Digital Commons Network^™

Interview With Achal Prabhala Regarding The Formation Of The Planetbinya.Org Archive, Myrtle Jones

Third Stone

No abstract provided.

Racial Reassignment Surgery And The Dissolution Of The Color Line: Afrofuturist Satire In George Schuyler’S Black No More And Jess Row’S Your Face In Mine, Christopher A. Varlack

Third Stone

Racial passing, during the antebellum period, was a way in which African-American peoples sought to escape the throes of slavery and the physical and psychological abuse associated with the plantation tradition. In time, racial passing became a way of obtaining the social, economic, and political opportunities denied people of color in the discriminatory and racially-biased United States. This study, however, examines a specific form of racial passing--that of racial reassignment surgery--as explored in George Schuyler’s Black No More and Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine as a way to test the theory that assimilation and miscegenation would one day resolve …

Algorhythms Artist Statement, Nettrice Gaskins

Third Stone

No abstract provided.

Annotated Bibliography

Third Stone

No abstract provided.

Methodology For The Integration Of Optomechanical System Software Models With A Radiative Transfer Image Simulation Model, Keegan S. Mccoy

Theses

Stray light, any unwanted radiation that reaches the focal plane of an optical system, reduces image contrast, creates false signals or obscures faint ones, and ultimately degrades radiometric accuracy. These detrimental effects can have a profound impact on the usability of collected Earth-observing remote sensing data, which must be radiometrically calibrated to be useful for scientific applications. Understanding the full impact of stray light on data scientific utility is of particular concern for lower cost, more compact imaging systems, which inherently provide fewer opportunities for stray light control. To address these concerns, this research presents a general methodology for integrating …

The Role Of Insurance Agents In The Prevention Of Environmental Loss And Damage, Leslie Ellen Arnold

Theses

Over the past several decades, businesses have been placed under great pressure from government and the public to avoid environmental loss and damages. To mitigate environmental loss and damages, companies purchase environmental insurance, which protects companies from direct financial liability and transfers the risk to the insurance agency. Thus, insurance companies to have a vested interest in preventing payouts to businesses by ensuring that their clients protect against environmental losses.

Past literature in the field of environmental management has paid little attention to the role of insurance companies and their agents in the prevention of environmental loss and damage. However, …

Joint Source-Channel Coding For Image Transmission Over Underlay Multichannel Cognitive Radio Networks, Long Pham

Theses

The increasing prominence of wireless applications exacerbates the problem of radio spectrum scarcity and promotes the usage of Cognitive Radio (CR) in wireless networks. With underlay dynamic spectrum access, CRs can operate alongside Primary Users, the incumbent of a spectrum band, as long as they limit the interference to the Primary Users below a certain threshold. Multimedia streaming transmissions face stringent Quality of Services constraints on top of the CR interference constraints, as some packets in the data stream have higher levels of importance and are the most vulnerable to packet loss over the channel. This raises a need for …

Accessibility Lab #1: Audio Cues, Jan Guillermo

Theses

An increasingly large number of people with disabilities are using software nowadays. However, much of the software created today is inaccessible to people with disabilities. The WorldWideWeb Consortium (W3C) and many other well-known companies have provided the best practices of creating accessible software. Unfortunately, developers either struggle to sympathize with accessibility issues, do not know the best practices of accessibility design, or both. Hence, there is a need to teach developers about accessibility and how to create accessible software. Unfortunately, accessibility is not widely taught in education.

The Accessibility Learning Labs (ALL) were created to address the limitation of readily …

Attracting Investment From Kosovar Diaspora, Dritëro Bajrami

Theses

The economy of Kosovo for decades has been fueled by remittances sent from Kosovar diaspora. These remittances have improved the standard of living in Kosovo, however, the full potential of diaspora for economic development of Kosovo has not been utilized properly by Kosovo’s institutions. Thus, this study focuses on analyzing the current framework of institutions in Kosovo that aim to translate the contribution of diaspora from sending remittances, which in short term increases the budget of their families, to direct investments that have an impact in the overall economy of Kosovo. Using both primary and secondary data this study will …

Flexible Hls-Based Implementation Of The Karatsuba Multiplier Targeting Homomorphic Encryption Schemes, Michael J. Foster, Marcin Lukowiak, Stanislaw Radziszowski

Presentations and other scholarship

Custom accelerators for high-precision integer arithmetic are increasingly used in compute-intensive applications, in particular homomorphic encryption schemes. This work seeks to advance a strategy for faster deployment of these accelerators using the process of high-level synthesis (HLS). Insights from existing number theory software libraries and custom hardware accelerators are used to develop a scalable implementation of Karatsuba modular polynomial multiplication. The accelerator generated from this implementation by the high-level synthesis tool Vivado HLS achieves significant speedup over the implementations available in the highly-optimized FLINT software library. This is an important first step towards a larger goal of enabling HLS-based homomorphic …

Breaking The Stigma: Major Depressive Disorder, Joanna Cox

Theses

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a mood and mental disorder affecting the brain; it is caused by the reduction of three monoamine neurotransmitters: serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine (Rot, M. A., Mathew, S. J., & Charney, D. S. 2009). MDD is one of the world’s most common mental disorders, affecting a predicted 4% of the world’s population and roughly 16.1 million adults in United States alone (Major Depression. 2019; Ritchie, H., & Roser, M. 2018). The concentrations of these neurotransmitters are reduced in the brains of people with MDD due to their increased reabsorption from synapses in the brain back into …

My Guest From Afar, Yuan Yao

Theses

An elderly American old man accepts a young Chinese visiting scholar to live in his house. They argue for trifles, they fight for money, but they build up the friendship as time goes by. One day the scholar finishes his research then the old man suddenly realizes that he has already been embedded in his life.

An Exploration Of Microaggression Awareness In Real-Time Conversations And Long-Term Tracking And Learning System, Feifei Guo

Theses

Microaggression is a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group. Microaggressions are often subtle and ambiguous, it's often hard to know if you're committing one or if you're on the receiving end. The recipients of microaggressions always feel a sense of powerlessness and invisibility, while the aggressors are often unaware of the harm they’ve brought. The impact of microaggressions always negatively affects both mental and physical health of recipients and results in persistent health problems.

My goal of the thesis is to make the invisible visible. …

Bodies In Dependence: A Foucauldian Genealogy Of The Americans With Disabilities Acts, Michael E. Skyer

Articles

The Americans with Disabilities Acts (ADA) of 1990 and 2008 are laws imagined as enacting two goals: enhancing civil rights and reducing sociopolitical discrimination for Americans with disabilities; however, findings from this study strongly contrast with popular assumptions about the ADA. Key findings show how the ADA legitimizes governmental control of disability through discourse to consolidate economic power. The study employs the genealogical method, derived from Foucault, which is used to identify destructive and productive operations of power and identify ambiguities in discursive regimes. The ADA constructs a discursive category of "disability," the results of which are contradictory and problematic, …

State Policies Of Medical Marijuana Versus Food & Drug Administration Policies Of Pharmaceutical Drugs, Kayla Stephan

Theses

In the past 22 years, 32 states have legalized and regulated marijuana for medical use. However, marijuana is scheduled as a Schedule I drug according to the federal government. This means that states have no specific regulations to follow for regulating marijuana for medical use. Because of this, states may be risking the safety of medical marijuana patients. Research was conducted to analyze the policies set out by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the regulation of a prescription drug. Since the FDA is responsible for the safety and efficacy of prescription drugs, this analysis included what types of …

Information Technology And Computing Topics And Their Relevance To Medical Undergraduate And Graduate Program Curricula At Rit, Lawrence W. Hill

Presentations and other scholarship

Two healthcare domain related programs in which this author has curricular relationships are the undergraduate Diagnostic Ultrasound (DU), and the graduate Master of Science in Health Informatics (MSHI). He teaches one course in the former and is the program coordinator for the latter. The undergraduate course is titled, “Computers in Medicine”, and is a rough 50% combination of a first-semester computing hardware course taught to our IT undergrads and another 50% of material from a textbook covering all the ways in which computing has benefitted various healthcare domains like, surgery, pharmacy, imaging, dentistry, psychiatry, remote medicine and the like. The …

The Line, Angelica Alegria Agelviz Rodriguez

Theses

The Line is an animated fairy tale for adults, meant to ask the age-old question of “who am I?” through the lens of its main character, Espe, a child born with skin made of mirror.

With this thesis, I wanted to delve deeper into my understanding of the themes of individuality, freedom of thought, fragility of ego and the unreliability of ‘truth’, as seen through the eyes of a child. The idea for this story was simple enough: What would happen if somebody was born made out of mirror? And what if that mirror were to look at itself? Though …

Music Consumption In The Dominican Republic: Technological Changes, Uses, And Gratifications, Frank R. Lantigua

Theses

Music consumption has been transformed by technological changes during the last three decades; the introduction of streaming technologies and the expansion of the global music market have changed the way people in various countries engage with music in daily life. Previous research on music consumption points to the uses and gratifications often sought by audiences, as well as the motives that drive their consumption habits. While most studies have centered on audiences from the developing world, this study focuses particularly on music consumption in the Dominican Republic. The data was collected through an online survey that inquired about the platforms …

Breastfeeding Discourse On Social Media, Andrea L. Whittemore

Theses

Using feminist theory, this study focuses on discourse around breastfeeding on Twitter. Using a mixed-methods approach, I first examine the use of the hashtag #breastfeeding on Twitter to identify the networks driving the discourse. The discourse analysis was completed to explore how feminist principles and mothers’ agency were represented in tweets related to breastfeeding. The results, based on (N = 2,818) tweets, show that discourses are seen as breastfeeding as “natural” and “primary,” bottle feeding as second best, sexualization versus the natural functions of the breast, breastfeeding as a provocative act, mothering as a public or private nexus, breastfeeding related …

Politics And Media Among Deaf And Hard Of Hearing, Charlotte Deering

Theses

This study investigated the civic engagement, political participation, and choice of news media of the deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) community at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, New York. Socialization factors that contribute to civic engagement and political participation were examined and contrasted with a hearing sample of students at Rochester Institute of Technology. The Activity Orientation Scale combined with the Political Media Gratification Scale were used to measure the likelihood of political engagement among the DHH and understand their media viewing habits. Socialization factors affect where DHH individuals get their news, what media …

Emely Peguero’S Case: News Frames And Gender Stereotypes In The Dominican Republic, Maria Fernanda Simo

Theses

Gender-based violence is a controversial topic in the Dominican Republic that affects many families, and is a cause of more than 200 women dying every year from it. Journalists have an important influence in the country, making information more noticeable and memorable. Using framing theory, this study analyzed news stories reported by three Dominican newspapers (El Diario Libre, Listin Diario, and Grupo Corripio) to identify news frames and gender stereotypes in Emely Peguero’s coverage, who was a pregnant young woman murdered by her boyfriend in the Duarte Province of the Dominican Republic. A quantitative content analysis of (N = 185) …

Trailxplorer: An Interactive Mobile Educational Tool To Promote Safety Awareness And Prevent Injuries From Outdoor Adventures., Zhuoxin Xu

Theses

This thesis seeks to introduce an interactive mobile prototype to promote safety awareness and a visualized guideline to assist outdoor adventurers.

Nature is a place where many people go to find peace and relax. According to the “Outdoor participation report 2017” (the Coleman Company, 2017), 144.4 million Americans participated in outdoor activities in 2017. Unfortunately for a multitude of reasons, people encounter some type of unfortunate event that results in either injury or death. As the number of outdoor participants has continued increased annually, safety awareness and skills training have become increasingly crucial now more than ever. This project sought …

Parameter Estimation Of A Cardiac Model Using The Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter, Nathan Holt

Theses

Cardiac arrhythmias are irregularities in the electrical activity in the heart; the electrical impulses in the heart become chaotic or disorganized, which can cause a possibly lethal problem to the contraction of the heart. In order to understand the dynamics of arrhythmias and to be able to predict and treat them, numerical models have been developed to capture the dynamics of the electrical impulses in the heart. In a clinical setting, optical mapping technologies — using cameras and voltage-sensitive dyes to capture the electrical impulses propagating across the heart — have been used to capture the dynamics of the electrical …

The Opioid Epidemic, Abigail Hallowell

Theses

Drug abuse, addiction, and overdoses are phenomenon’s that are not new or unfamiliar to the United States. Between 1999 to 2017, there were over 700,000 drug overdose deaths in the country. About 400,000 of those drug overdoses involved an opioid. In 2017, more than 70,000 people died of a drug overdoses and 68% of them involved an opioid. This makes the number of opioid drug overdose deaths in 2017 six times higher than in 1999 (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). The severity of the increase in opioid related overdose deaths that America is experiencing today did not happen …

Rovar: Authentic Travel Leveraging Local Social Media, Akshay Kumar Arun

Theses

In our era of constant technological development and an intricate network of information exchange, people tend to rely on online sources for their travels more and more. But because of the time crunch, people travel in, many places of authentic value go unnoticed. Take the ramen shop in Sankri, at the foothills of the Siwalik ranges of the Himalayas for example. It was here that I had one of the most authentic ramen noodles at a small little quaint shop which used hill spices to give it a unique flavor. This store was nowhere on the map, and if I …

Senso - A Real-Time Interactive Mobile System To Improve Users’ Overall Skin Condition, Wenyue Zhan

Theses

Healthy skin is a critical part of overall health for everyone and not only important for appearance. Useful information about the skin is often overwhelming, misleading, or difficult to obtain. There are many factors that affect the skin’s condition, from environmental conditions like UV, humidity, or lifestyle factors like diet and the amount of sleep a person gets to specific ingredients in cosmetics. All this makes the effective management of skin health time consuming and inaccurate without knowing where to find the right information.

This project explores a theoretical system that is designed to help users understand and manage their …

The Way Back Home, Bichen Yang

Theses

After traveling, Ming (38) and Qinyi (35) pack their stuff to catch the flight. A sudden email destroys Ming’s mood: he lost his new job. Then he sees his share price fall. He is upset with his wife and vents his anger to his son, Tommy (6). Qinyi thinks that Ming still has a grudge because she is unable to have another baby. They start to go to the airport in an awkward atmosphere.

On the road, Ming refuses to stop the car, which makes Tommy urinating on the seat. A STRANGER follows their car and keeps flashing him. Ming …

Elucidating The Effects Of Antibiotics On The Release Of Pal From Escherichia Coli, Leslie Gallardo

Theses

Sepsis, a life-threatening clinical condition affecting more than 1.5 million Americans per year, is defined as an over-exuberant immune response to infection. Currently, sepsis is the leading cause of death in U.S. hospitals, and the incidence of sepsis caused by Gram-negative bacteria, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli), has been steadily increasing since the late 1990’s. While the detailed mechanism of sepsis is not fully understood, several bacterial components are thought to contribute to the hyper-inflammatory response in humans, including lipopolysaccharide endotoxin and several other lipoproteins. Past studies suggest that one of those E. coli lipoproteins, peptidoglycan-associated lipoprotein (Pal), might …

Performing Dna Ligation On A Low-Cost Inkjet-Printed Digital Microfluidic Device, Sari Houchaimi

Theses

DNA Synthesis is a critical component in many biological and medical applications. Unfortunately, the production of DNA is tedious, time consuming, and expensive. To accelerate the production times and lower the cost, we take a closer look at the potential application of digital microfluidics for this process.

Microfluidics involves manipulating small volumes of fluid (microliters). It takes advantage of the relative dominance of forces such as surface tension and capillary forces at the submillimeter scale. This allows for lower reagent consumption and shorter reaction times. The technology is also portable and can accommodate for various functions to be performed on …

Internet And Tor Traffic Classification Using Machine Learning, Siddharth Palsambkar

Theses

Privacy has always been a concern over the internet. A new wave of privacy networks struck the world in 2002 when the TOR Project was released to the public. The core principle of TOR, popularly known as the onion routing protocol, was developed by the ‘United States Naval Research Laboratory’ in the mid-1990s. It was further developed by ‘Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’. The project that started as an attempt to create a secured communication network for the U.S. Intelligence was soon released as a general anonymous network. These anonymous networks are run with the help of volunteers that serve …