Digital Commons Network^™

Reimagining Safety And Justice: Experiences Of And Resistance To Police Sexual Violence In New York City, Priscilla Bustamante

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the era following both Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, police sexual violence (PSV) currently constitutes the second most commonly reported police complaint after excessive force. Police across the U.S. are caught for some form of sexual misconduct once every five days, with on-duty officers found to commit sexual assaults at more than double the rate of the general population. The gendered and racialized perpetration of sexual violence extends far beyond policing; however, it has been intensified within the masculine, militarized carceral structures designed to legally control and punish.

Accordingly, this dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach to offer what …

Less Self, Less Fear: Manipulation Of The Self Using Virtual Out-Of-Body Experiences To Alter The Conscious And Unconscious Experience Of Emotion, Dillon Freed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated whether adopting an out-of-body perspective in virtual reality (VR) reduces subjective and physiological emotional responses to vicarious pain stimuli compared to inhabiting a first-person embodied avatar. Twenty-four participants experienced two counterbalanced VR conditions: (1) Avatar Embodiment (AV), in which they inhabited a photorealistic avatar from a first-person perspective, and (2) a Virtual Out-of-Body Experience (vOBE), in which they observed their avatar from a displaced third-person perspective. In both conditions, participants viewed a standardized series of vicarious pain images while electrodermal activity was recorded and self-report measures of embodiment (AV) and disembodiment (the vOBE state), emotional intensity (a …

Cecil Taylor, 1950–1976: Theory & Practice In His Own Words, Michelle A. Yom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) was a poet, composer, pianist, and dancer who is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of Free Jazz. Despite this historical significance, Taylor has not been a subject of substantial archival research. Some scholars have written his name into music scholarship through explicitly or implicitly reiterating the notion of “freedom” that circulated among contemporary jazz critics of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Others have focused on analyzing Taylor’s solo piano music, often reducing Taylor’s musical theories and practices into the formal structures of the music itself. To date, the scholarship has simplified Taylor’s work …

Voces Of Teachers And The Politics Of Literacy: A Case Study Of Multilingual Kindergarten In A Midwestern Urban District, Rachel Chapman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States is home to more international immigrants than any other country in the world with about a quarter of its children learning two or more languages while growing up. This study explored teachers’ experiences with children's home languages as they learned English for the first time in a kindergarten classroom. In kindergarten, children build their emergent literacy skills as they enter the beginning stages of reading, when children use letter sounds to decode words. Because teachers have largely been left out of the debate about policy formation and curriculum on teaching reading, this study focused on teachers’ experiences …

Courts Of New York: A Visual Atlas Of The City’S Public Basketball Spaces, Nathaniel Rattner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Basketball courts in New York City are recreation facilities, community anchors and part of the city’s cultural image. In the basketball capital of the world, New Yorkers are rarely more than a few blocks away from a court. The visual diversity of these courts, however, is not widely documented in systematic ways.

This project makes that diversity visible to the public, combining open data, aerial imagery and computational analysis to document this important public space across the five boroughs. It is a narrative story and digital atlas of New York City’s public basketball courts, using surface color as a way …

Protein Allostery Probed By Ligands Across Sites, Virgil A. Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Allostery is a pervasive regulatory principle throughout biology, yet the structural pathways by which distal inputs alter active‑site chemistry within protein structures remain incompletely defined and exploited. This dissertation uses protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) as a tractable model to map those pathways with complementary experimental and computational tools. I integrate high‑resolution hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS), room-temperature crystallography, NMR, steady-state kinetics, crystallographic pseudo-ensembles, and machine-learning-guided ligand discovery. The working premise is that regulation reflects redistribution within a conformational ensemble rather than a binary switch. That orthogonal perturbations by small molecules, mutations, and protein partners can be used to both …

Precarious Status, Essential Work: Migrant Labor, Social Reproduction, And The Politics Of Regularization In Covid Quebec, Jessie Lauren Stein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how migrant justice struggles in Quebec during and immediately after the COVID‑19 pandemic challenged and reshaped the cultural politics of membership in a neoliberal welfare state under strain. The research is centered on an ethnography of the Status for All campaign, a coalition effort spearheaded in Montreal to secure permanent immigration status for all people with precarious status in Canada. I situate pandemic‑era regularization efforts within overlapping crises of border governance, social reproduction, and federal–provincial relations. I argue that Quebec’s growing reliance on migrants with precarious status to sustain essential public social reproductive functions in care work, …

Calculated Risks: The Power Of Predictive Risk Models To Regulate Families Of Color, Ashleigh Washington

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines predictive risk modelling (PRM) in New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS), specifically exploring AI-enabled design features, practices, and encoded and racialized assumptions about risk in child welfare prevention services. Guided by Critical Race Theory and the Algorithmic Ecology framework, this study traces how PRM in ACS evolved from a service termination tool into a broader, largely internal surveillance apparatus that leverages families’ personal information, including health information, to assess risk of future maltreatment and to evaluate contracted service providers. Drawing on analysis of public records and in-depth interviews with Black parents, the findings describe how …

How To Search For The Engram: Optogenetics And Network Dynamics, Claudia Garcia Jou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Memories are thought to be encoded by ensembles of neurons called "engram cells", because their artificial activation with optogenetics leads to the behavioral expression of a memory. However, the physiological mechanisms that mediate this process remain unknown. In this thesis, I investigate how optogenetic stimulation of memory-tagged cells changes neuronal firing, spatial coding, and the geometry of neural manifolds. I used an active place avoidance task and a foraging task to label engram cells in the dorsal hippocampus with Channelrhodopsin2 (ChR2). I then recorded the hippocampal activity response to optogenetic stimulation in mice under anesthesia, head-fixed, or freely moving. I …

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Of Transitioning Tandem And Ovoid Insertions From Or To Clinic, Akihiro Uno, Hasan Danish Md

USF-LVHN SELECT

No abstract provided.

Effectiveness Of Dialectical-Behavioral Intervention On Emotional Regulation Difficulties, Distress Tolerance, And Social Functioning Among Patients With Bipolar Disorder: Randomized Controlled Trial, Nashwa Ibrahim

Nursing

Aim

To determine the effect of implementing dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills training groups on emotional regulation difficulties, distress tolerance, and social functioning among patients with bipolar disorder (BD).

Methods

A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 120 patients diagnosed with BD who were attending follow-up at the outpatient clinic. Participants were randomly assigned to either the experimental group, which received 16 group psychoeducation sessions held twice weekly, or the control group, which received standard outpatient care. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures was applied to compare normally distributed quantitative variables across more than two time points or stages, …

“Language Learners As Ethnographers: A Case Study On A Pedagogical Approach To Developing Intercultural Communicative Competence”, Nihal El-Gameel

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the extensive theoretical models and frameworks for Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), pedagogical approaches to teaching culture remain underexplored. This study examined the effectiveness of integrating a pedagogical framework—the OSEE framework developed by Deardorff (2000)—within a language classroom context. Using a mixed-methods approach, data were collected through audio-recorded reflections, a questionnaire, an interview, and a final project video presentation in a single-case study design. Data analysis followed Miles and Huberman’s (2014) model of qualitative analysis, employing a funneling approach tailored to each research question: the first applied Chen and Starosta’s ICC model (1996;1999) the second used deductive thematic analysis to …

Interest Rate And Inflation Control In Egypt: Evaluating Policy Efficiency (1976-2023), Fatma Abouzeid

Theses and Dissertations

Inflation has been a persistent problem in Egypt peaking with unprecedented levels throughout the past decades affecting economic stability and living standards in the country. Controlling inflation through interest rate has been a major tool adopted by the monetary authorities in Egypt with no real satisfactory outcome with respect to inflation levels. This links to a theoretical debate in economic literate on the relationship between interest rate and inflation which represents a major controversy in the field. The study examines this controversy in the case of Egypt to reach a conclusion on the actual relationship between these two central economic …

Risk Factors For Anticoagulant-Related Bleeding In Cancer: Traditional And Cancer-Specific Factors, Alexa Loncharich, Brian F Gage, Suhong Luo, Martin Schoen, Amber Afzal, Amir Mahmoud, Kenneth Carson, Su-Hsin Chang, Yan Yan, Kristen M Sanfilippo

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Managing anticoagulant therapy in cancer-associated venous thromboembolism (VTE) is challenging due to risks of recurrent VTE and anticoagulant-related bleeding. Existing clinical risk models for bleeding are limited by discriminatory ability in patients with cancer, perhaps due to the omission of cancer-specific risk factors for bleeding. This study estimated the associations of traditional and cancer-specific risk factors with bleeding requiring hospitalization in patients with cancer-associated VTE prescribed anticoagulant therapy. We conducted a retrospective cohort study using the Veterans Health Administration database to identify patients with cancer-associated VTE between 2012 and 2020. Cancer-associated VTE was defined by diagnostic International Classification of Diseases …

Plasma Ceramides Levels In Severe Covid-19 Disease: Correlations With Survival, Tri Pham, Andrea M Heredia Castillo, Andrew Atkinson, Linda R Peterson, M Cristina Vazquez Guillamet

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: Dysregulated inflammatory processes have been associated with severe COVID-19 disease. Ceramides, bioactive lipids involved in inflammatory signaling, have been utilized to predict outcomes in chronic cardiometabolic diseases and pancreatic cancer, but their role in COVID-19 remains unknown.

METHODS: This observational study prospectively enrolled patients with COVID-19 disease who required intubation and mechanical ventilation at a Midwestern academic hospital between August 2020 and March 2021. Plasma ceramides 16:0 (C16), 22:0 (C22), and 24:0 (C24) and inflammatory markers (CRP, ESR, D-Dimer, and ferritin) were collected and organized weekly from symptom onset for up to 6 weeks. Patients were grouped by in-hospital …

Clinical Presentation, Risk Factors And Outcome Of Non-Tuberculous Mycobacteria Infection In Hematopoietic Stem-Cell Transplantation: A Multinational Case-Control Study, Mario Fernández-Ruiz, Sasinuch Rutjanawech, Carlos Mejía-Chew, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: The clinical and microbiological features of infection due to non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) after hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT) remain poorly understood.

METHODS: We performed a retrospective, multinational case-control study that included HSCT recipients (≥12 years) diagnosed with NTM disease between January 2008 and December 2018. Controls were HSCT recipients with no evidence of NTM disease, matched (1:2 ratio) by participating center and post-transplant survival. Logistic regression on matched pairs was used to investigate risk factors for NTM disease.

RESULTS: We included 25 cases of NTM disease. The most common HSCT type was allogeneic from unrelated donor (72.0%) after myeloablative conditioning …

Risk Factors For Complication And Reoperation In The Treatment Of Discoid Lateral Meniscus In Children And Adolescents: A Multicenter Study, Suzanna Ohlsen, Jeffrey J Nepple, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: The discoid lateral meniscus (DLM) is a common congenital abnormality of the meniscus. Tears are common, and initial treatment is often not definitive, leading to a spectrum of complications, including persistent symptoms, meniscal insufficiency, osteochondral defects, and recurrent tears potentially requiring reoperation.

PURPOSE: To determine demographic, injury, and perioperative risk factors that increase the likelihood of complications and reoperation after treatment in patients with DLM.

STUDY DESIGN: Case series; Level of evidence, 4.

METHODS: Patients surgically treated for DLM from 9 institutions between 2000 and 2020 were reviewed. Data on demographics, presenting symptoms and signs, surgical findings and treatments, …

Prediction Of Methane Gas By Using Hyperspectral Imageries And Remote Sensing Techniques, Aysha Ali Alhajeri

Theses

Greenhouse gases is important for sustaining life on earth as well as in mitigating climate change. Methane (CH4) is considered as one of the most important critical gases for the global climate change and have significant influences on our life. Accordingly, the prediction of this greenhouse gas emissions is very important for avoiding the climate change effects and to maintain environmental sustainability. The objective of this study is to explore the potential applications for remote sensing to predict methane levels in the Earth’s atmosphere with a combination of local ground data and data from hyperspectral satellite imagery. By using hyperspectral …

Utilization Of Plastic Waste In The Concrete Industry, Nancy Abdelmoneim Sakr

Theses and Dissertations

Plastic recycling has emerged as a crucial strategy that aligns with environmental, social and economic sustainability indicators. Currently, substantial volumes of plastic waste are either deposited in landfills or incinerated, neglecting the potential to harness its embodied energy and the energy consumed for producing virgin materials. A key advantage of plastic lies in its promising mechanical properties. Concrete mix design is fundamental to a wide range of construction applications, including brick walls, reinforced concrete slabs and concrete pavements. Despite the adoption of recycled plastic in construction materials in various countries, its widespread implementation remains limited. This is primarily due to …

Legal Reform And Cultural Resistance: Examining The Role Of Law And Custom In Ending Fgm In Egypt, Souhaila Hafez Abo Seada

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the persistent gap between legal reform and social practice in efforts to end Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Egypt. Although FGM has been criminalized since 2008, with stronger penalties introduced in 2016 and 2021, the practice continues, revealing the limits of law when it operates alongside powerful social, religious, familial, and medical norms. Using a qualitative case-based approach grounded in legal pluralism and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, the study draws on 11 semi-structured interviews with participants from civil society, religious institutions, the legal profession, the medical sector, and communities where FGM persists, alongside legislative, demographic, and documentary …

In-Silico Trial Of Same-Day Simulation-Free Spatially Fractionated Adaptive Radiotherapy (Sf2-Art), Dennis N Stanley, Alyssa R Birchmeier, Carlos E Cardenas, Richard A Popple, Natalie Viscariello, Joel A Pogue, Courtney B Stanley, Mehran Yusuf, Michael Soike, Samuel R Marcrom, Joseph Harms

2020-Current year OA Pubs

PURPOSE: Here we present an in-silico trial of the feasibility and deliverability of a same-day, simulation-free workflow for spatially fractionated adaptive radiotherapy (SF

METHODS AND MATERIALS: Ten patients (five thoracic and five extremity), previously treated with spatially fractionated radiotherapy (SFRT), were selected for this in silico trial. A two-phase regimen was simulated: Phase 1 delivered 12 Gy SBRT to a uniform, predefined high-dose lattice and 4 Gy to the gross tumor volume (GTV); Phase 2 consisted of 4 additional fractions of 4 Gy to the GTV. The planning workflow was performed entirely in silico, without the need for CT simulation. …

Motivating And Retaining Student Assistants: A Case Study, Catherine Paolillo, Christopher Marcum

Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship

This paper offers specific recommendations for effectively motivating and retaining student employees at an academic library that practitioners may consider as they develop and implement programs for hiring, training, and retaining student assistants at their institutions. It describes a methodology that can be replicated for similar studies at other universities. This paper contributes new knowledge to the subject of academic library employee retention by reporting on the opinions of library student assistants at a small private liberal arts university in Southern California to gain insight into the kinds of retention program elements that students recommend. This study used an online …

Vol 71 #1, Rebecca Chavez

MPLA Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Media Use And Pro-Equality Attitudes Toward Women As Leaders, Mark Tremayne, Dustin Harp, Ariana Hernandez

Communication Faculty Publications

This study examines how Americans’ media use corresponds with attitudes toward women as leaders. We surveyed 1,030 adults and measured pro-equality attitudes using a 17-item index. Newspaper reading and streaming video use were positively associated with pro-equality views, while time spent on social media (particularly Facebook and X) showed small negative associations. Participants who used newspapers for political content reported higher pro-equality scores than non-users, whereas those who used X for politics reported lower scores. The findings suggest that media habits and political ideology are connected to gender attitudes.

Association Of Clinical Severity In Autism Spectrum Disorder With Biomolecules Involved In Lipid Metabolism, Inflammation And Mirnas, Maria Gevezova, Michael Maes, Iliana Pacheva, Nikolay Mehterov, Zdravko Ivanov, Elena Timova, Stefka Spassieva, Erhard Bieberich, Maria Kazakova, Ivan Ivanov, Victoria Sarafian

Markey Cancer Center Faculty Publications

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous neurological condition with an unclear etiology and pathogenesis. In recent years, studies have identified changes in lipid metabolism, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and mitophagy in patients with ASD. However, the specific interactions between these molecular signatures and their clinical applications in ASD remain largely unexplored. The aim of our study is to search for correlations between changes in gene and miRNA expression and the clinical characteristics of ASD. The investigation included a cohort of children with idiopathic ASD and healthy controls (HC). Diagnosis was established based on ADOS assessment (autism diagnostic observation schedule). Gene …

Digital Ecosystems And Data Regulation, Andrew Rhodes, Jidong Zhou, Junjie Zhou

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper develops a framework in which a multiproduct ecosystem competes with multiple single-product firms in both price and innovation. The ecosystem can use data from one product to improve the quality of its other products. We use the framework to study three regulatory policies aimed at leveling the playing field. Restricting the ecosystem’s cross-product data usage, or forcing it to share data with single-product firms, benefits those firms and induces them to innovate more. However, these policies also dampen the ecosystem’s incentive to collect data and innovate, potentially raising prices. Consumers are better off only when single-product firms are …

Initial-Condition-Robust Inference In Autoregressive Models, Donald W. K. Andrews, Ming Li, Yapeng Zheng

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper considers confidence intervals (CIs) for the autoregressive (AR) parameter in an AR model with an AR parameter that may be close or equal to one. Existing CIs rely on the assumption of a stationary or fixed initial condition to obtain correct asymptotic coverage and good finite sample coverage. When this assumption fails, their coverage can be quite poor. In this paper, we introduce a new CI for the AR parameter whose coverage probability is completely robust to the initial condition, both asymptotically and in finite samples. This CI pays only a small price in terms of its length …

Willingness To Travel With Endogenous Distance: Evidence From The Changing Retail Landscape, Yue Cao, Judith Chevalier, Jessie Handbury, Hayden Parsley, Kevin Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Economists often use variation in consumers’ distance from services as a source of demand variation. This approach typically treats consumer-supplier distance as exogenous, despite suppliers strategically choosing locations. We develop a novel class of instruments to address this endogeneity. These instruments exploit the spatial distribution of consumer demographics and can be constructed from standard cross-sectional data, making them useful in a variety of spatial applications. Our preferred instruments use the income composition of concentric discs centered on the Central Business District. Applying these instruments to smartphone geolocation data for millions of devices across 18 metropolitan areas, we estimate consumer preferences …

Lessons Learned In A Data Linkage Project On Fatal Drowning, Rohit P Shenoi, Ned Levine, Elizabeth A Camp, Linh Nguyen, Sandra Mckay, Shaila Zaman

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: Drowning is the leading cause of death in US children 1-4 years old. The epidemiology of drowning at a regional level is understudied because no single data source provides complete information on persons who drown. Probabilistic data linkage is a novel way of studying the epidemiology of drowning. This study aimed to document the lessons learned during the linkage process.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of persons of all ages who died from unintentional drowning in metropolitan Houston from 2016 to 2022. We describe the lessons learned during the project planning and execution phases which pertained to data …

Perioperative Anaphylaxis In A Healthy Adolescent After First Lifetime Surgery, Shayan Sazdar, Salman Aljubran

Posters

Introduction: Perioperative anaphylaxis is a rare life-threatening event. Its evaluation poses complex considerations inherent to the use of multiple medications. Patient presentation: A healthy 11-year-old boy developed anaphylaxis shortly after discharge home from first lifetime surgery for orchiopexy. Perioperative medications included rocuronium, propofol, fentanyl, bupivacaine, sugammadex, ondansetron, dexamethasone, dexmedetomidine, and ketorolac. No antibiotics. After surgery, he consumed fast food dinner and ice cream. Within 2 hours after discharge home, he returned to our Emergency Department (ED) with facial and tongue angioedema, hives, and respiratory distress. He received multiple doses of intramuscular epinephrine and briefly required epinephrine drip in the ED. …