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: Department of Economics
- Creators: School of Community Resources and Development
Description
The objective of this paper is to provide an educational diagnostic into the technology of blockchain and its application for the supply chain. Education on the topic is important to prevent misinformation on the capabilities of blockchain. Blockchain as a new technology can be confusing to grasp given the wide possibilities it can provide. This can convolute the topic by being too broad when defined. Instead, the focus will be maintained on explaining the technical details about how and why this technology works in improving the supply chain. The scope of explanation will not be limited to the solutions, but will also detail current problems. Both public and private blockchain networks will be explained and solutions they provide in supply chains. In addition, other non-blockchain systems will be described that provide important pieces in supply chain operations that blockchain cannot provide. Blockchain when applied to the supply chain provides improved consumer transparency, management of resources, logistics, trade finance, and liquidity.
ContributorsKrukar, Joel Michael (Author) / Oke, Adegoke (Thesis director) / Duarte, Brett (Committee member) / Hahn, Richard (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Few studies have examined the correlations between individual characteristics and other popular forms of social media other than Facebook. This study explored the ways emerging adults use Instagram and Snapchat and examined the relationships between social media and individual characteristics. A sample of 393 participants were recruited from a large university in the Southwestern United States. The participants completed an online questionnaire that included a newly developed social media measure along with established measures that examined the individual characteristics of social comparison orientation, self-esteem, loneliness, contingent self-worth, narcissism, and life satisfaction. In the present study, more participants reported having an active Instagram account than an active Facebook or Snapchat account. Additionally, a higher number of participants also reported preferring Instagram and Snapchat compared to Facebook. Significant correlations were found between various individual characteristics and three aspects of social media use: overall time spent on social media, whether the individual felt that their time spent on social media was meaningful, and how the individual felt emotionally after comparing themselves to others' photos and posts. Potential explanations and implications of the results are discussed.
ContributorsArndorfer, Sydney (Author) / Field, Ryan (Thesis director) / Sechler, Casey (Committee member) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The town of Guadalupe, Arizona has a long history of divided residents and high poverty rates. The high levels of poverty in the town can be attributed to numerous factors, most notably high rates of drug abuse, low high school graduation rates, and teen pregnancy. The town has named one of its most pressing issues of today to be youth disengagement. There are currently a handful of residents and community members passionate about finding a solution to this issue. After working with Guadalupe's Ending Hunger Task Force and resident youth, I set out to create a program design for a Guadalupe Youth Council. This council will contribute to combating youth disengagement. The program design will assist the task force in creating a standing youth council and deciding on the structure and role the council has in the town. I will offer learning outcomes and suggestions to the Task Force, youth council staff, and the youth of the youth council. This study contains an analysis of relevant literature, youth focus group results and data, and how the information gathered has contributed to the design of the youth council. The results of this study contain recommendations about four themes within the program design of a youth council: size, recruitment, activities and engagement, and adult support. The results also explore how the youth council will impact the power, policy, and behavior of Guadalupe youth.
ContributorsBalderas, Erica Theresa (Author) / Wang, Lili (Thesis director) / Avalos, Francisco (Committee member) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Television is currently in a changing state. There is no longer a singular broadcast format for series to follow. Streaming websites such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime now release series in their entirety; this is known as a full-season release (FSR). Viewers are now able to act independently and determine the pace they wish to watch a new FSR series. This not only affects how fans engage in social television discussions on social media, but also changes the previously proposed viewer engagement model. Whereas previous research suggests that fans follow a static linear engagement model consisting of pre-communication, parallel communication, and post communication phases, fans are now able to move freely through viewer engagement phases. This creates a new type of engagement model: The Atomized Engagement Model. As fans move freely through the atomized engagement phases, they choose social media platforms to engage in fandom discussion. Research suggests that although there are distinct types of posts that occur in relation to social television discussions, the platforms used have a direct effect on the content and length of the post.
ContributorsPouls, Samantha Rae (Author) / Gilpin, Dawn (Thesis director) / Barrett, Marianne (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The passage of 2007's Legal Arizona Workers Act, which required all new hires to be tested for legal employment status through the federal E-Verify database, drastically changed the employment prospects for undocumented workers in the state. Using data from the 2007-2010 American Community Survey, this paper seeks to identify the impact of this law on the labor force in Arizona, specifically regarding undocumented workers and less educated native workers. Overall, the data shows that the wage bias against undocumented immigrants doubled in the four years studied, and the wages of native workers without a high school degree saw a temporary, positive increase compared to comparable workers in other states. The law did not have an effect on the wages of native workers with a high school degree.
ContributorsSantiago, Maria Christina (Author) / Pereira, Claudiney (Thesis director) / Mendez, Jose (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The nonprofit sector has experienced exponential growth in recent decades, thus creating a separate industry for nonprofits—an industry that requires education and training to run efficiently and successfully. As a result, Nonprofit Management Education (NME) at both graduate and undergraduate levels has steadily increased in number and demand. Recent changes in the political climate and changes in the government funding present new challenges to nonprofit professionals, thus enhancing the value of specific NME to prepare professionals for these challenges. To leverage NME and ensure that students are adequately prepared for these challenges, it is important to design curriculum that addresses the needs of the growing nonprofit industry. The Nonprofit Academic Center of Councils is the creator of the NACC Curricular Guidelines, which are currently used as a model all NME curricula should emulate. This study utilizes Arizona State University (ASU) to compare its current curriculum model to the NACC Curricular Guidelines, as well as the current challenges facing the nonprofit sector. In so doing, this study will provide an in-depth overview of NME at ASU through 1) focus groups of nonprofit leaders; 2) survey data from former students; and 3) curriculum mapping.
The comprehensive results indicated areas of opportunity for both ASU and the NACC Curricular Guidelines. According to the feedback of students, nonprofit professionals, and the current state of the ASU curriculum, ASU may wish to increase emphasis on Financial Management, Managing Staff and Volunteers, Assessment, Evaluation, and Decision Making, and Leading and Managing Nonprofit Organizations. After considering feedback from nonprofit professionals, NACC may consider amending some new competencies that reflect an emphasis on collective impact, cross sector leadership, or relationship building and the use of technology for nonprofit impact. The research team recommends accomplishing these changes through enhancing pedagogy by including case studies and an integrated curriculum into the ASU NME program. by applying the suggested changes to both the ASU curriculum and the NACC guidelines, this research prepares both ASU and NACC towards the process of accreditation and formalizing the NLM degree on a national level.
The comprehensive results indicated areas of opportunity for both ASU and the NACC Curricular Guidelines. According to the feedback of students, nonprofit professionals, and the current state of the ASU curriculum, ASU may wish to increase emphasis on Financial Management, Managing Staff and Volunteers, Assessment, Evaluation, and Decision Making, and Leading and Managing Nonprofit Organizations. After considering feedback from nonprofit professionals, NACC may consider amending some new competencies that reflect an emphasis on collective impact, cross sector leadership, or relationship building and the use of technology for nonprofit impact. The research team recommends accomplishing these changes through enhancing pedagogy by including case studies and an integrated curriculum into the ASU NME program. by applying the suggested changes to both the ASU curriculum and the NACC guidelines, this research prepares both ASU and NACC towards the process of accreditation and formalizing the NLM degree on a national level.
ContributorsFindlay, Molly Rebecca (Author) / Legg, Eric (Thesis director) / Ashcraft, Robert (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
The January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake, which hit Port-au-Prince in the late afternoon, was the cause of over 220,000 deaths and $8 billion in damages \u2014 roughly 120% of national GDP at the time. A Mw 7.5 earthquake struck rural Guatemala in the early morning in 1976 and caused 23,000-25,000 deaths, three times as many injuries, and roughly $1.1 billion in damages, which accounted for approximately 30% of Guatemala's GDP. The earthquake which hit just outside of Christchurch, New Zealand early in the morning on September 4, 2010 had a magnitude of 7.1 and caused just two injuries, no deaths, and roughly 7.2 billion USD in damages (5% of GDP). These three earthquakes, all with magnitudes over 7 on the Richter scale, caused extremely varied amounts of economic damage for these three countries. This thesis aims to identify a possible explanation as to why this was the case and suggest ways in which to improve disaster risk management going forward.
ContributorsHeuermann, Jamie Lynne (Author) / Schoellman, Todd (Thesis director) / Mendez, Jose (Committee member) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Radiometric dating estimates the age of rocks by comparing the concentration of a decaying radioactive isotope to the concentrations of the decay byproducts. Radiometric dating has been instrumental in the calculation of the Earth's age, the Moon's age, and the age of our solar system. Geochronologists in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU use radiometric dating extensively in their research, and have very specific procedures, hardware, and software to perform the dating calculations. Researchers use lasers to drill small holes, or ablations, in rock faces, collect the masses of various isotopes using a mass spectrometer, and scan the pit with an interferometer, which records the z heights of the pit on an x-y grid. This scan is then processed by custom-made software to determine the volume of the pit, which then is used along with the isotope masses and known decay rates to determine the age of the rock. My research has been focused on improving this volume calculation through computational geometry methods of surface reconstruction. During the process, I created an web application that reads interferometer scans, reconstructs a surface from those scans with Poisson reconstruction, renders the surface in the browser, and calculates the volume of the pit based on parameters provided by the researcher. The scans are stored in a central cloud datastore for future analysis, allowing the researchers in the geochronology community to collaborate together on scans from various rocks in their individual labs. The result of the project has been a complete and functioning application that is accessible to any researcher and reproducible from any computer. The 3D representation of the scan data allows researchers to easily understand the topology of the pit ablation and determine early on whether the measurements of the interferometer are trustworthy for the particular ablation. The volume calculation by the new software also reduces the variability in the volume calculation, which hopefully indicates the process is removing noise from the scan data and performing volume calculations on a more realistic representation of the actual ablation. In the future, this research will be used as the groundwork for more robust testing and closer approximations through implementation of different reconstruction algorithms. As the project grows and becomes more usable, hopefully there will be adoption in the community and it will become a reproducible standard for geochronologists performing radiometric dating.
ContributorsPruitt, Jacob Richard (Author) / Hodges, Kip (Thesis director) / Mercer, Cameron (Committee member) / van Soest, Matthijs (Committee member) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
I built a short-term West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price-forecasting model for two periods to understand how various drivers of crude oil behaved before and after the Great Recession. According to the Federal Reserve the Great Recession "...began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009" (Rich 1). The research involves two models spanning two periods. The first period encompasses 2000 to late 2007 and the second period encompasses early 2010 to 2016. The dependent variable for this model is monthly average WTI crude oil prices. The independent variables are based on what the academic community believes are drivers of crude oil prices. While the studies may be scattered across different time periods, they provide valuable insight on what the academic community believes drives oil prices. The model includes variables that address two different data groups including: 1. Market fundamentals/expectations of market fundamentals 2. Speculation One of the biggest challenges I faced was defining and quantifying "speculation". I ended up using a previous study's definition of "speculation", which it defined as the activity of certain market participants in the Commitment of Traders report released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. My research shows that the West Texas Intermediate crude oil market exhibited a structural change after the Great Recession. Furthermore, my research also presents interesting findings that warrant further research. For example, I find that 3-month T-bills and 10yr Treasury notes lose their predictive edge starting in the second period (2010-2016). Furthermore, the positive correlation between oil and the U.S. dollar in the period 2000-2007 warrants further investigation. Lastly, it might be interesting to see why T-bills are positively correlated to WTI prices and 10yr Treasury notes are negatively correlated to WTI prices.
ContributorsMirza, Hisham Tariq (Author) / McDaniel, Cara (Thesis director) / Budolfson, Arthur (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Department of Economics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
Tempe Late Night is a student run weekly variety comedy show at Arizona State University. The show tapes weekly in front of a live student audience and publishes videos online. The show specifically tackles better representing student perspectives at ASU. Additionally, Tempe Late Night also strives to provide an un-censored real take on college life. Tempe Late Night focuses on reaching a broad audience of students, local and nationwide.
ContributorsShannon, Nicholas Forbes (Author) / Knopf, Richard (Thesis director) / Talmage, Craig (Committee member) / School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Contributor) / School of Community Resources and Development (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05