We think about hope every day, even if we do not consciously think about it. It is an important part of our lives. It affects our subjective well-being and physical health. Yet, many people do not know the importance of hope and how it can be created within one's self. A workshop was designed to increase the knowledge of hope, primarily for college students. The workshop focused on defining hope, explaining how hope plays a part in a healthy lifestyle, and how to create hope for themselves. This project looked at the Hope Theory, discovered by Charles Snyder, and how it can be measured hope through goal attainment<br/>onattainment.
Affecting millions of Americans, depression is one of the leading causes of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD), followed by anxiety (Gibson-Smith et al., 2018). Communication that occurs between the human brain and the gut microbiome has been found to be a major contributor towards mental health. The human gut microbiome is comprised of many microbes that can communicate with the brain through the gut-brain axis. However, factors such as stress and diets can interfere with this process, especially after increasing the permeability of the intestine (Khoshbin et al., 2020). Perturbation of the gut-brain axis has been implicated across a wide scale of neurodegenerative disorders, with respect to psychopathology (Bonaz et al., 2018). The environment of the gut, along with which species reside there, can help determine the link between gut function and disease. Therefore, it may be possible to prevent the degradation of an individual’s immune function and well-being through alteration of the gut microbiome. (abstract)
Studies of animal contests often focus solely on a single static measurement of fighting ability, such as the size or the strength of the individual. However, recent studies have highlighted the importance of individual variation in the dynamic behaviors used during a fight, such as, assessment strategies, decision making, and fine motor control, as being strong predictors of the outcome of aggression. Here, I combined morphological and behavioral data to discover how these features interact during aggressing interactions in male virile crayfish, Faxonius virilis. I predicted that individual variation in behavioral skill for decision making (i.e., number of strikes thrown), would determine the outcome of contest success in addition to morphological measurements (e.g. body size, relative claw size). To evaluate this prediction, I filmed staged territorial interactions between male F. virilis and later analyzed trial behaviors (e.g. strike, pinches, and bout time) and aggressive outcomes. I found very little support for skill to predict win/loss outcome in trials. Instead, I found that larger crayfish engaged in aggression for longer compared to smaller crayfish, but that larger crayfish did not engage in a greater number of claw strikes or pinches when controlling for encounter duration. Future studies should continue to investigate the role of skill, by using finer-scale techniques such as 3D tracking software, which could track advanced measurements (e.g. speed, angle, and movement efficiency). Such studies would provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relative influence of fighting skill technique on territorial contests.
This thesis looks at how Latinx communities in Wyoming, despite recognizing the impossibility of overcoming the traditional conservative autocracy, still utilize their identity as a political response to unify Latinx communities throughout the state. The project draws from oral histories conducted with Latinx/Chicanx community members in Wyoming, including professors, legislators, and everyday citizens.
Uniforms and logos are an essential part of sports teams and are created with the intention of representing the city and state of their respective teams. More than a uniform: How culture influences the creation of Arizona sports logos and jerseys presents a look at the conversations and processes undergone before teams are able to unveil their new threads. Four local professional teams are involved with this project: Phoenix Suns, Arizona Diamondbacks, Arizona Coyotes and Arizona Cardinals. Members from each of the organizations were interviewed, in addition to Greg Fisher of Fisher Design. Information was gathered from each of those interviews in addition to research done on the history of each of the team’s uniforms. The information was then created into a documentary that consists of visual and verbal components. The film highlights how each team attempts to represent Arizona and its culture when it comes to what they are wearing on the field, court or ice. The interviews capture the mindset of creative teams as they explore growing new ideas and looks, in addition to a historical delve into two of the team’s debuts in the 1990s. Many of Arizona’s sports teams have much more behind their logos and jerseys than meets the eye. The project taught me how adapt broadcast skills into documentary style storytelling and how important visuals are for longer features. The interviews showed that so many things are taken into consideration when designing a sports logo or uniform and the process can take either months or years to finally reach fruition.
The COVID-19 pandemic began in March of 2020 and drastically affected the global human population. Millions of people died due to a SARS-CoV-2 infection while many who survived developed devastating sequelae of the disease. In addition, the closure of schools and businesses led to international economic struggle in the year 2020 as global economies declined. Since the beginning of the pandemic, over 200,000 scientific articles have been published and compiled into a database that grows daily— a rare occurrence within the scientific community. This thesis uses natural language processing tools via Python and VOSviewer software to perform a bibliometric analysis on 205,712 papers published between January of 2020 and February of 2021 pertaining to COVID-19. We first investigate how to analyze these publications most effectively in terms of title versus abstract keyword searches, we further obtain the focus of the current scientific literature via co-occurrence analysis and clustering, and we at last discuss the time evolution of these topics over the course of 14 months.
