Showing 251 - 300 of 681 Items
Transcending the Clinical: Empathic Care Work, Moral Injury, and the Community Health Worker in Rural Maine
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Anneke Halliday
Access: Open access
- The Maine Mobile Health Program is a federally qualified health center and community health organization that provides healthcare to migrant and seasonal farmworkers in rural Maine. The MMHP employs community health workers to act as negotiators between unjust systems, physicians, and patients. This thesis investigates the ways in which community health workers provide patients with “empathic care” and details how this happens in practice based on field observations and interviews. It also addresses how empathic care benefits patients by creating empowerment, building trust, and giving patients agency in their healthcare decision making. Furthermore, this thesis discusses the cost of providing empathic care as “moral injury” and considers how community health workers are emotionally and psychologically impacted by the work that they do. Ultimately, this thesis illuminates the transformative capacity of empathic care and the burden it imposes on community health workers operating within inequitable systems.
Where the Dead Leave No Trace: The Darién Gap, Bare Life, and the Afterlives of Prevention Through Deterrence This record is embargoed.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Mariana Silvano Blay
Access: Permanent restriction
Crystal Engineering Pharmaceuticals: Combining Cocrystals and Additives to Tune Morphology Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Brendan J. Hill
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
The Scientists of The Dawnland: Reframing the Boundaries of Knowledge Through Wabanaki Epistemologies
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Jonah Bussgang
Access: Open access
- This honors project explores how Wabanaki scientists navigate and reshape dominant paradigms of science, land use, and education by strategically integrating Western science with Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Through theoretical and historical analysis alongside three ethnographic interviews, I show how Indigenous knowledge is not simply surviving within colonial systems but actively transforming them from within. Framing the work through the concept of etuaptmumk (two-eyed seeing), I examine how my interviewees—Dr. Suzanne Greenlaw, Sam St. John, and Tyler Everett—use science as a relational, spiritual, and community-based practice to support cultural continuity and natural resource protection. Their work challenges the dominant binaries between science and religion, objectivity and identity, and knowledge and responsibility. They engage with Western institutions on their own terms to support their communities and uphold Wabanaki sovereignty. While the work of Indigenous scientists is increasingly studied across the U.S. and globally, Wabanaki communities remain underrepresented in this discourse. This project helps fill that gap and calls on Bowdoin College to invest more seriously in reciprocal relationships with Wabanaki communities, including institutional collaboration and the hiring of Indigenous faculty.
The Revolutionary Body & the Marxist Feminism of Wages for Housework, WITCH, and the Third World Women’s Alliance
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Talia Traskos-Hart
Access: Open access
- The Revolutionary Body traces three Marxist feminist groups which emerged in the late 1960s and organized through the 1970s: Wages for Housework, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and WITCH. These three groups have yet to be combined in secondary historical scholarship, and their grouping here evidences similarities in anti-capitalist organizing across demographic differences. This project delves into the groups’ conceptions of the home and the body as dual sites of oppression and sources of liberation. Through studying such issues as imprisonment, housework, and forced sterilization, this project uncovers the intensity of capitalist violence unto the body and the ensuing mysticism revolutionary women’s bodies were seen to hold.
Migrants at Risk:
How European Union Externalization Policies Challenge Accountability of Human Rights Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Clara Tunny
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Optimizing the Synthesis of 8-Quinolyl-Tetramethylcyclopentadiene for the Selective Dimerization of Linear Alpha Olefins Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Katie Lynn Rea
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Geochemical and Stratigraphic Analysis of the Linnévatnet Sediment Record: A Study of Late Holocene Cirque Glacier Activity in Spitsbergen, Svalbard
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Graham Harper Edwards
Access: Open access
- Morainal and lacustrine sediments in Linnédalen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, record the fluctuations of a glacier in a currently unglaciated mountain cirque during the Little Ice Age (LIA). This study attempts to reconstruct Late Holocene glacial activity within this cirque from geochemical, physical, and visual stratigraphic variation of the Linnévatnet lacustrine sediment record. A 57 cm lacustrine sediment core (D10.5) from Linnévatnet was analyzed at a high-resolution for variations in X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF)-measured elemental composition, spectral reflectance, and magnetic susceptibility. The visual stratigraphy was observed at a microscopic scale. An age-depth model for D10.5 is developed by extrapolating sedimentation rates from dated horizons, measured by 239+240Pu radionuclide fallout dating and chemostratigraphic enrichment of atmospheric anthropogenic pollutants. Visual stratigraphy of the sediment record indicates two periods of cirque glacier sediment delivery to Linnévatnet during the LIA (1329-1363 CE, 1816 CE-Present) and a third period of sediment delivery during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; 984-1082 CE). During non-glacial periods, stratigraphic variation in XRF-measured Ti and K appear to be associated with fluctuations in North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)-regulated precipitation. Within the LIA glacial intervals, decadal-scale variations in sediment Ti and K geochemistry may result from advance and retreat of the cirque glacier ice-margin or fluctuations in precipitation. Stratigraphic variation in Fe content indicates complex erosional and hydrological processes associated with MCA precipitation and glacial meltwater. Stratigraphic and geochemical variations in the lacustrine record of Linnévatnet indicate that both cirque glacier activity and sediment transport in Linnédalen are more sensitive to climatological change than previously thought.
Teaching Computers to Teach Themselves: Synthesizing Training Data based on Human-Perceived Elements
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: James Little
Access: Open access
- Isolation-Based Scene Generation (IBSG) is a process for creating synthetic datasets made to train machine learning detectors and classifiers. In this project, we formalize the IBSG process and describe the scenarios—object detection and object classification given audio or image input—in which it can be useful. We then look at the Stanford Street View House Number (SVHN) dataset and build several different IBSG training datasets based on existing SVHN data. We try to improve the compositing algorithm used to build the IBSG dataset so that models trained with synthetic data perform as well as models trained with the original SVHN training dataset. We find that the SVHN datasets that perform best are composited from isolations extracted from existing training data, leading us to suggest that IBSG be used in situations where a researcher wants to train a model with only a small amount of real, unlabeled training data.
Economic Analysis of the Critical Habitat Designation Process for Endangered and Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Katherine Fosburgh
Access: Open access
- Habitat destruction is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in the US. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), habitat deemed essential to endangered and threatened species recovery is proposed as critical habitat (CH). CH areas are subject to regulations that could alter land development plans or increase costs. The potential economic opportunity cost created by CH regulations may lead to the exclusion of land proposed for CH designation, thereby reducing the conservation benefits of the CH rule. In this paper, I use a unique dataset collected from Federal Register (FR) documents to estimate the reduction in CH acreage from proposed to final ruling, both on the extensive and intensive margin. I find a negative relationship between the level of household income in an area proposed for CH and the probability that a CH gains acreage or maintains acreage during the establishment process. I also find some evidence that higher household income in a CH area is associated with a greater relative loss in acreage between proposal and finalization. I also find that private land proposed for CH designation is less likely to be in the final designation than federal land. Overall, my results suggest that economic considerations influence CH allocation decisions. Whether reducing the amount of private land subject to CH designations is socially efficient depends on the unknown economic benefit of private land exclusions versus the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss that may result from not protecting all land deemed vital to species recovery.
ALGOrhythms: Leveraging Markov Chain-Based Generation of Functional Harmonies with User-Defined Musical Corpus as a Compositional Tool
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Coleman Brockmeier
Access: Open access
- Music forms the soundtrack to daily life and serves as an important cultural marker for people around the world. As the world becomes digitized and connected via the internet, the opportunity is increasingly accessible for anyone to share music with the world and to create chart-topping music that defines the cultural vernacular. Many prominent producers have little to no formal musical training, especially in Western music theory. As a result, loop-based music dominates the lists of most-played music on the radio and streaming services, often not deviating from basic functional harmony. With this project, I have created a compositional tool in the form of an iOS app which identifies the harmonic “fingerprint” behind a given set of songs. The app then leverages this understanding to create sequences of chords in the style of that fingerprint. To accomplish this, the app employs web scraping to create a corpus of musical information in the form of Markov chains — a transition table which underlies the data set. I introduce the idea of musical “chunks” defining a harmonic “fingerprint” and various methods of traversing the transition table to create chord progressions employing the fingerprint as a guide. The tool allows for specification of corpus, chunk size, traversal method, and the ability to listen to, share, and save generated results. The resulting app is a tool that allows the user to answer the question: “What would happen if Stevie Wonder and Billie Eilish wrote a song together?”
Reconsidering Operation Condor: Cross-border Military Cooperation and the Defeat of the Transnational Left in Chile and Argentina during the 1970s
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Georgia C Whitaker
Access: Open access
- In this study of the roots of Operation Condor, I track the development of this unusual military alliance forged by six Southern Cone governments (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay) during the 1970s, as well as the push-and-pull relationship between the transnational migration of political militants and the military’s impetus for collaboration. While most accounts of Condor focus on the United States as the operation’s primary orchestrator, I contend that initial motivation for the type of cooperation that Condor would later formalize was driven not by the U.S., but by the Southern Cone militaries’ perception that Marxism had to be excised from the entire region. In addition, while Condor scholars have either ignored or minimized the role of the left as political actors and placed the blame for violence exclusively on the militaries and the United States, I draw from unpublished Argentine police records, Argentine Embassy documents, and Chilean-Argentine solidarity group publications to argue that it is essential to broaden our understanding of what both sides in this ideological confrontation were attempting to accomplish. The transnational left, never a homogenous group, evolved to meet a variety of objectives. Many militants continued to be politically active while they were in exile, and many acted in solidarity with like-minded leftists in their midst.
Context-specific effects of vasotocin on social approach in the male common goldfish, Carassius auratus
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Katharine Torrey
Access: Open access
- The peptide vasotocin (VT) and its mammalian homologue, vasopressin (VP), produce effects on social behavior that are highly species- and context-specific. We recently sequenced two genes for V1a-like receptors (VTR) in the goldfish brain, one that encodes for a fully-functioning canonical receptor and one that encodes for a non-functional truncated receptor. The current study is an investigation of whether social context may alter expression of these receptor types and thus, potentially, behavioral responses to VT. We used western blotting and immunohistochemistry with custom anti-VTR antibodies to characterize the distribution of VTR throughout the forebrain and the hindbrain. Western blot results showed bands close to the predicted sizes for truncated and canonical VTR constructs, suggesting that both genes are translated into protein in the brain, but the presence of additional bands suggested potential nonspecific binding. Immunohistochemistry data revealed VTR signal throughout the brain in regions associated with social behavior. We additionally examined whether visual and olfactory context alters behavioral responsiveness to VT, potentially by altering the expression of one or both receptors. Behavioral tests suggested that VT inhibits approach to males, but its effect on response to females in reproductive contexts is still undetermined, likely due to interference from a stress response during testing. Further characterization of VTR throughout the brain will clarify how social context might alter VT signaling through context-dependent modulation of its receptors. Additionally, future work should examine the behavioral consequences of such modulation by further studying whether VT’s effect on social approach behavior depends on context.
Long Day with The Office: An Analysis of College Student Demand for Streaming Video on Netflix Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Summers Askew
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Répresentations de la banlieue dans le cinéma français contemporain
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Yaw Owusu Sekyere
Access: Open access
- Inhabitants of the poor French banlieues are rejected and isolated from the larger French society, who refuse to acknowledge their marginalization. As a result, the cycle continues where no political change is made. The French film genre, cinéma de banlieue, seeks to explain the perspectives of the underrepresented and marginalized groups within France. This honors project analyzes the representations of the banlieue through the films of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz), Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma), Divines (Houda Benyamina), and Banlieusards (Kery James & Leïla Sy). These films focus on the themes of drugs, policial relations, the confinement of the banlieue, and the discrimination and stigmatisation that inhabitants of the poor banlieues face, all of which revolve around the idea of entrapment. This work intends to see if these representations of the banlieue, specifically on the periphery of Paris, perpetuate stereotypes, or propose a more complex dynamic.
Characterization of negative phonotactic behavior in the adult 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: Julianne Scholes
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Characterization of an Arabidopsis thaliana Adhesion Mutant This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jacob Dexter-Meldrum
Access: Embargoed
Duty and Distinction: Scientists as Intellectuals in Modern China
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Helen Wang
Access: Open access
- As critical players in the Chinese state’s pursuit of modernization and political legitimacy, Chinese scientists have been the recipients of state attention and scrutiny throughout modern history. This paper will analyze how Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) became a national hero as the Chinese Communist Party’s model scientist. Qian developed his scientific expertise in the United States, before Cold War political tensions forced his extradition. Upon his return to China, Qian became a key missile scientist in the state’s emerging nuclear weapons program. By analyzing Qian’s public persona as portrayed in official state media, this paper will argue that the CCP conferred distinct political duties to scientists, defining a new socio-political role for scientist-intellectuals. Beginning from the Mao era and continuing through to the present day, the CCP’s portrayal and promotion of Qian’s legacy gives insight into the state’s strategy to use science to bolster authority and legitimize policy.
Digital Authoritarianism in China and Russia: A Comparative Study
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Laura H.C. Howells
Access: Open access
- Digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and threatens the data privacy and rights of both domestic and international Internet users. However, scholarship on digital authoritarianism remains limited in scope and case study selection. This study contributes a new, more comprehensive analytical framework for the study of Internet governance and applies it to the case studies of China and Russia. Special attention is paid to the still understudied Russian Internet governance model. After thorough literature review and novel data collection and analysis, this paper identifies relative centralization of network infrastructure and the extent and pace of change in governance as the most notable differences between the two models. These points of divergence may be explained by two theories; the varieties of authoritarianism hypothesis posits that different political systems face persistent and unique constraints to governance of the digital realm. The development trajectory theory argues that each country’s technological development path foreshadows the systems’ capacity for and extent of governance. This study is among the first to distinguish between Internet governance strategies of authoritarian regimes.
The Impact of Armed Conflict on Maternal Health in Colombia
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Madeleine Squibb
Access: Open access
- This study combines data from the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey and the Conflict Analysis Resource Center (CERAC) to examine the impact of conflict on maternal health service utilization and outcomes in Colombia. The primary results indicate a significant, negative relationship between conflict level and antenatal and postnatal care utilization. Conflict is insignificant in determining the use of professional assistance at delivery. Although rural women are, overall, less likely to access maternal health services, further analysis along rural-urban lines reveals that the negative effect of violence on prenatal and postnatal care is stronger among urban women. Secondary estimation of the occurrence of complications during or after delivery employs a Two-Stage Residuals Inclusion model to address potential endogeneity in service use. Estimated results show that conflict levels are insignificant, but that Indigenous women and women in lower wealth quintiles are significantly more likely to experience complications, even after controlling for service use. The conclusions of this paper suggest that Colombia’s universal healthcare system has been successful in reducing economic barriers to prenatal care and professional delivery, but that significant wealth-related inequalities remain in maternal health outcomes. Additionally, Indigenous and women with lower levels of education are less likely to access services and more likely to experience complications. The primary contribution of this paper is the inclusion of a conflict measure. The significant, negative impact on prenatal and postnatal care utilization, especially for urban women, warrants further study to better inform policy to increase service use and reduce maternal mortality and morbidity.
Responses of central pattern generators in the American lobster STNS to multiple members of a novel neuropeptide family
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Benjamin Harley Wong
Access: Open access
- Neuropeptides are important modulators of neural activity, allowing neural networks, such as the central pattern generators (CPGs) that control rhythmic movements, to alter their output and thus generate behavioral flexibility. Isoforms of a neuropeptide family vary in physical structure, allowing potentially distinct functional neuromodulatory effects on CPG systems. While some familial neuropeptide isoforms can differentially affect a system, others in the same family may elicit indistinguishable effects. Here, we examined the effects elicited by members of a novel family of six peptide hormone isoforms (GSEFLamides: I-, M-, AL-, AM-, AV-, and VM-GSEFLamide) on the pyloric filter and gastric mill CPGs in the stomatogastric nervous system (STNS) of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Recent unpublished work from the Dickinson lab found that five of the six GSEFLamides elicited similar increases in contraction amplitude when perfused through the isolated lobster heart, while one (AVGSEFLamide) had virtually no effect. Using extracellular recordings, we found the pattern of GSEFLamide effects on the STNS gastric mill to be similar to the pattern observed in the lobster cardiac system; the gastric mill circuit was fairly consistently activated by all isoforms except AVGSEFLamide. The intrinsically active pyloric pattern was also significantly enhanced by three out of five peptide isoforms, and nearly significantly enhanced by two more, but was likewise non-responsive to AVGSEFLamide. While the reason AVGSEFLamide had no effect on either pattern is unknown, the similar phenomenon noted in the isolated whole heart potentially indicates that this isoform lacks any function in the lobster.
That’s DOPE: the delayed-onset, prolonged excitation response of a primary auditory interneuron in Gryllus bimaculatus This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-13
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Samuel G. Brill-Weil
Access: Embargoed
Survival Strategies: Historic Preservation, Jewish Community, and the German Democratic Republic
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Emily Ann Cohen
Access: Open access
- Following the Second World War, as German Communists worked to establish a new socialist East German state, Jews who survived persecution and imprisonment by the Nazis worked to reestablish a Jewish community at the same time. Though many scholars dismiss the relationship between Jews and the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, as one characterized only by neglect and occasional political exploitation, it was much more nuanced, shaped in large part by the Cold War. Both the party and the Jewish community relied on the other to accomplish their goals, namely, survival in a new world order: The Socialist Unity Party relied on the Jewish community to maintain the German Democratic Republic's claim to legitimacy, and the Jews, few in number, relied on the party for financial support. Despite mutual benefits, however, the state and party nearly always had the upper hand. The power imbalance led Jews to find creative ways to fulfill their needs and, at several points, even prompted protest of the party’s treatment of its Jewish citizens. This paper follows the course of this relationship by focusing on the German Democratic Republic's management of sites of historical significance—which vacillated between outright destruction and dedicated protection—returning particularly to the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weissensee, one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. With this particular lens, this project addresses questions about memory, mythology, and agency in a socialist dictatorship and challenges assumptions about Jewish life in East Germany.
Food Comes First: Growing Up at my Family’s Table This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Eleanor Sapat
Access: Embargoed
Perdido en la transculturación: Compromisos de identidad en la América Latina judía
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jacob Bernard Baskes
Access: Open access
- Esta investigación explora los procesos de negociación y compromiso presentes en la experiencia judía de América Latina. Durante siglos, esta identidad ha existido junta con otras, sean nacionales, religiosas, o raciales, lo cual resulta en una nueva identidad compleja y singular. A través de novelas de Eduardo Halfon (Guatemala), Achy Obejas y Leonardo Padura (Cuba) e Isaac Goldemberg (Perú) en adición a una investigación antropológica en Lima, el texto explora una colección de temas que incluye el movimiento, la memoria, el exilio, la diáspora, el trauma, y el mestizaje. Cada tema aquí analizado tiene un rol profundo en la formación de la identidad judía de América Latina, tanto en su forma histórica como en su forma actual.
The Photodegradation of Endocrine Disrupting Compounds in Aqueous Solutions Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Peyton C Morss
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Bubbles & Bought-Ins: Reevaluating Price Movements in the Art Market
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Silas Wuerth
Access: Open access
- Employs two tests for bubbles in the art market. First, a right-hand forward recursive augmented Dickey-Fuller test to identify explosive price movements. Second, a test for the statistical significance of hedonic regression price index coefficients after controlling for equity market performance. Finds strong evidence for a speculative bubble in the pre-Great Recession "Post-War & Contemporary" market. Evidence for this bubble diminishes but does not dissipate after accounting for the effect of failed sales on index returns.
Gateway to the Forest City? Portland, Maine's Bayside Neighborhood, 1866-2014 Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Alexander J. Tougas
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Functionality of Candida albicans She3 in the mRNA transport of Saccharomyces cerevisiae Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Sheikh Omar Kunjo
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
A Moderated-Mediation Model of Emerging Adult and Parent Religiosity, Externalizing Behavior, and Parenting Style
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Benjamin M. Simonds
Access: Open access
- The present study investigated whether emerging adult religiosity mediated the relationship between high parental religiosity and low levels of offspring externalizing, and whether these pathways are moderated by aspects of authoritative parenting (i.e., acceptance, firm control, and psychological autonomy). Surveys were completed by 275 emerging adults aged 18-25, including scales assessing their religiosity, the religiosity of their parents, the style of parenting in which they were raised, and their own engagement in externalizing behaviors. Results indicated a correlation between high levels of parental and emerging adult religiosity, and a marginal relationship between high parental religiosity and reduced offspring externalizing. However, emerging adult religiosity was not related to externalizing, such that no mediation model could be tested. Psychological autonomy granting moderated the relationship between parental religiosity and emerging adult externalizing: low parental religiosity was associated with high levels of emerging adult externalizing only in parents who exhibited low levels of psychological autonomy granting, while high parental religiosity was related to low emerging adult externalizing regardless of psychological autonomy granting. The results indicate a complex relationship between parenting, externalizing, and religiosity.
“Bosques Si, Tala No”: The Uprising of Cherán K’eri
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Ray Tarango
Access: Open access
- In the spring of 2011, the indigenous community of Cherán K’eri in western Mexico rose up to protect their forests. Organized crime, and its allies, had taken over this town during the previous decade and had logged significant portions of its communal forests in the surrounding hills. This thesis examines the following questions: How do townspeople recall their experience under a narco state? What pushed this indigenous community to organize to protect the forest despite the threat of violence? What was it about this landscape in particular that brought people together? Previous research into this uprising has overlooked the gender dynamics of the community, and has failed to consider the townspeople’s connection to nature. Using interviews gathered over eighteen months in three separate visits, this thesis argues that despite patriarchal expectations that men “protect” the community and its resources it was women who led and organized the uprising. Chapter One analyzes how organized crime took control of the community, suggesting that memories and trauma of the “war on drugs” deeply affected the townspeople. Chapter Two centers on the uprising itself, exploring not only the gendered dynamics of that spring, but connecting the material and affective importance of the forest to the women who led the uprising. This thesis analyzes how organized crime took control of the community and argues that townspeople’s multilayered connection to nature played a central role in the town’s movement.
The Role of the Golgi ELMO Proteins in Cell Adhesion in Arabidopsis thaliana
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Wesley James Hudson
Access: Open access
- Proper growth and development of plant cells is dependent upon successful cell adhesion between cells, and this is mostly mediated by pectin in the plant cell wall. Previously, the Kohorn Laboratory identified a non-enzymatic Golgi protein named ELMO1 as it is required for cell adhesion, likely acting as a scaffold for cell wall polymer synthesis. Plants with mutant ELMO1 demonstrate a weak defective cellular adhesion phenotype as well as reduced mannose content in the cell wall. ELMO1 has homologous proteins in at least 29 different vascular plants. These homologues have 2 possible deletions in their amino acid sequence, but protein modeling determined that these variations will not affect protein structure. There are 5 homologous ELMO1 proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana that have been aptly named ELMO2, ELMO3, ELMO4, ELMO5. elmo2-/-mutants revealed no mutant adhesion phenotypes, while elmo1-/-elmo2-/-double mutants revealed strong defects in adhesion. Confocal microscopy of propidium iodide-stained seedlings confirmed the lack of a phenotype for elmo2-/-mutants and showed disorganized gapping cells for the elmo1-/-elmo2-/-mutant. Additionally, while elmo2-/-did not have any change to root or hypocotyl length, elmo1-/-elmo2-/- mutants were significantly shorter in both regards. Taken together, these data support that ELMO2 and ELMO1 are partially redundant.
The Effects of Temperature on the Cardiac System of the American Lobster, Homarus americanus
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Elizabeth A Owens
Access: Open access
- The American lobster, Homarus americanus, inhabits a large oceanic range spanning from Labrador, Canada to North Carolina, USA. This geographic range varies in temperature by as much as 25ºC, and daily temperature fluctuations of up to 12ºC may occur at a single location depending on season, water depth, and tides. The cardiac system of the lobster is sensitive to these temperature changes, and has been shown to adjust its functioning over a large temperature range. A previous study showed that various functional parameters respond differently to temperature changes, but a stable cardiac output can be maintained over the range of 2-20ºC. The current study showed that the effects of temperature were exerted primarily through changes in the lobster heart central pattern generator, the cardiac ganglion. Similar patterns of change were seen in both semi-intact hearts and isolated cardiac ganglion preparations in response to increasing temperature. Specifically, with increasing temperature, the burst frequency showed a biphasic pattern in which frequency initially increased, then decreased rapidly at high temperatures. The burst duration, duty cycle, and number of spikes per burst generally decreased with increasing temperature, and spike frequency increased over the entire temperature range. Semi-intact hearts and isolated cardiac ganglia showed similar “crash” patterns, characterized by complete loss of function at high temperatures and complete recovery of function when temperature was returned to baseline. Feedback in the semi-intact heart provided some stabilization of bursting activity, but it did not provide the expected protection from high temperatures. The isolated CG had a significantly higher crash temperature than did the semi-intact system. This discrepancy in crash temperatures may be explained by considering factors at the level of the muscle and neuromuscular junction (NMJ), such as stretch and nitric oxide (NO) feedback and the balance of facilitation and depression at the NMJ. Stimulated preparations showed defacilitation of contraction amplitude at high temperatures despite the maintenance of constant burst parameters of stimulation. Therefore, several factors contributing to the relatively low crash temperature of the intact system may be a shift in the balance of facilitation and depression at the NMJ, a depression in ganglion function due to the release of NO by the muscle, or a combination of the two mechanisms.
Alexander the Great and the Rise of Christianity
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Stephen M. Girard
Access: Open access
- Alexander the Great and the Rise of Christianity focuses on the political, mythical, and philosophical connection between Alexander the Great's life and the beginnings of early Christianity. The first chapter of the text focuses on an analysis of mythical conceptions of Alexander the Great as “Son of God” as well as cultural perceptions of him as “Philosopher King” and cosmopolitan, and how these portraits of Alexander were influential for Christianity. The second chapter analyzes Alexander’s relationship with the Jewish people, and his appearances in the Old Testament apocalyptic Book of Daniel. The last chapter discusses Alexander’s relationship with Christianity itself, seen through a study of the life of Jesus, Alexandrian Judaism, and the early Christian apologists.
Aortic pressure and heart rate in the lobster Homarus americanus are modulated by mechanical feedback and neuropeptides
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Grace Marie Hambelton
Access: Open access
- Baroreceptors are stretch receptors located in the aorta of mammals; in response to increased afterload, they elicit a decrease in heart rate, creating a negative feedback loop that lowers blood pressure. Although lobsters (Homarus americanus) do not have baroreceptors like mammals, closely related land crabs have been shown to have baroreceptor-like responses. Heart contraction is also regulated by the Frank-Starling response, where increasing stretch or preload increases the contractile force of the heart. In addition to these types of biomechanical modulations, lobsters use a central pattern generator, the cardiac ganglion, to maintain synchronicity of the heartbeat. The heart is also controlled by the central nervous system via neuromodulators, such as myosuppressin, which has been shown to increase active force and decrease frequency in isolated lobster hearts. We performed experiments on a lobster heart with the main arteries still intact, and varied the preload by stretching anterior arteries, and the afterload by elevating the dorsal abdominal artery. We added myosuppressin to modulate the cardiac ganglion output and muscle contraction. We found that the baroreceptor-like response is most directly modulated by active force, whereas frequency could be a secondary control. Increasing preload does increase active force, but that does not correlate to a higher cardiac output, which shows that how hard the heart pumps is not what determines how effectively it is pumping. Additionally, we found that myosuppressin has a much stronger effect on frequency than active force, and so with myosuppressin, frequency becomes the main determinant of cardiac output.
Extreme Value Theory and Backtest Overfitting in Finance
Date: 2015-05-01
Creator: Daniel C Byrnes
Access: Open access
- In order to identify potentially profitable investment strategies, hedge funds and asset managers can use historical market data to simulate a strategy's performance, a process known as backtesting. While the abundance of historical stock price data and powerful computing technologies has made it feasible to run millions of simulations in a short period of time, this process may produce statistically insignificant results in the form of false positives. As the number of configurations of a strategy increases, it becomes more likely that some of the configurations will perform well by chance alone. The phenomenon of backtest overfitting occurs when a model interprets market idiosyncrasies as signal rather than noise, and is often not taken into account in the strategy selection process. As a result, the finance industry and academic literature are rife with skill-less strategies that have no capability of beating the market. This paper explores the development of a minimum criterion that managers and investors can use during the backtesting process in order to increase confidence that a strategy's performance is not the result of pure chance. To do this we will use extreme value theory to determine the probability of observing a specific result, or something more extreme than this result, given that multiple configurations of a strategy were tested.
Natural variation in chromatin conformation among populations of Drosophila melanogaster
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Utku Ferah
Access: Open access
- The role of polymorphisms in protein-coding and non-coding regions of the genome during adaptive evolution has been a long-debated subject in evolutionary biology. Although the importance of coding-sequence polymorphisms during evolution has been well-documented, the influence of non-coding regions of the genome on phenotypic diversity and adaptive evolution remains less clear. Enhancers are cis-regulatory elements that dictate gene transcription rates, times, and locations; enhancers are located in noncoding regions and, when active, exhibit an open-chromatin conformation. In the current study, we identified putative enhancers that differ in chromatin conformation among three natural isolates of Drosophila melanogaster from different parts of the world. The genome-wide numbers of enhancers active in some natural isolates—but inactive in others—will provide insight into the amount of raw material available for evolution due to transcriptional regulatory variation.
Tracking photosynthetic seasonality at needle and forest scales in pines experiencing mild winters Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Sara Elizabeth Nelson
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Bridging the Bergschrund: Depictions of Glaciers in the Berner Oberland and Wallis Regions of the Alps and the ‘American Alps’ from the late 18th-century to the Present This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Lily Poppen
Access: Embargoed
Characterizing and Investigating the Electrophysiological Properties of the Plastic Cricket Auditory System in Response to Cooling
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Hannah Tess Scotch
Access: Open access
- The auditory system of the Mediterranean field cricket (Gryllus bimaculatus) is capable of profound compensatory plasticity. Following deafferentation due to the loss of an auditory organ, the dendrites of intermediate auditory neuron Ascending Neuron 2 (AN-2) grow across the midline and functionally connect to contralateral afferents. The loss of the auditory organ can be mimicked with reversible cold-deactivation, in which cooled Peltier elements silence the auditory organ and its afferents. Though this would presumably prevent AN-2 from firing, cooling instead induces a novel firing pattern called DOPE (delayed-onset, prolonged-excitation). In this study, intracellular physiological recordings were completed before, during, and after cooling in response to “chirp” and “pulse” sounds. Analysis was performed within and across crickets to characterize DOPE. Results revealed expected variability across individuals, as well as a wider spread of onset delay and a decrease in spike frequency and number of spikes per burst relative to baseline within individuals during cooling. Generally, subsequent warming only partially restored the neuronal responses to baseline as measured by all three parameters. This was particularly true in response to “pulse” stimuli. Future experiments will investigate if DOPE is caused by synaptic inputs or intrinsic properties of AN-2, as well as the role of inhibition in the circuit. Eventually, we hope to develop a complete model of the auditory circuit for future investigations of plasticity, with ramifications for treating human neuronal injury.
Binding Energy Determination of CO2 Adsorption in MOF-74 with Diffusion Monte Carlo This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-19
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Yucheng Hua
Access: Embargoed
Echoing Memories and Synchronicities of an Adoptive Family: A Memoir
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Gemma Jyothika Kelton
Access: Open access
- Published narratives about adoptions have typically been told from the perspective of the adopter. In recent years, Asian American writers who are part of the transracial, transcultural, and even transcultural adoptions, have published their narratives and expanded the discourse on adoptions to include the voices of orphans and adoptees. While there are still not many published works by adoptees, more and more writers are coming forward with their own stories separate from their adoptive parents. This honors project is a memoir and a work of nonfiction that examines the author’s experiences as an adoptee from India. It explores the issues of skin color bias (or colorism) in Indian adoption, as well as Indian government policies on inter-country and in-country adoptions. This memoir also delves into the complexities of an adoptive mother-daughter relationship, particularly in the transracial context. The work of non-fiction tells the story of a single white American mother adopting a 10 year old Indian girl to the United States. Written from the adoptee’s perspective, the memoir follows the different points of transitions in both the mother’s and the daughter’s lives and the ensuing challenges, chaos, vulnerabilities, and moments of tenderness, mutual support, care, and love that blooms in their adoptive mother-daughter relationship. This work draws upon narratives of Asian American women writers including Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, and Nishta J. Mehra’s Brown White Black to acknowledge their own voices and give credibility to the adoptee narrative.
Who Will Bear the Burden of Increased Coastal Flooding as Sea Level Rises in San Mateo County, California? An Analysis of the Factors Contributing to Community Vulnerability Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
- Restriction End Date: 2026-06-01
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Belinda C. Saint Louis
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
A Comparative Study of Equilibria Computation in Graphical Polymatrix Games Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Yuto Yagi
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Stuck in Limbo: Temporary Protected Status, Climate Migrants and the Expanding Definition of Refugees in the United States
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Noelia Calcaño
Access: Open access
- There will be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 as ecological disasters precipitate mass migrations around the world. The U.S. does not legally recognize climate migrants as refugees, instead adhering to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention that limits the definition of a refugee to individuals facing political persecution. Despite failing to expand the definition of a refugee, the U.S. has accommodated migrants displaced by natural disasters through a series of ad hoc fixes, most notably “Temporary Protected Status.” In Central American countries that were granted TPS, we encounter the paradox of the U.S. employing environmental disasters to justify continued extensions of this temporary protection, while addressing chronic conditions in the region. The central question of this thesis is, has employing the environment as a catch-all tool for Temporary Protected Status protection expanded the de facto definition of a “refugee,” for Central American migrants impacted by climate catastrophes and if so, how? Though TPS fills a gap in US law by providing de facto protections to migrants fleeing environmental disasters, the environment is being used as a catch-all tool for more systemic economic and political vulnerabilities in Central America. The environment is a catch-all tool for continued protection only insofar as it is not recognized as political, yet it is getting harder to employ the environment as an apolitical driver of migration. The precarious foundation of TPS threatens the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans that depend on this program to live and work legally in the United States.
Who We Are: Incarcerated Students and the New Prison Literature, 1995-2010
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein
Access: Open access
- This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Music and Autism: Cross-Disciplinary Dialogues Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Daniel Rohan Mayer
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
A Bayesian hierarchical mixture model with continuous-time Markov chains to capture bumblebee foraging behavior
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Max Thrush Hukill
Access: Open access
- The standard statistical methodology for analyzing complex case-control studies in ethology is often limited by approaches that force researchers to model distinct aspects of biological processes in a piecemeal, disjointed fashion. By developing a hierarchical Bayesian model, this work demonstrates that statistical inference in this context can be done using a single coherent framework. To do this, we construct a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) to model bumblebee foraging behavior. To connect the experimental design with the CTMC, we employ a mixture model controlled by a logistic regression on the two-factor design matrix. We then show how to infer these model parameters from experimental data using Markov chain Monte Carlo and interpret the results from a motivating experiment.
Cascades and Overexposure in Networks Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Kim Hancock
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
The sex specific effects of acute ketamine treatment on parvalbumin and anxiety and depression following early life adversity Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Seneca N. Ellis
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community