Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Death After: A Visualization Of Death In A Digital Medium, Cole Yamamura

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

NOTE: a free version of GameMaker is required to run this game and can be downloaded from https://gamemaker.io/en/download.

DEATH//AFTER is an original video game, generated by Cole Yamamura, in which a masked figure invites users to engage in one last encounter before their demise. Much like life, the figure chooses the game but the user chooses how to move through it. Depending on the user’s choices, the figure reveals additional challenges or one of several possible endings. A limited, unfamiliar deck of cards further complicates the matter, and the masked figure neither forgives nor undoes the user’s errors.

DEATH//AFTER seeks …

Evaluating The Efficiency Of Soil Amendments To Mitigate The Leaching Of Copper Nanopesticides, Brianna Benner

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

As pesticides are necessary to meet current and future agricultural needs, nanopesticides have seen increased use resulting from their more targeted application at lower doses. Copper-based nanopesticides have demonstrated efficacy but there are also concerns about their potential toxicity to aquatic species. This unintended toxic exposure resulting from agricultural runoff containing these nanopesticides can be mitigated through the use of soil amendments. In this study, biochar and chitosan were investigated as soil amendments, as they can bind metals and nutrients; however, there are still open questions about how their effective they are in different soil types and in relation to …

Food Systems Mapping And Goals At Western Washington University, Dylan Braund

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

In this project, I map food systems on the Western Washington University (WWU) campus with the intention of better understanding how different groups are working and collaborating to make food systems more accessible and sustainable on campus. By examining these connections, I also hope to reveal areas for potential future connections to form between groups engaging in similar work. In addition, I provide recommendations for new goals to be added to the existing WWU Sustainability Action Plan (SAP) related to food systems. As most of the goals currently listed in this plan relate directly to Dining Services, this research provides …

J.G.T., Joshua Dyeson

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A 2D platformer video game focused around the player quickly switching between tools to help them jump, grapple, or teleport to progress and avoid obstacles, a la Doom Eternal, while uncovering the mystery of the strange facility they find themselves in.

From Threads To Treasures: The Resilient Journey Of The Western Worn Community Closet, Jessica Dietzman

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Picture this - You are walking into a room filled with made-from-scratch clothing racks, hangers donated from the College of Business and Economics (CBE) Career Closet, clothes, shoes, and accessories filling up the shelves and racks all donated by your fellow students, professors, and faculty. You notice artwork decorating the walls designed from art students, and you have total access to any of these articles of clothing for free! This room is called the Western Worn Community Closet and written here is the resilient story of how it came to be.

Hydrophobicity Of Factor Viii On Membrane Binding, Mady Jacobs

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Factor VIII (FVIII) plays a crucial role in our body’s ability to prevent blood loss. This function comes from its ability to bind membranes and enhance catalytic function of other proteins. Membrane binding of FVIII relies on hydrophobic residues located at the lower C2 domain in a region named the PS head group. This study looks at how the enhancement of the hydrophobicity of this site can impact the protein binding ability to membranes. Specifically mutating the residues leucine at residue 2251 in the PS head group to phenylalanine, the study uses BLI instrumentation to determine whether this mutation can …

Artificial General Intelligence And The Mind-Body Problem: Exploring The Computability Of Simulated Human Intelligence In Light Of The Immaterial Mind, Caleb Parks

Senior Honors Theses

In this thesis I explore whether achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) through simulating the human brain is theoretically possible. Because of the scientific community’s predominantly physicalist outlook on the mind-body problem, AGI research may be limited by erroneous foundational presuppositions. Arguments from linguistics and mathematics demonstrate that the human intellect is partially immaterial, opening the door for novel analysis of the mind’s simulability. I categorize mind-body problem philosophies in a manner relevant to computer science based upon state transitions, and determine their ramifications on mind-simulation. Finally, I demonstrate how classical architectures cannot resolve so-called Gödel statements, discuss why this inability …

Early Report Of A Microcosm Of The Fourth Major Global Bleaching Event: A Comprehensive Survey Of Coral Bleaching At Chumbe Island Coral Park, Zanzibar, Christian Boudreaux

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Coral reefs harbor a wealth of the biodiversity present in the ocean. They provide an array of ecological and economic services that make them crucial to the function of a healthy ocean and prosperous coastal communities. Due to an array of anthropogenic stressors, including an increase in ocean temperatures as a result of climate change, reefs have been devastated worldwide. This is, in large part, due to the process of coral bleaching, the expelling of symbiont algae which the coral needs to produce energy, for an extended period until death. This study surveyed bleaching and death at a deeper and …

Short-Term Larval Surveys Reveal Rainy Season Breeding Site Preferences Of Malaria Vector Anopheles Spp. In Zanzibar City, Kaeden K. Hill

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Malaria is a serious illness that causes over 500,000 deaths annually worldwide, with Tanzania alone contributing to approximately 4% of those deaths. Malaria is caused by Plasmodium spp. parasites, and it is vectored by mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus. In Zanzibar City, the incidence of malaria has decreased over the past few decades due to standardized treatment protocols and public health interventions targeting adult mosquitoes. However, the incidence remains between 1-2%, with an increasing trend observed over the past few years likely stemming from continued exchange of Plasmodium spp. from other malaria-endemic areas. Because larvicidal strategies can be useful in …

Structural Responses To Land Use In Pollination Networks: Effects Of Biodiversity And Alien Plants In The Ecuadorian Chocó, Eric Abrahams

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

As a globally recognized hotspot of biodiversity, the Ecuadorian Chocó Andino region is extremely important for research and conservation. However, little research has been done regarding the mutualistic networks that sustain this ecosystem. The analysis of plant-pollinator networks helps us understand how ecosystems respond to change and is vital to conserving ecological productivity across multiple spatial scales. This study establishes a baseline for pollinator network structure across a land use gradient near the western montane cloud forest in Ecuador. Plants and pollinators were sampled along 11 transects in farms, communities, roads in the Río Manduriacu valley. Weedy herbs dominated overall, …

Uncovering Chimborazo’S Catchments: Insights Into The Fluvial Network, Stream Characteristics, And Hydrological Patterns In Reserva De Producción De Fauna Chimborazo, Ecuador, Julia L. Schwartz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Andean headwater streams play a crucial role in the provisioning of ecosystem services and supplying water to downstream communities. This study sought to analyze trends in hydrological patterns in the páramo of the southwestern aspect of Volcán Chimborazo in central Ecuador, as well as to provide a more complete survey of the fluvial network given the lack of existing data and its importance in water resource management. Measurements of stream elevation, grade of slope, water temperature, pH, width, depth, turbidity, velocity, and discharge, as well as geomorphological characteristics of catchments such as slope and permeability, were taken at 19 sites …

Coastal And Marine Fish Ecology Lab Intern, Rhiannon Michelle Holmes

College of the Environment Internship Reports

gained first-hand experience with seeing undisturbed estuary at Heron Point in comparison to the emergent marsh at Qwuloolt, increasing my knowledge about the effect dikes have on estuarine ecology and teaching me about the restoration projects in the Snohomish estuary. I also learned how to use a YSI probe and record field measurements. I also was able to observe some isopods and other salmonoid food sources.

Administrative And Field Intern - Coastal Watershed Institute, Amelia Kalagher

College of the Environment Internship Reports

Due to CWI’s uniquely small and agile nature as an organization, interns represent a core part of the staff and are involved in a variety of projects. Long-term data collection for Salish Sea nearshore ecology is the overarching goal. Projects I have been involved in within that sphere include monthly seining to monitor fish use of the nearshore, forage fish spawn surveys along several Strait of Juan de Fuca beaches, and snorkel surveys of herring spawn events and salmon use of nearshore kelp forests.

Coastal And Marine Fish Ecology Lab, Sarah Granard

College of the Environment Internship Reports

This Spring I worked under Sean Grealish and Kathryn Sobocinski in the Coastal and Marine Fish Ecology Lab at Western Washington University collecting invertebrate samples in the Snohomish estuary. The goal of the study is to better understand how invertebrates vary throughout the estuary to aid future restoration projects providing food for salmon where it is scarce. Weekly invertebrate samples were collected from April to June using neuston nets at surface and benthic levels within the channel.

Mt St Helens Pond Phytoplankton Intern, Lillie Cole Tomlinson

College of the Environment Internship Reports

No abstract provided.

City Sprouts Farm Internship, Stella Marie Sterk

College of the Environment Internship Reports

Over the course of this internship, I gained not just a deep understanding of the practical skills of regenerative agriculture, the experience also completely transformed my relationship with the land. For the first time in my life, I fully saw and felt and appreciated what it means to honor and steward the land we inhabit, and the gifts that it continually provides us with. Feeling the healing, transformative, and community building power of participating in community farming for myself has made me even more certain of what I want in my future career. I want to study urban planning and …

Amsec Internship, Leo Curtis

College of the Environment Internship Reports

One of my goals was to learn how to operate instrumentation that I had never used before in the context of environmental research. I learned the basics of how to operate the ICP-MS, and more specifically, began to learn to operate the ICP in a single-cell setting. This included the development of several skills and trainings, which included the basic AMSEC lab safety training. In addition, I had multiple sessions with professor Montaño practicing serial dilutions in preparation for the ICP. I also attended a compressed gas training, through which I learned the proper usage and handling of Argon gas …

Kicking Up Dust On Utah's Off-Road Vehicle Trails: Pi-Swerl Assessment Of Anthropogenic Dust Emissions, Wyatt A. Wiebelhaus

Honors Thesis

Upward trends in the use of off-highway vehicles (OHV) and the creation of new OHV trails facilitate an increase in soil disturbance and dust emissions in Utah. Anthropogenic destruction of soil crusts and the removal of vegetation by OHVs exposes soil and destroys soil structure, making the soil easier to erode by the wind. We used the PI-SWERL (Portable In Situ Wind Erosion Laboratory) to measure dust concentrations of disturbed and undisturbed soil. We tested soils at several popular OHV areas with landforms composed of sand dunes, playas, and Lake Bonneville sediments. Soil crust strength, grain size, and salinity were …

Methods, Analyses, And Applications Of Multilayer Temporal Link Prediction In Networks, Xie He

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Many applications stem from the possibility of accurately predicting links in various types of networks. In this thesis, we present methods, analyses, and applications for static, temporal, and multilayer networks. The first part of this thesis demonstrates how static network features serve as efficient and accurate predictors for link prediction in temporal networks. It includes an ensemble learning method we developed and presents experimental results on 90 synthetic stochastic block models and 19 real-world datasets. The second part closely follows, showcasing 20 different sampling methods and their effects on nine different link prediction algorithms for 250 real-world networks across 6 …

Impact Of Pulsed Electric Field Treatment On Barley Germination For Malting, Rose Saxton, Caitlin Lahey, Brianna Smith, Emily Hibberd, Joshua Bevan, Cini Baumhoff, Ashley Galant, Jerry Young, Brian Meyer, Owen M. Mcdougal

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

The malting process takes one week to steep, germinate, and kiln barley to make malt. Making quality malt is critically important to achieve the desired attributes of the finished beer, and the process is time-intensive and costly. Malt quality is assessed by indicators including β-glucan quantity, α-amylase activity, Free Amino Nitrogen (FAN) content, and overall extract concentration in the finished malt. Here, we report Pulsed Electric Field (PEF) treatment of barley to accelerate malt production. A small-scale trial of 250 g to 1.00 kg barley, was evaluated for germination at two PEF treatment conditions, generically referred to as “low” and …

Effects Of Heterogeneous Data Sets And Time-Lag Measurement Techniques On Cosmological Parameter Constraints From Mg Ii And C Iv Reverberation-Mapped Quasar Data, Shulei Cao, Michal Zajaček, Bożena Czerny, Swayamtrupta Panda, Bharat Ratra

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Previously, we demonstrated that Mg II and C IV reverberation-mapped quasars (RM QSOs) are standardizable and that the cosmological parameters inferred using the broad-line region radius–luminosity (R–L) relation are consistent with those determined from better-established cosmological probes. With more data expected from ongoing and future spectroscopic and photometric surveys, it is imperative to examine how new QSO data sets of varied quality, with their own specific luminosity and time-delay distributions, can be best used to determine more restrictive cosmological parameter constraints. In this study, we test the effect of adding 25 OzDES Mg II RM QSOs as well …

A Deep Dive On The Groundbreak Role Of Role Playing Games, Lawton Fong

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Role-playing games (RPGs) have revolutionized the gaming industry, fundamentally altering the way we engage with and perceive games. RPGs are defined by their emphasis on narrative-driven gameplay, character development, and immersive worlds. Originating from tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), RPGs have evolved into complex digital experiences that allow players to interact with richly detailed virtual environments and storylines. This genre's growth has been propelled by advances in technology, expanding from simple text-based adventures to fully realized 3D worlds. Overall, role-playing games have significantly influenced the gaming landscape and transformed our perceptions of games as interactive experiences by advancing …

Creating A Sustainabili-Tour, Lily Dubray, Caden Fisher, Allison Gross, Morgan Hrivnak, Emily Kilstrom, Sushant Mukhia, Hannah Nelin, Sam Parrish, Waverly Patterson, Bowen Rand, Caleb Swanson, Wyatt Wiebelhaus

Sustainability & Environment Projects

Executive Summary

The University of South Dakota has taken significant steps to become more sustainable in the last few years. Students, faculty, and administrators have worked together to raise awareness and advance sustainability on campus. Because of these efforts, the University of South Dakota was recently recognized by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education as a STARS Bronze Institution based on our accomplishments in campus sustainability.

Every year, Dr. Meghann Jarchow teaches the Sustainability Capstone course, leading a class of seniors on a semester-long project aimed at furthering community sustainability by synthesizing student expertise. Throughout …

Shall We Place More Advanced Students In A Separate Class?, Shahnaz Shahbazova, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In every class, we have students who are more advanced and students who are more behind. From this viewpoint, it seems reasonable to place more advanced students in a separate class. This should help advanced students progress faster, and it should help other students as well, since the teachers in the remaining class can better attend to their needs. However, empirically, this does not work: when we form a separate class, the overall amount of gained knowledge decreases. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon.

04-01-2024 Orsp Newsletter, Liz Williamson

ORSP Newsletter

NSF Conference, Jennifer Baumbaugh, Sustainable Food Packaging research, Export Control Policy Update

Extracting Relevant Test Inputs From Bug Reports For Automatic Test Case Generation, Wendkuuni C. Ouédraogo, Laura Plein, Kader Kaboré, Andrew Habib, Jacques Klein, David Lo, Tegawende F. Bissyandé

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The pursuit of automating software test case generation, particularly for unit tests, has become increasingly important due to the labor-intensive nature of manual test generation [6]. However, a significant challenge in this domain is the inability of automated approaches to generate relevant inputs, which compromises the efficacy of the tests [6].

Agricultural Groundcover Update February 2024, Justin Laycock

Natural resources published reports

• About 92% of the grainbelt had adequate (more than 50%) vegetative groundcover to prevent wind erosion in February 2024.

• Nearly 8% of the grainbelt (1,193,400 ha) had less than 50% groundcover, which is inadequate to prevent wind erosion.

• The northern grainbelt had the highest risk of wind erosion and 16.5% of this farmland had inadequate groundcover.

• Less than 0.7% of the grainbelt had a high to very high risk of wind erosion because groundcover was less than 30%.

Logic Lessons, Elizabeth Skiffington

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This project shows the common core of the disciplines of philosophy and computer science, logic, in the form of an entry-level course both in website and document format. Most consider these two fields of study to be incredibly far apart and unrelated. This course shows that they come from the same origin, and understanding one can give someone the tools to understand the other. The course covers basic logic, the tools to start thinking about complex issues, and common intersections of the two fields.

[A link to the codebase is included in a supplementary file at the end of this …

Sustainable Lab Certification Project Report, Alyssa White, Megan Ellis

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This report describes the creation of the new Sustainable Lab Certification program at WWU. Scientific and research labs are known to produce a lot of carbon emissions, and Western's labs are no exception. The Sustainable Lab certification process is open to labs from any department on campus, and includes a self-reporting audit that covers four categories of sustainability. Once labs fill it out, they can receive their certification scoring of Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum. We applied for and won a grant to provide participating labs with more sustainable options of different instruments and lab supplies and were able to …

Assessing The Efficacy Of The Washington Ban On Phosphorus Fertilizer, Pilar Deniston

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Freshwater lakes are essential ecosystems, providing crucial services for humans, plants, and animals. However, eutrophication, a process driven by an excess of nutrients such as phosphorus, poses a significant threat to lake health and water quality. To mitigate excess phosphorus and eutrophication, many states, including Washington, have implemented bans on phosphorus-containing fertilizers. This study evaluates the efficacy of Washington State's 2013 phosphorus-containing fertilizer ban, focusing on 58 lakes in western Washington. This study organized, filtered, and analyzed data from multiple counties' monitoring programs to examine total phosphorus concentrations before and after the ban. Additionally, this study involved a land cover …