Digital Commons Network^™

Towards Interpretable Machine Reading Comprehension With Mixed Effects Regression And Exploratory Prompt Analysis, Luca Del Signore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We investigate the properties of natural language prompts that determine their difficulty in machine reading comprehension tasks. While much work has been done benchmarking language model performance at the task level, there is considerably less literature focused on how individual task items can contribute to interpretable evaluations of natural language understanding. Such work is essential to deepening our understanding of language models and ensuring their responsible use as a key tool in human machine communication. We perform an in depth mixed effects analysis on the behavior of three major generative language models, comparing their performance on a large reading comprehension …

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 …

Somos Boricuas Y Estamos Despertando: Decolonial Education, Collective Identity, And The Struggle For Puerto Rican Studies, Ricardo Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Student movements have been and continue to be major catalysts for social change. The Puerto Rican student movement at The City University of New York (CUNY) during the late 1960s and early 1970s played a central role in desegregating CUNY—the largest urban university system in the United States—and establishing Black and Puerto Rican studies departments throughout the CUNY system. Student-activists also agitated for participatory democracy and community control of university institutions. Despite the movement’s intellectual contributions and its impact on higher education, it has received little scholarly attention. This study helps fill that gap by exploring the movement’s origins and …

Improving Collagen-Mimetic Fibrils To Study Fibrillogenesis And Effects Of Disease-Causing Mutations On Fibrillogenesis, Faizunnahar Dewan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Collagen, the most abundant protein in the human body, serves as the scaffold of connective tissue and has biomaterial applications to promote wound healing. The need to study collagen further stems from a disease perspective, as mutations in collagen lead to numerous connective tissue diseases. While collagen has been explored extensively at the triple helix level, much remains undiscovered regarding its function at the fibril level due to the lack of an effective collagen model system. Using tandemly repeating “sequence units” that contain sequences from native collagen, our lab has previously developed fibril-forming collagen-mimetic peptides (FCMPs), which provide tools to …

Investigating Epistemic Violence In Schools Using Machine Learning (Ai) To Explore The Effects Of Culturally Inclusive Curricula On High School Students’ Racial-Ethnic And Civic Identities, Leylah M. Bighach

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated the impact of culturally sustaining/inclusive curricula (CSP/CIC) and experiences of racism in school on racial-ethnic identity, racial self-worth, civic efficacy, and activism for African American/Black, Latino(a)(x), Asian, and Indigenous youth. The effect of CIC/CSP on developmental psychological self-concepts and the impact of the public health crises occurring in 2020 on curricula and activism was explored. The effect of CIC/CSP on non-White youth from New York City was captured using an interactive web-based survey (n=155) and quantified using a branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning. Consensus narratives and focus groups (n=20) were used to follow up on …

Between Two Messiahs: An Ethnography Of Settler-Colonizers In The West Bank, Amir Reicher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a study of settler-colonialism. Based on fieldwork among Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it analyzes from an anthropological perspective how a settler-colonial process takes place. Officially, since the signing of the Oslo Accords, with few exceptions, Israel ceased to build new settlements in the West Bank. But, on the ground, from the 1990s onwards, the West Bank hinterland was scattered with over 150 illegal outposts, strategically constructed to appropriate as much land as possible. Often established on remote hilltops, the illegal outposts are the central tool today in appropriating Palestinian land, and the “outpost people” who …

The Relationship Between “Black Lives Matter” Movement Protests And Police Arrests In New York City, Chicago, And Los Angeles: An Empirical Analysis, Lukas Louwagie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The summer of 2020 marked a boiling point of protest and frustration at long-criticized police behavior in the United States. The events that summer revealed the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement as something that could not be ignored and was capable of drawing national support and attention across many dividing lines (Mitchell 2020). Today, it seems evident that the BLM movement has had a substantial impact on modern political discourse—yet its impact on police behavior and reform, the primary target of the movement, is murky. Police departments across the nation are pushing back against calls to defund and reform their …

Recursive Functional Learning In Nonfluent Aphasia, Gerald C. Imaezue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

People with nonfluent aphasia (PWNA) require feedback from an external agent as well self-feedback to facilitate performance of language production tasks. The extent to which PWNA can use self-feedback alone to improve their task performance is unknown. In addition, it is argued that self-feedback may reinforce or minimize performance errors over time. To test whether either is the case, we introduce an original learning mechanism, recursive functional learning, which uses self-feedback loops to optimize recursively multiple subsystems (cognitive and linguistic subsystems) that PWNA engage during task performance. We used this mechanism to underpin a novel automated procedure we developed, recursive …

Population Genomics, Ecology And Conservation Of Asterias Sea Stars In The North Atlantic, Melenia I. Giakoumis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Uncovering how species respond to environmental change is a central question in biology (Ehrlén & Morris 2015; Habibullah et al. 2022). It is the key to elucidating the past, understanding the present and predicting the future of species’ population dynamics. This dissertation investigates the influence of environmental change on intertidal species’ distributions and genomics at several timescales, with implications for conservation.

Environmental changes have occurred throughout history, on a geological scale, and have shaped the global patterns of species’ distributions and population sizes. Biologists have long studied how geological history has shaped species distributions (Sanmartín 2012) in both terrestrial (Liu …

Artists, Activists, And Therapists Making Meaning Of Collective Violence In Lebanon: A Community-Engaged Participatory Research Study, Nawal Muradwij

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study collaborated with community-engaged artists, activists, and mental health workers living in Lebanon to explore the community narratives that exist around collective violence in Lebanon. With the support of a community advisory board, in-depth interviews, and focus groups were utilized to understand the associations that participants had with the construct of collective violence as it pertains to communities in Lebanon and their understanding of its impact on collective mental health. The sample of artists, activists, and mental health workers framed collective violence in Lebanon as intergenerational, perpetual, and institutionally and politically entrenched. Cultural concepts that described the impact of …

Colonial Investments: The Global Coordinates Of The English Political Imaginary, 1628–1668, Nathan D. Nikolic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The main question my dissertation attempts to address is: what role did the expansion of English colonial trades play in the transformation of English society and government between the Petition of Right and the early years of the Restoration (1628-1668)? My thesis is that during this period, colonial expansion rose to the level of a general national interest and that many early seventeenth-century texts index the complexities and tensions of this development. As a small but very organized group of merchants, peers, and MPs mobilized the military and financial technologies of colonization to support Parliament’s war against Charles I, their …

Drug Repurposing Using Gene Expression Data Mining, Yue Qiu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The conventional drug discovery process that employs the "one disease, one target, one drug'' paradigm is expensive, time-consuming, and has a high rate of failure for multi-genic complex diseases. An alternative approach to drug discovery is to repurpose an existing drug that has been used to treat some medical conditions. Drug repurposing is considered a promising method due to its accelerated the process of drug discovery and lower overall cost and risk.

Drug-perturbed gene expression profiles are powerful phenotype readouts of biological systems, and they have been widely used in drug repurposing studies. However, the existing drug-perturbed gene expression datasets …

Broadcasting La Presencia Latina: Tracing Identities Across Fields Of Interaction In Rural Minnesota, Anthony J. Harb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation project traces the concerted efforts of an emergent Latinx immigrant community in Westplain, Minnesota to construct and assert their individual and collective identities within the public sphere through a range of multimodal and face-to-face communicative resources. I address enduring questions within the fields of linguistic anthropology, language education, and Latinx (media) studies through a multi-sited ethnography centered around three focal field sites: (1) a Spanish-language community radio program I call La Gran Comunidad Latina (LGCL); (2) a college-level civic engagement Spanish conversation course titled Noticias Comunitarias (NC) designed and taught in partnership with LGCL; and (3) an antiracist …

Abuse Victimization And Impulsivity In Incarcerated Males: Examining The Roles Of Affective Instability And Trauma Symptoms, Jacqueline K. Douglas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Incarcerated individuals with a history of physical and/or sexual abuse have been found to exhibit increased levels of impulsivity compared to those with no abuse history (Carli et al., 2014; Davis et al., 2017; Sergentanis et al., 2014). Given that impulsivity is a risk factor for criminal delinquency (Carroll et al., 2006; Kamaluddin et al., 2015; Zimmerman, 2010), it is important to gain a thorough understanding of psychological factors that may contribute to higher levels of impulsivity in incarcerated populations. The present study examined the mechanisms underlying the relationship of physical and/or sexual abuse history to impulsivity in a sample …

Singlet Oxygen-Mediated Conformational Flexibility, Antioxidant, And Isomerization Studies In Chemistry And Biochemistry, Oliver Turque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Three chapters are included in this dissertation, each of which describes non-oxidative reactions, with peroxy intermediates formed between singlet oxygen (¹O₂) and substrate. (1) Novel discoveries related to the intermediate formed by ¹O₂ and dimethyl disulfane are explored. (2) A new mechanism is proposed, wherein the dihedral angle CS–SC (θ) determines the pro- or antioxidant activity of an organic disulfide. (3) A review of ¹O₂'s ability to facilitate the geometric isomerization of alkenes and polyenes is presented in Chapter 3.

Chapter 1 investigates the role of singlet oxygen potentially …

Does The Apoe-Ε4 Allele Differentially Influence Cognition: A Longitudinal Investigation In Healthy Older Adults At Risk For Alzheimer’S Disease, Aditya Kulkarni

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: The apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele is the strongest susceptibility factor for sporadic, late-onset, Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, not all persons who carry the ε4 allele show significant cognitive decline, and thus do not progress to dementia. The impact of the ε4 allele on memory decline has been documented primarily in populations already demonstrating cognitive impairment (i.e., those with mild cognitive impairment or dementia), with fewer investigations completed in baseline healthy older adults. Investigations of the ε4 allele and its influence on non-memory domains are also sparse in the literature. Furthermore, these cognitive investigations are typically cross-sectional and …

You Don’T Even Need The Ghosts: A Writer’S Look At The Turn Of The Screw, Andrea M. Schenkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The novella Turn of the Screw by Henry James was first published in 1898 as a serialized novel in Collier's Magazine. The short novel is characterized by its concise language. James chooses words carefully and consciously. The linguistic compression forces the reader to deal intensively with the main protagonists of the novel: the Governess, the children, Miles and Flora, and Mrs. Grose. Nothing is as it seems. James aims to challenge the reader by forcing them to constantly question what they read.

Countless essays have been written about the text since the novel was published. The figures, especially those …

Characterization And Modulation Of The Emergent Material Properties Of Biomolecular Condensates, Alfredo Vidal Ceballos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The discovery of membraneless organelles has revolutionized the field of cell biology and our understanding of cell compartmentalization. These organelles lack a distinct phospholipid bilayer and interact with the cytoplasm mediated by a liquid-liquid interface. The emergent properties and characterization of these organelles are essential for decoding the mechanisms underlying their function and dysfunction. In this thesis, we focus on two reconstituted in-vitro model systems of protein condensates and advance current methodology in order to address these fundamental questions. The first model system examined is the neuronal granule protein Fragile X Mental Retardation Protein (FMRP), an RNA-binding protein, that aids …

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 …

Remote Sensing Characterization Of Ecosystem Structure And Functional Types To Inform On Biodiversity Conservation In The Lowland Chocó Rainforest, Derek Tesser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on the utilization of remote sensing techniques to characterize ecosystem structure and functional types to inform on biodiversity conservation. This work is motivated by a guiding hypothesis that increased degradation of tropical forest biodiversity due to human activity results in in measurable changes in ecosystem processes that can be detected using remote sensing technologies. Throughout this dissertation, testing of aspects of this hypothesis involve comparing areas with varying degrees of human-induced degradation in a biodiverse tropical ecoregion, the lowland Chocó rainforest of Ecuador. Remote sensing data is used to evaluate changes in vegetation structure, thermal regimes, and …

Observers' Perceptions Of Rapport In Accusatorial Interrogations, Gabriela Rico

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rapport is widely regarded as a necessary precondition for interrogations and is thought to lay the foundation for the success of later interrogation techniques. In accusatorial contexts in which suspects are often resistant to disclose potentially self-incriminating information, rapport enables interrogators to gain the suspect’s trust, respect, and cooperation. Although the specific psychological mechanisms by which rapport achieves these effects are largely understudied, rapport-building techniques resemble principles of social influence (Goodman-Delahunty & Howes, 2014), specifically persuasion. Techniques such as establishing common ground, engaging in active listening, demonstrating empathy, and disclosing personal information may serve as impression management strategies, which allow …

Ai-Supported Academic Advising: Exploring Chatgpt’S Current State And Future Potential Toward Student Empowerment, Daisuke Akiba, Michelle C. Fraboni

Publications and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI), once a phenomenon primarily in the world of science fiction, has evolved rapidly in recent years, steadily infiltrating into our daily lives. ChatGPT, a freely accessible AI-powered large language model designed to generate human-like text responses to users, has been utilized in several areas, such as the healthcare industry, to facilitate interactive dissemination of information and decision-making. Academic advising has been essential in promoting success among university students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Unfortunately, however, student advising has been marred with problems, with the availability and accessibility of adequate advising being among the hurdles. The current study …

Fiqws Killer Stories Syllabus For Writing Section, Serhiy Metenko, Serhiy Metenko

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus informs the students of the course and their expected deliverables.

Mca 20500 - Editing (Fall 2023), Zachary Finkelstein

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Lead Self To Lead Others: Intersection Of Courage, Self-Awareness, & Leadership Communication For Self-Leadership & Development, Maribel Paulino

Student Theses and Dissertations

Toxic workplaces are recognized as the strongest predictor of attrition and turnover, contributing to global disengagement (70% of team engagement is attributed to managers who are also quietly quitting) particularly by way of workplace cultures, pay and benefits, and employee well-being. A recent workplace research study suggests that 59% of the global workforce is disengaged, 44% is experiencing record high stress levels, 21% is experiencing anger, 56% is struggling, and 24% feel cared for; meanwhile, global disengagement is costing the global economy a substantial $8.8 trillion dollars. As the world continues to evolve, leaders must forge ahead continuously shifting how …

Publishing Inequality In Lgbtqia+ Research In Psychology: A Content Analysis, Mackenzie L. Fingerhut

Student Theses

Despite the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973 and ego-dystonic homosexuality in 1987, nonheteronormative sexual orientations remain stigmatized and underrepresented in scientific literature. To estimate the prevalence of LGBTQIA+ topics in popular psychological research, the author queried more than 20,000 articles from 1987 to 2022 in the two most cited journals in each of four major domains (cognitive, clinical, developmental and social). In addition, the author randomly queried 20% of all empirical articles published from 1987 to 2021 in the top eight empirical journals to understand how often sexuality …

Transgender And Gender Nonconforming Individuals And Intimate Partner Violence Resources In Lgbtq+ Organizations, Claire Herr

Student Theses

A meta-analysis reporting on the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization of transgender populations found transgender people were two to three times more likely to experience IPV than cisgender people (Peitzmeier et al., 2020). The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) (2012) found transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people, particularly transgender women and transgender Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), were more likely to be threatened and harassed by their abusive partners than cisgender people. TGNC people may be at a high risk of IPV due to the lack of services designed for TGNC victims of IPV. Once …

Brain Arteriovenous Malformations: The Long Way Ahead In Physics, Chemistry And Mr-Angiography Practice Before Fully Replacing Digital Subtraction Angiography., Subhendra N. Sarkar

Publications and Research

Typically, only high field systems are equipped with stronger gradients and short RF pulse designs, a must for high temporal resolution that are also responsible for high SAR, high susceptibility as well as neurostimulation. Gradient induced image noise tends to be high at 3T. Often vendors try to ameliorate such increased image noise with multi-channel head arrays and aggressive filter designs allowing an appearance of high SNR and CNR quality; however, the achievable SNR and CNR in the AVM remain limited as the analyzed articles by Zhuo et al seem to have in common. A short term solution to harvest …

Approaches To The Erdős–Straus Conjecture, Ivan V. Morozov

Publications and Research

The Erdős–Straus conjecture, initially proposed in 1948 by Paul Erdős and Ernst G. Straus, asks whether the equation 4/n = 1/x + 1/y + 1/z is solvable for all n ∈ N and some x, y, z ∈ N. This problem touches on properties of Egyptian fractions, which had been used in ancient Egyptian mathematics. There exist many partial solutions, mainly in the form of arithmetic progressions and therefore residue classes. In this work we explore partial solutions and aim to expand them.

The Contribution Of Syntactic Awareness To Vocabulary Learning, Harry M. Steves

Theses and Dissertations

We explore the relationship between syntactic awareness and vocabulary learning, targeting parts of speech, punctuation, and relative clauses. Performance on a syntactic awareness questionnaire correlated with performance on low-difficulty vocabulary learning involving nonsense words. Base vocabulary had a significant effect on the contribution of syntactic awareness to vocabulary learning.