Digital Commons Network^™

Inhibition Of Cellular Thioredoxin Reductase By The Anticancer Prodrug Cloretazine, Tyler R. Schleicher

Honors Theses

Sulfonylhydrazines are a class of DNA alkylating drugs which also produce carbamoylating activity in situ. The carbamoylating species is of significance because it has shown to inhibit important thiol-containing enzymes such as glutathione reductase (GR) and thioredoxin reductase (TrxR). TrxR catalyzes dithiol-disulfide exchange reactions on thioredoxin (Trx), which in turn catalyzes other reductive processes such as deoxyribonucleotide biosynthesis. In this study, we demonstrate that TrxR activity is strongly inhibited by the anticancer prodrug Cloretazine both in purified form and in leukemia cell lysates. This inhibition is specific to the carbamoylating activity of methylisocyanate (MiC). In contrast, another important oxidoreductase, glutathione …

Movement Patterns And Feeding Behavior Of The Limpet Tectura Testudinalis (Müller) Along The Mid-Maine Coast, Joshua Lord

Honors Theses

Tectura testudinalis is a limpet that lives in the mid-intertidal zone along the coast of Maine and grazes on a variety of encrusting algae. A previous study asserted that T. testudinalis preferred to feed and rest on the encrusting alga Clathromorphum circumscriptum and that this species of limpet displayed homing behavior. However, I show that T. testudinalis does not home or return to any specific substrate while resting. Conclusive evidence was found for nocturnal movement. I show that C. circumscriptum was the preferred food source for this limpet, closely followed by Hildenbrandia rubra, another encrusting alga. Field and lab experiments …

Path Of The Dragon’S Eye: Using Fantasy Elements In Realism, Winston Edward Jones Jr.

Honors Theses

WINSTON EDWARD JONES: A Collection ofInterwoven Fantasy Short Stories (Under the direction ofRonald Schroeder)

The stories presented in this thesis illustrate a common theme through the use of both fantasy and realism. Specifically, these dichotomous styles are used to comment on the nature of human desire. To represent desire, each story features an appearance and interaction with the titular item, the dragon’s eye. This item often serves as both representation and foil to the characters’ deepest desires. By interjecting this fantastic jewel into realistic situations, these stories attempt to utilize fantasy as a vehicle through which emotional tension is created …

Object Usage Processing Improves Memory, Joseph C. Tann

Honors Theses

JOSEPH C. TANN: Usage as a Beneficial Method of Encoding

Many psychologists have attempted to find the most effective method of processing information in human memory. For years, the pleasantness method of processing was considered to be among the best methods for enhancing memory performance. One recent theory (Nairne, 2007) has suggested that processing items in terms oftheir survival value may be an even more proficient method of processing. Another theory (Reysen & Adair, 2008) attempted to prove that survival may not be the reason for the enhanced performance, but the individual’s connection with the specific object’s usage. My experiment …

Path Of The Dragon's Eye: Using Fantasy Elements In Realism, Winston Edward Jones, Jr.

Honors Theses

The stories presented in this thesis illustrate a common theme through the use of both fantasy and realism. Specifically, these dichotomous styles are used to comment on the nature of human desire. To represent desire, each story features an appearance and interaction with the titular item, the dragon’s eye. This item often serves as both representation and foil to the characters’ deepest desires. By interjecting this fantastic jewel into realistic situations, these stories attempt to utilize fantasy as a vehicle through which emotional tension is created and resolved. Also, the obvious juxtaposition of genres creates situations in which the reader …

The Magnitude Of Repression By Cro Protein In The Presence Of Lambda Operator Variants, Shabnam Sarker

Honors Theses

Synthetic genetic circuits were constructed to observe the dynamics of repression by the Cro and scCro repressors. Each circuit contained at least one repressor and a reporter gene. Cro repressor is one of two opposite repressors. This artificial switch also had a single-chain cro (scCro) protein that would not have to dimerize like Cro to be fimctional. Such repressors bind operator sites to prevent fiirther transcription fi-om the promoters. The Lac Repressor (LacR) was used to prevent transcription firom Pr. The inducer EPTG was used to remove the Lac Repressor. A reporter gene LacZ is transcribed from Pr. The protein …

Russians At Work: Past And Present Of The Russian Mentality Toward Work, Dustin Cody Bankston

Honors Theses

This paper is an analysis of the Russian mentality toward work. Several factors deeply affecting the work mentality are discussed along with their historical and cultural causes. Research for this paper was primarily gathered from personal experience, academic articles, newspaper articles, books, case studies, movies, literature, history texts, interviews, and a self-conducted quantitative questionnaire. The paper identifies five major themes that affect the Russian mentality toward work including relationship to authority, group dynamics, prioritization of work, political factors, and western influences. The themes are each linked to the unique historical and cultural development of Russia. The paper concludes that an …

Going Places: The Shift Of The Textile Industry To China, Vaughan Abbay Leatherman

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Nouveau: A Feminist Magazine Launch, Meghan Cori Blalock

Honors Theses

The following thesis is a combination of research on the history of feminism and magazines in America and a business plan with accompanying prototype for the launch of a feminist magazine called Nouveau. The research took several months to complete with the business plan and prototype requiring approximately one additional academic year to finish. Based on research and general knowledge of the magazine publishing industry, I found that there is a niche in feminist publications waiting to be filled; Nouveau, which aims to redefine feminism for young professional women, will fill that niche by presenting women with the option of …

Immunological Effects Of Written Disclosure In Athletes, Kristen Thatcher

Honors Theses

Many studies have demonstrated the health benefits of written disclosure of traumatic or stressful events. These benefits include improved psychological well-being, fewer health clinic visits, shorter hospital stays after surgery, and increased immune function. In athletes, high immune function is necessary to ward off illness during training and competition, but much research has shown that athletes tend to have lowered immune function. Therefore, writing about traumatic events may be a way for athletes to remain healthy during their seasons. To test this hypothesis, 21 varsity athletes and 15 individuals who exercised less than three hours per week participated in the …

Divergent Effect Of Social Cohesion On Economic Growth In East Asia And Latin America, Horacio Diaz Adda

Honors Theses

In this paper I explore the link between social cohesion and economic growth in Latin America and East Asia. Unlike previous studies, I allow for different slope parameters for the different regions. Using ethno linguistic fractionalization as a proxy, I find that social cohesion has not played an important role in determining growth outcomes in Latin America. While social cohesion has not had a direct effect on growth nor institutions in Latin America, it helps explain a large degree of the growth differentials among Asian countries. Social cohesion mostly impacts growth through its effect on institutional quality. However, these results …

Phylogeny And Population Genetics Of Allotheuthis (Loliginidae) And Discovery Of A Cryptic Species, Adria Pilsits

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

The Importance Of An Internship And What Makes Quicken Loans An Extraordinary Place To Intern, Frank C. Salinger

Honors Theses

Records the author's experiences interning for Quicken Loans as a student studying Business at Western Michigan University, and what benefits were found from the internship process.

Trials Bike Frame Concept, David Boboltz, Rob Harmer, Caleb Vanderveen

Honors Theses

Development of a Concept Trials Frame was a mechanical engineering design project that developed a new bicycle frame that has the strength and durability to be used for trials bike riding. The scope of the project was placed solely on the bicycle's frame. Current frames were analyzed based on their strength, durability, stiffness, weight, and appearance. These factors were ranked for importance and became the performance targets for the new frame. Several designs that utilize elastic strain energy to increase performance were brainstormed. Following SolidWorks modeling, equivalent impact loads were calculated using several analytical methods. These loads were then applied …

The Dwarfing Of Men In Victorian Fairy-Tale Literature, Heather Victoria Vermeulen

Honors Theses

As Jack Zipes explains in his preface to Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and the Elves, "The Victorian fairy-tale writers always had two ideal audiences in mind when they composed their tales -young middle-class readers whose minds and morals they wanted to influence, and adult middle-class readers whose ideas they wanted to challenge and reform" (xiv). "It was through the fairy tale," he continues, "that a social discourse about conditions in Victorian England took form, and this discourse is not without interest for readers today" (xi). My project begins with a critical analysis of the Grimm Brothers' …

Telling Arguments : A Weaverian Analysis Of Supreme Court Cases Regarding Civil Rights And Affirmative Action, Cathy Reno

Honors Theses

In his book, The Ethics of Rhetoric, influential rhetoric and culture scholar Richard M. Weaver articulates a framework called Grammatical Categories. These classifications are used to identify both the motivation and implications of arguments. There are four discrete categories. The first, and least difficult to formulate is the argument from circumstance. The second Grammatical Category is cause and effect, which links an action to a consequence. The third category is called the argument from similitude in which, as the name implies, the rhetor looks for inherent connections between certain objects or ideas. Finally, the argument from definition (or principle) is …

Rawls And Health Care, Elizabeth H. Coogan

Honors Theses

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the …

Voices Of The Poor: Poverty And Growth In Albania, Magda Tsaneva

Honors Theses

This paper uses three waves of panel surveys at the household level to study growth and poverty in Albania over the period 2002-2004. It attempts to answer two main questions. The first question is directed at finding the micro determinants of growth and aims to expose the obstacles households face to improve their economic situation. The main focus of the analysis is to investigate the importance of health, education, and infrastructure indicators for income growth. The second question asks whether growth in Albania during the period 20022004 has been pro-poor. I find that there is some evidence for a convergence …

Photojournalistic Manipulations Of Reality: The Power Over Knowledge, Valerie Friedman

Honors Theses

This project is an anthropological study on how students at Colby College interpret photojournalistic images and news media. Using extensive literature, I strove to find a better understanding of how news agencies and the media control the flow and availability of information. Through fieldwork and numerous research methods, I wanted to understand how students formed relationships with images and news stories they encountered. This paper shows how the media and images people see in the news controls the minds and ideas of the public. Newspapers, magazines, the radio, internet sites, television broadcasts, and other forms of news media are primary …

Concomitant Polymorphism In 1,2-Bis(9-Anthryl)Acetylene, Rebecca Goldstein

Honors Theses

This thesis details the serendipitous discovery of the phenomenon of concomitant conformational polymorphism found to exist in 1,2-bis(9-anthryl)acerylene. 1,2-bis(9anthryl)acetylene is a previously published molecule. However, the published crystal structure showed the molecule to be completely planar, and to crystallize in the form of orange needles. While this form of the crystal was indeed found during the synthesis of 1,2-bis(9anthryl)acetylene, a new polymorph, crystallizing as yellow prisms, was also discovered. This yellow polymorph was found by X-ray crystallography to be monoclinic with an angle of 66.7 between the anthracene planes. The planar polymorph 1,2-bis(9-anthryl)acetylene was also found by X-ray crystallography to …

Anhedonia And Depression: Anticipatory, Consummatory, And Recall Deficits, Kaitlin Hanley

Honors Theses

Current conceptions of anhedonia as a key symptom of depression do not consider the importance of anticipatory, consummatory, and recall deficits involved in anhedonia. Sixty-one depressed and non-depressed, college-student participants provided reports of anticipated pleasure to tasting chocolates, tasted chocolates and rated their experience of pleasure, and provided recalled reports of pleasure to the experience one day later. Results demonstrated a deficit in the ability to anticipate experiencing pleasure for depressed participants when compared to non-depressed controls, however, their reports of consummatory pleasure and recalled pleasure did not differ significantly from non-depressed control participants. This study suggests that actual experiential …

Collective Moral Responsibility, Allyson Rudolph

Honors Theses

What is collective moral responsibility? And why should you care? The answer to the former, like any good philosophical question, is largely unresolved. Although writing on collective responsibility has flourished, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust, and despite the existence of an increasingly consistent bibliography of essential writings in the field, there is no definitive authority on the subject. Unlike individual moral responsibility, however, there is little consensus among the ranks. Many theories disclaim the existence or the possibility of collective moral responsibility—a group is just not the sort of thing that can ever be considered a morally responsible …

Detailed Mechanistic And Optimization Of The Photochemical Production Method Of Superoxide, Ta-Chung Ong

Honors Theses

The highly reactive nature of superoxide anion presents an analytical challenge to prepare stable standards for instrument calibration. McDowell et al. (1983) developed a convenient method of superoxide production based on continuous photolysis of benzophenone and acetone in oxygen saturated, alkaline, 2-propanol solution. In the McDowell reaction, ketones are photolyzed to their triplet state, and then reacted with alcohol to produce ketyl radicals that react with oxygen to produce superoxide. This study investigated the mechanism and rate of these reactions by Laser Flash Photolysis (LFP). Reaction rate constants for the reaction between the benzophenone triplet and ethanol was 5.5 x …

Dialectics Of Diaspora Space: A Study Of Contemporary, Diasporic, South Asian Fiction, Christopher A. Zajchowski

Honors Theses

In light of these continuing debates concerning immigration, national identity and belonging, re-examinations of immigrant and ethnic communities, often referred to as ‘diaspora,’ have become increasingly popular and prudent. Khachig Tololian, editor of Diaspora magazine, calls diaspora “exemplary communities of the transnational moment.”5 In an increasingly globalized world, where labor, capital, and resources are passed fluidly from continent to continent, diaspora are created by relocation or displacement of immigrant workers and their descendents.6 For these unskilled, immigrant laborers, middle class immigrants, and the children of both groups, adaptation to the culture, society, and life in a new ‘host’ country can …

Gauguin : Generating Art Using Genetic Algorithms & User Input Naturally, Thomas E. Cook

Honors Theses

This paper outlines an undergraduate research project demonstrating an application of evolutionary computation in the context of computer art. The project, named GAUGUIN, combines the visual impact of modern computer graphics with the computational power of genetic algorithms. GAUGUIN allows the user to become a creator of art, without requiring any technical or artistic training. By using an intuitive and easily comprehensible process like evolution to create the composition, the user simply needs to evaluate a sequence of compositions. Mimicking the biological process of evolution, the system will evolve the works in order to achieve images that are more visually …

Too Many Bad Cooks Spoiling The Broth? Effectiveness Of Ngos In Addressing Child Labour In El Salvador, Ivica Petríková

Honors Theses

The reaction of the first world to the persevering plight of a large part of the third world varies. In response to the sometimes glaring disparities, many international organizations and multinational corporations have recently adopted a pro-development rhetoric with relation to the problem of global poverty. However, the rhetoric rarely translates into action. As David Bacon discusses, leaders of corporations and organizations now tend to conclude their speeches by expressing a desire to reduce the suffering of the third world. However, when it comes to agreeing on specific concessions that could indeed improve the world-wide economic situation, first world countries …

Self-Management: Saving One Western Student At A Time, Courtney L. Fox

Honors Theses

No abstract available.

Constructing Muammar Al-Gaddafi, Kristin Kushlan

Honors Theses

Rhetoricians such as Robert Ivie and George Lakoffhave examined the use of language of opposition to create and control various enemies during the War on Terror, but they have also ignored or overlooked numerous cases. This paper will examine one such case, that of Muammar al-Gaddafi, whose reciprocal violence eventually succumbed to the oppressor's global economic power. This case study will explore how the U.S. government rhetorically constructed Gaddafi in order to control both his identity within American society (as either an enemy or an ally), as well as the counter-violence that Gaddafi supposedly enacted against Western systems of power. …

Deficit Reduction In The U.S. Senate : The Search For Moral Leadership In The Budget Process, David Kendall Roberts

Honors Theses

Contemporary deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility are central to the economic wellbeing of future generations as well as their ability to freely decide their own policy priorities. Many scholarly publications and popular commentary on budget policy describe the obstacles to deficit reduction and political leaders' unwillingness to address the nation's long-term fiscal problems. However, current discussions of budget deficits and the national debt have not been informed by a comprehensive empirical analysis of attempts to reduce the deficit. This thesis examines all deficit-affecting floor amendments to budget legislation from 1975 to 2005 in order to assess whether the bleak account …

The Rise And Fall Of America's Education President : George W. Bush's Political Leadership And The Passage Of The No Child Left Behind Act, Ethan L. Mcwilliams

Honors Theses

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush proudly signed the "No Child Left Behind Act," thus ensuring that H.R. 1 became Public Law 107-110. During the signing ceremony, the President triumphantly proclaimed that, "as of this hour, America's schools will be on a new path of reform, and a new path of results."1 The legislation, which totaled more than six hundred pages, was intended to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and expand its aim according to four central principles: accountability for results; state and local flexibility; focusing resources on successful methods; and expanding choice? Although substantively notable …