OU - Emerging Scholars

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https://hdl.handle.net/11244/329114

The OU - Emerging Scholars collection showcases exemplary undergraduate student scholarship, such as published articles, papers that have won the University Libraries’ Undergraduate Research Award, works arising from research fellowships, etc.

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Open Access
Kantorovich Duality and Optimal Transport Problems on Magnetic Graphs
(1/31/19) Robertson, Sawyer Jack
We consider Lipschitz- and Arens-Eells-type function spaces constructed for magnetic graphs, which are adapted to the magnetic setting from the classical area of optimal transport on discrete spaces. After establishing the duality between this spaces, we prove a characterization of the extreme points of the unit ball in the (magnetic) Lipschitz space as well as a semi-constructive result relating the (magnetic) Arens-Eells norm for functions defined on a magnetic graph to the (classical) Arens-Eells norm for functions defined on the so-called magnetic lift graph.
Open Access
The Shadow Government: Influence of Elite Safavid Women
(1/7/19) Nazari, Jessamine
Until recently, the history of women in Safavid Iran has remained practically unexplored by scholars and historians. The lack of research done on women of the period can be mostly attributed to the scarcity of information available. One cause of this lack of material is the political and religious climate of Safavid Iran, which naturally lent to Muslim historiographers chronicling a masculine view of history. And when women, almost always in the higher classes of society, were deemed important enough to penetrate the patriarchal records, their lives and aspirations were usually generalized as hopes to see their sons acquire power.
Open Access
A Case of Mistaken Identity: State and Cultural Constructions of Mapuche Womanhood Through Activism
(11/2/21) Amechi, Lilly
This paper will first discuss the Chilean state and Chilean feminists’ understanding of Mapuche women’s identity. I will argue that the Mapuche are used as a means to an end, then discarded when they have served their purpose to the state. After I highlight this distortion of the Mapuche women by the Chilean state, I uncover how the Mapuche culture recognizes its people to build on my argument that colonialism and the Pinochet dictatorship created a fundamental shift in Mapuche methods of identifying each other. Lastly, I will peel back the layers of what Mapuche women believe it means to be Mapuche and how this view has come to contrast with the Chilean state and various Mapuche communities.
Open Access
The evolution of marriage equality as a policy issue and as a new social norm in Latin America
(11/23/15) Waugh, Jacob
The central question my research will address is the following: how has the issue of marriage equality evolved differently among Latin American countries and to what extent does it still remain contentious? The case studies I will explore are Argentina and Mexico. For each country, I will explore four areas: (1) early gay organization; (2) the emergence of marriage equality as a policy issue; (3) social context; and (4) the enactment of marriage equality. While the majority of my research focuses on the years from about the beginning of the 21st century to the present, I will often revert to decades that precede this time period to discuss early activism and other historical factors.
Open Access
Residential Segregation: A Story of Health Inadequacies
(12/4/18) Ananya Bhaktaram
The intentional segregation of metropolitan areas in the United States during the twentieth century has resulted in rising health disparities in low-income minorities today. Contemporary medical practices like collecting health data by race and not by socioeconomic status obfuscates the problem. OneÕs geography of opportunity, meaning the opportunities one is afforded based on where you live has direct effects on your prospective health. Low income minorities are faced with greater adverse risk because they are more likely to be found in a double jeopardy situation where they are simultaneously impoverished and living in a bad neighborhood. Additionally, treatment within the healthcare system itself is often times sub-par.
Open Access
Earth conscious behavior of OU students
(12/5/16) Woody, Tanya S.
Amid growing concerns of environmental issues, such as resource depletion and climate change, an understanding of college student altruistic and egocentric behavior can offer insight into approaches for change. Students of higher education may become the advocates for changing societal norms that can augment environmental problems. Therefore, knowledge of scholars’ environmental awareness and supporting activities could help understand the factors the influence pro-environmental behaviors. A wide range of information about individual behavior that impacts the environment was collected by surveying 100 University of Oklahoma students. Key findings include a relationship between percent of trash recycled by students and their classification, and student’s perception of local water safety is related to their opinion of local water taste. The information gathered from our sample population could be instrumental in improving environmental friendly programs and practices on campus by highlighting key determinants for specific actions.
Open Access
Arabella Buckley's Epic: Uniting Evolutionary Epic & Spiritualism to Account for the Evolution of Morals from Mutualism
(2016) Larsen, Jordan
Utilizing OU’s History of Science Collections, I focused my Honors College Research project on exploring the popularization of Victorian science, specifically that conducted by Arabella Buckley. Many of Charles Darwin’s contemporaries interpreted his theory of natural selection as evidence of competition ruling nature. Science writer and popularizer Arabella Buckley was the first to characterize Darwin’s theory of the evolution of morals as mutualistic rather than materialistic, and she did so through a unique consolidation of evolutionary epic and spiritualism. While scholars have stressed Buckley’s contribution to the evolutionary narrative as either driven by a maternal tradition or motivated by her spiritualistic beliefs, I aim to show that the significance of her distinctive, mutualistic addition to the debate on the evolution of morals lies in her unifying theory of traducianism.
Open Access
Decolonizing the Uncolonized: France, French Canadian Identity, and the Quebecois Nationalist Movement, 1945-1967
(2016) Miles, Sarah
This research project intended to analyze and understand the relationship between Third World decolonization movements, the nascent nationalist movement in Quebec between 1945 and 1967, and the simultaneous development of a strong association between France and Quebec. In this paper, I argue that the nationalist movement in Quebec utilized the terminology and ideology of the decolonization movements in both Algeria and the Caribbean in order to legitimize their rapprochement with France. In a break from the past, nationalists in the Era of Decolonization began to argue that they had been colonized unfairly by the British— despite the fact that they were themselves colonizers of the North American territory— and thus had suffered at the hands of their colonizers, just as other Third World peoples had at the hands of other European powers. This argument, in turn, legitimized the nascent nationalist movement, and permitted both the Quebecois and the broader international community to at least tacitly accept the clear, pro-nationalist actions taken by the French on behalf of the Quebecois starting with de Gaulle’s “Vive le Quebec Libre” speech of 1967.
Open Access
Analysis of Hurricanes Using Long-Range Lightning Detection Networks
(2016) Trabing, Benjamin; Knaff, John A.; Schumacher, Andrea; Musgrave, Kate; Demaria, Mark
The new GOES-R satellite will be equipped with the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) that will provide unprecedented total lightning data with the potential to improve hurricane intensity forecasts. Past studies have provided conflicting interpretations of the role that lightning plays in forecasting tropical cyclone (TC) intensity changes. With the goal of improving the usefulness of total lightning, detailed case studies were conducted of five TCs that underwent rapid intensification (RI) within the domains of two unique ground-based long-range lightning detection networks, the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) and Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN). This analysis will provide greater details of the distribution of lightning within predefined storm features to highlight specific phenomena that large statistical studies cannot resolve.
Open Access
The epistemological limitations of Google's Knowledge graph
(2017) Terry, Jeffrey
In 2012, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph, a computer system that instead of providing search results, provides information—what Google calls “knowledge.” Now, when people go to Google and search for “Leonardo da Vinci,” they see a little box pop up next to the traditional search results, outlining da Vinci’s vocation, his birth date, his siblings, his artworks, and so on. While a good deal of work has been done on the broader ethical implications of Google in general (“Search Engines and Ethics”), less has been done on the epistemological implications on the Knowledge Graph in particular—how does the Knowledge Graph affect the landscape of what can be known, and how does it change cultural assumptions about the nature of knowledge? Alexander Monea, in a 2016 paper, made strong headway into the topic. Examining the Knowledge Graph, he argued that “the fundamental data structure of the ‘triple,’ in essence a subject-predicate-object statement, constitutes a problem immanent to the database itself”. Using the “perspective of media theory, philosophy of difference, and epistemology”, he demonstrated that the “structure of the ‘triple’” sets certain limits on the types of knowledge that graph databases can represent. Taking his work as a starting point, and looking towards speech act theory and Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact for theoretical support, I argue that the Knowledge Graph is predicated on specific epistemological assumptions unique to the past five-hundred years or so, assumptions that take it on faith that knowledge consists of facts that can “exist in the world like pebbles, waiting to be picked up”. Furthermore, I contend that the Knowledge Graph, through Michel Foucault’s notion of the “will to truth,” limits what we can know by promoting a narrow definition of “the true discourse”.
Open Access
Bad People or Harmful Pasts? A Look into How Abuse Affects Deviance
(2018) Johnson, Lauren
Using data from the 2004 Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities, an analytical sample of 3,277 prisoners were used to examine the gendered relationship between suffering abuse and engaging in deviant acts. The study found differences between genders of the types of crimes committed and between those who have and have not been abused. Those who have been abused have greater odds of showing deviant behaviors than those who have not, and males have higher odds of both committing violent offenses and using hard drugs than females. When examining the findings, there is a much larger gap between the genders on violent offenses than on drug use.
Open Access
The Way of Death: Abortion’s Path to Criminalization During the Middle Ages
(2018) Pott, Laura
A lightning rod of controversy since the Middle Ages, abortion has both been condemned as the “way of death” and championed as a tool of female liberation (Elsakkers, “Reading Between the Lines” 468). Current debates over the legality of abortion rely on its religious characterization as an act of murder, a lingering stamp of ill fame from Europe’s medieval past. Remarkably, however, early medieval abortion laws were in some cases ambivalent toward early-term abortions (Elsakkers, “Abortion, Poisoning, Magic, and Contraception” 101). Frankish legal codes punished abortion as a poison, Frisian laws used a “hair and nails” criterion for abortion, and Old Germanic laws punished abortion more strongly for a male fetus. Intentional abortion went virtually unmentioned in Old Germanic law (Elsakkers, “Reading Between the Lines” 465). The Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, concentrated almost exclusively on intentional abortion. Church law vigorously denounced abortion as murder and warned women that they would be punished with “spiritual death,” excommunication, and hell if they obtained an abortion at any point in a pregnancy (Elsakkers, “Reading Between the Lines” 468). As the Middle Ages progressed, secular law began to echo these grim denunciations more and more frequently. The parallel development of the legal concept of criminalization and the religious concept of ensoulment at conception made possible the transfer of the Church’s condemnation of abortion into secular law.
Open Access
Spectral and Stochastic Solutions to Boundary Value Problems on Magnetic Graphs
(2018) Robinson, Sawyer Jack
A magnetic graph is a graph G equipped with an orientation structure σ on its edges. The discrete magnetic Laplace operator LσG, a second-order difference operator for complex-valued functions on the vertices of G, has been an interesting and useful tool in discrete analysis for over twenty years. Its role in the study of quantum mechanics has been examined closely since its debut in a classic paper by Lieb and Loss in 1993. In this paper, we pose some boundary value problems associated to this operator, and adapt two classic techniques to the setting of magnetic graphs to solve them. The first technique uses the spectral properties of the operator, and the second technique utilizes random walks adjusted to this particular setting. Throughout, we will prove some useful results including a Green’s identity, mean value characterization of harmonic functions, and extensions of the solution techniques to Kronecker product graphs.
Open Access
Exploring The Architecture on the Campus of the University of Oklahoma
(2020) Connor Hopper
As the title suggests, this paper presents itself as more than merely a historical account of the evolving architecture at the University of Oklahoma. Indeed, I have spent the past few months diving into how these buildings came about, the transition from the Collegiate Gothic Style into Modern Architecture, as well as the abstract implications of what the architecture says about this university.
Open Access
On Reinforcement Learning, Nurturing, and the Evolution of Risk Neutral
(2020) Kevin Robb
Reinforcement learning depends on agents being learning individuals, and when agents rely on their instincts rather than gathering data and acting accordingly, the population tends to be less successful than a true RL population. "Riskiness" is the elementary metric for determining how willing to rely on learning an individual or a population is. With a high learning parameter, as we denote riskiness in this paper, agents find the safest option and seldom deviate from it, essentially using learning to become a non-learning individual. With a low learning rate, agents ignore recency entirely and seek out the highest reward, regardless of the risk. We attempt in this paper to evolve this "risk neutrality" in a population by adding a safe exploration nurturing period during which agents are free to explore without consequence. We discovered the environmental conditions necessary for our hypotheses to be mostly satisfied and found that nurturing enables agents to distinguish between two different risky options to evolve risk neutrality. Too long of a nurturing period causes the evolution to waver before settling on a path with essentially random results, while a short nurturing period causes a successful evolution of risk neutrality. The non-nurturing case evolves risk aversion by default as we expected from a reinforcement learning system, because agents are unable to distinguish between the good risk and bad risk, so they decide to avoid risks altogether.
Open Access
Solutions to media bias
(2021) Grundmeyer, Seth
I want to discuss all of the possible options for media regulation. I want to look at the pros and cons of each along with the financial impacts to each. I have found five possible solutions; reinstate the Doctrine exactly as it was in 1949 to the FCC, follow the Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine Act and give the Fairness Doctrine to congress, reinstate the Fairness Doctrine to a new non-partisan organization, an all new system of regulation designed by me, and the final option would be to not regulate the media at all and leave it as it is now. These options are the five I have found during my research.
Open Access
Maycomb's usual disease: A practical application to disability studies in "To Kill A Mockingbird"
(2021) Sauer, Gillian
This paper aims to connect literary studies and disability studies through the acknowledgement of disability in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. By analyzing Boo Radley as a character with autism, we can begin to discuss disability in high school classrooms. By using a novel typically found on high school reading lists in the United States, curriculum can be implemented to discuss disability as a facet of diversity. This analysis will focus on Boo Radley’s characterization, as well as the prevalence of disability in the fictional Maycomb. Putting a disability perspective on the novel will help to approach the idea of adding conversations of diversity to children’s literature.
Open Access
Children of the Red Light
(2021-11) Donisi, Brooke
The city of Kolkata is full of astonishing history and various ways of life. As the capital of India’s West Bengal state, it attracts the public with its grand colonial architecture, art galleries, and cultural festivals. For those residing in this city, a different story can be seen. Despite all of Kolkata’s exuberance, many of the residents of this city live in some of the worst conditions, drastically distanced from the cultural ambiance. In specific, the Sonagachi neighborhood is not a place one would travel to witness the cultural vitality of Kolkata. This red- light neighborhood is home to roughly 16,000 sex workers and their families (Chakraborty 2020). The children of this neighborhood have grown up surrounded by the influence of sex workers and child laborers. Being raised in these conditions has impacted the expectations placed on them around schooling and has highlighted two different types of expectations: one for boys, and one for girls. The difference in expectations is brought on by the culture of the city, the predominance of sex-work, and the influence of the parents.
Open Access
Elucidating the Mechanisms of Antibiotic Tolerance During CoInfection of Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus agalactiae in Chronic Wounds
(2023-05) McCoy, Lane
Polymicrobial infections are some of the most financially demanding issues in the healthcare system, requiring over $25 billion in treatment annually in the United States alone. This results from their increased virulence, infectivity, and tolerance of common antimicrobial treatments, part of a process termed synergy. While interactions between bacteria have been appreciated for decades, we do not completely understand the exact mechanisms for how these organisms interact within the infection itself. Furthermore, questions remain about how these interactions depend on local microbes, on the environment of their host, or on spatial arrangement in the wound. Here, we sought to identify and understand novel interactions between Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus agalactiae (Group B Streptococcus, GBS) in a chronic wound environment. To accomplish this, we assessed tolerance to various antibiotics of each organism individually and in co-culture in our in vitro wound models. Furthermore, we sought to understand how a diabetes mellitus type II environment impacted interactions between these microbes by evaluating how a hyperglycemic environment altered antibiotic tolerance. Our preliminary results suggest that S. aureus has increased tolerance to specific antibiotics when cocultured in vitro with S. agalactiae and saw an increase in tolerance when grown in our wound models. Our data also shows that S. agalactiae has increased tolerance to specific antibiotics when co-cultured in wound models individually and decreased tolerance when grown with S. aureus. These results suggest a heightened importance of the environment on the role of antibiotic tolerance development in microorganisms when grown together, and further tests are needed to determine the exact mechanisms by which the environment alters the physiology of these two species. These investigations could be essential in producing more effective treatment strategies and hindering the progression of chronic wounds.
Open Access
The Substantial Restraint Doctrine: A New Judiciary Standard of Analysis for Campaign Finance Disclosure
(2023-05) Poupore, Carson
American elections are defined by the millions of campaign finance dollars contributed to individual candidates and campaigns by 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups seeking to push forth their interests’ competing agendas. While many criticize the volume of these donations, others seek to address the fact that 501(c)(4) nonprofits are using “dark money” vehicles enabled and enforced by Supreme Court precedent. While political donors may face First Amendment protections for their financial expressions, there is a strong public interest in voters being informed of such contributions. However, as NAACP v. Alabama contends, the implied right of privacy is critical in cases where political donation may yield harm or reprisal. This analysis details and expands upon a Supreme Court doctrine of substantial restraint, ensuring campaign finance reform with all these challenges in mind. As I derive through my research, a stare decisis precedent of substantial restraint would slow the proliferation of dark money on a case-by-case basis while allowing factions to continue to play in the game of political expression through campaign finance.