Digital Commons Network^™

The Worst Horror Of All: Greene’S Political And Salvific Imagination In Brighton Rock, James C. Mcguire

Theses and Dissertations

An evaluation of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock as it apprehends the Catholic novel as form. With ample assistance from Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Robert Hugh Benson's The Lord of the World, and select works of Fredric Jameson—most notably The Political Unconscious—this analysis seeks to clarify the politico-spiritual "horizon" evident in Greene's first "Catholic novel." By reviewing the novel through the lens of both Catholic theology and modern historical dialectic material criticism, this evaluation reclaims Graham Greene's early political radicalism that critics identify better in his later, less-religious texts. Discovered most clearly in the ending …

A Tool-Supported Metamodel For Program Bugfix Analysis In Empirical Software Engineering, Manal Zneit

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis describes a software modeling approach aimed at addressing empirical studies in software engineering. We build a metamodel that provides an overview of the taxonomy of program bugfixes in deep learning programs. For modeling purposes, we present a prototype tool that is an implementation of the model-driven techniques presented.

How Federal Pollution Discharge Permits Affect U.S. Water Quality: A Study On Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Cloe C. Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses difference-in-difference regression models to examine how state-level pollution discharge permits on concentrated animal feeding operations affect U.S. water quality. I ultimately deem the permitting to be ineffective at improving water quality, calling attention to the need to re-evaluate the ``socially optimal level of pollution."

Reconfigurable Hyperbolic Polaritonics With Correlated Oxide Metasurfaces, Neda Alsadat Aghamiri, Guangwei Hu, Alireza Fali, Zhen Zhang, Jiahan Li, Sivacarendran Balendhran, Sumeet Walia, Sharath Sriram, James H. Edgar, Shriram Ramanathan, Andrea Alù, Yohannes Abate

Advanced Science Research Center

Polaritons enable subwavelength confinement and highly anisotropic flows of light over a wide spectral range, holding the promise for applications in modern nanophotonic and optoelectronic devices. However, to fully realize their practical application potential, facile methods enabling nanoscale active control of polaritons are needed. Here, we introduce a hybrid polaritonicoxide heterostructure platform consisting of van der Waals crystals, such as hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) or alpha-phase molybdenum trioxide (α- MoO₃), transferred on nanoscale oxygen vacancy patterns on the surface of prototypical correlated perovskite oxide, samarium nickel oxide, SmNiO₃ (SNO). Using a combination of scanning probe microscopy and …

Your Discomfort Is Valid: Big Feelings And Open Pedagogy, Liz Pearce, Silvia L. Lin Hanick, Amy R. Hofer, Lori Townsend, Michaela Willi Hooper

Publications and Research

This article explores the affective reactions of 13 community college students engaged in an open pedagogy textbook creation project. The instructor and first author, a human development and family services faculty member and department chair at a community college in Oregon, received feedback from her students that the project impacted them differently than past learning experiences. Student engagement with research and the diverse personal experiences of their classmates fostered both personal challenges and growth. This article groups these experiences into themes and explores different theoretical lenses, including scaffolding (constructivism), transformative learning, threshold concepts and safe spaces/brave spaces. We discuss the …

How Groupy Is A Group?, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

Various Cooperating Groups

Why and how do they cooperate

Bees

Chinese troops

BLM demonstrators

The reasons are different in the three cases.

1) Bees cooperate because they are all sisters who have thesame DNA. From a purely evolutionary point of view the survival of one is the survival of all.

2) Chinese troops cooperate because they are obeying a single commander.

3) Black lives people cooperate because they have a single goal, and they have communicated to be together at one time and place.

The purpose of this work is to provide a definition of the "amount" of groupiness, revealed …

Engl 110: College Writing (Comedy, Satire, & Persuasion), Scott R. Kapuscinski

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus provides a themed approach to Freshman composition. Students are tasked with composing three essays in three distinct styles. Student engagement is high through the use of student-sourced primary sources (funny videos from YouTube, etc.) and the emphasis on thesis building and critical thinking.

Section 1: Comedy & the thesis-based essay

Section 2: Satire & writing to persuade

Section 3: Satire in Art & independent research

Observed-Data Dic For Spatial Panel Data Models, Osman Dogan, Ye Yang, Süleyman Taşpınar

Publications and Research

In spatial panel data modeling, researchers often need to choose a spatial weights matrix from a pool of candidates, and decide between static and dynamic specifications. We propose observed data deviance information criteria to resolve these specification problems in a Bayesian setting. The presence of high dimensional latent variables (i.e., the individual and time fixed effects) in spatial panel data models invalidates the use of a deviance information criterion (DIC) formulated with the conditional and the complete-data likelihood functions of spatial panel data models. We first show how to analytically integrate out these latent variables from the complete data likelihood …

Crime Scene Behaviors Of Sexual Murderers With And Without A Criminal History Of Sexual Assault, Tirza Z. Ben Ari

Student Theses

This exploratory study is intended to serve as a gateway to future research about the differences between sexual murderers with (HSAO) and without (N-HSAO) a recorded criminal history of sexual assault, on which there is little to no comparative literature. This study aims to extend our understanding of these groups by comparing their crime scene (and crime-related) behaviors and exploring their underlying psychological functioning. The results suggest that N-HSAO have a significantly higher tendency to murder friends or strangers, initially attack or abduct their victims from the victim’s residence, use more than one killing method in the murder, attack their …

A Comparison Of Methods Used For The Elimination Of Organics From Soil Prior To Analysis By Ftir-Atr And Sem-Eds, Argeliz Pomales

Student Theses

This project suggests improvements to the treatment methods utilized for the sample preparation and evaluation of minerals in soil samples encountered in forensic science casework and research. The evaluation of pre-treated and post-treated soil samples were performed using Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy with Attenuated Total Reflection (FTIR-ATR) and Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS). Because soil samples contain a significant amount of organic matter and water which interfere with examination of these minerals while using these instruments, pretreatment methods are necessary to isolate the mineral fraction for examination and analysis.

Soil samples were first sieved with various size stainless steel mesh …

Seasonal Effects On The Arrival And Colonization Of Blow Flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) On Carrion In New Jersey, Amanda A. Hernandez

Student Theses

Blow flies (Order: Diptera, Family: Calliphoridae) are a valuable forensic tool. Female blow flies will lay eggs (colonize) on remains often within minutes of death and entomological methods are based on their behavior and development to extrapolate postmortem intervals (PMI). External factors, such as temperature and weather patterns can influence timing of this behavior. This study seeks to gain a better understanding of the environmental factors that impact this behavior across two seasons. In this study, arrival and colonization behavior was investigated on rat carcasses from sunrise to sunset in a semi-rural region of New Jersey (n=64). Video recording software …

The Role Of Nest Location On The Reproductive Success Of Piping Plovers Breeding At Rockaway Beach, New York, Clara I.D. Arndtsen

Theses and Dissertations

The study’s goal was to learn what aspects of the piping plover experience affect reproductive outcomes at Rockaway Beach Endangered Species Nesting Area. Nest location was found to help predict reproductive success. Nests further from American oystercatcher nests were likely to fledge more chicks. Reproductive success was low in 2021.

Gaze In Cats And Dogs, Michael Bogese

Theses and Dissertations

Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) developed many behaviors across domestication, one example being gaze behavior. Gaze is the crux of other behaviors that make dogs unique in human-animal dyads, including lookbacks, gaze-following, and participation in an oxytocin feedback loop. Gaze behavior may have been motivated and sustained by evergreen cooperative relationships between dogs and humans (e.g., hunting, service roles). One way to confirm this relationship is to compare dogs to a domesticated species that lacks a protracted history of companionship: the domestic cat (Felis catus). In this study, we compare the gaze duration to owners of …

"The Personal Is The Political And The Political Is Personal:" Engendering Understanding Through Global Allegory In Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist And Exit West, Nicole Ordonez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West by British-Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid. In both novels, Hamid uses the representational literary device of allegory to present what I will frame as works of “global allegory,” or novels of global literature that present the world as one interconnected space rather than as one divided by borders and nations. In doing so, I will be situating my argument as a rebuttal of Frederic Jameson’s “Third World Literature in the Age of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson draws a distinction between works of third world and first world literature along the lines of allegory. …

Mtorc1 And Mtorc2 Complexes Regulate The Untargeted Metabolomics And Amino Acid Metabolites Profile Through Mitochondrial Bioenergetic Functions In Pancreatic Beta Cells, Ghada A. Soliman, Rinat Abzalimov, Ye He

Advanced Science Research Center

Background: Pancreatic beta cells regulate bioenergetics efficiency and secret insulin in response to glucose and nutrient availability. The mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) network orchestrates pancreatic progenitor cell growth and metabolism by nucleating two complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2. Objective: To determine the impact of mTORC1/mTORC2 inhibition on amino acid metabolism in mouse pancreatic beta cells (Beta-TC-6 cells, ATCC-CRL-11506) using high-resolution metabolomics (HRM) and live-mitochondrial functions. Methods: Pancreatic beta TC-6 cells were incubated for 24 h with either: RapaLink-1 (RL); Torin-2 (T); rapamycin (R); metformin (M); a combination of RapaLink-1 and metformin (RLM); Torin-2 and metformin (TM); compared to the control. …

National Data Sets And Calculating Percentile Ranks: A Guide For Benchmarking Library Collection Spending, Christine Mcevilly

Publications and Research

National data sets can be used by a librarian to compare library collection (materials) spending to that of similar schools, even if the librarian has little or no experience in statistics or database management tools. Percentile rank is a simple descriptive statistic that provides a way to present data with maximum impact on faculty and administrators who make funding decisions. Librarians must combine knowledge of their local circumstances with a basic understanding of the structure of the datasets. The article will focus on step-by-step methodologies, illustrated as they were used at the College of Staten Island, City University of New …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

Possible Causes Of Leaks In The Transfer Pipeline: Student Views At The 19 Colleges Of The City University Of New York, A. W. Logue, Yoshiko Oka, David Wutchiett, Kerstin Gentsch, Stephanie Abbeyquaye

Publications and Research

Only 11% of community college (associate’s-degree) students transfer vertically and obtain a bachelor’s degree within six years, despite over 80% originally intending to do so. These leaks in the transfer pipeline disproportionately affect students from underrepresented groups, who are more likely to attend community colleges and to leak out of the pipeline. To obtain insights about how to decrease these leaks, a survey was distributed to all City University of New York undergraduates; 31,511 responded. The survey concerned students’ life and academic circumstances, as well as their information about and views on transfer. Analyses particularly compared responses of never-transferred associate’s …

Quertci: A Tool Integrating Github Issue Querying With Comment Classification, Ye Paing, Tatiana Castro Vélez, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) researchers study (open-source) project issues and the comments and threads within to discover—among others—challenges developers face when incorporating new technologies, platforms, and programming language constructs. However, such threads accumulate, becoming unwieldy and hindering any insight researchers may gain. While existing approaches alleviate this burden by classifying issue thread comments, there is a gap between searching popular open-source software repositories (e.g., those on GitHub) for issues containing particular keywords and feeding the results into a classification model. This paper demonstrates a research infrastructure tool called QuerTCI that bridges this gap by integrating the GitHub issue comment search …

Formal Verification Applications For The Treekem Continuous Group Key Agreement Protocol, Alexander J. Washburn

Theses and Dissertations

The features of Secure Group Messaging, the security guarantees of Message Layer Security, and the TreeKEM protocol designed to satisfy these guarantees and features are explored. A motivation and methodology for verification via explicit model checking is presented. Subsequently, a translation of the TreeKEM protocol into a Promela reference model is described, examining the nuances explicit model checking brings. Finally the results of the formal verification methods are discussed.

"Dear Stanford: You Must Reckon With Your History Of Sexual Violence" By Seo-Young Chu, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomplete Compilation of Links to Sources Documenting Stanford’s History of Sexual Violence, in Chronological Order”—should be mandatory reading for administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and stakeholders at both Stanford and CUNY. #MeToo #MeTooAcademia

Oral Anticoagulant Underutilization Among Elderly Patients With Atrial Fibrillation: Insights From The United States Medicare Database, Muhammad Bilal Munir, Patrick Hlavacek, Allison V. Keshishian, Jennifer D. Guo, Rajesh Mallampati, Mauricio Ferri, Cristina Russ, Birol Emir, Matthew Cato, Huseyin Yuce, Jonathan C. Hsu

Publications and Research

Background

Oral anticoagulants (OACs) mitigate stroke risk in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). The study aim was to analyze prevalence and predictors of OAC underutilization.

Methods

Newly diagnosed AF patients with a CHA2DS2-VASc score ≥ 2 were identified from the US CMS Database (January 1, 2013–December 31, 2017). Patients were stratified based on having an OAC prescription versus not and the OAC prescription group was stratified by direct OAC (DOACs) versus warfarin. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to examine predictors of OAC underutilization.

Results

Among 1,204,507 identified AF patients, 617,611 patients (51.3%) were not prescribed an OAC during follow-up …

The Experiences Of Older Formerly Incarcerated Adults In A Specialized Reentry Program During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Robin O'Hanlon, Jessica Broome

Publications and Research

A growing area of concern among prison reform advocates and human rights activists is the “greying prison population” or the continuous, unified growth in the number of older incarcerated individuals. Older individuals experience an accelerated aging process while incarcerated, but are less likely to reoffend upon release. While the aging prison population has in recent years become a focus of criminological and gerontological scholars, the lived experience of older formerly incarcerated individuals during the reentry process remains understudied. Using a qualitative approach, this cohort study seeks to further elucidate the unique needs, beliefs, and perceptions of this population within the …

Review Of Emerging Approaches Utilizing Alternative Physiological Human Body Fluids In Non- Or Minimally Invasive Glucose Monitoring, Sunghoon Jang, Yu Wang, Andre Jang

Publications and Research

Diabetes can cause various acute as well as long-term complications in patients, with blood sugar levels of over 600 mg/dL, such as blindness, kidney disease, nervous & circulatory system disease, limb amputations, stroke, and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Frequent and regular blood glucose monitoring by diabetics and physicians is an essential step in the management of diabetes. Over the last five decades, there have been numerous attempts to develop viable painless non- or minimally invasive blood glucose monitoring techniques to replace all existing invasive methods, such as home blood glucose monitoring, which usually require drawing a blood sample by piercing the …

Dimensional Adjectives In Nuosu Yi, Xiao Li, Hongyong Liu

Publications and Research

In this paper, we discuss two types of dimensional adjectives in Nuosu Yi (Tibeto- Burman), which we refer to as Positive adjectives (PAs) and Equative Adjectives (EAs). We show that PAs and EAs are subject to different distributions in gradation structures: EAs are only admissible in gradation structures that can be associated with measure phrases, which include differential comparatives (e.g., Ayi is 2 cm taller than Aguo. ) and degree questions (e.g., How tall is Ayi ?). PAs are licensed elsewhere, including comparatives that do not introduce a differential (e.g., Ayi is taller than Aguo. ), the intensification construction (e.g., …

Collaborative Textbook On English Syntax (Version 1.0), Matt Garley, Karl Hagen, The Students Of Eng 270 At York College / Cuny

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Computer-Aided Response-To-Intervention For Reading Comprehension Based On Recommender System, Ming-Chi Liu, Wei-Yang Lin, Chia-Ling Tsai

Publications and Research

In 2019, New York State Education Department announced 54.6% of all students in grades 3 to 8 not meeting the standard of reading proficiency. Motivated by the need for a more efficient intervention model, we propose a recommender system to leverage the technology in machine learning to recommend suitable reading materials for effective intervention. The recommendation is based on the student's prior reading comprehension assessments and also assessments of other students at the same grade level using collaborative filtering. No other prior academic or demographic information of students is available. Two main challenges are lack of explicit ratings of reading …

Evaluation Rubric For Educational Resources For An Undergraduate English Syntax Course, Matt Garley

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Health Inequities As Measured By The Eq-5d-5l During Covid-19: Results From New York In Healthy And Diseased Persons, Erica I. Lubetkin, Di Long, Juanita A. Haagsma, Mathieu F. Janssen, Gouke J. Bonsel

Publications and Research

Introduction: The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic caused considerable psychological and physical effects in healthy and diseased New Yorkers aside from the effects in those who were infected. We investigated the relationship between known risk-enhancing and health-promoting factors (social and medical), comorbidity indicators, and, as the primary outcome, health-related quality of life (HRQoL).

Methods: Between April 22 and May 5, 2020, a market research agency (Dynata) administered a digital survey including the EQ-5D-5L and items related to individual characteristics, social position, occupational and insurance status, living situation, exposures (smoking and COVID-19), detailed chronic conditions, and experienced access to care to …

Cmv-Responsive Cd4 T Cells Have A Stable Cytotoxic Phenotype Over The First Year Post-Transplant In Patients Without Evidence Of Cmv Viremia, Lauren E. Higdon, Ayah A. Amad, Steven Schaffert, Kenneth B. Margulies, Jonathan S. Maltzman

Publications and Research

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is a known cause of morbidity and mortality in solid organ transplant recipients. While primary infection is controlled by a healthy immune system, CMV is never eradicated due to viral latency and periodic reactivation. Transplantation and associated therapies hinder immune surveillance of CMV. CD4 T cells are an important part of control of CMV reactivation. We therefore investigated how CMV impacts differentiation, functionality, and expansion of protective CD4 T cells from recipients of heart or kidney transplant in the fi rst year post-transplant without evidence of CMV viremia. We analyzed longitudinal peripheral blood samples by flow cytometry …