DigitalCommons@Colby

Exploring opportunity in America -- immigrant entrepreneurship and rags to riches success

Anna Erdheim — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:10:16 PST

The United States is, indeed, a land of vast opportunity. A diverse group of individuals continually benefit from the prospects provided by this inherently free nation. Although some constraints in America have prevented people from realizing their ultimate potentials, this nation offers immense possibilities overall to progress socially, economically, and culturally. America allows for people of all socioeconomic, religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds to take full advantage of the various opportunities offered by this mainly egalitarian land. I will demonstrate how various people have emerged from disadvantaged circumstances to succeed in the United States. In America, the majority of successful individuals are self-made.1 In fact, roughly 80% of American millionaires have earned their money by themselves, rather than through inheritance or as the result of family fortune. Such accounts of achievement are not rare in the United States.

Love, sex, & family: radical revisionings of the Oneida community

Cathryn Czernicki — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:41:37 PST

The Oneida Community and Oneida philosophy have attracted much attention throughout history. People have been interested in the Oneida Community because of what were considered its "outrageous" social and sexual practices. The message behind Oneida, however, was just as radical. The founder, creator, and leader of Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes, expressed a religious belief in Perfectionism. Noyes preached, "He that committeth sin is of the devil"?. Noyes's literal interpretation of that text is what made his message different and strange. Noyes believed that humans could live in a state of sinlessness. The Oneida Community espoused a way of life, laid out by Noyes, that would maintain such a life of sinlessness.

Rawls and Health Care

Elizabeth H. Coogan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:41:35 PST

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the morally irrelevant contingencies of nature and social arrangements are mitigated by principles of justice which govern the basic institutions of society. A common observation has been that Rawls left out any discussion of health care and how it might fit into his conception of a just society. Several philosophers have articulated expansions of the theory to account for health care. In the chapters that follow I will continue this tradition and consider how justice as fairness might be expanded to account for just health care allocation. In doing so, I hope to answer a particularly strong critique of the theory brought up by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and to argue for a broadened conception of health care which takes into account the complex causal relationship between society and human health.

Synthesis of a PEG-bipolar-dimyristoylphosphatidylethanoline

Hacho Bohos Bohossian — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:34:49 PST

The problem of drug delivery has been of continuous research interest to the biomedical scientific community. The basic problem of drug delivery is to facilitate the transport of medication via the bloodstream to the target organs. This process can be significantly hampered by the hydrophobic nature of most medications. Pharmaceutical compounds and in particular chemotherapeutics (which are a specific area of research at the Cornell Medical Center and the Sloan-Kettering Institute) tend to be extremely hydrophobic. Blood is a hydrophilic environment, so the hydrophobic drugs simply cannot dissolve in the bloodstream. As a result they cannot be transported successfully to the target tissues. For example, Sloan-Kettering possesses compounds that kill cancer cells 100ln vitro, yet those same compounds are virtually inactive in vivo because of their insolubility in the blood. It was our purpose, therefore, to develop an appropriate and successful drug delivery system.

The Effect of Orientation to Growing Season Sunlight on Stomatal Parameters of Q. rubra in the Belgrade Lakes Region, Central Maine

Rachel G. Daly — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:28:05 PST

Stomatal frequencies of fossil-plant species are used to estimate past pCO2 levels based on the physiological functions of living taxa. Numerous studies have shown that there is an inverse relationship between pCO2 and stomatal frequency parameters. As levels of pCO2 increase, the Stomatal Density (SD) and Stomatal Index (SI) decrease. However, pCO2 is not the only factor affecting SD and SI values, which are a product of leaf growth and expansion. Stomatal characteristics differ between genera, and studies also have shown that SD and light intensity have a positive correlation. The present study hypothesizes that SD and SI are not influenced by a leaf's physical orientation relative to the sun during the growing season. Leaves of Northern Red Oak, Quercus rubra, were collected from trees on lake margins around six lakes in the Belgrade Lakes Region, central Maine, USA. Lakes oriented in NE/SW, NW/SE, and E/W directions allowed for sampling of trees exposed to varying light intensities throughout the growing-season day. The SD and SI of each tree were calculated and comparisons made between populations exposed to predominant morning or afternoon light intensities, and between populations on lakes of differing orientations. No comparisons show a statistically significant difference between populations under different orientations to growing-season sunlight. The data suggest that exposure to various sunlight regimes on opposite sides of lakes does not play a role in the stomatal response as reflected in SD and SI of plants during a growing season.

Geographic distribution of genetic Variation in the Rare Orchid Isotria medeoloides

Emily Devlin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:02:32 PST

The rare orchid, Isotria medeoloides (Pursh) Raf., is a threatened species native to the Eastern United States. The species' range extends from Maine to Georgia, with many populations including fewer than 25 individuals. The degree of genetic variation among populations could have important implications for conservation strategies. This study evaluated the level of genetic variation within and among I. medeoloides populations through analysis of microsatellite regions, which contain dinucleotide repeats. The lengths of these regions are highly variable and have high mutation rates, making microsatellites a powerful genetic marker. Genetic variation was assessed at two microsatellite loci among 15 populations and three regions (New England, Virginia and Georgia). In this largely self-pollinating species, the inbreeding coefficient was high (Fis =0.964) indicating a high rate of self-fertilization. Populations in New England harbor the most genetic diversity. Southern populations are monomorphic, or nearly so, but distinct from each other, suggesting that they have each independently arisen by long distance colonization from Northern populations.

The Determinants of Recovery Rates on Defaulted Corporate Securities: Why do Fallen Angels recover more than Original High Yield Issues?

Adler Carolyn — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:22:02 PDT

Regression analysis has shown that recovery rates are determined by a variety of conditions at the time of default. These conditions can be broken into five major categories: (1) a security's seniority within the capital structure of the defaulting firm, (2) the type of default event, (3) firm-specific factors, (4) industry-specific factors, and (5) macroeconomic factors. Expectations of these inputs determine the expected recovery rate if default were to occur, thereby determining credit ratings and security prices. Although it is widely understood how recovery rate estimates influence credit rating assignments (the higher the expected recovery rate, the higher the assigned credit rating), no research, to the best of my knowledge, has investigated the reasons why higher rated securities recover more than lower rated securities in the event of default. Specifically, this paper will empirically investigate why securities originally rated investment grade, fallen angels, recover more than securities originally rated high yield in the event of default.

Religious Visions of the Feminine: An Examination of Mainstream Hindu Ideologies

Ann W. Levy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:02:53 PDT

Under the rickety fans and mosquito nets, the three of us would talk about work, the dog, my future, and before falling asleep I would always reflect on how amazing it was that I could live with these women, not just visit and impose myself, but become a part of their family and a part of their lives. Sadly, the connection in the dark was just that, it never carried on past sunrise, during the day, outside in the light. We are from two contrary cultures, one in which I clearly see intolerable injustices all around me. This is the same culture in which Indian women find a way of life that has existed for centuries that has aged into tradition. There exist two separate female identities; one is the powerful goddess whose Images pervade every crevice of society. The other identity is the reality, found in most every Indian woman's current situation. As I found myself connecting with the women in my Indian family, I also identified with their oppression. However, I was experiencing the oppression from a vastly different perspective, a temporary outsider's perspective, but one that has allowed me to question the sexual stratosphere and explore its origin and its slow transformation.

The Realization of Eisenstein's Excitation Factor: Grierson, Wiseman, and the Vietnam Documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s

Victoria A. Starr — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:02:47 PDT

In 1924, Sergei Eisenstein wrote "The Montage of Film Attractions," an essay that would powerfully influence the subsequent history of cinema. His insights as expressed in this essay widened the potential for nonfiction film to incite change through the audience reaction, modifying the screen-audience relationship from a passive reaction to an active interaction. Since Eisenstein's work in the 1920s, there has been a progression in the acceptance of Eisenstein's theories through the work of John Grierson and Frederick Wiseman. The final acceptance of Eisenstein's belief in the power of editing to incite change came in the late 1960s and early 1970s in a wave of documentaries based on Vietnam, which catalyzed their audiences through the use of novel juxtapositions. The Vietnam documentaries that illustrate this excitation through juxtaposition were Eugene Jones's A Face of War, Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig, and Peter Davis's Hearts and Minds.

Negotiating Gender and Lyric Tradition in Two Nineteenth Century Cultures

Po Yin Wong — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:02:42 PDT

The goal of this project is to compare the ways in which Emily Dickinson (1830 -1886) and Wu Zao (1799-1863), two female poets from America and China, respectively, create a unique female poetic voice with respect to and despite the cultural-specific challenges posed by their literary traditions. I will focus on lyric poetry, a genre that highlights the performative in both its structures and use of language as well as in its demands of engagement on the reader. Both Dickinson and Wu respond to the ideological challenges they face as women poets by expressing their temperaments in their lyric poems through their creative and performative use of diction and other literary devices.