Honors Projects
Showing 481 - 490 of 564 Items
The Role of the Nitric Oxide Negative Feedback Loop in the Stability of the Lobster Cardiac Ganglion Homarus americanus Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Marie Marjorie Bergsund
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
The Role of Competition and Patient Travel in Hospital Profits: Why Health Insurers Should Subsidize Patient Travel
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Joseph S Durgin
Access: Open access
- This paper explores the effects of patient travel distance on hospital profit margins, with consideration to the effects of travel subsidies on hospital pricing. We develop a model in which hospital agglomeration leads to a negative relationship between profit margins and patient travel distance, challenging the standard IO theory that profit margins are higher for firms with greater distances of customer travel. Using data on patient visits and hospital finances from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), we test our theory and confirm that a hospital tends to have less pricing power if it draws patients from beyond its local cluster. We then consider how our results might justify the subsidizing of patient travel by insurers and government payers. Lastly, we present an argument for why the ubiquitous Hirschman-Herfindahl index of market concentration can be robust to owner and system-level hospital cooperation.
Superhero Ecologies: An Environmental Reading of Contemporary Superhero Cinema
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Andrew McGowan
Access: Open access
Receptors and Neuropeptides in the Cardiac Ganglion of the American Lobster, Homarus americanus: A Bioinformatics and Mass Spectrometric Investigation
Date: 2019-01-01
Creator: Louis Mendez
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generators (CPGs) are neural networks that generate rhythmic motor patterns to allow organisms to perform stereotypical tasks, such as breathing, scratching, flying, and walking. The American lobster, Homarus americanus, is a simple model system whose CPGs are functionally analogous to those in vertebrate models and model complex rhythmic behaviors. CPGs in many Crustacea, including the American lobster, have been studied because of their ability to maintain biological function after isolation in physiologically relevant conditions. The cardiac ganglion (CG) is a CPG consisting of five larger motor neurons and four smaller pacemaker neurons that innervate the cardiac neuromuscular system and generate electrical bursts that drive patterned behaviors. Neuromodulators, such as neuropeptides, are known to modulate neural output in the CPGs of the American lobster. Currently, neuromodulators affecting the cardiac ganglia are thought to be mainly expressed and secreted outside of the cardiac ganglia, acting as extrinsic neuromodulators. However, there is current evidence to support the idea that neuromodulators can be intrinsically expressed within the cardiac ganglion of the American lobster. Preliminary studies using transcriptomic techniques on genomic and transcriptomic information indicate that neuropeptides are likely expressed within the cardiac ganglion. However, little research has been done to determine whether these neuropeptides are expressed in the cardiac ganglion of the American lobster. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to combine bioinformatics and mass spectrometric techniques to determine whether select neuropeptides are present in the cardiac ganglion within the cardiac neuromuscular system of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Our data mining techniques using protein query sequences obtained from previously annotated brain and eyestalk transcriptomes resulted in the identification of 22 putative neuropeptides preprohormones from 17 neuropeptide families and 20 putative neuropeptide receptors from 17 neuropeptide receptor families in the CG transcriptome. Additionally, 9 putative neuropeptide receptors from 7 neuropeptide receptor families were detected in the cardiac muscle transcriptome. Of the 17 neuropeptide families detected, receptors for 9 of these neuropeptide families were detected in the CG transcriptome. Receptors for 6 of the neuropeptide families were also present in the cardiac muscle transcriptome. Interestingly, receptors for 6 of neuropeptide families detected were not found in either the CG or cardiac muscle transcriptomes, and receptors for 4 neuropeptide families that weren’t detected in the CG transcriptome were found in the cardiac muscle transcriptome. Therefore, our research suggests that neuropeptides are able to modulate CPG activity extrinsically, either though hormonal or local delivery, or intrinsically. Additionally, neuropeptides were extracted from the stomatogastric ganglion and the commissural ganglion using a scaled-down neuropeptide extraction protocol to estimate the number of tissues required to obtain sufficiently strong mass spectrometry signals. Pooled samples with two commissural ganglia and single samples of a commissural ganglion and a stomatogastric ganglion displayed little signal and an increase in larger peptides and impurities relative to single-tissue samples. Therefore, further optimization of the scaled-down neuropeptide extraction protocol must be done prior to analysis of a cardiac ganglion in the American lobster.
A "Peculiarly American" Enthusiasm: George Bellows, Traditional Masculinity, and The Big Dory
Date: 2014-01-01
Creator: James W. Denison, IV
Access: Open access
- A “Peculiarly American” Enthusiasm: George Bellows, Traditional Masculinity, and The Big Dory investigates the portrayal of masculinity in the oeuvre of the much-lauded yet enigmatic American painter George Bellows (1882-1925). Rather than relying on Bellows’ urban works for source material, a significant portion of this investigation is conducted via a case study of Bellows’ 1913 panel The Big Dory, a scene of fishermen pushing a boat into the North Atlantic off Monhegan Island, Maine that the artist painted during a sojourn on the island in the months after his involvement in the landmark Armory Show in New York. The paper situates The Big Dory within the greater context of the history of the depiction of Maine through the lens of the heroic fisherman. Bellows achieved a heroic effect by forcing the viewer to focus on the labor of the fishermen via their positioning in the near middleground and by echoing the hues and forms of the men elsewhere in the painting, giving the work a sense of visual unity. I argue that these strategies highlight Bellows’ interest in tradition rather than modernism. Armed with this knowledge, Bellows’ other works come more sharply into focus. I reveal that the traditional heterosexual mode of white male identity Bellows represented in The Big Dory was not simply echoed in Bellows’ personal comportment, but in fact pervaded his oeuvre; such masculinity was a reaction by patriarchal American society against the perceived growth of other influences in the early twentieth century. The portrayal of such masculinity is then established as the key underlying feature of the sense of “Americanism” which has traditionally dominated reception of Bellows’ art.
“I’m Going to Help You Become a Better You”: Teacher-Student Dynamics in Special Education
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Sophie Sadovnikoff
Access: Open access
- This study explores teachers’ roles in special education in terms of how they interact with students with disabilities. In the struggle against oppression and disempowerment, teachers can play a crucial role in employing education as the great equalizer, or else not. The question this research seeks to answer is: how do special education teachers interact with their students with disabilities, and how does this teacher role fit within a society that seeks to marginalize these students? I argue that special education teachers reproduce ableism by disciplining, normalizing, and controlling their students, but teachers express a deep sense of caring for and about their students, and understand their work as being their best effort at helping their students. The ableist actions that they perform are, ironically, an effort to help their students create fulfilling lives within an ableist society.
The Future Regained: Toward a Modernist Ethics of Time
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jack Rodgers
Access: Open access
- This project explores the convergence of futurity and ethics through an examination of key figures in modernist literature. It studies works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in order to conceptualize an encounter with the future which goes beyond a traditionally linear and teleological model of time, setting out to reimagine the role of both temporality and ethics in novels including Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses. Key facets of this exploration, which is metaphorized and guided by the image of a window, include temporal otherness, transgression and fracturing of the self (primarily understood through the paradoxical experience of dying), and the arrival of the future into the present. Major theoretical influences include queer theory, poststructuralism, and anti-dialectics. Ultimately, the project makes the case that it is possible to construct a modernist ethics which embraces the messianic potential of absences, blanks, and blind spots, a proposition made possible by our encounter with an incomprehensible yet imminent fragment of the future out of place in the present. At the close, it suggests an ethical imperative towards “affirmative negation”—a messianic, annunciatory, affirmation of that which is missing or omitted.
Ecotourism Reconsidered: Chinese and Western Participation in the Thai Elephant Industry
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Miao (Jasmine) Long
Access: Open access
Differential gene expression during compensatory plasticity in the prothoracic ganglion of the cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Felicia F. Wang
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Mémoire et souvenir dans l'imaginaire antillais - Maryse Condé et Fabienne Kanor: Identité et existence noire aux Antilles et en France
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Elijah B Koblan-Huberson
Access: Open access
- L’histoire d’un peuple est en grande partie liée à sa mémoire, aux souvenirs et commémorations des évènements passés et des ancêtres.En raison de la colonisation et ses conséquences, les habitants des îles de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique vivent un malaise vis-à-vis de la mémoire en tant que peuple antillais.Par conséquent, il est important de se demander comment, après la déshumanisation effectuée par l’extermination des premiers habitants, les Caraïbes et les Arawaks, l’esclavagisation des Africains, et la colonisation des territoires antillais, une nouvelle conceptualisation de la mémoire peut mener à une nouvelle conceptualisation de l’existence et de l’identité pour l’être humain antillais qui provient de ceux qui ont été esclavagisés. Pour répondre à la question nous examinerons les romans de Maryse Condé et de Fabienne Kanor.