Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Stagnation In Psychotherapy: A Transtheoretical Approach, Kristine Mccormick

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Doctoral training in clinical psychology emphasizes the importance of utilizing empirically supported psychotherapy methods in pursuit of effective psychotherapy. When treatment is stagnant or ineffective, the focus of training and supervision is often geared toward searching the evidence-base for alternative psychotherapy approaches, or referring to a provider with expertise in a specific method. Using a case example, this paper offers guidance on possible roadblocks to effective psychotherapy treatment, and clear areas to explore before concluding whether psychotherapy is the most helpful intervention for a patient.

Urban School Violence Prevention: A Suggested Intervention Utilizing Liberation Psychology, Meghan K. Hogan

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

In the past decades, numerous programs have been developed in attempts to reduce the rates of violence facing students in American schools. The spotlight on these programs have increased since horrific mass shooting events have taken place throughout the country. Many of these programs have utilized varied methods in their attempt to reduce school-based violence, from the implementation of hardline policies meant to act as violence deterrents to the development of risk assessment teams aimed at identifying and intervening against potential threats; however, few of the existing programs have shown substantial efficacy rates. Additionally, several of the violence prevention programs …

Agent-Based Model Of Broadband Adoption In Unserved And Underserved Areas, Ankit Agarwal

Masters Theses

"In the last two decades, demand for broadband internet has far outpaced its availability. The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) 2020 Broadband Deployment report suggests that at least 22 million Americans living in rural areas lack access to broadband internet. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting normal life, there is an overwhelming need to enable unserved and underserved communities to adapt to the “new normal”. To address this challenge, federal and state agencies are funding internet service providers (ISPs) to deploy infrastructure in rural communities. However, policymakers and ISPs need open-source tools to predict take-rates of broadband service and formulate effective strategies …

Communicating Uncertain Information From Deep Learning Models To Users, Harishankar Vasudevanallur Subramanian

Masters Theses

“The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) decision support systems is increasing in high-stakes contexts, such as healthcare, defense, and finance. Uncertainty information may help users better leverage AI predictions, especially when combined with domain knowledge. I conducted two human-subject experiments to examine the effects of uncertainty information with AI recommendations. The experimental stimuli are from an existing image recognition deep learning model, one popular approach to AI. In Paper I, I evaluated the effect of the number of AI recommendations and provision of uncertainty information. For a series of images, participants identified the subject and rated their confidence level. Results …

Detecting Incentivized Review Groups With Co-Review Graph, Yubao Zhang, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Online reviews play a crucial role in the ecosystem of nowadays business (especially e-commerce platforms), and have become the primary source of consumer opinions. To manipulate consumers’ opinions, some sellers of e-commerce platforms outsource opinion spamming with incentives (e.g., free products) in exchange for incentivized reviews. As incentives, by nature, are likely to drive more biased reviews or even fake reviews. Despite e-commerce platforms such as Amazon have taken initiatives to squash the incentivized review practice, sellers turn to various social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook) to outsource the incentivized reviews. The aggregation of sellers who …

Constructively Deviant: Examining The Positive Employee Consequences Of Pro-Social Rule Breaking, Su Kyung (Irene) Kim

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Conceptualized as a form of constructive deviance, pro-social rule breaking (PSRB) refers to employees’ intentional violation of a formal organizational policy, regulation, or prohibition with the primary intention of promoting the welfare of organization or one of its stakeholders. The extant research primarily focused on the antecedents of PSRB, and research on the consequences of the behavior is limited. In my dissertation, I adopt a combination of correlational and experimental designs to examine various employee outcomes of PSRB, including employee well-being and behavioral outcomes, as well as evaluative outcomes rated by others. The first manuscript focuses on rule breaking for …

Invisible Wounds: Assessing The Awareness Of Moral Injury Among Toronto Police, Daniel Saugh

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Moral injury is believed to exist within the Canadian Police Services though it is difficult to recognize and is usually ignored. The research data emerging from military and first responders (i.e., police, firefighters, and EMS personnel) reveal the effects of moral injury and its implications for mental and spiritual health as it persists throughout the life and career of those affected.

This study investigates how moral injury may emerge from a potentially traumatic event(s) and/or psychological trauma and/or independent from such trauma and how moral injury may come to exist in members of the Toronto Police Service, as well as …

Zone Path Construction (Zac) Based Approaches For Effective Real-Time Ridesharing, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time ridesharing systems such as UberPool, Lyft Line and GrabShare have become hugely popular as they reduce the costs for customers, improve per trip revenue for drivers and reduce traffic on the roads by grouping customers with similar itineraries. The key challenge in these systems is to group the “right” requests to travel together in the “right” available vehicles in real-time, so that the objective (e.g., requests served, revenue or delay) is optimized. This challenge has been addressed in existing work by: (i) generating as many relevant feasible combinations of requests (with respect to the available delay for customers) as …

Local Fiscal Adjustments From Depopulation: Evidence From The Post–Cold War Defense Contraction, Timothy M. Komarek, Gary A. Wagner

Economics Faculty Publications

In this paper, we estimate the long-term causal effect of population losses on local government revenue, expenditure, and debt by exploiting a quasi-exogenous change that reduced the number of US military personnel by about 40 percent between the late 1980s and 2000. Aggregating across governmental units within commuting zones, we find that real per capita total revenues and expenditures remained unchanged for remaining citizens. At the same time, however, we note several important compositional effects. First, local governments appear to have offset reductions in state intergovernmental aid by increasing property tax revenues. Second, they significantly shifted the composition of expenditures …

Fixed Costs And The Division Of Labor, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

How market size and the level of coordination costs determine the degree of specialization is studied in an infinite horizon model with the amount of capital determined endogenously. Firms producing the same intermediate good engage in oligopolistic competition and choose the degree of specialization of their technologies to maximize profits. A more specialized technology is a technology with a lower marginal cost, but a higher fixed cost. Interestingly, the relationship between the level of coordination costs and a firm’s degree of specialization is ambiguous. A firm in a country with a larger market size, more patient citizens, or a higher …

Smart Parking Systems: Reviewing The Literature, Architecture And Ways Forward, Can Biyik, Zaheer Allam, Gabriele Pieri, Davide Moroni, Muftah O' Fraifer, Eoin O' Connell, Stephan Olariu, Muhammad Khalid

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has come of age, and complex solutions can now be implemented seamlessly within urban governance and management frameworks and processes. For cities, growing rates of car ownership are rendering parking availability a challenge and lowering the quality of life through increased carbon emissions. The development of smart parking solutions is thus necessary to reduce the time spent looking for parking and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The principal role of this research paper is to analyze smart parking solutions from a technical perspective, underlining the systems and sensors that are available, as documented in the …

Vehicular Crowdsourcing For Congestion Support In Smart Cities, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Under present-day practices, the vehicles on our roadways and city streets are mere spectators that witness traffic-related events without being able to participate in the mitigation of their effect. This paper lays the theoretical foundations of a framework for harnessing the on-board computational resources in vehicles stuck in urban congestion in order to assist transportation agencies with preventing or dissipating congestion through large-scale signal re-timing. Our framework is called VACCS: Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities. What makes this framework unique is that we suggest that in such situations the vehicles have the potential to cooperate with various …

Large Scale Subject Category Classification Of Scholarly Papers With Deep Attentive Neural Networks, Bharath Kandimalla, Shaurya Rohatgi, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Subject categories of scholarly papers generally refer to the knowledge domain(s) to which the papers belong, examples being computer science or physics. Subject category classification is a prerequisite for bibliometric studies, organizing scientific publications for domain knowledge extraction, and facilitating faceted searches for digital library search engines. Unfortunately, many academic papers do not have such information as part of their metadata. Most existing methods for solving this task focus on unsupervised learning that often relies on citation networks. However, a complete list of papers citing the current paper may not be readily available. In particular, new papers that have few …

Understanding The Impact Of Encrypted Dns On Internet Censorship, Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang, Chase Cotton

Computer Science Faculty Publications

DNS traffic is transmitted in plaintext, resulting in privacy leakage. To combat this problem, secure protocols have been used to encrypt DNS messages. Existing studies have investigated the performance overhead and privacy benefits of encrypted DNS communications, yet little has been done from the perspective of censorship. In this paper, we study the impact of the encrypted DNS on Internet censorship in two aspects. On one hand, we explore the severity of DNS manipulation, which could be leveraged for Internet censorship, given the use of encrypted DNS resolvers. In particular, we perform 7.4 million DNS lookup measurements on 3,813 DoT …

Ssentiaa: A Self-Supervised Sentiment Analyzer For Classification From Unlabeled Data, Salim Sazzed, Sampath Jayarathna

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In recent years, supervised machine learning (ML) methods have realized remarkable performance gains for sentiment classification utilizing labeled data. However, labeled data are usually expensive to obtain, thus, not always achievable. When annotated data are unavailable, the unsupervised tools are exercised, which still lag behind the performance of supervised ML methods by a large margin. Therefore, in this work, we focus on improving the performance of sentiment classification from unlabeled data. We present a self-supervised hybrid methodology SSentiA (Self-supervised Sentiment Analyzer) that couples an ML classifier with a lexicon-based method for sentiment classification from unlabeled data. We first introduce LRSentiA …

Review Of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies For Optimizing Digital Stewardship, Rand Boyd

Library Articles and Research

Review of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies for Optimizing Digital Stewardship by Angela Fritz.

Latest Developments Affecting Russian Protestant Seminaries And Churches, Mark R. Elliott

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

Excerpt: "Of course, the Russian state assault on Protestant theological education does not occur in a vacuum, as can be seen by an ongoing parallel campaign against individual Protestant congregations. A sample of three cases of direct disruption of Baptist, Pentecostal, and Adventist worship by local authorities in 2019, 2020, and 2021 may illustrate the point."

Is There Discrimination Against Women By The Orthodox Church In The Republic Of North Macedonia?, Aneta Jovkovska

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The growing interest in the issue of gender equality in the past few decades ranks this topic among the main themes of various research and reflection.There does not seem to be much agreement between the numerous studies, which in itself makes it difficult to understand them and again raises questions about the interpretation of fundamental Christian doctrines. In light of the existing and offered considerations, we believe that biblical texts, such as Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”), have encouraged women to stand up …

Book Review: Orthodox And Greek Catholics In Transylvania (1867-1916): Convergences And Divergences, Beth Admiraal

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

A review of Marcarie Drăgoi, Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Transylvania (1867-1916): Convergences and Divergences, Translated by Carmen-Veronica Borbely, Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015, 289 pp, hardback. ISBN: 979-088141-507-0.

Fr. Leonid Kishkovsky, In Memoriam, James R. Payton

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Global Perspectives On Harmful Algal Blooms: Impacts And Responses, Ryan Mitchell

Sustainability and Social Justice

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) can have devastating effects on aquatic ecosystems, economies, and communities. In general, their effects are also likely to worsen and become more frequent because of climate change. This paper will examine contemporary attempts to predict, prevent, monitor, control, and adapt to HABs.

2020 Institutional Repository (Ir) Report, Sarah Ellsworth Mls

Parkview Library Reports

A brief report of information and statistics on the globally accessible IR. This is managed and compiled by the Parkview Health Resource Librarians. Top downloads, usage metrics, readership distribution, and related metrics.

The Corruption Of Copyright And Returning It To Its Original Purposes, Michelle M. Wu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since its inception, Copyright has had two purposes: the private interest of the author in being paid for her work and the public interest served by the dissemination of these works. Within the last two decades, though, some industries have systematically undermined both of those interests, redirecting the benefits of copyright towards themselves instead of the intended beneficiaries. This paper looks at the book, music, and entertainment industries, examines how copyright has been used to suppress the uses it was intended to foster, and explores ongoing and proposed avenues for course correction.

Higher Goods As Indicators Of Self-Transcendent Well-Being: A Two-Dimensional Measure Of Contents And Modalities, Peter Joseph Varga

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This research explores the “higher goods” as indicators of self-transcendent well-being. The higher goods are here conceptualized as consisting of both contents and modalities. The contents are the classical transcendentals unity, truth, goodness, and beauty; the modalities are encounter, enlightenment, and transmission. Despite millennia of interest in philosophical and theological literatures, researchers have largely overlooked the intrinsic link between modality and content within empirical psychology. This thesis (a) develops and validates an empirical measure of the higher goods using matrix modeling techniques borrowed from multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), (b) evaluates the correlation of the Big Five personality traits …

Keep Your Distance! Modeling The Relationship Between Social Ecology And Changes In Geographic Mobility During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Jason Dillon Freeman

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

In this paper, we examine whether relational mobility and historical pathogen prevalence on a country level relates to an individual’s willingness or ability to restrict movement in response to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, both together an individually. We use data on geographic mobility compiled from geolocation data on mobile phones to examine aggregate changes in geographic mobility at the country-level at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared with a pre-pandemic baseline. We find that countries high in relational mobility showed a greater decrease in geographic mobility than countries low in relational mobility following the onset of the …

Unpredictable Paths Into Care: Examining Hiv And Ms Care Relationships In Southern Ontario, Melissa Popiel

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In Canada, we often speak of caring for others as more than a social obligation; it is part of how we conceptualize ourselves and our humanity. Family/friend relationships can become strained, however, when providing care and support for people with complex and unpredictable chronic episodic illnesses, here termed episodic care. Relational impacts may be understood as influences and impacts directly related to the relationship between the carer and family member/friend. The purpose of this study is to create a middle-range grounded theory of episodic caring based on the relational impacts of carers for people living with HIV and MS. …

Reading In Kapampangan, Filipino, And English: A Look At Multilingual Children In An Economically Challenging Philippine Community, Portia Padilla

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The present studies advance current understanding of the skills and processes involved in multilingual reading, especially in less researched alphabetic languages. These studies examined whether the dominant models in reading in English can explain the reading processes involved among low-income multilingual speakers of Kapampangan (L1), Filipino (L2), and English (L3) in the Philippines, a developing country. Kapampangan and Filipino use the same Roman alphabet that English uses. However, these two languages have transparent orthographies while English has an opaque orthography.

Study 1 examined the psycholinguistic grain size theory within the context of multilingual reading. There were three hundred twenty-six children …

Reducing Anticipatory Anxiety: Does Values-Affirmation Increase Self-Compassion?, Elena Harwood

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions for social anxiety incorporate techniques such as self-compassion and values articulations. Self-compassion has been shown to reduce anticipatory anxiety in students with high social anxiety but the impact of values-affirmation has not yet been explored. Additionally, past research suggests that values-affirmation may foster self-compassion. Three studies were conducted to explore whether values-affirmation, too, reduces anticipatory anxiety (related to an upcoming speech task) and to evaluate whether self-compassion is a mechanism of change. In study one, participants (N = 93) were randomly assigned to a self-compassion manipulation, a values-affirmation condition, or a control condition. After controlling …

Disclosing Mental Health: The Experience Of Post Secondary Students Transitioning Into A Career/Experiential Learning Environment, Jennifer Mei

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The stigma associated with mental health and underrepresentation of students with disabilities in higher education is well documented (Barnard-Brak, Lechtenberger, and Tan 2010, p. 411). This presents a disclosure problem for post-secondary students with mental health challenges who are transitioning into a career or experiential learning environment. If students require workplace accommodations, they may find themselves faced with a decision to disclose mental health challenges to a faculty supervisor, career services practitioner or potential employer. Difficulties with mental health can be experienced because of a diagnosed mental health disability or be a symptom of another diagnosable disability.

The research begins …

Rainbow Writes: Peer-Led Creative Writing Groups’ Potential For Promoting 2slgbtq+ Youth Wellbeing, Ceilidh Harrison

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Though mainstream acceptance for the 2SLGBTQ+ community is on the rise, elevated risks of mental health challenges still pervade this community, particularly for youth growing up in this changing environment. Based on previous literature citing the benefits of creative interventions and youth autonomy, the current study sought to explore the implementation of an online, peer-led creative writing program as a possible means to increase emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing in 2SLGBTQ+ youth. Twenty self-identifying 2SLGBTQ+ youth from across Canada were recruited to form two 10-week, online peer-led creative writing groups titled “Rainbow Writes”. Based on Lerner et al.’s (2003) “Five …