Digital Commons Network^™

Assessing The Invasive Potential Of Najas Minor In Maine, Kaitlin M. Volk

Honors Theses

Najas minor (European naiad), a relatively new invasive aquatic plant to the state of Maine, is thought be spreading more aggressively than previous invasive aquatic plants have. Once established, N. minor grows into dense monocultures that replace all native plant species, leading to a disruption in ecosystem functioning, a loss in food and habitat for invertebrates and fish, and a decrease in the recreational value of a waterbody. Understanding the natural history of N. minor – how it is dispersed and how long seeds can survive – is important for understanding the invasive potential of the species. However, no previous …

Algorithmic Surveillance: A Hidden Danger In Recognizing Faces, Lydia F. Venditti, Jim Fleming, Kara Kugelmeyer

Honors Theses

The goal of this thesis is to present the current status and awareness of facial recognition technology and their use as part of video surveillance systems. Specifically, I intend to help readers develop a greater understanding of how facial recognition systems contain algorithms that perpetuate bias in their matching and recognition of faces. Current research demonstrates that algorithms differentially recognize faces from different races and genders. As a technology with substantive impacts for use and abuse, more scrutiny of facial recognition technology is necessary. This paper will also help readers understand the dangers of facial recognition as a biometric technology …

Basis Reduction In Lattice Cryptography, Raj Kane

Honors Theses

We develop an understanding of lattices and their use in cryptography. We examine how reducing lattice bases can yield solutions to the Shortest Vector Problem and the Closest Vector Problem.

Tracking The Endangered Northern Black Racer, Coluber Constrictor Constrictor, In Maine To Determine Areas Of Conservation Importance, Josiah Johnson

Honors Theses

The Black Racer (Coluber constrictor) is a large-bodied snake species found across North America. One subspecies, the Northern Black Racer (C. constrictor constrictor) is listed as endangered in Maine because of its restricted range in York County. Racers have generally been found to prefer open habitats and ecotones, but the specific habitat preferences of racers in Maine is unknown, hindering efforts to preserve habitat for racer conservation. To address this knowledge gap, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW) has an ongoing project tracking black racer movements in Sanford and Kennebunk, Maine, and I had the opportunity to …

The Impacts Of Discrimination On Mental And Physical Health, Mahal Alvarez-Backus

Honors Theses

The present studies investigated the role of campus climate and discrimination on college students’ mental and physical health. Young adults completed measures that assessed their perceptions of campus climate, sense of belonging, depressive symptoms, anxiety levels, sleep quality, physical health symptoms, and experiences with discrimination. Despite the fact that there were not any differences in physical health or sleep quality, there were significant differences in phycological health, specifically with depressive symptoms. Across both studies, there were significant group differences in mental health, particularly that students of color reported higher levels of depressive symptoms than white students. Having empathetic faculty was …

Asian Jumping Worm (Megascolecidae) Impacts On Physical And Biological Characteristics Of Turfgrass Ecosystems, Ella L. Maddi

Honors Theses

Asian Jumping worms (Megascolecid spp) were introduced to North America in the early 1900s and have been altering soils in forest ecosystems as they spread throughout the continent. The worms differ from other introduced earthworms in their ability to consume large densities of organic material and potentially alter nutrient cycling in the ecosystems that they invade (Greiner et al. 2012). This study examined if and how Asian jumping worms alter turfgrass systems by changing the biological or physical properties of soil. To do this we conducted a mesocosm experiment and observational field study. For the mesocosm study we inoculated boxes …

A Rethinking Of Gray Asexuality: What Do We Learn From An Undefinable Identity?, Jason M. Gurevitch

Honors Theses

Gray-Asexuality offers us a paradox in understanding sexuality, since while it is posed as a middle ground between Asexual and Allosexual, it is also solidly a category of Asexuality. This poses the question of when does someone become Asexual and if they are ever interested in sex why are they not just Allosexual? While understandings of Asexuality that have excluded the Gray-Asexuality can ignore this question, including it requires asking this question, which not only requires defining Asexuality, but also more importantly requires a naming of what normative sexuality is. Within these contexts people who are Gray-Asexual engage in a …

Something Punny To Precede The Colon: Marking Whiteness And Exploring Blackness In Standup Comedy, Andrew Destaebler

Honors Theses

The general goal of this project is to investigate strategies and approaches used by comedians who rely heavily on racial humor in their acts. To do so, I consider the work of Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, and Dave Chappelle, all African American male comedians. The first chapter focuses on a strategy employed by all three of these comedians called “marking whiteness.” Greta Fowler Snyder coined this term in her essay, “‘Marking Whiteness’ For Cross-Racial Solidarity” (2015), and uses it to describe strategies that force the “hyper-visibility” of whiteness. This happens through the portrayal of “average” white behavior, with the understanding …

African Savannah Elephant Group Size And Behavior In The Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, Botswana, Katherine S. King

Honors Theses

African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana), the largest elephant species, influence the structure of the environment they inhabit. Elephants exhibit complex patterns of social behavior between individuals within a population. Many behavioral studies focus on interactions among individuals within a population rather than broader trends related to group size. My study seeks to understand how male African savannah elephant group size is influenced by seasonality, age, physical condition and distance to permanent water resources. I examined the interaction of these variables in two ways: (1) a literature review of elephant behavior and conservation, and (2) an analysis of male …

Beyond The Gates: Admissions In An Elite Schooling Context, Jamie Pine

Honors Theses

This project explores the ways in which the admissions process functions at an elite school in Santiago, Chile, The Croft School. The project focuses on the ways in which admissions procedures contribute to the reproduction of social classes, by only allowing the wealthy elite to have access to a prestigious education. In order to understand these structures of power, interviews were conducted with administrators and parents at the Croft School. These methods were used to analyze the administrators’ view of the school community, their role within the larger Santiago community, and how an exclusive admissions process contributes to socioeconomic divides …

The Read Scare: Reading Stereotype Threat In College Aged Males, Rachel A. Booth

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

A Critique Of Environmental Rhetoric Used During World Environment Day, William Calderon

Honors Theses

Fixing environmental problems is one of the fastest-growing priorities for young generations. College degrees such as chemistry and environmental engineering contain courses where students can learn how to tackle a variety of problems, from pollution to energy efficiency. Unfortunately, fixing large problems like global warming or plastics pollution will require the help of millions of people, not just those with technical skills. For this reason, environmental remediation is increasingly becoming not just a technical problem, but a communicative and rhetorical problem as well. Social media in particular is crucial in spreading awareness and garnering support for environmental movements. This paper …

Neuroscience And You: A Look Into Societal Interaction With Neuroscience Both Internally And Online, Ciarra Smith

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Start Where You Are: How American Youth Are Finding Fulfillment Through Nontraditional Forms Of Political Involvement, Johnathan Alfonzo Coleman

Honors Theses

Young people involvement in the political system has long been viewed through the negative lens of claims that the younger generation is not participating enough. Political scientists, strategists, and older citizens assert that the youth is uninvolved and uninterested. In this thesis, I sought to examine how, in 2019, young people are viewing their involvement within the political system. This was done in an effort to claim that young people are participating, but not through the traditional processes. My hypothesis is that young people are finding more fulfillment in participating in nontraditional modes of political involvement, the reasoning behind the …

The Effects Of Health Literacy On Treatment Adherence And Health Optimism In Chronic Kidney Disease Patients, Heather Gardiner

Honors Theses

Health literacy is a very critical aspect of a patient's recovery, and low levels of it have been correlated to a large range of negative health outcomes. Health literacy's effects on treatment adherence and health optimism was examined in a sample of 32 Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) patients who were recruited from a transplant center in the southeastern section of the United States. Participants had a mean age of 47.55, with 45.2% (n=14) of the participants being female and 54.8% (n=17) being Caucasian.The participants completed a survey, which incorporated the tools of Health Literacy Questionnaire, Life Orientation Tool, and the …

Leadership And Intergroup Relations : Which Leader Is More Favorable Or More Effective While Leading Distinct Subgroups?, Jieyi Ding

Honors Theses

While leading distinct subgroups nowadays, leaders need to address intergroup bias and establish beneficial intergroup relations. They could do so by promoting a collective identity that emphasizes commonality between subgroups or an intergroup relational identity that recognizes distinct characteristics of both subgroups and focuses on their dependency on each other as part of the identity. The research investigated the influence of leader's rhetoric and race interacting with moderators like identity distinctiveness threat on leader evaluation and intergroup bias. The results showed a complicated relationship between how much a leader was liked and how effective a leader could be.

The Downfall Of Chivalry: Tudor Disregard For Medieval Courtly Literature, Jessica G. Downie

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I have examined the notion of the gradual demise of chivalric ideals throughout the late-Middle Ages and culminating in the sixteenth century, analyzing how and why the developments of the sixteenth century both enabled and required the English monarchy and the aristocracy to redefine social identities and values, public responsibilities, political duties, and national and religious power. This thesis addresses why the Tudor monarchs appear to have disregarded the examples of chivalric behavior championed by late-medieval writers like Sir Thomas Malory and Jean Froissart, and instead, relied on new works of literature that were more relevant forms …

Who Runs The World: The Impact Of The Gender Of Clerks On The Legal Profession, Taylor Bernstein

Honors Theses

This paper investigates the role of gender on law clerks from the federal appellate clerks. There has been significant scholarship on the importance of the gender of judges and on the role and influence of law clerks; however, to this date there has been no analysis of how the gender of law clerks may or may not influence the clerkship experience. This honors thesis seeks to address that question and shed light on important aspects of the federal judiciary and the legal profession. I have approached this inquiry through descriptive and qualitative analysis, focusing on law clerks from this millennium. …

Contextualizing Sexual Assault Data Collection On College Campuses: A Socio-Technical Approach, Anushikha Sharma

Honors Theses

Sexual assault is a rampant issue on college campuses in the United States. Colleges and universities use a variety of survey instruments to collect data regarding sexual assault as a means to improve campus culture, policies, and resources. These instruments contain a wealth of associated information in the form of metadata, that is, data about data.

This project takes a human-centered socio-technical approach to understanding the data collection processes associated with sexual assault, specifically, on the campus of Bucknell University. By identifying the underlying metadata within the data collection processes, this research contextualizes and critiques the process of data collection, …

A Cross-Cultural Examination Of Social Reproduction In Educational Systems, Annie E. Girton

Honors Theses

In the form of an extended literature review, this thesis looks at how middle-school aged, second language immigrant students are welcomed into public schools in both France and the United States through second language programs. The study details the history of language and educational policy surrounding the inclusion of immigrant, second-language students in both countries, and looks at how those have shaped the program frameworks that are actually in place to help these students today.

Nationalism And Multi-Dimensional Identities: Ba'ath Propaganda During The Iran-Iraq War, Jennie Matuschak

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I examine the content of and mechanisms of disseminating propaganda originating from Saddam Hussein’s regime during the Iran-Iraq War. This research specifically looks at how and why the regime targeted Iraqi Shi’as during the war, and how that contributed to the ways in which the regime engaged with rhetoric. Moreover, this thesis attempts to make sense of the diverse, and sometimes seemingly opposing, amalgam of the rhetoric’s subject matter and methods of circulation. More broadly, it speaks to the difficulty of fostering an environment that can produce patriotism and lead to the construction of a strong national …

The Diversion Of Diversity: Uncovering The Antiblackness Of Diversity Initiatives, M. Jordan Alexander

Honors Theses

In more recent years, Diversity has been a driving force in universities across the country. As underrepresented groups in the United States have gained more traction in the political and legal realms, they have gained the agency and the ability to advocate for their inclusion in institutions and structures that previously denied their access. This gaining of agency within these public realms is what has fueled higher education institutions across the country to really push for diversity, in both their faculty and student populations. The ideology behind this push is multiculturalism or multiracialism; this idea by its premise, the inclusion …

Bridging Act-R And Project Malmo, Developing Models Of Behavior In Complex Environments, David M. Schwartz

Honors Theses

Cognitive architectures such as ACT-R provide a system for simulating the mind and human behavior. On their own they model decision making of an isolated agent. However, applying a cognitive architecture to a complex environment yields more interesting results about how people make decisions in more realistic scenarios. Furthermore, cognitive architectures enable researchers to study human behavior in dangerous tasks which cannot be tested because they would harm participants. Nonetheless, these architectures aren’t commonly applied to such environments as they don’t come with one. It is left to the researcher to develop a task environment for their model. The difficulty …

Els Catalans Són Diferents: Catalan Independence Through A Cultural Lens, Maren Burling

Honors Theses

With a focus on Catalan independence, this thesis looks at how Catalans create and perform their regional identity, and how cultural symbols of Catalan society – food, sports, language, and others – are uniquely situated within the wider Spanish society. Both linguistic anthropology and symbolic/interpretive anthropology inform my writing and support my argument for the importance of language and other cultural symbols to Catalan identity, which are key to understanding Catalan separatism. My research contributes to current conversations in anthropology about the role of cultural identity in creating community. I argue that, in the Catalan case, cultural identity both shapes …

Exploration Of Financial Accounting: A Compilation Of Individual Case Studies, Allison Gaerke

Honors Theses

This thesis contains twelve accounting-related case studies completed in Accounting 420: Independent Studies, a two-semester thesis course taught by Dr. Victoria Dickinson. For most cases, students were given access to case materials that provided brief descriptions of real companies along with the companies’ financial statements and related footnotes. The cases also provided conceptual, procedural, and analytical questions for students to answer; completing a case study entailed answering the questions selected by Dr. Dickinson and writing a brief introduction to the case. Students were given time in class to work in small groups to start answering the case questions. Students used …

The End Times, Gunnar Ohberg

Honors Theses

The End Times is a collection of apocalyptic short stories set within the same universe. The stories employ elements of magical realism and grit lit. It is the author's hope that each story deal with at least one external societal issue (such as digital discourse and sexual aggression) and one internal psychological issue (such as depression, obsession/compulsion, and survivor's guilt). Each story is told in the first-person in an effort to best demonstrate the various psychologies of its protagonist. In these stories, God has decided to punish humanity for their transgressions. The devices of this God are fantastic: limbs disappear, …

What We Could Do: Stories, Jacob D. Ferguson

Honors Theses

A collection of fiction and creative non-fiction—short stories and personal letters—exploring the lives, fears, anxieties, and joys of characters who grew up gay in southern, religious families. (Under the direction of Beth Spencer)

Fundamental Accounting Concepts: A Compilation Of Case Studies, Shelby Mackenzie Loftis

Honors Theses

This thesis is a compilation of twelve case studies that were completed over the course of an academic school year. These cases covered a variety of topics such as accounts receivables, property, plant, and equipment (PPE), long-term debt, shareholders' equity, deferred income taxes, revenue recognition, and many more. The cases touched on subjects that were relevant to things we covered in our other accounting classes, along with items we were exposed to during our internship. For many of the cases, we collaborated with fellow students in our thesis class to help analyze some of the questions posed in the case …

Accounting Cases, Drew Caruthers

Honors Theses

I developed my thesis in the Accounting 420 class, which is an exclusive class for accounting majors in the Sally Barksdale Honors College at Ole Miss. The class would meet once a week for two semesters. The class period would involve us receiving accounting cases that we would work on during the class and the rest of the week. The accounting cases involve real world companies and financial statements. Each case was designed to help us figure out and learn a different accounting topic each week with a total of 12 cases. The professor, Dr. Dickinson, would grade and suggest …

Understanding Factors Of Sexual Behaviors In Teenagers In Mississippi, Jackson Colburn

Honors Theses

The primary purpose of this study is to determine the associations between socio-demographic factors and sexual behaviors in teens based on bivariate analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System survey for 2015. In conducting a comparative analysis of survey data for both the United States and the state of Mississippi, this study aims to depict a picture of the state of teen sexual behaviors both nationally and in Mississippi. A secondary quantitative analysis of the Mississippi survey dataset also sets out to highlight any possible significant relationships between teen sexual behaviors and certain …