Digital Commons Network^™

Peo-Ppo-Peo Surfactant Mixtures As Templates For Silicas With Very Large Cylindrical Mesopores At Ambient Temperature And With Helical Mesopores At Sub-Ambient Temperature, Laurance Beaton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The original research described herein concerns the synthesis of mesoporous silicas through a surfactant-templating method. The approach taken involved the use of a mixed surfactant system of two poly(ethylene oxide)-poly(propylene oxide)-poly(ethylene oxide) surfactants, with one of the copolymers containing a much larger percentage of hydrophobic (PPO) blocks than the employed co-surfactant. Systematic adjustments of experimental parameters initially enabled the preparation of 2-D hexagonally ordered mesoporous silicas (SBA-15) of uncommonly large pore diameter at ambient temperature. Comparable silica was synthesized with and without temperature control. Additional adjustments to experimental parameters, including reduction of the relative amount of framework precursor used in …

Cot In The Act: Ethnicity And Age Affects Phonemic Perception Of The Low-Back Merger In New York City English, Omar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

This paper is an experimental study on how perceptions about a speaker’s age and ethnicity may influence whether listeners perceive the THOUGHT / LOT distinction. The macro-categories of age and ethnicity have been found to correlate with the lowering of raised THOUGHT (Wong 2012, Becker 2010) and the favoring of the merged vowels in perception (Haddican et al. 2016). This thesis examines whether images of faces associated with different age and ethnicity categories condition perception of auditory stimuli as belonging to either the LOT or THOUGHT class. This thesis builds on previous results suggesting that non-linguistic information influences speech …

The Grammatical Systems Of Attentionworthiness: Positional Signals And Invariant Meanings In Spanish Word Order, Eduardo Ho-Fernández

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a Columbia School analysis of word order phenomena in Spanish. The data was sourced from a corpus of manually collected utterances extracted from six volumes of Latin American short stories written in the twentieth century. The study employs various qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to test the various hypotheses offered as explanations of the distributional problems selected for the study. The observations roughly correspond to word orders that the grammatical tradition describes as having to do with either verbs with one argument (SV, VS, OV, VO) or verbs with two arguments (SVO, OVS, VSO, VOS, SOV, …

Employing High Probability Gene Choice Elements To Understand Singular Odorant Receptor Expression, Raena Mina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to detect odorous chemicals in the environment is the oldest of the senses necessary for survival, from escaping danger, finding mates, to locating food. It is said that humans can identify and discriminate up to a trillion different odor mixtures. For chemoreception to have such a high discriminatory power, would require a diverse population of cells dedicated for odor detection. These detector cells are the olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs), which express odorant receptors (ORs) that bind to chemical odors in the environment. In order to increase specificity and sensitivity, an essential property in olfaction is for each OSN …

The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Oil? On The Interpersonal Effects Of Boredom Expression, Manuel F. Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I explored how people react to employees who express boredom at work. I consider boredom expression as a social signal that the current situation does not adequately stimulate the expresser. The expression may then propel others to help stimulate the expresser, depending partly on others’ initial appraisals and reactions to the expression, and on the surrounding context. In Study 1, using qualitative surveys, I uncovered various affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to employees who expressed boredom. In Study 2, using experimental vignettes, I manipulated the emotion expressed by a “subordinate” (boredom, enthusiasm, or no emotion) and the manager’s beliefs about …

Overcoming Challenges In The Assessment And Treatment Of Problem Behavior In Adults With Autism, Julia A. Iannaccone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Problematic behaviors, such as self-injurious behavior or aggression, demonstrated by adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), create many significant life complications, some life-threatening. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is established as an evidence-based approach to treat problem behavior for children with ASD and shows promise as an effective treatment for adults, yet little research has been conducted within the adult population. Assessment and treatment of problem behavior with adults is often challenging due to funding limitations, increased severity and complexity of problem behavior, and underqualified staff. The purpose of the present study was to overcome these challenges by (1) identifying a …

Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms Of Adverse Trauma Outcomes In Emerging Adulthood, Olena Kleshchova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Exposure to traumatic stress and adversity during the formative years of development can have adverse effects on mental health, neuroendocrine stress system function, and the brain, that persist into adulthood. One candidate mechanism that might confer vulnerability to enduring adverse outcomes of early life trauma is disruption of normal brain maturation. As the brain matures, functional interactions among brain regions change until the functional brain architecture (i.e., the functional connectome) reaches a mature state in adulthood. Given that different neural circuits have distinct developmental trajectories and sensitive periods, traumatic stress at a given point in development might have …

“The Gifts Of Enemies”: The Acteal Massacre, Sociedad Civil Las Abejas And Mexico’S Ejército Zapatista De Liberación Nacional And Humanitarian And Development Aid During The Low-Intensity War, 1997–1999, Maria R. Hart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about a faction of the Sociedad Civil Las Abejas who, as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), were housed at the INI IDP camp in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in 1997-99 after the Acteal massacre on December 22, 1997. This faction is of interest because they protested the remaining members of Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (Civil Society The Bees) social movement at Acteal and the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, often better-known as the Zapatistas), because the movement required them to reject governmental humanitarian aid and development programs or lose their membership in the social …

Attachment, Exploration, And Internalized Homonegativity, Gregory J. Gagnon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Internalized homonegativity (IH; a.k.a. internalized homophobia), has been implicated in health disparities between lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons (LGBs) and their heterosexual peers. Yet, little available research has explored factors that may increase or decrease IH.

Objective: This dissertation investigates relations between child and adult attachment and IH. It further examines the mediating and moderating roles of exploration and mentalization, respectively, in the attachment–IH relation.

Method: One hundred fifty cisgender LGB adults participated in two waves of an online survey. The first assessed recalled child–maternal and child–paternal attachment and current attachment to the romantic partner. The second, conducted two …

Prep Use And Barriers To Use Among Adult And Young Sexual Minority Men In The United States, Thomas Whitfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) was approved for all individuals 13 years of age and older in May 2018. However, research pertaining to uptake has mostly focused on adult sexual minority men (SMM), leaving out many barriers and facilitators that may exist for those under 18 years of age. Two of the most important precursors leading to PrEP uptake identified in prior research are the perception of self as a PrEP candidate and having intentions to begin PrEP. Developmental and dual processing theories suggest that individuals who are younger make behavioral decisions differently from those who are older. Developmental theories suggest that, …

Wave Propagation In Random And Topological Media, Yuhao Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis discusses wave propagation in two kinds of systems, random media and topological insulators. In a disordered system, the wave is randomized by multiple scattering. The scattering matrix and associated delay times are powerful tools with which to describe wave transport. We discuss the relation among the Wigner time, the transmission time, and energy density in a lossless or lossy system. We propose the zeros of the transmission matrix and show how to manipulate the zero-transmission mode in a nonunitary system. In a photonic topological insulator, we realize an edge mode and discuss its robustness in the face of …

Affect, Behavior And (Dys)Regulation: Integrating Youth's Projective Tests And Self-Reports, Laurel Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Past and current research indicates that unconscious processes (e.g., outside the realm of conscious awareness) contribute to aspects of adaptation and development, such as emotion regulation, adaptability, interpersonal flexibility and overall identity formation. Further, unconscious processes including: Defense Mechanisms (DMs), Affect Maturity (AM) and Object Relations (OR), can be operationalized and scored using valid and reliable psychodynamic instruments (e.g., Rorschach Inkblot Method), with theoretical and empirical links to underlying emotion regulation processes. Currently however, emotional dysregulation and its sequelae (e.g.,depression and ADHD symptoms) are most often assessed based on one’s conscious awareness, using standardized self-report measures or structured clinical interviews. …

The Art Of Opacity: Guy De Cointet In L.A., Media Farzin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides the first detailed study of the work of French artist Guy de Cointet (1934–1983), specifically the books, objects, and performances he produced in Los Angeles between 1971 and 1983. Much of this work mined pop-cultural sources—genre fiction, magazine advertising, and television serials—for texts, which he reused in deliberately obfuscated ways: in pseudonymous publications written in code or invented languages, as well as in sigil-like paintings that doubled as props for performances in which actors delivered contradictory interpretations of the encoded objects. I argue that Cointet’s appropriations of the visual and narrative logics of postwar culture provide a …

Taking It To Heart: Trauma And Cardiovascular Risk In Court-Involved People Of Color, Tanya Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research supports that racial disparities in health persist in the United States, with cardiovascular risk and cardiovascular disease remaining particularly high in low-income, communities of color (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013; Winkleby, Jatulis, Frank, & Fortmann, 1992). Public health literature often focuses on sociodemographic variables when assessing for health disparities without considering trauma or forensic populations. This dissertation provides an overview of literature that examines cardiovascular disease and its relationship to trauma, particularly in low-income, communities of color, and forensic populations. Although the dissertation culminates in providing results for an investigation …

Three Essays On Natural Rates, Huseyin U. Demir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1. Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment and Non-accelerating inflation rate of output We followed Ball and Mankiw (2002) to estimate the natural rates of output and unemployment. The primary purposes of this paper are to provide more accurate estimates of a varying non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) than currently exist and to nd a new measure for the nonaccelerating inflation rate of output so we can estimate the output gap more accurately. Our contributions are adding time-varying coefficients estimated with a break test and finding more accurate measurements for the natural rate of unemployment. We also estimated the …

Wrongful Conviction Documentaries: Influences Of Crime Media Exposure On Mock Juror Decision-Making, Patricia Y. Sanchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychology and law researchers have urged colleagues to collaborate with the makers of popular media, such as documentary filmmakers, in efforts to educate the general public about wrongful convictions (Kassin, 2017; Wells et al., 2000). Recently, programs depicting wrongful convictions, such as Making a Murderer (Demos & Ricciardi, 2015) and When They See Us (DuVernay, 2019) have garnered substantial viewership. Research on general and case-specific pretrial publicity (Daftary-Kapur et al., 2014; Kovera, 2002) and the effects of crime media (Baskin & Sommers, 2010; Schweitzer & Saks, 2007) demonstrate that although consuming crime-related media and being exposed to information about a …

Intrapersonal And Interpersonal Factors Predicting Distress And End-Of-Life Planning Among Individuals With Advanced Cancers, Aliza A. Panjwani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The social-cognitive processing model of adaption to cancer posits that both intrapersonal and interpersonal factors influence psychological adjustment (Lepore, 2001). In this dissertation, two intrapersonal factors, intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and experiential avoidance (EA), were examined in relation to emotional distress (psychological outcome) and advanced care planning (behavioral outcome) among patients living with advanced cancer. EA (efforts intended to avoid negative emotions, thoughts, images or memories) was hypothesized to mediate the relationship between IU (the ability to tolerate uncertainty or the unknown) and emotional distress. In line with the social-cognitive model, two interpersonal factors, social support from family and friends …

Essays On Corporate Sustainability, Aditya Malateesh Kashikar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation provides an extensive literature review of topics in Corporate Sustainability. It further examines two key topics: ESG Pay and ESG Investing. For ESG Pay, I examine Bloomberg’s ESG linked pay measure using the largest panel (to date). I confirm several important results from the nascent literature on ESG Pay. Firstly, I find that Country and Industry play a major role in determining ESG Pay adoption. Secondly, among firm characteristics, Big and Value firms tend to have a greater probability of adopting ESG Pay. Thirdly, higher ESG scores increase the chance of ESG Pay adoption in the subsequent year. …

Sex/Gender Differences In Serial Position Profiles In Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment And Healthy Controls, Emnet Z. Gammada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Introduction: Alzheimer’s disease disproportionately affects more women, but paradoxically, men have a higher incidence of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Researchers have suggested that women’s verbal memory advantage across the lifespan reflects better premorbid skills, which then require more neurodegeneration to manifest early clinical impairment. To date, measurement of sex differences in verbal memory have used total list scores. We proposed that a granular examination of serial position effects (SPE) in list-learning can refine the source of sex/gender differences.

Methods: A cross-sectional analysis of participants with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Healthy Controls (HC) was examined from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging …

The Contribution Of Trait Emotional Intelligence To The Relationship Between Childhood Adversity And Pscyhiatric Symptoms In Adulthood, Aura-Maria Morales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trait emotional intelligence (TEI) has been found to be an important predictor of and protective factor against psychopathology, including psychopathology in the context of trauma (Hofman et al., 2016; Rudenstine & Espinosa, 2018). The long-established empirical investigation of the relationship between trauma and psychopathology has brought attention to the significance of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Similarly, recent literature has honed in on how important aspects of a person’s development such as their attachment style and the culture within which their development is embedded, can mutually inform their development of TEI. This dissertation is an attempt to derive a greater understanding …

Job Satisfaction Among Peer Support Staff In Mental Health Treatment And Recovery-Oriented Settings, Jonathan P. Edwards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Introduction/Objective: Peer support practice in mental health treatment and recovery-oriented service settings has seen exponential growth during the past several decades. An estimated 25,000 certified peer specialists in the United States alone necessitates a deeper understanding of factors that are associated with job satisfaction. While there exists a body of research on this topic, many of these studies were conducted with limited sample sizes, within discrete practice settings and geographic regions, often focused on one facet of job satisfaction (e.g., compensation), and lacked racial diversity in the sample. The current study addresses these limitations by examining multiple factors associated with …

The Effects Of Eighth Years Of Compulsory Schooling Enforcement In Turkey, Muhammed Tumay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that cover Education, Labor and Health Economics.

Chapter 1. Impacts of Compulsory Schooling Reform on Higher Education and Intergenerational Educational Mobility: we estimate the effects of an exogenous increase in mandatory schooling (5 years to 8 years of schooling), as a result of a change in compulsory schooling law, on higher education, potential intergenerational educational mobility, and labor market outcomes among women in Turkey. Our empirical strategy addresses a well-known identification problem where women’s years of schooling are endogenous to individual characteristics. The Law took effect in 1997, whereby girls born before January …

Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …

Alternative Cichoń Diagrams And Forcing Axioms Compatible With Ch, Corey B. Switzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation surveys several topics in the general areas of iterated forcing, infinite combinatorics and set theory of the reals. There are two parts. In the first half I consider alternative versions of the Cichoń diagram. First I show that for a wide variety of reduction concepts there is a Cichoń diagram for effective cardinal characteristics relativized to that reduction. As an application I investigate in detail the Cichoń diagram for degrees of constructibility relative to a fixed inner model of ZFC. Then I study generalizations of cardinal characteristics to the space of functions from Baire space to Baire space. …

Regulation Of A Messenger: Raising Oskar, It Takes A Village, Livia V. Bayer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

D. melanogaster oogenesis serves as an excellent system to study the life of an mRNA. Tremendous work has been done to understand the numerous complex mechanisms of mRNA regulation, still there is still so much that is yet to be discovered. In this thesis, I present studies I carried out to address several aspects of oskar mRNA post-transcriptional regulation. Leading me to extend our current understanding of the carefully controlled regulation of oskar mRNA life cycle via a myriad of proteins. I found that a specific NPC component, Nup154 is necessary not only for its export from the nucleus, but …

A Study Of Police Officers With Military Service Backgrounds Compared To Police Officers Without Military Service: Can Military Veterans Interact And Properly Engage The Public?, John F. Hussey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research was to determine if police officers with military experience are less likely to receive civilian complaints for use of force and unprofessional behavior than police officers without military experience. The research consisted of eight research questions that the dissertation attempted to answer. From these eight research questions, three hypotheses were established. To facilitate the research a mixed-methods approach was utilized to compare whether police officers with military experience accrued more or less civilian complaints than police officers without military experience. The initial portion of the dissertation utilized quantitative data collected from three police departments in …

Translanguaging About, With, And Through Code And Computing: Emergent Bi/Multilingual Middle Schoolers Forging Computational Literacies, Sara Vogel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As computing pervades more aspects of life, and as Computer Science for All (CS for All) initiatives roll out across the U.S., the field must understand the experiences and language practices of emergent bi/multilingual K-12 students and use that knowledge to drive equitable pedagogical and programmatic approaches. But little is known about how emergent bi/multilingual students — a growing population that school systems have often viewed with deficit-based lenses and have thus struggled to educate equitably — use language in the context of CS education. This dissertation addresses this gap by (1) qualitatively documenting and using asset-based frames to analyze …

Object Relations, Identity Formation, And Transitional Space In Religious Conversion, Arielle Rubenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Conversion between broad religious groups is a life transformation undertaken by 15% of Americans, yet it has seldom been studied closely from a psychodynamic perspective. The psychological study of conversion began with a Protestant paradigm of sudden and total transformation of the self, and over time came to characterize different manifestations of conversion to more diverse religious groups. Research on conversion has primarily sought to understand whether conversion is essentially a psychopathological phenomenon, and has led to a multiplicity of both positive and negative, at times contradictory, findings. Research has shown that conversion is associated with insecure attachment, neurotic personality …

An Accurate Solution Of The Self-Similar Orbit-Averaged Fokker-Planck Equation For Core-Collapsing Isotropic Globular Clusters: Properties And Application, Yuta Ito

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hundreds of dense star clusters exist in almost all galaxies. Each cluster is composed of approximately ten thousand through ten million stars. The stars orbit in the clusters due to the clusters' self-gravity. Standard stellar dynamics expects that the clusters behave like collisionless self-gravitating systems on short time scales (~ million years) and the stars travel in smooth continuous orbits. Such clusters temporally settle to dynamically stable states or quasi-stationary states (QSS). Two fundamental QSS models are the isothermal- and polytropic- spheres since they have similar structures to the actual core (central part) and halo (outskirt) of the clusters. The …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Eric Osborne-Christenson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters and covers topics in applied microeconomics broadly defined as health and labor. The precise topics are varied, with their unifying thread being that they are all related to marginalized or at-risk communities. The first chapter estimates the impact of Daylight Saving Time (DST) on deaths of despair (DoD) in the United States. Using Multiple Cause-of-Death Mortality Data from the National Vital Statistics System of the National Center for Health Statistics from 1979-1988, the effect is identified in two ways: a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits discrete time changes in the Spring and Fall; …