scientists and engineers have not …

Integrating Digital Tools In Remote Learning To Enhance The Delivery Methods Of Technical Content In Undergraduate Geosciences, Ruslana Baker, Malek Shami, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer

Publications and Research

The global transition to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic was an extremely difficult task for both students and faculty in geological sciences. Technical courses, such as Structural Geology, Mineralogy, Petrology, and Invertebrate Paleontology, that require in-person lectures and laboratory sessions involving various rocks and mineral samples, fossils, maps, and models, were a major concern at the start. The challenge of delivering the technical content via Microsoft Teams, Skype, Webex, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Zoom, and other internet based platforms was not only a burden for the faculty to carry, as students were struggling to conceptualize outcrop-and-type-section-based information and link …

The Internet Never Forgets: Image-Based Sexual Abuse And The Workplace, John Schriner, Melody Lee Rood

Publications and Research

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA), commonly known as revenge pornography, is a type of cyberharassment that often results in detrimental effects to an individual's career and livelihood. Although there exists valuable research concerning cyberharassment in the workplace generally, there is little written about specifically IBSA and the workplace. This chapter examines current academic research on IBSA, the issues with defining this type of abuse, victim blaming, workplace policy, and challenges to victim-survivors' redress. The authors explore monetary motivation for websites that host revenge pornography and unpack how the dark web presents new challenges to seeking justice. Additionally, this chapter presents recommendations …

The Relationship Between Impact Energy And Glass Fracture Via .177 Caliber Steel Bbs, Jocenel Beach

Student Theses

Fractured glass is often found at shooting scenes and can provide useful information for crime scene reconstruction. Mechanical glass fracture from a projectile impact can result in different types of fracture patterns. The degree of fracture depends on several factors including: type of glass, the thickness of the glass, curvature (if any), distance from the muzzle, contact angle, and type of projectile. Correlating impact energy to the degree of glass fracture can provide useful information regarding the muzzle-to-target distance for a particular firearm/ammunition combination. This research focuses on the projectile impact velocity of .177 steel BBs shot from a pneumatic …

Snow-Albedo Feedback In Northern Alaska: How Vegetation Influences Snowmelt, Lucas C. Reckhaus

Theses and Dissertations

This paper investigates how the snow-albedo feedback mechanism of the arctic is changing in response to rising climate temperatures. Specifically, the interplay of vegetation and snowmelt, and how these two variables can be correlated. This has the potential to refine climate modelling of the spring transition season. Research was conducted at the ecoregion scale in northern Alaska from 2000 to 2020. Each ecoregion is defined by distinct topographic and ecological conditions, allowing for meaningful contrast between the patterns of spring albedo transition across surface conditions and vegetation types. The five most northerly ecoregions of Alaska are chosen as they encompass …

Eco 230 / Mgt 230 Introduction To Economic And Managerial Statistics, George Vachadze

Open Educational Resources

Development and application of modern statistical methods, including such elements of descriptive statistics and statistical inference as correlation and regression analysis, probability theory, sampling procedures, normal distribution and binomial distribution, estimation, and testing of hypotheses.

A Comparison Of Tribal Sovereignty, Self-Determination, And Environmental Justice At The Epa’S Onondaga Lake And Tar Creek Superfund Sites, Thomas Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program mandates that Native American tribes are afforded the same treatment as states in the implementation of environmental remediation projects; however, the degree of coordination and consultation between the EPA and sovereign tribal governments varies widely between sites. Two of the Superfund program’s highest profile sites with Native American interest, northeast Oklahoma’s Tar Creek and central New York’s Onondaga Lake, are characterized by such a disparity in tribal participation. While Oklahoma’s Quapaw Tribe would ultimately enter into a number of cooperative agreements with the EPA for direct control over remedial projects, New York’s Onondaga Nation …

Decision Tree For Predicting The Party Of Legislators, Afsana Mimi

Publications and Research

The motivation of the project is to identify the legislators who voted frequently against their party in terms of their roll call votes using Office of Clerk U.S. House of Representatives Data Sets collected in 2018 and 2019. We construct a model to predict the parties of legislators based on their votes. The method we used is Decision Tree from Data Mining. Python was used to collect raw data from internet, SAS was used to clean data, and all other calculations and graphical presentations are performed using the R software.

Philosophical Perspectives, Jochen Albrecht

Publications and Research

This entry follows in the footsteps of Anselin’s famous 1989 NCGIA working paper entitled “What is special about spatial?” (a report that is very timely again in an age when non-spatial data scientists are ignorant of the special characteristics of spatial data), where he outlines three unrelated but fundamental characteristics of spatial data. In a similar vein, I am going to discuss some philosophical perspectives that are internally unrelated to each other and could warrant individual entries in this Body of Knowledge. The first one is the notions of space and time and how they have evolved in …

Cybersecurity (Cs 3550): Lecture 21: Hacking Democracy: Election Security, Michael Whiteman, Nyc Tech-In-Residence Corps

Open Educational Resources

Lecture for the course: CIS 3550: Cybersecurity - "21: Hacking Democracy: Election Security" delivered at Baruch College in Spring 2020 by Michael Whiteman as part of the Tech-in-Residence Corps program.

Does Applying Deep Learning In Financial Sentiment Analysis Lead To Better Classification Performance?, Tao Wang, Changhe Yuan, Cuiyuan Wang

Publications and Research

Using a unique data set from Seeking Alpha, we compare the deep learning approach with traditional machine learning approaches in classifying financial text. We apply the long short-term memory (LSTM) as the deep learning method and Naive Bayes, SVM, Logistic Regression, XGBoost as the traditional machine learning approaches. The results suggest that the LSTM model outperforms the conventional machine learning methods on all metrics. Based on the tSNE graph, the success of the LSTM model is partially explained as the high-accuracy LSTM model distinguishes between positive and negative important sentiment words while those words are chosen based on SHAP values …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 6.0, Robert O. Duncan, Joseph Bisz, Christina Boyle, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Carolyn Stallard, Deborah Sturm

Publications and Research

The CUNY Games Network is an organization dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in the developing field of games-based learning. We connect educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY and beyond who are interested in digital and non-digital games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching and inquiry-based learning. These proceedings summarize the CUNY Games Conference 6.0, where scholars shared research findings at a three-day event to promote and discuss game-based pedagogy in higher education. Presenters could share findings in oral presentations, posters, demos, or play testing sessions. The conference also included workshops on how to modify existing …

Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref

Dissertations and Theses

In dynamic environments, split-second sensorimotor decisions must be prioritized according to potential payoffs to maximize overall rewards. The impact of relative value on deliberative perceptual judgments has been examined extensively, but relatively little is known about value-biasing mechanisms in the common situation where physical evidence is strong but the time to act is severely limited. This research examines the behavioral and electrophysiological indices of how value biases split-second perceptual decisions and the possible mechanisms underlying the process. In prominent decision models, a noisy but statistically stationary representation of sensory evidence is integrated over time to an action-triggering bound, and value-biases …