Digital Commons Network^™

Coalescence Of Research: Urban Advantage As A Learning Organization Structured To Support A Culture Of Inquiry, Marianne Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a mixed methods study of the Urban Advantage Program- a Middle School Science Initiative formed by the New York City Department of Education and the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in collaboration with New York City’s science culturally rich institutions – the Bronx Zoo, the Staten Island Zoo, the Hall of Science, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Queens Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, and the New York Aquarium. Unprecedented in size and scope, UA brings together the largest school system in the largest city in the United States in a partnership with eight large …

Millets From The Margins: Value, Knowledge And The Subaltern Practice Of Biodiversity In Uttarakhand, India, Priya R. Chandrasekaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millets from the Margins: Value, Knowledge and the Subaltern Practice of Biodiversity in Uttarakhand, India analyzes what is at stake for small-scale, predominantly women, farmers as local varieties of rainfed food grains such as finger millet are being newly commodified and valued as a biodiversity resource. With support from a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted seventeen months of ethnographic research with farmers, activists, scientists, NGO leaders, government officials, transnational functionaries and agribusiness representatives in segregated yet interconnected realms ranging from a village in the Himalayan foothills to transnational institutions in Rome.

This work demonstrates …

Effect Of Temporal Onset Of Mechanical Loading On Tendon To Bone Healing, Determined With A Novel In-Vivo Device, Mark E. Stasiak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background: Exposure to tensile loading has been shown to maintain tendon/ligament homeostasis, with the tensile modulus of the tissue increasing in response to greater loading frequency, and even decreasing in the absence of load. However after injury or surgical repair the effect of tensile load is controversial, with many studies implicating mechanical loading with impaired healing. It is currently unknown when the tensile loading imparted during rehabilitation exercise, can be safely reintroduced after surgical tendon repair or ligament reconstruction, and at what time point it can most benefit the remodeling process. To investigate the effect of tensile loading protocols on …

Psychological Perspectives On The Under-Representation Of African Americans And Females In Entrepreneurship: The Relationship Between Perceptions Of Fit And Intentions To Leave, Rachel Pascall-Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Advisor: Professor Charles Scherbaum

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a vehicle for economic growth (Ireland & Webb, 2007), and recent years have shown growing multi-disciplinary interest among entrepreneurship scholars. The primary focus of this study was to identify psychological and contextual variables that explain African American and females’ intent to quit entrepreneurship. Specifically, using Heilman’s (1983) lack-of-fit model as a theoretical lens, it tested the proposal that the intent to quit entrepreneurship could be explained by the extent of African American and females’ perceptions of fit and identification with the role. Data were collected via survey methodology from a sample …

Madison Vanguard: A Novel, Berni Moestafa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project takes the form of a popular fiction novel that introduces parts of the academic discussion on capitalism to a wider audience through storytelling. Using a fictional fiscal crisis in New York as its setting, the novel discusses the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It therefore aims to address the underrepresentation of the debate on capitalism in popular entertainment and raise awareness about some of the debate’s key issues.

Popular culture be that music, film, books, media, videogames or advertisement surround our lives and expose us to a plethora of messages that help shape our understanding of the …

Re-Examining The Bilingual Advantage On Interference-Control And Task-Switching Tasks: A Meta-Analysis, Seamus Donnelly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A much-debated topic in psycholinguistics is whether lifelong bilingualism enhances executive functions (EF), the set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in the control of thought and action. Several researchers have predicted bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, especially interference-control and task-switching tasks. Many studies have tested these predictions, but results have proven unreliable. As a complementary approach to recent quantitative syntheses on this topic, the present dissertation tests whether the bilingual advantage is moderated by a number of theoretically significant variables: dependent variable (DV), task, age, age of L2 acquisition and lab.

Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 considered interference-control …

The Dream Defaulted: Foreclosure, Crisis, And Hope In Baltimore, Maryland, And Detroit, Michigan, Heidi M. Rafferty-Reijm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, the late 2000s were a time of crisis that tested many urban decision-makers. The recession that started in 2007 was defined by a severe crash in the housing market and the proliferation of mortgage foreclosures across the country. Foreclosures occurred in urban, suburban, and rural communities, but had a particularly devastating impact on larger, older cities and their low and moderate-income neighborhoods. These cities had been dealing with economic and population decline for half a century. In many of their urban neighborhoods, foreclosures affected as many as one in four households and added yet another challenge …

Animal Performance In Big-Time Vaudeville, Catherine M. Young

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Animal vaudevillians have been neglected by academic accounts of vaudeville. Drawing on the rapidly proliferating and highly interdisciplinary field of animal studies, this dissertation combines archival research and cultural theory to fill an important gap in our understanding of how animal bodies and images circulated during the vaudeville era. Taking up Nicole Shukin’s notion of animal capital as both animal “signs and substances” circulating in cultures of capital, I argue that vaudeville animal acts theatricalized animal capital for US citizen-consumers and often circulated animalized capital via racist ideologies and performance modes.

Theatre bookers balanced their reliance on animal acts …

Design Rules For The Nucleation, Growth, And Encapsulation Of Gold Nanoparticles With Applications To Cancer Imaging, Matthew A. Wall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) nanoparticles are exciting candidates for high-precision cancer imaging due to their highly specific spectral signature (Raman “fingerprint”) and propensity for passive targeting of cancerous tissues. However, the signal intensity of currently available SERS nanoparticles is insufficient for cancer imaging via passive targeting in most solid tumors. The overarching aim of this body of work is to develop a new generation of SERS nanoparticles with sufficiently low limits of detection to enable robust detection of various solid tumors in vivo.

The complexity of SERS nanoparticles requires significant advances to the theoretical and experimental understanding of metal …

Epistemic Considerations On Extensive-Form Games, Cagil Tasdemir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we study several topics in extensive-form games. First, we consider perfect information games with belief revision with players who are tolerant of each other’s hypothetical errors. We bound the number of hypothetical non-rational moves of a player that will be tolerated by other players without revising the belief on that player’s rationality on future moves, and investigate which games yield the backward induction solution.

Second, we consider players who have no way of assigning probabilities to various possible outcomes, and define players as conservative, moderate and aggressive depending on the way they choose, and show that all …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Segmented Fluorescent Conjugated Polymers Via Acyclic Diene Metathesis (Admet), Gagandeep Singh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral thesis is focused on the novel and facile synthesis and characterization of segmented conjugated polymers featuring various electro-optically active segments, with or without heteroatom linkages. The polymers were synthesized, via acyclic diene metathesis (ADMET) using ruthenium-based Grubbs-type catalysts. All products are soluble, and have a well-defined all-trans microstructure without defects. Some of the polymers were also synthesized via Suzuki polycondensation for comparison purposes. All monomers utilized were designed and synthesized in the laboratory.

Segmented conjugated polymers have received a great deal of attention in organic electronics, such as organic light emitting-diodes, organic field-effect transistors and organic solar …

Zncdmgse As A Materials Platform For Advanced Photonic Devices: Broadband Quantum Cascade Detectors And Green Semiconductor Disk Lasers, Joel De Jesus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ZnCdMgSe family of II-VI materials has unique and promising characteristics that may be useful in practical applications. For example they can be grown lattice matched to InP substrates with lattice matched bandgaps that span from 2.1 to 3.5 eV, they can be successfully doped n-type, have a large conduction band offset (CBO) with no intervalley scattering present when strained, they have lower average phonon energies, and the InP lattice constant lies in the middle of the ZnSe and CdSe binaries compounds giving room to experiment with tensile and compressive stress. However they have not been studied in detail for …

Synthesis Of Novel Aporphine-Inspired Neuroreceptor Ligands, Nirav R. Kapadia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aporphines are a group of tetracyclic alkaloids that belong to the ubiquitous tetrahydroisoquinoline family. The aporphine template is known to be associated with a range of biological activities. Aporphines have been explored as antioxidants, anti-tuberculosis, antimicrobial and anticancer agents. Within the Central Nervous Systems (CNS), aporphine alkaloids are known to possess high affinity for several clinically valuable targets including dopamine receptors (predominantly D₁ and D₂), serotonin receptors (5-HT_1A and 5-HT₇) and α adrenergic receptors. Aporphines are also inhibitors of the acetylcholinesterase enzyme – a clinical target for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Considering the …

Metabolic Disorders, Drug Development, Drug Design And Biomarkers, Gjumrakch Aliev, Ramon Cacabelos, V. Prakash Reddy

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Random Field Disorder At An Absorbing State Transition In One And Two Dimensions, Hatem Barghathi, Thomas Vojta

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We investigate the behavior of nonequilibrium phase transitions under the influence of disorder that locally breaks the symmetry between two symmetrical macroscopic absorbing states. In equilibrium systems such "random-field" disorder destroys the phase transition in low dimensions by preventing spontaneous symmetry breaking. In contrast, we show here that random-field disorder fails to destroy the nonequilibrium phase transition of the one- and two-dimensional generalized contact process. Instead, it modifies the dynamics in the symmetry-broken phase. Specifically, the dynamics in the one-dimensional case is described by a Sinai walk of the domain walls between two different absorbing states. In the two-dimensional case, …

Search Of The Orion Spur For Continuous Gravitational Waves Using A Loosely Coherent Algorithm On Data From Ligo Interferometers, J. Aasi, Marco Cavaglia, For Full List Of Authors, See Publisher's Website.

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We report results of a wideband search for periodic gravitational waves from isolated neutron stars within the Orion spur towards both the inner and outer regions of our Galaxy. As gravitational waves interact very weakly with matter, the search is unimpeded by dust and concentrations of stars. One search disk (A) is 6.87° in diameter and centered on 20^h10^m54.71^s+33°33'25.29'', and the other (B) is 7.45° in diameter and centered on 8^h35^m20.61^s-46°49'25.151''. We explored the frequency range of 50-1500 Hz and frequency derivative from 0 to -5 x 10 …

Wanted: Journalists Of Humanistic Mathematics, Mark Huber, Gizem Karaali

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Salade Producto, Vincent J. Matsko

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics and food -- a timeless combination.... (This recipe is a humorous piece about elementary calculus.)

A Desirable Middle, Susan Sechrist

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

A Desirable Middle is a short story about a woman trying to discover her own personal golden mean.

Newton's Law Of Cooling, Caleb J. Emmons

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

A poem reflecting three different viewpoints on Newton's Law of Cooling.

Three Euclidean Poems, Jordie Albiston

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Three poems using forms derived from various Euclidean algorithms.

Adversus Mathematicos, Christopher Norris

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

A poem about relationship between mathematics and the human experience of time.

Pythagoras Plays His Lyre, Sarah Glaz

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

A poem about the Pythagoreans' beliefs and way of life.

Pension Building, Washington Dc, E Laura Golberg

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

Select Poems From Sizes Only Slightly Distinct And From Truth And Beauty, Marion D. Cohen

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.

The Allure Of Mathematics Or Book Review: Seduced By Logic: Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Somerville, And The Newtonian Revolution, By Robyn Arianrhod, Elizabeth A. Lamprecht

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Today, there is a tendency to overlook the contributions of women such as Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville; yet, despite numerous obstacles, they were able to make meaningful contributions to science. This review of Robyn Arianrhod’s book provides brief biographical summaries of the lives of these extraordinary women. It also considers some of the ramifications of Isaac Newton’s theory.

Throughout history, various factors have impeded women from full participation in scientific research; nevertheless, Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville found and took advantage of opportunities to engage in scientific activities. This raises the question: had these women been born …

Teaching Calculus With Infinitesimals, Rebecca Vinsonhaler

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article argues that first semester calculus courses for non-mathematics majors should be taught using infinitesimals. This applies to both high school and undergraduate calculus courses. The use of infinitesimals in calculus, though more intuitive than the approach developed in the 19^th Century, has been controversial for over two millennia. However, in the 20^th Century their use was shown to be equa-consistent with the approach developed in the 19^th Century. Here I first provide a brief history of infinitesimals, why they were controversial, and how they were finally put on a firm footing. Next I illustrate the …

Jay Leno And Abstract Algebra, Adam Glesser, Martin Bonsangue

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

The Jay Leno skit Jaywalking, showing ordinary people struggling to answer basic questions, is both entertaining and applicable to teaching. This article describes how an instructor can strengthen students' conceptual understanding by creating an element of confusion, or "cognitive dissonance," in the students' minds using Jaywalking-style interactions in the classroom.

Dramathizing Functions: Building Connections Between Mathematics And Arts, Gunhan Caglayan

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article focuses on connections between mathematics and performance arts (drama). More specifically we offer an exposition of a segment of college algebra mathematics (an introduction to functions), with an approach primarily emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of mathematical learning, teaching, and performing.

A Meeting Of Minds: An Alternate Humor For Teaching Mathematics To Non-Stem Majors, Paul H. Grawe

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

John Allen Paulos argued essentially for three forms of humor dear to mathematics: Incongruity, Gotcha, and Word Play. Unfortunately, these three are often combative forms and easily drive non-STEM majors out of mathematics and statistics.

William Dunham in The Mathematical Universe shows how a fine mathematician can use humor to draw non-specialists in. Central to Dunham’s success is his use of Sympathetic Pain humor, which creates softer synthetic Reconciler, Consoler, or Bridgebuilder humor styles.