Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Why You Need A Summer Plan, Gizem Karaali

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

In the last decade, for many times, I have tasted first-hand the end-of-summer blues I described above. I have spent many early spring months dreaming of all that I would be doing when the summer arrives, only to realize that it was already September and I had not much to show for for the months in between. I have also observed many of my peers going through similar things, and I just assumed for years that this was how it had to be. But then some time in the middle of the tenure track, I decided to try approaching my …

The Pacific Crest Trail: A History Of America’S Relationship With Western Wilderness, Jenn Livermore

Scripps Senior Theses

The Pacific Crest Trail has become increasingly popular since Clinton Clarke first envisioned such a trail in the 1930’s. By comparing the original motives and experience of the trail to the realities of the trail today, the trail’s fluid narrative becomes apparent. While this narrative is ever changing, over the course of the trail’s history one theme has remained constant – a notably problematic relationship with wilderness rooted in an exaltation of the sublime and post-frontier ideals. This thesis focuses on how the Pacific Crest Trail’s development over the past eighty years has created an experience that, on the surface, …

Musical Missteps: The Severity Of The Sophomore Slump In The Music Industry, Shane M. Zackery

Scripps Senior Theses

This study looks at alternative models of follow-up album success in order to determine if there is a relationship between the decrease in Metascore ratings (assigned by Metacritic.com) between the first and second album for a musician or band and the 1) music genre or 2) the number of years between the first and second album release. The results support the dominant thought, which suggests that neither belonging to a certain genre of music nor waiting more or less time to drop the second album makes an artist more susceptible to the Sophomore Slump. This finding is important because it …

The Reclamation Of Public Parks: An Analysis Of Environmental Justice In Los Angeles, Allison Rigby

Scripps Senior Theses

People who live in cities are far more likely to suffer the physical and psychological effects of urban environments--high noise levels, automobile emissions, toxic industrial waste, crowded living conditions, and a general scarcity of open space. Combating these issues, public parks do more than provide recreational space. They are fundamental to any efforts focusing on urban revitalization, social justice, and sustainability. In downtown Los Angeles, public parks are rare, especially in low-income communities. Several new public parks have reclaimed abandoned land, unwelcoming spaces, and the City’s brownfields. After years of intense private use and neglect, spent land has been reinvigorated …

Biodynamic Agriculture: A Valuable Alternative To The Industrial Farming System, Eden K. Olsen

Scripps Senior Theses

Since the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, advancing technologies and cutting-edge science have enabled our society to continually promote a growing global economy. Industrial growth has increasingly become a top priority for most governments, notably in the agricultural realm. The advances towards agricultural industrialization began in the 17^th century and escalated during the Green Revolution, which examined the possibility of using synthetic fertilizers and mechanization in farming to decrease labor and improve yields. Although seen as economically beneficial, the shift from an agrarian lifestyle to industrial farming has created an ecological, economic, and ideological crisis to our modern world. This …

Improving Image Clustering Using Sparse Text And The Wisdom Of The Crowds, Anna Ma, Arjuna Flenner, Deanna Needell, Allon G. Percus

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

We propose a method to improve image clustering using sparse text and the wisdom of the crowds. In particular, we present a method to fuse two different kinds of document features, image and text features, and use a common dictionary or “wisdom of the crowds” as the connection between the two different kinds of documents. With the proposed fusion matrix, we use topic modeling via non-negative matrix factorization to cluster documents.

Review: Truncated Toeplitz Operators Of Finite Rank, Stephan Ramon Garcia

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Spreading The Char: The Importance Of Local Compatibility In The Diffusion Of Biochar Systems To The Smallholder Agriculture Community Context, Laura C. V. Munoz

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis enters the context of smallholder agriculture communities in the developing world. It explores the potentials of biochar and what biochar systems could bring to the smallholder communities while simultaneously bringing environmental benefits. It then acknowledges the challenges of diffusion –the spreading of an unfamiliar innovation. It seeks to answer the question of what will make diffusion of biochar systems more successful in the smallholder context, fixating on the characteristic of compatibility as well as the role local community members can play in making a new biochar system more visible to the rest of the communities.

A Comparison Of Clustering And Missing Data Methods For Health Sciences, Ran Zhao, Deanna Needell, Christopher Johansen, Jerry L. Grenard

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In this paper, we compare and analyze clustering methods with missing data in health behavior research. In particular, we propose and analyze the use of compressive sensing's matrix completion along with spectral clustering to cluster health related data. The empirical tests and real data results show that these methods can outperform standard methods like LPA and FIML, in terms of lower misclassification rates in clustering and better matrix completion performance in missing data problems. According to our examination, a possible explanation of these improvements is that spectral clustering takes advantage of high data dimension and compressive sensing methods utilize the …

The Fundamental Principle Of Productivity: What They Don't Teach You In Graduate School, Gizem Karaali

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

But through the years, I have read many books, ranging from self-help guides to creative writing manuals, attended workshops, frequented relevant websites, and reflected upon my own personal experiences. As a result, I have collected together a few ideas and tools on productivity and time management that have been working well for me. In this post I want to share with you the most basic of these principles, with the hope that it may assist you in your life, at whatever stage you are. Whether you are a graduate student, a postdoctoral researcher, a junior mathematician on the tenure track, …

The Scientist–Reporter Collaboration: A Guide To Working With The Press, Rachel Levy, Flora Lichtman, David L. Hu

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to the public can be challenging. Often, the language that researchers use among themselves is technical and difficult for non-experts to decipher. But as you probably know, communicating your research to non-experts is becoming mandatory. In a direct sense, funding agencies often require outreach for grant fulfillment. There are indirect benefits as well: Conveying the joy of discovery and the relevance of scientific results builds scientific literacy among the public---which of course includes both students who will eventually do research of their own and people who elect the policy makers who allocate funding. How …

Aftermath: Every Math Major Should Take A Public-Speaking Course, Rachel Levy

All HMC Faculty Publications and Research

Rachel Levy argues that all mathematics majors should learn the art of public speaking.

Guaranteed Sparse Signal Recovery With Highly Coherent Sensing Matrices, Guangliang Chen, Atul Divekar, Deanna Needell

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Compressive sensing is a methodology for the reconstruction of sparse or compressible signals using far fewer samples than required by the Nyquist criterion. However, many of the results in compressive sensing concern random sampling matrices such as Gaussian and Bernoulli matrices. In common physically feasible signal acquisition and reconstruction scenarios such as super-resolution of images, the sensing matrix has a non-random structure with highly correlated columns. Here we present a compressive sensing type recovery algorithm, called Partial Inversion (PartInv), that overcomes the correlations among the columns. We provide theoretical justification as well as empirical comparisons.

Greedy Signal Space Methods For Incoherence And Beyond, Raja Giryes, Deanna Needell

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Compressive sampling (CoSa) has provided many methods for signal recovery of signals compressible with respect to an orthonormal basis. However, modern applications have sparked the emergence of approaches for signals not sparse in an orthonormal basis but in some arbitrary, perhaps highly overcomplete, dictionary. Recently, several "signal-space" greedy methods have been proposed to address signal recovery in this setting. However, such methods inherently rely on the existence of fast and accurate projections which allow one to identify the most relevant atoms in a dictionary for any given signal, up to a very strict accuracy. When the dictionary is highly overcomplete, …

Review: The Relationships Among Multiplicities Of A J-Self-Adjoint Differential Operator's Eigenvalue, Stephan Ramon Garcia

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Stochastic Gradient Descent, Weighted Sampling, And The Randomized Kaczmarz Algorithm, Deanna Needell, Nathan Srebro, Rachel Ward

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

We obtain an improved finite-sample guarantee on the linear convergence of stochastic gradient descent for smooth and strongly convex objectives, improving from a quadratic dependence on the conditioning (L/µ) 2 (where L is a bound on the smoothness and µ on the strong convexity) to a linear dependence on L/µ. Furthermore, we show how reweighting the sampling distribution (i.e. importance sampling) is necessary in order to further improve convergence, and obtain a linear dependence in the average smoothness, dominating previous results. We also discuss importance sampling for SGD more broadly and show how it can improve convergence also in other …

Randomized Block Kaczmarz Method With Projection For Solving Least Squares, Deanna Needell, Ran Zhao, Anastasios Zouzias

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

The Kaczmarz method is an iterative method for solving overcomplete linear systems of equations Ax = b. The randomized version of the Kaczmarz method put forth by Strohmer and Vershynin iteratively projects onto a randomly chosen solution space given by a single row of the matrix A and converges exponentially in expectation to the solution of a consistent system. In this paper we analyze two block versions of the method each with a randomized projection, that converge in expectation to the least squares solution of inconsistent systems. Our approach utilizes a paving of the matrix A to guarantee exponential convergence, …

Turbulence, Climate And Supercomputers, Georgios Matheou

The STEAM Journal

Turbulence is often referred to as the last mystery of classical physics. Although turbulence is ubiquitous and prominent in our daily lives – from the mixing of milk in a cup of coffee to the perpetual motion of the atmosphere and the resulting weather variation – our understanding of this complex phenomenon is comparatively very limited (e.g., Davidson et al., 2011).

The Art Of Personal Science, Jeff Fajans

The STEAM Journal

Quantified Self isn’t really about finding answers or solving problems—it’s about asking new questions.

Steam: The Wave Of The Future Embedded In Ideals Of The Past, Sheena Ghanbari

The STEAM Journal

As da Vinci acknowledges, there is an inherent interconnectivity between different academic disciplines and this concept is vital in comprehending how the arts play a meaningful role in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education. This piece reflects on the positive effects of integrating the arts in STEM.

Steam Inspired By Insight, Diana Vizcarra

The STEAM Journal

Innovators of the 21st century might come from unexpected places. Visual impairment is no barrier when technology and creativity intersect. The world needs blind innovators! The blind input data without visual association and download blueprints of their surroundings to format a mental database. They categorize patterns, textures, and conditions to perceive their location in space. They are able to capture the beauty of the world through poetry and predict future trends through past experience – all without visual access to the physical world they inhabit.

This writing was possible because of collaboration with Angie Menjivar.

Creating 'Reflection And Refraction', Tara Prescott

The STEAM Journal

This essay offers personal narrative about the creation of Reflecting and Refracting, a collage artwork integrating literary and scientific texts regarding light. Reflecting and Refracting was made specifically for the STEAM journal’s first issue and elements were incorporated into the issue’s collaborative cover image, Equations of Light. The current essay, however, is the first time the original artwork is being published in its entirety.

The Efficacy Of Mathematics Education, Eric Geimer

The STEAM Journal

Evidence supports the notion that mathematics education in the United States is inadequate. There is also evidence that mathematics education deficiencies extend internationally. The worldwide mathematics education deficit appears large enough that improving student performance in this educational problem area could yield great economic benefit. To improve the efficacy of mathematics education, education’s root problems must first be understood. Often supposed educational root problems are considered and contrasted against potential deficiencies of mathematics methodologies and curricula that are based on mainstream educational philosophies. The educational philosophies utilized to form early-grade mathematics methodologies and related curricula are judged to be the …

Geology – Future Continent, Joy Wulke

The STEAM Journal

Terra Mirabila, a multi-media presentation illustrating the geological story of Stony Creek Granite back through complex sequence of geological events that spanned some 600 million years of early history.

Spannungsfeld, Julian Voss-Andreae

The STEAM Journal

My design for a sculptural installation for the University of Minnesota’s new Physics and Nanotechnology Building is inspired by a view of the human body through the lens of quantum physics.

The German title of the installation (literally "tension field") originated in physics but is used in contemporary German almost exclusively in a metaphorical sense, implying a dynamic tension, often between polar opposites, that permeates everything in its vicinity.

Big Horned, Juniper Harrower

The STEAM Journal

Tinta y tinto (Spanish for black ink and red wine)
Through a process of oxidation, reduction, and light manipulation, Juniper stains and colors paper with red wine and a rich black pigment made of the wild harvested mushroom Coprinopsis atramentaria.

Steam On Capitol Hill, Suzanne Bonamici, Aaron Schock

The STEAM Journal

Our increasingly technology-driven economy demands a workforce that is proficient in both the concepts and techniques of STEM fields as well as in extending those skills into new applications and innovations. Currently, an impressive and diverse coalition of educators, art advocates, industry leaders, and STEM practitioners across the county are working to achieve that goal, bringing their ideas and advocacy to Capitol Hill.

The Importance Of Being Creative, Dennis Callahan

The STEAM Journal

Dennis Callahan is a graduate student in Materials Science at Caltech and also is an advisor to The STEAM Journal. He has created many types of scientific art, and his images have twice consecutively won first place at Caltech's "Art of Science" competition.

A Better Way To Restore Wildfire-Burned Forests, Char Miller

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Arnold Diffusion, Florin Diacu

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

No abstract provided.