As social media becomes a dominant tool in political campaigns, it is important to analyze how candidates and voters interact over social media and how this impacts elections. This study aims to uncover whether Instagram comments - a key tool voters use to interact with candidates - have an impact on voters’ perceptions and whether or not there are differences in these impacts based on the gender of the candidate. Due to bias against women in politics, I hypothesize that respondents will evaluate female candidates more harshly than male candidates after viewing negative Instagram comments associated with them. To test this hypothesis, I randomly separated a sample of 435 undergraduate students into four groups. Each group was assigned a hypothetical incumbent Senate candidate (male or female) and shown a candidate biography. The biographies were identical, save for the names/genders of the candidates. Additionally, the two experimental groups were shown negative Instagram comments associated with their candidate. Each group was asked to evaluate their candidate's viability, favorability, competency, leadership ability, and qualifications, in addition to scoring the likelihood that they would vote for them. I found that the male candidate had lower scores than his female counterpart for all six traits evaluated, meaning he was evaluated more harshly. This persisted in both the control and experimental groups, as well as both before and after the stimulus was presented to the experimental groups. However, the respondents’ evaluation scores for the female candidate dropped by a larger margin after viewing the negative comments than the scores for the male candidate did. This persisted for five of the six traits evaluated. Voters’ perceptions, then, are impacted by negative Instagram comments for male and female candidates, although there is some evidence to indicate that they have a larger negative effect on the perceptions of female candidates.

Objective: This study aims to develop and evaluate a semi-automated workflow using Natural Language Processing (NLP) for sharing positive patient feedback with radiology staff, assessing its efficiency and impact on radiology staff morale. Methods: The HIPAA compliant, institutional review board-waived implementation study was conducted from April 2022 to June 2023 and introduced a Patient Praises program to distribute positive patient feedback to radiology staff collected from patient surveys. The study transitioned from an initial manual workflow to a hybrid process using an NLP model trained on 1,034 annotated comments and validated on 260 holdout reports. The time to generate Patient Praises e-mails were compared between manual and hybrid workflows. Impact of Patient Praises on radiology staff was measured using a 4 question Likert-scale survey and an open text feedback box. Kruskal-Wallis and post-hoc Dunn’s test was performed to evaluate differences in time for different workflows. Results: From April 2022 to June 2023, the radiology department received 10,643 patient surveys. Of those surveys, 95.6% of these surveys contained positive comments, with 9.6% (n = 978) shared as Patient Praises to staff. After implementation of the hybrid workflow in March 2023, 45.8% of Patient Praises were sent through the hybrid workflow and 54.2% were sent manually. Time efficiency analysis on 30-case subsets revealed that the hybrid workflow without edits was the most efficient, taking a median of 0.7 minutes per case. A high proportion of staff found the praises made them feel appreciated (94%) and valued (90%) responding with a 5/5 agreement on 5-point Likert scale responses. Conclusion: A hybrid workflow incorporating NLP significantly improves time efficiency for the Patient Praises program while increasing feelings of acknowledgment and value among staff.

With the growth of the additive manufacturing (AM) industry for metal components, there is an economic pressure for improved AM processes to overcome the shortcomings of current AM technologies (i.e., limited deposition rates, surface roughness, etc.). Unfortunately, the development of these processes can be time and capital-intensive due to the large number of input parameters and the sensitivity of the process’s outputs to said inputs. There consequently has been a strong push to develop computational design tools (such as CFD models) which can decrease the time and cost of AM technology developments. However, many of the developments that have been made to simulate AM through CFD have done so on custom CFD packages (as opposed to commercially available packages), which increases the barrier to entry of employing computational design tools. For that reason, this paper has demonstrated a method for simulating fused deposition modeling using a commercially available CFD package (Fluent). The results from this implementation are qualitatively promising when compared to samples produced by existing metal AM processes, however additional work is needed to validate the model more rigorously and to reduce the computational cost. Finally, the developed model was used to perform a parameter sweep, thereby demonstrating a use case of the tool to help in parameter optimization.

Anti-popery, political prejudice against Catholicism on the basis that it is not conducive to liberty, contributed to the American religious and political discourses of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution. While some have argued that anti-popery diminished in New England during the Revolution, this paper shows that it persisted as a political assumption among New England Protestants and continued to be expressed in sermons and political debates of America's early republican period. The Franco-American alliance was a pragmatic alliance which did not ultimately do away with anti-papal sentiment. Following history to the nativist movement of the mid-nineteenth century, this paper then shows that the arguments deployed against Catholic Irish immigrants were of the same vein as those deployed by Protestant New Englanders before the American Revolution and that the assumption of religio-political anti-popery never truly faded in the early republic, allowing for it to be enlivened by the dramatic increase in New England's Catholic population in the 1820s and 1830s.

In an increasingly globalized world, the issue of minor languages and their preservation is critical as the popularity of more widely-spoken languages is oppressing them both consciously and subconsciously. The preservation of these languages is important as they not only correspond with unique cultural practices, but with literature and oral tradition as well—all of which will be lost with the extinction of the language. The Sassarese (also called Turritano) and Pumuntincu (Oltramontano/Southern Corsican) languages found on the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, respectively, are both classified by UNESCO as highly endangered as they are spoken by 100,000 or fewer people. This thesis is designed as a report describing the level of preservation of the languages of Pumuntincu in southern Corsica and Sassarese in northern Sardinia. It describes the availability of language resources (educational or otherwise), current and former language policies, and any local efforts to preserve the language. Field research was conducted on the islands in the communities where the languages are spoken as well as at the Universities of Sassari and Corsica. The findings confirmed that both languages are, indeed, in a perilous situation, prompting language policy recommendations for both the French and Italian governments to implement in conjunction with existing policies of other recognized minor languages in each country, i.e. Sard, Gallurese, Tabarchino, Breton, Basque, and Cismontano/Northern Corsican.

CrAssphages are a type of bacteriophage, a virus that infects bacteria and reproduces within them. They are thought to infect one of the most prevalent bacteria in the human gut microbiome, Bacteroides (Dutilh et al., 2014). CrAssphages are suspected to be in 73-77% of humans (Siranosian et al., 2020), however little is known about the effects they might have on the gut microbiome or the host organism’s digestion, metabolism, nutrition, or host immune function and disease states (Shreiner et al., 2015). CrAssphages were recently identified in gelada fecal samples from infants and adults. This study analyzed variables surrounding crAssphage presence in fecal samples collected throughout infant development and from adults and analyzed the presence of six crAssphages that were genetically similar to the proto-crAssphage originally discovered in humans (Dutilh et al., 2014). It was determined that recent rainfall has a significant effect on crAssphage presence. Additionally, recent rainfall and gelada sex have significant effects on the likelihood of infection by multiple crAssphages at once. The six crAssphages analyzed all peaked in presence between 10-20 months of age, while Bacteroides presence decreases at ~10 months (Baniel et al., 2022). It remains unsure if Bacteroides are the true host of crAssphages, or if there are other possible hosts.

This thesis attempts to answer the question ‘What changes in understanding occur as a student develops their way of understanding similarity using geometric transformations and what teacher interventions contribute to these changes in understanding?’ Similarity is a topic taught in school geometry usually alongside the related topic Congruence. The Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, upon which many states have based their state level educational standards, recommend teachers leverage transformational geometry to explain congruence and similarity using geometric transformations. "However, there is a lack of research studies regarding how transformational geometry can be taught as a productive way of understanding similarities and what challenges students might encounter when learning similarities via transformational geometry approaches." This study aims to further the efforts of teachers who are trying to develop their students’ transformational understandings of similarity. This study was conducted as exploratory teaching interviews in Spring 2023 at a large public university. The student was an undergraduate student who had not previously taken a transformational geometry-based Euclidean geometry at the university. I, as a teacher-researcher, designed a set of tasks for the exploratory teaching interviews, and implemented them over the course of 5 weeks. I, as a researcher, also analyzed the data to create a model for the student's understanding of similarity. Specifically, I was interested in sorting the ways of understanding expressed by the student into the categories pictorial, measurement-based, and transformational. By analyzing the videos from the interviews and tracking the students’ understandings from moment to moment, I was able to see a shift in her understanding toward a transformational understanding. Thus her way of understanding similarity using geometric transformations was strengthened and I was able to pinpoint key shifts in understanding that contribute to the strengthening of this understanding. Notably, the student developed a notion of dilation as coming from a single centerpoint, negotiated definitions from each way of understanding until eventually settling on a definition rooted in transformations, and applied similarity to an unfamiliar context using both her intuition about similarity and the definition she created. The implications of this being that a somewhat advanced understanding dilation is productive for understanding similarity using geometric transformations, and that to develop a student's way of understanding similarity using geometric transformations there must be a practical need for this created by tasks the student engages with.

Migrant families are among one of the most vulnerable and under protected populations in terms of protection and aid from the United States government. Often arriving on the basis of fleeing violence and severe poverty, their quality of life deeply depends on their ability to find and maintain economic security. Education is recognized as a path and is strongly linked to the achievement of economic wellbeing (U.S. Department of Education, 2021). A great number of (im)migrants experience educational barriers to enrollment and participation in education and are therefore unlikely to obtain both an education and access to financial stability. This thesis presents research on the educational policies and programs currently available for (im)migrant students, recent federally reported educational outcomes of these students, and identifies substantial barriers to their obtaining a meaningful education. The intended demographic of this thesis is Latinx (im)migrant students in the state of Arizona. Distributive justice practices are rooted in the understanding that all humans need specific resources to survive and thrive. This paper theorizes that these practices, when applied in relation to educational barriers affecting (im)migrant students, will enable them to increase both their access to and success in higher education. The author applies a distributive justice framework to address these issues via the creation of an innovative, dual-language infographic to inform (im)migrant students about the resources available to increase their access to higher education. To conclude, the paper provides an analysis of the impact the resource might have on (im)migrant students, as well as what policies or changes might/should be implemented for a large-scale impact.