Showing 221 - 230 of 583 Items
Economic Analysis of the Critical Habitat Designation Process for Endangered and Threatened Species Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Katherine Fosburgh
Access: Open access
- Habitat destruction is the leading cause of biodiversity loss in the US. Under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), habitat deemed essential to endangered and threatened species recovery is proposed as critical habitat (CH). CH areas are subject to regulations that could alter land development plans or increase costs. The potential economic opportunity cost created by CH regulations may lead to the exclusion of land proposed for CH designation, thereby reducing the conservation benefits of the CH rule. In this paper, I use a unique dataset collected from Federal Register (FR) documents to estimate the reduction in CH acreage from proposed to final ruling, both on the extensive and intensive margin. I find a negative relationship between the level of household income in an area proposed for CH and the probability that a CH gains acreage or maintains acreage during the establishment process. I also find some evidence that higher household income in a CH area is associated with a greater relative loss in acreage between proposal and finalization. I also find that private land proposed for CH designation is less likely to be in the final designation than federal land. Overall, my results suggest that economic considerations influence CH allocation decisions. Whether reducing the amount of private land subject to CH designations is socially efficient depends on the unknown economic benefit of private land exclusions versus the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss that may result from not protecting all land deemed vital to species recovery.
ALGOrhythms: Leveraging Markov Chain-Based Generation of Functional Harmonies with User-Defined Musical Corpus as a Compositional Tool
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Coleman Brockmeier
Access: Open access
- Music forms the soundtrack to daily life and serves as an important cultural marker for people around the world. As the world becomes digitized and connected via the internet, the opportunity is increasingly accessible for anyone to share music with the world and to create chart-topping music that defines the cultural vernacular. Many prominent producers have little to no formal musical training, especially in Western music theory. As a result, loop-based music dominates the lists of most-played music on the radio and streaming services, often not deviating from basic functional harmony. With this project, I have created a compositional tool in the form of an iOS app which identifies the harmonic “fingerprint” behind a given set of songs. The app then leverages this understanding to create sequences of chords in the style of that fingerprint. To accomplish this, the app employs web scraping to create a corpus of musical information in the form of Markov chains — a transition table which underlies the data set. I introduce the idea of musical “chunks” defining a harmonic “fingerprint” and various methods of traversing the transition table to create chord progressions employing the fingerprint as a guide. The tool allows for specification of corpus, chunk size, traversal method, and the ability to listen to, share, and save generated results. The resulting app is a tool that allows the user to answer the question: “What would happen if Stevie Wonder and Billie Eilish wrote a song together?”
Reconsidering Operation Condor: Cross-border Military Cooperation and the Defeat of the Transnational Left in Chile and Argentina during the 1970s
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Georgia C Whitaker
Access: Open access
- In this study of the roots of Operation Condor, I track the development of this unusual military alliance forged by six Southern Cone governments (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay) during the 1970s, as well as the push-and-pull relationship between the transnational migration of political militants and the military’s impetus for collaboration. While most accounts of Condor focus on the United States as the operation’s primary orchestrator, I contend that initial motivation for the type of cooperation that Condor would later formalize was driven not by the U.S., but by the Southern Cone militaries’ perception that Marxism had to be excised from the entire region. In addition, while Condor scholars have either ignored or minimized the role of the left as political actors and placed the blame for violence exclusively on the militaries and the United States, I draw from unpublished Argentine police records, Argentine Embassy documents, and Chilean-Argentine solidarity group publications to argue that it is essential to broaden our understanding of what both sides in this ideological confrontation were attempting to accomplish. The transnational left, never a homogenous group, evolved to meet a variety of objectives. Many militants continued to be politically active while they were in exile, and many acted in solidarity with like-minded leftists in their midst.
Context-specific effects of vasotocin on social approach in the male common goldfish, Carassius auratus
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Katharine Torrey
Access: Open access
- The peptide vasotocin (VT) and its mammalian homologue, vasopressin (VP), produce effects on social behavior that are highly species- and context-specific. We recently sequenced two genes for V1a-like receptors (VTR) in the goldfish brain, one that encodes for a fully-functioning canonical receptor and one that encodes for a non-functional truncated receptor. The current study is an investigation of whether social context may alter expression of these receptor types and thus, potentially, behavioral responses to VT. We used western blotting and immunohistochemistry with custom anti-VTR antibodies to characterize the distribution of VTR throughout the forebrain and the hindbrain. Western blot results showed bands close to the predicted sizes for truncated and canonical VTR constructs, suggesting that both genes are translated into protein in the brain, but the presence of additional bands suggested potential nonspecific binding. Immunohistochemistry data revealed VTR signal throughout the brain in regions associated with social behavior. We additionally examined whether visual and olfactory context alters behavioral responsiveness to VT, potentially by altering the expression of one or both receptors. Behavioral tests suggested that VT inhibits approach to males, but its effect on response to females in reproductive contexts is still undetermined, likely due to interference from a stress response during testing. Further characterization of VTR throughout the brain will clarify how social context might alter VT signaling through context-dependent modulation of its receptors. Additionally, future work should examine the behavioral consequences of such modulation by further studying whether VT’s effect on social approach behavior depends on context.
Long Day with The Office: An Analysis of College Student Demand for Streaming Video on Netflix Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Summers Askew
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Répresentations de la banlieue dans le cinéma français contemporain
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Yaw Owusu Sekyere
Access: Open access
- Inhabitants of the poor French banlieues are rejected and isolated from the larger French society, who refuse to acknowledge their marginalization. As a result, the cycle continues where no political change is made. The French film genre, cinéma de banlieue, seeks to explain the perspectives of the underrepresented and marginalized groups within France. This honors project analyzes the representations of the banlieue through the films of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz), Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma), Divines (Houda Benyamina), and Banlieusards (Kery James & Leïla Sy). These films focus on the themes of drugs, policial relations, the confinement of the banlieue, and the discrimination and stigmatisation that inhabitants of the poor banlieues face, all of which revolve around the idea of entrapment. This work intends to see if these representations of the banlieue, specifically on the periphery of Paris, perpetuate stereotypes, or propose a more complex dynamic.
Characterization of negative phonotactic behavior in the adult cricket, Gryllus bimaculatus Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Julianne Scholes
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Characterization of an Arabidopsis thaliana Adhesion Mutant This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jacob Dexter-Meldrum
Access: Embargoed
Duty and Distinction: Scientists as Intellectuals in Modern China
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Helen Wang
Access: Open access
- As critical players in the Chinese state’s pursuit of modernization and political legitimacy, Chinese scientists have been the recipients of state attention and scrutiny throughout modern history. This paper will analyze how Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) became a national hero as the Chinese Communist Party’s model scientist. Qian developed his scientific expertise in the United States, before Cold War political tensions forced his extradition. Upon his return to China, Qian became a key missile scientist in the state’s emerging nuclear weapons program. By analyzing Qian’s public persona as portrayed in official state media, this paper will argue that the CCP conferred distinct political duties to scientists, defining a new socio-political role for scientist-intellectuals. Beginning from the Mao era and continuing through to the present day, the CCP’s portrayal and promotion of Qian’s legacy gives insight into the state’s strategy to use science to bolster authority and legitimize policy.
Digital Authoritarianism in China and Russia: A Comparative Study
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Laura H.C. Howells
Access: Open access
- Digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and threatens the data privacy and rights of both domestic and international Internet users. However, scholarship on digital authoritarianism remains limited in scope and case study selection. This study contributes a new, more comprehensive analytical framework for the study of Internet governance and applies it to the case studies of China and Russia. Special attention is paid to the still understudied Russian Internet governance model. After thorough literature review and novel data collection and analysis, this paper identifies relative centralization of network infrastructure and the extent and pace of change in governance as the most notable differences between the two models. These points of divergence may be explained by two theories; the varieties of authoritarianism hypothesis posits that different political systems face persistent and unique constraints to governance of the digital realm. The development trajectory theory argues that each country’s technological development path foreshadows the systems’ capacity for and extent of governance. This study is among the first to distinguish between Internet governance strategies of authoritarian regimes.