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Politics in Printing: Protestantism, Catholicism, Capitalism, and Censorship
Get PDFImagine a world in which every piece of media ever written must be approved by the government before being publicly distributed. Despite sounding like part of a dystopian novel, this is instead a process known in Latin as “Imprimatur”- or in English, “let it be printed”. This process was first used by the Catholic Church in the mid-1500s but was later adopted by others. A set of books that were Imprimatured in England in the 1700s is a collection of Latin poems held by Binghamton University’s Special collection entitled Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta. The research process into these books studied the Imprimatur process and its relationship to censorship over a period of time, especially since the third volume is an “unauthorized continuation” of the first two. The broader implications of this research could tell us whether Imprimaturing was strictly censorship, or if it was more politically and socially nuanced.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1118/thumbnail.jp
Class Imitation and Mobility
Get PDFThis study examines how American workers, particularly Generation Z, navigate and perform social class through appearance, behavior, and communication, with a focus on the fashion industry. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with 20 employees across industries and age groups, including 3 Gen Z fashion workers, it explores class performance as both a survival strategy in an unequal labor market and a form of self-expression in the digital age. Key findings reveal diverse strategies for class signaling, from dressing for success to leveraging social media and tech literacy as modern forms of cultural capital. The study highlights a phenomenon of class cosplay, where workers temporarily embody different social strata to navigate professional environments. This research sheds light on how fast fashion and social media have blurred and reinforced class boundaries, offering critical insights into social mobility, professionalism, and the role of technology in reshaping class dynamics in the 21st-century workplace.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1131/thumbnail.jp
Racial Discrimination in Law Enforcement and the Importance of Spreading Awareness
Get PDFThis project will examine racial discrimination within law enforcement and how it targets African American and Muslim communities in the United States. Tactics of surveillance, racial profiling, and even violence are used by police to monitor innocents based purely on their religion or race. Qualitative examination of court cases brought against the government reveals the repeated pattern of unfounded racial discrimination against minorities, many of which are dismissed on purely legal grounds without addressing the underlying factual issue. The research for this project will show that utilizing social media and litigation can not only bring awareness to social issues, but provide the basis for which legitimate change can take place. Research into the effects of widespread awareness of human rights issues shows that it makes a real difference towards addressing deeply rooted problems and can be an invaluable tool to prevent unchecked racial bias in law enforcement.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1133/thumbnail.jp
The Epistemic Responsibility of 1930s Eugenicists: What the Trial of Ann Cooper Hewitt Shows about Modern Disinformation Discourse
Get PDFIn this research, the author analyzes the 1936 eugenic sterilization trial surrounding Ann Cooper Hewitt, looking at the epistemic harms and wrong associated with the results and how those connect to modern day discourses of disinformation. It centers on the actions of two eugenicists involved, Ezra S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe. Richter argues that issues of epistemic responsibility in this eugenics case study reveal the ways in which this epistemic concept ties to disinformation and can further develop understandings of this emerging field.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1152/thumbnail.jp
Evaluating Waste Management Reform in the Municipality of Binghamton
Get PDFThis paper aims to investigate the potential for a three-stream waste management system mandate to be introduced in the city of Binghamton. The area currently utilizes the Blue Bag Policy which, after three decades in effect, faces an uncertain future due to a rise in residential complaints regarding the unreliable and inefficient nature of the program. In light of such issues, this paper conducts a comparative analysis between municipalities with a mandated three-stream waste management system and Binghamton’s current approach to assess operational differences and performance outcomes, and ultimately realize Binghamton’s need to update their waste management system. To incentivize such a shift, the paper conducts a cost-benefit analysis showcasing the potential for a reduction in landfill tipping fees after a three-stream system is instituted. Additionally, the paper utilizes the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and interviews with relevant officials to ensure well-founded conclusions.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1166/thumbnail.jp
The Bonds of Family: How One Family’s Experience Tells the Story of the Prison-Industrial System
Get PDFBeginning in the 1960s, a rightward shift in politics and “War on Drugs” policies propelled the United States toward mass incarceration. The result was a prison population of around 2 million people, in which minority groups have been disproportionately imprisoned. While historians and legal scholars have examined the policies and legal structures behind mass incarceration, oral historians working in the tradition of social history emphasize the importance of narratives of those most impacted yet traditionally neglected. This paper specifically examines the relatively unstudied Columbia University\u27s 2019 Mass Incarceration Oral History collection, which explores the interconnected perspectives of one family’s experience within the prison-industrial complex. This archive uncovers a perplexing paradox: the carceral system can provide a community with economic stability via employment, but this economic security relies on the incarceration of their community, even relatives. Furthermore, previous discussions have focused on black and white males, but this research engages with black women, AIDS patients, and prisoner activists.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1172/thumbnail.jp
Dewlap Color Variation and Male Visual Grasp Response Across Populations in a Neotropical Lizard
Get PDFThe sensory drive hypothesis proposes that signals evolve to be most effective in their respective environment, and that the receiver’s sensory systems in that environment should evolve to match those signals. Differences in sexual signals and sensory systems in adjacent habitats may operate as isolating mechanisms. Male Anolis lizards have brightly colored dewlaps that they use for communication. Anolis aquaticus, a Costa Rican species that exhibits intraspecific variation, was studied as populations’ dewlaps vary in redness or yellowness. It is hypothesized that this variation is shaped by sensory drive and facilitates species isolation in A. aquaticus. Visual modeling was used to simulate anole vision, model dewlap conspicuousness to A. aquaticus, conduct visual grasp response (VGR) trials, and employ ddRADSeq genotyping. It was found that “yellow-ness” of a dewlap varies among populations and larger males respond to yellow stimuli more than smaller males. However, preliminary VGR results currently do not support the sensory drive facilitating isolation hypothesis.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2025/1174/thumbnail.jp
Coarse-Graining Spiking Reservoirs: Reducing Reservoir Size While Preserving Critical Dynamics
Get PDFWe propose an extension of renormalization into the domain of spiking neural networks, thereby providing a novel framework for coarse-graining neural networks without disrupting their critical properties. The proposed coarse-graining technique merges neurons and synaptic connections based on a graph-theoretic distance derived from synaptic weight strength and is configured to effectively prune the reservoir size while preserving the scale-free spiking dynamics indicative of criticality. Criticality in spiking neural networks may provide information-theoretic advantages by optimizing information processing and sensitivity to input. Using time-series prediction benchmarks, we demonstrate that networks operating at criticality exhibit up to 32% higher prediction accuracy before coarse-graining and up to 30% higher prediction accuracy after coarse-graining when compared to non critical networks for a sufficiently complex task
ANALYZING THE TRENDS OF GOVERNMENT SHARE OF HEALTH BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Get PDFThis paper investigates whether the COVID-19 pandemic functioned as a critical juncture that led to lasting institutional change in government health investment. Using an original comparative framework, the analysis explores changes in health financing across ten OECD countries classified by Reibling et al.\u27s five-type typology of healthcare systems. We assess shifts in public, private, and government health expenditure before, during, and after the pandemic, using both descriptive and visual data. Our findings suggest that while nearly all countries increased government and public shares of health spending during the pandemic, the persistence of these changes varied by system type, GDP level, and institutional configurations of authority, responsibility, and accountability. High-income countries with strong accountability mechanisms, such as Canada and Denmark, maintained increased health investment post-crisis. In contrast, countries like Hungary and Slovenia reverted to pre-pandemic patterns, often due to weak public demand or financial constraints. Type 3 and 4 systems demonstrated greater resistance to structural change, while type 5 systems, despite private-sector dominance, saw notable increases in public investment. Our results underscore how institutional design and fiscal capacity jointly determine whether crisis-induced shifts in policy become entrenched or merely temporary, providing insight into the conditions for durable health system reform
Open Repository @ Binghamton Monthly Additions and Top Downloads - June 2025
Get PDFNewly added work in the Open Repository @ Binghamton (ORB) from 6/1/2025-6/30/2025. Top downloads from same time frame