Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Jane Austen’s depictions of musical performers and listeners in her novels suggest her belief that musical performances should strengthen intimacy between people, both between listeners and performers as well as among listeners. Austen commends music for its power to increase intimacy through honest expressions of taste, which more often arise in private performances, but she warns against its power to decrease intimacy through pretentious displays of taste, which more often arise in public performances. Austen’s belief that music allows for this healthy intimacy indicates that music has great significance in society. Austen suggests that music has a greater importance to everyday life than many may originally suppose, as it is a universal connection between people. Ultimately, Jane Austen’s perspective of music’s great power both to expose pretentiousness and to cultivate intimacy should lead all of her readers to recognize and respect music’s true power and to consider seriously the importance and role of music in their own lives.

Animal shelters are stressful environments for dogs and a plethora of research has been conducted on interventions aimed at improving the welfare of these animals. One type of intervention is social interaction, either between dogs and people or dogs and conspecifics. To investigate the types of social interaction dogs engage in and the impact of that contact on their welfare, 12 dogs were enrolled to participate in group sessions with other dogs, supervised by staff, in a shelter setting. There were three, 15-minute sessions per day across three days in which groups of two to four dogs were observed and recorded on video. These videos were then analyzed per dog for three types of interactions: dog-dog, dog-human, and dog-environment. It was found that the dogs spent significantly more time engaging with the staff members in the room than with conspecifics or the environment. Physiological measurements, including cortisol and S-IgA levels, were taken using urinary and fecal samples obtained both in the morning prior to these interaction sessions and after the final interaction of the day. No significant correlations were found between the amount of time that the dogs spent in each type of interaction and dogs’ cortisol or S-IgA levels. However, smaller statistical effects suggest that human interaction may correspond with decreased stress the day after interaction while conspecific interaction may be related to increases in stress the following day. Overall, these findings suggest that social interaction, particularly with people, may be beneficial, and should be further explored as a method to enhance the well-being of shelter dogs.

As the return to normality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic enters its early stages, the necessity for accurate, quick, and community-wide surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 has been emphasized. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been used across the world as a tool for monitoring the pandemic, but studies of its efficacy in comparison to the best-known method for surveillance, randomly selected COVID-19 testing, has limited research. This study evaluated the trends and correlations present between SARS-CoV-2 in the effluent wastewater of a large university campus and random COVID-19 testing results published by the university. A moderately strong positive correlation was found between the random testing and WBE surveillance methods (r = 0.63), and this correlation was strengthened when accommodating for lost samples during the experiment (r = 0.74).