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Intimacy Without The Chance Of Heartbreak For Richer, For Poorer, In Sickness & In Health, Cynthia Nguyen Jun 2024

Intimacy Without The Chance Of Heartbreak For Richer, For Poorer, In Sickness & In Health, Cynthia Nguyen

Honors Projects

The present study investigates the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the consumption of porn, shifts in the production of porn consumed between men and women, and the breakdown of any pattern in adult content via film, pictures, and audio. A quantitative approach was done by using R to analyze data pulled off of Pornhub, Reddit’s GoneWildAudio subreddit, and Archive of Our Own from 2018 to 2023. Statistical inference and modeling is used to attempt to find a pattern in the production of online porn across three mediums over several years before, during, and after the pandemic. Regardless of events …


Demystifying The "Social Media Algorithm": The Legacy Of Surveillance Advertising And Platformization, Garrett Crites Jun 2024

Demystifying The "Social Media Algorithm": The Legacy Of Surveillance Advertising And Platformization, Garrett Crites

Honors Projects

Recently, more individuals are becoming aware that they are being served content on social media platforms by automated means. Due to the lack of transparency, a colloquial understanding of the “social media algorithm” has emerged in popular discourse. To shed light on the real–world phenomena that these ideas surround, I look at the rise of surveillance advertising and the platformization of the internet in conjunction with the automated platform operations employed by large social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and X. In doing so I provide a clearer idea of the colloquial “social media algorithm” to encourage the reader …


A Survey Of Practical Haskell: Parsing, Interpreting, And Testing, Parker Landon May 2024

A Survey Of Practical Haskell: Parsing, Interpreting, And Testing, Parker Landon

Honors Projects

Strongly typed pure functional programming languages like Haskell have historically been confined to academia as vehicles for programming language research. While features of functional programming have greatly influenced mainstream programming languages, the imperative programming style remains pervasive in practical software development. This paper illustrates the practical utility of Haskell and pure functional programming by exploring “hson,” a scripting language for processing JSON developed in Haskell. After introducing the relevant features of Haskell to the unfamiliar reader, this paper reveals how hson leverages functional programming to implement parsing, interpreting, and testing. By showcasing how Haskell’s language features enable the creation of …


Anion Binding And Sensing Using Cs124-Sensitized Luminescent Terbium Complexes, Alessandro Rizzi, Minhee Lee, Wade Grabow, Olivia Brooks, Helena Nguyen, Neal Yakelis, Clarisse Vanderfeltz May 2024

Anion Binding And Sensing Using Cs124-Sensitized Luminescent Terbium Complexes, Alessandro Rizzi, Minhee Lee, Wade Grabow, Olivia Brooks, Helena Nguyen, Neal Yakelis, Clarisse Vanderfeltz

Honors Projects

Two terbium complexes with varying degrees of intramolecular coordination, Tb:DO2A-Cs124 and Tb:DOTA-Cs124, were prepared. Their capacity to detect biologically and environmentally relevant anions through their luminescence changes was investigated. Tb:DOTA-Cs124 demonstrated exceptional selectivity as a sensor for nitrite, while Tb:DO2A-Cs124 detects nitrite, phosphates, and a range of carboxylate-containing anions.


Analysis Of Green Data Center Efforts And Energy Usage, Dillon J. Goicoechea May 2024

Analysis Of Green Data Center Efforts And Energy Usage, Dillon J. Goicoechea

Honors Projects

This paper is an undergraduate level literature review and analysis of research surrounding the Green Data Center phenomenon. Review of work covering energy usage, data usage, usage predictions, and strategies for decreasing energy requirements is the main analysis of this work. The analysis shows that while data centers are becoming greener, the increase in usage of their capacities is negating those efficiency increases. The increase in the energy efficiency of data centers is crucial, however, there must be made efforts to lower computational and data usage to help achieve lower energy usage of data centers.


Helping The Home Cook: How Unsupervised Machine Learning Can Prevent Food Waste, Ryan B. Watson May 2024

Helping The Home Cook: How Unsupervised Machine Learning Can Prevent Food Waste, Ryan B. Watson

Honors Projects

A common problem for the home cook is having too much of one food ingredient leftover, then not knowing what to do with it. To alleviate this problem, I propose using an unsupervised machine learning model to recommend recipes based on what ingredients the home cook wants to use. This model is built with FastText and trained on the recipe ingredients in the RecipeNLG dataset. Recipes are recommended based on which recipe ingredient set is most similar to the recipe ingredients provided in the user input. This solution will reduce consumer food waste by giving the home cook the information …


Purification And Isolation Of Α-Chloro-Β-Lactone Precursor Molecules, Matthew Ellis May 2024

Purification And Isolation Of Α-Chloro-Β-Lactone Precursor Molecules, Matthew Ellis

Honors Projects

This research investigates the synthesis of α-chloro-β-lactone molecules, focusing on the production, isolation, and purification of two precursor compounds from chloroacetic acid and substituted benzaldehydes. While multiple methods were explored, including EDC, DIC, and DCC catalysis, DCC proved to be most effective in producing higher yields. However, challenges in purification arose due to the formation of byproducts, particularly with DCC, prompting further investigation for efficient extraction and purification techniques. DCC, however, shows a promising route for α-chloro-β-lactone synthesis, despite purification complexities.


Graph-Based Learning, Jason Gronn Apr 2024

Graph-Based Learning, Jason Gronn

Honors Projects

An educational approach to teaching students based on prerequisite knowledge they may or may not have is presented. This approach represents educational content in the form of a graph, where edges link each topic to the prerequisites of that topic. A proof-of-concept website is created based on this approach, where qualitative results are observed and a number of conclusions are drawn. Some of the findings are that, while it can prevent users from being confused by lacked prior knowledge, the users may instead be confused by the presentation of the graph structure. The work finds that the approach is workable, …


Evaluating Appropriate Participant Training Period For Anuran Auditory Surveys, Evianna Goebel Apr 2024

Evaluating Appropriate Participant Training Period For Anuran Auditory Surveys, Evianna Goebel

Honors Projects

Auditory surveys are common in anuran research as they can tell a lot about a species without being intensely laborious or costly. There has not been much research on training periods for those taking part in the surveys. Proper training is necessary and improper training can hinder a project and lead to skewed results. In this study, we took students from several biology 2040 classes and had them study the calls of 11 frog species in NW Ohio. From the data, we can conclude that 2 weeks of roughly 100 minutes of study time is not enough for successful results …


Feed More, Waste Less, Kaitlyn Dietz Apr 2024

Feed More, Waste Less, Kaitlyn Dietz

Honors Projects

With college prices and the cost of food increasing, so has the rate of food insecurity among college students. Food insecurity is defined as the lack of availability or access to food to meet someone’s basic and necessary needs. Food insecurity is associated with lower grades, depression, higher perceived stress, and lower graduation rates. Campuses across the country are responding to the problem in a variety of ways, including distribution of food directly to students through food pantries. Meal plans are expensive in the addition to college tuition and housing. The lowest cost for a meal plan at Bowling Green …


The Social Pot: A Social Media Application, Reid Long Apr 2024

The Social Pot: A Social Media Application, Reid Long

Honors Projects

The Social Pot is a web application that allows a user to post to Instagram and X simultaneously from one place. The user creates a Social Pot Account and from there can set their Instagram username and password within the home page. Once the user attempts to post, it will redirect them to login to X which once successful will make the tweet. Used the API 'instagram-private-api'. User needed to give access to my X Project which in turn gave an Auth token (via X redirect URL). The auth token was then sent to my endpoint in order to get …


Synthesis Of N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes Of Coinage Metals And Their Application In The Activation Of Hydrogen, Maryam Akramova Jan 2024

Synthesis Of N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes Of Coinage Metals And Their Application In The Activation Of Hydrogen, Maryam Akramova

Honors Projects

The main cause of the ongoing global climate crisis is the emission of greenhouse gases, and current climate reports emphasize the need to transition to low-emission renewable energy sources. Urgently needed are methods for storing renewable energy, such as synthetic fuels like hydrogen (H2) gas; however, a challenge to the widespread implementation of hydrogen fuel is its low volumetric energy density. This thesis describes an effort to synthesize a catalyst that takes advantage of hard-soft acid-base (HSAB) mismatches to activate H2 and facilitate its reaction with CO2 to form hydrocarbon fuels, thereby providing a sustainable means …


Modeling The Development & Expression Of Political Opinion: A Zallerian Approach, Avery C. Ellis Jan 2024

Modeling The Development & Expression Of Political Opinion: A Zallerian Approach, Avery C. Ellis

Honors Projects

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 …


Activation Of Hydrogen By Sterically Modulated Coinage Metal Catalysts Via Mutual Quenching Of Hard/Soft Acid/Base Mismatches, Zach Leibowitz Jan 2024

Activation Of Hydrogen By Sterically Modulated Coinage Metal Catalysts Via Mutual Quenching Of Hard/Soft Acid/Base Mismatches, Zach Leibowitz

Honors Projects

To mitigate the devastating environmental impacts of climate change in the coming decades, it is imperative that we replace the use of fossil fuels with renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric. As these renewable energy sources are inherently intermittent, there exists a need for sustainable mechanisms to store renewable energy for later use. While the direct use of dihydrogen (H2) as a combustible fuel would allow for energy storage without the harmful release of carbon dioxide (CO2) upon combustion, the practicality of H2 as a synthetic fuel is limited by its low …


Basins Of Attraction And Metaoptimization For Particle Swarm Optimization Methods, David Ma Jan 2024

Basins Of Attraction And Metaoptimization For Particle Swarm Optimization Methods, David Ma

Honors Projects

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a metaheuristic optimization method that finds near- optima by spawning particles which explore within a given search space while exploiting the best candidate solutions of the swarm. PSO algorithms emulate the behavior of, say, a flock of birds or a school of fish, and encapsulate the randomness that is present in natural processes. In this paper, we discuss different initialization schemes and meta-optimizations for PSO, its performances on various multi-minima functions, and the unique intricacies and obstacles that the method faces when attempting to produce images for basins of attraction, which are the sets of …


Fall Forward, Spring Back: Drivers Of Synchrony In The Sea Star Crawl-Bounce Gait Transition, Brady R. Nichols Jan 2024

Fall Forward, Spring Back: Drivers Of Synchrony In The Sea Star Crawl-Bounce Gait Transition, Brady R. Nichols

Honors Projects

The Froude number is the ratio of kinetic energy to gravitational potential energy used during locomotion and is often used to analyze gait transitions. Here, I compare and contrast the human walk-run gait transition, which occurs at a consistent Froude number of 1 because there exists a mechanical speed limit to walking, and the sea star crawl-bounce gait transition, which occurs around Froude numbers of 1*10^-3. In this thesis I investigate why sea stars exhibit two gaits despite lacking brains and moving at Froude numbers far below other known gait transitions, hypothesizing (1) that the crawl-bounce transition may be mechanical …


Statistically Principled Deep Learning For Sar Image Segmentation, Cassandra Goldberg Jan 2024

Statistically Principled Deep Learning For Sar Image Segmentation, Cassandra Goldberg

Honors Projects

This project explores novel approaches for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image segmentation that integrate established statistical properties of SAR into deep learning models. First, Perlin Noise and Generalized Gamma distribution sampling methods were utilized to generate a synthetic dataset that effectively captures the statistical attributes of SAR data. Subsequently, deep learning segmentation architectures were developed that utilize average pooling and 1x1 convolutions to perform statistical moment computations. Finally, supervised and unsupervised disparity-based losses were incorporated into model training. The experimental outcomes yielded promising results: the synthetic dataset effectively trained deep learning models for real SAR data segmentation, the statistically-informed architectures …