Showing 161 - 170 of 681 Items
A Practical Study in Conducting Renaissance and Contemporary Choral Music During the COVID-19 Pandemic Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Emily M. Ha
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
A Fatal Mistake or a Paradigm Shift? Noguchi Hideyo and the Global Reimagining of Yellow Fever
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Seth Gorelik
Access: Open access
Mythologisation, magnification, et modification : La Culture de la langue française
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Rachel Houston Scruby
Access: Open access
- Across three chapters, this thesis examines how the French language plays a vital role not only as a vehicle for communication but as an incarnation of culture, and how France makes sense of linguistic and cultural changes today through the lens of its long history. An analysis of historical documents from key moments in this history illuminates French’s central role as an instrument of power reliant on a prioritization of elegance and beauty, an equivalency between language and people based in a grand history, and a global influence. It shows how this history constructed the language as a political tool, capable of bolstering France’s global importance through “soft power.” This created not only the conditions for the imposition of French to combat fears of decline in military and political domains, but also a simultaneous conflict between the language as an expression of elegance and as a tool to be spread widely to assert the country’s dominance, particularly during the colonial period. Close examination of this long and intricate history illuminates our understanding of how France currently works to reconcile its history with its present in a world where the French language is far more widely spoken than at any other period but is no longer the primary possession of France itself.
Fitness and sex effects of a novel microsporidian parasite on its Daphnia host
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Gracie Scheve
Access: Open access
- Parasitism can influence host ecology and evolution in powerful ways, although the specific impacts on host fitness and life history may be context dependent and involve complex trade-offs. In this study, I investigated the effects of a novel microsporidian gut parasite on Daphnia ambigua, a freshwater zooplankton with a cyclical parthenogenetic life cycle. Combining extensive field sampling at Sewall Pond, Maine, with chronic exposure experiments in the lab, I assessed the parasite's impact on Daphnia fitness and propensity to shift from asexual to sexual reproduction. Field observations revealed a correlation between gut parasite prevalence and increased production of males and sexual females, independent of known sex inducers such as crowding, food limitation, and photoperiod. Lab experiments confirmed that chronic spore exposure significantly reduced Daphnia survival and reproductive output, particularly in clones previously naïve to this strain of the parasite. However, no induction of sex or male offspring was observed in response to parasite exposure under laboratory conditions. This suggests that more complex environmental interactions might be triggering sex in Daphnia. While sex provides the benefit of increased genetic diversity for future generations, I hypothesize that while Daphnia undergo sexual reproduction their ability to resist or tolerate parasite infection is diminished. Phylogenetic analyses indicate the parasite is closely related to the less virulent microsporidian Ordospora pajunii but genetically distinct, potentially constituting a new species or genus. These findings provide insight into the ecological and evolutionary tradeoffs involved in host-parasite interactions and introduce a new host-parasite system for this study.
Prendersi Cura: Taking Care of Nature in Perugia, Italy
Date: 2024-03-20
Creator: Katharine Kurtz
Access: Open access
- Cities need more green spaces to adapt to climate change and facilitate community resilience. However, successfully managing green spaces is challenging. City governments consistently employ top-down management practices that limit the benefits, usage, and perception of such spaces as Nature. Further, current management practices overlook socio-cultural factors important to residents. Using the existing categories of urban green spaces (UGS) and informal green spaces (IGS), this article situates the cultural practice prendersi cura as a way to conceptualize successful, bottom-up green space management. The term prendersi cura, meaning “to take care of” in Italian, emerged through interviews in Perugia, Italy, and reflects the socio-ecological value of IGS and the disconnect between residents and city-managed UGS. This study employed mixed methods, combining 10 weeks of participant observation, 13 interviews, and GIS analysis to understand the relationship between Perugians and their green spaces. Results indicate that interviewees did not describe city-supported UGS (i.e. top-down green spaces like parks or historic gardens) as Nature, even if they were areas of dense vegetation and recognized by the City of Perugia in GIS analyses. In contrast, interviewees described IGS (i.e. community gardens, vacant lots, or potted plants) that were unrecognized in city GIS visualizations as Nature, indicating a stronger attachment to green spaces when interviewees had active roles in their management or witnessed community-based management practices. This paper demonstrates the importance of managing green spaces through a socio-ecological framework that considers user perceptions and cultural values. To allow greening initiatives to reach their full potential, it is critical to embrace local values and participation in management practices.
Chains for Change: Mathematical Modeling of Boston’s Eviction Court Cases Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Brian Liu
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Mesurer l’identité : pourquoi les jeunes français se détournent du vin ?Measuring Identity: What’s Turning the Young French Away from Wine?
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Siyi (Jonathan) Li
Access: Open access
- We use a randomized discrete‑choice experiment with 381 French adults to investigate why France’s wine consumption decline is most pronounced among the young. The treatment group subjects were primed via a video about France’s viticultural heritage, which raises the probability of choosing French red wine over French amber beer by 14 percentage points for Generation X but lowers it by 15 points for Generation Z. Using observational data collected after the experiment, 2SLS estimates show that the decline of wine in France is primarily due to a weakened sense of “French wine identity.” The study provides the first causal evidence for the role of identity in consumption choices and cautions that heritage‑based marketing may backfire with younger cohorts, suggesting instead modernity‑ and sustainability‑oriented strategies for the wine sector.
Building (Cellular) Barriers: Identifying cellularization dynamics involving somatic Xchromosome eliminations in Bradysia coprophila embryonic development This record is embargoed.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Aale J. Agans
Access: Permanent restriction
Convolutional Squeeze and Excitation Networks
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Kavi Sarna
Access: Open access
- Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) networks improve CNN feature learning by channel-wise attention, but their global pooling strategy discards spatial context. In this work, we reinterpret the SE block’s excitation mechanism as a convolution operation, which leads to a novel patched pooling design. Instead of global average pooling, we propose to divide feature maps into patches and pool within each patch, preserving local spatial information for attention. The excitation step is implemented with 1x1 convolutions (replacing the original SE fully-connected layers), enabling the model to learn adaptive channel reweighting efficiently across those patches. This Convolutional Squeeze-and-Excitation (CSE) approach yields spatially aware feature recalibration with minimal overhead. We evaluate CSE across multiple CNN architectures (including a custom ConvNet and ResNet) on image classification tasks (Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10). The results show consistent accuracy improvements over standard SE blocks. Moreover, we demonstrate the generality of patched pooling by integrating it with other attention modules like Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and Global Context (GC), achieving further gains. Our findings highlight that incorporating localized pooling in SE-style attention significantly enhances representation learning across diverse scenarios.
Gracefully Navigating Industry Exit: Modeling Regional Climate Change-Driven Decline in Maine’s Lobster Fishery and the Urgent Need for Statewide Comprehensive Cost Data Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Luisa Isabelle Louchheim
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community