Lines and junctions

May 9, 2017

Hallie Echelman ’17 shows a Doppler device for
measuring sea-current speed. 

This year’s Academic Festival filled a whole day and the whole campus with some 115 solo and team presentations of student work. The examples below begin with “hard” science, blend into and through the social sciences and humanities, and end with “pure” art: 

* The biology of postcopulatory sleep reduction in female fruitflies

* Effects of shift work on firefighter physiology

* Geologic, environmental, and policy aspects of storing liquid petroleum gas in old salt mines

* Adolescent social isolation, the hormone oxytocin, and adult social anxiety

* Disaster planning and response: 2015 Nepal earthquake

* Pro bono business consulting for Saratoga’s Universal Preservation Hall performance venue, Death Wish Coffee, and Olde Saratoga Brewery

* The saving or rescuing impulse in international projects, from mitigating plastics in the oceans, to slum tourism, to Africa-China relations

* Effects of financial incentives and state regulations on the cost of solar power

* Comparing general vs. immigrant familial involvement in elementary schools

* Public opinion as a determinant of sex-offender public-notification laws

* Max Weber’s protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism

Thomas Cane ’19 explains an astrophysics project
as Connor Crawford ’17 looks on.

* Perceptions of incompatibility between Islam and Western secularism

* Neo-Aristotelian and other approaches to an ethics of virtue

* Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry readings

* Tourist art: 1950s Cuba in the American imagination

* Cognitive processes in interpreting vs. improvising music

* The role of Estonia’s music culture in its liberation from the Soviet Union

* Display of documentary videos, interviews, and exhibitions 

* Artworks inspired by the concept and tradition of the bestiary