Jstae V42 Full Issue, Manisha Sharma

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

No abstract provided.

Game Design: Competitive Mobile Games, Kalen Wallin

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the design process for a competitive multiplayer game mode in “baldorf,” a ball-throwing mobile game developed by Mystic Rhoads Productions. The research aims to enhance the overall gaming experience by introducing a competitive mode that challenges players’ skills and facilitates interaction with others. The research methodology included reviewing the popular competitive mobile games: Marvel Snap, Clash Royale, and Clash of Clans, which boast high download numbers and chart rankings. This analysis helped identify key features and mechanics that contribute to an engaging multiplayer experience. As a result, several designs were proposed, covering the profile, matchmaking, match, and …

Characterization Of Lps As A Virulence Factor In Burkholderia Cepacia During Plant And Human Infection, Jack Klahr, Elizabeth Danka

Biology Senior Theses

Burkholderia cepacia is a gram-negative bacterium first characterized as the causative agent of sour skin in onion crops. More recently, B. cepacia has become a clinical concern as an opportunistic pathogen that can colonize the upper respiratory tract of cystic fibrosis patients and increase mortality in these patients. Infection is exacerbated by the intrinsic resistance to antibiotics found in this genus of organisms. Additional virulence factors help the bacteria persist in the host during infection. However, few of these factors have been described. In this work, we characterized a putative virulence factor that was first identified through an onion infection …

Menu For Home Cooking, Zherong Hu

Theses - ALL

The purpose of this thesis is to chronicle the influences and origins of my work and how they ultimately led to the discovery of my current practice. While my childhood and high school experiences in China were the foundation for my art practice, my undergraduate and graduate school experiences in the United States are what allowed me to search, discover, and explore my roots. I begin the paper by describing who and what influenced me to pursue art as a calling. I then briefly refer to some of my undergraduate work for context. Next, I will address some of the …

Associations Between Parental Separation In Adolescence And Romantic Relationship Quality In Emerging Adulthood, Chloe Ludden

Theses - ALL

Abstract Parental separation can impact multiple aspects of an individual’s life, including romantic relationship satisfaction (Amato, 2010). Albert Bandura’s social learning theory suggests that children model their behavior based on their parents’ example, which means those whose parents separate may adopt similar relationship practices that lead to their eventual separation with their romantic partner– this could contribute to the pattern of divorce being more common in those whose parents’ divorced (Amato & Deboer, 2001; Bandura, 1977; Ross & Mirowsky, 1999). It is important to interrupt this pattern to prevent the cycle of negative impacts of parental divorce on children being …

Grit Games: Do Incentives Play A Role?, Kaylee Markham

Honors Theses

Grit is a personality trait defined by persistence in reaching long-term goals despite difficulties (Duckworth, 2021). Angela Duckworth introduced the topic through her research and creation of the grit scale. The purpose of this research was to assess the grit levels of athletic groups at a southern university, using Duckworth’s scale. The hypothesis was that NCAA athletes would have higher grit levels because they have more incentives to gain by persevering through difficult times. The three groups surveyed were Club sports, Esports, and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sports, which have a range of included benefits in their programs. These …

Sleep Duration Is Associated With Caudate Volume And Executive Function, Nicole Jones

Honors Theses

The ineligible role of the caudate nucleus in sleep has been implicated throughout multiple scientific studies. Previous literature has shown that greater caudate volume is associated with longer habitual sleep duration in older adults- ranging from 55 years of age and up. However, the association between sleep duration and caudate volume remains unknown in the younger population. In this study, we examined the caudate volume in youth to older adults (10 to 85 years old) with a greater sample size (N=464) to increase statistical power. The volumetric size of the caudate nucleus showed significantly positive association with habitual sleep duration, …

Historical Archaeology At The Chalmers Institute, Mississippi's First University, Antosia Briggs

Honors Theses

This study presents a basic description and analysis of the artifacts collected from the 2015 archaeological excavation conducted in Holly Springs, Mississippi at the Chalmers Institute site. The thesis includes history and background on Holly Springs as a city to orient the reader. This text also includes information regarding the program, Preserve Marshall County, as their work regarding the building and site ties directly into the ability of the student archaeologists being able to excavate in 2015 as well as the future of the building. This study analyzes the artifacts found based on the frameworks of the archaeology of institutional …

Medical Marijuana In Mississippi: A Journalistic View Of Physician Opinions And Patient Education, Michael Pitts

Honors Theses

Medical Marijuana in Mississippi: A Journalistic View of Physician Opinions and Patient Education is an in-depth investigative journalism project examining aspects of the Mississippi Medical Cannabis Program. Specific areas of interest were Mississippi physician opinions on the use medical marijuana and their views on the application of the state’s program as well as an examination into how patients are receiving education on medical marijuana. This project involved interviews of healthcare providers, dispensary staff, and patients, in addition to background research that was used to formulate interview questions, determine areas of interest and add necessary context. This project occurred during the …

To Dig A Hole And Fill It Back Up, Jackson Whetstone

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstract:

The socioeconomical philosophy of the United States is still very much related to the Marxist Labor Theory of Value which states that “the economic value of a good or service is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it” (Das Kapital, Marx 1.) This philosophy has penetrated the way that we think about art and object, and in turn positions art as a means of transaction, thus limiting art to a form of glorified currency. This Essay will chronicle my art practice, that have led up to two thesis pieces, Trench and Dig …

Photophysical And Photochemical Processes In Small Molecules And Materials For Solar Energy Conversion, Ethan Lambert

Honors Theses

The work covered in this thesis all falls under the theme of photophysical processes after light and matter interact. Those of primary interest are Raman scattering induced vibrations and excited state dynamics probed by transient absorption spectroscopy. Small molecules are studied with Raman spectroscopy and computational chemistry. These studies unearth the shifts in vibrational frequency as a function of charge transfer or receipt and how a quantitative assay of natural orbital populations and delocalization can offer both the nature and magnitude of this charge transfer. Further, a method is presented that builds upon previous work within the academic family tree; …

Photocatalyzed Hydrogen Evolution Using Nickel-Bound Metallothionein Protein, Windfield Swetman

Honors Theses

The continued burning of fossil fuels is not only a cause of increasing deterioration of the environment but also a financially unsustainable source of energy. Advances in energy production must be investigated to avoid the long-term effects of this current main source of energy. One of the avenues being explored is the use of metalloenzymes to catalyze hydrogen evolution via water splitting that occurs during the reductive half of artificial photosynthesis. Metalloenzyme catalysts with a single Ni(Cys)₄ active site have been previously studied, and this study explores the possibility of increasing hydrogen production by using metalloenzyme catalysts with multiple …

Development Of An Immunoblot Assay To Detect Antibodies To Sars-Cov-2 Spike And Nucleocapsid Antigens In Serum Of Covid-19 Patients, Christian Hollis

Honors Theses

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has created one of the most world-halting events in recent world history. Its effects have reached every corner of the globe and manifested problems within each country’s healthcare and social systems. During the pandemic, many researchers have searched to develop a more robust understanding of the novel virus’s genetic and structural material. In year three since the emergence of COVID-19, these researchers hope to implement new advancements in testing and detection for the presence of the virus.

This thesis intends to produce evidence for the reliability of COVID-19 antibody tests using immunoblot assay detection. These tests …

Hungry For Student Food Security: A Comparative Analysis Of University Food Pantry Policies, Anastasia Jones-Burdick

Honors Theses

This undergraduate research thesis aims to explore the relationship between public institutions of higher education and the operational policies of their university food pantries. The increasing rates of nontraditional students entering public universities correlate to an increasing population of students facing food insecurity, placing strain on institutional interventions, especially university food pantries (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015; Nazmi et al., 2019, p.2). This research conducted a qualitative comparative case analysis of university food pantry policies and semistructured interviews with pantry informants through a USDA-adapted evaluative framework to understand the evolution of public universities’ interventions (Barale et al., 2017). The …

Structural Integrity And Stability Of Dna In Ionic Liquid And Near-Infrared Indolizine Squaraine Dye, Ember Yeji Suh

Honors Theses

Luminol, the most common presumptive test for blood at a crime scene, has multiple issues, such as false positive results with chemical agents, no luminescence due to “active oxygen” cleaning agents on bloodstains, and inability to penetrate textile materials. A combination of indolizine squaraine dye and ionic liquid (IL), or Dye Enhanced Textile Emission for Crime Tracking (DETECT), have shown potential to address these issues. The purpose of this study was to assess the binding mechanism of CG (1:1) and SO₃SQ dye to HSA and how the mechanism can explain the W214 fluorescence quenching effect and to determine …

Associations Between Tiktok Use, Mental Health, And Body Image Among College Students, Alexz Carpenter

Honors Theses

Background. Social media use continues to increase globally, and there is a large field of research examining the relationships between social media use with anxiety, depression, and body image. College-aged students are particularly vulnerable to these associations because they are at a unique developmental point of their life. College-aged students also use social media more frequently than almost any other age group, which may put them at increased risk for negative mental health and body image outcomes related to their social media use. TikTok is a relatively new social media app that has exponentially risen in popularity, especially among younger …

Key Barriers To University-Enrolled Student Parents Enhanced By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Khadeejah Franklin, Alexa Saval

Honors Theses

Student parents, both undergraduate and graduate, already face the difficult task of balancing their studies and raising children. The COVID-19 pandemic enhanced already present issues student parents face, such as virtual-schooling, daycare costs and closings, staying home with sick children, and potentially not having a local support system, among others. Further, students who are performing laboratory research to fulfill their STEM educational requirements had their
research progress come to a halt when the country locked down. This study aims to identify the struggles student parents faced prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, what issues the pandemic exacerbated, and what new problems …

Leading For Equity: Understanding The Influences, Realities, Resistance, And Beliefs Around Tracking And Acceleration In Suburban School Districts, Joseph Michael Debarbieri

Dissertations - ALL

Inequity and marginalization exist within educational structures, policies, and practices. As such, practitioners, like district-level leaders need a clearer understanding of the barriers and their role in making meaning and shaping progress to overcome the disconnect between their beliefs, data, and meaningful and sustainable action. This study sought to understand regional efforts and influences of district leaders around issues of academic tracking and acceleration. As a result of a desire for transformation, this qualitative research study closely examined high-level district leaders by analyzing how they view academic tracking and acceleration within their organizations, how they address issues of equity within …

Recent Changes In Mercury Cycling Within The Conterminous United States, Connor Ian Olson

Dissertations - ALL

The natural cycling of mercury (Hg) has been augmented by anthropogenic activities, including mining, waste incineration, and the combustion of fossil fuels. The subsequent enrichment of Hg in air, soils, and surface waters has caused concern, due to the adverse health effects of mercury on humans and wildlife. In the United States, policies like the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Mercury and Air Toxics Rule have led to decreases in domestic emissions, but global emissions have increased in recent years and now dominate U.S. emissions. As a result, uncertainties remain regarding how quickly and to what extent …

Leadership Actions For Equitable Arts Education, Sarah Gentile

Dissertations - ALL

In May of 2020, over fifty arts and education organizations released a joint statement regarding the essential nature of arts education (NAEA, 2020). This announcement and subsequent campaign highlighted some benefits of a rich arts education such as increased social-emotional well-being and levels of empathy, the development of a safe and welcoming school environment, as well as lower suspension and drop-out rates (Gehry, 2020; NAEA, 2020). It also highlighted the consistent inequities that continually plague arts education programs (Gehry, 2020).

Five district level arts leaders from New York State, striving for equity in their programs, participated in this phenomenological, multi-sited, …

Numerical Methods For Integral Equations, Yuzhen Liu

Dissertations - ALL

We first propose a multiscale Galerkin method for solving the Volterra integral equations of the second kind with a weakly singular kernel. Due to the special structure of Volterra integral equations and the ``shrinking support" property of multiscale basis functions, a large number of entries of the coefficient matrix appearing in the resulting discrete linear system are zeros. This result, combined with a truncation scheme of the coefficient matrix, leads to a fast numerical solution of the integral equation. A quadrature method is designed especially for the weakly singular kernel involved inside the integral operator to compute the nonzero entries …

Haudenosaunee Men And Masculinities In Higher Education: Perceptions, Reminders, And Responsibilities To Community, Hugh Burnam

Dissertations - ALL

Native men in higher education experience among the lowest persistence and graduation rates in the United States (Condition of Education, 2020). Native men are subjected to systemic barriers brought by settler colonialism such as racism and patriarchal hegemony which negatively impact their perceptions of masculinity and forces them to move away from their traditional cultural teachings (Boyden, et al., 2014; Innes & Anderson, 2015). These systemic barriers also detrimentally impact the perceptions and experiences of Native men in higher education (Poolaw, 2018; Still, 2019). The experiences of Native men in higher education still need to be explored further (Reyes & …

Civility, Epistemic Injustice, And Criticality: Toward A Praxis Of Affective Democratic Friction, Sally J. Sayles-Hannon

Dissertations - ALL

Socially-privileged students’ discomfort in the social justice classroom as injustice is dramatically increasing in public discourse, especially as the Anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement thrives. It is in the current climate of Anti-CRT that social justice educators must be vigilant of how classrooms could reproduce the very injustices they seek to problematize. Coupled alongside social justice educators’ fears of job security and violence—physical, emotional, and epistemic—calls for civility that function to mute discomfort about systemic injustices could easily creep into classrooms. I claim civility can function speciously—when appeals to civility falsely claim, even if well-intentioned, to create just, open dialogue. …

A Multi-Disciplinary Approach To Plastic Pollution From Environmental Sampling To Surveying: Quality Assurance, Freshwater Contamination, And Popular Opinions, Laura Audrey Thomasina Markley

Dissertations - ALL

Plastic pollution is a global problem impacting every environmental compartment, from the air in Mount Everest to urban freshwater supplies. The scope and magnitude of the plastic problem requires an interdisciplinary approach that addresses human and environmental dimensions. I look to inform circular economy approaches through three phases of research: 1) individual waste generation and perceptions of waste and plastic issues; 2) methods and quality control evaluation for quantification of freshwater microplastics; and 3) temporal and spatial variation in plastic particle dynamics over a 3-year period in an urban lake compared with a rural lake in Central New York. In …

The Ecology Of Fine-Scale, Tissue-Specific Floral Scent Patterns In An Obligate Brood-Pollination Mutualism., Gwen Melissa Bode

Theses - ALL

Abstract: Interactions between plants and insect pollinators are of critical importance as the majority of flowering plants rely on animals for pollination and insects are the most diverse group of pollinators on Earth. To obtain pollination services plants must attract pollinators by signaling the presence of rewards, and chemosensory cues including floral scent are of particular importance to pollinator attraction. In highly-specialized brood-pollination mutualisms, like the yucca-yucca moth mutualism, the “reward” for pollinators is a brood site and food source for their offspring: fertilized plant ovules. Being able to distinguish among floral parts is critical for yucca moths to successfully …

Modeling Applications To Understand Dominant Processes And Surface Water Quality, Ruta Basijokaite

Dissertations - ALL

Models are universal tools that can be used to improve our understanding of natural system functioning and how these systems respond to perturbations (i.e., changing conditions). Due to the growth of computing power over the last decades, increasingly detailed models capable of working at finer resolutions and larger scales are expected to play a key role in advancing understanding Earth system sciences (Wood et al., 2011; Bierkens et al., 2014; Rauser et al., 2016). Such models are often used for weather forecasts, flood projection, drought severity assessment, among countless other applications including atmospheric circulations (Cotton et al., 2014), biochemical processes …

Causal Effects Of Green Infrastructure On Stormwater Hydrology And Water Quality, Caitlin G. Eger

Dissertations - ALL

Applications of green infrastructure to stormwater management continue to increase in urban landscapes. There are numerous studies of individual stormwater management sites, but few meta-analyses that synthesize and explore design variables for stormwater control structures within a robust statistical framework. The lack of a standardized framework is due to the complexity of stormwater infrastructure designs. Locally customized designs fit to meet diverse site conditions create datasets that become messy, non-uniform, and difficult to analyze across multiple sites. In this dissertation, I first examine how hydrologic processes govern the function of various stormwater infrastructure technologies using water budget data from published …

Design, Synthesis, And Characterization Of Monomeric Peptide Multiagonists For The Mitigation Of Cns-Associated Side Effects In The Treatment Of Type Ii Diabetes And Obesity, Kylie Sloane Chichura

Dissertations - ALL

Current treatments for type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and obesity do not reliably achieve long-termweight-loss and up to 50% of patients experience nausea and vomiting. Thus, there is a critical need for obesity medications that provide glycemic control with enhanced weight loss and without sideeffects. We recently reported on the development of EP45, a first in class monomeric peptide drug, which displayed glucoregulation and profound weight loss in rats, and an absence of visceral malaise in shrews, a mammalian model capable of vomiting (unlike rats). By targeting multiple weight-loss and glucoregulatory pathways simultaneously with a single drug, GEP44, we can …

Pahoehoe Breakouts And Lava-Substrate Interactions: Insights From Large-Scale Experimental Lava Flows, Christopher Joseph Sant

Dissertations - ALL

Basaltic lava flows are one of the most visible geologic processes on Earth. Gaining a thorough knowledge of basaltic lava flow behavior is imperative to understanding Earth’s formation processes and for the protection of humanity. Studies of basalt flow behavior have traditionally been completed on active natural basalt flows or in the laboratory using analog materials. Studying active lava flows can be difficult due to unpredictable timing, remote locations, and dangerous conditions. However, the advent of meter-scale laboratory generated lava flows allows for safe and detailed study of active basalt flows. By using natural basaltic material at natural eruption temperatures, …

On Homogeneous Closed Gradient Laplacian Solitons And The Modified Conformal Hessian, Nicholas Ng

Dissertations - ALL

Laplacian solitons are self-similar solutions to a geometric flow of $G_2$-structures $\varphi \in \Omega^3(M)$ on smooth $7$-manifolds $M$ called the Laplacian flow. Recently, Laplacian solitons on homogeneous spaces have received increased interest and many new examples have been found by Fernandez-Raffero, Lauret-Nicolini, and others (see, e.g., \cites{FR20, Lau17a, Lau17b, LN20, Nic18}, and \cite{Nic22}). Though there has been recent work on gradient Laplacian solitons in the nonhomogeneous setting due to Haskins and his collaborators (see, e.g., \cites{HN21, HKP22}), very little is known about gradient solitons of a closed Laplacian flow on homogeneous spaces.

In this thesis, we investigate homogeneous closed gradient …