Honors Projects
Showing 221 - 230 of 662 Items
Seize the Memes: Community, Personal Expression, and Everyday Feminist Politics Through Instagram Memes
Date: 2018-01-01
Creator: Tessa Westfall
Access: Open access

Clam shells and sea temperature: Evaluation of the oxygen isotopic climate proxy in Arctica islandica and development of a shell-derived sea temperature reconstruction from Isle au Haut, Maine Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Brielle Martin
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Africa and the International Criminal Court: Behind the Backlash and Toward Future Solutions
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Marisa O'Toole
Access: Open access
- Fifteen years into its operation as the preeminent international institution charged with the prosecution of the most serious international crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has faced and continues to face intense backlash from the African continent. Once the Court’s most fervent advocates, many African leaders now lambast the ICC. In recent months, three African countries and the African Union en masse have attempted withdrawal from the Court, thus pushing the ICC-Africa relationship into the international spotlight as a topic of acute global interest. This paper seeks to explore the critiques behind this backlash through both a historical and present-day lens, as well as from the perspectives of African leaders, victims-locals, and civil society actors. In doing so, it investigates historical critiques of the ICTY and ICTR, concerns raised during the Rome Statute negotiations, current African leader perspectives as viewed through the case studies of Darfur, Kenya, Uganda, and the AU-ICC relationship, and present African victim-local and civil society opinions of the Court. By understanding the current and multi-faceted African opposition to the ICC and such criticisms’ historical roots, as well as the pockets of hope for the Court within Africa, this analysis reveals the ICC’s main challenges in its relationship with the African continent. With such hurdles unveiled, the ICC can pursue several strategies, located primarily on the state and individual levels, in its endeavor to address these important critiques and regain African support.
Using atmospheric O2 and CO2 measurements to determine the stoichiometry of photosynthesis and respiration in a temperate forest
Date: 2018-01-01
Creator: Margaret Marie Conley
Access: Open access
- The O2:CO2 exchange ratio of the terrestrial biosphere (αb) is an important parameter in carbon sink calculations, but its value is not well constrained. We investigate the stoichiometry of O2 and CO2 at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts over a span of six years, considering the covariation of O2 and CO2 in forest air during 6-hour periods to determine an average value for the O2:CO2 exchange ratio. This approach provides a way to determine the value of αb averaged across seasonal cycles and species assemblages. Our analysis produces an overall average exchange ratio of -1.06 ± 0.01. Comparing measurements within and above the canopy and during nighttime and daytime periods, we observe that atmospheric dynamics and canopy effects produce lower exchange ratios indicative of an enhanced forest signal at the low intake and for daytime periods. We also see an increase in the exchange ratio in the winter compared to the summer that may reflect changes in plant physiological processes or contamination by a fossil fuel signal. To determine whether our observed ratio is truly representative of αb, we use a simple model to estimate the range of variability in CO2 and O2 mixing ratios expected from local influence alone and use this as a criterion to isolate periods dominated by local exchange, yielding an average summer forest exchange ratio of -1.00 ± 0.02. Our analysis provides insight into the average value and variability of αb for temperate forests for use in calculation of the land carbon sink.
The Epistemology of Observation: Performance, Power, and The Regulation of Female Sexuality in The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Sarah Claudia Bonanno
Access: Open access
Modulation of the crustacean cardiac neuromuscular system by the SLY neuropeptide family
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Grant Griesman
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generators (CPGs) are neuronal networks that produce rhythmic motor output in the absence of sensory stimuli. Invertebrate CPGs are valuable models of neural circuit dynamics and neuromodulation because they continue to generate fictive activity in vitro. For example, the cardiac ganglion (CG) of the Jonah crab (Cancer borealis) and American lobster (Homarus americanus) contains nine electrochemically coupled neurons that fire bursts of action potentials to trigger a heartbeat. The CG is modulated by neuropeptides, amines, small molecule transmitters, gases, and mechanosensory feedback pathways that enable flexibility and constrain output. One such modulator, the SLY neuropeptide family, was previously shown to be expressed in hormonal release sites and within the CG itself and has unusual processing features. However, its physiological effect was unknown. Here, I performed dose-response experiments in the crab and lobster whole heart and isolated CG to determine the threshold concentration of SLY neuropeptides to which these systems respond. The crab isoform had strong, excitatory effects in the crab whole heart and weakly modulated the crab CG. The lobster isoform weakly modulated the lobster whole heart and CG. Surprisingly, the crab isoform exerted large, variable effects on the lobster system, which suggests that SLY neuropeptides, their receptors, and their signaling pathways may be evolutionarily conserved across these two species. This research contributes to our understanding of how neural circuits can generate flexible output in response to modulation. It may also offer insight into processes influenced by peptidergic neurotransmission in the nervous systems of other animals, including mammals.

Group-theory constraints on color-ordered four-point amplitudes in SO(N) gauge-theories Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Athis Osathapan
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Mathematical Notions of Resilience: The Effects of DisturbanceI in One-Dimensional Nonlinear Systems
Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Stephen Ligtenberg
Access: Open access
Basins of Attraction and Metaoptimization for Particle Swarm Optimization Methods
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: David Ma
Access: Open access
- Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a metaheuristic optimization method that finds near- optima by spawning particles which explore within a given search space while exploiting the best candidate solutions of the swarm. PSO algorithms emulate the behavior of, say, a flock of birds or a school of fish, and encapsulate the randomness that is present in natural processes. In this paper, we discuss different initialization schemes and meta-optimizations for PSO, its performances on various multi-minima functions, and the unique intricacies and obstacles that the method faces when attempting to produce images for basins of attraction, which are the sets of initial points that are mapped to the same minima by the method. This project compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Particle Swarm with other optimization methods, namely gradient-descent, in the context of basin mapping and other metrics. It was found that with proper parameterization, PSO can amply explore the search space regardless of initialization. For all functions, the swarm was capable of finding, within some tolerance, the global minimum or minima in fewer than 60 iterations by having sufficiently well chosen parameters and parameterization schemes. The shortcomings of the Particle Swarm method, however, are that its parameters often require fine-tuning for different search spaces to most efficiently optimize and that the swarm cannot produce the analytical minimum. Overall, the PSO is a highly adaptive and computationally efficient method with few initial restraints that can be readily used as the first step of any optimization task.
Exploring Random Walks on Graphs for Protein Function Prediction
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Angela M Dahl
Access: Open access