Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Net Co2 Reduction Analysis For A Wind Farm, Darren Del Dotto

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to determine the net CO2 reduction benefit that can be achieved by using wind instead of coal power. Coal power has a significantly higher rate of CO2 emissions than wind generation, but wind power generation has a significant amount of embodied energy. The goal of this study is to determine the net carbon reduction benefit that can be achieved using wind power after accounting for factors such as embodied energy in materials and construction.

Production And Characterization Of Electrospan Polymer Nano-Fibers, Anna Sise

Honors Theses

Electrospinning is a process of generating polymer fibers by accelerating a polymer solution through an electric field. The polymer solution is released at a designated rate through a syringe; once the droplet enters the high voltage region, it whips throughout the chamber, landing upon a grounded collector. This procedure results in fibers with a range of diameter from several nanometers to a few micrometers. These fibers can be used in a variety of applications, including drug delivery, filter media, material substrates, optical media, tissue scaffolds, and wound dressing. For my senior thesis, I established the most successful method of creating …

The Calculus Of Variations, Erin Whitney

Honors Theses

The Calculus of Variations is a highly applicable and advancing field. My thesis has only scraped the top of the applications and theoretical work that is possible within this branch of mathematics. To summarize, we began by exploring a general problem common to this field, finding the geodesic be-tween two given points. We then went on to define and explore terms and concepts needed to further delve into the subject matter. In Chapter 2, we examined a special set of smooth functions, inspired by the Calabi extremal metric, and used some general theory of convex functions in order to de-termine …

Gaming Classics: The Bard, Thomas Defina

Honors Theses

Technological advancement is a driving influence in the development of today’s culture. Upon the creation of electronic videogames, gaming has allowed players to not only experience new ideas previously unheard of in a gaming medium, but gaming is easily accessible to people throughout the world. Academia has begun studying games, checking the positive and negative effects videogames have on people. Might one of these positive effects be educational? If it was, college professors might use the game to help supplement their classes. The question this paper will be focused on is as follows: using the classics as our field of …

The History Of Mining In Cerro De Pasco And Heavy Metal Deposition In Lake Junin Peru, Erin M. Delman

Honors Theses

Lake Junín covers 530-km2 and is located at 4,430-m in an intermontane basin between the eastern and western cordillera of the central Peruvian Andes. The lake sits between the large sulfide mining districts of La Oroya and Cerro de Pasco. Designated a National Reserve in 1974, Lake Junín drains northward to the Río San Juan, which joins the Río Mantaro within several kilometers of the lake. Dam construction by the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation on the Río Mantaro in 1932 caused the Río San Juan, the principal river draining Cerro de Pasco, to back up into the lake. Using …

Wind Energy: Do The Benefits Outweigh The Costs?, Scott E. Fixman

Honors Theses

As wind energy continues to increase in demand, research to reduce the overall impact of turbines on birds will greaten, resulting in lower turbine‐induced avian and bat mortality. It is important that wind energy continues to increase in energy production per year, as it is one of the safest and most viable renewable energy sources available today.

A Study Of Rr Lyrae Stars In The Globular Cluster Ic 4499, Anna Paola Mikler

Honors Theses

Observations of the globular cluster IC4499 were taken with the 1m telescope at Cerro Tololo and combined with archival data from multiple telescopes. These data were used to study the variable star population using CCD photometry, with observations in the U, B, V, R and I passbands. The period and the magnitudes have been measured for the RR Lyrae stars. We present light curves in all passbands for all 97 RR Lyrae stars. The magnitudes of the RR Lyrae stars are compared with those measured by Walker and Nemec (1996). The distribution of stars on the horizontal branch is compared …

Modeling Biofuel Production In Southern Pine Forests: The Effects On Soil Properties, Brittany L. Oakes

Honors Theses

From consuming energy alone in 2009, the United States ranked second as a carbon emitter at 5,425 million metric tons annually; China was the leader at 7,706 million metric tons and India placed third at 1,591 million metric tons (EIA, 2010). Yet in 2009, the U.S. consumed more electricity than both China and India and was the leading importer of electricity (EIA, 2010). Incorporating more domestic sources of renewable energy can simultaneously alleviate two issues: mitigating climate change catastrophes and significantly reduce our dependence on foreign markets for electricity and other forms of energy. Additionally, evidence of dwindling international oil …

The Advanced Educational Robot, Calder Phillips-Grafflin

Honors Theses

Existing literature in the field of computer science education clearly demonstrates that robots can be ideal teaching tools for basic computer science concepts. Likewise, robots are an ideal platform for more complicated CS techniques such as evolutionary algorithms and neural networks. With these two distinct roles in mind, that of the teaching tool and that of the research tool, in collaboration with customers in the CS department we have developed a new robotics platform suitable for both roles that provides higher performance and improved ease-of-use in comparison to the robots currently in use at Union. We have successfully designed and …

Combating Suburban Sprawl In The Capital District: An Outline For Regional Sustainable Development, Andrew J. Cahill

Honors Theses

Urban centers in America have commonly been plagued by high rates of pollution, decaying infrastructure, and the overall image of being undesirable places to live. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, masses of people vacated the cities that they called home, for literally greener pastures, settling in outlying, low-density living areas that became known as the suburbs. Suburbanization has particularly impacted the land use pattern in the Capital District of New York State, as countless suburbs developed away from the region’s urban centers of Albany, Schenectady and Troy. Recently people have moved back into the Capital District’s …

Trop Belles Pour La Science: A Brief Account Of French Female Scientists, Ramsey Steiner

Honors Theses

France has a unique history of French women scientists dating all the way back to the antiquity. This account of French women scientists focuses on celebrated individuals and their impact on French culture and the Western world. The contributions of Madame du Châtelet, Madame Lavoisier, Marie Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie will be discussed by beginning with femmes savantes of the Enlightenment and finishing with France’s most famous scientific family, the Curie. This account will conclude with a discussion of French women scientists today and the struggles they continue to face.

Documenting The Anthropogenic Impact On Ballston Lake New York From A Short Core Using Stable Isotopes Of Carbon And Nitrogen And Trace Metals, Taylor S. Labrecque

Honors Theses

Ballston Lake occupies a portion of an avulsed channel of the Mohawk River between Schenectady and Saratoga Springs, New York. The lake is about 5 km long, generally less than 200m wide, ~8-15m deep, dimictic, with a catchment basin area of ~22km2. Long cores (>8 m) indicate that the lake formed ~13,000 cal yr BP. This study was undertaken to document recent environmental change recorded in the upper portion of sediment in Ballston Lake. Three sediment cores ~40 cm long were acquired from ~8 m water depth at the north end of Ballston Lake (42°57.101’N, 73°51.066’W), and were analyzed …

Countries' Involvement In Whaling And The Impacts On Their Tourism Industries, Kaitlyn Hofeldt

Honors Theses

Since the expansion of whale watching as an industry, many countries have converted from whaling as a source of revenue. There are still some countries that partake in whaling and also conduct whale watching tours. The belief is that these two industries cannot coexist in a country and that whaling will have a negative impact on the whale watching sector and the tourism industry all together. A comparative analysis of scholarly articles was conducted alongside a survey to examine the impacts of whaling on the whale watching industries of certain countries. The results showed whaling and whale watching can coexist …

Effects Of "Ultrasound" On Completion Of Cognitive Tasks In Relation To Dolphin Assisted Therapy, Carrie Wein

Honors Theses

In previous studies, it has been suggested that ultrasound may be the mechanism behind the success of Dolphin Assisted Therapy programs. This study was conducted to determine whether advertising these positive effects of dolphin produced ultrasound to prospective patients will elicit a placebo effect of improving cognitive function. A memory matching task was designed to measure cognitive task completion efficiency, and completion times were recorded in seconds. Participants were divided into two groups, Group A completing the task under normal, or control conditions first, and under the mock "ultrasound" condition second, while Group B received the mock "ultrasound" condition first …

Population Structure Of Tursiops Truncatus In North Inlet, South Carolina And Use Of Inlet As A Nursery Ground, Heather Estep

Honors Theses

Abundance, distribution and movement patterns of bottlenose dolphin populations are becoming more frequently studied along the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Florida. One aspect of dolphin populations that has not been a focus of study is the use of nursery grounds by females with calves. Nursery grounds for bottlenose dolphin populations have been identified in Sarasota Bay, Florida and near Beaufort, North Carolina. This study analyzed data collected from September 1997 to June 2006 on focal follows and photo identification to determine if females were utilizing North Inlet, South Carolina as a nursery ground. There was no significant difference in …

The Effects Of Significant Rainfall Events On Surface Dissolved Oxygen Concentrations Off The Coast Of Long Bay In South Carolina, Kelsey M. Couch

Honors Theses

Long Bay in South Carolina is currently facing recurrent hypoxic conditions ("South Carolina Coastal Hypoxia"). Therefore the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of eight significant rainfall events on the surface dissolved oxygen content of the bay. Differences in theoretical values of average monthly dissolved oxygen content and actual values of average monthly dissolved oxygen were observed. When analyzed, the data from the eight-month study showed no strong correlation between significant rainfall events and changes in surface dissolved oxygen content. Phytoplankton blooms, phytoplankton productivity and seasonal stratifications could be causing these fluctuations (Lomas et al. 2009).

The Importance Of Isolated Wetlands As Habitat For Rare And Endangered Species In Comparison To Riparian Wetlands, Hillary K. Ballantine

Honors Theses

In this paper, I will review the literature on the factors contributing to the presence of rare or endangered species, the species found in each wetland type and what threatens them, and the views on how to and why we should conserve these habitats. I will also provide data analyses on the importance of isolated wetlands as habitats for rare and endangered species in comparison to riparian wetlands, and present my own views on the topic.

Photoionization Cross Section Measurement Of Rb 5p3/2, Charles Young

Honors Theses

The photoionization of atoms is still an emerging field with a foundation in laboratories and journals, yet much in the field is unknown. Photoionization is the phenomenon of an incident photon on a gaseous atom causing the ejection of an electron, and therefore, the atom becomes an ion. The photoelectric effect is a similar but broader term dealing with atoms in all forms: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. The photoelectric effect causes a current whenever light with a certain wavelength is shined on a metal. The wavelength that is needed to eject an electron is dependent on the atom(s) involved …

Effect Of Compactified Dimensions On The Ground State Energy Of The Hydrogen Atom, Floyd Maseda

Honors Theses

The three-dimensional Hydrogen atom has been explored extensively, and a wavefunction and energy expression can be found in closed form. Little work, however, has been done with higher-dimensional atoms. This discussion focuses on the effects of adding first one then two compactified dimensions to a Hydrogen atom. The metric of the 4-D Hydrogen atom is taken to be R3 × S1 while the 5-D metric is taken to be R3 × S2. We first determine the form of the Laplacian operator in each space and use it to find the respective atomic potentials. The variational method is used to determine …

Dnagents 3.0: Genetically Engineered Mobile Agents For A Dynamic Network Topology, John Bovatsek

Honors Theses

Mobile agents are a relatively new topic in the realm of computer science research. They are being researched throughout the world by many scientists in order to ascertain their viability in real world applications. They have many disadvantages that keep them from widespread adoption. With his graduate dissertation Genetically Engineered Intelligent Mobile Agents, Kackley opened a whole new area of this research by combining mobile agents with genetic algorithms. These algorithms model the natural process of evolution to evolve solutions for problems.

This thesis is part of a research group effort to expand on Kackley’s work in the Database …

Utilization Of Probabilistic Models In Short Read Assembly From Second-Generation Sequencing, Matthew W. Segar

Honors Theses

With the advent of cheaper and faster DNA sequencing technologies, assembly methods have greatly changed. Instead of outputting reads that are thousands of base pairs long, new sequencers parallelize the task by producing read lengths between 35 and 400 base pairs. Reconstructing an organism’s genome from these millions of reads is a computationally expensive task. Our algorithm solves this problem by organizing and indexing the reads using n-grams, which are short, fixed-length DNA sequences of length n. These n-grams are used to efficiently locate putative read joins, thereby eliminating the need to perform an exhaustive search over all possible read …

On A Problem Of Burnside, Matthew Mizuhara

Honors Theses

Burnside posed the question as to whether or not there exist groups having an external automorphism that behaves in a certain, specific way like an inner automorphism: we shall define such automorphisms to be nearly-inner.

NI-groups are fairly rare. With the aid of the computer algebra system Magma - in particular with the aid of its small group database - we set out to test this hypothesis.

A Comparison Of Van Hiele Levels And Final Exam Grades Of Students At The University Of Southern Mississippi, Cononiah Watson

Honors Theses

This research analyzed students final exam scores in a college mathematics class with geometric components and their van Hiele levels upon entering the class. After the class was completed, each student’s final exam grade was calculated. The researcher used a Spearman correlation to compare the two; the result was a correlation coefficient of 0.742. The researcher then reported that the results of the van Hiele test are a major component in predicting a student’s success in such a class.

Verifying Harder's Conjecture For Classical And Siegel Modular Forms, David Sulon

Honors Theses

A conjecture by Harder shows a surprising congruence between the coefficients of “classical” modular forms and the Hecke eigenvalues of corresponding Siegel modular forms, contigent upon “large primes” dividing the critical values of the given classical modular form.

Harder’s Conjecture has already been verified for one-dimensional spaces of classical and Siegel modular forms (along with some two-dimensional cases), and for primes p 37. We verify the conjecture for higher-dimensional spaces, and up to a comparable prime p.

Tower Families Of Ribbon Graphs, Jordan Keller

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Time Dependence Of Bathymetric Effects On Hurricane Storm Surge, Christopher Dupuis

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Sedimentology, Depositional Age, And Provenance Of Sedimentary And Volcanic Rocks Exposed Along Willow Creek, Eastern Susitna Basin, South-Central Alaska: Implications For Modification Of A Forearc Basin By Spreading Ridge Subduction, Erin E. Donaghy

Honors Theses

This is the first detailed study of the westernmost portion of the outcrop belt, which extends along the western flank of the Talkeetna Mountains and includes thick, well-exposed outcrops along Willow Creek in the eastern Susitna basin. New sedimentologic, compositional, and geochronologic data were obtained from stratigraphic sections within Arkose Ridge Formation strata at Willow Creek. This data combined with new geologic mapping and geochronologic data from Willow Bench and Kashwitna River Bluff (north of Willow Creek), and from the Government Peak area (east of Willow Creek), help constrain depositional processes and source terranes that provided detritus to the westernmost …

Behavioral Economics And Physician Behavior, Allyssa S. Ward

Honors Theses

This study seeks to answer whether the availability heuristic leads physicians to utilize more medical care than is economically efficient. Do rare, salient events alter physicians' perceptions about the probability of patient harm? Do these events lead physicians to overutilize certain medical procedures? This study uses Pennsylvania inpatient hospital admissions data from 2009 aggregated at the physician level to investigate these questions. The data come from the 2009 Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4).

The study is divided into two parts. In Part I, we examine whether bad outcomes during childbirth (defined as maternal mortality, an obstetric fistula or …

Mesoproterozoic Deposition, Regional Metamorphism And Deformation In North-Central New Mexico: Evidence From Metamorphic Monazite And Detrital Zircon Geochronology In The Picuris Mountains, Lily S. Pfeifer

Honors Theses

Detrital zircon and metamorphic monazite ages from the Picuris Mountains, north central New Mexico, were used to confirm the depositional age of the Marquenas Formation, to document the depositional age of the Vadito Group, and to constrain the timing of metamorphism and deformation in the region.

Detrital zircon 207Pb/206Pb ages were obtained with the LA-MC-ICPMS from quartzites collected from the type locality of the Marquenas Formation exposed at Cerro de las Marquenas, and from the lower Vadito Group in the southern and eastern Picuris Mountains. The Marquenas Formation sample yields 113 concordant ages including a Mesoproterozoic age population with four …

The Effect Of Phosphite On Mycorrhiza Formation In American Chestnut (Castanea Dentata), Matthew T. Perkins

Honors Theses

One of the primary hindrances to Castanea dentata restoration in the Southeast is the root rot disease caused by the fungus-like microorganism Phytophthora cinnamomi. Root rot can be combated by the application of mono- and di-potassium salts of phosphorous acid, which are marketed as phosphite fungicides. Despite its value in preventing infection by P. cinnamomi it is also thought that phosphite may impede root colonization by beneficial, ectomycorrhizal fungi. I hypothesized that plants given a routine application of phosphite will display fewer mycorrhizas in the root tips than those plants that were not treated with potassium phosphite. Therefore I attempted …