Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.

A Green Oasis: What Makes Community Gardens Worth Saving? While Researchers Amass Evidence Of Benefits, Advocates Develop New Strategy To Prove Their Value., Joel Wolfram

Capstones

Green Valley Community Garden in Brownsville, Brooklyn, is one of about a dozen gardens on land owned by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development that are being uprooted by plans to build affordable housing. The gardeners are fighting back to prevent the garden’s destruction, saying that the food-producing green space is a source of healthy eating in a community with high rates of health problems, like diabetes and obesity. Researchers are attempting to tease out the public health benefits of community gardens as one metric of their value, but the science is still catching up with …

Data-Driven Synthesis And Evaluation Of Syntactic Facial Expressions In American Sign Language Animation, Hernisa Kacorri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology to automatically synthesize linguistically accurate and natural-looking animations of American Sign Language (ASL) would make it easier to add ASL content to websites and media, thereby increasing information accessibility for many people who are deaf and have low English literacy skills. State-of-art sign language animation tools focus mostly on accuracy of manual signs rather than on the facial expressions. We are investigating the synthesis of syntactic ASL facial expressions, which are grammatically required and essential to the meaning of sentences. In this thesis, we propose to: (1) explore the methodological aspects of evaluating sign language animations with facial expressions, …

Variation In Restaurant Sanitary Scores In New York City, Kyle Gregory

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine whether restaurants that are homogenous in nature would exhibit substantially different hygiene scores based on the underlying consumer learning behaviors present in the neighborhoods in which the restaurants are located.

Quantifying Transit Access In New York City: Formulating An Accessibility Index For Analyzing Spatial And Social Patterns Of Public Transportation, Maxwell S. Siegel

Theses and Dissertations

This paper aims to analyze accessibility within New York City’s transportation system through creating unique accessibility indices. Indices are detailed and implemented using GIS, analyzing the distribution of transit need and access. Regression analyses are performed highlighting relationships between demographics and accessibility and recommendations for transit expansion are presented.

Epistemic Considerations On Extensive-Form Games, Cagil Tasdemir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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

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

Climate, Ecology, And Human Evolution During The Plio-Pleistocene, Scott Adam Blumenthal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A major goal of paleoanthropology is to identify the selective pressures associated with hominin biological and behavioral evolution, yet establishing cause-effect relationships between climate, ecology, and human evolution remains problematic. This dissertation seeks to investigate hominin paleoecology in eastern Africa by reconstructing aspects of climate and ecology using stable isotope analysis.

The first part of this dissertation is focused on the ecology of primates and hominins. Modern tropical African ecosystems provide a useful model for understanding the ecological correlates of isotopic variation in the fossil record, and living primates provide a useful model for understanding the ecological significance of isotopic …