Digital Commons Network^™

Calibration Of A Low-Cost Air Quality Sensor Package Integrated Into The New York State Mesonet, Ellie Hojeily

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The University at Albany designed and manufactured 59 low-cost air quality sensor packages to continuously measure PM₂.₅, CO, O₃, NO₂, and NO at 38 New York State Mesonet (NYSM) sites located in the New York City Metropolitan Area. Prior to use for monitoring, low-cost sensors require calibration to correct for environmental sensitivities. Calibration models can be developed using data collected from co-location periods in which low-cost sensors are installed at sites with Federal Reference Methods and/or Federal Equivalent Methods instruments. In this study, packages were periodically co-located (calibrated) for 18 to 162 days at the New York State Department of …

Concurrent Parasympathetic Synchrony In Romantic Couples Exposed To Childhood Maltreatment Subtypes, Kate L. Senich

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Early responsive caregiving hones children’s physiological systems and subsequently supports social interactions (Feldman, 2007; Porges 2001; Steelman et al, 2002). Conversely, mis-attuned interactions with caregivers, such as exposure to maltreatment subtypes, might hinder social engagement capacities at both behavioral and biological levels (Kim & Cicchetti, 2004; Sheridan & McLaughlin et al., 2014). These early adverse influences endure across development and can affect behavioral and physiological interactions with romantic partners (Mayo et al., 2021; River et al., 2020; Zamir, 2022). Specifically, temporally coordinated patterns of physiological responses between partners (i.e., synchrony) are linked with important relationship behaviors, including conflict behaviors …

“Broken Things: An Archive”, Kristen Mccallum

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This creative thesis starts from the idea that memory is shaped as much by the present as by the past. It explores the emotional and personal complexities of family estrangement, grief, survival, and love. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s idea that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past,” the project moves away from more traditional storytelling and instead is constructed as a collection of archival elements, that includes prose. What originally intended to be a collection of short stories gradually became a fictional family archive—made up of letters, text messages, and other everyday items—that reflects the messy, often conflicting …

Divided By Fear: The Influence Of Political Beliefs On The Perception Of Extremist Groups, Hannah A. Scott

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Acts of violent extremism and support for political violence have increased in the United States over the past decade. Previous studies have primarily focused on the differences in risk perception between White Supremacists and Islamic Extremists/Jihadists, neglecting other ideological movements. This study utilizes data from the fifth wave of the Chapman Survey of American Fears and employs ordinal logistic regression to compare the fear of seven different extremist groups and movements: Islamic Extremists/Jihadists, the Militia/Patriot Movement, White Supremacists, Extreme Environmentalists, Extreme Animal Rightists, Anti-Immigration Groups, and ANTIFA. The findings reveal notable differences across political parties (Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) and …

Impact Of The New York State Gender Recognition Act On Mental Health Outcomes Among Non-Binary Adults Served By The New York Public Mental Health System, Sahil Chaudhry

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation explores the impact of the 2021 New York State Gender Recognition Act (GRA) on mental health outcomes and service utilization among non-binary adults in the public mental health system. The GRA introduced pivotal legal reforms—including the option for an “X” gender marker and self-attestation for gender identity changes on state-issued documents—designed to affirm gender diversity and reduce structural barriers for transgender and non-binary populations. Guided by gender affirmation theory and minority stress frameworks, this study investigates how these legal shifts relate to changes in mental health service engagement and psychological well-being among non-binary individuals.

Using a difference-in-differences (DD) …

Reassurance After Abandonment: Alliance Politics After Alliances End, Poyung Lin

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation examines how major powers respond after pursuing abandonment policies, with particular attention to whether and how they seek to reassure their clients. Drawing from the literatures on reputation, alliance politics, and international credibility, it develops the theory of Selective Reassurance, arguing that reputational concerns, especially the desire to maintain a reputation for keeping promises, shape uneven patterns of post-abandonment military support. The study employs a mixed-methods design. Quantitatively, it analyzes U.S. material support from 1950 to 1989 using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood models, revealing that the United States systematically increased military aid to states in regions affected by abandonment, …

Challenges In Financial Prosperity: Cutback Management And Bounded Rationality In New York State School Districts, Moontae Hwang

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The Great Recession posed unexpected fiscal challenges for public sector entities, particularly small and mid-sized organizations such as school districts, which operate with limited revenue flexibility and constrained managerial capacity. While the recession was a macroeconomic event, which could be an exogenous shock to state and local governments beyond their control, state and local policy responses played a critical role in shaping its long-term effects on local public services. Scholars have emphasized the importance of long-term perspectives among policymakers and public managers to sustain the quality of public services during crises. However, the heightened uncertainty of the recession also constrained …

Investigation Of The Binding Mechanism Between The Supplemental And Tail Regions Of Mirna And Mrna Within Argonaute 2, Christina Ms Karadiakos

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are a class of small non-coding RNAs that play a key role in gene silencing. miRNAs form an RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC) with the argonaute 2 (AGO2) protein in order to control gene expression through silencing messenger RNAs (mRNA). The ability for a miRNA-mRNA complex to fit into AGO2 and form the RISC is based on the location and characteristics of a central bulge, but the mechanism and interactions that lead to a functional RISC remain unknown. Using available experimental data, we modeled the miR-34 and NOTCH1 duplex inside of AGO2 with only the seed region base paired. …

Nothing I Said Was Enough: Writing As Self-Validation, Michama M. Dorvile

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores the process of using writing as a coping mechanism to heal from trauma by portraying how personal narratives confront pain and reclaim agency. This thesis also explores how writing serves as a means of survival and sharing testimony. The thesis starts with a critical analysis essay, drawing on literary criticism and trauma theory. I explore how Roxane Gay, Kathryn Harrison, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Maya Angelou have used writing to challenge societal perceptions of trauma, and how through writing, they have resisted erasure.

The heart of this thesis is an original creative work, which involves an …

Worldbuilding A Queer Before: D&D As A Neomedievalism For A Modern Age, Brianna M. Thompson

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has had countless participants and audience members in the course of its over fifty-year existence. It has also been the subject of several studies that attempt to capture its unique form of performative play. Yet, there has been a scarcity of scholarship on how D&D acts as a neomedievalism and how that can offer a queer kind of opportunity to its players, allowing them to find a place in a past that is historically inaccessible and yet endlessly in the process of being (re)imagined. Using an interweaving of archival theory with queer and performance studies, particularly …

Perception As Creation In Swann's Way, Ethan D. Snowball

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way is written with such detail that it overwhelms both the reader’s and the character’s sensory experience. Despite all the details, each character takes their senses of the world and strings them together as coherent images and stories. Proust shows that perceptions and memories are malleable, as individuals perceive objects in a way that brings entire stories or images to their conscious experience. The way that Proust’s characters take sensory objects and create images shows that each character can consciously interpret the world around them. Social images find themselves competing with the personally constructed images of an …

Simulating A Multi-Tier Intervention For Refugee Mental Health Using Agent-Based Modeling, Bishan Huang

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Increasing numbers of people are fleeing political violence and becoming refugees who resettle all around the world.Compared to the general population in the countries where they resettle, refugees disproportionately suffer from depression and higher trauma-related mental health symptoms including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the experiences that led to their refugee status, as well as post-migration stressors, disadvantages in multiple social determinants of health, and lack of social support. New York City has received refugees from over 50 countries and may require policy and infrastructure changes to meet refugee mental health needs, especially in face of the recent surge …

Molecular Epidemiologic Studies Of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Me/Cfs), Anil Kumar

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Background: Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)/chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disabling multisystem complex disorder with no known etiology or approved treatment. Our studies aimed to assess the link between ME/CFS and autoimmune disease (AID) and cancer, and to identify potential biomarkers and biological mechanisms to further explore pathophysiology of this diseases.

Methods: All analyses were done using data from a case-control study of ME/CFS conducted by Dr. Roxana Moslehi and her collaborators. In our first study we estimated the cumulative incidences of AID and cancer among first degree relatives of 60 cases and 61 controls and compared cumulative …

Mobile Air Quality Assessment Using Public Transportation: A Community-Focused Study In The Capital Region, Allen Pronith Reddy Yeddula

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The monitoring of air quality plays a crucial role in establishment of concentrations of air pollutants over space and time in relation to human health, urban planning, and environmental conservation. This research offers a new strategy of monitoring the air quality in the Capital Region of New York State utilizing public transit buses as air quality moving sampling platforms. To assess the level of pollutants, a Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) bus network was used across the urban, suburban, and rural areas thus filling a research gap where public transit has most of the time been disregarded as a mobile …

“A ‘Normal’ Life”: Red Dwarf, Temporality, And The Neuroqueer Absurd, Gretchen B. Graf

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The science fiction series Red Dwarf, beginning in 1988 and broadcasting sporadically over the past nearly four decades, takes place more than three million years in the future where human beings have gone extinct. All, that is, except one; the show’s central character, Dave Lister, is the last known living human being in the universe, outliving humanity by remaining in stasis during a radiation leak that killed the rest of the crew of the titular mining ship. Besides Lister, the narrative also focuses on the nonhuman beings that keep him company. Besides residing in the genre of science fiction, …

Emergent Sites Of Language Contact: Lexical Borrowing By Mexican Bilingual Speakers In Live-Streamed Tabletop Games, Ethan Sims

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The field of contact linguistics has investigated numerous sites of contact between languages and the resulting phenomena (Poplack et al.; 1988, for example); however, there remain many contact sites that have yet to be analyzed. The present dissertation views the lexical evidence of language contact between English and Spanish via the medium of live-streamed tabletop role-playing games. These games, often lacking accessible translations in languages other than English, have become a popular pastime over the last decade, which has increased the amount of contact between the two languages. Dungeons and Dragons, a roleplaying game which typically deals with fantasy elements, …

Technology, Repression, And Contention: How Do Internet And Communication Technologies Affect Political Violence And Collective Action?, Reyhan Topal

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation explores the impact of new technologies on state repression, political violence, and contentious politics via three interrelated studies. The first chapter presents a novel theory that describes the technology policies the Chinese government uses to oppress Uyghurs and turn them into obedient citizens. The chapter analyzes artificial intelligence tools, incarceration testimonies, official documents, police data, satellite evidence, and reports by nongovernmental organizations and scholars. Its findings shed light on the pervasive and increasingly dangerous nature of state repression in the digital age. The second chapter investigates the relationship between digital repression and the nature of conflicts using a …

"Can We See How It Works?" The Interactions Among Teacher, Student, And Content At A Living History Museum, Stacy E. Ward

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Today’s students need to be critical consumers of information. To that end, a thoughtful social studies curriculum provides students an opportunity to gain content knowledge and to practice thinking skills. However, elementary teachers, especially primary grade (K-2) teachers, often do not possess the skills and content knowledge to teach rich historical content and thinking skills. Teachers can partner with museum professionals and access museum content in this endeavor. Living history museums, immersive museums that interpret multiple buildings, trades, and heritage breed animals, hold the potential to be a strong partner for primary grade students, who are only 5-, 6- and, …

The Benefit Of New Perspective: An Analysis Of Postcolonial Adaptation, Sara L. Tilbe

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In our modern world, the concept of literary adaptation is not unheard of. Each release of a new, popular text comes with an underlying chance that it will likely be snatched up by Hollywood executives to be told through a cinematic setting. However, there is less fanfare when it comes to the topic of literary adaptation, particularly of famous texts that are deemed “classic” of the literary canon. Usually, any news of a literary adaptation of a classic book is meant with polarizing views from the general public. Some welcome the change, excited for what a new author can bring …

Heterogeneous Being: The Inhumanities And The Creative-Scientific Aesthetic, Steven L. Ogden

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Heterogeneous Being attempts to set the often-disunited aspects of the sciences and humanities in congruence and to extol and advance a hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic that moves beyond any restricted dimensions of its previously segregated fields of study. It likewise expresses the need to perpetuate that hybrid form of inquiry and representation to successfully address or convey the precarious realities of Earth’s ecological and environmental conditions. Heterogeneous Being asks readers to observe the inexhaustible proofs of our pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world, to recognize the agentic potentialities nonhuman subjects may hold both in and outside of those inhuman enmeshments, and …

Conserved A-Rich Regions In The 3’ Utr Of Zika Virus Differentially Affect Viral Gene Expression, Kristen Kaytes

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Following its discovery in 1947, Zika virus garnered little attention in the global stage until a rapidly spreading epidemic brough the virus to the global stage in 2015. Continuous advances in research have begun to further the understanding of the molecular biology of Zika virus, however much is still unknown. Much of our understanding of the virus comes from cross reference to other viruses within the same family, such as Dengue virus and West Nile virus. A commonality of these viruses is that they resemble cellular mRNAs and have a single-stranded positive-sense RNA genome that contains a 5’-cap but lacks …

Demonstration And Assessment Of Dark Field And Phase X-Ray Computed Tomography, Wadiah Hamed Allahyani

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Conventional computed tomography produces a 2D slice or 3D image from multiple conventional images to avoid overlapping structures and increase visualization of the internal features of the object. A set up, macro controls and processing for computed tomography was created for the Center for X-ray Optics for the first time, and demonstrated in this work. Adding differential phase contrast to conventional x-ray images highlights edges. Two more channels of information, dark field and integrated phase, improve the contrast and increase the signal-to-noise ratios of the image. Combining these channels with computed tomography is an important development. This work is the …

The Job Satisfaction Of New York State’S Public School Business And Marketing Education Teachers, Michael Lamastra

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century (Perkins) Act defines career and technical education as organized educational activities in which students learn applied academics, professional skills, and career training in a specific technical field. Many United States students, and ,specifically, New York State students, do not have access to CTE coursework. New York has seven CTE content areas: agriculture, business and marketing, computer science, family and consumer science, health sciences, technology, and trade/technical education.

One barrier to accessing this coursework is the availability of teaching staff. According to data collected by the New York State Education Department …

Testigos, Pero No Protagonistas: Bioficciones, Postmemoria Y Trauma Transgeneracional En Las Narrativas De Nona Fernández Y Rita Indiana, Fiordaliza Ippolito

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation examines how the concepts of biopolitics and postmemory are addressed in the narratives of Chilean author Nona Fernández (1971—) and Dominican author Rita Indiana (1977—) when portraying the dynamics of control and power in the totalitarian regimes of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990) and Joaquín Balaguer Twelve Years (1966-1978). Methodologically, the study explores biopolitics, which regulates the lives and bodies of citizens, and necropolitics, which dictates who can live and who must die, to understand state repression in both narrative contexts. Through the concept of postmemory, the research observes how the trauma of dictatorships is transmitted generationally and manifests …

Large Scale Machine Learning Over Knowledge Graphs, Bedirhan Gergin

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have become popular across various fields, providing convenient access to web-based knowledge while storing and formalizing domain-specific information. By analyzing KGs, patterns, connections, and dependencies can be identified across different data sources, enabling the inference of new knowledge from given facts. As the use of KGs expands, the size of modern KGs has grown significantly, making them impossible to process within the main memory of a single computer. Distributed computing offers a viable solution to this challenge by leveraging the combined capabilities of multiple servers within a cluster. This thesis explores how distributed computing can be effectively …

The Maritime Archaic Occupation Of The Stock Cove Site (Ckal-3), Newfoundland, Canada, Dana M. Keil

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The Stock Cove site (CkAL-3), located on the southeastern coast of Newfoundland, is an archaeologically rich multi-component site. The Maritime Archaic (ca. 8,000-3,200 BP) culture was the earliest people to inhabit the island of Newfoundland and the Stock Cove site, settling the island by at least 6,400 years ago. Their ability to maintain lithic traditions was key to their success. Finding new sources of lithic material would have been necessary and that process would have varied greatly across the island. In southeastern Newfoundland, far away from key lithic sources on the mainland, this would have been even more important as …

Socio-Economic And Infrastructural Determinants Of Response Time Disparities Across Emergency Service Agencies, Alice N. Ottah

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This study comprehensively analyzes the determinants of disparities in emergency response times for EMS, Fire, and Police agencies in San Francisco from 2021 to 2023, utilizing a multilevel modeling framework and publicly accessible data. Contrary to a primary reliance on structural neighborhood factors, this research reveals that while neighborhood disadvantage statistically significantly interacts with agency type to influence response times, its direct effect is weak and not uniformly consistent across services. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates that variance in call response times across neighborhoods is minimal (Intraclass Correlation Coefficients < 0.02), the effects of disadvantage are agency-specific (null effects for Police and Fire), and even when significant (for EMS calls only), response times are faster in more disadvantaged neighborhoods. These findings challenge the existing literature on emergency response times and highlight the need for tailored policy interventions that consider both neighborhood context and agency-specific operations to promote equitable emergency response.

Reproductive Justice: People Matter! History Matters! Places Matter!, Jazmin L. High

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Research has established that racial disparities in contraceptive use exist in the United States with African American women being more likely than white women to report using a contraceptive method associated with lower efficacy or no contraception at all. Several factors have been suggested to explain low uptake of highly effective forms of contraception and disparities including cost, systemic racism, negative attitudes, and cultural mistrust stemming from the history of medical racism. However, the lived experiences of rural African American Southern women are underrepresented in contraceptive research. Utilizing mixed methods, this study explores the contraceptive experiences of 14 rural African …

Stratospheric Variability And Its Relationship To Cold Air Outbreaks In The United States, Paul T. Panhans

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Only since the early 2000s, has there been a growing body of work linking extreme winter temperature anomalies to the variability of the Northern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex (SPV). However, the understanding behind stratosphere-troposphere coupling and cold air outbreaks (CAOs) remain occasionally contradictory in the literature, making it difficult to properly articulate societal risks. Studies often focused on broad stratospheric influences, but this research directly compared stratospheric variability according to their respective tropospheric impacts. This dissertation filled a knowledge gap, as there has yet to be a comprehensive analysis to quantify the differences in stratospheric variability with and without CAOs …

Poética Transatlántica Vanguardista De Winétt De Rokha, Magda Portal, Norah Lange Y Ernestina De Champourcín, Mirna L. Alvarez

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

En el auge de la vanguardia histórica, desde Europa hasta Hispanoamérica, intelectuales de ambos lados del atlántico coincidieron en renovar los géneros literarios. El objetivo de la vanguardia consistía en promover diferentes formas de expresión escrita para manifestar su inconformidad sobre los acontecimientos sociales, estos provocaron cambios a la estética del momento. Es decir que se buscaba deconstruir a través de diferentes Ismos como el futurismo, el ultraísmo, el creacionismo, el estridentismo entre otros para innovar la escritura dentro de la literatura del siglo XX. Las estrategias del vanguardismo consistían en las múltiples imágenes insólitas fragmentadas, lo arbitrario de la …