Digital Commons Network^™

Asymptotic Classes, Pseudofinite Cardinality And Dimension, Alexander Van Abel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We explore the consequences of various model-theoretic tameness conditions upon the behavior of pseudofinite cardinality and dimension. We show that for pseudofinite theories which are either Morley Rank 1 or uncountably categorical, pseudofinite cardinality in ultraproducts satisfying such theories is highly well-behaved. On the other hand, it has been shown that pseudofinite dimension is not necessarily well-behaved in all ultraproducts of theories which are simple or supersimple; we extend such an observation by constructing simple and supersimple theories in which pseudofinite dimension is necessarily ill-behaved in all such ultraproducts. Additionally, we have novel results connecting various forms of asymptotic classes …

Biomarker, Treatment, And Socio-Demographic Factors Affecting Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Retention, Fernand A. De Los Reyes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

Biomarker, Treatment, and Socio-Demographic Factors

Affecting Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Retention

by

Fernand A. De Los Reyes

Advisor: Martha Velasco-Whetsell

Increasing mortality from opioid overdose and low treatment engagement are significant public health concerns. Along with increasing health care and criminal justice enforcement costs, there is an urgent need to study the factors associated with treatment retention in opioid use disorder. The study investigated the relative impact of the biomarker cholesterol on treatment retention in an opioid treatment program (OTP) clinic. Further, it examined the medical comorbidities, treatment, and socio-demographic variables that impact opioid use disorder treatment retention. This …

Festivali11: The Long Sixties And Women In Communist Albania, Manjola Shehu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Festivali11 is a digital project that aims to highlight the experiences of Albanian women during the communist period by collecting, digitizing and publishing oral histories for an Albanian and international audience. The heart of the project, which is hosted at www.festivali11.com, is a collection of educational materials built from two digitized interviews with an Albanian woman that describe her experiences during this period.

The project aims to showcase the potential of oral history in centralizing the experience of marginalized people in historical narratives and to provide contextualized, multimedia information and resources about this topic to an international public and facilitate …

Assembling The African City: Music Streets And Associational Life In Dakar's Médina, Brendan Kibbee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What can you understand about a city through its music? Most days and nights in Dakar’s Médina­­––a crowded quartier populaire adjacent to the city’s central administrative zone–– streetscapes are transformed by musical assemblies, including life cycle ceremonies and events produced by the neighborhood’s robust array of civic and religious associations. This dissertation examines how the confluence of music, public spaces (streets), and associational life shapes the possibilities of urban living in the contemporary African city. The musical assemblies that fill the neighborhood, I argue, spatialize social life in the city, organizing people’s movements, exposing them to a common sense-world, and …

Homotextualité Réaliste: Cryptosexualité Et Subculture Homosexuelle Masculine Chez Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Vincent Sallé

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse étudie les romans du canon réaliste français, en particulier Le Rouge et le noir et L’Éducation sentimentale, sous l’angle d’une textualité parallèle ancrée dans la langue érotique et les pratiques et les lieux de la subculture pédéraste. Principalement étudiée jusqu’ici dans des corpus identifiés comme érotiques ou dans des passages représentant l’homosexualité, cette homotextualité est ici inscrite dans la diégèse hétérosexuelle qu’elle permet de relire de manière située et historicisée.

La période de 1830 à 1870 est perçue par l’histoire et la littérature comme un hiatus sur le thème de l’homosexualité, pris entre son histoire moderne à …

Reporting On An Examination Of Controls At A Service Organization Relevant To User Entities' Internal Control Over Financial Reporting (Soc 1), September 1, 2022; Auditing Guide, American Institute Of Certified Public Accountants (Aicpa)

Industry Guides (AAGs), Risk Alerts, and Checklists

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Nfts, Angelina Tham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-fungible token stories have flooded the media since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. NFTs have changed the public’s views on art, finances, and the self. The emergence of Web 3 redefined ways of self expression with the help of NFTs. What are NFTs, how are they valuable, and how will they shape the future of digital art? The data visualization for this project indicates that the most popular type of crypto art is in the style of a profile picture. The discussion suggests that NFTs are in their infancy and there will be more to come from digital art, …

Relationships Between Sensory Reactivity, Restricted And Repetitive Behaviors, And Autonomic Nervous System Activity In Autistic And Non-Autistic Individuals, Sapir Elimaliah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current dissertation includes seven chapters. Chapter 1 includes my professional background and describes the experiences that led me to study restricted and repetitive behaviors. It also briefly describes my personal journey as an international graduate student. Chapter 2 is devoted to the rich literature that this dissertation is based on. The literature review covers both the foundational and most recent findings in the fields of sensory reactivity, restricted and repetitive behaviors, and autonomic activity, as well as the known relationships between these areas in autistic and non-autistic individuals. In Chapter 3, I describe in detail the methodology used in …

May The Word 'Shout' Be No More! Silence And The Hellenistic Voice, Noah Davies-Mason

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Antisocial Behavior And Callous Unemotional Traits In Youth: A Biosocial Approach, Yong Lin Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Early life presence of antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression/delinquency) and psychopathic/callous-unemotional (CU) traits (lacking empathy/remorse, shallow affect) are precursors to juvenile crime and criminal offending in adulthood. Etiological research on antisocial/CU tendencies has implicated both neurobiological (e.g., alterations in brain function and structure) and environmental (social adversity, prenatal stress) underpinnings. It has been proposed that reward and punishment processing deficits may induce problematic traits and behavior, such that antisocial/CU tendencies may be linked to hypersensitivity to rewards and hyposensitivity to punishment. Studies in this area have generated inconsistent findings and focused primarily on adult and clinical samples, leaving youth and community …

Terror En El Orinoco: Formas Del Espanto Animal Y Vegetal En La Historia Natural De José Gumilla, Roberto E. Martinez Bachrich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Terror in the Orinoco: Forms of Animal and Plant Horror in the Natural History of José Gumilla”, analyzes the repertoire of terrifying plants and animals that the Spanish Jesuit missionary José Gumilla described in his 1745 compendium El Orinoco Ilustrado y Defendido —a work that, surprisingly, has not been read from the perspective of animal and plant studies. Based on Spanish old models of the natural history of the Indies (Fernández de Oviedo, Acosta), Gumilla reconstructs an archive of monstrous beings (alligators, piranhas, snakes, poisonous plants) that challenges old medieval religious discourses when confronted with the nascent illustrated discourses. My …

Natural Striatal Signaling Dynamics During Food Approach, Devry Mourra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reduced dopamine (DA) signaling has been hypothesized to induce compulsive overeating in obesity. However, DA signaling facilitates food pursuit by acting on direct and indirect pathways. This disparity between why individuals compulsively overeat despite decreased DA and satiety signals is unclear. Characterizing how DA and direct/indirect pathways respond to satiation may elucidate how satiety signals become overwritten in obesity. The food's palatability may underlie this, which is putatively thought to override the satiety hormones since it directly increases DA signaling, resulting in the increased appetitive drive. We determined the pattern of dopamine and pathway-specific medium spiny neuron (MSN) activity across …

Mechanism Of Tau Propagation: Putative Therapeutic Approaches, Viktoriya Morozova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease and associated tauopathies is the accumulation and aggregation of hyperphosphorylated tau protein. The biological activity of tau is to bind to tubulin and promote its assembly into microtubules with subsequent stabilization of the latter. When tau gets hyperphosphorylated it cannot bind to tubulin and carry on its function, instead, it binds to normal tau and sequesters it from microtubules leading to disruption of microtubular assembly and ultimately to the death of neurons. Our lab had previously shown that tau phosphorylation sites 199, 212, 231, and 262, combined with the FTDP-17 mutation R406W (Pathological …

Operation Lone Star: The Spectacle Of Immigration Federalism, Danielle Puretz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March 2021 to respond to the “crisis” at the United States/Mexico border. While in the US immigration is usually thought of as a federal responsibility, different states have worked to expand their capacity to welcome or exclude immigrants. Operation Lone Star is an example of how one state is working to restrict immigration to the US and build notoriety for its republican governor. Drawing on press releases, executive orders, news articles, opinion pieces, and other sources I highlight the performative politics within this initiative. Operation Lone Star is an example of …

The Relative Cost Of Codeswitching: An Electrophysiological Study Contrasting Language Switching Versus Lexical Predictability, Iris Strangmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neurophysiological sentence processing studies are inconsistent about the additional costs that language switching within sentences (i.e., codeswitching) may bring about (cf. Valdés Kroff et al., 2020; Yacovone et al., 2021). There is discussion about whether there are, in fact, additional costs and, if so, about the origins of those costs, since some findings are consistent with effortful processing when comprehending single-language (not switched) words observed in monolingual studies. Specifically, studies are divided on whether codeswitched words are more difficult to lexically access than single-language equivalents of similar semantic predictability, as indexed by an increased N400 effect. The same studies, however, …

Analyzing The Linguistic Features Of Standardized Math Items: A Text Mining Approach, Magdalen A. Beiting-Parrish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following is a five-chapter dissertation surrounding the use of text mining techniques for better understanding the language of mathematics items from standardized tests to improve linguistic equity of these items to support assessment of English Language Learners.

Introduction: The dissertation begins with an overview of the problem that English Language Learners are likely not able to demonstrate their full mathematical ability due to the construct irrelevant variance caused by these items being written in English. This introduction also introduces the idea of text mining as a methodology for use in exploring this test design issue.

Article 1: This article …

Does A Neural Network Inflect Spanish Verbs In A Human-Like Way?, Elizabeth Garza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How do children learn that a verb like negar-‘to deny’ / niego - ‘I deny’ diphthongizes the 1st person present indicative, while it’s near minimal pair, pegar-‘to stick’ / pego - ‘I stick’, does not? To pursue this question, three small experiments were conducted in Spanish, given its complex and rich morphology. The first experiment was conducted to determine whether the Tolerance Principle of the Rules & Competition model (Yang, 2018) can accurately determine the productivity of verb classes in Spanish, and whether any irregular verb classes are exhibit subregular productivity. The second experiment was conducted to determine …

Effects Of Redundancy Of Multimedia Instruction On Spanish Reading And Listening Skills, Charles Raffaele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The redundancy principle of multimedia learning indicates that people learn better from graphics and narration simultaneously than from graphics, narration, and printed text simultaneously. The current study investigated whether the redundancy principle may apply to multimedia instruction of correspondences between a second language (L2) and a native language’s reading and listening content. 100 college students in New York City learned correspondences between Spanish and English words and phrases in a counterbalanced within-subjects design, from three trials of video instruction that was redundant (including text as captions) or non-redundant (including text as non-concurrent text slides). For each condition, participants completed tests …

Dietary Regulation Of Silent Synapses In The Dorsolateral Striatum, Allison M. Meyers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Obesity and drugs of abuse share overlapping neural circuits and behaviors. Cravings for drugs of abuse increase during abstinence, a phenomenon known as incubation. In obesity, increased craving is observed in individuals during dieting. Diets often fail, with return to- or increase above- original weight. The extent to which this reflects an incubation phenomenon has not been carefully examined. One mechanism underlying incubation is the reemergence of a developmental mechanism called silent synapses. Silent synapses are 'temporary' synapses that are important for remodeling brain circuits. They are prevalent during early development but largely disappear by adulthood. Drugs of abuse increase …

Destination Icaic: Cosmopolitan Intellectuals, Documentary Film And The Image Of The Cuban 1960s, Gabriel Arce-Riocabo Rollins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the interaction between foreign intellectuals and ICAIC (Instituto cubano de artes e industrias cinematográficas) in shaping the image of Cuba in the 1960s. I make the case that the idea of Revolution was a product of cosmopolitan intellectual engagement and that in this process documentary film was a privileged medium. By tracing the development of normative stories of commitment, cosmopolitanism, and aesthetic experimentation embodied both in written texts and travel essay films, I argue that such circulation destabilizes fixed ideas of Cuban, Revolutionary or Intellectual. The archive of Danish filmmaker and ICAIC collaborator Theodor Christensen as well …

The Interaction Of Different Primary Producers And Physical And Chemical Dynamics Of An Urban Shallow Lake, Majid Sahin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An artificial urban shallow lake, Prospect Park Lake (PPL), is situated on a terminal moraine in Brooklyn New York, and supplied with municipal water treated with ortho-phosphates. The constant input of the phosphate nutrient is the primary source of eutrophication in the lake. The numerous pools along the water course houses various aquatic phototrophs, which influence the water quality and the state of the system, driving conditions into favoring the survival of their species. In the first half of the dissertation, the focus of the project is on analyzing how the different primary producers in different regions of PPL affect …

Virtual Reality Supplement To The Peers Social Skills Intervention For Adolescents With Asd, Kevin Ambrose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this study was to replicate findings of the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relation Skills (PEERS) parent-assisted social skills training program for a diverse group of adolescents with historical autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses in an urban locality. Additionally, this study sought to pilot a 3D multi-user virtual environment for adolescent participants and an online learning community for parent coaches; both hypothesized to reinforce the social skills curriculum. A randomized controlled trial of PEERS was completed with 12 adolescents diagnosed with ASD with some participation from their caregivers. Results show that participants who received the …

Elucidation Of Gene Essentiality And Genetic Determinants Of Intrinsic P-Aminosalicylic Acid Resistance In Mycobacterium Kansasii, Keith J. Levendosky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mycobacterium kansasii (Mk) is an opportunistic pathogen capable of causing tuberculosis-like pulmonary disease in immunocompromised individuals and those with other risk factors including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or malignancy. Mk is frequently isolated from man-made water sources where it forms resilient biofilms, posing a health risk to these susceptible individuals. Despite its medical relevance as an environmental pathogen, and a close phylogenetic relationship with the obligate pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), few studies to date have probed the molecular biology and genetics of Mk. Here, we sought to apply a transposon (Tn) mutagenesis tool to dissect …

Finite Gaussian Neurons: Defending Against Adversarial Attacks By Making Neural Networks Say "I Don’T Know", Felix Grezes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this work, I introduce the Finite Gaussian Neuron (FGN), a novel neuron architecture for artificial neural networks aimed at protecting against adversarial attacks.
Since 2014, artificial neural networks have been known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which can fool the network into producing wrong or nonsensical outputs by making humanly imperceptible alterations to inputs. While defenses against adversarial attacks have been proposed, they usually involve retraining a new neural network from scratch, a costly task.

My works aims to:
- easily convert existing models to Finite Gaussian Neuron architecture,
- while preserving the existing model's behavior on real …

Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity, Dongwoo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some truths could not have failed to hold. Such are called metaphysically necessary truths. As Michael Dummett once aptly formulated, the philosophical problem about necessity is twofold: what makes necessary truths necessarily true and how do we recognize them as such? This dissertation aims to address these questions by developing and defending a novel account of necessity, which has the following three main theses: (1) the necessity of a statement about an entity is established as a consequence of a general principle implying that if the entity is a certain way then it is necessarily that way and the fact …

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Oxytocin, A Lover And A Fighter: Maternal Trauma Exposure And Mother-Child Coregulation, Patricia M. Pehme

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The placenta is responsible for regulating the fetal growth and environment in preparation for the anticipated external life. To succeed, it continuously adapts and weaves in a variety of neuroendocrine signals from the maternal organism. If a mother was exposed to trauma and her physiology sustained a change in the functioning of the immune, autonomic and/or endocrine systems, the placenta may anticipate different external environments for her children as compared to children of mothers without trauma exposure. This dissertation examined possible underlying mechanisms of psychosocial trauma transmission from one generation to the next via the placental oxytocinergic pathway. Encompassing three …

The Euro And Bumps In The Road: Historical Patterns Of Nonresident Holdings In Eurozone Bonds, 1980–2018, Michael H. Scarlatos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A developed bond market which attracts nonresident investors both enables and reflects a host currency’s transition from domestic to international status. My analysis of historical private nonresident holdings of Eurozone portfolio debt securities spanning the euro’s 1999 creation and its subsequent 2008 crisis reveals diverging patterns.

This analysis, complemented by coefficient stability tests, discovers that the conversion of national currencies to the euro was reflected by a pickup in nonresident holdings of bonds issued by countries adopting the euro, especially those of the periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain) relative to the core (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, and the …

Stability Of Two-Dimensional Magnetic Skyrmions, Amel Derras-Chouk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Magnetic skyrmions are whirls formed by magnetic moments in a crystal. They have attracted attention largely due to their topological protection, which provides an avenue for technology like next-generation memory storage. The idea of topologically protected solutions of a quantum field theory was originally proposed by Tony Skyrme when he developed a model to explain the stability of hadrons in particle physics. His work has extended far beyond his original intent to several areas of condensed matter physics. Here we focus on skyrmions in magnetic materials.

Skyrme's original theory modeled excitations which exist in three spatial dimensions, a requirement for …

The Moral Economy Of Ordinary Belarussians And A Critical Examination And Re-Evaluation Of The 2020 Post-Electoral Uprising, Geoffrey Blank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is three studies in one: First, a qualitative study of the moral economy of ordinary Belarussians based on E.P Thompson’s class-based economic conception of moral economy, as applied to complex socio-economic systems by Reinarman (1987). Second, a critical and broad examination and re-evaluation of the August 9, 2020 post-electoral uprising. And third, an examination of both the West’s hostility toward Belarus’ largely state-owned socially-oriented economic model (often considered market socialism) and toward President Lukashenka, and, of the West’s commitment to overthrowing President Lukashenka and Belarus’ largely state-owned socially-oriented economic model, through its sponsorship of color revolution, “democratization,” regime …