Digital Commons Network^™

Environmental Factors And Human Health Interactions : Ultrafine Particles, Temperature Variability, And Proximity To Power Stations, Ian Ryan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Background: Air pollution leads to more than four million premature deaths worldwide and nearly 200,000 in the US each year. While there is extensive research relating PM2.5 to hospital visits for various health outcomes, there is relatively little research on ultrafine particles (UFPs), a particularly small and dangerous air pollutant. Another important exposure is temperature due to its association with dehydration, heat stress, and cardiovascular-related hospital admissions. However, relatively little research has been conducted on diurnal temperature range (DTR), or the range of temperature within a single day, which is an important indicator of climate change. Importantly, the interaction between …

The Long Island Opt-Out Movement And Local Politics In Four School Districts, Raymond James Webb

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study focused on the political influence of the Long Island Opt-Out Organization, an interest group that promoted the right of parents and guardians to have their children opt out of standardized testing. The study examined the activism and influence of this group on school board elections and policy agendas in four school districts in Long Island, New York during 2014-2019.

Addressing The Scale Issues In Spatial-Temporal Analysis Of Crime : An Integrative Framework And Empirical Findings, Mohammed Abdulrazak Alazawi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Based on a critical review of existing literature in the spatial-temporal analysis of crime, three challenges have been identified: spatial-temporal scaling, theorizing spatial patterns for different types of crime, and the micro interaction between space and time. The spatial-temporal scaling issue is related to choosing the appropriate geographic unit of analysis. The theoretical issue concerns the lack of an integrative approach that can integrate the benefits of each theoretical perspective and identify broader processes to explain the resulting spatial patterns for different types of crime. Also, examining and explaining the variation of the micro space-time interactions for different types of …

Battlefield Women: How Nurses, Soldiers, And Spies Challenged Gender Roles During The American Civil War, Kaitlyn Thomas

History Honors Program

My research has focused on specific women in the Civil War that held the occupation of soldier, spy/scout, nurse or camp follower during the war and how their work in the war challenged the gender roles of the 1800s. I argued that the war has been an agent of change as women were able to hold male dominated roles that were involved in the war. While most of these women had not gone in with the intention of challenging those gender roles, those women had indirectly done so. To help with this project I have analyzed many sources to help …

Franco’S Failed War Of Legitimacy: Constructing The Historical Memory Of The Spanish Civil War In Education., Cameron Cupp

History Honors Program

In 1939, General Francisco Franco rose to power as a result of his victory in the Spanish Civil War. The Spain he ruled over was war-torn and fractured, grieving over lost loved ones and burning towns. As he looked to repair Spain, Franco turned to education. He entrusted the Catholic Church to administer his new curriculum which looked to accomplish one goal: indoctrinate Spanish youth into a new generation of National-Catholic sycophants. Although this goal seemed sound, Franco and his disciples failed to build upon their foundational legitimacy, which I argue was the fear and terror inflicted upon the public …

An Examination Of Historical Health Disparities Of The Black Population In America, And Their Effects On Contemporary Health Disparities In Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy, Sophia-Evelyne Blake Nehama

Public Health Undergraduate Program

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significant health disparities that the African American population faces in comparison to White Americans. The Tuskegee Syphilis study is often cited to support the theory that medical mistrust is responsible for these disparities despite conflicting opinions that medical distrust is not the main reason for disparities. This study examines the effects that historical health disparities in Black populations have on contemporary vaccine hesitancy. An analysis of recent sources, including peer reviewed historical analysis and news articles with accredited sources was used to make up the entirety of the literary review. For data on contemporary …

The Analysis Of Relationships Between Lightning Strikes And Particulate Matter 2.5 Utilizing Statistical And Numerical Modeling Methods Applied To The 2020 Wildfire Season, Megan Schiede

Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences

Throughout 2020, ambient air pollution was reduced as a result from limiting anthropogenic activities to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Not all air pollution is created the same as measurements of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) were generally unaffected by this reduction due to PM2.5s source from wildfires. Despite influences from COVID-19 lockdowns, rises in PM2.5 concentrations can be attributed to the anomalously active wildfire season of 2020. As climate change progresses, these extraordinarily active seasons can be classified as the “new normal”; thus, comprehension of such events are vital. Given the ability of lightning to naturally cause wildfires, there exists …

Observations And Analysis Of The 7 October 2020 Derecho, Maxim Couillard

Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences

A serial derecho impacted Upstate New York and western Massachusetts on the afternoon of 7 October 2020, resulting in 120 damaging wind reports alonga 515-km swath. The magnitude and extent of this event was unexpected and not well forecast, motivating a closer examination. This study seeks to better understand the conditions prior to and during the derecho to diagnose what led to such a damaging wind event. The synoptic forcing for this event was an upper- level jet with a broad, negatively tilted trough over the northeast U.S. and southeast Canada. The upper-level pattern provided forcing for a 990-hPa surface …

The Performance Of A Social Disease: Hysteria And Melancholia In Eighteenth-Century Britain Through William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (C. 1732-5) And Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare (1781), Kayleigh Ross

Art & Art History

Throughout the eighteenth century, hysteria and melancholia were two of the most diagnosed nervous disorders in Europe. Ambiguities in diagnosis and language frame the development of hysteria as a primarily feminine disease, with its male counterpart as hypochondria or melancholia. However, medicine and society worked to inform and reflect each other, creating a visual culture of art, performance, and entertainment surrounding these nervous disorders. William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (c. 1732-5) and Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) exemplify the fluidity between medicine and society in eighteenth-century Britain.

A Case Study: The Development Of Obstetrics In Eighteenth-Century Northern Europe Through Printed Medical Illustrations, Kayleigh Ross

Art & Art History

The eighteenth century in Europe was a time of intellectual and cultural advancement, with new systems of thought rooted in observation. Medically, observable evidence and experimentation served to advance the understanding of how the body operated. During an age of curiosity, the growing professionalization of medicine, increasingly literate population, and the expansion of print culture into scientific learning created a market for the popularization of medical texts. Medical manuals often included illustrated prints, as these images were integral modes for learning and teaching. As the reproductive female body became included in the study of anatomy and appeared in medical manuals, …

Feminist Critiques Of Ecofascist, Nativist Appropriations Of Indigeneity Since 2016, Breana Lynch

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies M.A. Final Projects

This project explores recent manifestations of ecofascism within right-wing movements that deploy environmental concerns and rhetoric. Immigrants in the United States and in Europe and other global North countries have long been targeted by xenophobic policy and rhetoric guised as environmental protection. Although investigations by critical scholars including feminists on right-wing environmentalism unveiled the nativism and hate behind green agendas that are inherently anti-immigrant, I analyze recent ecofascist rhetoric and visual discourse for their harm to Indigenous communities, which is equally insidious, if less overt. This project engages with manifestos of extremists, right-wing political websites, and on-the-ground footage of alt-right …

Missed Opportunities In Social Media To Reduce Maternal Health Disparities For Black Women, Nerissa George

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Pregnancy-related maternal morbidity and mortality disproportionately affect Black women more than their White counterparts. Black pregnant women are more likely to omit or engage in prenatal care late than White women. Social media is an essential source of pregnancy-related information and shows it effectively improves pregnancy knowledge. Greater than 80% of Black women own a mobile device, and some data demonstrate that Black women use social media for pregnancy-related information. However, little is known about social media use during pregnancy for this population. Several gaps exist about what maternal health content is available on social media, how Black women use …

Megacity : A Reservoir Of Toxic Environmental Contaminants And Health Disease Burden, Omosehin Daniel Moyebi

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Ambient air pollution is a global environmental problem of concern with more than 95% of the world population living in areas with unhealthy air. World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019 stated that air pollution is a principal environmental risk to human health with about 7 million premature air pollution-related deaths annually. Several epidemiological studies have linked morbidity due to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) to ambient air pollution exposure, especially in North America and Europe. However, the effect of air pollution in Karachi, Pakistan is understudied, which is the case for many urban centers in the developing countries. Karachi is a megacity …

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 …

The Communicative Capacities Of The Medical Discourse In Authoritarian Societies : The Case Of Aids In Iran, Elham Pourtaher

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This study explores the role of medical discourse in the Iranian formal public sphere. It examines how an epidemiological wave of HIV/AIDS—known as "the third wave"—highlighted nontraditional sexual behaviors in public and enabled a shift in policy and discourse by the Islamic Republic State. Through analyzing published content on HIV/AIDS from five major Iranian newspapers between 2009 and 2013, this study identified four competing narratives of the third wave which coexist and have a dynamic relationship with one another. First, the medical narrative warns of an unfolding public health crisis and provides a technical perspective to make sense of the …

Examining The Influence Of A Negative Affect Induction Task On Self-Reported Cannabis Use, Expectancies, And Problems, Brianna Rose Altman

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Substance use disorders and affective disturbances often covary. One commonly endorsed expectancy for substance use is stress relief, and using substances to cope with negative affect (NA) often covaries with greater use and problems. While strong evidence of these relations exists, NA might bias reporting of substance use due to hindered recall processes. This hypothesis warrants further research, as accurate reporting of substance-related variables is crucial in both research and treatment settings. The present study examined the influence of NA on reporting of cannabis variables using an affect-induction paradigm. Over 1,000 individuals recruited from Amazon’s MTurk participated. After reporting demographics …

The Impact Of Workplace Racial Harassment On Inclusion And Talent Retention, Katherine Kirkinis

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The technology industry is struggling to achieve and retain racial diversity in their talent pools (Pivotal Ventures & McKinsey & Co., 2019; Scott, Klein, & Onovakpuri, 2017). While companies and organizations in recent years have been focused on increasing diversity and decreasing discrimination in the workplace (cf. Cleveland, Shore, Anderson, Huebner, & Sanchez, 2018), organizations do not seem to be making data-driven decisions around diversity and inclusion efforts (Dobbin & Kalev, 2017) and they do not seem to be working ensure positive outcomes for diverse individuals after they are hired (Holvino, Ferdman, & Merrill- Sands, 2004). This study examined the …

An Entropic Approach To Dynamics, Pedro Henrique Moreira Pessoa

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The present thesis deals with different aspects of probability, the method of maximum entropy, information geometry, and dynamical systems and their applications to statistical physics and complex systems. Those topics come together in the framework for dynamics termed entropic dynamics. Work on the topic was initiated by my PhD advisor Professor Ariel Caticha and many colleagues at University at Albany as a method for explaining the dynamical processes in quantum mechanics from first principles of probability theory.

Essays On Technology And The Labor Market With Search Models, Soonhong Min

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation focuses on the impact of technological changes on workers based onthe task-based model. In the first chapter, I first investigate the impacts of two types of technologies on employment and job choices in the directed search model. The relationship between technology and labor with respect to complementarity and substitutability defines technology as labor-augmenting and labor-saving. Progress of labor-augmenting technology mainly works in jobs hiring highly-skilled workers in positive ways while labor-saving technological development affects jobs with middle-skilled workers in destructive ways during the last two decades in KLIPS data. The consequence of technological advances intensifies the advantage of …

A Gis Approach To Landscape Scale Archaeoacoustics, Kristy Elizabeth Primeau

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This research presents the development and critical assessment of an Archaeoacoustics Toolbox for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology written in the Python programming language, and applies this methodology to cross cultural case studies exploring the importance of soundsheds in an anthropological-archaeological context. As counterpoint to a common critique of experiential theoretical approaches the Soundshed Analysis and Soundshed Analysis-Variable Cover tools provide a replicable means of modeling baseline estimates of the experience of sound. Testing against modern acoustical studies establishing scientific accuracy, and explanations of the sound physics calculations performed by the tools are provided. The tools are then applied to …

Exposing Gan-Generated Faces Using Deep Neural Network, Hui Guo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Generative adversarial network (GAN) generated high-realistic human faces are visually challenging to discern from real ones. They have been used as profile images for fake social media accounts, which leads to high negative social impacts.In this work, we explore a universal physiological cue of the eye, namely the pupil shape consistency, to identify GAN-generated faces reliably. We show that GAN-generated faces can be exposed via irregular pupil shapes. This phenomenon is caused by the lack of physiological constraints in the GAN models. We demonstrate that such artifacts exist widely in high-quality GAN-generated faces. We design an automatic method to segment …

Midwifery Care's Potential To Improve Birth Outcomes And Experiences For Black Women And Infants, Neville Wintergerst-Burch

Undergraduate Theses

Black women and infants experience higher morbidity and mortality rates compared to white women and infants in the United States. Forces of systemic racism and poverty often lead to inadequate access to prenatal care for Black women, and care received is often compromised by implicit bias or barriers related to insurance coverage, impersonal provider-patient relationships, and poor healthcare literacy. Despite the rich history of Black Granny midwives in the United States, most Black women began using physicians for obstetric care in the 20th and 21st centuries. This integrative review explores how improving access to midwifery care for Black women could …

Pediatric Seizure Management With Ketogenic Diet, Lydia Beller

The Eleanor Mann School of Nursing Undergraduate Honors Theses

Seizure disorders can be life altering and debilitating, especially for developing children. Children who have seizure disorders often require social, emotional, educational, and behavioral adjustments for children. Most medication regimes do not achieve complete management of seizure frequency and intensity. For children, seizure disorders can lead to unsuccessful education experiences, low self-esteem, severe injury, and difficulties with social skills and engagement. Discovering that a dietary means can reduce their frequency and intensity is groundbreaking. The ketogenic diet is a high protein, high fat, and almost no carbohydrate diet. The ketogenic diet is an effective non-pharmacological method for treating epilepsy (Karimzadeh, …

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?

Commencement 2022 (Program And Video), Illinois Wesleyan University

Commencement Ceremonies

No abstract provided.

Personhood And Objecthood: Examining The Speaker’S Interiority And Double Consciousness In Citizen: An American Lyric, Winnie Chak

English (MA) Theses

The interpersonal use of the “you” (the second person) in Citizen: An American Lyric commands the reader to not look away and bear witness to the interiority Black Americans’ consciousness. The essay examines the transformation of Rankine’s works that expands how double consciousness, found in Citizen, influences the creative writing space (the racial imaginary) and exposes the ongoing discrimination against Black Americans due to white privilege. Rankine’s other works Just US: An American Conversation and The Racial Imaginary compile viewpoints of both Black and white communities that remember moments that either they witnessed racist discrimination or experienced it in …

The Brain Scan As Ideograph, Paige Welsh

English (MA) Theses

Medical imaging devices have enabled doctors to render images of the brain without cutting into the body. These images are colloquially called “brain scans.” Through journalism and mass dissemination online, brain scans have become an example of Michael Calvin McGee’s “ideograph,” a language term that subtly takes on outsized political and symbolic meaning to enforce state power. In conversation with theories of new materialism, I situate the brain scan as an ideograph within Jenny Edbauer’s model of rhetorical ecologies. The rhetorical force of the brain scan comes out of a collision between René Descarte’s mind/body dualism, the medical model of …

Changing The Definition Of The Orient Through Hollywood, Amanda Yaghmai

English (MA) Theses

In 2018, the film, Crazy Rich Asians showcased the glitz and glamour of the life of the one percenters of Singapore, one of the richest countries in the world. The film fueled the obsession that American media already has with cultures that are not their own. The purpose of this paper is to underscore the ways in which postcolonial theory applies to the way that American media and culture has warped the understanding of Asian cultures. I will use Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism and the theories set forth by Said’s work as a framework to explain how American media …

Speaking Up For Generic Asians In Charles Yu’S Interior Chinatown, Orel Shilon

English (MA) Theses

In this project, I will explore the ways in which the critical race theory works in conjunction with film and literature to showcase the depths of the racial issues faced by Asian Americans. I will use Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown as a framework to express the major issues faced by the Asian American community and the concern brought up by implications made within the novel. Scholars such as Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham and their book, Asian Americans and the Media, will be used as a primary source to introduce the problematic ways of the Hollywood establishment. Through …

Examining Wonder Woman Through A Feminist Voice: How Patty Jenkins’ 2017 Adaptation Upheaved Her Creation, Representation, And 80 Year Legacy, Tatiana Madrid

English (MA) Theses

This thesis aims to contribute to the scholarship on the modern female superhero by exploring Patty Jenkins’ 2017 film Wonder Woman and how the female super-heroine is viewed. In this study I look at Jill Lepore’s renowned novel The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Patty Jenkins’s 2017 film Wonder Woman, Signe Bergstrom’s Wonder Woman: Ambassador of Truth, Allison Harvey’s Feminist Media Studies and other scholarship as well as reviews of the film and articles pertaining to the feminist movement Patty Jenkins portrays in the film. First, I will explore Wonder Woman’s Creation and Intent. Second, I delve …