Author: Nancy Foasberg

Welcome to the April 2022 edition of QC Research Highlights! As the weather warms (I hope) and the flowers on campus begin to bloom, it’s time to bring you another collection of faculty research available in CUNY Academic Works.  

I’m including some articles from the sciences in this post, but I also wanted to include some works from other fields with a relationship to the scientific. All the works featured in this post deal with either physical or mental processes, or both.  

(I’ll also note that all these works are a few years old; if you’re intrigued, you should also check out the authors’ more recent work!) 

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Humanities 

Jason Tougaw (English) works in Consciousness Studies, and is specifically interested in the sense of the self and the relationship between the mind and the brain. His chapter, “The Self Is a Moving Target: The Neuroscience of Siri Hustvedt’s Artists,” analyzes the use of ekphrasis (the verbal description of works of visual art) in the works of Siri Hustvedt, a novelist who has also published academic research articles about neuroscience and memoirs about her own seizure disorder. Many of Hustvedt’s characters are artists who use visual media to portray the people around them. Tougaw argues that Hustvedt’s work explores the ethical implications of art’s power to “fix” a person’s identity at a specific moment in time, thus rendering them an artistic object. Ultimately, Tougaw sees Hustvedt’s work as arguing for a sense of identity rooted in subjectivity, change, and relationships. 

Math and Natural Sciences 

Cathy Savage-Dunn (Biology), along with at-the-time QC graduate students James F. Clark, Michael Meade, and Gehan Ramepura and co-author David H. Hall (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) published the article “Caenorhabditis elegans DBL-1/BMP Regulates Lipid Accumulation via Interaction with Insulin Signaling”. Savage-Dunn’s lab studies cell-to-cell signaling in nematodes (roundworms) – specifically, C. elegans. This article is about how cells regulate inputs to achieve metabolic homeostasis; specifically, it examines the role of a specific group of proteins (BMPs) in regulating lipids. BMP signaling was found to regulate lipid metabolism by signaling to the insulin pathway. Understanding this network is important to gaining a better understanding of metabolic disorders such as type II diabetes. 

Usha Barahmand (Psychology) and co-authors (Ehsan Tavakolian and Ali Khazaee from the University of Mohaghegh and K. Mohammadi of Shahrekord University) studied the cognitive effects of methadone treatment for opioid addition in their article “Hot and Cold Executive Functions in Pure Opioid Users Undergoing Methadone Maintenance Treatment: Effects of Methadone Dose, Treatment Duration, and Time Between Last Methadone Administration and Testing.” Methadone treatment can benefit opioid users but is also associated with executive function impairment. The researchers used various tests to better understand participants’ cognitive responses, including decision-making, emotion perception, cognitive flexibility, working memory, and response inhibition. (I would recommend looking at the article for further descriptions of each of these very interesting tests.) The participants who had taken higher doses of methadone had more difficulty with the tasks involving cognitive flexibility and emotion perception, especially anger, but the authors also point out that not all studies agree on these points. This article also finds a relationship between the duration of methadone treatment and the decline in cognitive flexibility and several other areas, but the other effects seemed to decrease over time.  

Education 

Finally, I’d like to feature an article that directly addresses cross-disciplinary thinking.  Bradley W. Bergey (Secondary Education and Youth Services), along with co-authors Joanna K. Garner (Old Dominion University), Avi Kaplan (Temple University), and Stephanie Hathcock (Oklahoma State University) write about concept mapping in professional development in their article, “Concept Mapping as a Mechanism for Assessing Science Teachers’ Cross-Disciplinary Field-Based Learning.”  Secondary teachers with deeper subject knowledge and an understanding of the connections between disciplines are able to adopt better pedagogical strategies. The researchers used concept maps in a summer institute for science teachers’ professional development. Over the course of the institute, teachers were able to create concept maps reflecting a more sophisticated understanding of the subject matter and the links among different concepts. This article suggests one possible model of enriching teacher professional development to promote constructivist pedagogy. 

Thanks for reading, and thanks to all the authors who have included their works in CUNY Academic Works.  

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

Welcome to the March edition of QC Research Highlights! This mid-semester blog post seems as good a time as any to feature some odds and ends; exciting, interesting, or important research that doesn’t necessarily follow any particular theme. Enjoy!

All the works featured in this series are available to read and download for free from CUNY Academic Works. 

Math and Natural Sciences

Sung-Eun Choi (Family, Nutrition, and Exercise Science) researches taste perception, food sensory science, and the relationship between taste preferences and culture. She and co-author Jeff Garza wrote “Consumer Likings of Different Miracle Fruit Products on Different Sour Foods.” Miracle fruit is a plant which, when eaten along with sour foods, makes them taste sweet!  As such, it has potential as a healthy sweetener. Dr. Choi and Mr. Garza wanted to test consumer reactions to miracle fruit, in order to understand whether it would be accepted as a sweetener by the public. Participants in the study ate miracle fruit products along with several popular sour foods (sour apples, goat cheese, lemonade, pickles, and plain yogurt) and evaluated whether they liked the flavor, texture, and aftertaste. Participants liked yogurt, goat cheese, and apples more when using miracle fruit as a sweetener, but they liked lemonade and pickles less.

Valentina Nikulina (Psychology) studies the developmental effects of childhood adversity. She and her co-authors (Anthony Carpi, Xuechen Li, and Cathy Spatz Widom, all from John Jay College) wrote “Childhood Maltreatment and Lead Levels in Middle Adulthood: A Prospective Examination of the Roles of Individual Socio-economic and Neighborhood Characteristics.” In this article, they studied whether children with histories of child abuse and neglect are also at increased risk for environmental hazards, specifically lead. This study matched participants around the age of 40 who had been maltreated as children with a control group who were similar in terms of social class and other characteristics (race, sex, and age), but who had not been maltreated.  Lead exposure in the blood was not correlated to maltreatment, however, there was a correlation between maltreatment and exposure to lead dust, as well as poverty and neighborhood disadvantage.

Education

Sara B. Woolf (Education and Community Programs) teaches in the Graduate Programs for Special Education. One of her research interests is action research. Her article, “Exploring Pedagogies to Elevate Inquiry: Teaching Action Research in the Third Space,” documents the pedagogical strategies Dr. Woolf used to teach action research over the course of a semester, along with the impact of these strategies. Her teaching in this class is informed by third space theory, which allows students to reflexively examine cultural biases as a means of generating knowledge and working toward social progress. The article details how Dr. Woolf established trust in the classroom, increased students’ authority in the class, promoted authentic inquiry, and elicited student feedback. While students were initially uncomfortable or skeptical of this approach, over the course of the semester, they were better able to engage critically and to work collaboratively.

Arts and Humanities

Ala Alryyes (English) studies the literature of empire and exploration. His article, “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “Maps,” Natural Law, and the Enemy,” examines the role of navigation in Robinson Crusoe. Dr. Alryyes argues that Crusoe is a “user and interpreter of space and the knowledges of space.” He reads Defoe’s novel through the lenses of natural law and cartography, two imperialist discourses that allow Crusoe to accomplish nearly impossible feats of navigation while also upholding the European reader’s sense of mastery over geography. Ultimately, the novel “ties place, enmity, and selfhood.”

Gregory Sholette (Studio Art) teaches sculpture and social practice; his research is on activist art. In the short piece “Tactical Tutorial for the Post-Internet Era,” he defines “samiZine” as a portmanteau of “samizdat” (underground publications from the Soviet era,  which were self-published and manually distributed to evade Soviet censorship) and “zine” (a different type of self-published work, with a history based partially in fan cultures, reproduced by photocopy). This piece cites some examples of samiZines and also, as the title says, a little bit of a “tactical tutorial” of anti-surveillance practices. 

Social Sciences

Kristina Richardson (History) studies non-elite peoples of the medieval Middle East. In “Invisible Strangers, or Romani History Reconsidered” she examines how the “Strangers,” or Yenish, have been rather arbitrarily seen as separate from the Roma because they use a different language. Dr. Richardson is particularly interested in the conflation of language with ethnicity, which has obscured the relationship between the Roma and the Yenish. From this perspective, she critiques the racialized myth of language, in which languages may be seen as “pure” or “bastardized.” Additionally, she addresses Romani calls for aid during the Holocaust and how the modern understanding of Roma identity was reified. Dr. Richardson suggests that acknowledging the Strangers and the existence of mixed languages in and histories may pave the way for more complex understandings of European and Middle Eastern history.

James Lowry (Library and Information Studies) researches records management for government information, especially in international and post-colonial settings. He and his co-authors (Alicia Chilcott, Kirsty Fife, Jenny Moran, Arike Oke, Anna Sexton, and Jass Thethi) wrote “Against Whitewashing: The Recent History of Anti-Racist Action in the British Archives Sector.” This article offers an account of anti-racist action in the archival sector of the UK between 2017 and 2020. The article describes organizations including the Black Cultural Archives, “the major site of Black archival representation in the United Kingdom,” which collects Black archival materials and counteracts whitewashing in representations of UK history.  The article discusses many other groups and activities, including the development of protocols for describing racist resources, the establishment of critical reading and discussion groups, and more. Finally, Dr. Lowry and co-authors dive into the repercussions of a racist incident on social media during the 2019 Archives and Records Association conference. Following this incident, there were more calls for specific action to address white supremacy within the profession; the article details some appropriate future steps.

Thank you to all the authors whose works are listed here!  

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.  

Welcome to the New Year! As we move into the Spring 2022 semester, it’s time to reflect back on 2021.   

Last year was a great year for CUNY Academic Works; over the course of the year, 526 different works were downloaded from the QC Publications and Research series, for a total of 37,769 downloads. These publications span all disciplines – education, biology, English, history, and many more. New works were frequently downloaded, of course, but many works of research going back to the beginning of Academic Works and even long before are still relevant, judging by the number of them that people accessed this year.  

Since I opened this post with a little data, I’d like to use this month’s edition of QC Research Highlights to highlight some works that are doing interesting things with data! Each of these works is interested in finding and evaluating new ways of measuring and using data, whether that means getting new results from old data or developing modified scales for understanding the data. This type of research is exciting because it creates new possibilities for future research.  

Let’s start with an article from three authors from Queens College’s School of Earth and Environmental Science: Christine Ramadhin, Chuixiang Yi, and George Hendrey. In their article, “Temperature Variance Portends and Indicates the Extent of Abrupt Climate Shifts,” the authors used a paleotemperature dataset documenting the changes in temperature over time.  While this dataset has been used in many other studies, this article focuses on the variance in temperature, finding a correlation between high variance and quick temperature increase. Their data suggests that changes in temperature variance can predict abrupt climate changes. 

Similarly, our next article is interested in finding new ways to query data produced elsewhere. Using data from the financial website Seeking Alpha, Cuiyuan Wang (formerly of the QC and Graduate Center Economics departments, currently at Trinity College), Tao Wang (Economics), and Changhe Yuan (Computer Science) ask: “Does Applying Deep Learning in Financial Sentiment Analysis Lead to Better Classification Performance?.” Seeking Alpha is a crowdsourced website where experts of various types express opinions on stocks. The authors used a deep learning model known as LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) to measure the accuracy of these opinions; the purpose of this experiment was to see whether this model was better than other tools which make similar assessments. They found that according to most metrics, LSTM outperformed more traditional measures. 

My colleague Joan Xu (Library) studied information searching and user engagement in visual information searching: “Validating and Developing the User Engagement Scale in Web-based Visual Information Searching.”  She considers the four-factor User Engagement Study model, a modified version of an earlier six-factor model, to measure users’ psychological involvement in visual searching, including in Google Image Searching and YouTube. She proposes a scale based on reward, focused attention, aesthetic appeal, and sense discovery. For visual searching specifically, sense discovery was shown to be important for cognitive-affective experience.  

Thank you to all the authors whose works are listed here!  

This is one of a series of blog posts featuring faculty publications in CUNY Academic Works. Academic Works is a service of the CUNY Libraries dedicated to collecting and providing access to the research, scholarship, and creative and pedagogical work of the City University of New York. In service to CUNY’s mission as a public university, content in Academic Works is freely available to all. 

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.

If you would like to share your research in Academic Works, please see this guide to Academic Works, or contact Nancy.Foasberg@qc.cuny.edu.