Honors Projects
Showing 11 - 20 of 564 Items

- Embargo End Date: 2026-05-20
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Anneka Florence Williams
Access: Embargoed

- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Emma D. Kellogg
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Mara R Chin-Purcell
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generators are neuronal networks that produce reliable rhythmic motor output. A simple pattern generator, known as the cardiac ganglion (CG), controls the heart of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Previous studies have suggested that stretch feedback relays information to the cardiac ganglion about the degree of filling in the heart, and that this feedback is mediated by stretch-sensitive dendrites extending from CG neurons. I sought to determine the mechanisms behind this stretch feedback pathway. One hundred second extension pyramids were applied to each heart while amplitude and frequency of contractions were recorded; 87% of hearts responded to stretch with a significant increase in frequency of contractions. To ascertain the role of dendrites in this feedback pathway, the accessible branches along the trunk of the CG were severed, de-afferenting the CG. In de-afferented hearts, stretch sensitivity was significantly less than in intact hearts, suggesting that the dendrites extending from the CG are essential for carrying stretch feedback information. To separate the effects of active and passive forces of heart contraction on stretch sensitivity, the CG was de-efferented by severing the motor nerves that induce muscle contraction. Hearts with only anterolateral nerves cut or with all four efferents cut were significantly less stretch sensitive than controls. These results indicate that the CG is sensitive to active stretch of each contraction. Hearts with reduced stretch feedback had more irregular frequency of contractions, indicating that a role of stretch feedback in the cardiac system may be to maintain a regular heart rate.

- Embargo End Date: 2026-05-20
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Claire Christine Havig
Access: Embargoed

Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Cecilia Markmann
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Tam Phan
Access: Open access
- “Twitter Revolutions” in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and Moldova illustrate social media’s capacity to mobilize citizens in uprooting systems of injustice. As non-democratic regimes, these “Twitter Revolutions” offer insight into how Twitter’s microblogging, hashtags, and global user connections help broker relations between activists hoping to challenge the government. However, this thesis focuses on the democratic regime of the US and how Twitter plays a role in aiding the prison abolition movement in their effort to dismantle carceral networks that inflict racial and political violence on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Color. The thesis outlines how, under the US’ classification as a democracy, the US utilizes infrastructural power to coerce American citizens into accepting carceral networks of violence as essential institutions to maintain civil society. The following sections explain the abolitionist movement’s history of attempting to dismantle the discrete formal and informal institutions of political violence, and includes the complicating development of liberal-progressive reformism that attempts to co-opt the goals of the abolition movement. The thesis focuses on the Twitter hashtag #PrisonAbolition in 2020 to explore how American Twitter users perceive the US carceral state and the prison abolition movement. The research concludes that #PrisonAbolition does not currently possess the capacity to evolve into the social mobilization seen in the “Twitter Revolutions” of non-democratic regimes because the US’ infrastructural power effectively engrained into the minds of Americans that prisons protect civil society. However, the tweets still show a promising development as American Twitter users become more engaged in abolitionist conversations.

Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Francesca Ann Cawley
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

- Restriction End Date: 2027-06-01
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Jeffrey Charles Price
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Noah Gans
Access: Open access
- Urban Sociology is concerned with identifying the relationship between the built environment and the organization of residents. In recent years, computational methods have offered new techniques to measure segregation, including using road networks to measure marginalized communities' institutional and social isolation. This paper contributes to existing computational and urban inequality scholarship by exploring how the ease of mobility along city roads determines community barriers in Atlanta, GA. I use graph partitioning to separate Atlanta’s road network into isolated chunks of intersections and residential roads, which I call urban pastures. Urban pastures are social communities contained to residential road networks because movement outside of a pasture requires the need to use larger roads. Urban pastures fences citizens into homogenous communities. The urban pastures of atlanta have little (

- Restriction End Date: 2027-06-01
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Phuong Luong
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community