Digital Commons Network^™

Applying The Strategic Self-Regulation Model To Tone Acquisition In Mandarin : A Case Study, Adele Laurie Touhey

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the experience of college-level American native English- speaking students who are learning elementary Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language acquire tone. Oxford (2011)’s Strategic Self-Regulation (S2R) Model is used to analyze the findings in a cross-case analysis. The findings showed that students in this study employed a variety of language learning strategies across all dimensions (cognitive, affective, and sociocultural-interactive), with the highest number of tactics being categorized as metacognitive and affective strategies. The results indicated that fostering a positive classroom environment can contribute to reduced learner anxiety and overall increased positive emotions related to tone acquisition. This …

Ai-Synthesized Speech : Generation And Detection, Ehab Alsayed Albadawy Abdrabuh

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From speech to images, and videos, advances in machine learning have led to dramatic improvements in the quality and realism of so-called AI-synthesized content. While there are many exciting and interesting applications, this type of content can also be used to create convincing and dangerous fakes. We seek to develop forensic techniques that can distinguish a real human voice from a synthesized voice. We observe that deep neural networks used to synthesize speech introduce specific and unusual artifacts not typically found in human speech. Although not necessarily audible, we develop various detection algorithms to measure these artifacts and be able …

Motiochihuanih : Catechists And Prayer Specialists As Religious Leaders Brokering 'El Costumbre' Nahua In Chicontepec, Veracruz, Abelardo De La Cruz De La Cruz

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

El presente proyecto examina la religiosidad que se practica en el municipio de Chicontepec, ubicado en el norte del estado de Veracruz, en la región de la huasteca veracruzana. A partir de 1980 hasta la fecha actual y partir de una perspectiva emic, el estudio se enfoca en cuatro historias de caso, procedentes de una comunidad nahua conocida como Chapictlan. A través de la etnografía se analizan las opiniones de los catequistas y rezanderos conocidos como motiochihuanih, resaltando la historia personal individual, la formación católica recibida, la experticia del trabajo religioso, y de sus inconformidades con el catolicismo. Los catequistas …

Visions And Seeds Of Change : Pathways To Defining And Seeking Liberation, Ramon Kentrell Lee

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

From July 2015 to May 2018, the sociopolitical terrain and atmosphere of Albany, New York underwent significant shifts as the levels and types of activism and liberation discourse increased. The shifts were related to national occurrences, such as the development of the Black Lives Matter movement, the state of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, the campaign and election of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United State, and the emergence of the Me Too movement. During this period of change, activists engaged in a series of political struggles for situated identification and empowerment, the emergence of a …

Therapist Facilitative Interpersonal Skills In Simulated Text-Based Telepsychotherapy With Cultural Minority Clients, Carly Max Schwartzman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Objective: The prevalence of mental health difficulties has increased, yet the availability and use of mental health services remains low, particularly in traditionally underserved groups. Telepsychotherapy via videoconferencing has been advertised as a means of mitigating barriers to accessing mental healthcare for these populations, though less attention has focused on text-based approaches. Indeed, although text-based telepsychotherapy is currently widely available, its efficacy in treating folx from cultural minority identities is unknown. Additionally, no research to date has studied the adaptation of multiculturally competent psychotherapy practice to a text-based platform. Thus, this project aimed to examine therapist facilitative interpersonal skills via …

Relationships Of Teacher Perceptions And Racially Diverse Third Grade Student Achievement : An Analysis Of Ecls-K:2011 Data University At Albany, Lynnette Renee Williams

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACTIt has been over 50 years since desegregation efforts began and many public-school systems in the United States are still battling with performance gaps between White and historically underrepresented students. The term historically underrepresented refers to people from diverse racial, cultural, linguistic, and economically disadvantaged backgrounds who have been denied access or suffered institutional discrimination in the United States, and according to the U.S. Census includes Blacks/African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans (Artiles et al., 2010). Many historically underrepresented students are lagging behind their peers on academic performance measures, standardized achievement tests, high school graduation, and college-career readiness …

Composing An Identity: How Musicians And Scholars Of The Mid-Twentieth Century Utilized The Sevdalinka To Establish A Modern Bosniak Identity, Aida Hrustić

History Honors Program

This paper explores how musicians and scholars contributed to the development of a modern Bosniak identity during the mid-twentieth century through their utilization of the sevdalinka. Many historians and scholars have studied the relationship between the sevdalinka and the Bosniaks and recognized its significance but have overlooked the impact sevdalinka musicians and scholars of the mid-twentieth century had in ushering in a modern Bosniak identity. This paper discusses how the growth of the music industry elevated the status of sevdalinka musicians in society and within the Bosniak community, deepening the Bosniak community’s tie to the sevdalinka through their musical work …

Investigación Sobre Los Materiales Disponibles En Español En El Sitio Web “Ny State Of Health”, Michaela Kirwan

Languages, Literatures & Cultures

Las lenguas que se usan en todo el mundo son sistemas ricos y diferentes que permiten a los miembros de las diferentes comunidades de habla comunicarse a diario de forma oral y escrita. La importancia de una comunicación exitosa es obvia, especialmente para acceder a los servicios públicos como el sistema judicial o la asistencia médica. Tanto los ciudadanos como los profesionales en estos campos tienen que asegurarse de poder comunicar la información de forma adecuada. Sin embargo, en estos sistemas, históricamente no siempre se ha garantizado el acceso a la información en el caso de grupos migratorios por la …

The Albany Answers Plant Incinerator : Environmental Justice And Slow Violence At The New York State Capital, Matthew D. Saddlemire

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The ANSWERS plant and its impact on the residents of Sheridan Hollow has recently been accepted by many as a case of environmental injustice. Simply looking at the benefits and burdens of environmental processes shows clearly that the primarily black community faced most of the health burdens that came from waste in the capital region, while white residential areas who sent their trash to ANSWERS faced minimal risk. The state benefitted from energy production, which was used to heat and cool the Empire State Plaza, the Alfred E. Smith State Office Building, the state Education Building and New York State …

Coffee, Music, And Taste: Why We Like What We Like, And Why That Matters, Thomas Curdt '22

Honor Scholar Theses

Research Questions

In both my research and performance, I will investigate three aspects of taste:

How do we Taste?

• What are the mechanical and physiological mechanisms through which we taste food and hear music?

How do we communicate Taste?

• How do we translate physical senses and taste into language?
• What is the role of metaphor in communicating taste?

How does our worldview affect our Taste?

• How do our emotions affect our taste?
• How does our identities affect our taste?
• How does technology affect our taste?
• How can we be more intentional about our taste?

Urban Literacy: Learning To Read The City Around You, Leanne Claire Serbulo

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

This book introduces students to the basic concepts of urban studies. It is an interdisciplinary text that was developed for lower-division undergraduate students. The book is organized into thematic chapters that explore different aspects of urban life, such as the environment, housing, and culture. Each chapter introduces a new way of conceptualizing the city, presents core theories and concepts, and provides examples and case studies from cities around the globe to illustrate the ideas presented in the text. At the end of each chapter, there are review questions and a series of interactive field activities where students can apply the …

Language Barriers In The Field Of Audiology: Spanish-Speaking Patient & English-Speaking Audiologist, Jamiles Trejo

Doctoral Scholarly Projects & Capstones

Language barriers in the healthcare system have been a continuously growing dilemma in the United States, affecting communication between a provider and patient, which leads to problems in healthcare delivery. Policies and regulations currently in place have attempted to decrease language barriers but several healthcare providers are not aware of the responsibility, have not prioritized the issue, or have not been held accountable through the enforcement of the laws. The goal of this paper was to provide best practices for audiologic testing that minimize language and cultural barriers and maximize the benefit the patient receives from the hearing evaluation. The …

Twitter Account Classification Using Account Metadata: Organizationvs. Individual, Yusuf Mucahi̇t Çeti̇nkaya, Mesut Gürlek, İsmai̇l Hakki Toroslu, Pinar Karagöz

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Organizations present their existence on social media to gain followers and reach out to the crowds. Social media-related tasks and applications, such as social media graph construction, sentiment analysis, and bot detection, are required to identify the entities' account types. Some applications focus on personal accounts, whereas others only need nonpersonal accounts. This paper addresses the account classification problem using only minimum amount of data, which is the metadata of the account's profile. The proposed approach classifies accounts either as organization or individual, in a language-independent manner, without collecting the accounts' tweet content. The model uses a long short term …

A Novel Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Stock Price Prediction Using Knowledge Graph And Community Aware Sentiments, Anil Berk Altuner, Zeynep Hi̇lal Ki̇li̇mci̇

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Stock market prediction has been an important topic for investors, researchers, and analysts. Because it is affected by too many factors, stock market prediction is a difficult task to handle. In this study, we propose a novel method that is based on deep reinforcement learning methodologies for the prediction of stock prices using sentiments of community and knowledge graph. For this purpose, we firstly construct a social knowledge graph of users by analyzing relations between connections. After that, time series analysis of related stock and sentiment analysis is blended with deep reinforcement methodology. Turkish version of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from …

A New Speed Planning Method Based On Predictive Curvature Calculation For Autonomous Driving, Beki̇r Öztürk, Volkan Sezer

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

As the number of vehicles in traffic is increasing day by day, the accident rates and driving effort are significantly raising. For this reason, ensuring safety and driving comfort is becoming more and more important. Driver assistance systems are the most common systems that are adopted for this purpose. With the development of technology, lane tracking support and adaptive cruise control systems are now being sold as standard equipment. More advanced research is being done for fully autonomous driving. One of the most critical parts of autonomous driving is speed profile planning. In this paper, a curvature-based predictive speed planner …

Hallucinogenic Neoshamanism As Antimodernism: Development And Ethical Considerations, Ethan Thompson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Humans have been using hallucinogenic plants and fungi for thousands of years. Historically, people around the world have made use of these substances to aid in their spiritual development. Studies of the usage of hallucinogens in indigenous societies often use the term “shamanism” to characterize the associated system of belief and ritual practices. In popular understanding, shamanism is a religious system that features highly ritualized performances in which a practitioner (shaman) utilizes an altered state of consciousness to gain access to realms inhabited by spirits with the intent of recruiting their help to resolve a problem, cure a patient, correct …

"Folk" Home-Lore: Storytelling And The Architecture Of The Home, Madeleine Pollara

Masters in Architecture Program: Theses

I have observed that architecture is not sufficiently understood. This problem is largely due to the fact that the language used to describe architecture is broad and convoluted. This language is also divided into two categories which describe the denotative and connotative nature of architecture. It is easier to understand the denotative nature of architecture than it is to understand the connotative nature. As a response to this issue, my project aims to explore the connotative nature of architecture through telling stories about the home from the architecture’s point of view. The purpose of my thesis is to explore the …

Originalism's Implementation Problem, Michael L. Smith, Alexander S. Hiland

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

Despite the vast body of theoretical work produced by originalist scholars, this literature fails to address how practicing judges and attorneys should apply originalist theories. All too often, academic originalists appear to write for an audience of other originalist scholars. This results in lengthy, technical, and heavily theoretical discussions. The question of how courts and judges are to apply these increasingly technical and theoretical originalist methods is left by the wayside. All too often, judges and attorneys cherry-pick from this body of scholarship to create a veneer of academic legitimacy for their own goal-oriented arguments.

We do not seek to …

Barriers To Mental Health Supports And Resources Experienced By Online Graduate Social Work Students, Joseph B. Camacho

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The focus of this qualitative exploratory study was to examine barriers online graduate social work (MSW) students encountered in obtaining mental health services. To obtain relevant data, the researcher interviewed online MSW students at a public university in southern California. This project employed bottom-up data analysis techniques by using open and axial coding to categorize and synthesize varied participant experiences. Relationships between axial codes were identified and analysis provided a window into the student experience for these online graduate social work students.

This study uncovered a phenomenon that this author calls the participants’ “student experience” as they pursue their online …

Multiple Intelligence Theory Activities In The Middle School English As A Second Language (Esl) Classroom And The Impact On Student Perception And Engagement, Allison M. Horner

International Graduate Program for Educators Master's Projects

In 1983, Howard Gardner published his Theory of Multiple Intelligences and detailed seven distinct intelligence areas. He extended his theory into the classroom and asserted that every student has their own unique gifts and talents which they bring to the classroom. Despite these contributions to pedagogy, schools continue to mainly focus on teaching curriculum standards concerned with matriculating pupils to the next grade level or getting them ready for the next standardized test.

Authentic educational experiences accommodated to student needs are infrequently used in the modern classroom. Educational institutions largely cater to verbal-linguistic and mathematical intelligence profiles, despite many students …

Examining The Experiences That Motivate High School Students To Read For Leisure, Umair Farooq

International Graduate Program for Educators Master's Projects

In my role as a high school principal, I feel that reading is an essential tool for gaining a better grasp of the world around us and enhancing one's academic skills. As is the case with many others in my area, and before starting this research, I was worried about the decline in motivation to read for leisure that generally begins in the high school years (Brozo et al., 2014). Students' enjoyment of reading can be stifled by schools' use of forced reading practices, the selection of texts that do not match their identity, and a lack of knowledge of …

Early Mathematical Abilities Of 48-Month-Old Children With Williams Syndrome., Jenna N. Tinnell

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder associated with relative strengths in concrete vocabulary, nonverbal reasoning, and verbal short-term memory and considerable weaknesses in visuospatial construction and relational language. While the cognitive profile of WS has been studied extensively, there have been few studies of the early mathematical abilities of children with WS and the cognitive predictors of these abilities. The purpose of this study was to describe the early mathematical abilities of 48-month-olds with WS and determine the concurrent cognitive predictors of these abilities. The Differential Ability Scales–second edition (DAS-II) was used to determine cognitive and mathematical abilities …

Children's Book On Pragmatics, Emily Conners

Senior Honors Projects

Pragmatics of communication is the use of social language skills when communicating with others. These skills are important in learning how to appropriately communicate and in building relationships. This is one area of communication that children can have difficulties with when they are developing language skills.

This children’s book focuses on one pragmatic skill learned during development, using language to request permission, with the goal of teaching children aged two to five about its importance. I used my background knowledge in pragmatics and child development to write a story about a boy named Jacob that struggles to ask his Grandpa …

Experimental Jurisprudence, Kevin Tobia

University of Chicago Law Review

“Experimental jurisprudence” draws on empirical methods to inform questions typically associated with jurisprudence and legal theory. Scholars in this flourishing movement conduct empirical studies about a variety of legal language and concepts. Despite the movement’s growth, its justification is still opaque. Jurisprudence is the study of deep and longstanding theoretical questions about law’s nature, but “experimental jurisprudence,” it might seem, simply surveys laypeople. This Article elaborates on and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is not only consistent with traditional jurisprudence; it is an essential branch of it.

Sentiment Trends In Political Tweets: A Case Study Of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madeline Enlow

Honors Theses

Political public relations has changed in recent years with new developments in social media, leading to a greater use of digital communication. This thesis focuses on the wording in Twitter posts. This purpose of this case study is to find the potential effect of tweet sentiment on audience engagement when looking specifically at messages from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s professional Twitter account. A sentiment analysis of a sixth-month time span of tweets was created using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) system. The variables assigned for tone were averaged for each day and charted on a graph, showing when they …

Context Modeling With Evidence Filter For Multiple Choice Question Answering, Sicheng Yu, Hao Zhang, Wei Jing, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is one of the challenging tasks in machine reading comprehension. The main challenge in MCQA is to extract "evidence" from the given context that supports the correct answer. In OpenbookQA dataset [1], the requirement of extracting "evidence" is particularly important due to the mutual independence of sentences in the context. Existing work tackles this problem by annotated evidence or distant supervision with rules which overly rely on human efforts. To address the challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach termed evidence filtering to model the relationships between the encoded contexts with respect to different options …

Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender In Multiple Domains, Lizi Liao, Ryuichi Takanobu, Yunshan Ma, Xun Yang, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conversational systems have recently attracted significant attention. Both the research community and industry believe that it will exert huge impact on human-computer interaction, and specifically, the IR/RecSys community has begun to explore Conversational Recommendation. In real-life scenarios, such systems are often urgently needed in helping users accomplishing different tasks under various situations. However, existing works still face several shortcomings: (1) Most efforts are largely confined in single task setting. They fall short of hands in handling tasks across domains. (2) Aside from soliciting user preference from dialogue history, a conversational recommender naturally has access to the back-end data structure which …

Colorectal Cancer Screening In The Latino Population At A Family Medicine Clinic: A Quality Improvement Project, Michael S. Vinson

The Eleanor Mann School of Nursing DNP Capstone Projects

Background: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a preventable and curable disease that affects all genders, races, and ethnicities, and its impact on society can be reduced with early screening. The Latino population is at greater risk compared to groups or ethnicities due to social determinants and health disparities within the community. Review of Literature: Language barriers, low education levels, persistent social stressors, poor healthcare navigation, and structural barriers make it difficult for this population to be properly screened at appropriate intervals. Purpose: This quality improvement (QI) project was designed to combat reduced screening rates seen in the Latino population. The target …

Examination Of Spelling Skills Of Elementary Students Who Are Deaf And Hard Of Hearing, Lacey Simpson

Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders Undergraduate Honors Theses

Spelling is a crucial skill that children must learn to read, write, and communicate effectively, but this comes with challenges for students with hearing loss. Linguistic processes, such as phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, semantic awareness, and mental graphemic representations are building blocks to understanding how to spell words accurately but are more difficult to grasp and apply with hearing loss. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the spelling skills of deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) students to identify which linguistic processes need to be corrected and strengthened. By identifying which linguistic processes need remediation, educators …

Practicing Organizational Care: Using Human-Centered Approaches To Facilitate Change In Your Library, Meghan Musolff, Annie Bélanger

Presentations

Most traditional change management practices seek to mitigate risk. They focus on process and implementation over listening, compassion, and healing. By using human-centered change methodologies and approaches, we will explore ways to tailor change efforts in ways that honor the individuals and the organization. We will consider how to engage in a change that harnesses the strengths of the team, making space for voices to be heard.