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: Martin, Thomas
Description
There are problems in the breeding practices of miniature horses. This study seeks to determine the source of these detrimental outcomes based on an evaluation of primary attributes selected for by breeders and the lack of genetic information and understanding of these attributes. In order to do this a program model was created to test the effects of selection criteria on breeder behavior and the resultant foals of these crosses. Moving forwards this program will evolve into a database of the equine genome for different horses. This will allow breeders to input their horses and do faux crosses in order to decrease the incidence of negative and detrimental outcomes.
ContributorsDavis, Marissa Lynn (Author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / College of Letters and Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The 1878 Treaty of Berlin sought to address the issue of minority rights in order to stabilize the interests of the Great Powers and the international order; however, in their formulation of a treaty intended to save the imperial component of the system, the European imperial powers not only gave one of their official acknowledgments to nationalist principles, but articulated a critique of the existing notion of state protection for ethnic minorities. This tentative but landmark modification of the imperial model of legitimacy suggested Europe or the world could consist of a host of sovereign nations. In so doing, it recognized the political, and ideological changes that nationalism demanded, changes that would reshape how national groups organize politically, culturally, and militarily. The logic of nationalism demanded that new boundaries, conceived on national lines be drawn, and they were drawn, both within the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The Treaty of Berlin led to the formation of Greater Bulgaria and Albania, and these new nationalities formed a initial answer to the European question of minority groups. The Treaty of Berlin is useful to examine in relation to its better-known and much more radical offspring, the Treaty of Versailles. Differences in the approach of either treaty provide a study in the lasting effects of soft power to resolve international conflict. The Great Powers met in Berlin to address a developing crisis in an attempt to avoid a destabilizing regional conflict through diplomatic and legal means, whereas the Paris Peace Conference met at Versailles to develop new order across Europe in the wake of the Great War. The Treaty of Versailles, sharply chiding the Central Powers as it promulgated a victor's peace, hoped to prevent future war by placing economic burdens on Germany. While the conference at Paris acknowledged the minority position, the overwhelming legal focus went to addressing developing nations and nationalisms in a way that was consistent with the beliefs of old imperial rule. The earlier Treaty of Berlin's relative emphasis on minority questions as logically antecedent to the disposition of nationalism becomes of highest significance in retrospect. It is this focused approach to addressing developing nationalism that makes the Treaty of Berlin an important point of discussion. It provides a precedent for how questions of minority rights should be addressed, and where it falls short of an answer on how conflict might be prevented, it explores how the tensions within the international system can exacerbate one another, as they did in the breakdown of diplomacy and law that to the First World War . This thesis aims to address how the triumph of nationalism as a model of state legitimacy almost immediately gave rise to the question of legal protection of minorities. The minority question only became more urgent as nationalists developed policies that practiced first passive, and then active exclusion of minority groups. While nationalism's relation to democratic rule seemed to solve the problems of representative government, it quickly forced the question of how legitimate representation was determined. Shifting notions of political legitimacy, unworkable empires, and heightened international rivalry formed a widening spiral of crisis that eclipsed the minority question, but this thesis supports the belief that the centrifugal force of conflict came out of the avoidance of addressing minority rights completely. Attempts were made through the twentieth century to mitigate conflict between people groups, but many failed to produce fully developed solutions, while many others favored the status quo, seemingly hoping that the question would answer itself. A study of the early history of the minority rights question helps us understand the national question in the old-new light of the international order and questions of international law. Given the conflicts that have arisen out of the relations between nations and the question of minority rights, the minority question is present in much of today's thinking about human rights and the maintenance of international order. Understanding the origins of minority rights and the factors considered in the early negotiations set to address the problem helps develop a deeper understanding of the of the interactions between nations and people today.
ContributorsGobble, Tyler Scott (Author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Aviation Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The Barrett Poly Writing Colloquium is a dedicated group of students and faculty that come together to provide Freshmen in the Human Event with an impactful tutoring experience that enriches their Human Event papers and reading responses. There were, however, a few major issues with the way in which tutoring sessions were recorded, archived, and maintained. We set out to clean up the process and provide a more positive experience for all involved. Starting out, we searched to find a way to electronically archive tutoring receipts that students receive at the end of a tutoring session. In the beginning of the project, we were sporting experience with front-end coding languages such as HTML and CSS, with a minuscule amount of experience using JavaScript. By diving in and closing the gaps in our knowledge of JavaScript, we were able to build a web form that would suit the needs of the tutors and administrators, while still offering students the feedback that they needed to improve their writing, in a personal way that preserves the quality of the core service provided by the colloquium. Our primary objective was to build a system that moved the reporting of tutoring sessions online, while maintaining a way to generate a receipt for distribution to the students and tutors. We delivered on that, and then some, by building an automated system using Google's developer tools to automatically write all tutoring session data to a Google Sheet, and send an automated email with all relevant information to both the student and tutor. We then dedicated the time we had remaining to adding additional features. It is here that we began to run into problems that unfortunately proved to be technological constraints of the platforms we were developing on, and the languages we were using. By this point, it was too late for us to pivot, but we were still able to achieve many of our goals. For example, we successfully implemented a feature that automatically archives the entire year's worth of data and creates a new, clean Google Sheet at the beginning of each school year. If we were to continue our project, with more time, we would use different development tools and systems so that we could have more flexibility. However, using the Google API provided us with many benefits that allowed us to jump right in to building our program, without having to struggle with building a whole database with accounts and permissions.
ContributorsLiddle, Lucas (Co-author) / Fix, Nathan (Co-author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Kennedy, Chad (Committee member) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
This thesis will draw connections between Viktor Frankl’s psychological practices of Logotherapy and the pedagogical system put into place to support Arizona State University Barrett students on the Polytechnic campus through the Writing Colloquium. On Poly, the Writing Colloquium is uniquely structured through its six functions (Teacher Assistants, Thesis Fests, Paper Mini Conferences, Tribunals, Flipped Thesis Workshops, and Service Projects) to provide support for the Human Event and upperclassman students with an emphasis on engagement with Barrett through all four years of undergraduate learning. Through the work in the Colloquium, both the students it serves and those within the program grow in their understanding of how written language adds meaning to their time in college and can provide purpose and direction for their life after graduation. This view connects back to the existentialist framework suggested by Frankl’s writings in Man’s Search for Meaning, where he discusses the sustaining and enabling power in writing during his time in German concentration camps in World War II and his experience as a psychoanalyst. In the analysis of these theories of life, meaning, and writing, I emphasize the exploration and connection of concepts through written language as a way to discover meaning and purpose in difficult circumstances. In order to do so, also included in my thesis is interviews of: the Barrett Poly Associate Dean; three Faculty members; two Honors Staff; and five ASU Barrett Poly Alumni. These interviews document the early years of Barrett’s presence on the Polytechnic campus and also how the Colloquium has grown over the years to support the expanding population of the honors college on the campus.
ContributorsSantana, Lunden Murial (Author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Boyce-Jacino, Katherine (Committee member) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The population of undocumented immigrants includes over a million individuals known as “Dreamers,” who are for all intents and purposes naturalized Americans but are not counted among the American citizens. Dreamers have grown up believing in the American dream of one day being able to develop themselves into hard-working, accomplished and fully recognized Americans. Unfortunately, however, Dreamers are caught in a limbo of hope: their undocumented status forces them to work and live in the “underground,” or risk being deported to an unfamiliar country. After years of activism, the Dreamers found limited protection under an executive action introduced by former-President Barack Obama, known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA deferred deportation and gave the Dreamer the ability to legally work within the United States. Unfortunately, DACA’s provisional protection of hundreds of thousands of Dreamers also created gaps of its own: many other naturalized residents have been excluded and those covered by the DACA program remain limited in education and work. DACA’s protection is also limited in practice and time; it lasts for only two years before needing to be renewed and it can be revoked at any time. Only through legislation creating a “path to citizenship” and/or through formal naturalization can the Dreamers’ nightmare end and normalcy be instated. But precisely this idea of a “path to citizenship” has become the object of invective by anti-immigrant politics of Trump and the Republican Party. The Republican Party has worked to define itself as the party of White America by fomenting fear and anxiety over immigrant populations, whose mere existence or growth it presents as a threat. With continuing Republican government control, the Dreamer will not be able to legalize their status and will remain to be limited with their American dreams.
ContributorsMundo Sayas, Celso (Author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / College of Integrative Sciences and Arts (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
All freshman honors students are required to take a two-semester course during their freshman year at ASU called Human Event. This course focuses on developing a student’s ability to break down the concepts in important historical texts and then write essay’s that explore these concepts. One of the unique qualities of the honors college at ASU Polytechnic is the Thesis Fest, which is an opportunity for students to share their progress when writing each essay before the due date. During Thesis Fest, students discuss the texts they are writing about with tutors and they get helpful pointers regarding how to clearly understand the concepts they want to explore. These tutors are previous Human Event students who are all enrolled in another course called the Honors Colloquium. The polytechnic campus is also unique because it allows a student’s paper to be evaluated in a conference – Paper Mini-Conference (PMC) – between the student, a tutor, and the professor. The inspiration for this project is derived from personal experiences in the Honors Colloquium. During each Thesis Fest, students and tutors are required to fill out tutor receipts, verifying that the student attended Thesis Fest as well as the texts discussed. In addition, a receipt is also used to verify that the tutor is fulfilling his/her tutoring obligations. Therein lies a pain point for both tutors and students, which is the fact that all receipts are hand-written on small pieces of paper and both the tutor and student must have separate duplicate copies. In addition, the head tutor of the Colloquium is then required to analyze the cards and verify that individual tutors have enough receipts for the semester. Lastly, the student must verify that they attended Thesis Fest by bringing a receipt to the PMC. There have been many occasions when a student has forgotten their receipt, which results in them having to email the receipt to the professor or bring it in at a later time. This project aims to solve this problem by building a mobile application that digitizes the data collection for receipts.
ContributorsAlimov, Alexander (Author) / Oberle, Eric (Thesis director) / Martin, Thomas (Committee member) / Software Engineering (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05