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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- Creators: Brian, Jennifer
- Creators: O'Flaherty, Katherine
- Creators: Computing and Informatics Program
Description
The inherent risk in testing drugs has been hotly debated since the government first started regulating the drug industry in the early 1900s. Who can assume the risks associated with trying new pharmaceuticals is unclear when looked at through society's lens. In the mid twentieth century, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published several guidance documents encouraging researchers to exclude women from early clinical drug research. The motivation to publish those documents and the subsequent guidance documents in which the FDA and other regulatory offices established their standpoints on women in drug research may have been connected to current events at the time. The problem of whether women should be involved in drug research is a question of who can assume risk and who is responsible for disseminating what specific kinds of information. The problem tends to be framed as one that juxtaposes the health of women and fetuses and sets their health as in opposition. That opposition, coupled with the inherent uncertainty in testing drugs, provides for a complex set of issues surrounding consent and access to information.
ContributorsMeek, Caroline Jane (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Brian, Jennifer (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
As of 2019, 30 US states have adopted abortion-specific informed consent laws that require state health departments to develop and disseminate written informational materials to patients seeking an abortion. Abortion is the only medical procedure for which states dictate the content of informed consent counseling. State abortion counseling materials have been criticized for containing inaccurate and misleading information, but overall, informed consent laws for abortion do not often receive national attention. The objective of this project was to determine the importance of informed consent laws to achieving the larger goal of dismantling the right to abortion. I found that informed consent counseling materials in most states contain a full timeline of fetal development, along with information about the risks of abortion, the risks of childbirth, and alternatives to abortion. In addition, informed consent laws for abortion are based on model legislation called the “Women’s Right to Know Act” developed by Americans United for Life (AUL). AUL calls itself the legal architect of the pro-life movement and works to pass laws at the state level that incrementally restrict abortion access so that it gradually becomes more difficult to exercise the right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade. The “Women’s Right to Know Act” is part of a larger package of model legislation called the “Women’s Protection Project,” a cluster of laws that place restrictions on abortion providers, purportedly to protect women, but actually to decrease abortion access. “Women’s Right to Know” counseling laws do not directly deny access to abortion, but they do reinforce key ideas important to the anti-abortion movement, like the concept of fetal personhood, distrust in medical professionals, the belief that pregnant people cannot be fully autonomous individuals, and the belief that abortion is not an ordinary medical procedure and requires special government oversight. “Women’s Right to Know” laws use the language of informed consent and the purported goal of protecting women to legitimize those ideas, and in doing so, they significantly undermine the right to abortion. The threat to abortion rights posed by laws like the “Women’s Right to Know” laws indicates the need to reevaluate and strengthen our ethical defense of the right to abortion.
ContributorsVenkatraman, Richa (Author) / Maienschein, Jane (Thesis director) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Abboud, Carolina (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
DescriptionThis project is designed to generate enthusiasm for science among refugee students in hopes of inspiring them to continue learning science as well as to help them with their current understanding of their school science subject matter.
ContributorsSipes, Shannon Paige (Author) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Thesis director) / Gregg, George (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Division of Teacher Preparation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
Distant is a Game Design Document describing an original game by the same name. The game was designed around the principle of core aesthetics, where the user experience is defined first and then the game is built from that experience. Distant is an action-exploration game set on a huge megastructure floating in the atmosphere of Saturn. Players take on the role of HUE, an artificial intelligence trapped in the body of a maintenance robot, as he explores this strange world and uncovers its secrets. Using acrobatic movement abilities, players will solve puzzles, evade enemies, and explore the world from top to bottom. The world, known as the Strobilus Megastructure, is conical in shape, with living quarters and environmental system in the upper sections and factories and resource mining in the lower sections. The game world is split up into 10 major areas and countless minor and connecting areas. Special movement abilities like wall running and anti-gravity allow players to progress further down in the world. These abilities also allow players to solve more complicated puzzles, and to find more difficult to reach items. The story revolves around six artificial intelligences that were created to maintain the station. Many centuries ago, these AI helped humankind maintain their day-to-day lives and helped researchers working on new scientific breakthroughs. This led to the discovery of faster-than-light travel, and humanity left the station and our solar system to explore the cosmos. HUE, the AI in charge of human relations, fell into depression and shut down. Awakening several hundred years in the future, HUE sets out to find the other AI. Along the way he helps them reconnect and discovers the history and secrets of the station. Distant is intended for players looking for three things: A fantastic world full of discovery, a rich, character driven narrative, and challenging acrobatic gameplay. Players of any age or background are recommended to give it a try, but it will require investment and a willingness to improve. Distant is intended to change players, to force them to confront difficulty and different perspectives. Most games involve upgrading a character; Distant is a game that upgrades the player.
ContributorsGarttmeier, Colin Reiser (Author) / Collins, Daniel (Thesis director) / Amresh, Ashish (Committee member) / School of Arts, Media and Engineering (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This thesis project examines the likely factors that cause students to drop out of Barrett, the Honors College. Honors literature regarding retention and attrition suggests four areas encompassing individual student attributes and honors program characteristics which may impact a student's decision to stay or leave an Honors College. The primary question in focus is, "Why do students leave the Honors College?" followed by the tertiary questions of, "what can be done to mitigate this occurrence?" and, "how does this affect the quality of an honors education?" Assessing attrition can be broken down into biographical, cognitive-behavioral, socio-environmental, and institutional-instrumental components. Students who graduated with honors and those who did not graduate with honors were assessed on these four components through survey methods and qualitative interviews to investigate specific reasons why students leave the honors program. The results indicated a wide array of reasons impacting student attrition, the most significant being negative perceptions towards (1) honors courses and contracts, (2) difficulty completing a thesis project, and (3) finding little to no value in "graduating with honors." Each of these reasons reflect the institutional-instrumental component of student attrition, making it the most salient group of reasons why students leave the Honors College. The socio-environmental component also influences student attrition through peer influence and academic advisor support, though this was found to be within the context of institutional-instrumental means. This project offers solutions to ameliorate each of the four components of attrition by offering standardized honors contracts and more mandatory honors classes, mandatory thesis preparatory courses instead of workshops, and emphasizing the benefit Barrett gives to students as a whole. These solutions aim at increasing graduation rates for future honors students at Barrett as well as improving the overall quality of an honors education.
ContributorsSanchez, Gilbert Xavier (Author) / Parker, John (Thesis director) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Committee member) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Physician-assisted suicide occurs when a physician facilitates a patient's death by prescribing a lethal medication that they understand will be used for the purpose of ending the patient's life. It is a highly contentious subject and, with the recent addition of California to the list of states that allow physician-assisted suicide, is an increasingly relevant subject. Physician-assisted suicide is rarely framed as a healthcare experience, despite being a choice in the process of end-of-life care. The research seeks to bring together the debates about physician-assisted suicide with conversations about health care experiences. The experiences and perspectives of young people are particularly valuable to evaluate now, as their voices will soon be the leaders in the debate over physician-assisted suicide. Within this research, there is an underlying theme of independence of individuals that is present through both the literature review and the body of data collected and analyzed. The study found that there was no significant relationship between the quality of a person's healthcare and their perspectives about physician-assisted suicide.
ContributorsMoeur, Katherine Elizabeth (Author) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Graff, Sarah (Committee member) / Stevenson, Christine (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The objective of this project concentrates on the game Defense of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2). In this game, players are constantly striving to improve their skills, which are fueled by the competitive nature of the game. The design influences the community to engage in this interaction as they play the game cooperatively. This thesis illustrates the importance of player interaction in influencing design as well as how imperative design is in affecting player interaction. These two concepts are not separate, but are deeply entwined. Every action performed within a game has to interact with some element of design. Both determine how games become defined as competitive, casual, or creative. Game designers can benefit from this study as it reinforces the basics of developing a game for players to interact with. However, it is impossible to predict exactly how players will react to a designed element. Designers should remember to tailor the game towards their audience, but also react and change the game depending on how players are using the elements of design. In addition, players should continue to push the boundaries of games to help designers adapt their product to their audience. If there is not constant communication between players and designers, games will not be tailored appropriately. Pushing the limits of a game benefits the players as well as the designers to make a more complete game. Designers do not solely create a game for the players. Rather, players design the game for themselves. Keywords: game design, player interaction, affinity space, emergent behavior, Dota 2
ContributorsLarsen, Austin James (Author) / Gee, James Paul (Thesis director) / Holmes, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / School of Arts, Media and Engineering (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Bots tamper with social media networks by artificially inflating the popularity of certain topics. In this paper, we define what a bot is, we detail different motivations for bots, we describe previous work in bot detection and observation, and then we perform bot detection of our own. For our bot detection, we are interested in bots on Twitter that tweet Arabic extremist-like phrases. A testing dataset is collected using the honeypot method, and five different heuristics are measured for their effectiveness in detecting bots. The model underperformed, but we have laid the ground-work for a vastly untapped focus on bot detection: extremist ideal diffusion through bots.
ContributorsKarlsrud, Mark C. (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis director) / Morstatter, Fred (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
In 2010, two gamma-ray /x-ray bubbles were detected in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These bubbles extend symmetrically ≈ 30, 000 light years above and below the Galactic Center, with a width of ≈ 27, 000 light years. These bubbles emit gamma-rays at energies between 1 and 100 giga-electronvolts, have approximately uniform surface brightness, and are expanding at ≈ 30, 000 km/s. We believe that these Fermi Bubbles are the result of an astrophysical jet pulse that occurred millions of years ago. Utilizing high-performance computing and Euler’s Gas Dynamics Equations, we hope to find a realistic simulation that will tell us more about the age of these Fermi Bubbles and better understand the mechanism that powers the bubbles.
ContributorsWagner, Benjamin Leng (Author) / Gardner, Carl (Thesis director) / Jones, Jeremiah (Committee member) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
This paper encompasses part of the complex topic of relationships between consumers, organic products, and advertising in America with a particular focus on Tempe, Arizona. Background research included in this paper includes how the term "organic" was developed and regulated to fit the federal standards that are implied through the use of the USDA organic label that was introduced in October of 2002. Further research considers the factors that have empirically and overwhelmingly contributed to motivations of attitude development and purchasing behaviors of the average organic consumer in America, tracking changes and potential causes over the past several decades. A large proportion of this paper analyzes the results of a survey conducted in Tempe between late 2014 and early 2015. This survey, shown in the appendices, includes responses from 310 Tempe consumers regarding questions of demographics, knowledge and perception of organic products, perceived access to organic products, consumer values, and purchasing behaviors. The results of the survey reflect the values displayed in previous studies on national surveys, with some discrepancies that appear to set Tempe apart from the national average. However, the results of the survey are limited by their exclusion and limited parsing of multiple confounds. Additionally, the respondents of the survey were not proportionate to the actually population of Tempe and therefore cannot be accurately generalized to the Tempe population as a whole. The third and final section of this paper deals with the relationship between advertisers and consumers. This considers how advertising helps to develop product values and perceptions through various methods. Future directions for advertising of organic products is also addressed, as advertisers can potentially become a source of developing scientific information if properly utilized. Further directives and gaps in research are addressed in the final portion of the paper and include how to increase consumer knowledge, the problems faced by organic advocates, what is important about what we already know, and where to go from here.
ContributorsAttanasio, Amber-Leigh Lace (Author) / Brian, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Phillips, Elizabeth Capaldi (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05