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.
According to a survey performed by Pew Research in 2014, 40% of Internet users have experienced online harassment. 18% had experienced severe harassment – stalking, sexual harassment, physical threats – while 22% had only experienced less severe harassment, such as name-calling. Women ages 18–24 receive a disproportionately large percentage of all severe online harassment. The emotional trauma suffered from severe or long-term harassment can lead to (and has led to) fear, depression, and suicide in the worst cases.
The anonymity of the Internet partially enables online harassment, since it allows perpetrators to hide behind usernames or false images while they harass others — there is little accountability. However, 66% of online harassment happens on social media platforms, where people's names and images are usually readily available. This indicates that anonymity is not the only factor, and not even the main factor. Rather, the separation of the Internet from the physical world, that which makes it less "real," is what enables harassers to treat it as entirely different experience. They can say across a keyboard what they might never say face-to-face.
To increase my understanding of the problem, I made two three-dimensional pieces – a functioning clock and an exhibit wall. Each project explored different aspects of online harassment and implored the audience to keep compassion and kindness in mind while interacting with others digitally.
Another goal was to create a campaign which could tackle the problem on a larger, more definite scale. To learn from others' attempts, I studied two recent, real-world campaigns against online harassment, Zero Trollerance and HeartMob. Each of these received significant amounts of good press on online news outlets, but people who enjoyed or were helped by those campaigns were grossly outnumbered by those who criticized and even lambasted those campaigns, for various reasons.
I determined that the reactive nature of those campaigns was the main cause of their failure, so I created a proactive campaign with the goal of preventing online harassment, rather than correcting it. I designed the beginnings of "You & I," a multiplayer online game for children ages 4–6, which would encourage positive interaction between players through its very game mechanics. Ideally, the habits formed by the children while playing this game would carry over to their future Internet experiences, and a new generation of kinder, more cooperative, "native" Internet users would arise, reducing the amount of harassment seen on the Internet.
The purpose of this study, which was done in conjunction with the Arizona Heart Foundation, was to evaluate whether pyridoxine accelerates ulcer wound healing in diabetic patients with ulcers in the lower extremities. In this study, 100 mg of pyridoxine per day was given to patients in the experimental group (while they receive normal wound treatment) while patients in the control group received normal treatment of wounds without the pyridoxine. Over time, wound healing was evaluated by photographing and then measuring the size of patients' ulcer wounds on the photographs. Results from the experimental group were compared with those of the control group to evaluate the efficacy of the pyridoxine treatment. In addition, comparisons of the healing rates were made with respect to whether the patients smoked, had hypertension or hypotension, and the patients' body mass indexes. It has been found that there was no statistically significant difference in the mean healing rates between the control groups and experimental groups. In addition, it has been found that smoking, BMI and blood pressure did not have a statistically appreciable effect on the difference in mean healing rates between the control and experimental groups. This is evidence that pyridoxine did not have a statistically significant effect on wound healing rates.