Showing 401 - 410 of 564 Items

The Ethiopian Student Movement and the Dilemma of Eritrean Sovereignty

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Liat G. Tesfazgi

Access: Open access

From the perspective of Ethiopian royalists, Pan-Africanists, Marxist internationalists, supports of union, and the broader international community, Eritrean nationalism revealed distressing fissures in many different arguments for preserving Ethiopian territorial unity– arguments not necessarily or explicitly problematic, but nevertheless in opposition to Eritrean demands for the right to national self-determination. For the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) specifically, Eritrean sovereignty demanded a reconfiguration of Pan-African unity that conflicted with Ethiopian exceptionalist historiography. Through an analysis of student politics at Haile Selassie University, from 1960-1974, this thesis seeks to complicate existing historiography on the ESM by examining the periodically divergent experiences of Eritrean student activists.


Miniature of Self-Censorsh** in the Classroom
Self-Censorsh** in the Classroom
This record is embargoed.
    • Embargo End Date: 2027-05-14

    Date: 2024-01-01

    Creator: Sarah Greenberg

    Access: Embargoed



      Neural compensation in response to salinity perturbation in the cardiac ganglion of the American lobster, Homarus americanus

      Date: 2024-01-01

      Creator: Josephine P. Tidmore

      Access: Open access

      Central pattern generator (CPG) networks produce the rhythmic motor patterns that underlie critical behaviors such as breathing, walking, and heartbeat. The fidelity of these neural circuits in response to fluctuations in environmental conditions is essential for organismal survival. The specific ion channel profile of a neuron dictates its electrophysiological phenotype and is under homeostatic control, as channel proteins are constantly turning over in the membrane in response to internal and external stimuli. Neuronal function depends on ion channels and biophysical processes that are sensitive to external variables such as temperature, pH, and salinity. Nonetheless, the nervous system of the American lobster (Homarus americanus) is robust to global perturbations in these variables. The cardiac ganglion (CG), the CPG that controls the rhythmic activation of the heart in the lobster, has been shown to maintain function across a relatively wide, ecologically-relevant range of saline concentrations in the short-term. This study investigates whether individual neurons of the CG sense and compensate for long-term changes in extracellular ion concentration by controlling their ion channel mRNA abundances. To do this, I bathed the isolated CG in either 0.75x, 1.5x, or 1x (physiological) saline concentrations for 24 h. I then dissected out individual CG motor neurons, the pacemaker neurons, and sections of axonal projections and used single-cell RT-qPCR to measure relative mRNA abundances of several species of ion channels in these cells. I found that the CG maintained stable output with 24 h exposure to altered saline concentrations (0.75x and 1.5x), and that this stability may indeed be enabled by changes in mRNA abundances and correlated channel relationships.


      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.


      Miniature of Lie to Me: Linguistic Markers of Deception in Relation to Individual Differences in Executive Control
      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?”


            Miniature of Using metabolic oligosaccharide engineering to induce immune-mediated cell killing of bacterial pathogens
            Using metabolic oligosaccharide engineering to induce immune-mediated cell killing of bacterial pathogens
            Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.

                Date: 2020-01-01

                Creator: Brendan H. Pulsifer

                Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



                  Miniature of Phenylisocyanide Ligand Synthesis and Coordination to a Cobalt Catalyst for Dimerization of Linear Alpha Olefins
                  Phenylisocyanide Ligand Synthesis and Coordination to a Cobalt Catalyst for Dimerization of Linear Alpha Olefins
                  Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.

                      Date: 2020-01-01

                      Creator: Julia Hazlitt Morris

                      Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



                        Miniature of It's All Under Control: Essays
                        It's All Under Control: Essays
                        Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.

                            Date: 2020-01-01

                            Creator: Jack Tarlton

                            Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community



                              Word Embedding Driven Concept Detection in Philosophical Corpora

                              Date: 2020-01-01

                              Creator: Dylan Hayton-Ruffner

                              Access: Open access

                              During the course of research, scholars often explore large textual databases for segments of text relevant to their conceptual analyses. This study proposes, develops and evaluates two algorithms for automated concept detection in theoretical corpora: ACS and WMD retrieval. Both novel algorithms are compared to key word retrieval, using a test set from the Digital Ricoeur corpus tagged by scholarly experts. WMD retrieval outperforms key word search on the concept detection task. Thus, WMD retrieval is a promising tool for concept detection and information retrieval systems focused on theoretical corpora.