Fordham University: DigitalResearch@Fordham
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Urban Healthscapes: Examining the Relationship Between Hospitals and Their Neighboring Communities in New York City
No full textThis thesis examines the relationship of hospital institutions and their surrounding communities in New York City. The neighborhoods of the South Bronx, Bronx and Washington Heights, Manhattan are used to further analyze this relationship in an urban setting. Multiple variables such as concentrated poverty and socioeconomics, the built environment, the right to public space, neighborhood history, and health conditions are discussed to understand the context of these working class neighborhoods. Through observation and interviews, perspectives from community members, organizations, and hospital staff insights are provided into the dynamics and challenges of hospital-community relations. The role hospitals play is not only vital during public health emergencies like the Covid-19 pandemic, but also the daily health and well-being of the community
Sentiment Analysis Model Integration Using Combinatorial Fusion Analysis
No full textThis thesis explores the efficacy of the Combinatorial Fusion Analysis (CFA), a method for calculating the diversity of model outputs based on rank-score diversity, also known as cognitive diversity, of machine learning models and which differs significantly from traditional measures of model diversity and independence by incorporating the Euclidean score space with the non-Euclidean rank space, in combining machine learning models for natural language processing. This is done primarily through integrating the results of sentiment analysis models, but with methods and practices that are general enough to be partially or fully applicable to other natural language processing tasks. By applying CFA on the IMDB sentiment analysis dataset, the thesis demonstrates how the approach performs in this dataset and shows a significant increase in sentiment classification accuracy compared to base models for combination. This result is competitive with other state of the art models and sets a new benchmark in sentiment analysis accuracy of 97.116%
Wesley Caines Interview
No full textTranscribed and summarized by Alan C. Ventura
In an engaging and informative interview as part of the Bronx COVID-19 Oral History Project, Mr. Wesley Caines—former DIrector of Community Engagement and standing Chief of Staff at Bronx Defenders—sits down with various other Fordham University interviewers to discuss the impact of the pandemic on the organization\u27s holistic defense approach and the challenges faced in providing housing for individuals released from detention. Caines also shares the success story of helping a client in ICE detention and sheds some light on the prospect of positive policy change in New York, the securing of funds for Bronx Defenders, and the work of the organization in supporting the Bronx community during the pandemic. The conversation is also interspersed with many ponderings on discrimination and police brutality in the United States, the importance of amplifying marginalized voices, and the impact of COVID-19 on marginalized communities in the Bronx. In closing, Caines provides advice for pursuing a career in law and discusses the inspiring origins of his New York Theological Seminary degree. This interview looks to serve as a testament to the importance in archival work and the hope for positive change for Bronxites in the future
Schwalb, Susan
No full textSusan Schwalb’s father was raised on the Lower East Side to immigrant parents, while her mother grew up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Her mother’s family was German immigrants from the mid-19th century, and owned and operated restaurants. Her grandparents would sell their restaurant and move to Miami, but her uncle owned a famous restaurant in Manhattan that Schwalb would visit as a child. Her mother’s family was wealthy for the time, with extravagant birthday parties that once involved an elephant. Her parents met in the Catskills and Schwalb was born in 1944.
Schwalb grew up in the Kingsbridge area of the Bronx. Because he mother’s family had lived in the United States for multiple generations, they were very secularized, even celebrating Christian holidays, until she got older and her father ended those celebrations and began to take them the shul. She found her own, prettier reform shul in Riverdale where she was confirmed. They moved to Riverdale when she was an older teenager. Schwalb attended the High School of Music and Art, which was a long commute. There was also the danger of drunk men on the streets in the morning, so she would run to the train. When she was younger, Schwalb describes going to the movies and playing games outside and dressing up for Halloween.
Schwalb is influenced by coming of age in the 60’s, in terms of music and becoming a feminist, attending a be-in, etc. She describes a meat-heavy diet because her father, a lawyer, would get paid in things instead of money, but also loving Italian food, particularly pizza. She attended PS 86 and JHS 115, an all-girls school. Being at Music and Art got her involved in the women’s art movement and later second wave feminism. Schwalb doesn’t remember any non-white students until high school, though there were non-Jewish students.
After high school, Scwalb attended Carnegie Mellon, and she is proud now of how many more women attend and teach at the school. While her mother was a semi-professional artist and substitute teacher, Schwalb became a professional artist, taught art classes at the university level, and organized women artists organizations and gatherings. She sometimes returns to Riverdale. The Bronx is remembered as a happy time, but was not beautiful enough, in terms of nature, and did not have enough art culture, which is why she would spend a lot of time in Manhattan.
Keywords:
Grand Concourse, food, Kingsbridge, Riverdale, High School of Music and Art, feminism, art, 1960s, 1970
An Investigation of Bayesian Approximate Measurement Invariance with Longitudinal Data
No full textThe Bayesian structural equation modeling approach was introduced by Muthén and Asparouhov (2013) to test measurement invariance (MI) across multiple groups or multiple time points. This approach estimates approximate measurement invariance by applying the zero-mean, small variance prior to the difference parameters between groups. The approach has been implemented in applied research. However, there is a lack of simulation research on the Bayesian Approximate MI with longitudinal data. Longitudinal MI is a critical assumption of modeling the underlying subjective growth or change over time. This study explored the performance of this approach with a comprehensive simulation study and provided practical suggestions in the choice of the methods when dealing with longitudinal data. Results suggested that the Bayesian A-MI approach is appropriate for testing longitudinal measurement invariance with continuous items, but not recommended for ordered-categorical data. This study also recommended using DIC, WAIC, and LOO for model selection, rather than Bayesian approximate indices
To the General Reader: How 16th-Century Paratexts Evolved the Reader
No full textThis dissertation is concerned with how authors conceived of readers reading their texts in 16th-Century England. With the advent of print on the British isle, authors, editors, and printers wrote for an ever-expanding readership. As a response, 16th-century book contributors used and developed the paratext, a rhetorical device that created a threshold of space for author and reader to interact, before, during, or after encountering the text. The first chapter examines the ancient rhetorical theories on paratexts as well as medieval paratextual devices, which all influenced the 16th-century paratexts. The second chapter surveys the varied and sprawling examples of early-and mid-16th-century paratexts. Over the course of the century, more and more authors include a paratext to the general reader, rather than only personal letters to friends or dedicatory epistles to patrons. The third chapter narrows its focus on one author: Edmund Spenser. Spenser, more than anyone in this period experiments with paratexts in order to create and respond to specific kinds of readers: general, patronal, or friendly. The Coda explores how the work in the following chapters could helps us understand relationships not only between authors and their readers but relationships created in dramatic performances, as in Shakespeare\u27s plays
Attributing Intentionality to Artificial Intelligence: An Investigation
No full textMatthew David Johnson BS, University of Oklahoma Attributing Intentionality to Artificial Intelligence: An Investigation Thesis directed by Peter Tan, Ph.D. Intentionality, a mental phenomenon characterized by the aboutness, directedness, or givenness of some object in the world is often defined by a few discrete traits. This thesis is directed at ascribing these traits to three different theories of intentionality, specifically phenomenological, analytical, and systematic intentionality. Furthermore, I probe if any one particular theory is best suited to attribute to the growing technology in Artificial Intelligence (AI). First, I’ve presented each theory and ascribed the traits of reflexivity, form, and detachability. After each theory is adequately defined, it becomes apparent that the analytic approach is the best suited to support current AI convolutional neural networks. However, growing capabilities and our perspective on these machines will call for a more refined approach as the limit of convolutional neural networks is reached. These limits are characterized by the technical flaws that arise in neural networks as we increasingly attempt to make these AI machines think more like their human inventors. A different kind of intentional position will be needed to support this endeavor, specifically the systematic interpretation of intentionality. Utilizing Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance, we can grant greater flexibility in the integration of various interpretations of intentionality. Although a rational approach to begin with, Dennett’s position needs refinement in order to adequately apply it to the current and future technological landscape. By implementing a modified intentional stance, we can provide an avenue by which we as philosophers and scientists can investigate further claims on consciousnesses and highlight what parameters can be attributed to AI systems as they inevitably become more advanced
Tracing Modernist Time “Back through our Mothers”
No full textResponding to the idea that the innovative approach to time in modernist literature should be understood as a masculine response to the Great “literary war,” bibliographies and anthologies of women’s writing about war extended to women writers of the period what Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis described as a rejection of literary culture of the previous century. Expanding upon the foundational work of queer and feminist scholars like Bonnie Kime Scott, Elaine Showalter, Rita Felski, and Marianne DeKoven, as well as newer publications from Allison Pease, Celia Marshik, and Maria Bucur, this dissertation not only refocuses our approach to the modernist experiments with time to make much more of temporal values that fall under the aegis of Virginia Woolf’s “ordinary mind on an ordinary day” rather than Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new,” but also rearranges modernisms’ historical coordinates to account for a wider constellation of texts. Using the precedent Rita Felski’s Doing Time (2000), Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao’s Bad Modernisms (2006), and Susan Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015) have set before me, this project defines literary modernism or modernisms as not relegated to a definitive time period or to that which responds to the Great “literary war,” but rather any work that draws attention to a shift from a representation of stability and order in time to one that reflects a dissatisfaction with the ordered, stable world’s vision of time. Thus, this dissertation pairs readings of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) with Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight (1939) with Emily Dickinson’s “Good Morning, Midnight” (1862), and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) in order to prove that women writers had already begun uncoupling narrative and lyric from action a century before the modernists were to try it. Unweaving the tightly knit sequence of time in modernist novels by women, then, builds upon what women writers in the nineteenth century had already done and had already done well: they pushed against linear time, unsettled the mechanics of progression, and extended the vision of time in women’s lives beyond the resolution of marriage