Showing 4951 - 5000 of 5831 Items
Date: 2009-02-20
Creator: Paul P. Brountas
Access: Audio recording permanently restricted
- Biographical NotePaul Peter Brountas was born on March 19, 1932, in Bangor, Maine. He and George Mitchell were classmates at Bowdoin College, where he was graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1954; he took bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford in 1956 and his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1960. That same year, he joined Hale and Dorr, the predecessor of WilmerHale. He became a partner in 1968 and served as senior counsel to the firm from 2003 until his retirement in 2005. In 1987 and 1988, he served as national chairman of the Committee to Elect Michael S. Dukakis President of the United States, and in 1968 he served as a campaign aide to Senator Edmund Muskie during the Humphrey-Muskie presidential campaign. SummaryInterview includes discussion of: growing up in Bangor, Maine, influenced by Greek ethnicity; attending Bowdoin College in the early 1950s. Remainder of interview permanently restricted.
Date: 2016-01-27
Creator: V. Douhovnikoff, S. H. Taylor, E. L.G. Hazelton, C. M. Smith, J., O'Brien
Access: Open access
- The fitness costs of reproduction by clonal growth can include a limited ability to adapt to environmental and temporal heterogeneity. Paradoxically, some facultatively clonal species are not only able to survive, but colonize, thrive and expand in heterogeneous environments. This is likely due to the capacity for acclimation (sensu stricto) that compensates for the fitness costs and complements the ecological advantages of clonality. Introduced Phragmites australis demonstrates great phenotypic plasticity in response to temperature, nutrient availability, geographic gradient, water depths, habitat fertility, atmospheric CO2, interspecific competition and intraspecific competition for light. However, no in situ comparative subspecies studies have explored the difference in plasticity between the non-invasive native lineage and the highly invasive introduced lineage. Clonality of the native and introduced lineages makes it possible to control for genetic variation, making P. australis a unique system for the comparative study of plasticity. Using previously identified clonal genotypes, we investigated differences in their phenotypic plasticity through measurements of the lengths and densities of stomata on both the abaxial (lower) and adaxial (upper) surfaces of leaves, and synthesized these measurements to estimate impacts on maximum stomatal conductance to water (gwmax). Results demonstrated that at three marsh sites, invasive lineages have consistently greater gwmax than their native congeners, as a result of greater stomatal densities and smaller stomata. Our analysis also suggests that phenotypic plasticity, determined as within-genotype variation in gwmax, of the invasive lineage is similar to, or exceeds, that shown by the native lineage.

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Chiamaka Doris Okoye
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2011-08-01
Creator: Kimberly A. Tice, D. B. Carlon
Access: Open access
- Genome scans have identified candidate regions of the genome undergoing selection in a wide variety of organisms, yet have rarely been applied to broadly dispersing marine organisms experiencing divergent selection pressures, where high recombination rates can reduce the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) and the ability to detect genomic regions under selection. The broadly dispersing periwinkle Echinolittorina hawaiiensis exhibits a heritable shell sculpture polymorphism that is correlated with environmental variation. To elucidate the genetic basis of phenotypic variation, a genome scan using over 1000 AFLP loci was conducted on smooth and sculptured snails from divergent habitats at four replicate sites. Approximately 5% of loci were identified as outliers with Dfdist, whereas no outliers were identified by BayeScan. Closer examination of the Dfdist outliers supported the conclusion that these loci were false positives. These results highlight the importance of controlling for Type I error using multiple outlier detection approaches, multitest corrections and replicate population comparisons. Assuming shell phenotypes have a genetic basis, our failure to detect outliers suggests that the life history of the target species needs to be considered when designing a genome scan. © 2011 The Authors. Journal of Evolutionary Biology © 2011 European Society For Evolutionary Biology.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Nina Nayiri McKay
Access: Open access
- Even though Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, many American children still attend schools that are racially and, increasingly, socioeconomically segregated. Philadelphia, a northern city that did not have an explicit policy of segregating children on the basis of race when Brown was decided, nevertheless still has entrenched residential segregation that replicates in public schools. The metropolitan area became a segregated space in the years around World War II, when housing discrimination, employment discrimination, lending discrimination, suburbanization, and urban renewal started the years-long trajectory of growing white suburbs surrounding an increasingly non-white and under-resourced urban core. These patterns had profound implications for school segregation, which city organizers began trying to fight shortly after Brown v. Board. However, the first court case to take on segregation in Philadelphia schools—Chisholm v. The Board of Education—was largely unsuccessful, with overburdened NAACP and ally lawyers struggling to meet the judge’s expectations of concrete proof of an intent to segregate on the School District of Philadelphia’s part. In the early 1960s, though, the state’s Human Relations Commission obtained a legislative mandate to take on school desegregation. It won its first integration victory in the Pennsylvania port city of Chester before moving to Philadelphia, where it pushed for school integration from 1968 to 2009. The city’s political and ideological battles over those decades reflect national trends around the rise of conservatism and neoliberalism in suburban politics and school reform, limiting the possibilities for change.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Ryan Telingator
Access: Open access
- Many Americans believe that the president is an omnipotent figure who can achieve any political or policy objective if they try hard enough. On the contrary, the presidency was intentionally crafted by the Framers of the Constitution to have limited legislative powers to mitigate the risk of despotism. Thus, this paper seeks to answer the question, when is change possible?, to try to bridge the gap between popular belief and Constitutional powers. Three questions guide this research: 1) What conditions are conducive for change? 2) What Constitutional tools help a president facilitate change? And 3) What skills can a president bring to office to help create change? This thesis seeks to answer these questions by reviewing the existing literature on political context, tools, and legislative skills. Case study analyses of the Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan presidencies are then presented to assess their legislative successes and failures, and the factors behind them. Finally, the thesis concludes by evaluating President Joseph Biden’s first 100 days in office and uses the theory and findings from the cases to predict Biden’s ability to affect change. This research reveals that the political context is the most important factor in determining the possibility of change – successful change relies on open policy windows, resilient ideological commitments, and a mandate to stimulate congressional action. Within the constraints of the case studies, Constitutional tools were not important. Legislative skills helped to pass legislation, however, they were not potent enough to overcome a bad political context.

Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Zachary FM Burton
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Nur Schettino
Access: Open access
- Cosmic rays have been detected for over a century. While some sources have been confirmed, they cannot explain the high energy of the particles (> 10^15 eV), so it remains unclear where and how they are accelerated to extreme energies. The study of astrophysical high-energy neutrinos may help solve the puzzle. These neutrinos are produced by cosmic rays interacting with other charged particles or photons. Moreover, while cosmic rays do not reveal their sources of origin because they can be deflected by magnetic fields, cosmic neutrinos detected by the IceCube Observatory can be traced back to their sources of origin. We will consider an active galactic nucleus (AGN) as a candidate source for a high-energy neutrino.This thesis examines the AGN WISEA J175051.31+105645.3 as a potential source for IceCube-220303A, a high-energy neutrino with a 78% probability of being astrophysical in origin. Using follow-up NuSTAR and Swift/XRT observations, WISEA J175051.31+105645.3 was the only viable source we found in IceCube-220303A’s uncertainty region. We used follow-up X-ray data to construct a multi-wavelength spectral energy distribution (SED) through which we calculated the AGN’s neutrino energy flux. This calculation yields the number of neutrinos we would expect to detect from the AGN in a given time period. We used this number to calculate the probability that IceCube-220303A was emitted by WISEA J175051.31+105645.3. Finding a statistically significant link between IceCube-220303A and WISEA J175051.31+105645.3 may help us better understand what processes can accelerate particles like cosmic rays to extreme energies and learn more about AGN.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Karin van Hassel
Access: Open access
- The cardiac ganglion (CG) is a central pattern generator, a neural network that, when activated, produces patterned motor outputs such as breathing and walking. The CG induces the heart contractions of the American lobster, Homarus americanus, making the lobster heart neurogenic. In the American lobster, the CG is made up of nine neurons: four premotor pacemaker neurons that send signals to five motor neurons, causing bursts of action potentials from the motor neurons. These bursts cause cardiac muscle contractions that vary in strength based on the burst duration, frequency, and pattern. The activity of the CG is modulated by feedback pathways and neuromodulators, allowing for flexibility in the CG’s motor output and appropriate responses to changes in the animal’s environment. Two feedback pathways modulate the CG motor output, the excitatory cardiac muscle stretch and inhibitory nitric oxide feedback pathways. Despite our knowledge of the modulation of the CG by feedback pathways and neuromodulators separately, little is known about how neuromodulators influence the sensory feedback response to cardiac muscle stretch. I found one neuromodulator to modulate each phase of the stretch response differently, one neuromodulator to generally not affect the stretch response, and three neuromodulators to suppress the stretch response. These results suggest neuromodulators can act to produce flexibility in a CPG’s motor output, allowing the system to respond appropriately to changes in an organism’s environment, and allow for variation in CPG responses to different stimuli.
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Rahul Prabhu
Access: Open access
- Sexuality was at the fulcrum of various issues facing late-colonial India from social reform projects such as child marriage, women’s rights and birth control to concerns of socioeconomic, physical and sexual weakening. The question of sexual modernity became implicated in imaginations of the modern post-colonial nation, setting the stage for a period of energized, linguistically plural projects of sexual knowledge production. While science was used to authorize such projects in the West, where could authority be located in a context where science held plural meaning and authority itself was highly contested? This paper asks how scientific authority was understood, deployed and shaped by the eugenics project of Narayan Sitaram Phadke (1894-1978) and the sexology project of A.P. Pillay (1890-1956). This thesis argues that the mechanics of each figures’ utilization of science captures how the interaction between scientific authority and society was understood by Phadke and Pillay in different ways. While both figures subscribed to the idea that science was universally authoritative in the making of sexual modernity, Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects show the plurality in how science was understood by social reformers. Furthermore, the thesis presents the differences between Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects as a product of the larger movements – British-era birth control advocacy, Hindu nationalism, upper-caste marriage reform and global sexology – that Phadke and Pillay were distinctly invested in or separated from. Scientific authority and the mechanics of its use is proposed as a vivid lens into the complex dynamics of modernization in late-colonial India.

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Norell Sherman
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Halina E. Bennet
Access: Embargoed
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Reed Foehl
Access: Open access
- During the mid-20th century, a new form of Algerian literature emerged, thematically detached yet linguistically tied to France. Novelists aligned with this littérature algérienne de langue française used their narrative power to expose the atrocities of the colonial period, while emphasizing the rising nationalist spirit throughout the country. A peculiar aspect of this national literature is the presence of a child protagonist. Many of Algeria’s most prominent authors centered their first novels on a young boy. This leads to my central question: does the récit d’enfance (childhood narrative) possess certain qualities that lend it useful for representing ubiquitous suffering, as well as an imminent national awakening. My research focuses on two Algerian novelists, Mouloud Feraoun and Mohammed Dib, who employ the récit d’enfance for different aims. In this paper, I first define the récit d’enfance and show how Feraoun and Dib implement this literary style. Secondly, I argue that Mohammed Dib’s trilogy is distinctly political. Employing the critical theories of Frantz Fanon and Benedict Anderson, I contend that Dib’s trilogy, published between 1952-1957, is a littérature de combat (combat literature). Although Feraoun’s publication of Le Fils du Pauvre in 1950 inaugurated Franco-Algerian literature, his work is more reflective than political. Comparing Feraoun and Dib’s early work, allows me to expose the disparate narratives arising in the decade prior to Algerian independence. Their portrayal of colonial oppression, as well as the courage and ambition of an exploited people, remains useful when studying models of colonial and post-colonial nationalism and nation-state.

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Kyu Young "Kevin" Chi
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Oliver M. Nix
Access: Embargoed
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Isabel Kristina Ball
Access: Open access
- Plant cell growth and development relies on proper cellular adhesion. As the extracellular matrix serves as the area of connection between two cells, its synthesis and maintenance are essential for cellular adhesion. The middle lamella region, the layer of the extracellular matrix between two adjacent cell walls, is diffuse with the polysaccharide pectin due to its delivery by Golgi vesicles early during cell division. A Ruthenium Red screen for cellular adhesion mutants identified the family of 5 ELMO proteins that are critical for proper cellular adhesion. To further our understanding of plant cellular adhesion and pathways of pectin synthesis and modification, this work investigates ELMO5. Plants homozygous for a T-DNA insertion in ELMO5 and a new deletion mutant allele generated using CRSPR do not have a cellular adhesion phenotype, suggesting it is either not critical for cellular adhesion or is redundant with another gene. Redundancy within the ELMO family is identified through the analysis of double mutants of elmo5 and each of the other four elmo genes. Both elmo1-/- elmo5-/-and elmo4-/- elmo5-/-mutants have a visibly worse cellular adhesion defect phenotype, suggesting partial redundancy through the ELMO family. The mutants are also rescued by growth on agar, pointing to the importance of turgor pressure and osmotic potential in modulating cellular adhesion. Both ELMO4 and ELMO5 were found to localize to the Golgi using a GFP fusion, consistent with a role for ELMOs as scaffold for pectin biosynthesis.

- Restriction End Date: 2028-06-01
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Tabarak Al Musawi
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

- Embargo End Date: 2026-12-16
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Lauren Katz
Access: Embargoed

- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-19
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Andrew MacGregor Nicholson
Access: Embargoed

- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-18
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Lauren Kanoelani Waters
Access: Embargoed

- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-16
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Brooke Asherman
Access: Embargoed

- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Paloma Ada Aguirre
Access: Embargoed

- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Sofie Brown
Access: Embargoed

- Restriction End Date: 2026-06-01
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Grace Cross
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

- Embargo End Date: 2028-05-16
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Tara M. D. Mullen
Access: Embargoed

- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Hayden D. Redelman
Access: Embargoed
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Avery C Ellis
Access: Open access
- Research focused on John Zaller's famous RAS model of political opinion formation and change from "The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion" (1992). Analyzed the mathematical and psychological underpinnings of the model, the first paper to do so in over fifteen years and the first to do so through an analysis of motivated reasoning and Bayesian reasoning. Synthesized existing critiques of Zaller's model and other literature to suggest ways to build on Zaller, utilizing fundamental reunderstandings of opinions and messages from political and mathematical perspectives. Found verification for Zaller's model, confirming its value, but also found support for the proposed RAIS model, which suggests foundational changes in the way citizens interact with information in the current political environment. Confirmed the utility of a Zallerian framework for analyzing shifts in mass opinion over time and suggested ways to improve the creation of surveys and polls for understanding elections and reported opinions on issues.

- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-17
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Eban Charles
Access: Embargoed

Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Nicholas J Saba
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Jackie Seddon
Access: Open access
- Neuromodulation, the process of altering the electrical outputs of a neuron or neural circuit, allows an organism to control its physiological processes to meet the needs of both its internal and external environments. Previous work shows that the pyloric pattern of the kelp crab (Pugettia producta) stomatogastric nervous system (STNS) neurons responded to fewer neuromodulators than the Jonah crab (Cancer borealis). Since the kelp crab diet primarily eats kelp, it is possible that the movements of the foregut that control digestion may require less flexibility in functional output compared to an opportunistic feeder. To determine whether a reduced flexibility is correlated with diet, this study compared the modulatory responses in Pugettia to two other species of majoid crabs: Chionoecetes opilio and Libinia emarginata, which are both opportunistic feeders. Pooled data for this study found that Libinia and Chionoecetes responded to all twelve modulators tested. When considering the effect of modulators on stomatogastric ganglion (STG) motor outputs, we must consider whether these modulators also alter the excitatory junction potentials (EJPs) at the neuromuscular junction (NMJ), and whether there are differences in responses across species. To test this, the dorsal gastric nerve (dgn) was stimulated while recording intracellularly from the muscle fibers of the associated gm4 muscles. The NMJ of the gm4 in Cancer borealis did not appear to be broadly modulated, as only RPCH and CabTRP showed increases in amplitude, and RPCH decreased facilitation at 5 Hz.

- Embargo End Date: 2026-05-18
Date: 2023-01-01
Creator: Violet Louise Rizzieri
Access: Embargoed

Date: 2016-01-01
Creator: Cody P Woods
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Nuanxi (Sissi) Feng
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Maynor Alberto Loaisiga Bojorge
Access: Open access
- For most of their histories, Costa Rica and Honduras were primarily agricultural societies with little economic diversification. However, around 1990, after the implementation of Washington Consensus reforms, the economies of both nations began to diverge. Costa Rica’s economy rapidly expanded for the following 30 years, while Honduras remained stagnant. Through a New Institutional Economics approach, I argue that institutional differences between Costa Rica and Honduras are responsible for the impressive economic growth Costa Rica has been able to achieve in the past few decades. Specifically, early political developments in Costa Rica have deeply imbedded relatively egalitarian values into the population, helping shape formal and informal inclusive political institutions. Meanwhile, Honduras experienced the development of extractive political institutions, as political and economic power was heavily concentrated in the hands of a select few. These political institutions were crucial during the implementation stages of Washington Consensus reforms, as strong and inclusive political institutions attracted Foreign Direct Investment that helped propel the Costa Rican economy and materialize its position as an outlier in the region. In contrast, lack of institutional guarantees discouraged foreign investors from investing money into the Honduran economy. Through a deep dive into the political histories of both nations, from European discovery to modernity, I conclude that the political institutions of these Central American nations have determined their economic growth paths.

- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Serena Jonas
Access: Embargoed

Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Livia Kunins-Berkowitz
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Grace Monaghan
Access: Open access
- This project examines Victorian England through the analysis of three Victorian gothic novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903/1912), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). The end of the nineteenth century and the final years of the Victorian era brought with them fears and uncertainties about England’s role in the world and its future, fears that the Victorian gothic sought to grapple with, but inevitably failed to contain. In examining this genre, I draw on “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (Chatterjee et al, 2020), which calls for the field of Victorian studies to center racial theory. As such, I foreground race and whiteness in these novels, in conjunction with animality, empire, and sexuality, all of which were crucial tools in the imperial gothic’s project of constructing the monstrous Other. The British empire relied on the establishment of a physical and moral boundary between itself and the colonized Other, in order to justify its imperialism and maintain its own perceived superiority. Yet, ultimately, this project demonstrates that the boundaries between the self and the Other, between morality and monstrosity, and between mainland England and its empire, were dangerously porous.

Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Alexandra Mathieu
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community