Digital Commons Network^™

The Quasi-Human Child: How Normative Conceptions Of Childhood Enabled Neoliberal School Reform In The United States, Debbie Sonu

Publications and Research

This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault’s concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that worked on the child, rather than with the child. In order to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections …

Crime In Developing Countries: The Contribution Of Crime Science, Mangai Natarajan

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Do Catastrophes In Poor Countries Lead To Event-Related Policy Change? The 2010 Earthquake In Haiti, Denise D. P. Thompson

Publications and Research

Prompted by Birkland and Warnement‘s (2014) findings that the earthquake was not a significant focusing event in Haiti, the author reassessed the issue. Using the 2010 earthquake as the starting point, a detailed content analysis of evaluation and strategy report and DRR and developmental plans to find the level of policy adopted and implemented after the earthquake. Using the criterion of event-related implementation as a proxy for event-related policy change the author judges whether and to what extent was the earthquake a focusing event. Among the findings are that not only were there event-related policy change inside and outside of …

Die Hard: The Impossible, Absolutely Essential Task Of Saving The Web For Scholars, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

The web is fragile and littered with broken links. This poses a problem for the scholarly record and one’s own academic history. In this presentation given at the Association of College & Research Libraries – Eastern New York chapter conference, I review the stats on link rot and reference rot, and I give a brief overview of web archiving and its challenges. I review some web archiving tools: the Internet Archive, Perma.cc, WebRecorder, and GitHub. I advise creators of web projects to design their websites to be accessible and archivable, and to think about preservation (afterlife) of their projects from …

Rapid Assessment Of “Eve Teasing” (Sexual Harassment) Of Young Women During The Commute To College In India, Mangai Natarajan

Publications and Research

Many countries have taken action in recent times to address harassment in the work place and violence in the home, but little attention has been paid to sexual harassment in public places, specifically during women’s journey to work and school. In developing countries, many more women are seeking education and employment than previously, which has increased the opportunity for sexual harassment in public places. In India, the study location, this harassment is known as “eve teasing”. Eve teasing includes cat calling, lewd remarks, and inappropriate sexual contact such as rubbing and fondling. Tolerance of such incidents could lead to more …

Early Warning/Intervention Systems (Presentation Slides From Nacole Symposium 2016 Held At John Jay College), Jennifer Helsby, Samuel Carton, Kenneth Joseph, Ayesha Mahmud, Youngsoo Park, Joe Walsh, Lauren Haynes

Publications and Research

Adverse interactions between police and the public harm police legitimacy and produce high costs due to harms to both officers and the public as well as litigation. Early intervention systems (EIS) that flag officers considered most likely to be involved in one of these adverse situations are an important tool for police supervision and for targeting of interventions such as counseling or training. However, the EIS that exist are often not data-driven and are based on supervior intuition. We have developed a prototype data-driven EIS that uses a diverse set of data sources from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and machine …

Body-Worn Cameras And Civilian Policy Oversight: A Camden Case Study (Presentation Slides From Nacole Symposium 2016 Held At John Jay College), Maria Ponomarenko, Barry Friedmann

Publications and Research

Throughout its Final Report, the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing repeatedly called for a new form of civilian oversight: for police departments to involve community members in the process of developing and reviewing department policies on a variety of topics from use of new technologies to police training. The Task Force stressed that this sort of engagement is essential to promoting external legitimacy and building trust between policing agencies and the communities they serve. Yet as a number of police officials have acknowledged, community engagement around matters of policy raises a number of difficult questions—and there are few …

Reversing The Realities Of Mass Incarceration: The Role Of American Business, Jeremy Travis

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Comparative Error-Free And Error-Prone Translesion Synthesis Of N2‑2′-Deoxyguanosine Adducts Formed By Mitomycin C And Its Metabolite, 2,7-Diaminomitosene, In Human Cells, Arindam Bose, Chaitra Surugihalli, Paritosh Pande, Elise Champeil, Ashis K. Basu

Publications and Research

Mitomycin C (MC) is a cytotoxic and mutagenic antitumor agent that alkylates DNA upon reductive activation. 2,7-Diaminomitosene (2,7-DAM) is a major metabolite of MC in tumor cells, which also alkylates DNA. MC forms seven DNA adducts, including monoadducts and inter- and intrastrand cross-links, whereas 2,7-DAM forms two monoadducts. Herein, the biological effects of the dG-N2 adducts formed by MC and 2,7-DAM have been compared by constructing single-stranded plasmids containing these adducts and replicating them in human embryonic kidney 293T cells. Translesion synthesis (TLS) efficiencies of dG-N2-MC and dG-N2-2,7-DAM were 38 ± 3 and 27 …

Make A Twitter Bot In Python: Iterative Code Examples, Robin Camille Davis, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

A tutorial based upon the LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee’s “Build Your Own Twitter Bot” day in December 2015, which was billed as a gentle introduction to programming in Python.

The Impact Of Academic Service Learning On Community College Students, Sharon S. Ellerton, Sandy Figueroa, Peter Fiume, Debra Greenwood

Publications and Research

Although research clearly indicates that academic service-learning provides multiple benefits to college students in baccalaureate institutions, there is less known about its impact on community college students; a population who may benefit the most from this pedagogy. Four faculty members from four different community colleges within the City University of New York incorporated service-learning into their classrooms while also maintaining control classes. Quantitative survey data on student civic engagement and college skills were collected and survey responses from those students that did, and did not, participate in service-learning were compared. The data demonstrated meaningful differences between the non-service-learners and service-learning …

Barack Obama Blindness (Bob): Absence Of Visual Awareness To A Single Object, Marjan Persuh, Robert D. Melara

Publications and Research

In two experiments, we evaluated whether a perceiver’s prior expectations could alone obliterate his or her awareness of a salient visual stimulus. To establish expectancy, observers first made a demanding visual discrimination on each of three baseline trials. Then, on a fourth, critical trial, a single, salient and highly visible object appeared in full view at the center of the visual field and in the absence of any competing visual input. Surprisingly, fully half of the participants were unaware of the solitary object in front of their eyes. Dramatically, observers were blind even when the only stimulus on display was …

"I Bought The Book And I Didn't Need It": What Reading Looks Like At An Urban Community College, Rachel Ihara, Annie Del Principe

Publications and Research

Based on a qualitative study of students’ experiences, we offer a new typology of student reading behaviors across the disciplines at a community college.

Review: Saving Place: 50 Years Of New York City Landmarks, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

This piece is a review of "Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks" at the Museum of the City of New York from April 2015 to January 2016. It discusses the presentation of the history of preservation in New York City and how the landmarks law has been implemented and challenged over its first half century.

Article of record is at http://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/75/1/119.abstract

Distance Education More Expensive Than Thought., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Cost is one of the big issues facing higher education.

Diminishing government funding has spiraled

the expense of attending public colleges and

universities, which, in turn, has increased the debt

burden on students to more than a trillion dollars.

Facing this issue has become a national concern

for many politicians. State legislators and governors,

as well as executives of some for-profit

education companies, have been pushing distance

education (mostly in the form of on-line courses)

as the solution.

Reclaiming Futures And Organizing Justice For Drug-Using Youth, Jeffrey A. Butts, Kathleen A. Tomberg, Jennifer Peirce, Douglas N. Evans, Angela Irvine

Publications and Research

Reclaiming Futures is an organizational change initiative that supports coordinated and individualized responses for justice-involved youth with problematic substance use issues. The Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice compared people's perceptions currently working in Reclaiming Futures communities with similar colleagues from nearly ten years ago. The study suggested that communities with the strongest engagement in Reclaiming Futures tended to have more positive perceptions of their youth justice and substance abuse treatment systems, including key facets of administration, collaboration, and overall system quality.

Unmanned Arial Systems (Uas) In The Local Public Safety Environment: A Review, Hiram Taylor, Blount-Hill Blount-Hill, Charles R. Jennings

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Annotate The Web: Four Ways To Mark Up Web Content, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Web annotation has been a pipe dream almost since the birth of the Internet itself. Commenting in the margins of a text itself is so simple for paper and print, yet replicating the experience online remains elusive. In this article, I examine four tools for private or public web annotation. Hypothesis and Genius offer users a shareable way to annotate webpages line by line and start conversations in the margins. Pinboard and Evernote allow users to organize and save web documents and add private annotations.

Emerging Justice Technologies And The Need For Evaluation, Jason Tashea

Publications and Research

This report from John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center examines the role of emerging technologies in criminal justice reform, emphasizing the need for thorough evaluation to assess effectiveness and avoid unintended consequences. It suggests that technology should support, not replace, human judgment in justice processes.

A Decision Model For Recommending Which Building Occupants Should Move Where During Fire Emergencies, Norman E. Groner

Publications and Research

This paper describes a decision model for managing the movement of building occupants during fire emergencies. Currently available guidance from standard practice, egress modeling, codes and the re-search literature, is too general to provide much help to persons charged with the responsibility of where groups of occupants should be located given a fire scenario. The occupant movement decision model described in the paper uses three basic yes–no questions to divide building occupants into groups during a fire emergency. For any particular group, the decision model recommends one of two basic actions:(1) people remain where they are already located; or, (2) …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Review Of Daniel J. Sargent. A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking Of American Foreign Relations In The 1970s., Itai Sneh

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Iraqi Women Confronting Isil: Protecting Women’S Rights In The Context Of Conflict, Lisa Davis

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Costs Of "Broken Windows" Policing: Twenty Years And Counting, K. Babe Howell

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Taking Stock Of Cuny Esl: What A Survey Of Esl Faculty And Adminstrators Says About The Past, The Present, And The Future, Effie Paptzikou Cochran, Lubie Grujicic-Alatristie

Publications and Research

This report provides a summary of a survey of CUNY ESL faculty and administrators in an attempt to assess CUNY ESL programs’ achievements and to offer an insight into current challenges. In the new millennium, with educational, financial, political, and linguistic concerns on the rise, taking stock of where we are in English as a second language instruction in higher education and planning for the future are at once prudent and pressing.

Conscientization & Third Space: A Case Study Of A Tunisian Activist, Habiba Boumlik, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

This article examines the role of a female cyber and social activist, Amira Yahyaoui, in the aftermaths of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia through the lens of adult education. In this case study, the theoretical frameworks of conscientization and third space are utilized to describe Yahyaoui’s development of the watchdog political organization, al-bawsala, for the purpose of transformative learning and knowledge transmission in regard to political practices toward democracy in Tunisia. The focus will be on platforms used by this non-governmental organization (NGO), Al-Bawsala, to educate and raise political consciousness; these participatory platforms are: marsad (parliamentary observatory), debates or town …

Hashtag Activism And Why #Blacklivesmatter In (And To) The Classroom, Prudence Cumberbatch, Nicole Trujillo-Pagán

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Collaboration Between The Library And Office Of Student Disability Services: Document Accessibility In Higher Education, Rebecca Arzola

Publications and Research

Purpose – The paper aims to discuss the relationship between interdepartmental stakeholders in higher education and the information identified as a result of collaborations. It proposes that collaborations can help clarify issues to then advocate for them.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper opted for a naturalistic case study design, gathering direct and participant observation of interdepartmental collaborations including 1 Student Share, 12 one-hour collaborative sessions and 1 Accessibility Conference.

Findings – The paper provides observed insight about student needs to have documents that are accessible for assistive technologies to recognize and read how change is brought about during internal brand building. …

Insights Into The Molecular Antiviral Mechanism Of Pokeweed Protein From Phytolacca Americana, Valentina R. Aitbakieva, Artem V. Domashevskiy

Publications and Research

Agriculture is an indispensable part of every person’s life, ensuring that nutritious and inexpensive food is readily available. As any other organisms, plants are subject to numerous parasitic infections. Biological evolution has allowed plants to produce a variety of toxic compounds to deal with their pathogens. American pokeweed plant (Phytolacca americana) manufactures pokeweed antiviral protein, a ribosome inactivating protein that disrupts protein synthesis and lowers infectivity of many plant and animal viruses. The intricate mechanism of PAP antiviral activity entails a delicate coordination and interplay of several factors, allowing the plant to battle its invaders. Here, we examine the molecular …

Proceedings Of The 3rd Annual Cuny Games Festival, Robert O. Duncan, Joe Bisz, Julie Cassidy, Carlos Hernandez, Kathleen Offenholley, Maura A. Smale, Deborah Sturm, Cuny Games Network

Publications and Research

Proceedings of the CUNY Games Conference, held from January 22-23, 2016, at the CUNY Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Literacy and Story - Anything Can be Attempted: In-Person Simulations and Role-Plays in Educations - Game Design - STEM - Design Research - Literature and Story - Awareness: Gender and Sex - Transformative Games Initiative: Game Design as a Classroom Laboratory for Any Discipline - Narrative and Rhetoric - Design Challenges - Information Literacy and Language - Game Design for All: What’s Your Game Plan? Turn Any Idea into a Game! - Ghosts in the Machine - Game …