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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DescriptionThe city of Siena is picturesque as an almost perfectly preserved medieval fortress in the heart of Tuscany. But the true beauty stems from its unique, family-oriented culture.
ContributorsPrice, Tea Francesca (Author) / Silcock, Bill (Thesis director) / Dell'Anna, Antonella (Committee member) / Dodge, Nancie (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This project explores the history of technology and social media, and their impact on the music industry. Social media and music culture are part of a remix culture, which encompasses new ways of recreating old content. Social media is not a new phenomenon, but has existed for centuries in various forms, dating back to ancient cultures. Music is constantly changing due to the remix culture- each new music style is created by changing what exists to fit the individual musician's style. Technological advances pushed the music industry to change, from the start to audio recording, to the digital sharing that is present in 2015, creating the musical culture as we presently know it. Due to the way that social media and music are interacting, a new platform is necessary to serve the artists in the music industry. Marketing on social media is incredibly powerful, but is ill-suited for small artists. As a result, SoundScope was developed to serve the needs of small musicians on social media. Soundscope develops a website that lets musicians use social media to it's greatest capacity and take advantage of the remix culture and the concept of virality that has developed with online communication. It uses a voting/ranking system to populate and organize it's home page, allowing listeners to find the most popular music first, and artists can get feedback based on the voting system and commenting capability. These create the community necessary for effective marketing and sharing of garage artist's music in the digital sphere.
ContributorsCash, Aimee Nicole (Author) / Silcock, Bill (Thesis director) / Dodge, Nancie (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Historically, studies of condition-dependent signals in animals have been male-centric, but recent work suggests that female ornaments can also communicate individual quality (e.g., disease state, fecundity). There has been a surge of interest in how urbanization alters signaling traits, but we know little about if and how cities affect signal expression in female animals. We measured carotenoid-based plumage coloration and coccidian (Isospora spp) parasite burden in desert and city populations of house finches to examine urban impacts on male and female health and attractiveness. In earlier work, we showed that male house finches are less colorful and more parasitized in the city, and we again detected that pattern in this study for males. However, though city females are also less colorful than their rural counterparts, we found that rural females were more parasitized. Also, regardless of sex and unlike rural birds, more colorful birds in the city were more heavily infected with coccidia. These results show that urban environments can disrupt signal honesty in female animals and highlight the need for more studies on how cities affect disease and condition-dependent traits in both male and female animals.
ContributorsSykes, Brooke Emma (Author) / McGraw, Kevin (Thesis director) / Sweazea, Karen (Committee member) / Hutton, Pierce (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The purpose of this creative project is to make an E-Book that promotes time management for college students in a way that interests them. The author of this recognizes that there are many distractions to keep college students from sitting down and reading a textbook; that is why an E-Book featuring videos and interactive videos was chosen. The research questions presented below began my research and understanding of the topic. These questions are as follows: 1. What is a way to promote time management for college students? a) What are some mediums that will appeal to young people who want to do more than just read a book. 2. When figuring out how to manage their time, what are the areas of life students consider to be most important? 3. What perspectives to various facets of the world like, business, academia and the foreign community think about time management? 4. What perspective to millennials have on time management? By answering these questions above, the author hopes to understand what is good time management, and how to explore it in a way that will interest young people. The author is doing so by creating a series of narrative videos that he himself acted in portraying a fictitious student both engaging in and not practicing good time management techniques. The created nine videos, with three dedicated to a section each. The three sections were what students do wrong, how they can improve and how they can maintain their success. Within each section were three sub- sections that students must use time management skills for: mental techniques, physical well-being, and juggling work and personal commitments. See the attached documents (Appendix A) for a full collection of the scripts that were created for these videos. The author also created quizzes through the website Bookry, allowing him to make review questions for those reading the book. The quizzes were then made into widgets and inserted into the book. Each quiz was about 5 questions each and was at the end of each of the sub-sections, meaning there were 45 questions total. See the attached documents (Appendix B) for screenshots of each quiz question and the correct answer.
ContributorsCzajka, Jagger James (Author) / Silcock, Bill (Thesis director) / Rodriguez, Rick (Committee member) / Dodge, Nancie (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The purpose of this study is to examine how social connectivity in a collaborative business environment translates to online social communication, namely to social media. Not a lot of academic research focuses in-depth on how startups and entrepreneurs within the technology industry perceive social media, or how their work environment can influence the ways they see the role of these platforms. Gangplank was chosen as the subject of this case study based on the emphasis they as a coworking space put on connecting to others in order to accomplish mutual goals. Initial research showed that entrepreneurs using social media did so with a collaborative focus in mind. However, it was unclear if, by developing their businesses in a space devoted to fostering social relationships, entrepreneurs would be more likely to engage and interact with other users on social media platforms. Furthermore, it was unclear if their attitudes toward online and offline communication would be affected by spending time in a dedicated social workspace. In order to find how some entrepreneurs that started or worked closely in the beginning stages of a collaborative, connection-driven workspace used social media and see whether or not they used the platform to establish and build relationships and connect with others, three entrepreneurs from such a workspace were personally interviewed. In these interviews, each entrepreneur gave their personal feelings and opinions on the space itself, their view on the role of social media, and whether or not they connected their space to their social media use. The study also examined each entrepreneur's social media profile on one prominent social network to see how each was practically using the platform, and to analyze how each entrepreneur's use of the platform compared to his perceptions of social media as a whole. The study found that entrepreneurs who became established in a collaboration-oriented space definitely interacted frequently on social media. Each entrepreneur interviewed expressed the importance of working closely with others and forming valuable connections through both online and offline means. These entrepreneurs were established to have followed all the best practices of social media use outlined through research, and to have had a large number of personally engaging interactions and conversations on observed social media platforms.
ContributorsThompson, Lauren Elizabeth (Author) / Wu, Xu (Thesis director) / Dodge, Nancie (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
This study is an exploration of the nutritional physiology of Gambel's quail, Callipepla gambelii, in terms of the comparison of rural and urban area populations of this gallinaceous species, and the employment of in situ study by design. The health of quail populations is of interest as a resource to recreational enthusiasts, hunters, stakeholders, as well as agencies charged with their management. Quail are the only resident small avian game species known to be native to the southwest that is depended upon by management agencies for recreational opportunities. The condition of the Gambel's quail populations determine regulatory actions with respect to recreational quailing opportunities and these quail represent a species which shows adjustment to human expansion. The combination of morphologic, physical, and plasma nutrient data gathered from samples during this study are hypothesized to show a difference between rural and urban populations of C. gambelii. The hypothesis is that urban quail will display morphological differences, and nutrient differences that are crucial to quail fitness, therefore, potential selective differences. Ground and ambient air temperatures are hypothesized to be higher in urban areas andthus these measurements were taken for site comparison. Plasma nutrient concentrations between rural and urban populations of adult male Gambel's quail were compared for potential existing variations in nutrition. The blood nutrient assays are expected to display increased plasma concentrations of constituents such as glucose, lipids, and proteins, which are known to be involved in growth, reproductive success, and general fitness in the urban quail populations. Morphological data was collected to examine the potential differences in the physical attributes of the sampled quail. A fitness advantage in male Gambel's quail living within urban areas is hypothesized to be associated with differences in plasma nutrients and morphology. The potentially differing plasma nutrients in samples of the C. gambelii in urban versus rural environments is believed to be affected by, and to indicate, differing nutrient availability. Body mass and length, chest circumference as well as skin temperatures were measured to assess potential differences in these outward physical attributes. The urban quail are hypothesized to have reproductive and/or natural selective advantages where their measured morphology may show physical size differences. Differences in the physical attributes of the male Gambel's quail that live in urban areas may be supported through measured morphologic attributes.
ContributorsFunk, Alexander L (Author) / Deviche, Pierre (Thesis director) / Sweazea, Karen (Committee member) / Hutton, Pierce (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-12