Digital Commons Network^™

Virality Is Virility: Viral Media, Popularity, And Violence, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The author takes ethical looks at viral images of black death and other violence wrought by fake media.

Cooperative Target Tracking In Concentric Formations, Lili Ma

Publications and Research

This paper considers the problem of coordinating multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a circular formation around a moving target. The main contribution is allowing for versatile formation patterns on the basis of the following components. Firstly, new uniform spacing control laws are proposed that spread the agents not necessarily over a full circle, but over a circular arc. Uniform spacing formation controllers are proposed, regulating either the separation distances or the separation angles between agents. Secondly, the use of virtual agents is proposed to allow for different radii in agents’ orbits. Thirdly, a hierarchical combination of formation patterns is …

Teaching Authors About Predatory Journals In The One-On-One Consultation, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

This recipe guides academic librarians through author consultations related to predatory or questionable publishers. Lists of predatory journals provide quick answers to questions but leave authors in the dark. The focus of the consultation is to closely examine negative and positive indicators for a specific journal. Although it is valuable for authors to learn the signals of predatory journals, it is equally if not more important to emphasize tools like Think.Check.Submit that stimulate critical and analytical thinking about publishing choices. The consultation will result in a more empowered and scholarly information literate colleague and provides opportunities to introduce authors to …

Geoprivacy, Convenience, And The Pursuit Of Anonymity In Digital Cities, Jerome Dobson, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

Cities demand spatial efficiencies that can be achieved only through sharing of information. Current technologies support collection, processing, and dissemination of unprecedented quantities of personal, public, and corporate information. Inherent in this milieu is an inevitable contest among societal efficiency, corporate profits, consumer convenience, personal privacy, and even freedom. The authors examine current trends in technology, data collection, legislation, and public acceptance. They find that without broad specific regulations limiting location data collection and use—including a universal protected right for individuals to pursue anonymity—governments, commercial enterprises, employers, and individuals increasingly will exploit tracking technologies at the expense of geoprivacy.

Assessment Challenges In Acquired Aphasia In Multilingual Individuals, Monica Norvik, Mira Goral

Publications and Research

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder resulting from damage to the brain, most typically a stroke in the left cerebral hemisphere. The degree and type of impairment vary depending on the site and size of the lesion, and the extent to which people with aphasia recover – with time and therapeutic intervention – their pre-stroke linguistic skills varies, depending on exogenous and endogenous variables. Multilingual speakers who acquire aphasia may exhibit comparable or different profiles of impairment in each of their languages. The present chapter explores the challenges associated with the assessment of all languages of multilingual and multicultural speakers …

Communication During A Crisis: Keeping Our Patrons Informed During The Covid-19 Pandemic, John P. Delooper, Michelle Ehrenpreis

Publications and Research

This article discusses the Leonard Lief Library’s communications strategy to keep its patrons informed during the COVID-19 crisis. The Leonard Lief Library at Lehman College (CUNY) made use of its website, social media, and research guides to effectively convey timely information about service changes, library resources, and to improve outreach activities to our patron community while the library’s physical building was closed to its students, faculty, and staff.

Aphasia In Multilingual Patients, Mira Goral, Zahra Hejazi

Publications and Research

Purpose of Review

We summarize recent published work concerning assessment and treatment of aphasia in bilingual and multilingual people and review current related models of treatment outcomes. As well, we discuss studies that address the recently debated topic of cognitive processes in bilingual individuals with aphasia, with a focus on the effects of bilingualism on aphasia recovery and its potential protective effects.

Recent Findings

Providing assessment and treatment tools that best serve multilingual individuals with aphasia and unpacking the variables and mechanisms that underlie response to treatment have emerged as goals of several recent studies. Additionally, while findings are still …

All We Need Is One Mic: A Call For Anti-Racist Solidarity To Deconstruct Anti-Black Racism In Educational Leadership, Soribel Genao, Yaribel Mercedes

Publications and Research

In this article, we outline some of the vital measurements of racism and anti-blackness as a macro system in education. We contend that principal preparation programs have not explicitly prioritized anti-racist school leadership, while often resisting the possibilities of solidarity or one mic of knowledge to increase anti-racist dispositions. Considering the lexicon of whiteness as an assemblage, a racial discourse should be “supported by material practices and institutions,” that prepare educational leaders to examine anti-blackness curriculum that have been embedded as a standard method. We also posit that theoretical understanding of racism as global whiteness from a post-oppositional lens and …

Protocol For Safe, Affordable, And Reproducible 1 Isolation And Quantitation 2 Of Sars-Cov-2 Rna From Wastewater, Monica Trujillo, Kristen Cheung, Anna Gao, Irene Hoxie, Sherin Kannoly, Nanami Kubota, Kaung Myat San, Davida S. Smyth, John J. Dennehy

Publications and Research

The following protocol describes our workflow for processing wastewater with the goal of detecting the genetic signal of SARS-CoV-2. The steps include pasteurization, virus concentration, RNA extraction, and quantification by RT-qPCR. We include auxiliary steps that provide new users with tools and strategies that will help troubleshoot key steps in the process. This protocol is one of the safest, cheapest, and most reproducible approaches for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. Furthermore, the RNA obtained using this protocol, minus the pasteurization step, can be sequenced both using a targeted approach sequencing specific regions or the whole genome. The protocol …

Women’S Political Leadership And Adult Health: Evidence From Rural And Urban China, Hongwei Xu, Nancy Luke, Susan E. Short

Publications and Research

This study examined the role of women’s political leadership at the community level in China, a context that has experienced recent political and socioeconomic change and has a distinctive rural-urban divide. Drawing on longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (N = 40,918~52,406 person-year observations), we found that female community directors outnumbered male directors in urban China but were much less common in rural areas. Female community directors had higher levels of human capital regardless of rural or urban location. Residents living in female-directed communities reported better mental health, but not physical health or life satisfaction, compared to those …

Computable Procedures For Fields, Russell Miller

Publications and Research

This tutorial will introduce listeners to many questions that can be asked about computable processes on fields, and will present the answers that are known, sometimes with proofs. This is not original work. The questions in greatest focus here include decision procedures for the existence of roots of polynomials in specific fields, for the irreducibility of polynomials over those fields, and for transcendence of specific elements over the prime subfield. Several of these questions are related to the construction of algebraic closures, making Rabin's Theorem prominent.

Premarital Fertility And Marital Timing In Malawi, Michelle Poulin, Kathleen Beegle, Hongwei Xu

Publications and Research

In Malawi, Africa, the median age at first marriage is among the lowest on the continent and adolescent fertility rates are among the highest. Using high-frequency panel data from the country designed to follow single women and men into marriage, we examine the extent to which premarital fertility is associated with the timing of marriage. Two notable findings emerge. First, premarital fertility typically leads to a more rapid transition into marriage, compared to those not having had a premarital conception or birth, with controls. The effect is as strong for men as it is for women. Second, among women with …

Toward Transformable Photonics: Reversible Deforming Soft Cavities, Controlling Their Resonance Split And Directional Emission, Mark Douvidzon, Shai Maayani, Harel Nagar, Tamir Admon, Vladimir Shuvayev, Lan Yang, Lev Deych, Yael Roichman, Tal Carmon

Publications and Research

We report on reversible and continuously deformable soft micro-resonators and the control of their resonance split and directional emission. Assisted by computerized holographic-tweezers, functioning as an optical deformer of our device, we gradually deform the shape and change the functionality of a droplet whispering-gallery cavity. For example, we continuously deform hexagonal cavities to rectangular ones and demonstrate switching to directionally emitting mode-of-operation, or splitting a resonant mode to a 10-GHz separated doublet. A continuous trend of improving spatial light modulators and tweezers suggests that our method is scalable and can control the shape and functionality of many individual devices. We …

Beyond Crisis Moments: Mediating Instructor-Student Conflict Through Anti-Racist Practice, Amy J. Wan, Christopher John Williams

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Multimodality From The Multilingual Epicenter: Queens, “The Next America”, Eunjeong Lee, Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan

Publications and Research

Understanding that multimodality is a critical part of language work, this article
examines the conditions for uptaking multimodality. With a focus on the material
conditions and/of the labor crucial in building a culture of multimodality, we discuss how our context of Queens College (QC), a senior college in the public-serving CUNY system, where the majority of the students represents what Hall (2009) has described as the “Next America,” shapes the implementation and the impact of multimodal work for our students and educators. Particularly for multilingual students, whose multimodal meaning-making potential is often disregarded as irrelevant to their “language needs” (Sánchez-Martín …

Validity, Reliability, And Measurement Error Of A Sit-To-Stand Power Test In Older Adults: A Pre-Registered Study, Anoop T. Balachandran

Publications and Research

Objectives: Lower body power declines with age and is associated with decreased physical function in older adults. However, the majority of the tools available to measure power are expensive and require considerable space and expertise to operate. The purpose of this study was to assess the validity, reliability, and measurement error of a sit-to-stand power test (STSp) to assess lower body power. Methods: 51 community-dwelling adults, 65 years or older, completed a power test using a pneumatic leg press (LP), the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) that includes a test of balance, usual walking speed, and chair stand tests; Timed …

Creating A Culturally Relevant Statistics Assignment On Z-Scores, Grace Pai

Publications and Research

Culturally relevant teaching or pedagogy has become increasingly popular both in practice and in research, but there are still few curricular resources for instructors to use, particularly for a college-level mathematics course. Departing from the question “relevant to whom,” this article illustrates how to design a statistics assignment on z-scores that is culturally relevant to students based on their prior experiences. Ultimately, the author shares design principles—which includes the importance of considering student trauma—that can be transferable to any statistics or quantitative analysis/reasoning class.

Dimers, Orientifolds And Stability Of Supersymmetry Breaking Vacua, Riccardo Argurio, Matteo Bertolini, Sebastían Franco, Eduardo García-Valdecasas, Shani Meynet, Antoine Pasternak, Valdo Tatitscheff

Publications and Research

We study (orientifolded) toric Calabi-Yau singularities in search for D-brane configurations which lead to dynamical supersymmetry breaking at low energy. By exploiting dimer techniques we are able to determine that while most realizations lead to a Coulomb branch instability, a rather specific construction admits a fully stable supersymmetry breaking vacuum. We describe the geometric structure that a singularity should have in order to host such a construction, and present its simplest example, the Octagon.

Reflections On The Bgj Anti-Racism Seminar, Michelle Billies

Publications and Research

In this Letter to the Editor, Billies (2021) responds to critical and supportive opinion pieces in the British Gestalt Journal (BGJ) following their plenary presentation at BGJ’s 2018 annual seminar (see Asherson Bartram, 2019; O’Malley, 2019). As author of the companion article "How/ Can Gestalt Therapy Promote Liberation from Anti-Black Racism?” (Billies, 2021), Billies, who identifies as white, discusses the intent at the seminar to support white people to increase accountability and reduce harm in dialogue with people of color, while supporting the work and needs of people of color on their terms from a Gestalt perspective. Describing a fishbowl …

All Rise: Suiting Up When Showing Up For The Practice Of Law In The Covid-19 Virtual Legal Environment, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

The age-old advice: “No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up for work and life!” may be worth remembering as more legal professionals participate in virtual environments due to the COVID-19 mandated court closures.

Virtual court hearings, mediations, and meetings are taking place. Attorneys and legal educators have adapted to changes in how we meet clients and students by utilizing Blackboard Collaborative, Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet/Hangouts, and Skype. Do such changes in our ways of meeting and communicating-within the virtual environment-bring with them a corresponding change in expectations of what is appropriate attire …

Lives In Musicology: My Life In Writings, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Responding to an invitation from the editors of Acta Musicologica to tell the story of his life in musicology, Kofi Agawu describes his upbringing and early education in Ghana and his university studies in the UK and the US. In a career focused on teaching, research, and writing, he outlines a number of intellectual projects involving the analysis of African and European music. He ends by acknowledging renewed discussions of race and identity in the musical academy today, and hints at his own growing interest in African art music.

Ultrafast Thermal Modification Of Strong Coupling In An Organic Microcavity, Bin Liu, Vinod M. Menon, Matthew Y. Sfeir

Publications and Research

There is growing interest in using strongly coupled organic microcavities to tune molecular dynamics, including the electronic and vibrational properties of molecules. However, very little attention has been paid to the utility of cavity polaritons as sensors for out-of-equilibrium phenomena, including thermal excitations. Here, we demonstrate that non-resonant infrared excitation of an organic microcavity system induces a transient response in the visible spectral range near the cavity polariton resonances. We show how these optical responses can be understood in terms of ultrafast heating of electrons in the metal cavity mirror, which modifies the effective refractive index and subsequently the strong …

The ‘Global South’ In The Study Of World Politics: Examining A Meta Category, Sebastian Haug, Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, Günther Maihold

Publications and Research

This introductory contribution examines the ‘Global South’ as a meta category in the study of world politics. Against the backdrop of a steep rise in references to the ‘Global South’ across academic publications, we ask whether and how the North–South binary in general, and the ‘(Global) South’ in particular, can be put to use analytically. Building on meta categories as tools for the classification of global space, we discuss the increasing prominence of the ‘Global South’ and then outline different understandings attached to it, notably socio-economic marginality, multilateral alliance-building and resistance against global hegemonic power. Following an overview of individual …

A Refined Experimentalist Governance Approach To Incremental Policy Change: The Case Of Process-Tracing China’S Central Government Infrastructure Ppp Policies Between 1988 And 2017, Huanming Wang, Bin Chen, Joop Koppenjan

Publications and Research

This article was originally published in Journal of Chinese Governance, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/23812346.2021.1898151

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

The Role Of The Physical And Social Environment In Observed And Self-Reported Park Use In Low-Income Neighborhoods In New York City, Javier E. Otero Peña, Hanish Kodali, Emily Ferris, Katarzyna Wyka, Setha Low, Kelly R. Evenson, Joan M. Dorn, Lorna E. Thorpe, Terry T. K. Huang

Publications and Research

Physical and social environments of parks and neighborhoods influence park use, but the extent of their relative influence remains unclear. This cross-sectional study examined the relationship between the physical and social environment of parks and both observed and self-reported park use in low-income neighborhoods in New York City. We conducted community- (n = 54 parks) and individual-level (n = 904 residents) analyses. At the community level, observed park use was measured using a validated park audit tool and regressed on the number of facilities and programmed activities in parks, violent crime, stop-and-frisk incidents, and traffic accidents. At the …

Extracellular Vesicles Released By Human Retinal Pigment Epithelium Mediate Increased Polarised Secretion Of Drusen Proteins In Response To Amd Stressors, Miguel Flores-Bellver, Jason Mighty, Silvia Aparicio-Domingo, Kang V. Li, Cui Shi, Jing Zhou, Hannah Cobb, Patrick Mcgrath, German Michelis, Patricia Lenhart, Ganna Bilousova, Søren Heissel, Michael J. Rudy, Christina Coughlan, Andrew E. Goodspeed, S. Patricia Becerra, Stephen Redenti, M. Valeria Canto-Soler

Publications and Research

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of blindness worldwide. Drusen are key contributors to the etiology of AMD and the ability to modulate drusen biogenesis could lead to therapeutic strategies to slow or halt AMD progression. The mechanisms underlying drusen biogenesis, however, remain mostly unknown. Here we demonstrate that under homeostatic conditions extracellular vesicles (EVs) secreted by retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells are enriched in proteins associated with mechanisms involved in AMD pathophysiology, including oxidative stress, immune response, inflammation, complement system and drusen composition. Furthermore, we provide first evidence that drusen-associated proteins are released as cargo of extracellular …

Dimers, Orientifolds And Anomalies, Riccardo Argurio, Matteo Bertolini, Sebastían Franco, Eduardo Garcia-Valdecasas, Shani Meynet, Antoine Pasternak, Valdo Tatitscheff

Publications and Research

We study 4d N = 1 gauge theories engineered via D-branes at orientifolds of toric singularities, where gauge anomalies are cancelled without the introduction of non-compact flavor branes. Using dimer model techniques, we derive geometric criteria for establishing whether a given singularity can admit anomaly-free D-brane configurations purely based on its toric data and the type of orientifold projection. Our results therefore extend the dictionary between geometric properties of singularities and physical properties of the corresponding gauge theories.

Light-Ray Moments As Endpoint Contributions To Modular Hamiltonians, Daniel Kabat, Gilad Lifschytz, Phuc Nguyen, Debajyoti Sarkar

Publications and Research

We consider excited states in a CFT, obtained by applying a weak unitary perturbation to the vacuum. The perturbation is generated by the integral of a local operator J⁽ⁿ⁾ of modular weight n over a spacelike surface passing through x = 0. For |n| ≥ 2 the modular Hamiltonian associated with a division of space at x = 0 picks up an endpoint contribution, sensitive to the details of the perturbation (including the shape of the spacelike surface) at x = 0. The endpoint contribution is a sum of light-ray moments of the perturbing operator …

Framing Inclusion: The Media Treatment Of Irregular Immigrants' Right To Health Care In Spain, Alisa Petroff, Anahí Viladrich, Sònia Parella

Publications and Research

With the passing of Royal Decree-Law 16/2012, Spain’s national health system switched from a model defined by universal and free health care principles, to a private insurance system that excluded large population groups. Based on a qualitative research design, this paper examines the media treatment of undocumented immigrants’ prerogatives to public health care in Spain (2012–2018). The analysis of 234 articles, drawn from three major Spanish newspapers, reveals three frames that underscore the media’s "rhetorics of inclusion," which argue for the extension of free medical services to irregular immigrants a topic traditionally underestimated by the literature. The moralist frame, supported …

Sharing Library And Information Resources During A Global Pandemic Introduction From The Guest Editor, Beth Posner

Publications and Research

Written in the summer and fall of 2020, and revised and published in 2021, the articles in this special issue of Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery and Electronic Reserve offer examples of how the library community has been meeting local and global needs for information during this pandemic. They highlight the challenges and issues that have regrettably, but understandably, limited information sharing, as well as some best practices that have emerged. They also report on local activities and details for which there is not yet a consensus. This journal issue is not the first word on the subject; we …