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Time pressure, decision stressors, and diabetes self-management
Get PDFThe purpose of this study was to examine the influence of time pressure on diabetes self-management (DMSM) decision-making. This was done by examining the relationships between time pressure and DMSM activities (diet, exercise, SMBG, foot care), decision stressors (depression, self-efficacy, perceived cognitive function, cognitive function), and individual characteristics (gender, age, level of education, ethnicity, diabetes duration, number of comorbidities). The Decision Stressors and Diabetes Self-Management Activities framework was adapted from Phillip-Wren and Adya’s (2020) Integrated Model of the Impact of Decision Stressors on Decision Quality and used to guide this study. This descriptive, correlational study was a secondary data analysis of a randomized clinical trial designed to determine the efficacy of a cognitive rehabilitation training program for improving cognitive functioning in older adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Participants, who were given the Chronic Time Pressure Inventory during their initial data collection, were included in this dissertation study. This resulted in the sample consisting of 87 adults between the ages of 44 and 76 years who were diagnosed with T2DM and reported cognitive concerns. The main finding of this study was a small negative correlation between time pressure and exercise (r [subscript s] = -.26, p = .03) which means higher levels of time pressure were associated with less frequency of exercise. Time pressure was not significantly correlated with the other DMSM activities (diet, SMBG, foot care), decision stressors (depression, self-efficacy, perceived cognitive function, cognitive function) nor individual characteristics (gender, age, level of education, ethnicity, diabetes duration, number of comorbidities). Furthermore, the results did not support the study’s proposed framework, Decision Stressors and Diabetes Self-Management Activities. The results may be due to sample characteristics and the use of different measurements compared to previous work. Nevertheless, this study’s findings contributed to the growing research of time pressure within the field of health science. Future work should focus on gaining an understanding of time pressure and the factors that contribute to its development, as well as exploring if time pressure is domain-specific. The findings from such investigations can be used to assist in the improvement of DMSM and therefore potentially DMSM decision-making.Nursin
Mexicans in rural Pennsylvania : disrupting dominant representation and discussion of self-identity
Get PDFThis thesis focuses on various narratives reproduced about the Mexican community in Adams County, Pennsylvania, and at times Pennsylvania more broadly. This thesis focuses on the following questions: What are the dominant narratives produced about this community in local and national media; what cultural productions are being produced by the Mexican community? The thesis begins with a context of Latinx in Pennsylvania, followed by an overview of representations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in local and national newspapers. Through ethnographic research, there is a focus on a photographic production by and about the Mexican community, and discussions of self-identity that came about through the viewing of this photographic production. The principal argument is that dominant representations within local and national media replicate narrow, and at times anti-Mexican, narratives that rarely include the voices of Mexicans themselves, and so reflections and discussions of self-identity and photographs by the Mexican community function as counter-narratives to dominant narratives. By making space for discussions of self-identity, memory and story-telling through viewing of a photographic cultural production by Mexicans in Adams County, counter-narratives emerge and are central to the analysis, which highlights a Latinx community in the Mid-Atlantic rarely made visible.Mexican American Studie
The history of Christian providence and divination in the Codex Mexicanus
Get PDFThis report presents the intellectual genealogy of Christian providence and its relationship to divination practices. This story enters the confines of Christian origins in the 1st-century CE, the late antiquity, the medieval period, and the colonial encounter in the Americas. While the climax of the story is the Codex Mexicanus, the argument takes shape through the centuries that precede it. The report treats the Codex Mexicanus as the prime example of how Christians incorporate various epistemologies in periods of cultural transitions.Religious Studie
Bear and grin it : tragicomic ethics on the modern stage
Get PDFBear and Grin It: Tragicomic Ethics on the Modern Stage contends that modern tragicomedy enacts a dialogic pursuit of ethical philosophy. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, modern tragicomedy offers a direct response to the ethics of German classical tragedy epitomized in the work of Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As the heirs of German Idealist ethics and aesthetics, the modern tragicomedians adopt tragedy’s demand that the individual surrender to a greater force, but they also stage the ridiculousness that such a demand creates. More than explicating the philosophical underpinnings of several important works of drama, however, Bear and Grin It explores how theater negotiates the difficulty of reconciling ethical theorization and lived experience. After outlining both the draw and the shortcomings of tragedy’s ethics of surrender in an opening chapter, the dissertation turns to three modern tragicomic interventions: Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Sarah Kane’s Blasted. In each case, the tragicomic playwright uses humor to disrupt the conclusions their otherwise tragic plays would seem to present. First, the dissertation examines Ibsen’s direct challenge to the Hegelian union of tragic actor and universal cause through The Wild Duck’s comic stage philosopher Gregers Werle. Then, it turns to Beckett’s ethical scrutiny of the post-tragic moment in the prolongations of Godot. Finally, it assesses the muddied but urgent demands of Kane’s uneasy combination of humor and brutality in Blasted. Ultimately, Bear and Grin It argues, these plays create a new, self-critiquing mode of ethical tragedy for the skeptics of the twentieth century.Englis
Empowering novice teachers : the effects of campus leadership on teacher retention in high poverty middle schools
No full textTeacher turnover is a national problem, especially in hard-to-staff schools. Studies show that if new teachers do not receive ongoing assistance and support during their first few years, they are less likely to remain in the teaching profession. In order to help close the teacher quality gap, more mechanisms of teacher retention can be used besides spending excessive amounts of district funding on teacher incentives and innovative recruitment strategies. There is a strong need to gain a better understanding about the role of campus leaders in retaining novice teachers who have one to five years of teaching experience. Without effective teacher methods, there will always be a continuous revolving door of teachers in and out of education. This qualitative phenomenological study was conducted to explain how campus leaders should empower teachers to remain in the teaching profession from a constructivist approach. The data collected was gathered from interviews that captured data of teachers’ “lived” experiences during their novice years of teaching. The teacher participants include middle school teachers who work at high-poverty schools that service a large population of minority students. This research study added value to the literature regarding the need to better understand the principal’s role and impact in teacher retention. The data collected is beneficial to explain how leaders of disadvantaged schools can retain new teachers through empowerment and the process of building stronger leader to teacher relationships. The findings of this study help prove that a novice teacher seeks approval, guidance, and feedback from campus leaders regardless if they experience positive or negative interactions. It also confirms that a new teacher feels a sense of empowerment if they are positively influenced by their campus leader. A campus leader can have a significant impact ways to influence the endurance, attitude, and actions of a novice teacher. A campus leader can help retain novice teachers through the process of empowerment.Educational Administratio
Hasta la raíz : a proposed study of parent-child language concordance, family stress, coping, and depressive symptoms in bilingual Latinx youth
Get PDFLatinx youth have one of the highest rates of depressive symptoms in the United States compared to other ethnic groups according to the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2014). In 2019, 40% of Latinx youth in the United States were experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, compared to 36% of white and 31.5% of Black peers (CDC, 2020). Research findings suggest the important role of family stress in the mental health of Latinx youth (e.g., Lorenzo-Blanco et al., 2012), but also highlight the need to understand processes that influence family stress in Latinx families (e.g., parent-child language concordance and acculturation) as well as mediators of the relation between family stress and youth mental health outcomes (e.g., coping). Little research has examined parent-child language concordance in relation to family stress and youth mental health, although existing findings suggest that greater discrepancy in language use is associated with more stress and potentially more mental health symptoms for youth (Perreira et al., 2019). Further, while research has examined youth coping and mental health, more research is needed to understand connections between family stress and youth coping in the context of Latinx families. Ultimately, research that examines pathways across these processes is needed to better understand the possible effects of parent-child language concordance, family stress, and coping on Latinx youth mental health. The proposed study introduces a model that hypothesizes the associations between parent-child language concordance, family stress, coping, and depressive symptoms, with child integrated acculturation serving as a moderator within the model, and child coping serving as the mediator between family stress and child depressive symptoms. The proposed study could inform clinicians and researchers on how to work with bilingual families and provide considerations for how language use might affect parent-child relationships and youth mental health.Educational Psycholog
Enabling trustworthy and scalable collaborative learning systems
No full textModern distributed networks of devices, such as mobile phones, wearables, and smart home devices, produce vast amounts of data that can be used to train machine learning models for various prediction and inference tasks. As the computational capabilities of these devices grow, and due to increasing concerns about privacy, there has been growing interest in locally storing data and moving network computation to the edge. This motivated federated learning (FL), a collaborative learning paradigm that enables privacy-preserving training of machine learning models across multiple devices, avoiding the need to collect the private data stored on those devices. However, (1) statistical data heterogeneity, (2) costly communication, (3) systems heterogeneity, and (4) risks of privacy leakage present challenges to the deployment of FL in realistic settings. It is important to develop FL algorithms capable of addressing these four challenges, thereby paving the road toward scalable and trustworthy collaborative learning systems.
This dissertation first addresses the challenge of learning an accurate global model in federated learning systems characterized by statistical data heterogeneity. Data heterogeneity, where client devices possess private datasets that differ significantly in features or labels can lead to client drift, ultimately degrading the performance of the global model. In this line of work, we developed a provably convergent FL algorithm that leverages knowledge distillation to extract differentially private data representations from clients and uses them to regularize local training. Furthermore, we developed a data augmentation framework based on a variational autoencoder (VAE), guided by differentially private data representations, to balance feature and label skew in local datasets, thereby mitigating performance degradation.
We then turn our attention to systems heterogeneity, tackling the challenges that arise when conducting FL training on resource-constrained heterogeneous devices. For such settings, we developed a mixed-precision quantization framework that allows clients to train local models with varying bit-widths, driven by the available computational resources. To further reduce communication costs and accelerate the convergence of the global model, we developed a client sampling scheme that enables the server to select clients with minimal data heterogeneity without compromising the privacy of their data distributions. The third theme of my dissertation explores potential privacy vulnerabilities in federated learning, revealed by our novel label recovery scheme, which provides near-perfect accuracy when attacking untrained models and leads to significant improvements in gradient inverse attacks aided by the recovered labels.
Next, we investigate improving the scalability of federated learning systems in real-world scenarios, which can be viewed as a continual learning (CL) problem. Existing replay-based continual learning schemes, which store previously learned data for regularization, are impractical on resource-constrained devices in federated learning settings. To this end, we developed a replay-free federated continual learning scheme based on gradient projection to address catastrophic forgetting, the primary challenge in continual learning.Electrical and Computer Engineerin
From fractons to fractional Hall : an exploration of exotic quantum field theories
No full textQuantum field theory remains at the epicenter of both theoretical high energy and condensed matter physics. Given this, it is quite surprising that many diverse systems at very different scales can be studied using the same tools of quantum field theory. While quantum field theory has been incredibly successful in describing many universal properties of condensed matter systems as well as the standard model of particle physics, there are still many systems and phenomena that are difficult to study using conventional quantum field theory techniques. This is either because such systems don't seem to nicely fit into the standard paradigms of quantum field theory, or because the coupling between the various constituents is strong and so the conventional perturbative methods break down. This thesis focuses on two such systems from arising from the study condensed matter, fractonic systems and the fractional quantum Hall effect; with two overarching goals: trying to understand exactly how these exotic condensed matter systems fit into (or expand) the paradigms of quantum field theory, and adapting techniques developed in the high energy community to investigate strongly interacting systems in condensed matter.Physic
Digital Dilemmas: Parental versus Pediatric Perspectives on Preschooler Screen Time
Get PDFThis thesis explores the gap between pediatric recommendations and real-
world parental practices concerning screen time for preschool-aged children (2-5
years). As digital media use becomes increasingly embedded in early childhood,
screen time has emerged as a public health concern and everyday parental decision-
making topic. Although the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends no
more than 1 hour of high-quality programming per day for this age group, many
families struggle to adhere to these guidelines due to practical demands, limited
resources, and conflicting information.
Using a mixed-methods approach, this study integrates insights from semi-
structured interviews with five practicing pediatricians and survey data from 38
parents. Statistical analysis revealed key correlations between parental screen habits
and children’s screen use and highlighted discrepancies in the implementation of
professional guidelines. The findings underscore that while pediatricians often advise
screen moderation with an emphasis on content quality, their recommendations are
not always communicated or consistently followed. At the same time, both
pediatricians and parents recognized the nuanced role of screen time, acknowledging
its potential educational value and usefulness in managing everyday responsibilities.
The findings of this research contribute to the growing discourse on digital
childhood by highlighting the need for more actionable, accessible guidance. By
bridging medical expertise with household realities, this research offers practical
recommendations for improving pediatric communication, empowering parental
decision-making, and supporting healthier developmental outcomes in an increasingly
digital world.Psycholog
Finding the Balance: What the US Can Learn From France’s Online Speech Regulations
Get PDFSocial media has completely changed the way people see and interact with the world, especially when it comes to politics. This has raised concerns about misinformation, radicalization, and the security of our democratic systems online. This thesis examines the United States’ and France’s contrasting approaches to this issue, focusing on historical, legal, and cultural factors, as well as their impact on recent elections. Through a comparative analysis, the study explores the US's reluctance to regulate speech, against France's more interventionist stance, both shaped by their post-war era judicial and legislative systems. Case studies of the 2016 and 2020 US elections and the 2017 and 2022 French elections reveal contrasting effects of misinformation and foreign interference on the democratic process in either country. The findings highlight France's enhanced resilience against misinformation, and the United States’ lack thereof. We conclude with policy recommendations for the US, developed through the comparative analysis. Mainly, we advocate for amendments to Section 230, enhanced media literacy education, and age restrictions on social media use, drawing inspiration from French strategies.Plan II Honors Progra