Honors Projects
Showing 471 - 480 of 662 Items
Understanding the Truce of the Irish War of Independence Through Regional Newspaper Editorials
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Janet Elizabeth Briggs
Access: Open access
Characterizing the organizational/activational role of ovarian hormones in the mediation of
adversity-induced anxiety in female rats Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Cassidy J. Scott
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Random Walks on Finite Groups: an
Application of Group Representations
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: David Guan
Access: Open access
- Playing cards, a set of fifty-two cards with four suits and thirteen numbers, appear every- where in ourdaily lives. In particular, theyare commonly used ongambling tables in casinos. Before every game, the dealer needs to shuffle those cards to put them into a random order so that the game is fair. (Is it really the case in casinos?) One may wonder whether a shuffling technique is really efficient or not, i.e. whether it can turn the deck into a random configu- ration in a small number of rounds. Mathematically, this can be interpreted as a problem of random walks on the symmetric group of 52 elements S_{52} and we aim to determine how fast the random walk becomes (uniformly) random. This paper aims to explain an important application of group representations to this type of problems; in particular, techniques from group representations can provide a (roughly) accurate approximation. There will be six chapters in this paper. Chapter 1 is an introduction to problems of random walks. Chapter 2 and 3 discuss group representations in general, and a key lemma for application is discussed at the end of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is an application to the easiest random walk one can encounter. Chapter 5 focuses on discussing properties distinctive to symmetric groups, and Chapter 6 discusses a card-shuffling example in details. Contents in Chapter 5 are mostly from the second chapter of [Sag01]; the key result in Chapter 6 along with the rest of the paper are mostly from [Dia88] with a few exceptions. This paper is written in a self-explanatory way, so anyone with necessary background of linear algebra, group theory, and probability will be able to follow the entirety of it.
Exploring the Effect of Core Tactics and Demographics on Squash
Gameplay Patterns Using Computer Vision
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Abhiroop Reddy Nagireddygari
Access: Open access
- This paper presents a computer vision system for analyzing common tactical and training pat- terns in squash using player locations and movement dynamics. Leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as YOLO and TrackNet, we extract player coordinates on a squash court through a lightweight, single-camera framework. Match footage and detections are segmented by gender, skill level, and match phase to enable contextual comparisons. From 2D coordinates, we generate heatmaps of player locations, court coverage percentages, and distance-over-time graphs to visualize movement tendencies. Our results show that women demonstrate greater ball control and accuracy than men across all levels, while professional players exhibit more aggressive court usage than amateurs. We also identify that games 2 and 3 are the most physically demanding, highlighting a balance between slow starts and fatigue.
Demagogues of Disunion: The Role of Honor in Southern Secession Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Evan Robert Cote Chapman
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Energy Policy is a Highway: Federal Energy Policy Evolution in the United States Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Chelsea Moody
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
La representación literaria y la construcción espacial de la pampa argentina – un
análisis de textos desde el siglo XIX hasta el XXI
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Kaitlyn Brunner
Access: Open access
- This paper analyzes the spacialization of the pampa in Argentine literature, both canonical works and contemporary ones. How is rurality and the Argentine countryside represented in these works? How do they expand upon or challenge each other? The immensity of the pampa and its vast plains has served as a focal point of fascination for various authors and Argentine political leaders, intimately related to ideas of frontier and progress. It has served as a site for various political dreams and agendas throughout history and presidential administrations, even to propel its own extermination project to assert dominion over the pampa and assassinate its own Indigenous people. The various conceptualizations of the pampa and the people who inhabit and care for the land—the gauchos and indigenous communities—demonstrate a larger dichotomy of the city and the urban versus the countryside and the rural, or as Sarmiento puts it—civilization and barbarie. The effort to tame the ‘wild’ pampa produces the immense projects of agricultural development that we see today, degrading the land and poisoning the bodies of rural people. More contemporarily, the spacialization of the city and the country in contemporary Argentine literature begins to subvert and defy the traditional binary thinking of the two spaces. I analyze Argentine literature from the 19th century to the 21st century to show how the locus of the pampa and other rural spaces has changed over time, showing the reconfiguration of the country’s landscape in literature.
GEM-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization Guided by Enhanced Memory
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Kevin Fakai Chen
Access: Open access
- Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a widely-used nature-inspired optimization technique in which a swarm of virtual particles work together with limited communication to find a global minimum or optimum. PSO has has been successfully applied to a wide variety of practical problems, such as optimization in engineering fields, hybridization with other nature-inspired algorithms, or even general optimization problems. However, PSO suffers from a phenomenon known as premature convergence, in which the algorithm's particles all converge on a local optimum instead of the global optimum, and cannot improve their solution any further. We seek to improve upon the standard Particle Swarm PSO algorithm by fixing this premature convergence behavior. We do so by storing and exploiting increased information in the form of past bests, which we deem enhanced memory. We introduce three types of modifications to each new algorithm (which we call a GEM-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization, Guided by Enhanced Memory, because our modifications all deal with enhancing the memory of each particle). These are procedures for saving a found best, for removing a best from memory when a new one is to be added, and for selecting one (or more) bests to be used from those saved in memory. By using different combinations of these modifications, we can create many different variants of GEM-PSO that have a wide variety of behaviors and qualities. We analyze the performance of GEM-PSO, discuss the impact of PSO's parameters on the algorithms' performances, isolate different modifications in order to closely study their impact on the performance of any given GEM-PSO variant, and finally look at how multiple modifications perform. Finally, we draw conclusions about the efficacy and potential of GEM-PSO variants, and provide ideas for further exploration in this area of study. Many GEM-PSO variants are able to consistently outperform standard PSO on specific functions, and GEM-PSO variants can be shown to be promising, with both general and specific use cases.
Lie to Me: Linguistic Markers of Deception in Relation to Individual Differences in Executive Control Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Lauren Pashkowski
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
"I Deny Your Authority to Try My Conscience:" Conscription and Conscientious Objectors In Britain During the Great War
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Albert William Wetter
Access: Open access
- During the Great War, the Military Service Act was introduced on January 27, 1916 and redefined British citizenship. Moreover, some men objected to the state’s military service mandate, adamant that compliance violated their conscience. This thesis investigates how the introduction of conscription reshaped British society, dismantled the “sacred principle” of volunteerism, and replaced it with conscription, resulting in political and popular debates, which altered the individual’s relationship with the state. British society transformed from a polity defined by the tenets of Liberalism and a free-will social contract to a society where citizenship was correlated to duty to the state. Building off Lois Bibbings’ research on conscientious objectors, this thesis nuances the analysis with the case studies of David Blelloch and Norman Gaudie. Framed by two theories—Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional community—these case studies demonstrate how conscientious objectors exposed the incongruence of the British imagined and emotional community, and the redefinition of citizenship. By weaving these theories into the British Great War tapestry, this thesis contends that the British nation was imagined differently before the war than it was after the war because of the introduction of conscription. Drawing from parliamentary debate transcripts, newspaper articles, and archival material from the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Liddle Personal Collection at the University of Leeds, Blelloch’s and Gaudie’s respective case studies ultimately bait the question: “What does it mean to be British?”