Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Cost Of Doing Business: Defense Contracting Fraud, Shane M. English

Capstones

The federal government relies heavily on outside contractors to provide essential research and services. Following World War II, the Department of Defense and the military began to rely on approved government contractors to develop, test and improve weapons and tools used to keep soldiers and the nation safe.

Defense contracting is a massive business that commands billions of dollars a year. Despite the magnitude of the United States' contracting system, detecting fraud and preventing bad actors from continuing to profit off of the government has proven difficult. The systems at hand: civil and criminal charges, suspension and debarment have consistently …

Nyc Waterfronts, Pollution And Access, Guglielmo Mattioli

Capstones

This capstone is about the waterfronts of New York and their relation with access and pollution.

The city has come a long way since the 80s in terms of cleaning up open waters, rivers, and creeks. Many new promenades have been open and development spurred along the city shores. Yet too many miles of waterfront are still not accessible to the one most in need.

Jamaica Bay, Newtown Creek, and Flushing Bay are some of the most representative examples of where there is little access to the water and pollution levels are still too high. This capstone, organized in two …

Spend Your Student Loans On A Vacation. No One Is Watching., Raul A. Hernandez, Morten Buttler

Capstones

Student loan debtors who spend their loans on non-educational expenses   increase the likelihood of financial hardship once they begin repayment. Contributing to the financial struggles of student loan debtors is an overly-complicated student loan system which can entangle borrowers with unclear financial statements and a glut of federal loan repayment programs.

Link to capstone project: https://medium.com/@raul.hernandez/spend-your-student-loans-on-a-vacation-no-one-is-watching-a71834ed6f45#.vj61hhxig

Lgbt In Colombia: A War Within, Monica Espitia

Capstones

On the surface, Colombia appears to be at the vanguard of the gay rights movement, having extended legal rights to same-sex couples and transgender people in recent years. But for many of the nearly five million Colombians who are LGBT, these rights have been largely meaningless as a result of the deep-rooted prejudice that often results in violence.

Gay, lesbian and transgender Colombians have been actively persecuted by armed groups involved in Colombia’s decades-long civil war. Members of the LGBT community are four times more likely than the rest of the population to be threatened and abused by both legal …

The Last Gay Man On Earth -- Can The Mainstreaming Of A Culture Be Responsible For Its Demise?, Muri Assunção

Capstones

Social acceptance towards the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Queer community (LGBTQ) has seen incredible progress in the last few decades. Less than 50 years ago, an act of rebellion against a homophobic police raid at Stonewall, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, kicked off the gay liberation movement and the fight for LGBTQ rights. Today, the queer revolution has proved effective: same-sex unions in the U.S. are legally allowed, and gay parenting is socially accepted. But, at what cost? Are queer people conforming to a heteronormative way of life? Can such social advances be also responsible for the …

No Hindu Left Behind Is A Tall Order, Even In America, Rheaa Rao

Capstones

Hindutva, synonymous for Hindu nationalism, is not a fringe ideology in India but is something that often violently singles out other religious minorities. Hindu organizations in the United States do not have a violent history or intent in the United States, it is important to trace their roots back to the Hindu nationalist movement in India to dig deeper into their rhetoric and what it means for Indian and American democracy. This article investigates the role these organizations play in spreading a Hindutva message in the diaspora.

https://social.shorthand.com/RheaaRao/ngSoDOqapT/no-hindu-left-behind-is-a-tall-order-even-in-america

In The Wake Of Broken Windows Policing How Aggressive Policing Contributed To East Harlem Residents Distrust Of Police, Stephanie Daniel, Nicole Lewis, Kalalea Kalalea

Capstones

In 2015, the East Harlem neighborhood – specifically the 25th Precinct – had the highest rate of criminal court summonses amongst residential areas. At 145 summonses for every 1,000 residents, it was more than four times the citywide average, according to an analysis of data obtained from the NYPD.

Since 2010, summonses have declined as the NYPD moves towards a more community-based approach to policing. But the Broken Windows theory has left a lasting and often negative effect on the East Harlem community.

This past fall, CUNY reporters investigated how summonses have affected the relationship between East Harlem residents and …

Different Names For Bullying, Marco Poggio

Capstones

“There's all different forms of bullying,” says Steven Gray, a Lakota rancher and former law enforcement officer living in South Dakota. In this look into Gray’s life, we learn about two instances of bullying: the psychological and physical harassment that pushed his son, Tanner Thomas Gray, to commit suicide at age 12; And the controversial construction of an oil pipeline in an ancient tribal land that belongs to the Lakota people by rights of a treaty signed in 1851, which Gray sees as an institutional abuse infringing on the sovereignty of his people. Gray is involved in the movement that …

Still Here: Life In A New York Garment Factory, Veronika Bondarenko

Capstones

After the majority of clothing production jobs left the US for Asia in the 1990s, a new market of smaller factories that employ mostly immigrant women in their forties and fifties to create high-end clothes with a “Made in the USA” label emerged. But as factories struggle to survive in New York, large numbers of workers still endure long hours, on-job injuries, and lack of overtime pay in the name of homegrown fashion — often with little oversight.

http://lifeinanewyorkgarmentfactory.info

The 11 Percent: Black Conservatives In America, Janae M. Hunter

Capstones

For years, most African-Americans have voted democrat in presidential elections. But this year, Republican and president-elect Donald J. Trump got 8 percent of the black vote. And as of 2014, 11 percent of black Americans identified as a republican. Who are some of America's black republicans and conservatives, and did they vote for Trump? For this project, I spoke with several black republicans and black people with conservative ideologies about whether or not the voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election, and what it's like to be in the minority among other African-Americans.

https://medium.com/@janae.hunter/the-11-percent-black-conservatives-in-america-a57e37c02691#.5xs5my5mh

Catering Hall Harbors Immigrant Families Through Underground Employment, Kimberly J. Avalos

Capstones

A catering hall in Queens serves as a hub of work for immigrant families and holds a collection of Latin American migration stories and insights into illegal immigration in the United States.

The stories of the catering hall workers—younger and older, longtime residents and new arrivals—reflect the different struggles of immigration across the different generations of immigrants who work there. Their stories also show the common bonds for the different generations and the longstanding dreams of America.

immigrantworkers.kimberlyjavalos.com

Slavery, Migration, And Local Development In The Western Us, Colin Q. Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the effects of migration from eastern slave states in the 19th century on the subsequent development of counties in the Western US. I find that increased migration from slave states has a large, statistically significant negative effect on 2010 income, and no significant effect on racial inequality or overall income inequality. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications, including controls for geographic factors, state fixed effects, and various county level social and economic conditions. Data on individual migrants suggest that the cause of the negative income effect is the lower average human capital endowment of …

Implicit Prosody And Cue-Based Retrieval: L1 And L2 Agreement And Comprehension During Reading, Elizabeth Pratt, Eva M. Fernández

Publications and Research

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish–English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry—cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing—in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for subject-verb agreement. To explore this proposal, the experimental design manipulated text presentation to influence implicit prosody, using sentences designed to induce subject-verb agreement attraction errors. Materials included simple and complex relative clauses with head nouns and verbs that were either matched or mismatched for number. …

Cause For Question: Risk And Postmodern Panic In The Vaccine Safety Debate, Marygrace Trifilio

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thoughts and feelings of non-vaccinating parents in America and argues that contemporary vaccine refusal results from overwhelming information saturation in the Internet age. Non-vaccinating parents express distrust of competing scientific research and call for a return to a more natural, toxin-free lifestyle.

De Graauw Studies The Role Of Nonprofits On Immigration., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Immigration is, and always has been, a hot issue. And it’s gotten even hotter in the last few years, both in Europe and in the U.S. More times than not, this topic seems to be discussed in emotional rather than rational terms. That is why we need scholars who look closely at the facts and tell us what we really need to know.

One of those scholars is Dr. Els de Graauw. An assistant professor in the Department of Political Science in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, de Graauw has an interesting personal sto- ry …

Cuny Libraries And Open Source: Wins And Fails, Stephen Klein, Robin Davis, Junior R. Tidal, Leslie Ward, Mark Eaton, Stephen Zweibel

Publications and Research

This panel presentation will highlight free, open-source projects throughout the libraries. This includes digital display systems, web content management, collections management and more.

Sexual Violence As The Language Of Border Control: Protecting Exceptional Difference, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

When I first arrived in the Paris region in 1999 to do research on the struggle by undocumented immigrants (les sans papiers) for basic human rights, discussions of violence against women were remarkably absent from the public arena. Nongovernmental organizations and researchers had begun to broach the topic, but with little public visibility. However, this changed in late 2000, with a media explosion on the issue of les tournantes, or the gang rapes committed in the banlieues of Paris. Such tournantes involve boys »taking turns« with their friends’ girlfriends, both parties usually being of Maghrebian or North …

Some Social Differences On The Basis Of Race Among Puerto Ricans, Carlos Vargas-Ramos

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Puerto Ricans are a multiracial people. This is given by the fact that the Puerto Rican population is composed of people from different categories of socially differentiated and defined racial groups, and also because not an insignificant number of Puerto Rican individuals share ancestry derived from multiple racial groups. Yet, the analysis of social difference and inequities among Puerto Ricans on the basis of physical difference is largely avoided, and when it is conducted its findings are often neglected.

Puerto Rican Households In The U.S., Eric Franqui-Rivera

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

In 2014 there were an estimated 1.56 million Puerto Rican households in the United States. These households accounted for 1.3 percent of all 116.2 million households in the U.S. and 11 percent of all 14.1 million Hispanic households in the U.S. Married male-female couples and single female households each accounted for over a third of Puerto Rican households (36.4% and 36.5%, respectively) with the third largest householder group being that of single males (17.9%). Unmarried male-female and same-sex households, including married and unmarried, accounted for 8.5 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively, of Puerto Rican households in the U.S.

Notes On People Of Dominican Ancestry In Canada, Ramona Hernandez, Sarah Marrara, Utku Sezgin

Publications and Research

A brief profile of the Latino population in Canada, with a particular focus on Dominicans, in an attempt to develop wider interest and more scholarly research on the subject.

Flipping The Classroom In Business And Education One-Shot Sessions: A Research Study, Madeline Cohen, Jennifer Poggiali, Alison Lehner-Quam, Robin Wright, Rebecca K. West

Publications and Research

In response to the challenge of maximising the effectiveness of one-shot information literacy (IL) sessions, library faculty at Lehman College experimented with the flipped classroom model. This research paper reports the results of a multi-semester quantitative study of the flipped classroom in business management and education one-shot sessions. Researchers explored two research questions: Do students in a flipped session demonstrate greater knowledge before their session than students in a control session? and Do flipped and control students demonstrate significant, positive improvement in knowledge after their session? The researchers used pre- and post-tests to evaluate two crucial aspects of the flipped …

The Future Of Web Citation Practices, Robin Camille Davis

Publications and Research

Citing webpages has been a common practice in scholarly publications for nearly two decades as the Web evolved into a major information source. But over the years, more and more bibliographies have suffered from “reference rot”: cited URLs are broken links or point to a page that no longer contains the content the author originally cited. In this column, I look at several studies showing how reference rot has affected different academic disciplines. I also examine citation styles’ approach to citing web sources. I then turn to emerging web citation practices: Perma, a “freemium” web archiving service specifically for citation; …

The Latino Population Of New York City, 1990 - 2015, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

This report is an update to the CLACLS report "The Latino Population of New York City, 1990-2010" issued in November 2011. It uses the most current data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2015 American Community Survey released in October 2016. The report examines a wide range of social and economic variables tracing how these changed for Latinos in general within the City in comparison to non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and Asians. It also examines the changes within the five largest Latino nationalities in the City: Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, and Colombians. There has been a definitive transformation in Latino …

The Winds Of Changes Shift: An Analyis Of Recent Growth In Bargaining Units And Representation Efforts In Higher Education, William A. Herbert

Publications and Research

This article analyzes data accumulated during the first three quarters of 2016 regarding completed and pending questions of representation involving faculty and student employees in higher education. It is part of a larger and continuing National Center research project that tracks faculty and graduate student employee unionization growth and representation efforts at private and public institutions of higher learning since January 1, 2013. The data presented in this article demonstrates that the rate of newly certified units at private colleges and universities since January 1, 2016 far outpaces new units in the public sector. There has been a 25.9% increase …

The Social Work Librarian And Information Literacy Instruction: A Report On A National Survey In The United States, Margaret Bausman, Sarah Laleman Ward

Publications and Research

As an interdisciplinary profession encompassing macro, mezzo, and micro fields of praxis, well-informed and ethical social work practice necessitates the continual utilization of information literacy skills across a wide and ever-evolving range of information sources and access points. In response to a dearth of scholarship concerning information literacy instruction in social work education, this article reports on an initial endeavor to quantify and describe the nature of information literacy instruction in social work education on a national level in the United States. In addition to a review and discussion of the National Social Work Librarians Survey's descriptive data, this article …

Review Of Muslims And Jews In France. History Of A Conflict By Maud S. Mandel, Bryan Turner

Publications and Research

The mood of European scholarship with respect to the recognition and integration of Islam is typically pessimistic. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Islam political parties – Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy, Marine Le Penn and the National Front in France, and the English defense league in Britain – have exposed a hitherto hidden or ignored under-current of resentment against foreigners. In the context of these developments, Maud Mandel’s study of Muslims and Jews in France is a welcome corrective to the dominant focus on anti-Islam in the academic literature and in the popular media. The historical …

Being A Scholar In The Digital Era: Transforming Scholarly Practice For The Public Good, Polly Thistlethwaite, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

What opportunities do digital technologies present scholars? How do developments in digital media support scholarship and teaching, and how can academics apply them to further social justice activism? The authors, a sociologist and a librarian, examine scholarly practice in the digital era to explore how academics, journalists, and activists can combine efforts to support social justice issues. With scholarly communication undergoing rapid change, and with digital innovation applied in higher education for many reasons, authors outline what scholars can do to channel their work to benefit the public good.

Street By Street: Cross-Site Evaluation Of The Ojjdp Community-Based Violence Prevention Demonstration Program, Kathleen A. Tomberg, Jeffrey A. Butts

Publications and Research

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) launched the Community-Based Violence Prevention (CBVP) program to reduce youth violence through targeted community-level initiatives. The program offered grants to cities for implementing evidence-based strategies, such as Cure Violence and the Boston Gun Project, to address high-risk youth involvement in violence. The John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center evaluated the program’s impact on five recipient cities: Brooklyn, NY; Denver, CO; Newark, NJ; Oakland, CA; and Washington, DC. The evaluation focused on the effectiveness of these interventions in reducing violence among youth and young adults.

Dissociable Early Attentional Control Mechanisms Underlying Cognitive And Affective Conflicts, Taolin Chen, Keith M. Kendrick, Chunliang Feng, Shiyue Sun, Xun Yang, Xiaogang Wang, Wenbo Luo, Suyong Yang, Xiaoqi Huang, Pedro A. Valdes-Sosa, Qiyong Gong, Jin Fan, Yue-Jia Luo

Publications and Research

It has been well documented that cognitive conflict is sensitive to the relative proportion of congruent and incongruent trials. However, few studies have examined whether affective conflict processing is modulated as a function of proportion congruency (PC). To address this question we recorded eventrelated potentials (ERP) while subjects performed both cognitive and affective face-word Stroop tasks. By varying the proportion of congruent and incongruent trials in each block, we examined the extent to which PC impacts both cognitive and affective conflict control at different temporal stages. Results showed that in the cognitive task an anteriorly localized early N2 component occurred …

Validating A Measure Of Ethnic Identity In Afro-Caribbean American Students, Keisha V. Thompson

Publications and Research

The purpose of this study was to validate the Multi group Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) on a sample of Afro- Caribbean American college students. This investigation is unique in that it disaggregated the data to go beyond the usual labels of Black and African American used in past validation studies. Due to being subsumed in the past under such monikers, information on the ethnic identity of Afro-Caribbean American college students has largely been missing from the literature. This investigation served as a comparison to past investigations on ethnic identity in populations of African descent. The results of this study indicated …