Digital Commons Network^™

The Rise Of Femicide & Digital Activism, Hannah Micciolo

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Women’s voices are often silenced as compared to men, especially when it comes to speaking out against the injustice women have faced. In Mexico, women had been enduring femicide for decades, oftentimes being silenced and overshadowed by the government’s narrative. In this new wave of activism called digital activism, people are now using social media to inform their audience about specific issues. Florence Pugh is one of these people. Pugh uses digital activism to spread awareness for Femicide in Mexico and encourage her audience to also speak up on the issue in a time where women’s voices are silenced.

More Than An Athlete: A Qualitative Analysis Of How Student-Athletes Develop Self-Authorship Through Their Experiences In Athletics, Haley Kate Webb

Honors Theses

Within the context of the newly instituted NCAA Name, Image and Likeness legislation, student-athletes are able to profit from their personal brands. This legislation presents newfound exposure to student-athletes. In order to assess the preparedness of student-athletes to benefit monetarily from their personal brands, an analysis of student-athlete development provides beneficial insight regarding their cognitive development. Using self-authorship theory as a guide, this qualitative research used long interviews to explore how student-athletes are developing their identities through their journeys with athletics. The research analyzes the lived experiences told by five athletes from a medium-sized faith-based NCAA Division II university. The …

Team Learning Within Nurse Teams In A Home Care Organization, Carol A. Gavan

Dissertations

The purpose of this interpretive case study was to determine whether the team learning model (Dechant, Marsick, & Kasl, 1991), which served as a framework, aptly described team learning as it took place among professional service teams in a home health care environment. The learning effectiveness of two teams, of 12 and 14 home care nurses respectively plus their managers and administrators, was described using observations, document analysis, interviews, a literature review, and the Team Learning Survey (Dechant & Marsick, 1993) to gather data.

Factors Affecting The Outcome Of The National Council Licensure Examination Among Nontraditional Learners From Associate Degree Nursing Programs, Angela C. Gaud

Dissertations

The composition of student population in higher education is a reflection of a globalized society and current socioeconomic conditions. Characteristics of nontraditional adult learners have a significant impact in the achievement of their academic goals. A more diverse composition of students enrolled in nursing programs poses an important challenge to NCLEX-RN pass/fail outcomes. Studies that explore or predict the factors associated with NCLEX-RN performance amongst nontraditional adult learners after graduation are limited.

This study analyzed how the demographic, social, and psychological factors observed in the characteristic profile of the nontraditional adult learner are related to NCLEX-RN performance for graduates of …

Systems And Methods For Scalable Retinal Screening Programs, Jeremy Richard Benson

Computer Science ETDs

This dissertation addresses gaps in artificial intelligence-based computer vision tasks in the medical image processing field. We demonstrate effective methods for standardizing and augmenting digital fundus photographs so that robust convolutional neural network-based systems can perform high-throughput disease classification and generalize to never-before-seen data from novel camera technologies, scaling with the changing hardware landscape, as well as keeping up with vast amount of incoming data from the ever-increasing population. We also tackle the problem of discovering relevant samples in an unlabeled cohort of image data, thus widening the bottleneck to all downstream supervised machine learning tasks.

Engineering Advanced Micro And Nanofiber Materials For Biomedical Applications, Alec D. Mccarthy

Theses & Dissertations

At the functional crossroads of engineering and biomedical sciences lies the interdisciplinary field of biomedical engineering. Principles of biomedical engineering are vast, and the rigorous application of engineering towards clinically-relevant medicine has the ability to take novel concepts from bench to bedside. Arguably one of the most promising and productive sub-fields within the biomedical engineering discipline is biomaterial engineering. Here, novel biomaterials, synthesized from natural, synthetic, or hybrid materials, can be used in tissue repair and regeneration, hemostasis, as anatomical support and drug delivery vessels, or as diagnostic devices.

Of particular interest are applications of nanofiber and microfiber objects, which …

Who Pays To Clean Up What A Dying Industry Leaves Behind?, Audrey Carleton

Capstones

As the birthplace of oil and gas, Pennsylvania is home to the highest number of orphaned abandoned oil and gas wells in the country — an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 dot the Keystone State, all remnants of a dying industry. These wells emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and have, for decades, caused alarm to hundreds of residents, documents obtained in a months-long capstone investigation show. The state is currently plugging 10 to 12 abandoned wells per year, on average, out of hundreds of thousands, in part because it has not collected enough in cleanup funds from producers to fund …

Living Positive, Cheyann Harris, Emani King Mack

Capstones

A short documentary by Emani King Mack & Cheyann Harris, that focuses on Black men who are living with HIV. This film features the stories of Malik Davon, Jah Love, and Melchizedek Roberson to destigmatize, empower, and set a new precedent in media on how to cover people living with HIV.

Link to capstone: https://cheyannharris.wixsite.com/livingpositive

"Our Strength Is Unity:" Delivery Bikers In Their Own Words, Connor W. Zaft

Capstones

"Our Strength Is Unity" is a year-long photographic essay on food delivery workers and their attempts to self-organize during the pandemic.

Retail Workers On The Frontlines, Anthony L. Medina

Capstones

Retail work culture has been forever altered by COVID 19. The pandemic shook what was life in New York City. Two years later the nation continues to grapple with the impact of the virus.

Next to frontline workers, retail workers who man the cashiers and maintain the sales floors at big chain stores that sell socks, shirts, shoes and other everyday items are just as vulnerable to the physical and social impact of the pandemic and in some ways provide services just as essential to health care workers.

This photo essay shares the lives of three Brooklyn natives: Cheyann Harris, …

Search And Rescue Missions On The Rise In U.S. National Parks, Sahalie Donaldson

Capstones

Across the country the number of search and rescue missions in national parks has been creeping up since 2018. While the number of missions being undertaken are up overall, some parks in particular have seen a dramatic spike in the number of people requiring rescue services, straining a patchwork, often volunteer-based search-and-rescue system. Some parks like Maine’s Acadia National Park, Zion National Park in Utah and the Grand Canyon National Park even experienced their busiest years to date in regards to the number of search and rescue calls they received.

Both former and current park rangers who go on search …

An Industry Under Construction, Hannah Fullmer

Capstones

A growing number of entrepreneurs (often young, frequently queer or people of color) are trying to change a restaurant industry from within by opening up their own businesses. HAGS, an upcoming queer-focused fine-dining restaurant and Daughter, a community-focused cafe in Brooklyn are just the newest of these socially-minded ventures popping up across the country. These spaces are committed to creating equitable spaces, addressing toxic restaurant and workplace cultures and are frequently tied to larger social issues like food insecurity, zero-waste initiatives or in the case of HAGS, queer representation. But these new business owners are fighting an entrenched system and …

New York’S First Supervised Safe Injection Sites Are A First Of Its Kind In The United States, Jason Gonzalez

Capstones

During the 1980s, the HIV epidemic grew worse each year. The virus is easily spread through shared injection needles. In 1985, activists in New York learned of a solution utilized in Amsterdam, where the municipal health system established a needle exchange program that distributed more than 100,000 needles.

Application Of Vortex Tubes In An Underground Mine Ventilation System, Nelson K. Dumakor-Dupey

Engineering

A major challenge for deep underground mines in tropical regions is high-temperature climate conditions at a working face. The high-temperature conditions can cause discomfort to people working underground and lead to health and safety issues. In some instances, airflow from primary ventilation and central refrigeration systems is not adequate to reduce the ambient temperature below a permissible limit at remotely located working faces. In some mines, mobile cooling systems are used in conjunction with an existing central cooling system. However, mining companies are often skeptical about implementing the combined cooling system due to its high operating costs involved with refrigeration …

Performance Evaluation And Environmental Partitioning Of Op-40 Chemical Herder During Herder Mediated In Situ Burning Of Crude Oil At Varying Environmental Conditions, Md Ibnul Hasan

Engineering

In situ burning (ISB) aided by chemical herders is one of the most suited and effective oil spill response (OSR) techniques for Arctic conditions. OP-40 has been reported as the most efficient and suitable herding agent among the two US EPA-approved herders; however, the fate of OP-40 in the environment after an effective ISB is not fully understood. Previous studies reported partial accumulation of OP-40 in water and confirmed the absence of OP-40 in the air after a burn. The only other possible place of OP-40 accumulation is burned oil residues; however, there was no standard method in previous peer-reviewed …

Review Article: Synthesis Of Fe3o4 Nanoparticle And Its Application For Glassy Carbon Electrode Modification, Agung Slamet Nugraha, Asep Bayu Dani Nandiyanto

Chimica et Natura Acta

Nanomaterials have various unique properties and characteristics so that they can apply in many sectors. One of the most popular nanoparticles today is magnetite nanoparticles. Magnetite particles have several properties such as being super magnetic, having a high saturation field, chemical stability, biocompatibility, and low production costs. The purpose of this article is to review the synthesis of magnetite nanoparticles and their application to Glassy Carbon Electrode (GCE) modification. This modified GCE can applied as an electrochemical sensor to detect various organic and inorganic substances. In this study, type synthesis methods of magnetite nanoparticles which taken from kind literature well …

Femicides: The Other Growing Epidemic We Don’T Want To See, Natalia Gutierrez

Capstones

This report analyzes how gender-based killings is a growing topic within the feminist community of New York and Mexico City and how the use of the right terminology is essential to understand the scope of the problem. I worked for 18 months with the feminist community in both cities and the term ‘femicide’ came over and over in the interviews Femicide, how it is referred in the rest of the world, is the intentional killing of women or girls because they are female, and it is a growing epidemic in the U.S. and in Mexico. I interviewed more than 40 …

Working In New York City With A Disability: Nowhere Near Easy, Milette S. U. Millington

Capstones

This project investigates the common challenges that people with disabilities faced prior to COVID-19 when finding a job and keeping it, and explores how the pandemic may have changed things.

Project link: https://milettem98.wixsite.com/portfolio/capstone

Poetic Self Expression, Impact, And Activism, Mariah Thomas

Capstones

Poetic Self Expression, Impact, and Activism revolves around Black women activists and how they used poetry to fight against racial and social injustice.

Link: https://medium.com/@mariaht/poetic-self-expression-impact-and-activism-a98c7f3385b2

The Healthcare Changemakers Podcast And Existing Conditions .Press, Emily Lowinger

Capstones

A podcast made from live interviews with healthcare changemakers.

http://existingconditions.press/podcast

“The New Pinkertons”: Anti-Union Consultants And Surveillance Tech Thwart Organizing, Jo Constantz

Capstones

In 2020, just 6.3% of U.S. private-sector workers were union members, despite the fact that 68% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest since 1965, and nearly half of non-union workers say they would join.

After World War II, wage growth kept pace with GDP growth, but then began to diverge in the 1970s, according to a study by the RAND Corporation. After 1975, incomes of the bottom 90% rose more slowly than the economy as a whole, while incomes of the top 10% grew faster. The declining wage growth coincided with and is closely related to a drop-off …

Chosen Family: One Woman’S Fight To Become Her Best Friend’S Next Of Kin, Yessenia M. Moreno

Capstones

Nearly 70,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the state of New York. For the queer community, this time of death and mourning has highlighted how complicated things can get at the end of someone’s life.

This audio documentary, “Chosen Family, ”is the story of one woman’s fight to overcome the legal system and become her best friend’s health care proxy in the final battle of his life .

Link to capstone project: https://medium.com/@yessimoreno/7b3d96691b9f

Improving First Case Starts For A Neurosurgery Or, Tara L. Goodall

Master's Projects and Capstones

Problem: On-time first cases for operating rooms (OR) is a worldwide focus for improvement. OR delays have many adverse effects, including economic costs and patient and facility staff satisfaction.

Context: The site for this improvement project is a medium-sized hospital in Northern California. There are 12 ORs, with an average of 600-700 cases. Neurosurgery was the chosen specialty due to low on-time starts and long delay minutes. The focus was working with one OR to improve first case on-time starts by 20%.

Interventions: A worksheet was created to track room setup, delay reasons, and delay minutes. A visual setup guide …

Improving An Electrocardiogram Competency Assessment Tool For Registered Nurses, Laurel K. Ng

Master's Projects and Capstones

Abstract

Problem: Rapid and accurate interpretation of an EKG rhythm is an advanced-level competency required for all acute care nurses working in a cardiac monitored/telemetry unit. Observational data collected over a 4-month period by the facility clinical nurse educators identified that less than half of the nurses required to take the EKG exam passed on the first attempt.

Context: The education department at the facility onboards approximately 550-600 nurses annually for the 241-bed community hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California, part of a larger healthcare organization.

Interventions: A total of 19 nurses from various …

Increasing Lactation Consultant Support To The Mch Unit, Daniella Grace Mcclendon

Master's Projects and Capstones

Problem: Breastfeeding is the most beneficial feeding choice for newborns and one of the best ways for mothers to bond with their newborns. In the current Maternal Child Health (MCH) unit, exclusive breastfeeding rates have fallen lower than the unit’s goal of 82%.

Context: Exclusive breastfeeding, when a newborn consumes only human breastmilk, is not always an easy process to initiate immediately after birth and in the early postpartum period. On this specific unit, there is not enough lactation consultant support to provide all patients on the unit.

Interventions: This project considers adding additional lactation consultants to support the MCH …

Examining The Interaction Of Adverse Childhood Events, Dental Issues, Asthma And Autism, Cathy Koetting

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Dissertation supervised by Dr. Rebecca Kronk

Purpose: Adverse childhood events (ACEs) have a profound and long-term effect on the health outcomes of many children and adults. However, few studies have focused on specific ACEs and health outcomes in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of the study was to investigate if ASD moderated the relationship between ACEs and specific health outcomes in children who had been the subject of a child welfare system report.

Design and Methods: Using the second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW II), a secondary analysis was performed on a sample of …

Improving Medication Administration Safety In A Correctional Facility With An Electronic Medication Administration System, Rosalinda Salazar

Master's Projects and Capstones

Problem: According to the World Health Organization (2020), medication errors are one of the leading causes of injury and avoidable harm in health care globally.

Context: The county jail houses approximately 700 inmates/patients on a daily basis, and the potential for error when administering medications is high as medications are prepared manually using a paper medication administration record.

Interventions: The jail began using an electronic health record/barcode administration system on October 19, 2020.

Measures: Unusual occurrence reports related to medication errors were reviewed. The time frame included 6 months before electronic implementation, and 6 months after implementation.

Results: Unusual occurrence …

Distribution, Abundance And Natural Enemies Of The Invasive Tomato Leafminer, Tuta Absoluta (Meyrick) In Kenya, G. Kinyanjui, F. M. Khamis, F. L.O. Ombura, E. U. Kenya, S. Ekesi, S. A. Mohamed

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Tuta absoluta (Meyrick) has become a serious menace to sustainable production of tomato in Kenya. A survey was conducted between April 2015 and June 2016 to determine its distribution, abundance, infestation, and damage levels on tomato, and associated natural enemies. Trap counts of T. absoluta moths were recorded in all surveyed 29 counties, which indicated its nationwide distribution irrespective of altitude. Tuta absoluta was present in both open fields and greenhouses. The highest moth/trap/day was 115.38 ± 15.90. Highest leaf infestation was 92.22% and the highest number of mines and larvae per leaf were 3.71 ± 0.28 and 2.16 ± …

Assessing Moral Distress And Substance Use Among Nurses In The Time Of Covid-19 To Improve Patient Safety, Lauren Childers

Doctors of Nursing Practice (DNP) Final Projects, 2020-current

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought rapid changes, increased stress, and ethical challenges to nurses across the globe. These factors may place nurses at increased risk for developing moral distress and substance use disorder. This stress can also increase nurse vulnerability to substance use. Previously there was little evidence about the rates of moral distress and substance use disorder among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of this evidence-based project was to describe levels of moral distress and substance use among nurses in a community hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic and to make recommendations for interventions to improve nurse …

The Resilience Vaccine, Sara Horton-Deutch T. Duffy

Master's Projects and Capstones

Healthcare workers have been working in unprecedented circumstances since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Caregivers have been taxed with burnout. A large healthcare organization’s 26-bed, medical-surgical, telemetry, COVID-19 overflow unit was significantly impacted. Many healthcare organizations have adopted advocacy for attaining joy in work as an extra dimension of the Institute for Health Improvement’s Triple Aim. Adding this fourth aim supports averting caregiver burnout (CBO) while promoting joy in work.

This quality improvement project examined nurse leaders’ interventions that address CBO, promote healthy work environments, and promote joy in work. From June through August 2021, an 8-week resilience program …