Digital Commons Network^™

Establishing Quiet Hours In Long-Term Care: A Quality Improvement Project, Heather Battaglia

Master's Projects and Capstones

Problem: Sleep disturbances in long-term care residents are associated with falls, behavioral problems, and increased mortality rates, yet long-term care facilities are traditionally noisy environments at night. Designated quiet hours have been shown to improve patient sleep as well as decrease stress levels in nurses.

Context: In a skilled nursing facility that provides care for military veterans with complex medical and psychosocial needs, signage exists that indicates to be quiet between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., but no defined guidelines were available for staff to observe.

Interventions: Standards for quiet hours were established and posted throughout the microsystem. Lecture-style teaching …

The Feasibility Of Industrial Wastewater Reuse Onsite In The Tri-City Area, Shayla Bergeron

Master's Projects and Capstones

Industries typically discharge wastewater to a centralized wastewater treatment plant, but given ongoing water scarcity from repeated droughts, onsite wastewater reuse within the industrial facility’s plant is an attractive alternative. However, information on economic and technical feasibility on wastewater reuse onsite is limited. A literature review showed that membrane bioreactors are a promising wastewater reuse treatment technology due to their reduced footprint and high quality produced effluent. A watershed assessment of the Tri-City area was conducted to evaluate future water supply. A case study was then performed on industrial dischargers in the Tri-City area applying this technology. Finally, the costs …

Joint Management Of Upland & Aquatic Habitat For The California Red-Legged Frog & California Tiger Salamander, Kyle E. Verblaauw

Master's Projects and Capstones

As federally and state protected amphibians, the California tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense) and the California red-legged frog (Rana draytonii) are recipients of ample management focus. Both species face a variety of threats, including habitat loss and alteration, introduction of non-native species, spread of disease, and effects of climate change. While management plans for the California tiger salamander and California red-legged frog exist, they frequently do not consider both species in tandem and often contain multiple shortcomings. This document aims to address the shortfalls of current management by providing practical recommendations for jointly managing the upland and …

Arts And Science Integration On The Kaleidoscope School Nature Trail And Greenhouse, Sara Boersma

Education

The Kaleidoscope KSAS Nature Trail and Greenhouse provide a gateway to pathways of understanding the immediate natural space surrounding our school. In addition, students are provided arts and science education informed by a critical place-based pedagogy. This emphasizes the activist, restoring possibilities of art making and affirming the need for students to become involved in learning outside the physical school building (Graham, 2003). The possibilities ofunderstandings and stewardship are encouraged through arts and science integration and experiences on the nature trail and greenhouse. Through these experiences, students can gain a sense of awareness and understanding oftheir natural environment and this …

Parental Perceptions Of Family Management Styles In Families With A Child With Asthma, Annette Hines

Dissertations

Asthma is the most common chronic illness among children in the United States, and families who have a child with asthma face daily challenges to maintaining a normal family life. A descriptive, cross-sectional study was performed that studied four risk factors and four protective factors derived from the literature that impact these families, in order to better understand how nurses can meet the health care needs of the children with asthma and their families. Knafl's (1990, 1996) family management styles framework was applied as the theoretical framework of the study, and the concept of normalization was measured using the Family …

Perceived Exercise Habits Of Individuals With Parkinson’S Disease Living In The Community, Jordana Lockwich, Kate Schwartzkopf-Phifer, Camille L. Skubik-Peplaski, Richard D. Andreatta, Patrick H. Kitzman

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Publications

Context

Exercise has been shown to improve gait in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Stepping practice at higher intensity levels has been suggested as a beneficial treatment option to improve gait in the neurological population. Unfortunately, this mode is poorly understood and underutilized within the PD population. Information on what individuals with PD are doing for exercise would be beneficial to help tailor exercise programs to improve gait and provide exercise options in the community for intensity-based exercise.

Objective

To investigate the current exercise habits of individuals living with PD in the community aimed at improving walking and to understand …

Physics-Informed Machine Learning To Predict Extreme Weather Events, Rthvik Raviprakash, Jonathan Buchanan, Mahdi Bu Ali

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

Extreme weather events refer to unexpected, severe, or unseasonal weather events, which are dynamically related to specific large-scale atmospheric patterns. These extreme weather events have a significant impact on human society and also natural ecosystems. For example, natural disasters due to extreme weather events caused more than $90 billion global direct losses in 2015. These extreme weather events are challenging to predict due to the chaotic nature of the atmosphere and are highly correlated with the occurrence of atmospheric blocking. A key aspect for preparedness and response to extreme climate events is accurate medium-range forecasting of atmospheric blocking events.

Unlike …

Active Membrane Energy Exchanger For Air Cooling And Dehumidification, Songhao Wu, Andrew Fix, David M. Warsinger, James E. Braun

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment consume 35% of total building energy use in the US, among which a large share is used for cooling and dehumidification. The majority of air dehumidification systems take the conventional approach of moisture condensation removal. It requires air to be cooled below its dew point temperature and is an energy-intensive process, especially for areas with hot and humid climates. Vapor selective membrane systems are promising alternatives for air dehumidification as they do not require cooling energy for latent (humidity) heat removal. It allows water vapor transport through the membrane while blocking air. Previous …

An Analysis Of Two Photometric Redshift Methods And Their Uses For Finding Void Galaxies, Rochelle J. Steele

Theses and Dissertations

An extensive survey of extragalactic objects with accurate distances is difficult to perform. Distance at that scale is commonly found with redshift and most easily identified with spectroscopic observations, which are time intensive. This is especially a concern when surveying for the elusive, possibly non-existent dwarf galaxies in the centers of voids, whose light would be so faint that a spectroscopic survey to find them would be unreasonably time consuming. Photometric methods to calculate redshift could provide a much quicker way to find distance, but the photometric methods used thus far are characterized by large errors that make them unusable …

Conceptual Design Of Two Tiltrotor Aircraft For Urban Air Mobility, Michael T. Radotich

Engineering

There has been an abundance of new and novel aircraft designs created for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in recent years. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contributes to the research and development of this industry in part by applying its aircraft design tools to create conceptual designs of UAM reference vehicles. The vehicles are intended to quantify the tradeoffs and performance capabilities necessary for VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft in the UAM design space. The reference vehicles represent a variety of configurations that seek to encompass many of the design characteristics suitable for UAM. This thesis focuses on …

Trans Sex Workers - A Community In Resilience, Alejandra Pedraza Buenahora

Capstones

By exploring the ways the trans sex worker community supports itself and all the tactics community leaders are using to support community members, this engagement journalism projects details the way journalist can service the trans community and aid in their information acquisition needs. By using an array of journalistic skills this capstone explores what journalist can and should do to build trust with trans community members to better report on the experiences of individual community members. Here you will find detailed lessons learned from interviews, informal chats, reporting and gatherings with trans community leaders in the city of New York.

"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 …

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

Nikkei And Chifa: Two Styles Of Peruvian-Asian Fusion, With Two Different Trajectories, Megan Caceres

Capstones

Nikkei and Chifa, two different styles of Peruvian-Asian fusion, have established a foothold in New York and New Jersey, but each style is taking a very different path to growth. Nikkei restaurants, a blend of Japanese and Peruvian ingredients, are booming, especially at the higher-end, while Chifa restaurants, which mix Chinese and Peruvian customs and ingredients, are struggling to gain traction; this reality follows how New Yorkers undervalue restaurant concepts that are not mainstream or exclusive, and this holds implications for spots that depend on word-of-mouth or other patrons to gain buzz and notoriety, since they do not have star …

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 …

Naturally Occurring Etiologic Factors Affecting The Health Of Breeding Seabirds In The Bering Sea, Maile Branson

Biological Sciences

Seabird populations across the globe have experienced both significant instability and consistent overall declines in recent history. Seabirds in the Bering Sea of Alaska, USA appear to be severely affected by environmental changes, exhibiting large-scale shifts in behavior and distribution and increases in unusual mortality events (UMEs) in recent years. I analyze a selection of the naturally occurring pathogenic and toxicological factors affecting breeding seabirds in the Bering Sea region using an approach focusing on zoonoses and bioaccumulating toxins. Specimens were collected at three breeding colonies in the Bering Sea in 2018 and 2019, and were evaluated for the presence …

Visual Displays In Space Station Culture: An Archaeological Analysis, Justin St. P. Walsh, Alice C. Gorman, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Articles and Research

We offer an archaeological analysis of the visual display of “space heroes” and Orthodox icons in the Russian Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS). This study is the first systematic investigation of material culture at a site in space. The ISS has now been continuously inhabited for 20 years. Here, focusing on the period 2000–2014, we use historic imagery from NASA archives to track the changing presence of 78 different items in a single zone. We also explore how ideas about which items are appropriate for display and where to display them originated in earlier Soviet and Russian …

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.

Nitrogenase Iron Protein Classification Using Cnn Neural Network, Amer Rez

Master's Projects

The nitrogenase iron protein (NifH) is extensively used to study nitrogen fixation, the ecologically vital process of reducing atmospheric nitrogen to a bioavailable form. The discovery rate of novel NifH sequences is high, and there is an ongoing need for software tools to mine NifH records from the GenBank repository. Since record annotations are unreliable, because they contain errors, classifiers based on sequence alone are required. The ARBitrator classifier is highly successful but must be initialized by extensive manual effort. A Deep Learning approach could substantially reduce manual intervention. However, attempts to build a character-based Deep Learning NifH classifier were …

Achieving Fairness Through Load-Balancing In Social Cloud Computing Networks, Kaiyi Huang

Master's Projects

Cloud-based computing networks have taken over the digital landscape. From small non-profits to large multinational corporations, more and more entities have been offloading computing effort to the cloud in order to take advantage of the increased cost-efficiency and scalability of cloud computing. One of the new types of cloud that have emerged is the P2P cloud, which disengages from a traditional datacenter setup by allowing users to instead share their own computing hardware into a cloud to take advantage of cloud computing’s advantages at an even lower cost. However, this new paradigm comes with a slew of challenges, notably, security …

An Examination Of Bone Loss During Space Travel With Differential Gene Expression Analysis, Claudia Vo

Master's Projects

Spaceflight poses many risks to human health due to the harsh conditions of microgravity, cosmic radiation, and confinement. One of the impacts that spaceflight entails is bone loss, which is a risk to astronauts as future space missions will require long travel durations. To elucidate the role of genetics in spaceflight bone loss, in this study differential gene expression analysis was performed using Nextflow-RCP, an adaptation of NASA Genelab’s RNA-Seq Consensus pipeline. The dataset for this project was GLDS-241, which contained samples from mice femoral skin. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the genes involved in bone loss, the results …

The Impact Of Programming Language’S Type On Probabilistic Machine Learning Models, Sherif Elsaid

Master's Projects

Software development is an expensive and difficult process. Mistakes can be easily made, and without extensive review process, those mistakes can make it to the production code and may have unintended disastrous consequences.

This is why various automated code review services have arisen in the recent years. From AWS’s CodeGuro and Microsoft’s Code Analysis to more integrated code assistants, like IntelliCode and auto completion tools. All of which are designed to help and assist the developers with their work and help catch overlooked bugs.

Thanks to recent advances in machine learning, these services have grown tremen- dously in sophistication to …

Cgrp-Driven Lateralization Of Pain Modulation By The Central Amygdala, Heather Allen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The central amygdala (CeA) is a bilateral, mid limbic brain region involved in the processing of pain and emotion. Interestingly, the left and right CeA are functionally lateralized in the context of bladder pain, with the left and right CeA having opposing effects on bladder pain-like behavior. However, the specific mechanisms driving these divergent functions are unknown. Nociceptive signals from the bladder are relayed to the CeA via projection neurons in the parabrachial nucleus (PBN) that express high levels of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP). In these studies, we investigated the influence of PBN CGRP signaling in the left and right …

The Contribution Of Bioethics To Home Healthcare (Hhc) In Saudi Arabia, Saeed Alghamdi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the contribution of bioethics to Home Healthcare (HHC) In Saudi Arabia (SA). Through exploring the critical bioethical issues that have influenced the implementation of home health care, the dissertation highlights the significance of incorporating bioethics in home health care. Organizational ethics has led to the regulation of healthcare professionals, patients, and the stakeholders within clinical care settings. Healthcare organizations and other stakeholders, such as global health bodies, should formulate laws and policies that promote bioethics in contemporary healthcare. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, through the Ministry of Health, should promote the adoption of home health care services …

Investigating Relationships Between Diabetes Distress, Diabetes Self-Care Behaviors, Intention To Use And Actual Use Of A Personal Health Record Within 30 Days Of Hospital Discharge In Persons With Type 2 Diabetes, Khaliah Fisher-Grace

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Background: Diabetes distress (DD) is defined by emotional and behavioral challenges caused from diabetes and its management. Diabetes self-care behaviors can be compromised by DD. Personal Health Record (PHR) use has been associated with improvements in HbA1c, blood pressure, and LDL-C, but the relationship between DD and PHR use is unknown. Aims: 1) to determine differences between sociodemographic variables and intention to use and actual use of PHR in hospitalized persons with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM), 2) to investigate the relationship between DD, intention to use a PHR and actual use of a PHR within 30 days of hospital …

Forced Together, Growing Apart: An Exploration Of Heterosexual African American Males' Disengagement In Romantic Relationships With African American Females, Kenya Johns

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The decline of intraracial dating has been more pronounced among African Americans in comparison to other racial groups. There is lack of available research tailored towards Black men’s dating experiences. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of heterosexual African American males related to their disengagement in romantic relationships with African American females.

A phenomenological study explored the lived experiences of 10 African American males and the dynamics that appear to contribute to the decline in intraracial dating in the African American community. Five themes emerged from the study: – self-regard, family matters, proximity, the new …

Loneliness, Interpersonal Goals, Life Satisfaction, And Subjective Well-Being In Older Adults, Francesca C. Ezeokonkwo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Background: Loneliness is detrimental to health and is linked to numerous physiological and psychological problems. People across the age spectrum can be affected by loneliness at one point or another in their lives; however, older adults are disproportionally affected.

Aims: This study investigated the effect of interpersonal goals (compassionate and self-image goals), life satisfaction, and subjective well-being on loneliness in older adults and the influence of demographics and social support. The Ecosystem-Egosystem Theory of Social Motivation served as the theoretical framework.

Design and Method: This descriptive cross-sectional correlational study used the 2016 Health and Retirement Study. Participants were 65 years …

Real-Time Monitoring Of Cell Death Progress Using Capacitance Spectroscopy, Suyang Wu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Biologics, including the monoclonal antibody (mAb), has experienced rapid development in the last decade. However, the price of biologics is often prohibitively high because of the low process efficiency. Delaying the inevitable cell death improves the productivity of upstream bioprocessing, whose success relies on monitoring the cell death onset that indicates the timing for preventive actions.

This study proposes to develop a real-time monitoring model that quantifies the dying cell percentage in lab-scale bioreactors using capacitance spectroscopy. The capacitance spectroscopy contains cell death-related information due to various physical properties changes during the cell death process, e.g., cytoplasmic conductivity change. The …