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The Science & Art of Provostship During Faculty Retrenchment
No full textThe pandemic laid bare the financial challenges many regional state universities had been facing for some time. This article offers a case window into William Paterson University, a regional state University in New Jersey, that was able to navigate a difficult, but necessary reduction in the faculty size and come out the other side much stronger and on a positive trajectory. Central to this was a mix of science and art. Its components, and the ultimate outcome, are described in this article
Cyber Warfare and the Future of Conflict
No full textThis thesis examines whether cyber warfare now poses a more immediate threat to U.S. national security than weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Cyber operations have become a dominant instrument of contemporary conflict, with malicious actors operating in a persistent “grey zone” that blurs traditional boundaries between war and peace. These operations target military and civilian entities, both directly and often as collateral damage due to the uncontrollable nature of cyber threats. WMDs, despite their catastrophic destructive potential, remain largely constrained by established deterrence frameworks.
The evolving nature of cyber warfare warrants comparison to WMD effects and impact, as cyber capabilities may achieve comparable destructive outcomes while also potentially amplifying or enabling WMD threats. Through comparative analysis across dimensions of destructive capacity, attribution challenges, legal constraints, accessibility, and strategic impact, this study demonstrates that cyber threats present a pressing immediate danger to U.S. national security and its allies.
This research paper analyzes major cyber incidents, including Stuxnet, the OPM breach, U.S. election interference, and critical infrastructure attacks, to reveal how adversaries exploit digital anonymity and attribution challenges to achieve strategic objectives below the threshold of armed conflict. Cyber operations permit continuous low-level aggression through espionage, sabotage, and information warfare, allowing malicious actors to achieve significant strategic impact.
This analysis reveals the emergence of fifth-generation warfare (5GW) and cognitive warfare as defining paradigms of future conflict. They represent an evolution from the current cyber threat landscape where information and human cognition become primary targets rather than physical destruction.
The study concludes that cyber warfare poses a more active and immediate threat to U.S. national security through its frequency, sophistication, and ability to cause widespread disruption across critical infrastructure, information environments, and cognitive domains
Learned Helplessness: An Online Replication and Validation
No full textThe current study entails the partial replication of a classic learned helplessness two-phase triadic design experiment within an online learning context and aimed to validate a new attributional style self-report measure designed to identify individual differences in tendencies to develop learned helplessness consistent with the original reformulation of the hypothesis. Further, recent innovations in neuroscientific technology have allowed for a deeper examination of the mechanisms at play, finding support for a major re-interpretation of the theory of learned helplessness - suggesting that helplessness is more so the default passive response, while the active ingredient that is detected or expected (i.e., learned) is sense of controllability. It was hypothesized that: (1) a group initially and repeatedly exposed to unsolvable anagrams will perform worse than groups initially exposed to solvable anagrams on a subsequent identical solvable anagram measure, with regard to mean response latencies, number of trials to solution (three consecutive solutions under 15 seconds), percentage of correct trials (solved within 100 seconds), and slope of response latencies across trials; and (2) individuals with global, stable, and internal (i.e., pessimistic) attributional styles will demonstrate greater susceptibility to learned helplessness than those with specific, unstable, and external (i.e., optimistic) attributional styles on both the new Learned Helplessness Attributional Scale (LHAS) and the original Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), with the new measure demonstrating greater predictive validity. While statistically significant differences were not observed between the experimental groups, the results were mostly in the predicted direction and influenced by confounding variables as evidenced in the inescapable condition’s within-group variability. Pessimistic individuals for the most part were no more likely to be impaired by the effects of prior uncontrollability, however, contrary to what was expected, individuals with stable attributional styles for negative outcomes were less likely to experience this interference. Lastly, while the LHAS demonstrated superior internal consistency, the original ASQ exhibited stronger criterion validity. After accounting for recruitment group, students were found to be significantly more susceptible to the phenomenon, and professionals with internal attributional styles for negative outcomes were more likely to experience this deficit. While of theoretical interest, however, these latter findings are exploratory and require further examination
Restoration of Giant River Cane (Arundinaria Gigantea) in Southwest Missouri
No full textGiant river cane (Arundinaria gigantea), a native bamboo species, once dominated riparian landscapes across the southeastern United States but has declined to approximately 2% of its historic range. This study evaluated restoration techniques for giant cane in southwest Missouri by examining the influence of rhizome source (putative genotype), planting type, and restoration site on restoration success. I compared two planting types: greenhouse-to-field (G2F) transplanting, where rhizomes were first propagated in the greenhouse before planting, and field-to-field (F2F) transplanting, where rhizomes were directly transplanted from source canebrakes to restoration sites. Rhizomes were collected from four existing canebrakes in Taney County, Missouri and outplanted at four restoration sites across Greene, Christian, and Cedar Counties. My results revealed that planting type significantly affected shoot production, with G2F rhizomes producing more shoots than F2F rhizomes (p \u3c 0.01), while rhizome source and restoration site did not significantly influence restoration success. Environmental variables between sites (soil moisture, leaf area index, soil type) showed no significant differences between source and restoration sites, suggesting successful site selection criteria. Overall rhizome survival was high (\u3e70%) across all treatments, with G2F plantings showing marginally higher survival rates (77.8% vs. 72.2%). These findings suggest that while both planting types can effectively establish giant cane in southwest Missouri, the greenhouse propagation period provides advantages for initial shoot production, though at the cost of additional time and resources. This research provides valuable guidance for canebrake restoration efforts in Missouri and establishes a foundation for future studies on long-term canebrake development and associated ecosystem services
Dystopian Politics in the Hunger Games Series
No full textSuzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series takes readers to a fictional country known as Panem that hosts an annual nationwide celebration in which adolescents compete in a battle to the death. In this analysis, I approach this book series with a Marxist lens to argue that the capitalistic system in Panem satirizes American culture in the early 21st century. Every novel in the series, through this theory, can be read as what scholars identify as a “critical dystopia,” a defamiliarized version of our culture, upheld through institutions and social participation in a way that satirizes ours. I argue that the Hunger Games are a materialization of the competition that exists within capitalism and is used to uphold capitalist ideology. Moreover, the series critiques our culture’s response to the systemic issues presented in the series, proposing that our populist investment in political figures upholds a cycle of repressive subjection. In conclusion,The Hunger Games series holds a mirror to our culture’s hegemony so that we may see how we are complicit, and that the solution is not to create a new hegemony, but to create our individuality separate from our political investments
From the Battlefield to the Asylum: The Social Construction of Disability in Italy, 1900 - 1950
No full textThe Italian social construction of disability reflects a complex interplay between social, religious, political, and religious influences present during the first half of the twentieth century. While Western European and American disability discourse remained similar, those influences unique to Italy resulted in the formation of two distinct disability discourses during the early twentieth century: that of the heroic physically disabled veteran who sacrificed everything for the good of Italy, and the eugenically unfit Italian associated with dependency and uselessness. By combining a theoretical framework that includes critical disability theory with historical methodology, the following thesis demonstrates how the emerging disability culture present in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century evolved due to the influence of the Catholic Church, the spreading eugenics movement, Italy’s participation in World War I, and the Fascist regime. Each sociopolitical influence resulted in changes to the cultural conception of disability, forming cultural attitudes that changed depending on an individual’s ability to contribute to society and adhere to normative social standards
An Investigation of the Physiological and Behavioral Correlates of Mental Imagery
No full textMany conventional theories hold mental imagery to be fundamental to self-regulation. Recently, a current of research into mental imagery has developed, with the terms anaurelia and aphantasia being coined for the inability to experience, respectively, auditory and visual thought content, yet little is known about the impact that such individual differences have on persons’ lives. The present experiment was performed in order to test the hypotheses that self-regulation and mental imagery positively correlate and that mental imagery mediates the correlation of resting heart-rate variability and self-regulation. Self-regulation was measured via a self-report questionnaire (the Short Self-Regulation Questionnaire), as was mental imagery (the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire). Only the visual and auditory subscales of the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire were used, because these two sensory modalities have been found to predominate everyday mental imagery. Resting heart-rate variability was calculated as the root mean square of successive differences between normal heartbeats within the final 30 seconds of a five-minute period of rest. The present results do not support either hypothesis. It is possible that both hypotheses, whether supported by theorization or experimentation, are false. On the other hand, it is possible that the validity of the present method is poor for the testing of the present hypotheses
Development of Cyan and Blue Thermostable Fluorescent Proteins: Characterization and Structural Analysis
No full textFluorescent proteins are commonly used as cell markers in living organisms. Modifications by mutation can be used to improve the qualities of these proteins including fluorescence, thermostability, pH stability, and chemical stability. The goal of this project is to use mutagenesis to improve the fluorescence of thermostable cyan and blue proteins derived from the thermal green protein (TGP). The first cyan protein developed by the DeVore lab (CTP 0.0) shifted the fluorescence to cyan but decreased the quantum yield (ΦF) to 0.056. Further mutations were incorporated to increase the quantum yield through incorporating hydrogen bonding interactions to the chromophore and to remove a kink present in beta strand seven. The resulting proteins, CTP 0.5 (Y67W I199T) and CTP 1.0 (Y67W I199T W143L E144I P145D S146A), increased the quantum yield to 0.07 and 0.37, respectively and improved stability characteristics. CTP 0.75 incorporated another chromophore mutation into CTP 1.0 (Q66E) to increase the stability characteristics but decreased the quantum yield to 0.22. The CTP 1.0 cyan protein was also compared to mTurquoise2, one of the current best cyan fluorescent proteins based on GFP. CTP 1.0 had comparable chemical stability and improved acid stability. Crystal structures were solved for CTP 0.5 at pH 6.5 (2.00 Å), CTP 1.0 at pH 6.5 (1.70 Å), CTP 1.0 at pH 8.5 (1.60 Å), and CTP 0.75 at pH 7.4 (1.70 Å). Structural analysis of the proteins showed that while improvement to beta strand seven was unsuccessful, the increase in quantum yield is likely due to the incorporation of the T199 residue and subsequent hydrogen bonding interaction improvements with the chromophore. The first blue protein developed by the DeVore lab (BTP 0.0) shifted the fluorescence to cyan but decreased the quantum yield (ΦF) to 0.004. Three blue mutants BTP 0.1 (W143L E144I P145D S146A I199T), BTP 0.2 (W143L E144I P145F S146F I199T), and BTP 0.3 (W143L E144I P145D S146H I199T) all increased the quantum yield to 0.006, 0.014, and 0.017 respectively. Stability characterization showed varying improvements among the three mutants. Crystal optimization was done for BTP 0.1 for future structural analysis for the blue protein project
Territorial Behavior of a Terrestrial Salamander: Effect of Physical Stress, Residency Status, and Sex
No full textEnvironmentally induced stressors can include threats from predators and competitors. Individuals in territorial species, including the subject of this study, Southern Red-backed Salamanders, Plethodon serratus, face ongoing competitive threats, and loss of contests may be more consequential to territory owners (losing a territory) than to intruders (continuing to be without a territory). Therefore, when the threat of increased predation risk is added, residents may respond differently than intruders. Here, I tested the impact of physical stress, residency status and sex on the territorial behavior of Southern Red-backed salamanders. Territorial behavior was assessed through staged contests with same-sized and same-sexed individuals, using a simulated predator attack as the physical stress. The amount of time salamanders displayed the aggressive posture was significantly affected by an interaction among stress treatment, residency status, and sex. Overall, stressed salamanders showed fewer aggressive displays than non-stressed salamanders, but this difference was stronger for intruders, and particularly female intruders, than for residents. Marking behavior (chin taps) was generally more common in non-stressed salamanders, with the strongest effects for female intruders. The stronger response to stress by intruders than residents and the particularly strong effects on female intruders likely reflect a difference in the costs and benefits of territory ownership. For residents the benefit of maintaining ownership of a territory may outweigh the cost of increased predation risk. Female intruders may value gaining a territory more than males, suggesting a high value of territory ownership for females
Photometric and Spectroscopic Classification of 43 Variable Stars
No full textThis study presents a photometric and spectroscopic classification of 43 variable stars observed across multiple TESS sectors. By combining high-precision light curves with ground-based spectroscopic data, we explore the variability patterns, pulsation characteristics, and stellar properties of each target. While the sample includes a diverse range of variable star types, a substantial number exhibit behavior consistent with Delta Scuti and Gamma Doradus variability, including rapid pressure-mode and gravity-mode oscillations. Using Fourier analysis, asymptotic spacing detection, and rotational splitting patterns, we identify and characterize pulsation modes, supported by spectral line diagnostics and absorption feature identification. This classification effort not only refines the variable star types within the sample but also contributes to a deeper understanding of pulsators and the broader population of intermediate-mass, short-period and long-period variable stars