Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Modeling The Development & Expression Of Political Opinion: A Zallerian Approach, Avery C. Ellis

Honors Projects

Research focused on John Zaller's famous RAS model of political opinion formation and change from "The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion" (1992). Analyzed the mathematical and psychological underpinnings of the model, the first paper to do so in over fifteen years and the first to do so through an analysis of motivated reasoning and Bayesian reasoning. Synthesized existing critiques of Zaller's model and other literature to suggest ways to build on Zaller, utilizing fundamental reunderstandings of opinions and messages from political and mathematical perspectives. Found verification for Zaller's model, confirming its value, but also found support for the proposed …

Analyzing The Efficacy Of Covid-19 Travel Bans: A Regression Analysis Approach, Mallory Kochanek

Honors Projects

Some might associate the term ‘public health’ with the pandemic that occurred in 2020. COVID-19 spread like most have never seen in their lifetime. It is useful to look at the effectiveness of the travel re- strictions in mitigating the spread of the global pandemic. Using linear regression and network regression, we obtain parameter estimates to determine the relation of predictors, such as network effect, percentage of urban population and GDP, on the COVID-19 incidence rate for the months January to April of 2020. Linear regression does not ac- count for the correlation structure of the data. Network regression, on …

Baseball’S Evolution In The 21st Century, And How It Exemplifies Human Response To Change, Jonathan Sharpe

Honors Projects

The game of baseball has changed a lot in the past twenty years. It can be primarily attributed to the explosion in data analytics and how they are used to evaluate baseball players. This led to different player profiles being preferred and eventually led to the development of players changing. As a result, the strategies employed have also evolved and turned into a different game than seen only a couple of decades ago. This paper will explore the changes that the game has seen. On the other hand, Major League Baseball has also implemented its own changes to try and …

Teaching About The Global Refugee Crisis, Melissa Kafer

Honors Projects

Around the world, there are more than 30 million refugees (UNHCR, 2023) facing language barriers, cultural differences, prejudice, racism, and xenophobia. The number of admitted refugees in 2022 has more than doubled since 2021 (Duffin, 2022), and yet, many Americans do not know or understand the global refugee crisis. There are misconceptions in America that cause lack of empathy, bias, and prejudice towards refugees. Through the creation of four lesson plans, this research project aims to discover Americans’ misunderstandings regarding refugees and teach them about the crisis to remedy the misconceptions. This study includes a literature review detailing appropriate teaching …

Data Ethics: An Investigation Of Data, Algorithms, And Practice, Gabrialla S. Cockerell

Honors Projects

This paper encompasses an examination of defective data collection, algorithms, and practices that continue to be cycled through society under the illusion that all information is processed uniformly, and technological innovation consistently parallels societal betterment. However, vulnerable communities, typically the impoverished and racially discriminated, get ensnared in these harmful cycles due to their disadvantages. Their hindrances are reflected in their information due to the interconnectedness of data, such as race being highly correlated to wealth, education, and location. However, their information continues to be analyzed with the same measures as populations who are not significantly affected by racial bias. Not …

Analytical Study To Determine Significant Causes Of Increased No-Hitters In The 2021 Major League Baseball Season, Joel Robison

Honors Projects

Why were there so many no-hitters in the 2021 MLB season? This project focuses on possible significant causes to the record-breaking number of no-hitters pitched in the 2021 Major League Baseball season. Specifically, this project takes an analytical look at the recent trends in launch angles and spin rates to determine if there are any significant causes to the increased number of no-hitters in baseball. The random nature and unpredictability of the game of baseball make it almost impossible to come to any solid conclusions.

Examining Bacteriophage Reliance On The Tola Protein Of Escherichia Coli, Ellen Davis

Honors Projects

With the ever-growing crisis of antibiotic resistant bacteria, bacteriophage provide an important potential alternative therapy to treat infections when antibiotics are ineffective. For this reason, it is important to understand the mechanisms bacteriophage use to enter their bacterial host cell. The cellular envelope of the gram-negative bacterium E. coli contains a protein system known as Tol-Pal, which utilizes energy from the Proton Motive Force to carry out several cellular functions, including some associated with cellular division and outer-membrane stability. Certain bacteriophage take advantage of the energy produced by this system to cross the bacterial cell membrane. One important protein of …

Teacher Education Programs Of Top Pisa Scoring Countries, Stephanie Kafer

Honors Projects

This research paper aims to investigate the teacher education programs of four different countries that have consistently scored high on the international Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test. This project intends to answer two questions: What locations consistently perform high on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test? What do the teacher training programs look like for these locations and are there commonalities between programs of different locations? The first question is answered using statistics of PISA scores from the past twenty years and from those statistics, the top four countries that this paper focuses on are Finland, …

An Exploratory Analysis Of The Bgsu Learning Commons Student Usage Data, Emily Eskuri

Honors Projects

The purpose of this study was to explore past student usage data in individualized tutoring sessions from the Learning Commons from two academic years. The Bowling Green State University (BGSU) Learning Commons is a learning assistance center that offers various services, such as individualized tutoring, math assistance, writing assistance, study hours, and academic coaching. There have been limited research studies into how big data and analytics can have an impact in higher education, especially research utilizing predictive analytics.

This project applied analytics to individualized tutoring data in the Learning Commons to create a better understanding of why those trends happen …

A Bayesian Hierarchical Mixture Model With Continuous-Time Markov Chains To Capture Bumblebee Foraging Behavior, Max Thrush Hukill

Honors Projects

The standard statistical methodology for analyzing complex case-control studies in ethology is often limited by approaches that force researchers to model distinct aspects of biological processes in a piecemeal, disjointed fashion. By developing a hierarchical Bayesian model, this work demonstrates that statistical inference in this context can be done using a single coherent framework. To do this, we construct a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) to model bumblebee foraging behavior. To connect the experimental design with the CTMC, we employ a mixture model controlled by a logistic regression on the two-factor design matrix. We then show how to infer these model …

Statistical Analysis Of Land Cover Conversion Trends In Northwest Ohio, Chaska Mcgowan

Honors Projects

Agricultural land in the U.S. is abundant but not infinite. Change in cropland impacts national and local economies and the natural environment. The Black Swamp Conservancy (BSC), a non-profit land trust in Perrysburg, Ohio, is committed to preserving agricultural and natural lands in the Northwest Ohio region for future generations. This project was designed in collaboration with the BSC to illustrate the spatial distribution of land cover change within their sixteen-county service area in Northwest Ohio and to find a list of factors associated with land cover change in the region. The primary data source was the National Land Cover …

Market Research On Student Concert Attendance At Bgsu's College Of Musical Arts, Mary Solomon

Honors Projects

Bowling Green State University boasts a well established College of Musical Arts which holds concerts performed by esteemed faculty, prestigious guest artists, and students. The school hosts these events in Kobacker Hall and Bryan Recital Hall which can accommodate up to 800 and 250 audience members, respectively. However, performances in Kobacker hall only fill one- fourth of the 800 seats, on average. Why is this so? This project aims to investigate the factors that influence students’ decisions to attend concerts at the College of Musical Arts (CMA). By methodology of survey research and statistical analysis, this project will look into …

Black Swamp Pub And Bistro Analysis, Sara Aniol

Honors Projects

The Black Swamp Pub and Bistro is a full-service restaurant located in the Union on the Bowling Green State University Campus. We mainly do sit-down service, but we also do take-out orders and have a full bar with draft beers as well as mixed drinks. Our menu tends to change a lot, with new additions as well as some of the items being deleted. My goal of this project is to try to give some insight on the patterns that are too big to see with day-to-day operations as well as give some recommendations for the future that is backed …

Examining The Relationship Between Pre-Collegiate Educational Experiences And Religious Affiliation, Erica Augustyniak

Honors Projects

This paper explores the relationship between the type of school students experienced before college and how that schooling affected the students’ religious affiliation. The specific types of schools examined are public and private schools with private schools being further divided into religious and non-religious private schools. I explore the differences in religious importance among several groups including students who attended Catholic schools and those who did not, students who attended religious schools for varying lengths of time (low, medium, high, and no involvement), and students who had a choice in the schools they attended and those who did not. I …

Statistical Analysis Of Momentum In Basketball, Mackenzi Stump

Honors Projects

The “hot hand” in sports has been debated for as long as sports have been around. The debate involves whether streaks and slumps in sports are true phenomena or just simply perceptions in the mind of the human viewer. This statistical analysis of momentum in basketball analyzes the distribution of time between scoring events for the BGSU Women’s Basketball team from 2011-2017. We discuss how the distribution of time between scoring events changes with normal game factors such as location of the game, game outcome, and several other factors. If scoring events during a game were always randomly distributed, or …

Visualizing Lab And Phenotype Associations Using Phewas And Electronic Health Records, Brenda Emerson, Miriam Goldman, Sahiti Kolli

Honors Projects

As the digitization of patient health records is becoming more common, we are given a great opportunity to analyze these records and hopefully make discoveries about diseases or medicines. Being given large datasets of Electronic Health Records, I and two other students decided to look for novel phenotype associations with mean lab values, look to see whether the presence of a lab had associations with a phenotype, and create an interactive application to visual the associations between labs and phenotypes.

Assessing The Relationship Between Change Blindness And The Anchoring Effect, Melissa Schoenlein

Honors Projects

A lack of consideration for all aspects of a question prompts fragmented decision making. These decisions, as they leave out fundamental information, repeatedly then lead to a potentially problematic reaction to the target question or stimuli. The anchoring heuristic propels one to make a decision, usually an estimate, based on a presented “fact”, often ignoring additional background and environmental clues. Reducing the rate of occurrence of the anchoring bias is thought to lead to an increase in holistic decision making. To promote this reduction, the purpose of this research was to affirmexamine the relationship between the susceptibility to change blindness …

Economic Opportunity And Young Adult Mortality: Variations By Race/Ethnicity And Gender, Jocelyn Mineo

Honors Projects

This study examines the relationship between economic opportunity and adolescent and young adult mortality in the United States. In addition, this study explores other variables, such as social support and rurality, and their link to young adult mortality rates. First, we examined the link between economic opportunity and all-cause mortality rates for youth ages 15 to 34 in the United States. Given the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of America’s youth, we pay particular attention to race/ethnic differences. We also examine the differences in mortality by gender.

The Relationship Between Time Of Day, Mood, And Electroencephalography (Eeg) Asymmetry, Morgan Tantillo

Honors Projects

Previous researchers have had success in finding a correlation between exercise and an increase in positive mood. Researchers have also found a correlation between time of day and mood. The current study will explore the relationship between time of day, mood, and electroencephalography (EEG) asymmetry. The study utilized a convenient sample of ten undergraduate students at Bowling Green State University. Participants had baseline EEG recordings taken, and then participated in moderate exercise, followed by another EEG recording. Participants’ mood was assessed through a self-reported mood questionnaire before the condition as well as immediately after. Due to multiple statistical tests, the …

Extreme Value Theory And Backtest Overfitting In Finance, Daniel C. Byrnes

Honors Projects

In order to identify potentially profitable investment strategies, hedge funds and asset managers can use historical market data to simulate a strategy's performance, a process known as backtesting. While the abundance of historical stock price data and powerful computing technologies has made it feasible to run millions of simulations in a short period of time, this process may produce statistically insignificant results in the form of false positives. As the number of configurations of a strategy increases, it becomes more likely that some of the configurations will perform well by chance alone. The phenomenon of backtest overfitting occurs when a …