Digital Commons Network^™

Forecasting The Future: The Early United States Weather Bureau, Robert T. Canning

Honors Theses

The national weather service of the United States came into being in 1870 for the practical utility of the American people. The interaction between weather, agriculture, and commerce provided the impetus for the inception of the service. Many historians put forward the notion of an obdurate weather bureau, a scientific backwater with no interest in modernization until after World War II. I disagree with this popular historiography and instead offer a history of the weather bureau’s attempts to institute the latest meteorological practices that takes into consideration the burdens and obligations of the bureau, as well as the historical context. …

What Causes Ministers Of Finance To Get Fired?, Bradley Turner

Honors Theses

This paper seeks to establish the determinants of turnover in finance ministers. Based on an original worldwide data set, political and economic factors are considered for 58 countries. While the same political factors affect Minister of Finance turnover in both advanced and developing economies, the economic variables that matter differ between the sub-samples. Finance minister turnover is higher during years that there is also presidential turnover. Further, emerging economies have a higher Minister of Finance turnover than developed economies during years without presidential turnover. Results largely hold for robustness checks.

More Than Just Nonsense Verse?: The Language Of Dr. Seuss And Children's Literacy, Nicole Hewes

Senior Scholar Papers

In this Senior Scholars project I wanted to demonstrate that Dr. Seuss books are much more than just nonsense verse. For the first part of my project, I familiarized myself with all of his texts and scrutinized his use of language in a textual analysis. By scrutinizing Geisel’s use of language and wordplay, I hoped to isolate some characteristics that make a Seuss book different from other types of stories and texts. The second part of my project was an empirical study that tested what influence reading a real Seuss text versus a fake Seuss text has on students’ performance …

Island Voices, Sarah Hirsch

Honors Theses

A story that’s actually a series of poems, told somewhat by the people themselves but mostly as it is seen by the ocean, which narrates lovingly, scathingly, honestly, feelingly.

Electronic Detection Of Ultra Cold Neutral Plasma, Nirakar Poudel

Honors Theses

The project was started with an objective to investigate the effect of radio fre- quency absorption in Ultra Cold Neutral Plasmas (UNPs). The plasma oscillation is density dependent and can be excited by using external radio frequency field. A homodyne circuit is used to detect direct absorption of the radio frequency waves. The radio frequency waves are applied to conducting meshes which lie on either side of the plasma. The meshes are effectively a capacitor, which together with inherent circuit resistance constitute a high pass filter. A small part of the gain and phase shift of the filter depend on …

The Radon Transform And The Mathematics Of Medical Imaging, Jen Beatty

Honors Theses

Tomography is the mathematical process of imaging an object via a set of finite slices. In medical imaging, these slices are defined by multiple parallel X-ray beams shot through the object at varying angles. The initial and final intensity of each beam is recorded, and the original image is recreated using this data for multiple slices. I will discuss the central role of the Radon transform and its inversion formula in this recovery process.

From Pond To Pump: Microalgae As A Feedstock For Biodiesel, Anna H. Leavitt

Honors Theses

The global reliance on fossil fuels is an unsustainable practice that has led to the depletion of finite resources and the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, leading to global climate change (Demirbas 2010). Transportation accounts for about a third of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States. Demand for oil continues to increase and resources are becoming more uncertain. Increased production of renewable fuels such as biofuels can help ease the dependence on fossil fuels. Although interest and production in biofuels has been increasing in the past decade, current feedstocks do not meet efficiency needs and some …

Life In Color, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

I have always been fascinated by collections of short stories; I love how authors manage to seamlessly tie different crests of life together, uniting both theme and motif. Theme of place is particularly useful, notably as a starting point. If the short stories all take place within the same universe, a cameo from an earlier short story lends an air of magic to the tales. However, I do greatly appreciate the less-magical stories featuring life at its pinnacle of unacknowledged third-person agony. The concluding message is what really intrigues me, though. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories almost always conclude with …

Odd Or Even: Uncovering Parity Of Rank In A Family Of Rational Elliptic Curves, Anika Lindemann

Honors Theses

Puzzled by equations in multiple variables for centuries, mathematicians have made relatively few strides in solving these seemingly friendly, but unruly beasts. Currently, there is no systematic method for finding all rational values, that satisfy any equation with degree higher than a quadratic. This is bizarre. Solving these has preoccupied great minds since before the formal notion of an equation existed. Before any sort of mathematical formality, these questions were nested in plucky riddles and folded into folk tales. Because they are so simple to state, these equations are accessible to a very general audience. Yet an astounding amount of …

Edible Activism: Food And The Counterculture Of The 1960s And 1970s, Sandra Johnson

Honors Theses

Food is an essential part of every person’s life. Not only does it provide sustenance, but it also holds cultural value. Throughout American history, food has played a significant role in activism because of its ability to form and express identity, build community, demonstrate allegiance with certain beliefs, and reject the status quo. In 1773, American colonists boycotted the controlling British Monarchy and the monopolistic East India Company by throwing tea into the Boston harbor in what later became known as the Boston Tea Party. During the Jacksonian era of the 1830s, radical vegetarians led by the ideologies of …

The Development And Morphology Of Zebrafish After Embryonic Ethanol Exposure, Frances Lee

Honors Theses

Maternal consumption of alcohol may subject the fetus to fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FAS or FASD). FAS/D is a public health problem, and affected children are defined by varying degrees of irreversible mental retardation, physical defects, behavioral issues, and vision problems from prenatal alcohol exposure (Riley et al. 2011). Recent studies on FAS have looked towards animal models, such as zebrafish, Danio rerio, that exhibit homologous physical and behavioral effects of alcohol (Bilotta et al. 2004). I exposed zebrafish embryos to low doses of ethanol (0.5% v/v or 1% v/v) in either chronic (at least 8 …

Geodynamic Constraints On The Flow Of Samoan-Plume Mantle Into The Northern Lau Basin, Nathan Katsiaficas

Honors Theses

The northernmost portion of the Lau basin, South Pacific, features numerous geochemical and geophysical anomalies. These include: (1) a strong latitudinal gradient in the trace element and isotopic (Sr-Nd-Pb) enrichment of basalts erupted along the various back-arc spreading centers (BASCs) within the basin, (2) high 3He/4He (up to 28 times RA, where RA, the ratio in Earth's atmosphere, is 1.4 x 10-6) in basalts erupted along some portions of the BASCs (e.g., Rochambeau Bank), and (3) the presence of trench-parallel shear-wave splitting near the Tonga arc. The occurrence of these anomalies has been attributed to the southward flow of mantle …

Nine, Emily C. Stuart

Honors Theses

N/A

The Influence Of Framing Effects And Regret On Health Decision-Making, Sarah Falkof

Honors Theses

This study investigates methods for influencing decision-making regarding preventative vaccine shots. Specifically, the research assessed the influence of message framing on regret and future action likelihood. In Experiment 1, participants read information about an available vaccine shot that was either framed positively or negatively. Participants were told whether they decided to get the shot (action) or not get the shot (inaction) and rated their feelings of regret after being told they got sick, regardless of their decision. Results showed that participants who read the positively framed information experienced more regret overall than participants who read the information with the negative …

A Web Application In Rest: The Design, Implementation, And Evaluation Of A Web Application Based On RePresentational STate TRansfer, William O’Brien

Honors Theses

It is no secret the Internet has evolved at an alarming rate since its public debut in the early 90s. What began as a simple way for users to publish files has evolved into a platform for impressively complex interactive applications. Now, applications once restricted to a single operating system are made available to all through advancements in browser technology and libraries. For a long time, Adobe has offered Photoshop as a far from trivial image editing program for around $100 to the Windows and Mac platforms. Recently, a web application emulating Photoshop’s features has been made freely available to …

“Called Her Women Together” Home Birth In Maine, Margaret Kruithoff

Honors Theses

Nine months ago, I set out to write a thesis on childbirth: hippies having their babies in the woods, hospital politics, and women’s rights. The final product is very different than what I had intended. Instead of finding crazy hippies in the woods, I found a community of kind and skilled midwives and loving, openhearted mothers. I am deeply indebted to these inspiring women for their stories and wisdom, which fill the pages of this thesis. Interviewing these mothers, midwives, and home birth advocates was a tremendously empowering experience for me, a young woman.

Recurrence Relations, Fractals, And Chaos: Implications For Analyzing Gene Structure, Sarah. M. Harmon

Honors Theses

The “chaos game” is a well-known algorithm by which one may construct a pictorial representation of an iterative process. The resulting sets are known as fractals and can be mathematically characterized by measures of dimension as well as by their associated recurrence relations. Using the chaos game algorithm, is it possible to derive meaningful structure out of our own genetic encoding, and that of other organisms? In this paper, I will present one method of applying the chaos game to biological data and subsequently will discuss both the mathematical and biological implications of the results.

Should She Run? The Decision For Female Congressíenal Candidates, Laura . J. Maloney

Honors Theses

This study, “Should She Run? The decision for female congressional candidates,” explores Why Women decide to or not to run for Congress. lt focuses on the influence of state political Culture with a case study on the emergence of female candidates in the primaries for U.S. House of Representative races New England districts from 2002-2010. After running a series of general linear models, the study Ends that certain aspects of a state’s political culture do impact female candidate emergence in New England. Looking forward, it suggests that the key to shrinking the gender gap in the U.S. Congress is to …

Isometries And Spontaneous Lorentz Violation In General Relativity, Greg Merritt

Honors Theses

General Relativity, or GR, is a theory which describes gravity as a manifestation of the curvature of space and time. While the other three fundamental forces in nature are represented as field theories, GR is a geometric theory. In the search for a way to reconcile the field theories for the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces with the gravitational force, a logical place to start is by re-expressing GR as a field theory. In doing so, we find that the theory contains a number of symmetries. When we solve the equations in GR, we find that by choosing certain solutions …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

The Effectiveness Of Capital Controls On Capital Inflows In Emerging Markets, Kathleen A. Davis

Honors Theses

Capital flows have become increasingly more volatile over the past

decade, causing growing concern in emerging markets over the potential damages

large sudden capital inflows and outflows can cause those economies. Capital

controls have been used since World War I as a way to try to control these flows.

After being abolished nearly everywhere, they have recently been reintroduced in

a number of countries. The main analysis of this paper looks at the effect of the

capital controls on capital inflows from 2000 through 2010 in an 8 country sample

of emerging markets who have recently implemented changes in their …

Cameras, Satellites, And Surveys: A Multi-Platform Approach To Monitoring Lake Conservation Behavior, Daniel D. Homeier

Honors Theses

Shoreline buffers are essential to maintaining lake water quality and there are numerous methods for their assessment. There is uncertainty in the benefits and drawbacks of different shoreline buffer assessment methods. In this study I explore three methods of remotely assessing shoreline buffers in the Belgrade Lakes Region of Maine: household surveys, geotagged shoreline photos, and satellite imagery. By comparing these three methods I will evaluate their accuracy and applicable scale when used to assess the presence and quality of shoreline buffers.

I used both parametric and non-parametric analysis to (1) evaluate the relative accuracy of 154 household surveys in …

Examination Of Spatial Variations In Recrystallization Mechanisms In Quartz, Emma N. Beck

Honors Theses

S-C mylonites form as a result of non-coaxial deformation in ductile shear zones. Planes of weakness develop and delineate two domains, the S and the C Each of these domains accommodates variable amounts of strain. Sample WMSZ-188 exhibits subgrain rotation (SGR) recrystallization in the C domains, and grain boundary migration (GBM) recrystallization in the S domains. This partitioning of recrystallization mechanisms indicates either: (1) strain-rate partitioning during a single deformation event; or (2) a second, lower-temperature deformation event that over-printed the C domains. This study tests these two hypotheses. Optical and EBSD analyses were used to look for evidence of …

Let Them Eat Cake, Courtney Yeager

Honors Theses

My mother has always said she belongs in the kitchen. Sure, she voted in presidential elections and wasn’t surprised when I, as a seventh-grader, mentioned that Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted all moms to find a real job. But whenever I glanced up at my childhood home, tucked neatly into the hillside towering over town, I envisioned my mother dicing zucchini or fingering the grout between counter tiles as she pored over hardback cookbooks, turning pages as delicately as she would crack an egg.

A Poet Of The Sikhs: Aesthetic Embodiment In The Poetry Of A Young And Elderly Bhai Vir Singh, Todd Curcuru

Honors Theses

Bhai Vir Singh, famous 19^th and 20^th century Sikh poet, writer, and scholar is remembered for his great literary achievements and proliferation of the Pubjabi language. Raised in the Punjab, India after the fall of the Sikh kingdom to the British, Vir Singh grew up in a time of religious turmoil due to Western influence. Joining the Singh Sabha reformation movement, he dedicated his life wholeheartedly to return contemporary Sikh identity to its foundational roots as present in the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth.

Despite his desire to return to a fundamental Sikh identity, Bhai Vir Singh …