Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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 …

Designing Emotional Content Into The Mouthfeel Of Food, Shahd Zubier

Theses

Processed foods may lack nutritional value; however, they are inexpensive, convenient, and highly palatable or satisfying to consumers. All of these factors impact the relationships we have with food. One of the reasons why processed foods are enjoyable is the variation of sensorial qualities it provides. Our senses facilitate our connection with food, we observe the color and form visually, we examine the texture with our hands and mouth, we hear the crunch of a crispy chip. All of these factors are considered in the realm of food design. Designers can contribute to this area by applying the Design Thinking …

Virtual Reality Interfaces For Product Design: Finding User Interface Solutions For Design Creation Within Virtual Reality, Johanna Lopez Taveras

Theses

The focus of Virtual Reality has gone from research to widespread adoption in entertainment and practical directions, like automotive design and architectural visualization. With that, we have to take into consideration the best way to give in-experience control to the user and the interaction within the interface.

Recent studies explore the ergonomic considerations and zones of content for VR interfaces. But Virtual Reality interaction design has a long way to go and nowadays is done mainly like a projection of 2D screens, with planar interfaces in the 3D space, almost ignoring the immersive potential of the Virtual Reality medium (Alger …

Blinc: Designing Bicycle Path Protection For Accessible Transportation Networks, Blair A. Benson

Theses

The City of Rochester is defined by both poverty and renewed development in its center city. Often overlooked, access to transportation systems plays an important role in the prevalence of poverty. Accessing areas of Rochester that offer higher paying jobs, better schools, and a greater variety of services is directly related to car ownership, a luxury that Rochester’s poorest cannot afford. This transportation inequality is considered a contributing factor to Rochester’s poverty rate.

In addition, the discontinuous urban fabric of downtown Rochester is designed for automobile, not pedestrian or bicycle traffic. Safe and continuous pedestrian and cycling pathways are often …

How To Avoid Collisions Between Cyclists And Motorists In Urban Areas, Yinan Luan

Theses

Using a bicycle as a means of transportation is becoming more common in cities. Protecting the safety of cyclists in complex urban environments is important.

This paper discusses user research, collisions analysis, and environment. Then, the article expounds by providing the different perspectives of cyclists and motorists. Analyzing the accidents of bicycles, how to effectively avoid collisions will significantly solve the safety problems of cyclists. In terms of solutions, this paper considers theoretical methods and existing products available. It then recommends a visibility system and proposes a visibility system to enhance visibility and avoid unpredictable behavior. The whole system makes …

The Legal Experiences Of The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing Community, Dillon Curren

Theses

The criminal justice system serves in many different ways for people. Sometimes, groups of people are underserved by the criminal justice system and cannot achieve the goals being set up by the criminal justice system to be a watchful guardian who is swift, certain, and fair. The following project will look at the Deaf/Hard of Hearing Community (D/HH) and their experiences with the criminal justice system in a series of working papers including a literature review of studies, papers, and documentation of experiences within the system. There are several obstacles between the two communities that causes tension and unfairness for …

Swift, Certain, And Fair: A Pilot Program Of The Probation Department In Monroe County, New York, Luisa R. Swan

Theses

For my capstone, I will be breaking down some components of the evaluation of the Swift, Certain, and Fair probation program in Monroe County, New York. Monroe County Probation’s Swift, Certain & Fair Model Pilot Program focuses on offenders between 16–24 years old who have been arrested on certain gun charges (more specifically, Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the second degree). It is designed to help change the behaviors of those who may otherwise be unlikely to succeed under traditional probation supervision. This model extends the program development and analysis of a program known as HOPE (Hawaii Opportunity Probation …

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 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 …

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 …

Recognition Of Stress In Emergency Room Nurses, Coleen Karr

Theses

Emergency room nurses work in an environment that is volatile and challenging due to the frequent exposures to critical incidences and stressful events. Given the frequency of exposure to these critical incidences and stressful events, this study was initiated to identify the reactionary responses to stress in emergency room nurses and to if the nurses could then be predisposed to posttraumatic stress disorder. The theoretical framework of Betty Neuman's Systems model of nursing was reflected throughout the investigation for the purpose of identifying the effects of stress on a person's line of defense. The use of the Depression Anxiety Stress …

Sheep: A Lifestyle Platform Providing Access To Freshest Greens For Metropolitan Areas Through Vertical Farming System, Xiao Cui

Theses

With today’s food supply chain, consumers who live in metropolitan areas can not be able to get the freshest greens they want everyday. Main reason is the long transportation between urban city and traditional farms. Based on the research, l found that a new agriculture technology named vertical farming can solve these problems. Because of the main feature of this technique is efficient use of urban space, it can solved the scarcity of land problem. Secondly, the shorter growth cycle can meets the high demand of fresh greens in urban cities. Thirdly, vertical farming can cultivate vegetables which is free …

Important Considerations For Creative Professionals When Designing For Users With Mental Health Issues, Yiting Zhu

Theses

Creative professionals who design products, entertainment, application, websites, and even marketing are gradually beginning to realize the importance of evoking emotions and personalized communication to attract users’ attention and improve the satisfying experience. Emotional-based design can profoundly influence overall user experience since emotions affect decision making, attention, memory, and meaning. Designers often apply emotional design by two main approaches. The first is based on the modification of objects’ aesthetic appearances such as color, shape, and texture. The other focuses on engaging interaction mostly based on technology development (Van Gorp, Adams 2012). Both of these factors have significant effects on people …

Juveniles And The Criminal Justice System, Tayler Ruggero

Theses

Although juvenile crime rates have been decreasing rapidly in the last three decades, 2,805 children are still arrested each day in the United States (The State of America’s Children®, 2017). A child should get to grow up feeling safe and secure, with room to grow and develop with the support of their families, schools, and communities. Of those being arrested, they are mostly children of color and those that come from lower income communities. After these youths are incarcerated, they are at risk of physical and psychological abuse, sexual assault, and suicide. They also lack proper educational instruction while in …

Controllability Of Cardiac Alternans, Mark O. Ampofo

Theses

An arrhythmia is a disorder in the heart that occurs due to irregular or abnormal heartbeats. There are many types of arrhythmias, some of which are harmless, but some, including ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation, can be life-threatening. Certain arrhythmias are preceded by electrical alternans, which is a state characterized by beat-to-beat alternation in cellular action potential duration. Cardiac alternans may arise from instabilities in either voltage or intracellular calcium cycling. Although a number of techniques have been proposed to suppress alternans, most have focused on appropriately adding a new ionic current or adjusting the timing of pacing stimuli based on …

Nmr Studies Of Translational And Rotational Diffusion Of A Phase Separating Eye Lens Protein: Bovine Γb-Crystallin, Aaron Thomas Fadden

Theses

Cataracts are one of the leading causes of blindness in the world. Cataracts can occur when proteins (known as “crystallins”) in the cytoplasm of the eye lens phase separate or associate, creating local fluctuations in the refractive index of the lens. Bovine γB-crystallin is analogous (in sequence, structure, and function) to the human γD-crystallin and can be isotopically labeled during growth with 13C and 15N when expressed in Escherichia coli. In this work, the two most important Brownian motions, rotational and translational diffusion, were measured under various temperatures and concentrations in an effort to better understand the intermolecular interactions and …

Post-Gated Era: Towards Integrated Urban Communities In China, Xiaojing Lin

Theses

Gated communities, which typically refer to residential compounds that have strict boundaries with entrances guarded by securities and other technology appliances for surveillance, are the most common developments in Chinese cities over the past few decades. These enclosures of isolated city blocks have caused heated discussion since The CPC (Central Committee and State Council) published a guildline in 2016 to prohibit the construction of Gated communities in Chinese cities. For unique historical and social-cultural reasons, “Gated” has been deeply embedded in Chinese traditional dwelling ideology for a long time, and it is still widely accepted by the vast majority as …

Efficient Distribution Regression, Nicholas Wilkins

Theses

In this thesis we devise a method for performing distribution regression utilizing an extension of mixture density networks. This method will be benchmarked against other state-of-the-art methods (utilizing negative log loss) and distribution-agnostic models of similar complexity. We demonstrate that our proposed method performs at least as well as the state-of-the-art methods in distribution regression. Additionally, we show that adding distribution predictive capabilities does not significantly decrease performance in models. We illustrate how one can utilize this methodology to regress to confidence interval predictions. Finally, we demonstrate a variety of novel and interesting applications of our framework.

A Study On The Effect Of Fabric Structure And Finishing On Perceived Image Quality, Payal Sharma

Theses

Valued at nearly US 7.5 billion, the global textile industry continues on a growth trajectory. Printed textiles represent a major segment of the market, and are making significant contributions to the overall expansion of the industry. Historically, screen printing has dominated the printed textile market, but digital technologies continue to make inroads (Hayward, 2016).

One of the problems encountered in the textile industry is obtaining the desired color. Studies have shown that the texture and finishing of a fabric can have an impact on the way the ink sets on the fabric and in turn effect the quality of image. …

Drug Quality Assurance To Combat Counterfeit Streptomycin Using Facile, Low Cost Colorimetry, Makayla R. Foster

Theses

An easy to use, low cost colorimetric method to identify the quality and quantity of the tuberculosis (TB) medication, streptomycin was developed. TB is typically treated using a multi-drug regimen comprised of antibiotics such as streptomycin. According to WHO and USAID up to 50% of pharmaceuticals are counterfeit worldwide. The problem intensifies the closer one gets to the point of care. A facile counterfeit detection method, that is specific to only the authentic medication, is essential. Since the 1940s, streptomycin was colorimetrically identified using a 16-hour base hydrolysis process followed by an iron complexation reaction. A tris(maltonato)iron (III) complex was …

Oil Dependency And National Food Security: A Case For Nigeria, Alexandra A. Akaakar

Theses

Food insecurity is a condition of insufficient access to quality nutritious food; it is often rooted in shocks that interrupt the food production/distribution system in an area. Amidst the capabilities of Nigeria's agricultural system, the number of households across Nigeria experiencing food shortages has increased rapidly. The main reason for this increase were price shocks. This incident highlighted a huge vulnerability in Nigeria's food system, the vulnerability to price shocks. Incidences such as poverty and conflicts magnify the frequency of food insecurity. The ability to reduce vulnerabilities while addressing existing issues in food production and supply depends on a stable …

Assess Material Properties Of Concrete Using Combined Ndt Methods, Abhishek Chitti

Theses

The aim of this research is to assess the material properties of concrete like modulus of elasticity, compressive strength, and Poisson’s ratio using various nondestructive Testing (NDT) methods like Ultrasonic Pulse Velocity (UPV) and Rebound Hammer (RH). Assessment of material properties of concrete is very important as they are used for structural design process. Various NDT methods are applied to ensure the quality of concrete specimens but they can also be used to find material properties. UPV is a NDT method which is used to test the internal condition of the concrete specimen. RH is a surface hardness testing method …

Real-Time Facial Emotion Recognition Using Fast R-Cnn, Salem Bin Saqer Almarri

Theses

In computer vision and image processing, object detection algorithms are used to detect semantic objects of certain classes of images and videos. Object detector algorithms use deep learning networks to classify detected regions. Unprecedented advancements in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have led to new possibilities and implementations for object detectors. An object detector which uses a deep learning algorithm detect objects through proposed regions, and then classifies the region using a CNN. Object detectors are computationally efficient unlike a typical CNN which is computationally complex and expensive. Object detectors are widely used for face detection, recognition, and object tracking. In …

A Qualitative Examination Of Experiences Of Acculturation, Acculturative Stress, And Coping Among Black International Students, Maame Esi Arkofoa Coleman

Theses

This study was designed to describe the experiences of acculturation, acculturative stress, and coping behaviors among Black international students. While research exists on the acculturative and coping experiences of international students in the United States, very few studies have been designed to explicitly examine the experiences of Black international students of sub-Saharan and Caribbean origins. A majority of the existing literature has focused on experiences of Asian and Latin American international students (Malcolm & Mendoza, 2014). This study was intended to provide information about the acculturative experiences of Black international students enrolled at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Interviews were conducted …

Act-Based Statements Effect On Bartending Tips, Mariah Patz

Theses

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a behaviorally-based intervention that emphasizes psychological processes related to mindfulness, values, committed actions towards values, defusion from troubling thoughts, and acceptance. ACT is often used with populations who experience psychological inflexibility or stress, but not much research has been done understanding how ACT processes may affect everyday tasks within the common public or within business practices. The present study used a randomized controlled trial to determine the effect that statements related to ACT processes given while receiving a bar tending service altered the outcome tipping percentage from guests. The current research also discussed how …

Understanding Prediction Of Low-Quality Comments In Online Science Discourse, Elizabeth R. Lucas

Theses

Online public forum discussion in the Reddit science community is moderated to ensure a high standard of scientific content in discourse. This thesis project creates predictive models to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forum comments, and it seeks to interpret those models based on input from moderators. Information was collected from moderators (their demographics, moderation habits, moderation decisions and reasons for removing comments) to curate a deeper understanding of the online moderation community and predictive models for automated moderation support.