University at Albany, State University of New York
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The Impact of Puzzles on Short-Term Attention
Get PDFSuccessfully solving Sudoku puzzles requires constant diverting of attention to certain puzzle elements. Previous research has shown that puzzles, including Sudoku, aid in cognitive functioning and the aging process (Lin et al., 2023). Social media use has become increasingly popular for younger generations. With this trend has come various mental health complications, including shorter attention spans (Sha & Dong, 2021). This study tested undergraduate college students and the impact puzzle solving (Sudoku, and mazes) had on attentional capabilities. Our study contributes to the literature by investigating if enhanced attention results from completing Sudoku puzzles for a short amount of time. Two experiments were conducted, with a within and between subjects design, respectively. This was used to compare the effects of puzzle solving on attention. Performance on a letter detection task was used to measure attention after completing either a puzzle task or watching a nature documentary. Based on the literature regarding Sudoku puzzles and cognitive functions, such as attention, we expected that Sudoku puzzles would enhance performance on the letter detection task as compared to the maze task and especially compared to the no puzzle condition. We hope this study provides insight on mitigating the negative effects from a growing trend of social media use
Challenges in Financial Prosperity: Cutback Management and Bounded Rationality in New York State School Districts
Get PDFThe Great Recession posed unexpected fiscal challenges for public sector entities, particularly small and mid-sized organizations such as school districts, which operate with limited revenue flexibility and constrained managerial capacity. While the recession was a macroeconomic event, which could be an exogenous shock to state and local governments beyond their control, state and local policy responses played a critical role in shaping its long-term effects on local public services. Scholars have emphasized the importance of long-term perspectives among policymakers and public managers to sustain the quality of public services during crises. However, the heightened uncertainty of the recession also constrained cognitive capacity, potentially leading to suboptimal decisions and unintended policy consequences. This dissertation explores these issues through the following three chapters.
The first chapter examines the impact of New York State’s primary aid cut policy during the post-Great Recession era. A recession like the Great Recession is unpredictable and uncontrollable by policymakers, its impact on school districts is highly dependent on federal- and state-level policies, particularly state aid cut policies. High urgency and uncertainty of policy environment due to the recession, these policies are structured inadequately through missing new emerging needs, which could result in greater student learning losses in certain communities. My analysis, utilizing eleven years of data from 620 public school districts in the State of New York, demonstrates that a one percent net loss in total revenue due to state funding cuts following the Great Recession led to declines of 0.04 and 0.037 standard deviations in mathematics and English Language Arts performance indices, respectively, under average local economic conditions. These effects were more pronounced in regions with severe labor market downturns, indicating that state funding cuts based on pre-recession conditions failed to account for the recession’s heterogeneous impact across regions, thereby widening educational disparities. Developing contingency plans for such funding cuts could help formulate more equitable policies in urgent policymaking situations.
The second chapter examines the factors influencing school districts’ strategic responses to fiscal crises related to the state aid cut policy discussed in the first chapter, using data from 618 school districts in New York State during the post-Great Recession era. While existing research on cutback management often emphasizes either theoretical frameworks or narrow empirical assessments of budgetary decisions, my study advances the field by integrating unsupervised machine learning techniques—specifically Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) and hierarchical clustering—to categorize district-level budget responses across multiple years and categories. I identified three budgetary responses and used a multinomial probit regression model to test the extent to which superintendent experience, administrative capacity, and institutional factors shape these strategies. Results indicate that administrative capacity and financial institutional factors, particularly relevant to school district finance, were associated with budgetary responses of school districts. In contrast, superintendent experience and non-financial institutional factors were not associated with those choices. These findings underscore the importance of institutional and managerial capacity in navigating financial retrenchment and highlight the need for state-level support to help small public entities respond more strategically to future economic downturns.
The third chapter evaluates school districts’ responses behind budgets to a mandatory expenditure increase resulting from rising teacher pension costs. Stemming from mandatory expenditures like employer contributions to public pension plans, fiscal pressures present significant challenges for public school districts. Unlike revenue declines during recessions, these expenditure increases are often less visible but still have substantial implications, particularly for personnel budgets. This study investigates the effects of rising employer contributions in New York State school districts from the 2007-08 to 2014-15 school years. Using eight years of data from 621 districts, the analysis reveals that a 10 percent increase in per-teacher employer contributions results in almost a 0.6 percent reduction in full-time equivalent teachers, predominantly through cuts to non-permanent positions and reduced hiring of new teachers. With inflation adjusted employer contributions more than doubled since the early 2000s, these impacts are particularly severe. While superintendents with prior experience managing pension cost spikes present slight differences in how they managed senior staff and professional positions, these variations were limited. Contrary to recent studies emphasizing the importance of exceptional leadership during budgetary crises, this research underscores the limited role of superintendents in creating cutback strategies, potentially due to institutional factors such as limited revenue flexibility and strong stakeholder influence. Additionally, the findings highlight the need for funding policy reforms to enhance school districts’ capacity to manage fiscal stress effectively.
Through these three chapters, I tried to illustrate the challenges in public education in responses to financial crises. Limited cognitive capacity of policymakers can lead to unintended policy side effect widening inequity within a generation. The limited managerial discretion and institutional constraints question whether superintendents can make significant differences in financial responses with the possibility of their effort behind budgetary decisions. While prior research emphasizes the importance of a long-term perspective during crises, my findings suggest that this is not easily achievable by relatively small and mid-sized public entities such as school districts. This work contributes to the literature on cutback management by framing school district behavior through a suboptimal decision-making lens and offers practical insights into responses through federal- and state-level policies rather than overemphasize local managerial capacity
Predictors of Viral Suppression among People Living with HIV (PLHIV) on Antiretroviral Treatment in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Get PDFABSTRACT
Introduction
The Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) region is experiencing the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic, with Kazakhstan among the countries most affected. Despite progress in HIV testing and treatment, Kazakhstan continues to face significant challenges in achieving optimal viral suppression among PLHIV. While 82% of PLHIV in Kazakhstan know their HIV status, only 73% are on ART, and just 67% of those on treatment achieve viral suppression. Adherence to ART remains a critical barrier, influenced by a complex interplay of individual, social, and structural factors, including mental health disorders such as depression, substance use, stigma and discrimination. Understanding the multifaceted determinants of viral suppression is essential for improving treatment outcomes. This study aims to assess the level of viral suppression and identify its predictive factors among PLHIV attending the AIDS center in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Methods
Using data from the AIDS Center in Almaty, we performed bivariate analysis to assess the possible factors associated with viral load suppression. Potential predictors included gender, age, marital status, education, region, HIV stage, adherence level, years in care, transmission routes, initiation of HIV treatment before or after implementation of the “Test and Treat” policy, hepatitis C, tuberculosis, alcohol misuse. Then we conducted multivariable logistic regression using backwards elimination to identify the best predictive model.
Results
Of 3,716 patients aged 18 years and older seen in the Almaty AIDS Center, 72% were virally suppressed. Bivariate analysis showed several factors to be significantly associated with the viral suppression among PLHIV in Almaty. Marital status, education HIV stage, adherence level, years in care, heterosexual and homosexual transmission were statistically significant. Age, gender, region, “Test and Treat” policy, tuberculosis and misuse of alcohol were not shown to be significantly associated with whether or not a person was virally suppressed.
Multivariable analysis revealed that five of the factors remained significantly associated with the odds of PLHIV to be virally suppressed. The education level, transmission routes, ART duration, “Test and Treat” policy, and adherence level were all statistically significant in the multivariable analysis. The predictive model showed good performance, with a c-statistic of 0.724, indicating acceptable discriminative ability. Calibration was adequate, as demonstrated by a non-significant Hosmer-Lemeshow test (p = 0.3589). These results suggest the model is both well-calibrated and capable of distinguishing between individuals with and without the outcome.
Conclusions
This study highlights the multifaceted influence of sociodemographic, behavioral, and clinical factors on viral suppression among PLHIV in Almaty. The findings offer critical insights to inform and enhance HIV care strategies in the city, particularly supporting the ongoing optimization of the Test and Treat approach. The findings underscore the need to support ART adherence across all populations, with a heightened focus on people who inject drugs, who face unique barriers to achieving and sustaining viral suppression. Continued research is warranted to elucidate the pathways through which these determinants impact viral suppression and to assess the effectiveness of targeted interventions aimed at improving outcomes for PLHIV in Almaty
Postcolonial Notions of Criminality in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
Get PDFThis thesis will use Charlotte Brontë\u27s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea to gain a greater understanding of the postcolonial notions of criminality that are sustained and reproduced through racialized purity rhetoric and hierarchy. I argue that the restriction of the definition of the human, within scientific, religious, and legal realms, functioned towards the colonial end of sustaining racial hierarchy. In terms of its means of functioning, I argue that its need to function discretely is a direct response to the abolishment of slavery and with it, the shifting social demand for an appearance of reason, moral righteousness, and equity, making its success reliant on the entanglement of disciplines, not yet codified as distinct until the end of the 19th century. This presentation will follow this solidification of “fact” and how its culmination takes the form of an intricately developed image of the criminal, subject to the same Eurocentric ideologies that are inextricable from the means and ends of colonialism. This historical and literary reflection will therefore examine the construction of the criminal that has unjust ramifications for those who do not conform to the masculine, Eurocentric image of ideal, civilized personhood
Testigos, pero No Protagonistas: Bioficciones, Postmemoria y Trauma Transgeneracional en las Narrativas de Nona Fernández y Rita Indiana
Get PDFThis dissertation examines how the concepts of biopolitics and postmemory are addressed in the narratives of Chilean author Nona Fernández (1971—) and Dominican author Rita Indiana (1977—) when portraying the dynamics of control and power in the totalitarian regimes of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990) and Joaquín Balaguer Twelve Years (1966-1978). Methodologically, the study explores biopolitics, which regulates the lives and bodies of citizens, and necropolitics, which dictates who can live and who must die, to understand state repression in both narrative contexts. Through the concept of postmemory, the research observes how the trauma of dictatorships is transmitted generationally and manifests in the works of these authors, who employ techniques such as biofiction and intertextuality to challenge official narratives and give voice to the silenced in the past and the present. The conclusions highlight that Nona Fernández\u27s and Rita Indiana\u27s works offer incisive critiques of these regimes and reveal how literature serves as a space for resistance and memory, confronting the persistent legacy of dictatorship in collective identity, marked by a living history of oppressive control through bodily punishment.
Keywords: Biofiction, Memory, Postmemory, Pinochet dictatorship, Los doce años, Nona Fernández, Rita Indian
Christ at the Gates of the Minster: Drama and Civic Space in Later Medieval York
Get PDFThis project makes use of spatial theory to more fully understand the performative possibilities of the celebrated York cycle within its spatial, historical, political, and cultural contexts, and in conversation with visual arts and ritual practices performed around and within medieval York. Though play cycles were not uncommon in late medieval England, York produced a unique series, encompassing biblical events from creation to judgment, which was performed annually on pageant wagons that traveled annually through the city streets with performances at several set stations. The text of the plays was registered with the City government, or Corporation, who required all gild members to participate in and financially support this extraordinary production. As a whole, the plays presented an image of a unified society, yet through the text and its interaction with performance spaces in the city we can see that the homogeneity presented in the image was as staged as the play performances themselves. As we will see, the plays of York juxtaposed, physically and religiously, the biblical world and the historical, political, and social elements of city residents’ contemporary world. In their performance, moreover, they interacted with static elements of material culture, like visual arts and city buildings, and with vital aspects, such as ritual practices. Events in the society layered meaning onto spaces of the city, allowing meaning-making to shift from one year’s performance to the next.
While this project is necessarily conjectural, there is enough documentary and material evidence to entertain possible contemporary meanings audiences could have brought to bear on performances of these plays. I have selected three plays from the passion sequence of the York cycle to demonstrate how audiences may have made meaning from different performance scenarios by bringing contemporary information with them as they mentally and emotionally brought together images available to them through visual arts, religious and political ritual, and the performances themselves. Specifically, I draw attention to the agency audiences claimed through this process and argue that this agency and meaning-making gives power to the audiences beyond the control of civic or ecclesiastic authorities, potentially creating “uncooperative signs” throughout both the performances and the city itself that undermine messages structured and presented by the wealthy and powerful of the city
Machine Learning-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy for Sjögren’s Disease Diagnostics and Forensic Body Fluid Analysis
No full textThis dissertation explores the integration of Raman spectroscopy with machine learning to advance two critical applications: forensic body fluid identification and medical diagnostics. Building on research from the Lednev group, this work seeks to address limitations in current methodologies by providing innovative, non-invasive, and highly accurate solutions.
The first objective focuses on the development of a universal forensic model capable of identifying six main body fluids—peripheral blood, sweat, semen, saliva, vaginal fluid, and urine. Unlike existing methods, this approach is confirmatory, non-destructive, and requires minimal sample preparation, offering significant improvements in forensic investigations. Extending this framework, the research demonstrates the potential of Raman spectroscopy for phenotypic profiling. Specifically, a machine learning model using Random Forest was developed to differentiate urine stains from donors of Caucasian and African American descent with 90% accuracy. This novel capability enables rapid phenotypic profiling at crime scenes, significantly narrowing suspect pools and enhancing investigative efficiency.
The second objective investigates the application of Raman hyperspectroscopy combined with machine learning in medical diagnostics, focusing on Sjögren\u27s disease—a chronic autoimmune disorder affecting exocrine glands. Sjögren’s disease is frequently underdiagnosed due to non-specific symptoms and limitations of current diagnostic techniques, which are invasive, costly, and lack sensitivity and specificity. This research establishes a novel screening method that effectively distinguishes Sjögren\u27s disease patients from healthy controls and individuals with radiation-induced dry mouth. The proposed method offers a rapid, non-invasive, and cost-effective alternative for early detection, using Raman hyperspectral signatures to address diagnostic gaps and improve patient outcomes.
Furthermore, we investigated the same objective utilizing the complementary vibrational spectroscopy technique ATR-FTIR and a machine learning classification model. We attained 90% accuracy for ten external validation samples from various donors.
This dissertation utilizes the flexibility of Raman spectroscopy combined with machine learning to address essential gaps in forensic science and medical diagnostics. The results underscore the opportunity to create universal, dependable, and effective tools for criminal investigations and healthcare, showcasing the transformative influence of these technologies in their respective domains
An Unlikely Burden
Get PDFAn Unlikely Burdening follows the story of twins, Madeline and Isaac Blake. The harrowing story explores the adversities faced by these high achieving siblings, uncovering deeper truths and depths of pain far seen from the surface. It takes place in various settings, beginning in a mental health inpatient facility after Madeline’s failed suicide attempt, uprooting the entire family’s world as they knew it. Uniquely written in diary form, it provides prospective to the reader from Madeline, Isaac, and both parent’s viewpoint as well. An Unlikely Burdening addresses real world issues such as mental health, and assault. Can Madeline overcome her demons? What demons are lurking within the Blake’s perfectly curtailed façade? Explore the trying times of the coming-of-age process, family dynamic shifts, and ultimate healing throughout this work
Conceptualizing the Sacred Self: Toward a Theory of Collective Despair
No full textThis dissertation, comprising three papers, develops a new sociological approach to understanding the self toward creating high-leverage social theory. Drawing on critical realist personalism in social science philosophy and humanist theories of culture, I develop the concept of the “sacred self,” a meaning-centered human person actualized through culture. My work argues for centering the moral, believing nature of the human person in sociological research. It also demonstrates a methodological route by which to make social ontology visible, thereby enabling and calling for new interpretations of patterned crises in the social world. In my first paper, I explain how elites drive crises, using discourse from 18th and 19th century thinkers to create a theory of what I term “collective despair.” Using the collapse of the Soviet empire as a case study, I situate suicide epidemics and anti-elite sentiment, including the nostalgia for totalitarianism and far-right populism, as natural manifestations of crisis. My second paper explores oral histories of Soviet Union nostalgia to demonstrate that a macro theory of despair holds true at the micro level. This paper extends the theoretical framework of the first paper, uniquely connecting suicide, nostalgia, and revolutionary nationalism by revealing their ontological connection within the despairing human person. My third paper explores a natural route by which elites create despair. It examines how elites transform meanings of the sacred, and the consequences of this evolution. Through in-depth interviews, I examine how the meanings of harm have been subjectivized in the contemporary US. This paper identifies a “theory-practice gap” between what elites claim and what they actually do in their efforts to mitigate psychic (non-physical) harm, revealing, in this case, that professed liberalism operates in an illiberal manner. I illustrate the outcomes of a theory-practice gap, including educational stratification, alienation, and low social trust