Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Land-Use Governance And Indigenous Engagement In Arctic Alaska And Norway: Successes, Current Gaps, And Paths Forward, Ningning Sun

Environmental Studies Senior Theses

This study aims to analyze the land use governance structures and the role of Indigenous engagement in Alaska and Norway using a comparative approach, with special focus on successful practices, current gaps, and paths forward to achieve equitable governance. Extractive land uses, such as oil and gas extraction and the construction of wind farms, have mixed impacts on Indigenous communities and lead to social and legal issues such as land use conflict and environmental injustice. Previous research has studied land use governance in Arctic countries with regard to Indigenous Peoples, yet there is a lack of literature that spans Alaska …

Fiscal Incentives For Green Growth: A Mixed-Methods Study Of The State Of Agroforestry And Tree Cover In India, Spriha Pandey

Environmental Studies Senior Theses

Agroforestry is a crucial strategy for diversifying farmer livelihoods and achieving India's climate goals, but its adoption has been hindered by institutional and fiscal obstacles. This mixed-methods study investigates the impact of national government schemes on tree cover increase and expert perceptions of incentives and barriers to agroforestry adoption. Our analysis of national schemes from 2013-2017 reveals that effective fiscal mechanisms and policy cohesion are critical drivers of agroforestry growth. Specifically, we find that increased funding for the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) is associated with significant increases in tree cover area while funding for the Horticultural Scheme (NHM) is …

The Shifting Landscape Of Adolescent Wellness In Boarding Schools: Can Time Spent Off Screens And Outdoors Improve Adolescent Wellbeing?, Kristen H. Peterson

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

For nearly twenty years I have worked directly with adolescents as an independent school educator. Whether in the classroom, on the field, or in the dorm, I have observed and supported students through their middle and high school experiences. During this time, I have witnessed an alarming shift in adolescent physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. Concurrently, I have observed a dramatic increase in the amount of time students spend using screen-based devices, and a decrease in their time spent outdoors.

Using research to ground my anecdotal accounts in empirical understanding, my thesis examines whether or not screen use might help …

(Meta-)Physical Artworks: Digital Augmentation In Art Observation, Macy A. Toppan

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Augmented art— the subgenre of art that incorporates physical and digital artwork— is a rapidly growing field driven by advancing technology and a new generation for whom that tech is a given. Yet the presence of media like augmented and virtual reality in exhibition remains a controversial subject. Rather than focusing on the many theoretical debates about whether digital pieces can qualify as "good" art, we study it in practice through the eyes of the casual art observer. This paper highlights the audience in a within-participant study that asked viewers to take in a physical sculpture intentionally built with virtual …

Triple Helix: Ai-Artist-Audience Collaboration In A Performative Art Experience, Xuedan Zou

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Imagine an art exhibition that morphs its content according to the audience’s experience like a chameleon, reflecting the audience’s mind and culture and turning the artist’s exhibition into the viewer’s. But when the viewers leave, the work fades back to the creator’s original work and waits for the next audience. In this project, my team introduced an interactive exhibition called "Triple Helix," where audience members were provided the opportunity to alter the artworks created by the artist, thus imbuing them with their own perspectives. This interactive exhibition was held at three physical-locations and online, and a comprehensive user study was …

Anatoview: Using Interactive 3d Visualizations With Augmented Reality Support For Laypersons’ Medical Education In Informed Consent Processes, Michelle Chen

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

AnatoView is an interactive multimedia educational application that visualizes medical procedures in three-dimensional (3D), augmented reality (AR) space. By providing visual and spatial information of medical procedures, AnatoView acts as a learning supplement for laypersons/patients in informed consent (IC) processes — wherein instructional content is traditionally limited to purely spoken explanations that lead to poor patient comprehension. We design a mixed study and conduct a randomized, controlled trial with 15 laypersons as participants: administering a traditional IC process to a control group, and an IC process supplemented by the use of AnatoView to experimental groups. As a primary outcome, medical …

Say That Again: The Role Of Multimodal Redundancy In Communication And Context, Brandon Javier Dormes

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

With several modes of expression, such as facial expressions, body language, and speech working together to convey meaning, social communication is rich in redundancy. While typically relegated to signal preservation, this study investigates the role of cross-modal redundancies in establishing performance context, focusing on unaided, solo performances. Drawing on information theory, I operationalize redundancy as predictability and use an array of machine learning models to featurize speakers' facial expressions, body poses, movement speeds, acoustic features, and spoken language from 24 TEDTalks and 16 episodes of Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents. This analysis demonstrates that it is possible to distinguish between these …

The Dilemma Of Disclosure: Designing Interpersonal Informatics Tools For Mood Tracking, Daniel Earl Westphal

Computer Science Senior Theses

Mental health is a serious issue that affects people of all ages, but is especially prevalent amongst college age youth. In the 2020-2021 school year, researchers found that around 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health condition, such as major depression or generalized anxiety disorder. Many digital interventions have been innovated in order to help address this issue. These range in type and functionality from teletherapy to medication tracking applications. Some of these digital interventions include social features that allow users to interact with other users, friends, family, or doctors; however, having social features …

Information Diffusion In Online Social Networks: A Simulation Experiment, Maxwell Jacob Blum

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

The advent of online social networks has completely transformed the way we communicate, with news, opinions, and ideas now spreading faster than ever before (Guille et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2022). That online social networks have a profound impact on the spread of information suggests further investigation of the relationship between network structure and information diffusion (Light & Moody, 2020). This honors thesis investigates degree assortativity – a measure of large-scale network structure that has often only been a footnote in relevant literature on infor- mation diffusion in online social networks – and its effect on the speed of …

The Flow Of Power: Addressing Asymmetric Flood Risk In The Upper Valley, Eric Vr Hryniewicz

Geography Undergraduate Senior Theses

Floods are the most damaging natural disasters in America. Land use change in upland watersheds can increase the probability and severity of floods (Bronstert, Niehoff, & Burger, 2002). When watersheds are divided by political and private property boundaries it leads to a misalignment of incentives in which downstream users lack recourse for upstream land use decisions contributing to flood risk. In this thesis, researchers interrogate the attributes of town officials and towns that determine what motivates town governments to act on flooding and what motivates and enables town officials to collaborate on planning and how do they collaborate in practice. …

Utilizing Mixed Graphical Network Models To Explore Parent Psychological Symptoms And Their Centrality To Parent Mental Health In Households With High Child Screen Usage, Piper F. Stacey, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Damien Lekkas

Computer Science Senior Theses

Especially among adolescents, screens are being used more than ever. In conjunction with this trend, mental illness is increasingly prevalent among both adults and children, and parental psychological problems are shown to be associated with children's TV watching, video watching, and gaming (Pulkki-Råback et al., 2022). This study aims to approach parent mental illness symptom by symptom to explore which specific symptoms are most central to parent psychological problems in households where children show high screen time behaviors. We draw from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study®), a nationwide sample of 11,875 children aged 10-13 collected by …

Investigating English-Language Dialect-Adjusted Models, Samiha Datta

Computer Science Senior Theses

This thesis describes several approaches to better understand how large language models interpret different dialects of the English language. Our goal is to consider multiple contexts of textual data and to analyze how English-language dialects are realized in them, as well as how a variety of machine learning techniques handle these differences. We focus on two genres of text data: news and social media. In the news context, we establish a dataset covering news articles from five countries and four US states and consider language modeling analysis, topic and sentiment distributions, and manual analysis before performing nine experiments and evaluating …

Analyzing Behavioral Adaptation To Covid-19 And Return To Pre-Pandemic Baselines In A Cohort Of College Seniors, Vlado Vojdanovski

Computer Science Senior Theses

As the critical phase of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be winding down, it is important to analyze the adjustment to COVID-19 and return to normalcy of various populations. In this study we focus on the behavioral adjustments exhibited by a cohort of N=114 college seniors. To infer COVID-19 adjustment we compare the 2021 year (second year of COVID-19) to the 2020 year (first year of COVID-19) and 2019 (prepandemic baseline year). We begin with a broad analysis between the second and first covid year, finding that the second year of COVID-19 shows significant returns to pre-pandemic baselines on multiple …

Identifying Optimal Course Structures Using Topic Models, Tehut Tesfaye Biru

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

This research project investigates whether there exists an optimal way to structure topics in educational course content that results in higher levels of engagement among students. It is implemented by fitting topic models to transcripts of educational videos contained in the Khan Academy platform. The fitted models were used to extract topic trajectories across time for each video and subsequently clustered based on whether they have similar “shapes”. The differences in mean engagement metrics per cluster suggest that some course shapes are more palatable to students regardless of subject matter. Additionally, the topic trajectories suggest a constant progression of topics …

A Configurable Social Network For Running Irb-Approved Experiments, Mihovil Mandic

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

Our world has never been more connected, and the size of the social media landscape draws a great deal of attention from academia. However, social networks are also a growing challenge for the Institutional Review Boards concerned with the subjects’ privacy. These networks contain a monumental variety of personal information of almost 4 billion people, allow for precise social profiling, and serve as a primary news source for many users. They are perfect environments for influence operations that are becoming difficult to defend against. Motivated to study online social influence via IRB-approved experiments, we designed and implemented a flexible, scalable, …

Improving Existing Methods For Calculating Embodied Carbon Emissions In Trade Through Feature Discovery: An Information Theoretic Approach, Sam Morton

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

The continued societal and ecological risks posed by climate change have spurred renewed interest in quantitative tools that can improve policy aimed at climate mitigation. In 2008, international trade accounted for up to 26\% of global anthropogenic emissions, and therefore trade has garnered increased attention from policymakers seeking carbon mitigation. The concept of embodied carbon emissions in trade (EET) quantifies overall carbon emitted in the production and transport of goods for the purposes of trade. EET in theory could prove an indispensable tool to climate-concerned policymakers, but current implementations and data availability limit EET calculation to annual snapshots that extend …

Stylized 2d Fabrication Of Non-Photorealistic Images, Athina Panotopoulou

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

A current trend in computer graphics is the use of programmable tools that allow non-experts to engage in the design of physical prototypes. Within fabrication, one area of research focuses on non-photorealistic images which are stylized to depict a particular aesthetic quality or convey key information. In cases where authenticity is demanded or the images need to be manipulated, fabrication is necessary. Non-photorealistic image fabrication involves two challenges: identifying and abstracting key information during design and considering material restrictions during fabrication. This thesis showcases two examples for fabricating new types of non-photorealistic images, the first involving watercolors, and the second …