Digital Commons Network^™

Religion Is Not The Answer: How To Turn Restlessness Into Meaningful Change - The Egyptian Conundrum, Alain C. Seckler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The situation in Egypt and elsewhere in parts of the Arab world is to some extent reminiscent of the situation that prevailed before 1914 in Europe, where a motley array of unharnessed popular micronationalisms (today, instrumentalized religious fervor) combined with big power politics and interests and led to the cataclysm of war. With regard to Egypt, there is also a huge generational gap, with 2/3 of Egypt's population below the age of 35 years. The so-called "solutions" of the past, whether religious or secular, will no longer work if the voice of the young people is not heard by their …

Ovid's Pentheus: An In-Depth Guide For Students And Teachers To A King's Anger And Fiery Oration, Benjamin Joffe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Born out of my years of using traditional commentaries for Latin and Greek texts, both for myself as a student learning the language anew and then as a teacher sharing my experience with others &mdash and still learning the language years later &mdash this in&ndashdepth guide to Ovid's version of the story of Pentheus I have conceived as a reimagining of the genre, at once a vehicle designed to allow students to navigate their own ways through the literature and also a tool for building their analytical skills to apply liberally, earnestly, and enthusiastically to other Latin and Greek texts, …

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 …

Ridiculous Geographies: Mapping The Theatre Of The Ridiculous As Radical Aesthetic, Kelly Aliano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a comprehensive study of the artists associated with the Theatre of the Ridiculous. The discussion begins with Charles Ludlam, the most famous practitioner of the form and then extends to artists with whom he collaborated, including Jack Smith, the Play-House of the Ridiculous, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Charles Busch. The argument traces the overlapping aesthetic qualities of all of these theatre practitioners; they all shared a reverence for popular culture of the twentieth century; they all blended references from high and low culture in their dramaturgy; and they all created performances that took a unique approach to cross-dressed …

Canvas: A Fast And Accurate Geometric Sentence Alignment System Using Lexical Cues Within Complex Misalignment Settings, Hussein M. Ghaly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this paper, we present a new sentence alignment system (Canvas), which is a Python implementation of a geometric approach to sentence alignment, based on lexical cues. Canvas system is designed mainly to handle parallel texts exhibiting complex misalignment patterns, namely within English-Arabic pairs for United Nations documents. The system relies heavily on pre-indexing words/tokens in the source and target texts, and it creates correspondences between the token indexes. From this point onward, the alignment problem is reduced to a geometric problem of finding the path that runs through the True Correspondence Points (TCPs). The likelihood of a point being …

Ethnomedical, Ecological And Phytochemical Studies Of The Palauan Flora, Christopher Kitalong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There has been a serious deterioration of Palauan culture, language and traditional practices over the last century. To promote health and avoid this deterioration of tradition, ecological, ethnobotanical and phytochemical studies have been carried out on the plant Phaleria nisidai Kaneh. (Thymelaeaceae), "Delal a Kar", Palauan for "Mother of Medicine". This study is the first study that sets the foundations for the development of natural Palauan therapeutics, through validation of ethnomedically significant plants. Validations of these plants is done through documenting Palauan plant ethnomedical data; mapping the distribution of Palauan plants on limestone Rock Islands; and analyzing ethnopharmacological and phytochemical …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The Status Of Languages In Post-Independent Morocco: Moroccan National Policies And Spanish Cultural Action, Khalid Chahhou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to assess the status of languages in post-independent Morocco from two different angles: the Moroccan national policies and the Spanish cultural action. In particular, it demonstrates that the national policy in post-independent Morocco was, to a great extent, a response to the pressure exercised by the nationalist movement since 1963, the great involvement of the Francophone elite, and the carelessness and emptiness left by Spain. As a result, the Moroccan authority has had to opt for a policy of double standards: On the one hand, to fulfill the identity claims raised by the nationalist movement, Arabic was …

The Interplay Of Syntactic Parsing Strategies And Prosodic Phrase Lengths In Processing Turkish Sentences, Nazik Dinctopal-Deniz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many experiments have shown that the prosody (rhythm and melody) with which a sentence is uttered can provide a listener with cues to its syntactic structure (Lehiste, 1973, and since). A few studies have observed in addition that an inappropriate prosodic contour can mislead the syntactic parsing routines, resulting in a prosody-induced garden-path. These include, among others, Speer et al. (1996) and Kjelgaard and Speer (1999) for English. The studies by Speer et al. and Kjelgaard and Speer (SKS) showed that misplaced prosodic cues caused more processing difficulty in sentences with early closure of a clause (EC syntax) than in …

Representational Implications Of The Phonologization Of Contour Tones, Benjamin Kirkland Macaulay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis bridges accounts of tonogenesis to representations of contour tones in the dominant framework, autosegmental phonology. Accounts of tonogenesis reference phonetic features and structures that are unable to be represented in autosegmental phonology. As these features are required for the phonologization of contour tones, it is argued that they must also receive some representation in the synchrony. This is done under the Evolutionary Phonology framework of sound change. An attempt to reconcile the disparity between perceived phonetic features and synchronic structure is made by discussing the implications of the sequencing of targets within autosegmental contours. This innovation would better …

Works In Progress: Child Characters In Victorian And Postcolonial Fiction, 1814 - 2006, Kiran Mascarenhas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between national and individual development in Victorian and postcolonial novels set in India. My central argument is that the investment in the idea of progress that characterizes colonial narratives of childhood gives way in postcolonial fiction to a suspicion of dominant understandings of progress, and that this difference is manifest in the identity formation of the child character as well as in the form of the novel.

In the Victorian colonial narratives discussed in this study, the bildung of the child involves the overcoming of the child's conflicted cultural identity. The children of …

Kafka's German-Jewish Reception As Mirror Of Modernity, Abraham Ariel Rubin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explores the diverse and contradictory ways German-Jewish intellectuals identify what they commonly refer to as Kafka's "Jewish essence." Focusing on the commentaries of Margarete Susman, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Gershom Scholem, and Max Brod, I claim that Kafka's German-Jewish reception reflects a broader historical dilemma that grew out of the Jewish encounter with modernity: Are Judaism and Jewishness best defined through religious, cultural, national, or ethnic categories? It is precisely this ambiguity that forms the historical backdrop to Kafka's Jewish interpretations. Situating the early phases of Kafka's posthumous reception within the broader context of interwar German-Jewish culture, my dissertation examines …

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) …

Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices Of Moroccan Jews In Brooklyn, Samuel Reuben Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the role of musical practices in the synagogue life of Maroka'im (Moroccan Jews) in Brooklyn, New York. Living in an urban setting known for its diverse and robust Jewish life, community members utilize several different types of musical expression to emblematize three distinct diasporic ethnic identities: Jewish (of ancient Israel), Sephardi (Spanish), and Maroka'i (Moroccan). Based upon ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2008 and 2013, this study demonstrates how Maroka'im in Brooklyn use musical expressions to evoke more than one sense of diaspora consciousness--Jewish, Sephardi, and Maroka'i--to foster what I term a layered diaspora consciousness.

To illustrate …

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". …

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 …

Verbal Behavior In Individuals With Generalized Anxiety Disorder And Depressive Disorders, Tzachi Slonim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and clinical depression are both internalizing disorders characterized by sustained negative affect and have mainly been studied utilizing either self-report or physiological measures. Fewer studies have focused on behavioral indices of these disorders, and little is known about their overlapping and distinct linguistic features. The present research examined the above gap in two separate studies. Study 1 synthesized previous efforts made to study the linguistic features of individuals with depression. Previous investigations found that depressed individuals evidence high proportions of I-words, high proportions of negatively-valenced words, low proportions of positively-valenced words, and high proportions of cognitive …

Underprivileged Children In Port-Au-Prince, Haiti: Hearing And Academic Performance Of Children In Public Schools In Port Au Prince, Talia Meisel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hearing loss is estimated to affect more than 360 million people worldwide, 32% of whom are children. Children with hearing loss tend to develop compromised communicative abilities and also have been found to perform more poorly academically than their normal hearing peers. Because of the lack of medical care, children in third world countries are expected to have more difficulty hearing and learning in a classroom setting than children in first world countries due to higher incidences of conductive pathology. The purpose of this study is to assess the hearing ability of underprivileged children in kindergarten and primary schools in …

The Regional North Indian Popular Music Industry In 2014: From Cassette Culture To Cyberculture, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This article explores the current state of the regional vernacular popular music industry in North India, assessing the changes that have occurred since around 2000 with the advent of digital technologies, including DVD format, and especially the Internet, cellphones and ‘pen-drives’. It provides a cursory overview of the regional music scene as a whole, and then focuses, as a case study, on a particular genre, namely the languriya songs of the Braj region, south of Delhi. It discusses how commercial music production is adapting, or failing to adapt, to recent technological developments, and it notes the vigorous and persistent flowering …

"Epidermic" And Visceral Works: Lygia Pape And Anna Maria Maiolino, Claudia Calirman

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Sticking Your Neck Out And Burying The Hatchet: What Idioms Reveal About Embodied Simulation, Natalie A. Kacinik

Publications and Research

Idioms are used in conventional language twice as frequently as metaphors, but most research, particularly recent work on embodiment has focused on the latter. However, idioms have the potential to significantly deepen our understanding of embodiment because their meanings cannot be derived from their component words. To determine whether sensorimotor states could activate idiomatic meaning, participants were instructed to engage in postures/actions reflecting various idioms (e.g.,sticking your neck out) relative to non-idiomatic control postures/actions while reading and responding to statements designed to assess idiomatic meaning. The results showed that statements were generally more strongly endorsed after idiom embodiment than control …

Mapping The Methods Of Composition/Rhetoric Dissertations: A “Landscape Plotted And Pieced”, Benjamin M. Miller

Publications and Research

What methods do graduate students take up for their dissertation projects? This article shares findings from distant reading of 2,711 abstracts, suggesting that humanist approaches predominate within the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, but not without some methodological pluralism. A large number of studies outside the consortium are also considered.

Can Culture Justify Infant Circumcision?, Eldar Sarajlic

Publications and Research

The paper addresses arguments in the recent philosophical and bioethical literature claiming that social and cultural benefits can justify non-therapeutic male infant circumcision. It rejects these claims by referring to the open future argument, according to which infant circumcision is morally unjustifiable because it violates the child’s right to an open future. The paper also addresses an important objection to the open future argument and examines the strength of the objection to refute the application of the argument to the circumcision case.

Compromise Programming Based Scenario Analysis Of Urban Water Systems Management Options: Case Study Of Kerman City, Saeed Nazari, S. Jamshid Mousavi, Koroush Behzadian, Zoran Kapelan

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Supplying adequate water for urban water systems (UWSs) suffering from lack of water resources has always been a major concern in urban water management. Integrated simulation models are useful tools for sustainable planning and management of UWSs. This paper presents an integrated, conceptual modeling approach for simulation and analysis of an UWS by which different envisaged scenarios of water demand and resources are assessed. Other than water flow, the simulation model quantifies flows of energy, GHG emissions and cost in UWS. The performance of the developed model is demonstrated through its application to the UWS of Kerman City located in …

Graduate School And University Center Archives Finding Aid - Record Group V-A: Presidents' Files: Rees, Graduate Center Library, Cuny

Finding Aids

This is part of the finding aid to the Graduate School and University Center (GSUC) Archives. Record Group V-A is the papers of Mina S. Rees from when she was president of the GSUC (1969-1972).

Setting Priorities On The Functional Status Of Hydraulic Structures In Mountainous Catchments, V. Juliette Cortes, Simone Sterlacchini, Thom Bogaard, Simone Frigerio, Luca Schenato, Alessandro Pasuto

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

The frequent inspection of hydraulic structures in mountain catchments is important due to the changing interaction among water-related processes that take place in the context of hydro-meteorological hazards such as debris flow and flash floods. At first level inspections, reports from survey protocols carried out by trained citizen-volunteers are combined to provide an index that represent the status of the structure. The survey protocols aim at identifying needs for cleaning of obstructions or to pre-screen potential problems for a second level inspection or more technical and detailed inspection. Thus, reports are focused on the functional status for the following parameters: …

Optimal Placement Of Metering Devices For Multiple Purposes, Ramon Perez, Gerard Sanz, Josep Cuguero, Miquel Angel Cuguero

International Conference on Hydroinformatics

Monitoring devices installed in a huge system like a water network imply a high cost. This cost includes installation and maintenance. Thus the placement of these devices must be optimal. The optimal sensor placement is an issue that comes up in many innovation projects in water networks. The use of models even if the final application does not use them may be crucial in such process. Nevertheless the optimality of the placement may depend highly on the final use of these sensors. In general a better placement may imply a more specific use of the information. This work studies the …

Audience Preferences Are Predicted By Temporal Reliability Of Neural Processing, Jacek P. Dmochowski, Matthew A. Bezdek, Brian P. Abelson, John S. Johnson, Eric H. Schumacher, Lucas C. Parra

Publications and Research

Naturalistic stimuli evoke highly reliable brain activity across viewers. Here we record neural activity from a group of naive individuals while viewing popular, previously-broadcast television content for which the broad audience response is characterized by social media activity and audience ratings. We find that the level of inter-subject correlation in the evoked encephalographic responses predicts the expressions of interest and preference among thousands. Surprisingly, ratings of the larger audience are predicted with greater accuracy than those of the individuals from whom the neural data is obtained. An additional functional magnetic resonance imaging study employing a separate sample of subjects shows …