Digital Commons Network^™

Discrimination Experiences During Covid-19 Among A National, Multi-Lingual, Community-Based Sample Of Asian Americans And Pacific Islanders: Compass Findings, Van M. Ta Park, Marcelle M. Dougan, Oanh L. Meyer, Bora Nam, Marian Tzuang, Linda G. Park, Quyen Vuong, Joon Bang, Janice Y. Tsoh

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Reports of escalated discrimination among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) due to COVID-19 are alarming, making this a public health priority. However, there are limited empirical studies on the scope and impact of COVID-19-related discrimination among AAPIs. Using the COVID-19 Effects on the Mental and Physical Health of AAPI Survey Study (COMPASS) data (N = 4971; survey period: October 2020–February 2021), which is a U.S.-wide multi-lingual survey, we examined the prevalence of, and factors associated with discrimination experiences attributable to being an AAPI during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, 60.7% reported experiencing discrimination; the group prevalence ranged from 80.0% (Hmong) …

Impact Of Location Spoofing Attacks On Performance Prediction In Mobile Networks, Nikhil Sai Kanuri, Sang Yoon Chang, Younghee Park, Jonghyun Kim, Jinoh Kim

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Performance prediction in wireless mobile networks is essential for diverse purposes in network management and operation. Particularly, the position of mobile devices is crucial to estimating the performance in the mobile communication setting. With its importance, this paper investigates mobile communication performance based on the coordinate information of mobile devices. We analyze a recent 5G data collection and examine the feasibility of location-based performance prediction. As location information is key to performance prediction, the basic assumption of making a relevant prediction is the correctness of the coordinate information of devices given. With its criticality, this paper also investigates the impact …

Word Embeddings For Fake Malware Generation, Quang Duy Tran, Fabio Di Troia

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Signature and anomaly-based techniques are the fundamental methods to detect malware. However, in recent years this type of threat has advanced to become more complex and sophisticated, making these techniques less effective. For this reason, researchers have resorted to state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to combat the threat of information security. Nevertheless, despite the integration of the machine learning models, there is still a shortage of data in training that prevents these models from performing at their peak. In the past, generative models have been found to be highly effective at generating image-like data that are similar to the actual data …

Robustness Of Image-Based Malware Analysis, Katrina Tran, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In previous work, “gist descriptor” features extracted from images have been used in malware classification problems and have shown promising results. In this research, we determine whether gist descriptors are robust with respect to malware obfuscation techniques, as compared to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) trained directly on malware images. Using the Python Image Library (PIL), we create images from malware executables and from malware that we obfuscate. We conduct experiments to compare classifying these images with a CNN as opposed to extracting the gist descriptor features from these images to use in classification. For the gist descriptors, we consider a …

Twitter Bots’ Detection With Benford’S Law And Machine Learning, Sanmesh Bhosale, Fabio Di Troia

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have grown exponentially in terms of active users and have now become an influential factor in the formation of public opinions. For this reason, the use of bots and botnets for spreading misinformation on OSNs has become a widespread concern. Identifying bots and botnets on Twitter can require complex statistical methods to score a profile based on multiple features. Benford’s Law, or the Law of Anomalous Numbers, states that, in any naturally occurring sequence of numbers, the First Significant Leading Digit (FSLD) frequency follows a particular pattern such that they are unevenly distributed and reducing. This …

A Blockchain-Based Tamper-Resistant Logging Framework, Thomas H. Austin, Fabio Di Troia

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Since its introduction in Bitcoin, the blockchain has proven to be a versatile data structure. In its role as an immutable ledger, it has grown beyond its initial use in financial transactions to be used in recording a wide variety of other useful information. In this paper, we explore the application of the blockchain outside of its traditional decentralized, financial domain. We show how, even with only a single “mining” node, a proof-of-work blockchain can be the cornerstone of a tamper resistant logging framework. By attaching a proof-of-work to blocks of logging messages, we make it increasingly difficult for an …

Abortion Attempts Without Clinical Supervision Among Transgender, Nonbinary And Gender-Expansive People In The United States, Heidi Moseson, Laura Fix, Caitlin Gerdts, Sachiko Ragosta, Jen Hastings, Ari Stoeffler, Eli A. Goldberg, Mitchell R. Lunn, Annesa Flentje, Matthew R. Capriotti, Micah E. Lubensky, Juno Obedin-Maliver

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Background Transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive (TGE) people face barriers to abortion care and may consider abortion without clinical supervision. Methods In 2019, we recruited participants for an online survey about sexual and reproductive health. Eligible participants were TGE people assigned female or intersex at birth, 18 years and older, from across the United States, and recruited through The PRIDE Study or via online and in-person postings. Results Of 1694 TGE participants, 76 people (36% of those ever pregnant) reported considering trying to end a pregnancy on their own without clinical supervision, and a subset of these (n=40; 19% of those …

A Blockchain-Based Retribution Mechanism For Collaborative Intrusion Detection, Wenjun Fan, Shubham Kumar, Sang Yoon Chang, Younghee Park

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Collaborative intrusion detection approach uses the shared detection signature between the collaborative participants to facilitate coordinated defense. In the context of collaborative intrusion detection system (CIDS), however, there is no research focusing on the efficiency of the shared detection signature. The inefficient detection signature costs not only the IDS resource but also the process of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. In this paper, we therefore propose a blockchain-based retribution mechanism, which aims to incentivize the participants to contribute to verifying the efficiency of the detection signature in terms of certain distributed consensus. We implement a prototype using Ethereum blockchain, which instantiates …

Writing Fires: Writing Instruction, Student Learning Perceptions, And The Importance Of Connection In The Age Of Covid-19, Isaac Sullivan

English

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought with it devastating and potentially long-lasting impacts to the world. From economic upheavals, political ramifications, and educational disruptions, COVID-19 has changed the face of many aspects of life, perhaps forever. The issue in this study is to ask how COVID-19 may have impacted the literacy development of undergraduate students through the use of emergency remote instruction. To begin investigating the issue, roughly 200 undergraduate students in writing-focused classes (first-year composition and upper-division writing courses) were surveyed to understand how they learned the rhetorical conventions and genre expectations of their discipline. Out of the 200 responses, …

The Contribution Of Positive Affect And Loneliness On Readiness And Self-Efficacy To Quit Smoking Among Spanish-Speaking Mexican American Smokers, Tatiana Londoño, John R. Moore, Zully C. Guerra, Nazanin M. Heydarian, Yessenia Castro

School of Social Work Faculty Publications

Background: The existing research on affective and interpersonal determinants of smoking cessation largely under-represents minority smokers, such as Latinos.

Objective: The current study examined associations between affective and interpersonal factors with intermediary smoking cessation variables among Mexican-American smokers (N = 290; 60% male).

Methods: Measures of positive and negative affect, social support, and loneliness were each examined for associations with measures of motivational readiness to quit smoking, and smoking abstinence self-efficacy. Significant predictors were entered into models simultaneously to examine their unique associations. Covariates included gender, age, and educational attainment.

Results: Negative affect (b = .68, SE b = …

Voting Technology, Democracy, And Propaganda: Ontological Considerations For The 2020 Presidential Election, Erik Gustafson

Communication

The 2020 United States Presidential election was considered one of the most tumultuous political contests in the 21st century. During an international pandemic, travel restrictions and social distancing requirements created uncertainty about whether to vote in person or via absentee-mail-in ballot. The present study sought to investigate how voters experience different technologies in the 2020 United States Presidential election. Selected concepts in media ecology supplemented Fox and Alldred’s (2013) framework for new materialist inquiry to explore the technical material characteristics of voting technology and the discursive elements of voter fraud propaganda. By tracing the history of voting technologies and voter …

Originalism And Personal Jurisdiction: Several Questions And A Few Answers, Lawrence B. Solum, Max Crema

Faculty Scholarship

The modern constitutional law of personal jurisdiction is largely the product of living constitutionalism. International Shoe's minimum-contacts and fairness standard was not derived from the constitutional text, and it cannot be supported by the original meaning of the Due Process of Law Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. This Article explores the implications of that fact for the constitutional law of personal jurisdiction, with a focus on the federal courts.

The Article proceeds in six steps. First, it lays out the theoretical framework provided by Public Meaning Originalism, including the Fixation Thesis, the Constraint Principle, and the interpretation-construction …

Sentiment Analysis Of Covid-19 Vaccination Impact On Twitter Tweets Using Nlp Supervised Learning And Rnn Classification Comparison, Tanvir Ahmed

Computer Science

Twitter provides a platform for exchanging information and opinions on global concerns like the COVID-19 epidemic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a collection of around 16,180 tweets to derive inferences regarding public views toward the vaccine impact once immunizations became widely available to the community. We use natural language processing and sentiment analysis techniques to uncover information regarding the public's perception of the COVID-19 vaccine. Our findings demonstrate that people are more pleased about taking COVID-19 shots than they are about some of the vaccines' side effects. We also look at people's reactions to COVID-19 safety measures after they …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Music Recommendations Using Cosine Similarities Of Various Combined Feature Sets Consisting Of Metadata And User Generated Tags, Shubhit Kumar

Computer Science

This paper aims to compare and evaluate the methods for recommending songs using metadata, user generated tags, metadata and tags, and metadata and top five tags. Recommendations are calculated using cosine similarities with relevant exceptions (artist filtering, tag filtering, year to decade conversion) investigated.

"My 'Eh' Is Authentic"; Commodification Of Language And Identity In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Meg Elaine Perry

English

The following paper is an investigation of the historic, economic, social, and ideological processes that have shaped dialect awareness in Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas. The goal of this study is to explore dialect perceptions between “Yoopers” and “Trolls” with a specific focus on the tourist industry and material items. This work performs textual analysis of various commodified dialect features in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to examine the complex relationship between language use and identity. Secondary research is used to synthesize the historical, political, and cultural circumstances resulting in present day dialect features, while textual analysis reveals that material artifacts circulate …

An Analysis Of Cpr Performance, Self-Efficacy, And Deliberate Feedback, Caroline Martinez

Health Nutrition and Exercise Science

During sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), prompt initiation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by a healthcare provider or layperson is critical to a patient’s odds of survival.4 The absence of health care providers in athletic settings often leaves coaches as the primary responder in competitive or recreational athletics. The goal of this study was to determine if coaches could provide high-quality CPR. Twenty coaches completed confidence and deliberate feedback questionnaires before and after two sessions of 5 minute compression-only CPR. Data were analyzed to compare confidence pre and post CPR assessment, as well as to determine the relationship between CPR performance, self-efficacy, …

Systematic Intervention Component Analysis: Dose-Response For Therapeutic Ultrasound, Stephanie Hamersky

Health Nutrition and Exercise Science

Therapeutic ultrasound has been well documented in the literature to affect human tissue. The four main parameters practitioners are able to influence are frequency, duty cycle, intensity, and treatment time. Alteration to one or more of these parameters will affect the total dose of acoustical energy delivered to the tissue resulting in a target tissue temperature increase or biophysical effect. The goal of this two-part study was to determine the appropriate energy dose of therapeutic ultrasounds needed to create a beneficial intervention when treating unhealthy human tissue. Prior to the investigation a non-systematic review was conducted to determine the dose-response …

Solidarity Forever: A Call For Inclusive Holocaust Memory And Coalition Building Amid Forgetting & Denial, Elisabeth Fricker

History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies

According to a recent survey, less than half of American Millennials can name a Holocaust concentration camp, and more than two-thirds of the respondents did not know the number of Jewish people the Nazis killed in the camps. This lack of knowledge is happening in a world where some people do not even admit the Holocaust event happened. This thesis will first lay out the current state of Holocaust remembrance in education, memorialization, and popular culture, particularly in America. Particular attention is given to how these remembrances overlook or silence certain victims of the Holocaust, such as LGBTQ+ victims. The …

A History Of North Dakota's Petroleum Industry, 1917-2017, Clarence Anthony Herz

History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies

North Dakota’s petroleum industry can be traced back to 1917, when Arthur Blum found a small amount of oil in a well drilled to water his cattle. The unsuccessful exploration for oil continued from 1917 until 1951, when on April 4, oil was produced, in commercial quantities, from the Clarence Iverson #1 well. The discovery well initiated the state’s first boom, and after several other wells began production, the state began construction of industry infrastructure. This discovery boom lasted until 1966, when a global oil glut reduced exploration and production slowed. In the 1970s, as a result of OPEC’s manipulation …

Multiracial Identity As A Factor In Body Image And Disordered Eating, Kerrie Leonard

Human Development and Family Science

Emerging adulthood is a significant developmental stage where both ethnic-racial identitydevelopment and body dissatisfaction/disordered eating are salient. Past research suggests that there are links between identity development and body image/disordered eating (Palmeroni et al., 2020). Additionally, studies in the body image/disordered eating field have begun to examine differences among ethnic-racial groups (see Bucchianeri et al., 2016). However, there is limited research with Multiracial individuals (i.e., individuals with two or more ethnic-racial backgrounds). It is undetermined how Multiracial identity development influences body image and disordered eating behaviors. Thus, two studies were conducted to explore such connections. Participants included 174 Multiracial emerging …

Engagement Et Jeunes De Banlieue : Quand Le Roman Policier Rejoint Le Rap Pour Dire ¨Je Suis Français¨, Iziar De Miguel

Publications and Research

Avec la grande ville au cœur des romans noirs, les activités illégales, les portraits de délinquants, ainsi que de détectives et de flics qui naviguent entre des valeurs morales et amorales prennent place au sein du roman policier. Proposant une image mitigée de la banlieue nord, montrant une culture et des valeurs qui lui sont propres mais aussi ses contradictions et ses malaises, les romans de Rachid Santaki se démarquent du reste de la littérature policière par leur mise en scène de héros issus de l’immigration. Si l’intrigue policière se concentre sur la description de milieux criminels liés au trafic …

Dataset For "Possible Causes Of Leaks In The Transfer Pipeline: Student Views At The 19 Colleges Of The City University Of New York", Alexandra Logue, Yoshiko Oka, David Wutchiett, Kerstin Gentsch, Stephanie Abbeyquaye

Publications and Research

Research dataset for the study resulting in this article: Logue, A. W., Oka, Y., Wutchiett, D., Gentsch, K., & Abbeyquaye, S. (2022). Possible causes of leaks in the transfer pipeline: Student views at the 19 colleges of The City University of New York. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice.

Publisher version of article: https://doi.org/10.1177/15210251221117276

Accepted manuscript version of article: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/901

The Survey That Was Used For The Study “Possible Causes Of Leaks In The Transfer Pipeline: Student Views At The 19 Colleges Of The City University Of New York”, Alexandra Logue, Yoshiko Oka, David Wutchiett, Kerstin Gentsch, Stephanie Abbeyquaye

Publications and Research

Survey used for the study resulting in this article: Logue, A. W., Oka, Y., Wutchiett, D., Gentsch, K., & Abbeyquaye, S. (2022). Possible causes of leaks in the transfer pipeline: Student views at the 19 colleges of The City University of New York. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice.

Publisher version of article: https://doi.org/10.1177/15210251221117276

Accepted manuscript version of article: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/901

Working Knowledge: Catalogers And The Stories They Tell, Amanda Belantara, Emily Drabinski

Publications and Research

Cataloging librarians make myriad choices every day as they create the metadata necessary for information retrieval. Each record represents an interaction between the cataloger and the systems they work within and, sometimes, against. Their work is highly constrained by standardized machine-readable fields and codes, controlled subject terms, and classification schema. In the exploratory research project Catalogers at Work, the authors use sound recording to reveal the complex yet hidden negotiations embedded in library catalog records.

For Critical Language Awareness And Against The “Exclusive-Use-Of-The-Target-Language” Myth: The Effects Of Sociolinguistic Content In English In An Elementary Spanish Classroom, Beatriz Lado, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

Scholars have advocated for critical approaches to language education (e.g., Del Valle, 2014; Leeman & Serafini, 2016), including those that promote the development of Critical Language Awareness, CLA (e.g., Alim, 2010; Leeman, 2018). The goal is to develop students’ critical knowledge of the cultural, political, and social dimensions of language. To this end, Del Valle (2014) suggests the inclusion of language-related content units taught in the first or shared language from the early stages of language learning. This proposal entails revising strong beliefs such as the use of the non-target language in the new language classroom. The purpose of our …

Extractable Entanglement From A Euclidean Hourglass, Takanori Anegawa, Norihiro Iizuka, Daniel Kabat

Publications and Research

We previously proposed that entanglement across a planar surface can be obtained from the partition function on a Euclidean hourglass geometry. Here we extend the prescription to spherical entangling surfaces in conformal field theory. We use the prescription to evaluate log terms in the entropy of a conformal field theory in two dimensions, a conformally coupled scalar in four dimensions, and a Maxwell field in four dimensions. For Maxwell we reproduce the extractable entropy obtained by Soni and Trivedi. We take this as evidence that the hourglass prescription provides a Euclidean technique for evaluating extractable entropy in quantum field theory.

Superluminal Propagation On A Moving Braneworld, Brian Greene, Daniel Kabat, Janna Levin, Arjun S. Menon

Publications and Research

We consider a braneworld scenario in the simplest setting, M₄ × S¹, with a four-dimensional (4D) Minkowski metric induced on the brane, and establish the possibility of superluminal propagation. If the brane is at rest, the 4D Lorentz symmetry of the brane is exact, but if the brane is in motion, it is broken globally by the compactification. By measuring bulk fields, an observer on the brane sees a slice through a higher-dimensional field profile, which carries an imprint of the extra dimensions even when the brane is at rest. If the brane is in motion, we …

Defining Entanglement Without Tensor Factoring: A Euclidean Hourglass Prescription, Takanori Anegawa, Norihiro Iizuka, Daniel Kabat

Publications and Research

We consider entanglement across a planar boundary in flat space. Entanglement entropy is usually thought of as the von Neumann entropy of a reduced density matrix, but it can also be thought of as half the von Neumann entropy of a product of reduced density matrices on the left and right. The latter form allows a natural regulator in which two cones are smoothed into a Euclidean hourglass geometry. Since there is no need to tensor factor the Hilbert space, the regulated entropy is manifestly gauge invariant and has a manifest state-counting interpretation. We explore this prescription for scalar fields, …

Quark And Gluon Entanglement In The Proton On The Light Cone At Intermediate X, Adrian Dumitru, Eric Kolbusz

Publications and Research

In QCD with $N_c$ colors the antisymmetric valence quark color space singlet state $\sim \epsilon_{i_1\cdots i_{N_c}} |i_1,\cdots, i_{N_c}\rangle$ of the proton corresponds to the reduced density matrix $\rho_{ij}=(1/N_c) \delta_{ij}$ for a single color degree of freedom. Its degenerate spectrum of eigenvalues, $\lambda_i=1/N_c$, the purity $\tr \rho^2 = 1/N_c$, and the von Neumann entropy $S_\mathrm{vN}=\log(N_c)$ all indicate maximal entanglement of color. On the other hand, for $N_c\to\infty$ the spatial wave function of the proton factorizes into valence quark wave functions determined by a mean field [E. Witten, Nucl. Phys. B160, 57 (1979)] where there is no entanglement of spatial degrees of …

Two-Loop Four-Fermion Scattering Amplitude In Qed, R. Bonciani, A. Broggio, S. Di Vita, A. Ferroglia, M. K. Mandal, P. Mastrolia, L. Mattiazzi, A. Primo, J. Ronca, U. Schubert, W. J. Torres Bobadilla, F. Tramontano

Publications and Research

We present the first fully analytic evaluation of the transition amplitude for the scattering of a massless into a massive pair of fermions at the two-loop level in quantum electrodynamics. Our result is an essential ingredient for the determination of the electromagnetic coupling within scattering reactions, beyond the currently known accuracy, which has a crucial impact on the evaluation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. It will allow, in particular, for a precise determination of the leading hadronic contribution to the (g − 2)_μ in the MUonE experiment at CERN, and therefore can be used to …