Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Narrowing The Wealth And Income Gap In Poland, China, And The United States, Cyndy Carboo, Zhiling Song, Jiawei Feng, Xudong Zhu

School of Professional Studies

With the widespread of globalization, the wealth gap continues to widen globally. Due to the enormous differences in national conditions and political systems of various countries, this article selects China, the United States, and Poland as the research objects, and uses a specific time unit as the benchmark, and mainly focuses on the four directions of medical care, education, job opportunities, and pensions. A reader could understand the correlation between the wealth gap and multiple factors deeply in this article. This article analyzes the impact of income disparity on these three countries and proposes solutions to help narrow the gap …

The Impact Of Special Interest Groups On The Federal Dietary Guidelines: Consequences For American Health, Dory Mcmillan

School of Professional Studies

This research paper explores the impact of relationships between lobbyists and both the USDA and HSS, and the impact these relationships have on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans that the agencies work together to create. The paper focuses specifically on the information the guidelines present in regard to red meat consumption, and the impacts this may have on American health, and healthcare costs associated. It was hypothesized that a relationship would be found between special interest groups and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and/or the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Research found there was a relationship between special …

Worst Time Being Poor? The Hunger Problem In U.S. During Covid-19 Pandemic, Yuanhang Hu

School of Professional Studies

Food insecurity is deeply rooted in American society during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Food Insecurity usually associates with economic indicators, such as unemployment rate, income level, etc. Currently, there are two main tools to fight the war of hunger. The first one is the government food assistance programs. And the second one is food pantries from the private sectors of the community. Both tools are facing numerous challenges due to COVID-19. The purpose of this article is to provide rational reasons to persuade the government to enhance the benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and use administrative …

Rcap Solutions Breach Management - Case Study, Eugene Adu-Gyamfi, Gio Al Muarrawi, Kwame Ofori

School of Professional Studies

Companies get hacked every day, and our in-scope company for this case study, RCAP Solution, was not an exception. Security incidents have increased both in volume and range in recent years, and cyber-attacks have become more sophisticated than ever before. There are so many reasons that drive this fact; one is that our infrastructure was not protected efficiently, but also attackers have become more knowledgeable in initiating advanced attacks at a scale. Additionally, the entrance of emerging technologies such as blockchain, machine learning, and the internet of things, added additional complexity to the already complex scene. Cybercriminals are using various …

A Web-Based Ai Assistant Application Using Python And Javascript, Viet Le, Tej Bahadur, Jainee Shah, Roushan Ara

School of Professional Studies

Our research is mainly based on a chatbot which is powered by Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Amazon’s Alexa are currently fast-growing and widely integrated with many smart devices. These assistants are built with the primary purpose of being personal assistants for every individual user in certain contexts. In this research, we would highlight the development process of the chatbots, features, problems, case studies and limitations.

This research delivers the information, helps developers to build answer bots and integrate chatbots with business accounts. The aim is to assist users and allow transactions …

The Killingly Mascot Case Study, Jordan Lumpkins

School of Professional Studies

In the summer of 2019, in Killingly, Connecticut the local Board of Education voted to retire the "Redmen" mascot name it had used for nearly a century. This legislation was widely opposed and received extensive media coverage. Within a few months, the town experienced a massive political referendum where several local Board of Education members and Councilmen were replaced by single issue politicians promising to reinstate the "Redmen" name. Now holding a majority on the Board of Education, these Board members made Killingly the first school in U.S. history to reinstate a mascot after being deemed "derogatory."

It is the …

How Museum Utilize Social Media On Communication, Jiake Han

School of Professional Studies

With the development of Internet, social media became more and more popular among people. Many industries realize the importance of social media in business. Traditionally, museum concentrates more on personal visual experience, which is hard to be replaced by online media. However, museums now also put more concentrate on social media platform because it expands the way of engagement. Especially, for Coronavirus, many organizations including museums have to close. Therefore, museums have to depend more on social media platforms to communicate with audiences. This research aims at finding how different kind of social media help museum communicate and engage with …

Higher Education Responses To Crisis: A Case Study Of Clark University And The Pandemic Of 2020, Lisa Gillingham

School of Professional Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered an existential challenge to universities and other academic institutions at a time when they are already grappling with other weighty issues that may alter the fabric of higher education. COVID-19 has forced these institutions to consider and employ new ways of conducting its work with a sense urgency that is unprecedented in the recent history of the academy. The rate of learning around these models is rapid, and Higher Education is ripe for change.

Clark University has addressed the pandemic with a plan to protect and pivot using strategies that support the continuation of its …

Identifying And Characterizing Alternative News Media On Facebook, Samuel S. Guimaraes, Julia C. S. Reis, Lucas Lima, Filipe N. Ribeiro, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Fabricio Benevenuto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As Internet users increasingly rely on social media sites to receive news, they are faced with a bewildering number of news media choices. For example, thousands of Facebook pages today are registered and categorized as some form of news media outlets. This situation boosted the so-called independent journalism, also known as alternative news media. Identifying and characterizing all the news pages that play an important role in news dissemination is key for understanding the news ecosystems of a country. In this work, we propose a graph-based semi-supervised method to measure the political bias of pages on most countries and show …

Argumentation Stance Polarity And Intensity Prediction And Its Application For Argumentation Polarization Modeling And Diverse Social Connection Recommendation, Joseph Winstead Sirrianni

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cyber argumentation platforms implement theoretical argumentation structures that promote higher quality argumentation and allow for informative analysis of the discussions. Dr. Liu’s research group has designed and implemented a unique platform called the Intelligent Cyber Argumentation System (ICAS). ICAS structures its discussions into a weighted cyber argumentation graph, which describes the relationships between the different users, their posts in a discussion, the discussion topic, and the various subtopics in a discussion. This platform is unique as it encodes online discussions into weighted cyber argumentation graphs based on the user’s stances toward one another’s arguments and ideas. The resulting weighted cyber …

Business Practice Of Social Media - Platform And Customer Service Adoption, Shujing Sun, Yang Gao, Huaxia Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines the key drivers in business adoptions of the platform and customer service within the context of social media. We carry out the empirical analyses using the decision trajectories of the international airline industry on Twitter. We find that a firm's decision-making is subject to both peer influence and consumer pressure. Regarding peer influence, we find that the odds of both adoptions increase when the extent of peers' adoption increases. We also identify the distinctive role of consumers. Specifically, before the platform adoption, firms learn about potential consequences from consumer reactions to peers' adoptions. Upon the platform adoption, …

Healthy Food Portal Business Plan And Its Function Model, Alena Raupova

School of Professional Studies

Business planning is a tool of paramount importance in the process of company management, on the efficiency of which the future functioning of the enterprise depends. Formation of a business plan enables the team to productively and competently use existing funds and resources in their work and apply planning as a very effective management mechanism (Hamm, 2016).

The goal of this final project is to develop a business plan for a healthy nutrition portal for Bellyful LLC. Bellyful is based in Boston, USA, and the portal will be its first product. Our client is interested in researching the prospects of …

Cvs Covid-19 Screening Website: Test Automation, Savya Rawat

School of Professional Studies

CVS Pharmacy is an American retail corporation, also known as, and originally named, the Consumer Value Store owned by CVS Health, it is headquartered in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. CVS Pharmacy is currently the largest pharmacy chain in the United States by number of locations over 9,600 and total prescription revenue. CVS sells prescription drugs and a wide assortment of general merchandise, including over-the-counter drugs.

Now, coming to the reason why I have selected CVS pharmacy’s website cvs.com as my case study topic is because of CVS’s response to the covid-19 pandemic’s no-cost testing strategy. Whole of the world is suffering …

Transparency And Yielding Of Law Officers Reform (Taylor) Act Of 2020: Proposal For Police Reform, Marwa Alnaal, Matthew L. Anderson, Hannah Brier, Mollie Campbell, Rose Wine

School of Professional Studies

The Transparency and Yielding of Law Officers Reform Act of 2020 (TAYLOR) proposes an example bill for law enforcement reform. During the summer of 2020, the United States witnessed civilian demonstrations nationwide calling for a change to policing. Our proposal is hoping to heed that call, offering a foundation for change that police forces and localities across the United States can utilize to rebuild trust and accountability.

The goal of the TAYLOR Act is not to defund the police; but rather, TAYLOR rethinks the priorities of the police. There can be no denying that the relationship of trust and security …

The Practical Applications Of Video Games Beyond Entertainment, Jack Martin

School of Professional Studies

Much of the attention directed toward video games is focused on their role as entertainment. However, researchers have found that video games can have other, more practical uses for society. This thesis is designed to examine three specific examples of the practical applications of video games: video games in education, video games as accessible technology, and the social uses of video games. This project is based on pre-existing research conducted by professionals studying the aforementioned subtopics. Anecdotal stories from educators, people with disabilities, and developers are also discussed. The thesis explores specific examples of video games being used practically, and …

Social Media Analytics: A Case Study Of Singapore General Election 2020, Sebastian Zhi Tao Khoo, Leong Hock Ho, Ee Hong Lee, Danston Kheng Boon Goh, Zehao Zhang, Swee Hong Ng, Haodi Qi, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The 2020 Singaporean General Election (GE2020) was a general election held in Singapore on July 10, 2020. In this study, we present an analysis on social conversations about GE2020 during the election period. We analyzed social conversations from popular platforms such as Twitter, HardwareZone, and TR Emeritus.

Digital Social Listening On Conversations About Sexual Harassment, Xuesi Sim, Ern Rae Chang, Yu Xiang Ong, Jie Ying Yeo, Christine Bai Shuang Yan, Eugene Wen Jia Choy, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In light of the #MeToo movement and publicized sexual harassment incidents in Singapore in recent years, we built an analytics pipeline for performing digital social listening on conversations about sexual harassment for AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research). Our social network analysis results identified key influencers that AWARE can engage for sexual harassment awareness campaigns. Further, our analysis results suggest new hashtags that AWARE can use to run social media campaigns and achieve greater reach.

Coupled Hierarchical Transformer For Stance-Aware Rumor Verification In Social Media Conversations, Jianfei Yu, Jing Jiang, Ling Min Serena Khoo, Hai Leong Chieu, Rui Xia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The prevalent use of social media enables rapid spread of rumors on a massive scale, which leads to the emerging need of automatic rumor verification (RV). A number of previous studies focus on leveraging stance classification to enhance RV with multi-task learning (MTL) methods. However, most of these methods failed to employ pre-trained contextualized embeddings such as BERT, and did not exploit inter-task dependencies by using predicted stance labels to improve the RV task. Therefore, in this paper, to extend BERT to obtain thread representations, we first propose a Hierarchical Transformer1 , which divides each long thread into shorter subthreads, …

A Two-Stage Model For Social Network Investigations In Digital Forensics, Anne David, Sarah Morris, Gareth Appleby-Thomas

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper proposes a two-stage model for identifying and contextualizing features from artefacts created as a result of social networking activity. This technique can be useful in digital investigations and is based on understanding and the deconstruction of the processes that take place prior to, during and after user activity; this includes corroborating artefacts. Digital Investigations are becoming more complex due to factors such as, the volume of data to be examined; different data formats; a wide range of sources for digital evidence; the volatility of data and the limitations of some of the standard digital forensic tools. This paper …

Bootstrapping Web Archive Collections From Micro-Collections In Social Media, Alexander C. Nwala

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

In a Web plagued by disappearing resources, Web archive collections provide a valuable means of preserving Web resources important to the study of past events. These archived collections start with seed URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) hand-selected by curators. Curators produce high quality seeds by removing non-relevant URIs and adding URIs from credible and authoritative sources, but this ability comes at a cost: it is time consuming to collect these seeds. The result of this is a shortage of curators, a lack of Web archive collections for various important news events, and a need for an automatic system for generating seeds. …

An Attention-Based Rumor Detection Model With Tree-Structured Recursive Neural Networks, Jing Ma, Wei Gao, Shafiq Joty, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rumor spread in social media severely jeopardizes the credibility of online content. Thus, automatic debunking of rumors is of great importance to keep social media a healthy environment. While facing a dubious claim, people often dispute its truthfulness sporadically in their posts containing various cues, which can form useful evidence with long-distance dependencies. In this work, we propose to learn discriminative features from microblog posts by following their non-sequential propagation structure and generate more powerful representations for identifying rumors. For modeling non-sequential structure, we first represent the diffusion of microblog posts with propagation trees, which provide valuable clues on how …

Patterns Of Population Displacement During Mega-Fires In California Detected Using Facebook Disaster Maps, Shenyue Jia, Seung Hee Kim, Son V. Nghiem, Paul Doherty, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The Facebook Disaster Maps (FBDM) work presented here is the first time this platform has been used to provide analysis-ready population change products derived from crowdsourced data targeting disaster relief practices. We evaluate the representativeness of FBDM data using the Mann-Kendall test and emerging hot and cold spots in an anomaly analysis to reveal the trend, magnitude, and agglommeration of population displacement during the Mendocino Complex and Woolsey fires in California, USA. Our results show that the distribution of FBDM pre-crisis users fits well with the total population from different sources. Due to usage habits, the elder population is underrepresented …

Elder Isolation In Immigrant Communities, Jessica Da Silva

School of Professional Studies

This paper examined loneliness, as a measurement of perceived social isolation, in older immigrant adults. Previous research shows that older adults are more likely to experience social isolation and loneliness. Both of which have a direct correlation with their overall health (Wilson & Molton, 2010, Cacioppo et al., 2002) and mortality rates (Holt-Lunstad et al, 2015). Another international study found that immigrants in particular are at a higher risk for experiencing loneliness (Government of Canada, 2018). In this study, 35 immigrants and non-immigrants participants answered a survey which included 20 questions from the UCLA Loneliness Scale Version 3 (Russel, 1996). …

Becoming A Trauma Informed Care Organization, Katie Robery

School of Professional Studies

The Brockton Area Mutli Services Inc or BAMSI is a private, non-profit human services organization providing services to adults and children with developmental disabilities, mental illness, behavioral health, and public health needs. Founded in 1975, BAMSI is in the business of “bringing people and services together.” BAMSI transforms lives by building the capacity of individuals, families, organizations, and communities to learn, thrive, and achieve their goals. BAMSI services promote the recovery, resiliency, and self-determination of the people we serve. As a human services leader, we strive to be the provider of choice. (Duffy, 2019) With an emphasis on respect and …

Diversity And Inclusion In The Workplace; Benefits, Challenges And Strategies For Success, Margaret Leone

School of Professional Studies

In this case study I have explored the topic of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and learned how it can transform a business. When D&I is a serious business strategy supported by senior management it can help recruit and retain top talent, increase profits, and unleash creativity among other benefits. It is important to have leadership that is inclusive so they can set the tone for their staff

This case study evaluates the D&I culture at The Children’s Study Home (CHS) and explores best practices for improvement. CHS is a non-profit human service agency in Western MA, that’s mission …

A Case Study On The Best Practices Of The Facilitating Organization For Peer Recovery Support Services In The State Of New Hampshire, Maggie Ringey

School of Professional Studies

In working with the Facilitating Organization for Peer Recovery Support Services through Harbor Homes, I have found that the Recovery Community Organizations that receive support through the FO provide valuable services that help individuals that struggle with substance use disorder achieve and maintain long term sobriety and recovery. The RCOs throughout New Hampshire bridge gaps in services and treatments that are left untouched by traditional clinical methods and through regular check ins, participants at the RCOs have reported that the services provided resulted in positive outcomes in their lives. Throughout the course of this research, I found that the RCOs …

Managing Burnout And Secondary Traumatic Stress In Human Service Organizations, Naomi Ingram

School of Professional Studies

This Case Study explores how burnout and secondary traumatic stress impact staffing, service delivery, and organizational effectiveness in a human service agency. The Case Study is focused around Ascentria Care Alliance’s Children & Family Services in Massachusetts, which encompasses three foster care programs: the Unaccompanied Refugee Minor (URM), Division of Children’s Services (DCS), and Intensive Foster Care (IFC) programs. Both individual and organizational approaches are needed to most effectively address burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Individual workers need to build resilience factors such as self-compassion and mindfulness, set appropriate boundaries with clients, engage in ongoing training, support, consultation, and supervision, …

The Mental Health Of Black Men: Stabilizing Trauma With Emotional Intelligence, Davis Brandford

School of Professional Studies

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the impact of historical trauma and barriers on African-American males and the effects of emotional intelligence in reducing traumatic experiences. This research study is based on previous research and studies that explores the historical review of African- American oppression, trauma in black males, and mental health in the African American community. This study will utilize the historical trauma and emotional intelligence theories to explore barriers that African Americans have experienced over time and the role emotional intelligence can play to reduce trauma. It also explores the relevance of historical …

Rest Homes: Their Value On Massachusetts Healthcare Continuum, Ronald Pawelski

School of Professional Studies

In Massachusetts, rest homes provide cost effective care for elderly residents in a community setting. Rest homes, however, are not well-understood and the rest home industry itself suffers greatly, not only from a lack of understanding of the services they provide, but also from the strain on their financial resources due to both competition from other healthcare options and insufficient reimbursement rates for residents’ care.

The paper explores the financial challenges facing the industry and outlines the data that speaks to the value of the rest home care option for both the residents themselves and Massachusetts state healthcare budget. It …

Crisis Communication And Executive Leadership: Ethical Shortcomings In Government, Daniel Davidoff

School of Professional Studies

This research thesis project is an analysis of how and why governments fail in their attempts at crisis communication. The hypotheses tested are: there exists a negative correlation between unethical leadership and successful crisis communication practices. And governments are more likely to experience these failures due to ethical disconnects in modern politics. Research includes a review of relevant academic literature regarding crisis communication theory, as well as the ethical framework that can be applied to that theory. Cases considered are Hurricane Katrina, the choking death of Eric Garner, and the COVID-19 global pandemic. The research project concludes with a recommendation …