Virtual Talks

I spent this summer working with Professor Eve Bratman of the Earth and Environment department on the editing of her current book project, tentatively titled Honey and Influence. The work for this project centered on finding and reviewing literature to be cited, editing chapters, and collecting the pieces needed for proposals to potential book agents and publishers. This summer has allowed me to see an alternate facet of the scientific world, one that involves communicating research to the public, which one could argue is just as important as the actual act of research itself. Since this summer, I have a new found appreciation for how much work actually goes into writing a book, and that it is much more tedious than one might originally think, between organizing the initial ideas, writing and rewriting chapters, and the business aspects of getting a book published. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Eve Bratman, Department of Earth and Environment

Lancaster County's history of human activity and agriculture has proven to contribute to pollution of water systems leading to the Chesapeake Bay. Due to the construction of dams in the 1700's, valley bottom wetlands became damaged, preventing pollution filtration and a clean flow to the Chesapeake Bay. While the dams are now gone, legacy sediment produced from agriculture is deposited in the pond that was produced by the dam, creating high, eroding stream banks. Through a cost effectiveness analysis, it has been determined that legacy sediment removal is the most efficient method for recovering Lancaster's wetland ecosystems. The scope of our research this summer has been to build an experiment that would help us understand how to best engage landowners and farmers living on affected properties with the sediment removal process and wetland restoration initiatives. This project was supported by funding from the Richard King Mellon Foundation via Chesapeake Watershed Initiative.

Project Mentor: Professor Patrick Fleming, Department of Economics and the Public Policy Program

In this talk, we will describe how we developed an automated image stacking pipeline for a long-term project optically monitoring a region in the constellation Orion that contains a small radio source (NVSS J054710-02319; hereafter, Source R). We will demonstrate how our process works, using some of 12,500 optical images obtained so far. Our image stacking pipeline uses a combination of routines from Astropy-affiliated packages (ccdproc, reproject, photutils) and Alsvid Python scripts. We first fixed bad columns in each image on our input list, then reprojected and cropped the images to center on Source R. Next we used mean subtraction to normalize the backgrounds, and used aperture photometry, which measures the light of specific stars, to further normalize the images, before fitting gaussians to those stars to do chi-square averaging, which weighs the poor seeing less heavily. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium.

Project Mentor: Professor Elizabeth Praton, Department of Physics and Astronomy

Intellectually humble individuals consider divergent views (even of outgroups) and acknowledge the potential fallibility of their beliefs. While academics consider intellectual humility (IH) a virtue, it is unclear whether this is true of the general public, and particularly children (who tend to be overconfident and conformist). Our research investigated whether American adults and 6- to 9-year-old children perceive IH as a positive or negative attribute, in cases when changing minds entails matching an outgroup’s beliefs. We expected that children would condemn IH, and we predicted greater acceptance of IH with increasing age. To test our hypotheses, we presented participants with moral and factual scenarios featuring characters from fictional countries. Characters’ group memberships were emphasized and pitted against the truth. The majority of participants believed IH was good, even in the intergroup contexts we studied. This was most pronounced for adults, though children across ages also showed this pattern. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program and C. Richard Puff Fund.

Project Mentor: Professor Joshua Rottman, Department of Psychology

The topic of mental health was identified as Lancaster County’s primary concern by its residents who have seen an increase in mental health issues. When learning about children’s mental health, we came across the topic of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as it relates to childhood trauma. From this, we observed that there is a need for preventative measures to help against ACEs for Lancaster’s children. We propose an afterschool club that enables middle school children to plan seasonal activities for themselves, their peers, and their parents with some adult supervision and local organizational funding to create resiliency and positive childhood experiences (PCEs) in children. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Creativity, Innovation and Future of Work Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Maya Greenshpan, Department of Italian Studies and Hebrew

The presence of molybdenum in marine sediments can provide valuable information regarding past oceanic conditions. Although molybdenum has been established as a paleotracer, there is still an inadequate understanding surrounding the accumulation and adsorption of Mo in iron-sulfide rich sediments as well as in the transformation of iron into certain phases in the presence of Mo. The following research was conducted to study the co-precipitation of molybdenum, iron, and sulfide. In order to do this, a modified procedure from the literature was performed. Once an established method was completed, a colloidal substance was formed where the liquid and solid phases were separated in order to retrieve separate data. An ICP instrument was used to provide quantitative analysis on the aqueous solutions while a PXRD instrument was used to provide information on the solid. This project was supported by funding by the National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society.

Project Mentor: Professor Jennifer Morford, Department of Chemistry

During our time in the Creativity & Innovation for the Future of Work program, we dedicated half of our time to learning how to think critically and efficiently, and the other half applying our training to real-life problems relating to healthcare. Through thoughtful exercises and compassionate conversations, our cohort was able to empathize with and understand our target groups better. Our group found a need within the community of expecting mothers for education about lead paint detection in their homes. Our final project was centered around an at-home lead detecting kit, complete with a website containing information about the need-to-know facts about the dangers of lead and the different types of home-remediations that are possible, along with the phone number for Lead Free Families, the Lancaster-based home remediation program. We will continue to work on our project over the course of the semester, in collaboration with Lancaster General Health. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Creativity, Innovation and Future of Work Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Maya Greenshpan, Department of Italian Studies and Hebrew

Our research was centered on one of the 10 clinical research guidelines that included race as a factor during a 2018 review. Specifically, our focus was on the way that race has been used historically as a variable in studies related to dermatology. We felt inspired by the phrase “decolonizing dermatology,” as coined by physician Neil Singh, that we came across in our background reading. This concept encapsulates the historical exclusion of patients of color in dermatology research, as well as the persistent white normativity evident in medical textbooks and academic curricula. We explored these issues through qualitative interviews with dermatologists, annotating medical and sociological articles, and engaging in collaborative analysis with medical students and staff at Weill-Cornell. Our research left us with a better understanding of how harmful a lack of racial representation in studies meant to communicate crucial risk prevention behaviors can be. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Ashley Rondini, Department of Sociology

The origin of RotationSlicing began when astronomers had no easy way to take uniform slices of galaxy clusters at any arbitrary angle. Professor Praton as well as a multitude of interested students developed the RotationSlicing Python package to solve this dilemma. The goal for RotationSlicing is to become an Astropy-affiliated package and eventually a part of Astropy itself. This summer we worked on adding a new version of our existing coordinate transformation module to our package. The new code is much more complex but more modern, in that it keeps track of units and enables auto-transforms to other celestial coordinate systems. In this talk we will briefly demo the result, then focus on how we used Sphinx to auto-generate new html documentation. We will also show how we packaged everything for the Python Packaging Index (PyPI) and uploaded it to TestPyPI, PyPI's testing site. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Elizabeth Praton, Department of Physics and Astronomy

Deductive reasoning is a common human and AI capability. Humans are also capable of reasoning without complete knowledge, but most logic-based systems are limited in their ability to make inferences with incomplete knowledge due to the closed-world assumption. In this presentation/poster, we present our approach that uses analogical inferences to make deductive inferences with and without complete knowledge. Our algorithm, Repeated Analogy for Goal Reasoning (RAGeR), like many forward chaining reasoning algorithms makes inferences based on a match between the available facts and the antecedents of the rule. However, RAGeR uses analogical processes to find matching rules instead of unification. We demonstrate that a model of analogical retrieval is effective at identifying applicable models and that RAGeR can make a set of reasonable inferences when given incomplete knowledge. Overall, there is evidence that warrants further exploration in the relation between analogical processes and logical reasoning. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Jason (Willie) Wilson, Department of Computer Science

Typically, studies which strive to measure LGBTQI+ rights throughout the world narrow their focus on whether national legislation is protecting their rights. While this is a crucial angle to analyze, we must not overlook the merit in studying LGBTQI+ rights from a less concrete, more subjective viewpoint — the lived experiences of the people themselves. The Franklin and Marshall Global Barometers, in partnership with the Council for Global Equality, have launched the LGBTQI Perception Index — a survey that is available in four languages and across 204 countries. When we joined the project, our main goal was to reach out to other partners and influencers to ensure a diversity of responses. We launched an extensive social media campaign, consisting mainly of posts that aim to educate our audience on prominent LGBTQI figures and events. The results of the survey (closing September 2022) will be presented at the White House Summit for Democracy. This project was supported by funding from F&M's Hackman Summer Scholar Program.

Project Mentor: Professor Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, Department of Government

Social media, gender, and personality traits are factors that influence healthy sleep behavior in adolescents. iNOD scores measure difficulty disengaging from social media at bedtime after one should be asleep. They are significantly higher, sleeping times are significantly earlier, and neuroticism and agreeableness are significantly more prevalent in girls. Spearman’s test for correlation shows a very strong positive correlation between neuroticism and sleeping time, a strong negative correlation between agreeableness and sleeping time, a very strong positive correlation between neuroticism and SC subscale of the iNOD measure, and a strong correlation between agreeableness and the subscale. The higher agreeableness and neuroticism in girls could explain their higher iNOD scores due to the positive correlation between the two personality traits and the iNOD subscales of SC and FE. The higher agreeableness could explain the earlier sleeping times in girls despite higher iNOD scores owing to its negative correlation with sleeping time. This project was supported by funding from the Charles J.G. Mayaud Summer Travel Award.

Project Mentor: Dr. Holly Scott, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow