Welcome To OpenBU
OpenBU is Boston University’s digital institutional repository for scholarly articles, theses and dissertations, preprints, and grey literature. This repository enables BU researchers to share, disseminate, and preserve their scholarship, and makes their research more accessible
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Recent Submissions
An outline course in rural sociology
(Boston University, 1928) Frampton, Merle Elbert
The balance of power in the control of religious education
(Boston University, 1929) Armstrong, Housen Parr
Josiah Royce's philosophy of religion
(Boston University, 1928) Johnson, Paul E.
Poster: analyzing and correcting inaccurate CVE-CWE mappings in the National Vulnerability Database
(ACM, 2024-12-02) Şimşek, Şevval; Shi, Zhenpeng; Xia, Howell; Medina, David Sastre; Starobinski, David; Luo, Bo; Liao, Xiaojing; Xu, Jun; Kirda, Engin; Lie, David
The commercialization of volunteer contributions in digital platforms
(2025) Lee, Jiho; Burtch, Gordon; Dellarocas, Chrysanthos
Digital platforms increasingly rely on the unpaid contributions of volunteers to build, maintain, and scale their products and services. While such contributions generate substantial economic value, the commercialization of volunteer work raises critical questions about organizational control, contributor agency, and community sustainability. This dissertation investigates how commercialization efforts reshape contributor behavior and platform-community dynamics across different stages of monetization, drawing on quantitative case studies of monetization events that took place at two organizations: the Huffington Post and Duolingo. The first study examines Duolingo, considering an increasingly common practice in platform governance, wherein the operator transitions from volunteerism to a model of paid employment, in preparation for an eventual sale or public offering. Focusing on Duolingo’s internal professionalization strategy, I analyze detailed activity logs and internal records from the Duolingo Incubator to investigate how pre-existing organizational commitment shaped volunteers’ decisions to apply for paid roles and their subsequent productivity once hired. While all three forms of commitment—continuance, affective, and normative—influenced these outcomes, continuance commitment—defined as sustained engagement motivated by the perceived benefits of staying and the costs of leaving—emerged as the strongest predictor of both application behavior and post-hire performance. In contrast, affective commitment, while associated with a desire to stay involved, did not consistently translate into productivity under formal employment arrangements.
The second study examines a second form of commercialization event: acquisition. Examining panel data on contributor activity surrounding the announcement of AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post, I apply a dynamic difference-in-differences approach to understand causal effects on different groups of contributors. I find that the acquisition led to a significant decline in article submissions, particularly among unpaid contributors and specifically contributors working as professional journalists. These heterogeneous effects offer insight into the underlying mechanisms of contributor disengagement, highlighting how perceived violations of community norms—rather than the acquisition itself—drive withdrawal. Further, the results highlight the critical role of worker identity as a driver of volunteers’ response to commercialization events.
I conclude by discussing open questions in this space and identifying fruitful avenues for future research. Together, these studies advance our understanding of how commercialization reshapes the social contract between digital platforms and their contributors, offering both theoretical and practical insights for platform governance and emphasizing the importance of managing contributor relationships during key organizational transitions.
Cannabis use amongst individuals with CNS neuroinflammatory diseases
(2024) Delgado, Melanie; Ratner, Marcia; Levy, Michael
Patients with rare central nervous system (CNS) inflammatory diseases often endure heightened levels of pain unique to their conditions. Despite the availability of symptomatic treatments, many individuals with neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD), myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody disease (MOGAD), acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM), and transverse myelitis (TM) experience only partial relief with these therapies. The use of medicinal cannabis is widespread amongst patients with central nervous system neuroinflammatory disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS). While extensive research has been published on cannabis use in the MS community, this topic has not been explored in the rarer neuroinflammatory conditions. Neurologists’ clinical observations coupled with insights from patient advocacy groups and a dearth of published information have led to a range of usage patterns, dosing, reported adverse events, and motivations among these patient populations. This cross-sectional study sought to begin to bridge these gaps through a comprehensive survey. By employing an electronic census design using a REDcap software, participants with rare neuroinflammatory disease belonging to social media advocacy groups were invited to participate via email-based invitation. This study aims to elucidate the frequency, mode, and dosing of cannabis use; symptom targets; perceived efficacy; and adverse effects. With this data, the roles of healthcare providers in cannabis use, reasons for non-use or discontinuation, and the relationship between recreational and medicinal use will be explored. In summary, our findings show that out of 117 respondents, 57.3% of the population turns to cannabis for symptom relief. Of those that use cannabis, three of the most common symptoms being targeted included: neuropathic pain, insomnia and muscle spasticity. The most common methods of cannabis consumption were through ingestion (ex.edibles), inhalation, and or vaporization. Respondents frequently reported daily consumption and that it was a very effective outlet for pain management, anxiety, depression and sleep disturbances. Symptoms with little relief from cannabis included the following: tremor, overactive bladder, sexual dysfunction, migraines/headaches, eye pain and nausea. Survey respondents also reported that while some feel comfortable discussing cannabis use with physicians, others were not comfortable due to the belief that their physician is unlikely to have helpful knowledge or experience with cannabis use. With the rising popularity of cannabis use for symptomatic relief in neuroinflammatory conditions, these findings offer guidance to physicians and patients hoping to better understand this topic.
A scaffolded approach to learning FEA implementation: code as textbook, LLMs as tutor
(2025-05-28) Lejeune, Emma
Modern finite element analysis (FEA) software—both commercial and open source—can achieve impressive results while abstracting away much of the underlying complexity. While this is a strength from an implementation standpoint, it also means that users can begin mapping inputs to outputs without understanding how the software actually works. Developing this understanding, however, is valuable: it satisfies curiosity, makes it easier to interpret errors (e.g., why a solver fails to converge), and equips learners to contribute to future advancements. Currently, a wealth of excellent resources already exists: comprehensive textbooks, free online courses, informal lecture notes, and open-source codebases. So what does this document add? With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), we now have a new educational tool—whether we choose to embrace it or not. This guide is meant to help learners use LLMs to teach themselves the fundamentals of FEA, particularly in the context of onboarding to FEA software and understanding what happens "under the hood." It is not a replacement for a full course in FEA, but rather a supplement that offers LLM-based strategies for exploration. This document is paired with a GitHub repository that provides example code to support that process.
Protocol optimization and volumetric imaging for the functional lung atlas
(2025) Jones, Mitchell; Nia, Hadi T.
Understanding how mechanical and pathological forces interact with the 3D lung structure, cellular populations, and molecular architecture on an organ-wide scale remains a central challenge in pulmonary biology and disease research. Current techniques used to spatially interrogate biology — including histology, medical imaging, and spatial transcriptomics — lack the ability to resolve full 3D organ architecture while simultaneously capturing cellular and molecular information. Additionally, live organ imaging methods such as intravital windows and, in our lab, the Crystal Ribcage have enabled impressive visualization of dynamic processes on the lung surface while preserving physiological function, but visuals are restricted to superficial layers due to light scattering. Emerging techniques using chemical optical clearing have overcome this limitation by matching tissue refractive index and removing light-scattering components in fixed tissues, enabling deep optical imaging across intact organs. Additionally, novel cyclic immunofluorescent multiplexing methods have enabled imaging of many molecular targets within a single sample, though labeling thick tissue sections remains a key challenge. Utilizing these advances, this thesis aims to develop a pipeline for volumetric imaging of the murine lung by integrating serial tissue sectioning, 2,2-thiodiethanol (TDE) optical clearing, and high-resolution confocal microscopy. We focused on (1) optimizing sample preparation, clearing, and imaging for thick, well-oriented lung sections; and (2) aligning slice images to form a complete volume. In part this required registering fluorescent images to a structural scan acquired via section tomography combined with optical coherence tomography, allowing correction of slice deformation and enabling reconstruction of anatomically accurate volumes. This work demonstrates the desired image resolution and alignment for building a functional lung atlas — an integrated 3D map of structural, cellular, and molecular features across the murine lung. Future work will focus on scaling up computation and optimizing multiplex labeling.
The experience of worship for older adolescents in the church school
(Boston University, 1929) Wynn, Pauline LLewellyn
Flexibility and control in working memory gating: behavioral, demographic, and neuromodulatory influences
(2025) Huang, Han; Reinhart, Robert M. G.
Working memory (WM) supports goal-directed behavior by maintaining and updating relevant information. A key mechanism underlying this function is gating—the selective control of what enters and exits WM and how its contents guide behavior. This dissertation investigated how behavioral cues, aging, and neuromodulation influence distinct WM gating operations, leveraging the reference-back task to isolate input, output, and response gating. Chapter 2 examined the effects of retro-cues and aging. Retro-cues enhanced gating efficiency by reducing switch costs and mitigating interference, particularly under high-conflict conditions. These benefits extended to updating processes, suggesting that cue-driven selective reactivation facilitates proactive control across WM functions. In contrast, aging broadly impaired performance, increasing gate switch costs and elevating updating demands. Chapter 3 explored whether a specific gating mechanism—input gate opening—could be selectively modulated via neuromodulation. High-definition transcranial alternating current stimulation (HD-tACS) significantly reduced input gate opening costs without affecting other WM operations or overall task performance. This result supports theoretical accounts of beta oscillations as facilitators of flexible cognitive engagement and highlights their role in WM gating dynamics. Exploratory EEG analyses also implicated delta-band activity during gate opening, suggesting a potential interaction between oscillatory and corticostriatal mechanisms. Together, these findings offer converging evidence that WM gating is a functionally dissociable process shaped by attentional control, neural oscillations, and aging. Behavioral and demographic factors exerted broad effects across WM operations, while frequency-specific neuromodulation selectively influenced a targeted gating mechanism. These insights refine the Prefrontal–Basal Ganglia Working Memory (PBWM) framework and offer promising, non-invasive strategies for improving cognitive control in aging and clinical populations.