University at Albany, State University of New York
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Communicating Hazard Location through Text and Map in Earthquake Early Warnings: A Mixed Methods Study
Get PDFThe purpose of this research was to examine the effect of presenting hazard location in different formats on key warning message outcomes—understanding, personalizing, believing, deciding, and milling. We conducted two studies using experiment and focus group methods. In the experiment, we compared a standard ShakeAlert earthquake early warning message, which merely implied location, to three enhanced messages that communicated information about the earthquake epicenter via text, map, or a combined text-and-map format. Focus groups explored reactions to warning messages accompanied by different types of maps. Overall, the standard ShakeAlert message was associated with worse message outcomes compared to messages that explicitly stated the hazard location; communicating hazard location via text was associated with better message outcomes than the map or combined text-and-map format. Although participants preferred the combination text-and-map format, the text format was associated with significantly better message outcomes. Findings revealed that providing specific hazard location information leads to improvements in message outcomes; however, the format in which the information is communicated via text is the best strategy
Opioid Task Force Highly Successful in Training Residents in Naloxone Use
Get PDFAiming to limit the increase in deaths from opioid overdose to 25% of current levels, the Genesee-Orleans-Wyoming Opioid Task Force (“the Task Force”) began a campaign in 2015 to, among other goals, increase the number of individuals trained to administer Naloxone in the tri-county area. This training is a critical need in these rural counties where there are low numbers of professional first responders dispersed over a wide geographic area. The Task Force also used these trainings to promote the importance of follow-up care after the administration of Naloxone, thus aiming to prevent opioid overdose deaths and facilitate a first step in recovery
You Have to Send the Right Message: Examining the Influence of Protective Action Guidance on Message Perception Outcomes across Prior Hazard Warning Experience to Three Hazards
Get PDFA long-term goal for warning message designers is to determine the most effective type of message that can instruct individuals to act quickly and prevent loss of life and/or injury when faced with an imminent threat. One likely way to increase an individual’s behavioral intent to act when they are faced with risk information is to provide protective action information or guidance. This study investigated participant perceptions (understanding, believing, personalizing, deciding, milling, self-efficacy, and response-efficacy) in response to the National Weather Service’s experimental product Twitter messages for three hazard types (tornado, snow squall, dust storm), with each message varying by inclusion and presentation of protective action information placed in the tweet text and the visual graphic. We also examine the role of prior hazard warning experience on message perception outcomes. To examine the effects, the experiment used a between-subjects design where participants were randomly assigned to one hazard type and received one of four warning messages. Participants then took a post-test measuring message perceptions, efficacy levels, prior hazard warning experience, and demographics. The results showed that for each hazard and prior hazard experience level, messages with protective action guidance in both the text and graphic increase their understanding, belief, ability to decide, self-, and response-efficacy. These results reinforce the idea that well-designed messages, that include protective action guidance, work well regardless of hazard type or hazard warning experience
A Fault in Democracy: The Disenfranchisement of Voters
Get PDFOur project is focused on why there is variation in felon disenfranchisement policy among states. After selecting five different states (New York, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and Vermont) with various policies, we tested them against our different hypotheses: demographics (age, education level, and the number of people incarcerated), partisanship, and race. We expected race to be a strong factor, meaning that as diversity of the state increased the strictness of its felon disenfranchisement policy would increase. We expected to see a similar correlation with partisanship, that the more Republican-leaning states would have stricter policies. Additionally, we believed that age, education, and prison population would have somewhat of an impact, but nothing substantial. The results were different from expectations. While race and partisanship had a slight correlation, it was not as strong as we initially expected it to be. Age and education had virtually no impact, and the prison population had very limited influence. Our results were able to provide some clues as to why such variation among states exists and should be used as a starting point for further research
Racial Injustice in Astrid Lindgren’s Kati in America
Get PDFThis article addresses Astrid Lindgren’s Kati in America, which was written in 1950 and translated into English in 1964. The novel reflects Lindgren’s impressions of the United States, where she traveled in 1948 on assignment for the publishing house Åhland and Åkerlund. By chance, the author of this article discovered that there is a fifteenth chapter of the book in the Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, and German translations, but which is missing in the English. This missing chapter describes the racism Lindgren’s protagonist witnesses during her visit to New Orleans. Astrid Lindgren’s depiction of racial injustice in the South is especially relevant in the current era, when the subject of race is so prominent in the national conversation. In light of this fact, it is more important than ever that a new, complete English translation of Kati in America be published, one that reflects the racial injustice to which Astrid Lindgren sought to call her readers’ attention in Chapter 15
Determining the Functional Roles of Short Open Reading Frames in Mycobacterium Smegmatis
Get PDFThe study examines the roles of a subset of short open reading frames (sORFs) in M. smegmatis using targeted mutagenesis and the subsequent examination of phenotypes associated with sORF mutation or overexpression. sORFs are defined as stretches of nucleic acid encoding a protein with a maximum of 50 amino acids. Genome annotation pipelines overlook sORFs encoding small proteins (sproteins) and, thus, sproteins in bacteria have gone unnoticed, even those that are expressed at levels similar to larger, well-described proteins. As a result of recent advances in ribosome profiling and mass spectrometry, hundreds of previously unannotated sORFs have been identified, increasing the number of annotated genes in both the M. tuberculosis and M. smegmatis genomes. Previously studied sproteins have been found to carry out diverse functions within the cell, ranging from modulating enzymatic activity to stress response signaling. In the present study, annotated sORFs were inspected using a JBrowse genome viewer that displays RNA-seq and Ribo-seq data mapped to mycobacterial reference genomes to determine active gene boundaries. The sORFs chosen for study are thought to be physiologically relevant based on their high expression level and conservation within the M. smegmatis genome and across other mycobacterial species. Utilizing targeted mutagenesis protocols, mutant sORFs were created and then assayed for a reproducible phenotypic effect using a variety of molecular and physical assays that aim to accurately address the function of the synthesized sprotein itself, as well as examining the potential of the sprotein to participate in fundamental cellular processes. Studying sORFs and their encoded sproteins has the potential to provide insight into how they modulate biological functions, and to identify novel functions not previously considered due to their seemingly negligible size
Neuronal Glutamate Transporters Mediate Stereotypic Reward-Based Behaviors
Get PDFObsessive-compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a common neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by obsessions (uncontrollable and recurring thoughts), and compulsions (behaviors that one has the urge to repeat several times). One of the genes carrying non-functional mutations in OCD is Slc1a1, the gene that encodes the neuronal glutamate transporter EAAC1. However, we still have an incomplete understanding of how EAAC1 contributes to the onset of compulsivity in OCD-like behaviors. EAAC1 is abundantly expressed in the striatum, the input nucleus of the basal ganglia implicated with compulsivity and reward. Here, we use a series of behavioral assays to determine whether and how reward-based behaviors vary between wild type and EAAC1-/- mice. We found that EAAC1-/- mice have an increased propensity to engage in reward-based behaviors. Together, these findings suggest that EAAC1 may be critical to limit hyperactivity in the striatum and its ability to integrate reward and sensory information
Final Report for the Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership Telehealth Project
Get PDFExecutive Summary:
This report describes the history and achievements of the Northern Manhattan Maternal Action Network (NMPP) Telehealth Project (“the Telehealth Project”) and identifies opportunities for program improvement and sustainability.
Objective:
The Northern Manhattan Maternal Action Network (NMPP) Telehealth Project received funding from the New York Health Foundation (NYHF) in 2021 to build a patient-driven model for perinatal care delivered through telehealth. In particular, the project sought to identify ways to enhance patients’ access to and use of a patient portal, MyChart/Connect1 and video visits with providers accessed through MyChart
Near-Optimal Motion Planning Algorithms Via A Topological and Geometric Perspective
Get PDFMotion planning is a fundamental problem in robotics, which involves finding a path for an autonomous system, such as a robot, from a given source to a destination while avoiding collisions with obstacles. The properties of the planning space heavily influence the performance of existing motion planning algorithms, which can pose significant challenges in handling complex regions, such as narrow passages or cluttered environments, even for simple objects. The problem of motion planning becomes deterministic if the details of the space are fully known, which is often difficult to achieve in constantly changing environments. Sampling-based algorithms are widely used among motion planning paradigms because they capture the topology of space into a roadmap. These planners have successfully solved high-dimensional planning problems with a probabilistic-complete guarantee, i.e., it guarantees to find a path if one exists as the number of vertices goes to infinity. Despite their progress, these methods have failed to optimize the sub-region information of the environment for reuse by other planners. This results in re-planning overhead at each execution, affecting the performance complexity for computation time and memory space usage.
In this research, we address the problem by focusing on the theoretical foundation of the algorithmic approach that leverages the strengths of sampling-based motion planners and the Topological Data Analysis methods to extract intricate properties of the environment. The work contributes a novel algorithm to overcome the performance shortcomings of existing motion planners by capturing and preserving the essential topological and geometric features to generate a homotopy-equivalent roadmap of the environment. This roadmap provides a mathematically rich representation of the environment, including an approximate measure of the collision-free space. In addition, the roadmap graph vertices sampled close to the obstacles exhibit advantages when navigating through narrow passages and cluttered environments, making obstacle-avoidance path planning significantly more efficient.
The application of the proposed algorithms solves motion planning problems, such as sub-optimal planning, diverse path planning, and fault-tolerant planning, by demonstrating the improvement in computational performance and path quality. Furthermore, we explore the potential of these algorithms in solving computational biology problems, particularly in finding optimal binding positions for protein-ligand or protein-protein interactions.
Overall, our work contributes a new way to classify routes in higher dimensional space and shows promising results for high-dimensional robots, such as articulated linkage robots. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive solution to motion planning problems and offer a new perspective on solving computational biology problems
Liberation’s Love-Language: The Politics and Poetics of Queer Translation after Stonewall
Get PDFPoetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period\u27s activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because it can foreground intimacy and can foment new relational forms, while deconstructing heteronormative codes of self and collectivity. Commonplace associations of queer translation with cross-language literary translation can provide a starting point for my discussion. Activist-poets discussed include anti-carceral gay activist Paul Mariah\u27s translations in ManRoot of French writer Jean Genet\u27s verse; lesbian feminist poet Judy Grahn\u27s figurative translation of the Sumerian poet Enheduanna, reimagining her epic about the goddess Inanna in a lesbian bar; and Beat poet Harold Norse\u27s celebrated homoerotic translations of the ancient Roman Catullus, a decades-long project pre- and postdating Stonewall. Recovering such liberationists translation projects can help us refigure understandings of how queer poetry and queer translation are not just literary products or artifacts from LGBTQ+ history but instead are present and future modalities and processes of political living and becoming