The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHS) Capstone is a semester-long project that builds upon prior coursework and allows students to produce a polished piece of original work. Past projects have included papers suitable for publication, art installations, computer games, and more. This collection contains final AHS work in a variety of mediums, for projects from 2006 to the present.
For capstone project, I explored the following research questions: What were the differences between Engineers who built engines and those who bought engines for industrial work? How did migration & utilization of steam engine technology shape American engineering?
Criminal profiling is a compilation of best guesses about the personality of an unknown criminal. Since the 1970s this technique has developed into a viable investigation tool. This report explains the importance of criminal profiling and the procedure for creating a profile. Additionally, the well-known, unsolved Zodiac Killer case is analyzed and a profile of the killer is created from this crime assessment.
Compassion and the utilitarian German culture at first seem diametric opposites to the Westerner. But, people are people and they care for each other, their causes, and their countries. Three contemporary German films are reviewed in order to better understand current and historic perspectives of German life through the compassions emoted through each film.
This semester I set out to improve my a cappella arranging skills. I wanted to find out what techniques make an arrangement successful and learn how to use them in my own arrangements. I analyzed several existing arrangements before starting work on four of my own: Little Wonders, Settle Down, Price Tag/Where’s the Love, and Let It Snow. Over the course of the semester, I learned that revision is extremely important in arranging. I also learned that a piece does not need to be complex to be successful – in fact, based on feedback from PowerChords members singing my arrangements and the audience who attended the performance of my arrangements, the simplest one (Price Tag/Where’s the Love) was their favorite. I compiled all of my analysis, arrangements, and revisions in to a portfolio of work, aimed at helping future a cappella arrangers understand their own arranging process better.
A notational system is a means of unambiguously expressing a certain relationship between, or certain properties of, one or more quantities under investigation. Such a system makes use of written symbols that either represent the quantities in question or connect them to each other in various ways. The former kinds of symbols are referred to as variables, quantities, or terms, and the latter symbols are referred to as operators, predicates, or connectives. Generally speaking, variables represent the specific “things” we are making reference to, and operators and connectives express the relationships between these things. A specific sequence of these symbols is called a mathematical expression and is restricted by rules that set the syntax of allowable expressions. Those combinations of symbols that have correct syntax in a given notational system are called well-defined, and those that don’t are generally considered nonsensical and aren’t pursued further. For example, the expressions 1+1=2 and 2×2=4 are well-defined relative to the almost universal notational system of basic arithmetic, but expressions such as ×2+=1 are syntactically incorrect. These rules of syntax are largely a matter of convention, and it is possible to envision a notational system where this last “incorrect” expression is accepted as possessing a clear meaning.
Chinese school was always a negative experience in the past for me; however, I am now interested in Chinese learning. For capstone project, I wanted to compare and contrast Chinese school experience at present with mine and also understand parents' motivation for sending their kids to Chinese school.
Literature is both a reflection of the environment in which it is written and a force of change. It acts both as a record of events and as a spark to influence the future. In examining the presentation of self-identity in Turkish novels of the 1980’s, it becomes clear that it was not just the literature that was influenced by history, but the subjects of the literature as well. Both Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Curfew and Bilge Karasu’s Night present the self-identity of Turks in the 1980’s as being directly tied to the state and modern history of Turkey.
In today’s world, many of the items we use are designed to be used for a very specific purpose, in a specific context. Chairs, tables, soda cans, and other objects tend to be made from template, without consideration for how people really use them. In practice, there are many ways that new functions will emerge, independent of what the original intent was. For example, common dining chairs that are intended just to be used for sitting on are also used to hang clothes and bags, or as a temporary spot for a book. This piece approaches the idea that we do not know how people will use an item until they actually begin to interact with them and live with them, and that people never exactly know what they want out of an object until they have used them for a while. In concept, a highly modular and easily changeable group of objects will allow people to figure out for themselves what functions they desire, and reconfigure them as time passes, based on what works and what does not.
For my project I am creating pieces of curriculum for an after school program with the mission of teaching high school students the basics of computer science.
The state of health and healthcare in rural China has been an area of growing concern for the Chinese government and international observers for the last twenty years. A pattern of regression, marked by shockingly low health service utilization rates and staggeringly low health indicators across the board compared to urban neighbors, has thrown the backward farmlands of Central and Western China into the spotlight. The story of how health conditions in rural China arrived at its current state involves characters from the Chinese Revolution, the liberalization and privatization era of post-Mao China, and the ranks of contemporary providers, insurers, and government officials. A close look at the current system and its problems lead to the uncontestable conclusion that reform is needed. Fortunately, this fact has been recognized by the central Chinese government, which, bolstered by full coffers—the prize of unprecedented economic growth—and galvanized into action by the discontent of its citizens, has begun a significant attempt at healthcare reform in the past ten years. The following paper examines these efforts, with both a look back at the circumstances necessitating them and a prospective look ahead at potential obstacles, both institutional and political, to their successful implementation.
This guide is written for a group of people who possess a unique skill-set: engineering students. These people are well-qualified to help solve some of the world’s most pressing issues, particularly through the development of technology. The idea of appropriate technology is to develop products that are perfectly tailored to a specific context in order to enable a positive change in a user’s life. This can be as difficult a problem as the hardest technical task. It is impossible to evaluate these products in the abstract, without accounting for their roles in larger systems of interaction, behavior, and culture. Creating a product that fits into these more nebulous systems is much harder than simply making a part fit into another part correctly – it requires developing a deep understanding of a shifting, human context, filled with all of the good and bad that make us who we are.
This project focused on considering the progress of feminism in America, particularly since the 1960s, and how this progress has been reflected in the world of engineering. Further research into the large gaps between genders led me to the conclusion that women in engineering continue to have many battles to fight. This realization leaves me concerned about my ability to resolve the tension between being a female and being an engineer, but I remain confident in my abilities to be successful. I reflected this confusion and tension that I feel, in addition to my hope for resolution, in a textile reworking of a portrait I first drew in the spring of my sophomore year. Via material, color choice, and inspiring artists, I attempted to convey both uneasiness and comfort to the audience.
For my AHS Capstone, I wrote two short stories, “Ilied” and “Eglantine Roses,” and an essay concerning meaning in fiction. “Ilied” is a surrealist story inspired by visual music animation. “Eglantine Roses” is a realistic story focusing on the friendship of two young women. My essay considers the viewpoints on meaning in fiction from both literary critics and successful authors of fiction. I find that a pragmatic author will not attempt to communicate a particular meaning to all readers. Rather, an author will deliver a general meaning that readers can interpret differently based on their varied backgrounds. Finally, I reflect on my own writing experience. I explain how revision played an important role in communicating meaning in my stories.
Performers in the Americana music genre in New England and beyond combine influences from a variety of American music traditions including folk, rock and roll, country, andblues. However, there is no absolute set of musical elements that qualifies a song as “Americana.” Emphasis is placed less on the specific attributes of the music, and more on thesense of authenticity and integrity fans perceive behind the music. Listeners feel a strong senseof solidarity with the performers, resulting in the camaraderie and loose boundary between musician and fan that characterizes a music scene. In New England, artists who fall within this broad label work towards the genre’s recognition and growth. These efforts represent a collaborative grassroots effort to build a prominent and thriving music scene. In the case of Americana in New England, the reach of the community is extremely broad, both as a result ofthe genre’s vague definition and the regional geographic distinction set forth by an association of artists. The scene organizers nonetheless hold the power over how this music is perceived, and in what listeners define as Americana. Ethnographic fieldwork provided case studies in how the values and methods of this artist network impact the process of music scene formation and the structure of the community itself.
The goal for this project was to understand what, philosophically, distinguishes science from engineering. To accomplish this goal, I adopted a two-tiered approach. The meta-level focused on developing definitions for “science” and “engineering.” The support for this meta-level came from two philosophical papers, the first on falsification and the second on intersubjectivity. I wrote the papers in response to two self-supplied prompts on philosophical topics. As the diagram illustrates, the target thought space is the intersection of philosophy of science and of engineering, excluding philosophy of technology.
Whether it is celebrated as an empowering culture of individualism or mourned as a hollow and unsustainable plea for help, contemporary America’s identity as a consumer society is accepted as a universal fact. As a nation, our spending currently exceeds our means, yet we are by most metrics, among the richest nations on Earth. Clearly, consumption is a central value in our culture, and as such, has been the focus of extensive research, theorization, and discussion over the past century. Consumption, however, is also an extremely complex topic and its pervasiveness in contemporary American society necessarily and inextricably links it to myriad other aspects of culture and scholarship. Consequently, despite its central place—or perhaps because of it—our comprehension of the enormity and richness of consumption remains incomplete and at times controversial. This paper seeks, therefore, to explore only a narrow, but theoretically significant aspect of consumption behavior.
It is difficult to name a particular discipline this project falls under. It makes use of sociological theories, ethnographic research, and historical methods to study the meanings and the social community of the accordion. The closest thing to an existing “discipline” for this project is the rather small set of existing writings on the accordion’s history. There are several Russian, French, and German books about the instrument which, for reasons of language, are inaccessible to English-speaking readers. As for English-language works, there was practically nothing written before Toni Charuhas’ book The Accordion from 1955, of which I have not been able to obtain a copy. There have been several student theses about the accordion, Henry Doktorski has published several short articles describing aspects of the accordion’s history, and there are even a few accordion-centered short books such as the Accordion Resource Manual by Joseph Macerollo (1980). Victor Greene’s A Passion for Polka (1992) mentions the accordion as a relevant side note. However, the only two comprehensive works appear to be Flynn et al.’s The Golden Age of the Accordion (1992) and Steve Winkler’s master’s thesis in sociology, Accordion Work: Stigma and Struggle (1999). Most of these works focus on the accordion’s past, rather than the present situation that I am studying in this paper.
It has been said that short stories are for busy people or for those with short attention spans. But it seems that no matter what one says about short stories versus novels, as many exceptions support the opposite argument, and it becomes hard to pin down precisely what comprises a short story. For instance, the busy or distracted reader can meander in and out of a novel for ten-minute intervals, but cannot with a short story. Thus the classic definition of a short story that it must be able to be read in one sitting. Yet there is no strict consensus on the defining traits of the short story, which is technically a genre, not a form, and yet resists the precise definitions that usually surround both. The only obvious criterion, of course, is the defining length, approximately under fifty-pages: typically in the 12-16 or 18-24 page range, but sometimes in the 28-36 and occasionally even 38-48 page range.[1] Other definitions place the maximum word length at 7,500 words, and in contemporary usage, the term short story most often refers to a work of fiction no longer than 20,000 words and no shorter than 1,000. Stories shorter than 1,000 words fall into the flash fiction or “short short story” genre; stories surpassing the maximum length approach the areas of novelettes, novellas, or novels [1] Prof. Alicia Erian, Newhouse Visiting Professor of Writing, Wellesley College, April 10, 2006.
Internet has changed the way people meet new people. Meeting people online and then meeting them in person in life can be either positive or negative. The paper studies the effects of online meetups on people.
Musicians generally do not divide themselves with respect to their ability to hear. Instead, musicians rally around how or why they create music: players self-assemble under a common genre, instrument, style or type of ensemble. Musicians rarely question how a peer perceives sound if that sound is recognized as musical. However, hearing ability is an important distinction that elucidates important and unobvious opportunities for exploring what music means to musicians. This project is a study of musicians who fall at different places on the continuum that connects hearing and deafness. The goal of this study is to create a starting point for musicians to explore how others who share their passion can approach and perceive music in radically different ways.
Though formal and informal forms of any language always diverge to some degree, the particular political and social influences on French have created a marked difference between the textbook and colloquial varieties of the language. For non-native speakers who are proficient in the textbook variety, sudden immersion into the vernacular French culture can be a shock and can create misunderstandings between native and non-native speakers. This paper will provide the potential traveler with a historical understanding of how the two threads of the language evolved. It will also look at political and social influences on modern French and introduce the reader to situations for which formal French education may not prepare.
The goal of my AHS Capstone project has been to analyze the role of computers and the computing gap during the period between Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Specifically, I attempted to identify the means by which computers and the computing gap affected the Soviet Union during this active period of shifting economic, political, and social structures. I specifically discuss the economic consequences of the computing gap, and analyze the effect the relative backwardness in computing technology had on the Soviet Union, both in general, and in relation to the restructuring effort orchestrated by Gorbachev as part of perestroika. I then discuss the political consequences of the attempted rapidintroduction of computers during the Gorbachev reforms. Finally, I attempt to quantitatively describe the scope and magnitude of the computing gap, and to draw some broad conclusionsabout the role computer technologies play in geo-politics.
After studying formal theories of dance composition, I choreographed 3 dance pieces and documented my own choreographic process. I then compared these with the processes of professional choreographers to determine the differences.
I’ve been interested in languages since 3rd grade when I started taking Spanish language classes. In 7th grade I switched my focus to the French language and after 3 years of French I decided to spend a year abroad in Belgium to completely immerse myself in the French language and culture. That experience made me curious about the way in which languages are learned and how children learn them with more ease and success than adults. To combine my love of languages and education, I chose to do a 4 month project on immersion schooling in the hopes of making a useful guide for others to learn about the idea.
There is general confusion amongst many young students about what an engineer does. Some common misconceptions of an engineer’s occupation include driving a train or repairing a VCR. This narrow definition of engineering is misleading many students, leaving them uninformed about the possible career opportunities available to them. This includes females, who historically have been underrepresented in engineering due to such factors as lack of encouragement and inhibiting environments. Therefore, there is a significant need to attract students of both genders equally into engineering careers to create a balance workforce.
For my AHS Capstone, I have been working with Tom Kochem on writing the screenplay[1] for the movie Yellow Lights, which we are also producing, directing, and editing. We have been working on this screenplay since June 2005 and have essentially finished the production version of the screenplay for the start of filming in early December 2005. Between June and December, the screenplay will have gone through over 80 revisions and over 300 hours of work put in from both Tom and me. [1] Throughout this annotation, I will interchangeably use the words script and screenplay. In film, the main difference is that a screenplay is a script written to be filmed, instead of performed in a theater.
I have always been interested in both 19th century Spanish piano music and Jewish religious music, and I have spent my four years at Olin investigating the connection between the two. While learning about that connection through music and history classes, I worked steadily on composing a three-part musical piece that captured my understanding and displayed the relationship between the two different musical styles, and their influence on my own personal style. Can a musical piece be organized in a way that explains those connections to a listener? Can a musical piece take clearly separate multiple styles of music and connect them in an reasonable manner? I believe it can. My composition will have a large and complicated structure which I plan on explaining and justifying to my audience, along with a written description of the background and education that inspired my work. My objective is for an individual to read my written explanation, then listen to the musical work and clearly recognize the connection between Spanish piano music and Jewish religious music.
The transition from praxis to theoria—from mathematics as tekhne (techniquesfor dealing with practical activities) to mathematics as episteme and gnosis (a form of pure knowledge)—occurred only once in human history, namely, among the classical Greeks. No earlier mathematical tradition gives evidence of such a theoretical dimension,and where one encounters mathematical theory among later traditions, it is in the context of some manner of borrowing from the ancient Greek precedent. The goal of this paper is to examine the above “Greek precedent,” their process of developing mathematics as well as other scientific theory. We will first examine the rise of rational thought and beginnings of deduction in the Archaic Era, using Thales as representative of the time period. Then we will see how Aristotle added the syllogism and emphasis on observation during the Classical Era in order to enhance and codify deductive reasoning. Finally, Archimedes enters the picture and introduces an inductive method of discovery that crosses the disciplines of mathematics and mechanics.Throughout the paper are examples of how the Greeks applied their mathematical and scientific knowledge in order to demonstrate what new developments in reasoning added to the times.
Optical illusions are interesting within scientific disciplines because they lie on the border of what we are able to see. Different kinds of optical illusions may be better explained by one discipline or another. Some optical illusions trick us because of the properties of light and the way our eyes work, and are addressed by biology and perhaps optics, while other illusions depend on a “higher” level of processing which is better addressed by psychology. Some illusions can only be fully explained using knowledge of more than one discipline. When there are both biological and psychological explanations, they may both be right. In this paper, I cover some relevant theories from the fields of biology and psychology, and then apply them to four different optical illusions.
Although a photograph is an image of the past, it can only exist in the present and is thus subject to interpretation in the immediate context of whoever is viewing it. I explored the essence of photography by exploring contrast, a fundamental element of photography. My exploration is framed by a pursuit of basic geometric elements in my environment: the building blocks of all forms, whether natural or artificial. By focusing on elemental themes (contrast and geometry), I directed my energy at expressing my perception of the essence of photography.
This project is an exercise in digital painting, world building, and self-indulgence. My goal for it has always been to take a ‘pet’ idea I’ve had and expand on it as much as I could within a semester. While I’ve done digital art for a few years, I wanted to do an original project with a cohesive environment that conveyed something on a narrative level; both things that were new to me, as prior to this I was mainly concerned with rendering detail or primarily character focused. Through exposure in the gaming and film industry, I wanted to do the work of a concept artist, who creates illustrations of areas that do not exist to be used in media. For this project I created three large paintings as well as an array of sketches of a world built over human society dominated by fish-people. I defined the world of the compositions to be one where a race of humanoid fish creatures emerged from the sea, killing all humans, and integrating into the human infrastructure around them.
For my AHS Capstone project, I researched the life and times of Ada Lovelace, a 19th century noblewoman widely regarded as the world's first programmer for her work with Charles Babbage on his mechanical computers. After outlining my historical research and developing multiple graphical representations of my story (plot plots? :D), I created a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of my novel to guide my writing process. My final submission is this outline as well as the completed first two chapters, which cover the events of a few days in young Ada Lovelace's life.
Through our faces, we express emotions, form relationships, and sense the world. It’s natural for humans to want to reproduce this critical element of our identities, and portraiture photography is a popular art genre centered around the face. We live in an age of digitally massaged portraits designed to flatter the subject in the context of the society’s beauty standards. In my series, Faces, I’ve subverted this model—nobody’s pores have been edited out, nobody’s face has been manipulated. Here, I have deliberately taken up methods and techniques that are foreign to the digitally “perfected” image and alien to my “digital native” age. In this essay, I describe some of my technical and artistic choices in documenting faces and I suggest how they engage with the tradition of portraiture. The unvarnished, unretouched examination of people's faces is novel for the subjects of Faces, leading one of the subjects to remark that she “didn't know [her] face looked like” what was reproduced in the picture I took of her.
At the most fundamental level Augustine's Confessions is Augustine of Hippo sharing his story of conversion to Christianity. This story, however, doesn't fit neatly into what one might typically imagine when contemplating the process by which a future saint finds God. Indeed, a large part of what makes Augustine's journey so delightful is that in many ways it was a very personal and common project: finding one's place in the world.
I set out to connect three subjects with this project: my AHS concentration in media studies, science fiction and fantasy media, and education. The intersection of these topics is the result of my project: a curriculum for a media studies course analyzing common themes and structures used in the representation of fictional worlds and their connections to modern and historical cultures and societies. The media I explored and class discussion prompts I created raise a variety of questions and will spur conversation on philosophy, ethics, religion, race, sexuality, and the foundation of them all, identity. This project has provided a unique opportunity for me to go through the experience of analyzing books, film, and television from my perspective as a student, but also from the perspective of a teacher. In forming my exploration into a cohesive curriculum, I worked to create an overarching structure that builds up new ideas and concepts in both a logical and interesting order. As the course concludes, the topics and the relationships among them should begin to crystalize and connect, ideally in a manner that reveals as many new questions as answers and leaves students excited to continue to further pursue the ideas of the course in their own media consumption. The following document includes the course syllabus and lesson plans for a half-semester course that I will co-teach with my advisor, Prof. Maruta Vitols, in Spring 2016.
For my AHS Capstone project, I was invited to teach in a seventh grade classroom at the Fuller Middle School in Framingham, MA. I taught seven class sessions, dividing them into four parts to do a crash-course in various types of engineering. Two classes were spent teaching computer programming concepts using Scratch, two classes involved learning about circuits through MaKey MaKeys, one class was spent on a design exercise to encourage creativity and designing for real people, and two classes involved an active build where each student built their own custom standing desk converter using cardboard. The lesson plans and teaching materials used for this project are included in this document.
One reason I wanted to explore high speed was to branch out artistically. In the past, I've specialized in macro still life photographs. Macro embodies the idea that everything is amazing if you look at it closely enough. It makes tiny worlds all around us appear, for a moment, larger than life, stimulating the imagination. To me, the capture of things that are small on the time axis (as opposed to the size axis) seemed analogous but more technically challenging. The \staging" of a transient event is an art of its own. Some, like Reugels, have it down to a science. I don't, but through this work I gained a deep enough understanding of the process to have some consistency of quality in my photographs while exploring different materials.
I am attracted to working in metal because it is a medium of many contradictions. The heft of the metal grounds it to the earth, yet it still manages to dance in curves and valleys. Through its malleability and ductility, metal is able to be moved atom by atom, and shaped by a hand which gifts it the qualities of movement. From this movement, the piece can come to an equilibrium and arrive at the final form. This final form is a suspension—a balance of forces compressive and in tension. It’s seemingly static—but in reality, very much alive.
As someone who has been in and around the theater his entire life, I knew that my AHS Capstone project would involve some sort of production. Luckily for me, Claire Barnes was already planning on putting on a production of one of my favorite musicals, Next to Normal, for her capstone project. I hopped on board and now we are playing Diana and Dan, the wife and husband leads of the show. My project has a major section and a minor section. The major section is the actual acting. As someone who has never formally taken an acting class, I am embracing this opportunity as a great chance to learn in a private, personal matter. In addition, this show is giving me an acting opportunity that will extend my range as an actor. Actors have types - the typical sort of character they play. For me, that means the young, optimistic, tenor love interest lead. Playing Dan is a challenge for me because it is essentially the opposite of my type: older, tired, and fatherly. The very intense dramatic nature of this show also provides me an interesting opportunity because I rarely am involved in very dramatic scenes. I am excited at the opportunity to portray this role to the best of my abilities. The minor section, but by no means less important section, is research into mental illness. As part of developing my character, I am looking into how mental illness can affect social life, especially amongst family members. I will also be writing a note that will be in the playbill, discussing the role of mental illness in a family environment. I hope that this research will assist in my character development to create a deeper, more believable persona.
Over the last five hundred years, the North American landscape has been shaped by human expansion. In that time, the attitude toward nature has shifted from respect to attempts at domination. Urbanization and sprawl have worn away at the human-nature bond and living spaces once sculpted out of forests are now deposited on bulldozed lots. This semester, I created this series of photographs to tell a story of how our connection to the surrounding natural environment is realized through the homes we build. This story is spatial rather than temporal and is not intended as a criticism of city life or suburban sprawl. While preparing this collection, I was struck by small modernist villas encompassed by towering oak trees and by old farm houses framed by perfectly manicured lawns. The following images aim to remind of the ways in which we can design human environments to harmonize with those already present.
I examined media and textbooks aimed at children and analyzed what assumptions and lessons they contain about human rights in historical and colonial contexts. I then gave a presentation on my findings and on why these issues matter.
Synopsis: Inspired by my love of sailing and history, I sculpted my AHS Capstone project into an investigation based in these subjects. The resultant paper is a discussion of the relationships between engineering and design, and their influence on fabrication techniques in sailboat design. To this end, I discuss the designer Nathanael Herreshoff, the America’s Cup, and the influence of the US Navy.
This project was a look into surrealist literature. One goal was to understand how to both generate and understand surrealist fiction. The second goal was to improve as analytical writers by using various methods to examine text.
CultureHouse is a future pop-up community and cultural space in the Boston area. With regular programming, local food pop-ups, and an attention to good design, the space
I write a science fiction piece regarding time travel, and especially how it affects the mind of users and those around the user. I explore the strengths and weaknesses of the genre of science fiction, and also connect my creative side to my more common engineering personality.