Honors Projects
Showing 241 - 250 of 662 Items

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Clara Tunny
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Katie Lynn Rea
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Jiahn Son
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Jonathan Gordon Lerdau
Access: Open access
- Libyan Jewry and Jews of the Italian peninsula have engaged in near-constant interaction at least as far back as the time of the Roman empire. This project seeks to add to the history of those interactions by discussing Italian Jewish colonial impacts on the Libyan Jewish population. Using ideas of Orientalism and the imagined nation, this project demonstrates how Libyan Jewish identity was shaped by interaction with Italy and how Italian Jews worked colonially to subjugate, define, and change Libyan Jewry. Through analyzing–among other things–newspapers, scholarship, and general Italian Jewish discussion of and interaction with Libyan Jews, I show how Italian Jews (and elite Libyan Jews) worked to Italianize and later ‘Hebraicize’ the Libyan Jewish community..
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Alexander Richardson
Access: Open access
- The primary goal of this thesis is to bridge two powerful learning paradigms—kernel methods and deep learning—to design novel neural architectures. Kernel methods offer a strong theoretical foundation, in contrast to deep learning, which often operates as a black-box despite its widespread success in real-world applications. In an era where such opaque models increasingly shape the economy and daily life, it is crucial to develop architectures that combine the theoretical clarity of kernel methods with the empirical effectiveness of deep learning. At present, computer scientists largely lead the charge in advancing state-of-the-art models, while many mathematicians work retrospectively to understand why these methods are so successful. A key motivation for this thesis—admittedly a personal one—is the hope that mathematical theory can not only explain existing architectures, but also inspire the development of better ones from the outset.

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Matthew Joseph Morales
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Yanevith A. Peña
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Yasemin Altug
Access: Open access
- In order to maintain circuit stability through environmental perturbations, such as increases in temperature, neural circuits are able to adjust their output via modulatory and ion channel regulation. For instance, peptide modulators enable the lobster cardiac neuromuscular system to sustain physiological function at temperatures that surpass the crash temperature of the organ in the absence of modulation. Crash temperature is defined as the temperature at which neural activity ceases. For a crash, this temperature induced loss of activity is recovered when temperature is returned within the permissible range. Thus, it is hypothesized that there are underlying physiological mechanisms employed by the nervous system that compensates for changes in temperature and provides stability within acute temperature fluctuations. Neuromodulatory mechanisms have been proposed as one hypothesis that provide this temperature compensation. In accordance with previously collected data (Lemus 2022), I hypothesized that myosuppressin, a crustacean neuropeptide, provides stability during acute temperature variations. Because myosuppressin acts on the cardiac neurons and muscles separately, we hypothesized that the myosuppressin-induced increase in heart contraction amplitude, and decrease in contraction period can offset each other to provide system stability as temperature is increased. To test whether or not myosuppressin stabilizes circuit output as temperature is increased, myosuppressin was applied to the lobster whole heart at 7ºC, 10ºC, 13ºC and 16ºC, for 20 minutes. Changes in cardiac output in response to temperature and modulation were assessed by measuring the contraction force, heart beat frequency, and minimum contraction force. Interestingly, and contrary to previous results, in this data set, the cardiac neuromuscular system was temperature compensated in saline alone (control), and was not temperature compensated when perfused with myosuppressin (10-6 M). These findings seemed to differ from Lemus’ data (2023), where the cardiac neuromuscular system was not temperature compensated in control conditions and became temperature compensated when perfused with myosuppressin. The seasons at which each data set was collected (June-August vs November-March) could underlie these observed discrepancies.

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Jasmine Jia
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Elisabeth C. Chan
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community