Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

Towards Collaboration Between Lawyers And Social Workers: A Content Analysis Of Joint Degree Programs, Ifem E. Orji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Collaboration is a central issue in the interdisciplinary education of social work and law students. Joint JD/MSW degrees have the potential to promote collaboration between practitioners of law and social work in areas where their practices converge. The 1969 recommendations by the National Conference of Lawyers and Social Workers (NCLSW) to establish these joint degree programs assumed that collaborative learning would occur within them. However, prior research has not investigated whether or not this occurs. The purpose of this dissertation was to determine whether evidence of the intent to promote collaboration was present in written materials associated with joint degree …

Targeting Efficiency: The Effects Of Video Modeling And Feedback On Instructors’ Acquisition And Generalization Of Behavior Analytic Skills, Maya S. Madzharova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is a highly effective, evidence-based treatment for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Low treatment integrity could greatly compromise the delivery of effective ABA interventions, but instructors who hold no formal training make up the larger portion of employees within the special education field. Designing efficient and effective training for these employees is important because schools have limited resources for caregiver training. This study used a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across three novice ABA instructors to evaluate the effects of a training protocol consisting of video and in-vivo modeling and feedback, a training algorithm, and multiple exemplars …

Delusional Disorder: Treatment And The Restoration Of Adjudicative Competence, Martin Kassen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Delusional disorder has long been recognized in the psychiatric nomenclature, however, low prevalence rates and prevailing clinical views about the seemingly refractory nature of delusional disorder have restricted data on clinical treatment outcomes for this illness. Similar perspectives have been noted in forensic settings where minimal data is available to guide standards of care for incompetent to stand trial (IST) delusional pretrial defendants. Rationale. While the factors explicated in Sell provide guidelines for the involuntary medication of defendants found IST, numerous questions are left unanswered regarding the restorability of pretrial delusional detainees. The proposed study investigated the competency restoration rates …

Voicing The Other: Mock Aave On Social Media, Hanna L. Smokoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the use on social media sites of features of African American Vernacular English by nonspeakers of it. This outgroup use of AAVE does not require nor reflect any true proficiency with the variety, but instead is often used to exaggerate the social distance between the stylizers using it on social media and the marginalized people for whom AAVE is a genuine mode of communication. Through double indexicality, nonspeakers of AAVE use features of it to annex certain positive qualities associated with Black or hip hop culture—toughness, coolness, an anti-establishment stance—for themselves, while reproducing negative stereotypes of …

What Are The Barriers And Conduits To College Success For Academically Vulnerable Students?, Marisol Zacarias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What are the barriers and conduits to college success for academically vulnerable students? Employing two theoretical frameworks—ecological systems theory and intersectionality—this thesis interrogates two concepts: grit/persistence and support. To do this, data were collected from a group of academically vulnerable students of color from low-income backgrounds via two methodologically different venues: a focus group in 2012 and follow-up one-on-one interviews two years later, in 2014. From the focus group, two themes emerged: discouraging messages and hope. Two years later the follow-up one-on-one interviews produced two additional themes: balancing act and support. Building positive peer relationships was identified as a key …

Millets From The Margins: Value, Knowledge And The Subaltern Practice Of Biodiversity In Uttarakhand, India, Priya R. Chandrasekaran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Millets from the Margins: Value, Knowledge and the Subaltern Practice of Biodiversity in Uttarakhand, India analyzes what is at stake for small-scale, predominantly women, farmers as local varieties of rainfed food grains such as finger millet are being newly commodified and valued as a biodiversity resource. With support from a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, I conducted seventeen months of ethnographic research with farmers, activists, scientists, NGO leaders, government officials, transnational functionaries and agribusiness representatives in segregated yet interconnected realms ranging from a village in the Himalayan foothills to transnational institutions in Rome.

This work demonstrates …

Re-Framing Informal Family Caregiving, Magdalena T. Ornstein-Sloan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Informal family caregivers are the backbone of the long-term care system, providing an estimated 80% of the long-term care in the United States. Caregivers provide care to people with disabilities, the ill and older adults, often with little to no outside assistance from the formal long-term care system. Although caregivers receive attention in the academic literature, mainstream media and within public policy and services development, caregiver services continue to remain underutilized. The focus on service provision has various goals, including the desire to lessen the burden caregivers experience by providing services so they can provide care at home longer than …

Status Signaling And The Characterization Of A Chirp-Like Signal In The Weakly Electric Fish Steatogenys Elegans, Caitlin E. Field

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sensory systems are critical to both exploratory and communicatory processes, the study of which is critical to our understanding of how animals perceive and respond to their environments. In weakly electric fishes the electrosensory system is utilized for both of these purposes. One type of communication, status signaling, is widespread across taxa and frequently hormonally modulated. This hormonal modulation keeps the signal honest, wherein the status of the sender and the production of the status signal itself are both hormone dependent. We investigated exploratory and communicatory strategies of the electromotor system in pulse-type gymnotiforms, with a focus on status communication …

Re-Examining The Bilingual Advantage On Interference-Control And Task-Switching Tasks: A Meta-Analysis, Seamus Donnelly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A much-debated topic in psycholinguistics is whether lifelong bilingualism enhances executive functions (EF), the set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in the control of thought and action. Several researchers have predicted bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, especially interference-control and task-switching tasks. Many studies have tested these predictions, but results have proven unreliable. As a complementary approach to recent quantitative syntheses on this topic, the present dissertation tests whether the bilingual advantage is moderated by a number of theoretically significant variables: dependent variable (DV), task, age, age of L2 acquisition and lab.

Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 considered interference-control …

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 …

An Advertisement And Article Analysis Of Skin Products And Topics In Popular Women’S Magazines: Implications For Skin Cancer Prevention, Corey H. Basch, Jennifer Mongiovi, Grace Clarke Hillyer, Md Fullwood, Danna Ethan, Rodney Hammond

Publications and Research

Background: In the United States, skin cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer, with an estimated 5 million people treated per year and annual medical treatment expenditures that exceed 8 billion dollars. The purpose of this study was two-fold: 1) to enumerate the number of advertisements for skin products with and without Sun Protection Factor (SPF) and to further analyze the specific advertisements for sunblock to determine if models, when present, depict sun safe behaviors and 2) to enumerate the number of articles related to the skin for content. Both aims include an assessment for differences in age and in …

1 Platform, 31 Libraries: Pedagogy And Digital Identity In The Wake Of A Cuny Discovery Layer, Nora Almeida, Helen Georgas, Alexandra Hamlett

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Emerging Justice Technologies And The Need For Evaluation, Jason Tashea

Publications and Research

This report from John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center examines the role of emerging technologies in criminal justice reform, emphasizing the need for thorough evaluation to assess effectiveness and avoid unintended consequences. It suggests that technology should support, not replace, human judgment in justice processes.

A Decision Model For Recommending Which Building Occupants Should Move Where During Fire Emergencies, Norman E. Groner

Publications and Research

This paper describes a decision model for managing the movement of building occupants during fire emergencies. Currently available guidance from standard practice, egress modeling, codes and the re-search literature, is too general to provide much help to persons charged with the responsibility of where groups of occupants should be located given a fire scenario. The occupant movement decision model described in the paper uses three basic yes–no questions to divide building occupants into groups during a fire emergency. For any particular group, the decision model recommends one of two basic actions:(1) people remain where they are already located; or, (2) …

The Problematic Pleasures Of Productivity And Efficiency In Goa And Navegador, Nancy M. Foasberg

Publications and Research

Eurogames are a specific subset of modern board games known for mathematical beauty, low conflict and light themes. However, despite their apparent nonviolence, they often use colonial themes. This article argues that the uncritical embrace of these themes and "abstracting away" of troubling historical content results in a narrative that supports colonialism. Two examples of the genre, Goa and Navegador are analyzed in detail.

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Investigating The Social And Cognitive Factors Influencing Risky Sexual Behaviors In Emerging Adults, Anthony W. Surace

Theses and Dissertations

The present investigation tested a regression model predicting sexual risk behavior among emerging adults using social and cognitive factors. Participants were 301 sexually active young adults living in New York City. Social and cognitive factors predicted sexual behavior individually, but did not interact with one another in the regression model.

Repetitive Motor Movement, Social Responsiveness, And Global Development In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Jenny Waltzer

Theses and Dissertations

This study assessed whether specific repetitive motor movements (involving body), are associated with social abilities and global development. Additionally, we evaluated whether our observational measures of specific repetitive behaviors corresponded to standard diagnostic measures. Sixty-nine children, aged 32 to 82 months, with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder or autism were enrolled.

The Effects Of Changing Attention And Context In An Awake Offline Processing Period On Visual Long-Term Memory, Timothy M. Ellmore, Anna Feng, Kenneth Ng, Luthfunnahar Dewan, James C. Root

Publications and Research

There is accumulating evidence that sleep as well as awake offline processing is important for the transformation of new experiences into long-term memory (LTM). Yet much remains to be understood about how various cognitive factors influence the efficiency of awake offline processing. In the present study we investigated how changes in attention and context in the immediate period after exposure to new visual information influences LTM consolidation. After presentation of multiple naturalistic scenes within a working memory paradigm, recognition was assessed 30 min and 24 h later in three groups of subjects. One group of subjects engaged in a focused …

Impact Of Irrigation Method On Water Use Efficiency And Productivity Of Fodder Crops In Nepal, Ajay K. Jha, Razan Malla, Mohan Sharma, Jeeban Panthi, Tarendra Lakhankar, Nir Y. Krakauer, Soni M. Pradhanang, Piyush Dahal, Madan Lall Shrestha

Publications and Research

Improved irrigation use efficiency is an important tool for intensifying and diversifying agriculture in Nepal, resulting in higher economic yield from irrigated farmlands with a minimum input of water. Research was conducted to evaluate the effect of irrigation method (furrow vs. drip) on the productivity of nutritious fodder species during off-monsoon dry periods in different elevation zones of central Nepal. A split-block factorial design was used. The factors considered were treatment location, fodder crop, and irrigation method. Commonly used local agronomical practices were followed in all respects except irrigation method. Results revealed that location effect was significant (p < 0.01) with highest fodder productivity seen for the middle elevation site, Syangja. Species effects were also significant, with teosinte (Euchlaena mexicana) having higher yield than cowpea (Vigna unguiculata). Irrigation method impacted green biomass yield (higher with furrow irrigation) but both methods yielded similar dry biomass, while water use was 73% less under drip irrigation. Our findings indicated that the controlled application of water through drip irrigation is able to produce acceptable yields of nutritionally dense fodder species during dry seasons, leading to more effective utilization and resource conservation of available land, fertilizer and water. Higher productivity of these nutritional fodders resulted in higher milk productivity for livestock smallholders. The ability to grow fodder crops year-round in lowland and hill regions of Nepal with limited water storages using low-cost, water-efficient drip irrigation may greatly increase livestock productivity and, hence, the economic security of smallholder farmers.

The Feliks Gross Collection, Brooklyn College

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Feliks Gross was born in 1906 in Karakow, Poland. He taught at Brooklyn College for the Sociology Department from 1946-1977 and also lectured at the CUNY Graduate Center on political sociology. He was a member of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. Over his long career. Feliks Gross also held positions at the League of Nations, London School of Economics, lectured at NYU and the College of Europe. He authored more than 20 books and countless articles which have been published in many languages.

The Papers Of Belle Zeller, Brooklyn College

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The Papers of Belle Zeller contains materials from her personal life, as well as her professional life which was richly involved in education, politics and philanthropy. Within this collection, researchers will find a plethora of items including over 150 photographs; awards; hand-written and typed correspondence between colleagues and administrators of Brooklyn College, the New York State Legislature, the Senate and the House of Representatives; numerous publications and scholarly papers; a unique hand-made scrapbook detailing the events of World War I; as well as her personal classroom materials such as her grade books and propaganda advertisements created during World War II. …

Shirley Chisholm Collection, Brooklyn College

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Within this collection, researchers will find roughly 300 photographs, typed and handwritten correspondence between Chisholm's constituents and members of her campaign team (including James Pitts), magazines and newspapers, various forms of media including CD’s, video cassette tapes, DV-Cam’s, and a DVD, as well as ephemera from Chisholm's historic Presidential campaign. The bulk dates of this collection are from 1968-1982, and the inclusive dates are from 1944-2012.

The Records & Papers Of The New York State Women’S Political Caucus, Brooklyn College

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The New York State Women’s Political Caucus is a thriving branch of the national organization. Adele Cohen, the creator of this collection, was highly involved with the organization on the state and national level and served as the president of the New York State caucus from 1992-1994. She began her association with NWPC in the 1980s and remained actively involved after her presidency.

The documents in this collection range in date from the late 1980s to the early 2000s and include information on the governance and activities of the organization as well as correspondence, newsletters, and endorsements.

Brooklyn College Community Garden Collection, Brooklyn College

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This collection consists of the records of the Brooklyn College Community Garden and two scrapbooks. The records contain correspondence spanning the years 1991 – 2011, newspaper articles, garden plans, legal documents, and two DVDs. The scrapbooks contain over 300 photographs, along with other ephemera, which document seventeen years of the Brooklyn College Community Garden.

The Papers Of Peter James Mcguinness, Brooklyn College

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The Papers of Peter J. McGuinness profiles the political career of Peter McGuinness, his power in the local Brooklyn Democratic party and in city government, as well as his civic dedication to the place he called “The Garden Spot of the World,” his neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. McGuiness held was an elected official from 1919 to 1948.

The bulk of this collection is in the form of large scrapbooks containing news clippings collected by McGuiness. The eleventh box contains correspondence, speeches, photographs and personal memorabilia.

Burnout Is Associated With A Depressive Cognitive Style, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

We examined whether burnout is associated with a depressive cognitive style, understood as a combination of dysfunctional attitudes, ruminative responses, and pessimistic attributions. A total of 1386 U.S. public school teachers were included—1063 women (M_age: 42.73, SD_age = 11.36) and 323 men (M_age: 44.60, SD_age = 11.42). Burnout was assessed with the Shirom–Melamed Burnout Measure (SMBM). Dysfunctional attitudes were measured with the Dysfunctional Attitude Scale Short Form, ruminative responses with the Ruminative Responses Scale, and pessimistic attributions with the Depressive Attributions Questionnaire. For comparative purposes, depression was assessed using the 9-item depression module of the …

Beyond Baby Steps An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898, Elizabeth Ann Glass Geltman, Gunwant Gill, Miriam Jovanovic

Publications and Research

This study evaluated the impact of Executive Order (EO) 12898 to advance environmental justice. We conducted a review evaluating the frequency and effective use of EO 12898 since execution with particular focus following President Obama’s Plan EJ 2014. We found that both EO 12898 and Plan EJ 2104 had little, if any, impact on federal regulatory decision making. To the extent federal agencies discussed EO 12898, most did so in boilerplate rhetoric that satisfied compliance but was devoid of detailed thought or analysis. In the 21st year, with the exception of the Environmental Protection Agency, very little federal regulatory activity …

Drilling For Common Ground: How Public Opinion Tracks Experts In The Debate Over Federal Regulation Of Shale Oil & Gas Extraction, Elizabeth Ann Glass Geltman

Publications and Research

Public interest in environmental and health impacts from shale oil and gas extraction (what the public calls “fracking”) is growing. Industry claims the public outcry against the new technology is not grounded in science. In February 2013, Resources for the Future (“RFF”) published a list of high priority “risk pathways” that experts from NGOs, academia, government, and industry all agreed were real concerns about fracking. This article used the risk matrix to evaluate whether public comments in dockets of federal agencies that proposed regulation concerning hydraulic fracturing tracked expert concern. The article found that the public tracked many of the …