Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
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- All Subjects: Insects
- All Subjects: Poetry
- Creators: School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Description
With the advent of sophisticated computer technology, we increasingly see the use of computational techniques in the study of problems from a variety of disciplines, including the humanities. In a field such as poetry, where classic works are subject to frequent re-analysis over the course of years, decades, or even centuries, there is a certain demand for fresh approaches to familiar tasks, and such breaks from convention may even be necessary for the advancement of the field. Existing quantitative studies of poetry have employed computational techniques in their analyses, however, there remains work to be done with regards to the deployment of deep neural networks on large corpora of poetry to classify portions of the works contained therein based on certain features. While applications of neural networks to social media sites, consumer reviews, and other web-originated data are common within computational linguistics and natural language processing, comparatively little work has been done on the computational analysis of poetry using the same techniques. In this work, I begin to lay out the first steps for the study of poetry using neural networks. Using a convolutional neural network to classify author birth date, I was able to not only extract a non-trivial signal from the data, but also identify the presence of clustering within by-author model accuracy. While definitive conclusions about the cause of this clustering were not reached, investigation of this clustering reveals immense heterogeneity in the traits of accurately classified authors. Further study may unpack this clustering and reveal key insights about how temporal information is encoded in poetry. The study of poetry using neural networks remains very open but exhibits potential to be an interesting and deep area of work.
ContributorsGoodloe, Oscar Laurence (Author) / Nishimura, Joel (Thesis director) / Broatch, Jennifer (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The culture surrounding death in America is one of science and silence. When possible, death is hidden away from the public view. When exposure to death is unavoidable, it is sensationalized, made into a spectacle. Our dying are put into hospice care, nursing homes, and other hidden spaces, or else they are plastered over the news and internet. So, we get one of two views of death: the sterile, silent death that happens in the presence of medical professionals or the bloody, tragic deaths that are constantly reported across news outlets and social media or sensationalized on entertainment platforms such as movies and video games. Entire genres of television and movies are created on the foundation of bloody deaths and we are exposed to the concept of death constantly.
Despite the consistent coverage of death on a large scale, the average person is not often exposed to death on a personal level in this day and age. The deaths we see on television or in the movies are not typically connected to people with whom we are attached and so we are not required to work through our emotional response and experience. We are afforded the space to be a casual observer in most of the deaths that we see—we do not need the emotional and mental tools to cope with death on a personal level. While this distance from death may be true of the American whole, it is not entirely generalizable. Professionals in select fields are required to deal with death on a much more regular basis than the average person, including, but not limited to, healthcare and forensic professionals. In these professions, death is a fundamental aspect of the job—either as an expected risk or a necessary precursor. These professionals deal intimately with death, its causes, and its effects on a regular basis because of their chose line of work and, in doing so, are regularly exposed to death and other trauma which has the potential to affect them on both a professional and personal level. In doing so, these professionals are required to, as scientists, analyze and record these experiences with death through the lens of objectivity. These professionals are expected to maintain a professional distance while also being required to give an empathetic response to other’s trauma. The potential effect of this secondary trauma on these professionals is only sharpened by the culture of machismo in these science-based fields that prevents many professionals from expressing emotions regarding their job and getting the social support they need from others within their community.
Despite the consistent coverage of death on a large scale, the average person is not often exposed to death on a personal level in this day and age. The deaths we see on television or in the movies are not typically connected to people with whom we are attached and so we are not required to work through our emotional response and experience. We are afforded the space to be a casual observer in most of the deaths that we see—we do not need the emotional and mental tools to cope with death on a personal level. While this distance from death may be true of the American whole, it is not entirely generalizable. Professionals in select fields are required to deal with death on a much more regular basis than the average person, including, but not limited to, healthcare and forensic professionals. In these professions, death is a fundamental aspect of the job—either as an expected risk or a necessary precursor. These professionals deal intimately with death, its causes, and its effects on a regular basis because of their chose line of work and, in doing so, are regularly exposed to death and other trauma which has the potential to affect them on both a professional and personal level. In doing so, these professionals are required to, as scientists, analyze and record these experiences with death through the lens of objectivity. These professionals are expected to maintain a professional distance while also being required to give an empathetic response to other’s trauma. The potential effect of this secondary trauma on these professionals is only sharpened by the culture of machismo in these science-based fields that prevents many professionals from expressing emotions regarding their job and getting the social support they need from others within their community.
ContributorsSandoval, Alicia Rose (Author) / Kobojek, Kimberly (Thesis director) / Watrous, Lisa (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
The spread of urbanization leads to habitat fragmentation and deterioration and changes the composition of ecosystems for species all over the world. Different groups of organisms are impacted differently, and insects have experienced loss in diversity and abundance due to changing environmental factors. Here, I collected seed beetles across 12 urban and rural sites in Phoenix, Arizona, to analyze the effects of urbanization and habitat variation on beetle diversity and abundance. I found that urbanization, host tree origin, and environmental factors such as tree diversity and density had no impact on overall beetle diversity and abundance. Beetles were found to have higher density on hosts with a higher density of pods. In assessing individual beetle species, some beetles exhibited higher density in rural sites with native trees, and some were found more commonly on nonnative tree species. The observed differences in beetle density demonstrate the range of effects urbanization and environmental features can have on insect species. By studying ecosystem interactions alongside changing environments, we can better predict the role urbanization and human development can have on different organisms.
ContributorsPaduano, Gabrielle (Author) / Savalli, Udo (Thesis director) / Sweat, Ken (Committee member) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Forensic entomology is the use of insects in legal investigations, and relies heavily upon calculating the time of colonization (TOC) of insects on remains using temperature-dependent growth rates. If a body is exposed to temperatures that exceed an insect’s critical limit, TOC calculations could be severely affected. The determination of critical thermal limits of forensically-relevant insects is crucial, as their presence or absence could alter the overall postmortem interval (PMI) calculation. This study focuses on the larvae of Phormia regina (Meigen) (Diptera: Calliphoridae), a forensically relevant blow fly common across North America. Three populations were examined (Arizona, Colorado, and New Jersey), and five day old larvae were exposed to one of two temperatures, 39℃ or 45℃, for five hours. Across all colonies, the survival rate was lower at 45℃ than 39℃, in both larval and emerged adult stages. The Arizona colony experienced a harsher drop in survival rates at 45℃ than either the Colorado or New Jersey colonies. This research suggests that the range of 39℃ - 45℃ approaches the critical thermal limit for P. regina, but does not yet exhibit a near or complete failure of survivorship that a critical temperature would cause at this duration of time. However, there is opportunity for further studies to examine this critical temperature by investigating other temperatures within the 39℃ - 45℃ range and at longer durations of time in these temperatures.
ContributorsMcNeil, Tara (Author) / Weidner, Lauren (Thesis director) / Meeds, Andrew (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor)
Created2022-05