The Electoral College, the current electoral system in the U.S., operates on a Winner-Take-All or First Past the Post (FPTP) principle, where the candidate with the most votes wins. Despite the Electoral College being the current system, it is problematic. According to Lani Guinier in Tyranny of the Majority, “the winner-take-all principle invariably wastes some votes” (121). This means that the majority group gets all of the power in an election while the votes of the minority groups are completely wasted and hold little to no significance. Additionally, FPTP systems reinforce a two-party system in which neither candidate could satisfy the majority of the electorate’s needs and issues, yet forces them to choose between the two dominant parties. Moreover, voting for a third party candidate only hurts the voter since it takes votes away from the party they might otherwise support and gives the victory to the party they prefer the least, ensuring that the two party system is inescapable. Therefore, a winner-take-all system does not provide the electorate with fair or proportional representation and creates voter disenfranchisement: it offers them very few choices that appeal to their needs and forces them to choose a candidate they dislike. There are, however, alternative voting systems that remedy these issues, such as a Ranked voting system, in which voters can rank their candidate choices in the order they prefer them, or a Proportional voting system, in which a political party acquires a number of seats based on the proportion of votes they receive from the voter base. Given these alternatives, we will implement a software simulation of one of these systems to demonstrate how they work in contrast to FPTP systems, and therefore provide evidence of how these alternative systems could work in practice and in place of the current electoral system.

System and software verification is a vital component in the development and reliability of cyber-physical systems - especially in critical domains where the margin of error is minimal. In the case of autonomous driving systems (ADS), the vision perception subsystem is a necessity to ensure correct maneuvering of the environment and identification of objects. The challenge posed in perception systems involves verifying the accuracy and rigidity of detections. The use of Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic (STPL) enables the user to express requirements for the perception system to verify, validate, and ensure its behavior; however, a drawback to STPL involves its accessibility. It is limited to individuals with an expert or higher-level knowledge of temporal and spatial logics, and the formal-written requirements become quite verbose with more restrictions imposed. In this thesis, I propose a domain-specific language (DSL) catered to Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic to enable non-expert users the ability to capture requirements for perception subsystems while reducing the necessity to have an experienced background in said logic. The domain-specific language for the Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic is built upon the formal language with two abstractions. The main abstraction captures simple programming statements that are translated to a lower-level STPL expression accepted by the testing monitor. The STPL DSL provides a seamless interface to writing formal expressions while maintaining the power and expressiveness of STPL. These translated equivalent expressions are capable of directing a standard for perception systems to ensure the safety and reduce the risks involved in ill-formed detections.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a great need for United States’ restaurants to “go green” due to consumers’ habits of frequently eating out. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has caused this initiative to lose traction. While the amount of customers ordering takeout has increased, there is less emphasis on sustainability.<br/>Plastic is known for its harmful effects on the environment and the extreme length of time it takes to decompose. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), almost 8 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans at an annual rate, threatening not only the safety of marine species but also human health. Modern food packaging materials have included a blend of synthetic ingredients, trickling into our daily lives and polluting the air, water, and land. Single-use plastic items slowly degrade into microplastics and can take up to hundreds of years to biodegrade.<br/>Due to COVID-19, restaurants have switched to takeout and delivery options to adapt to the new business environment and guidelines enforced by the Center of Disease Control (CDC) mandated guidelines. Some of these guidelines include: notices encouraging social distancing and mask-wearing, mandated masks for employees, and easy access to sanitary supplies. This cultural shift is motivating restaurants to search for a quick, cheap, and easy fix to adapt to the increased demand of take-out and delivery methods. This increases their plastic consumption of items such as plastic bags/paper bags, styrofoam containers, and beverage cups. Plastic is the most popular takeout material because of its price and durability as well as allowing for limited contamination and easy disposability.<br/>Almost all food products come in packaging and this, more often than not, is single-use. Food is the largest market out of all the packaging industry, maintaining roughly two-thirds of material going to food. The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that almost half of all municipal solid waste is made up of food and food packaging materials. In 2014, over 162 million tons of packaging material waste was generated in the states. This typically contains toxic inks and dyes that leach into groundwater and soil. When degrading, pieces of plastic absorb toxins like PCBs and pesticides, and then each piece will, in turn, release toxic chemicals like Bisphenol-A. Even before being thrown away, it causes negative effects for the environment. The creation of packaging materials uses many resources such as petroleum and chemicals and then releases toxic byproducts. Such byproducts include sludge containing contaminants, greenhouse gases, and heavy metal and particulate matter emissions. Unlike many other industries, plastic manufacturing has actually increased production. Demand has increased and especially in the food industry to keep things sanitary. This increase in production is reflective of the increase in waste. <br/>Although restaurants have implemented their own sustainable initiatives to combat their carbon footprint, the pandemic has unfortunately forced restaurants to digress. For example, Just Salad, a fast-food restaurant chain, incentivized customers with discounted meals to use reusable bowls which saved over 75,000 pounds of plastic per year. However, when the pandemic hit, the company halted the program to pivot towards takeout and delivery. This effect is apparent on an international scale. Singapore was in lock-down for eight weeks and during that time, 1,470 tons of takeout and food delivery plastic waste was thrown out. In addition, the Hong Kong environmental group Greeners Action surveyed 2,000 people in April and the results showed that people are ordering out twice as much as last year, doubling the use of plastic.<br/>However, is this surge of plastic usage necessary in the food industry or are there methods that can be used to reduce the amount of waste production? The COVID-19 pandemic caused a fracture in the food system’s supply chain, involving food, factory, and farm. This thesis will strive to tackle such topics by analyzing the supply chains of the food industry and identify areas for sustainable opportunities. These recommendations will help to identify areas for green improvement.

CubeSats can encounter a myriad of difficulties in space like cosmic rays, temperature<br/>issues, and loss of control. By creating better, more reliable software, these problems can be<br/>mitigated and increase the chance of success for the mission. This research sets out to answer the<br/>question: how do we create reliable flight software for CubeSats? by providing a concentrated<br/>list of the best flight software development practices. The CubeSat used in this research is the<br/>Deployable Optical Receiver Aperture (DORA) CubeSat, which is a 3U CubeSat that seeks to<br/>demonstrate optical communication data rates of 1 Gbps over long distances. We present an<br/>analysis over many of the flight software development practices currently in use in the industry,<br/>from industry leads NASA, and identify three key flight software development areas of focus:<br/>memory, concurrency, and error handling. Within each of these areas, the best practices were<br/>defined for how to approach the area. These practices were also developed using experience<br/>from the creation of flight software for the DORA CubeSat in order to drive the design and<br/>testing of the system. We analyze DORA’s effectiveness in the three areas of focus, as well as<br/>discuss how following the best practices identified helped to create a more reliable flight<br/>software system for the DORA CubeSat.

"No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth." These were the words of former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya who publicly expressed his regret in a 2017 interview over his role in co-creating Facebook. Palihapitiya shared that social media is ripping apart the social fabric of society and he also sounded the alarm regarding social media’s unavoidable global impact. He is only one of social media’s countless critics. The more disturbing issue resides in the empirical evidence supporting such notions. At least 95% of adolescents own a smartphone and spend an average time of two to four hours a day on social media. Moreover, 91% of 16-24-year-olds use social media, yet youth rate Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as the worst social media platforms. However, the social, clinical, and neurodevelopment ramifications of using social media regularly are only beginning to emerge in research. Early research findings show that social media platforms trigger anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and other negative mental health effects. These negative mental health symptoms are commonly reported by individuals from of 18-25-years old, a unique period of human development known as emerging adulthood. Although emerging adulthood is characterized by identity exploration, unbounded optimism, and freedom from most responsibilities, it also serves as a high-risk period for the onset of most psychological disorders. Despite social media’s adverse impacts, it retains its utility as it facilitates identity exploration and virtual socialization for emerging adults. Investigating the “user-centered” design and neuroscience underlying social media platforms can help reveal, and potentially mitigate, the onset of negative mental health consequences among emerging adults. Effectively deconstructing the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (i.e., hereafter referred to as “The Big Three”) will require an extensive analysis into common features across platforms. A few examples of these design features include: like and reaction counters, perpetual news feeds, and omnipresent banners and notifications surrounding the user’s viewport. Such social media features are inherently designed to stimulate specific neurotransmitters and hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol. Identifying such predacious social media features that unknowingly manipulate and highjack emerging adults’ brain chemistry will serve as a first step in mitigating the negative mental health effects of today’s social media platforms. A second concrete step will involve altering or eliminating said features by creating a social media platform that supports and even enhances mental well-being.

Over the years, advances in research have continued to decrease the size of computers from the size of<br/>a room to a small device that could fit in one’s palm. However, if an application does not require extensive<br/>computation power nor accessories such as a screen, the corresponding machine could be microscopic,<br/>only a few nanometers big. Researchers at MIT have successfully created Syncells, which are micro-<br/>scale robots with limited computation power and memory that can communicate locally to achieve<br/>complex collective tasks. In order to control these Syncells for a desired outcome, they must each run a<br/>simple distributed algorithm. As they are only capable of local communication, Syncells cannot receive<br/>commands from a control center, so their algorithms cannot be centralized. In this work, we created a<br/>distributed algorithm that each Syncell can execute so that the system of Syncells is able to find and<br/>converge to a specific target within the environment. The most direct applications of this problem are in<br/>medicine. Such a system could be used as a safer alternative to invasive surgery or could be used to treat<br/>internal bleeding or tumors. We tested and analyzed our algorithm through simulation and visualization<br/>in Python. Overall, our algorithm successfully caused the system of particles to converge on a specific<br/>target present within the environment.

In this Barrett Honors Thesis, I developed a model to quantify the complexity of Sankey diagrams, which are a type of visualization technique that shows flow between groups. To do this, I created a carefully controlled dataset of synthetic Sankey diagrams of varying sizes as study stimuli. Then, a pair of online crowdsourced user studies were conducted and analyzed. User performance for Sankey diagrams of varying size and features (number of groups, number of timesteps, and number of flow crossings) were algorithmically modeled as a formula to quantify the complexity of these diagrams. Model accuracy was measured based on the performance of users in the second crowdsourced study. The results of my experiment conclusively demonstrates that the algorithmic complexity formula I created closely models the visual complexity of the Sankey Diagrams in the dataset.

In theory, Electric Vehicle (EV) ownership and renewable energy seem like a perfect solution to our climate crisis; however, unless done properly, the effects can be less than ideal. We need to find a way to maximize the impact of our efforts to reduce carbon emissions, which is exactly what the heart of my paper gets to. Carbon emissions are bad for the environment because they comprise a large majority of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases have recently become dramatically out of balance and have resulted in an increase in respiratory diseases from smog and air pollution, as well as extreme weather and an increase in wildfires. Getting these greenhouse gases back in balance and maintaining an ecological balance is the goal of sustainability. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA), transportation makes up 29% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US followed closely by electricity generation at 28%, which makes Electric Vehicles the perfect target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions<br/>Arizona has many unique constraints when it comes to its electric infrastructure and its electric generation energy mix, which means the impacts of EV ownership become extremely complicated.<br/> In my paper, I aim to address the question: What are the carbon impact effects of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in Arizona through the lens of 1) the time of day that charging occurs, 2) the infrastructure needed to support EV penetration and 3) the incentives given to the public to help provide the impetus for making greener choices? Using the best available research on how EVs are being adopted to reduce emissions, I will provide conclusive recommendations and a framework for how Arizona can best reduce carbon emissions through EVs.

This thesis examines the value creation potential of renovating an existing commercial real estate asset to a medical office. It begins by examining commercial real estate and the medical sector at a high level. It then discusses the various criteria used to select a subject property for renovation. This renovation is then depicted through a modified pitch book that contains a financial model and pro forma.

Though about 75 percent of American waste is recyclable, only 30 percent of it is actually recycled and less than ten percent of plastics disposed of in the United States in 2015 were recycled. A statistic like this demonstrates the immense need to increase recycling rates in order to move towards cultivating a circular economy and benefiting the environment. With Arizona State University’s (ASU) extensive population of on-campus students and faculty, our team was determined to create a solution that would increase recycling rates. After conducting initial market research, our team incentives or education. We conducted market research through student surveys to determine the level of knowledge of our target audience and barriers to entry for local recycling and composting resources. Further, we gained insight into the medium of recycling and sustainability programs they would be interested in participating in. Overall, the results of our surveys demonstrated that a majority of students were interested in participating in these programs, if they were not already involved, and most students on-campus already had access to these resources. Despite having access to these sustainable practices, we identified a knowledge gap between students and their information on how to properly execute sustainable practices such as composting and recycling. In order to address this audience, our team created Circulearning, an educational program that aims to bridge the gap of knowledge and address immediate concerns regarding circular economy topics. By engaging audiences through our quick, accessible educational modules and teaching them about circular practices, we aim to inspire everyone to implement these practices into their own lives. Though our team began the initiative with a focus on implementing these practices solely to ASU campus, we decided to expand our target audience to implement educational programs at all levels after discovering the interest and need for this resource in our community. Our team is extremely excited that our Circulearning educational modules have been shared with a broad audience including students at Mesa Skyline High School, ASU students, and additional connections outside of ASU. With Circulearning, we will educate and inspire people of all ages to live more sustainably and better the environment in which we live.