Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Logistics Planning: Putting Math To Work In A Business Setting, Michael C. Hannan

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The optimization of business procedures benefits all aspects of the product. Maximizing efficiency can lead to more profits for the business, cheaper products for the consumer, and less fuel consumption for the environment. Tracing the history of optimization, we can see that people have always strived for the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. However, the field of optimization did not blossom until innovations in mathematics allowed us to solve a majority of real world problems. The discovery of linear and nonlinear programming in the 1940s allowed us to optimize problems that were unsolvable before. This paper introduces how …

Acceptable Title Pending: Probing The Limits Of Precision Measurement And Academic Assessment, Bobby King

Senior Projects Spring 2023

This is a project in two parts. The first is an attempt to impart onto the reader the necessary mental models required to understand a scientific experiment related to the improvement of gravitational wave detectors. Part one is illustrated in collaboration with Simone River Wilding, Sohpie Foley, Roma Taitwood, and Cam Goldberg.

Part two is a technical description of efforts made to reduce speckle in measurements of scattered light. Gravitational wave detection requires extremely high precision measurement, and one source of noise in the detectors is scattering off of defects and surface roughness in optical coatings. Research into the development …

From Fast Fashion To Conscious Couture : Revealing The Need For Policy In Shaping A Sustainable Fashion Industry, Mikelison D. Womack

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

¿Quién Soy Yo? [Who Am I?]: Exploring Identity Through Analyzing Afro-Cuban Poetry And Creative Coding In A Post-Secondary Spanish Literature Classroom, F. Megumi Kivuva

Senior Projects Spring 2022

With efforts to broaden participation in computing by integrating CS education into humanities and developing more critical pedagogy, this research focuses on teaching computing in a post-secondary Spanish literature class through analyzing Afro-Cuban poetry. Its goal was to evaluate how participants may use Twine to reflect on Afro-Cuban poetry and their own identities. A group of 5 participants, one professor, and five students, learned how to use Twine to create interactive narratives reflecting on “El apellido,” a poem by Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Through analyzing researcher notes, participants’ projects, post-workshop surveys, and interviews, the research revealed that students were able …

Predicting League Of Legends Ranked Games Outcome, Ngoc Linh Chi Nguyen

Senior Projects Spring 2022

League of Legends (LoL) is the one of most popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games in the world. For LoL, the most competitive way to evaluate a player’s skill level, below the professional Esports level, is competitive ranked games. These ranked games utilize a matchmaking system based on the player’s ranks to form a fair team for each game. However, a rank game's outcome cannot necessarily be predicted using just players’ ranks, there are a significant number of different variables impacting a rank game depending on how well each team plays. In this paper, I propose a method to …

Optimizing Green Infrastructure: Designing, Managing, And Evaluating Green Infrastructure To Receive Social, Economic, And Ecological Benefits, Mikaela Christine Martiros

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Writing At The Horizon: How Producing Imagined Narratives Affects Mood, David Yu-Zhong Liang

Senior Projects Fall 2021

The present study explores the effect of three different writing activities and their subsequent effects on participant mood. Writing has been of particular interest for psychologists due to its use in interventions aimed at working through traumatic or stressful periods, and recent research has begun to explore the use of narrative in placing traumatic events and experiences in greater context. However, purely therapeutic, intervention-based writing exercises exclude a large amount of more expressive, imagined creations and narratives, which may have the capacity to reorient, contextualize, and otherwise positively affect a person’s mood. This study investigates whether employing the imagination may …

Determining Tone Of A Body Of Text, Cole G. Hollant

Senior Projects Spring 2020

We will be looking into emotion detection and manipulation within a body of text based off of Robert Plutchik’s basic emotions. This project encompasses building probabilistic and lexical models, full-stack web development, and dataset creation and application. We will build our models off of Latent Dirichlet Allocation—a grouping model common in natural language processing (nlp) and lexicons compiled through crowdsourcing. User testing is undergone as a means of measuring the effectiveness of our models. We discuss the application of concepts and technologies including MongoDB, REST APIs, containerization, IaaS, and web frontends.

A Machine Learning Approach To The Perception Of Phrase Boundaries In Music, Evan Matthew Petratos

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Segmentation is a well-studied area of research for speech, but the segmentation of music has typically been treated as a separate domain, even though the same acoustic cues that constitute information in speech (e.g., intensity, timbre, and rhythm) are present in music. This study aims to sew the gap in research of speech and music segmentation. Musicians can discern where musical phrases are segmented. In this study, these boundaries are predicted using an algorithmic, machine learning approach to audio processing of acoustic features. The acoustic features of musical sounds have localized patterns within sections of the music that create aurally …

Earth Alienation And Space Exploration: Uncharted Territory For Sociology, Sam Arroyo

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

An Algorithmic Approach To Detect Non-Injectivity Of The Partial Borda Count, Jazlyn Johnson

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Voting is how we elect today’s voices, faces, and leaders in our country. It is argued to be a very essential right we have as a people. A voter votes, by listing their preferences. Their preferences are relating the candidates to one each other (i.e. whether they prefer candidate A to candidate B or if they are indifferent between the two). There are many different social choice functions that can be used to calculate the results of an election. This project glances over the theory of Condorcet, Borda, Arrow, and Young, all of whom had a great impact on voting …

Gerrymandering And The Impossibility Of Fair Districting Systems, Danielle Degutz

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Voting district boundaries are often manipulated, or gerrymandered, by politicians in order to give one group of voters an unfair advantage over another during elections. To make sure a system of voting districts is not gerrymandered, the population size, the shape, and the voting efficiency of each party in each district should be taken into consideration. Following recent work of Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon, we discuss mathematical criteria for each of these three aspects, and we prove how problems arise when attempting to apply all three at once to a districting system--first to a simplified districting system and …

Losing Shahrazad: A Distant Reading Of 1001 Nights, Taysa Mohler

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project is a distant reading analysis of seven 19th and 20th-century English translations of One Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights. Through the use of computer programming and distant reading, it becomes clear that the Nights' frame tale is the carrier of the internal logic and generative power of the story cycle. Further, the frame tale expresses the Nights' self-representation, which serves to undermine the historical use of the Nights as synecdoche for the Orient. Therefore, the translators that remove the frame story from their versions further the Nights' use as an Orientalist object, …

Knowing Water: Science And The Politics Of Knowledge Production Along The Saw Kill, Carlo Diego Raimondo

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Beginning with globally oriented ideological constructions of water as resource, this project explores the materiality of water and how it comes to understood within our current geological era. Specifically exploring the politics of scientific knowledge production, I follow the methodological processes of the Bard Water Lab as they monitor water quality of a local stream, exploring how different apparatuses of observation are utilized in order to make a stream a legible and knowable object.

(Un)Packing The Natural: Exploring Tactics Of Empowerment For Girls Through Outdoor Education, Avalon Blue Qian

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

An Analysis Of China’S Regional Emissions Trading System: Challenges And Lessons, Ronghui (Kevin) Zhou

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

China, the largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world, has faced environmental pressures both internationally and domestically over the last ten years. In early 2011, the Chinese government approved a carbon emissions trading program in seven cities and provinces, and started planning a national emissions trading framework. This thesis reviews these pilot programs and examines the issues that underlie them. Drawing lessons from the U.S. Acid Rain Program, the European Union’s ETS, and California’s CAT, the three largest emissions trading frameworks in the world, I find that: (1) lack of trades in China’s pilot programs is a consequence of permit …

Climate Change In The Hudson River Estuary: Promoting Adaptation And Resilience Through Stakeholder Engagement In Design And Visualization, Gabrielle S.D. Weiss

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

In response to the growing risk to communities from climate change impacts, Professor Cerra at the Cornell University School of Landscape Architecture developed the Climate Adaptive Design (CAD) program. CAD is being implemented as a partnership between the Hudson River Estuary Program (Estuary Program) and Cornell that utilizes participatory design and visualization to engage communities about planning for future climate impacts. The goal of CAD is to build climate resilience, galvanize community participation and education, and build links to external sources of support including local institutions of higher education. This thesis outlines background for the development of the program and …

Public Perception Of Environmental Programs In The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, Landa De Matamoros, Queretaro, Mexico, Danielle Marie Salisbury

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Biological or ecological corridors have recently been sought out as a solution to biodiversity loss due to habitat fragmentation. In eastern Mexico, the Mexican and German governments are collaborating to connect fragmented landscapes and Natural Protected Areas (NPAs) over five states across a Madrean Pine-Oak biodiversity hotspot through the implementation of the Ecological Corridor of the Sierra Madre Oriental (CESMO). One of the ways the CESMO is accomplishing its conservation goals is by extending environmental programs that are currently in place within NPAs to other areas within the corridor, but outside of NPA borders. However, the success of the corridor …

Carbon Stocks In Shade Coffee: Strategies For Enhancing Carbon Storage In Smallholder Systems In Jinotega, Nicaragua, Vanessa Katheryn Kichline

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Climate change has recently shifted focus to adaptation and mitigation strategies in coffee production. Shade coffee systems, already widely recognized for their contribution to biodiversity and soil conservation, are now drawing attention for their role in carbon storage. Researchers have generally assumed that high carbon storage must come at the expense of reduced crop yields, implying that farmers must choose between sustainability and profit. This study uses field inventories of 70 farms in Jinotega, Nicaragua to estimate this tradeoff in smallholder shade coffee systems. Field inventories were used to develop three typologies representing different shade management strategies in use in …

Utilizing New York State’S Distributive Generation Laws For Affordable Housing Organizations, Reuben Jaffe Goldstein

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

The focus of this report is to assist in the deployment of renewable energy in New York City by creating a framework that affordable housing organizations can use to navigate evolving New York regulations to deploy solar PV to their tenants and reduce their tenants’ utility bills. New York’s regulatory environment is trying to make it easier to deploy solar PV through programs such as Shared Solar Program and Remote Net Metering that provide guidance to those who are currently unable to access solar PV. However, incentivizing Solar PV and distributed generation have disproportionately increased costs for utilities, which has …

To Nudge Or Not To Nudge: Promoting Environmentally Beneficial Behaviors, Emma Jean Cooper

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

In order to mitigate the effects of climate change, humans need to change how they act toward the environment. Unfortunately, as much as we may want to act in ways that would be best for us and for the environment, we often struggle to do just that due to cognitive biases. Nudge theory attempts to remedy this problem by helping us make the decision that would be in our best interests. To explore this issue, I conduct an extended review of the literature to examine how well nudge theory can be applied to the realm of environmental policy. Specifically, I …

Addressing Antibiotic Resistance From Farm-Raised Fish Imported To The United States, Nicholas Ali

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Misuse of medically important antibiotics in animal production threatens the effectiveness of drugs that are vital in combating disease and infections. Recently, the FDA implemented regulations to limit the use of and access to veterinary drugs. However, these regulations only affect domestic production operations. Because over 90% of seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported from countries with different regulatory standards and because the U.S. has an import inspection rate of less than 1%, antibiotic resistance stemming from imported aquaculture is still a risk that is not sufficiently accounted for. This research investigates how the U.S. has reacted to the …

Recognizing The Interdependent Self: The Perception Of The Production And Consumption Of Meat At Bard College, Avery Evelyn Brown-Cross

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Radical Recognition In Off-Line Handwritten Chinese Characters Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Xiangying Shuai

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the past decade, handwritten Chinese character recognition has received renewed interest with the emergence of touch screen devices. Other popular applications include on-line Chinese character dictionary look-up and visual translation in mobile phone applications. Due to the complex structure of Chinese characters, this classification task is not exactly an easy one, as it involves knowledge from mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.

Given a large image database of handwritten character data, the goal of my senior project is to use Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), a recent method for finding a suitable representation (parts-based representation) of image data, to detect specific …

Envy-Free Fair Division With Two Players And Multiple Cakes, Justin J. Shin

Senior Projects Fall 2016

When dividing a valuable resource amongst a group of players, it is desirable to have each player believe that their allocation is at least as valuable as everyone else's allocation. This condition, where nobody is envious of anybody else's share in a division, is called envy-freeness. Fair division problems over continuous pools of resources are affectionately known as cake-cutting problems, as they resemble attempts to slice and distribute cake amongst guests as fairly as possible. Previous work in multi-cake fair division problems have attempted to prove that certain conditions do not allow for guaranteed envy-free divisions. In this paper, we …

The Golden Pandemic, Leo Dylan Stevens-Lubin

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The work in my senior show is a representation on how I feel about conventional focusing specifically on corn. The reason that I have chosen corn is because it is one of the most detrimental crops that we are growing in the US. It is grown specifically for livestock feed and ethanol with a minimal fraction for direct human consumption. Corn itself offers minimal nutritional benefits in comparison to most other vegetable crops and the overproduction of corn crops decreases the benefits all the more.

Artwork:

• Woodblock Print Series: The extent of how much land is actually used for corn …

Cyber Power Restrained: How Strategic Culture Inhibits The Integration Of Cyber Weapons By The United States Military, David Matthew Bisson

Senior Projects Spring 2014

This article seeks to reconcile the support status of cyber power in the United States military with the seriousness of the cyber threat confronting the nation. It rejects the argument that cyber weapons are not useful and are not traditional “weapons” by drawing parallels between cyber power and military force in the physical domains, as well as revealing how some of the most prominent issues in cybersecurity are political and not technological in nature. The article proposes strategic culture as an alternative explanation for U.S. cyber power’s current status. By studying the case studies of American air and space power, …

Welfare Versus Stability In "Stabilizing An Unstable Economy": A Minskyan Growth Model, Stergios Mentesidis

Senior Projects Spring 2012

The paper focuses on Minsky's financial fragility hypothesis incorporated in a growth model and investigates whether an inherently unstable economy can be stabilized by a big and proactive government. Using dynamical systems theory and expanding a supply-driven growth model developed by Lin, Day and Tse (1992), the paper explores how different government spending programs and financing paths can affect the growth, as well as the stability of a capitalist economy. The results and implications of the new frameworks are analyzed, using analytical and numerical methods of bifurcation, to examine the dependence of optimal government intervention on the economic environment. The …

The Environmental And Cultural Effects On The Conquest Of Mexico, Tristan Siegel

Senior Projects Spring 2012

In this work I examine the environment and cultural attitudes of Mesoamericans, specifically the Mexica (Atzec), and how these factors played a role in the Conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes. I begin by examining Mesoamerican agriculture, lithic technology, and metallurgy. I conclude by examining how these factors played out in the Conquest.