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A Good Place for Moral Philosophy: Associate Professor Lydia Moland on The Good Place and why all of her students should be haunted
Get PDFAssociate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland recently moderated a WBUR CitySpace event featuring producer Michael Schur and actor William Jackson Harper of the NBC comedy The Good Place. The award-winning show is about a character, Eleanor, who is mistakenly sent to “the good place” in the afterlife and then has to figure out how to become a better person. Moland spoke with Colby Magazine Editorial Director Gerry Boyle ’78 about television, morality, and how the most important ideas should fit on a bumper sticker
The Quantitative Assessment of Pond Scum: An examination of the biogeochemistry of phosphorus cycling in the Belgrade lakes
No full textThe internal recycling phosphorus in freshwater lake bottom sediments represents a significant source of hypolimnetic phosphorus (P) release for many of Maine’s lakes. In summer months, Maine lakes often thermally stratify and the lake hypolimnion develops anoxia, leading to a reduction in redox potential at the sediment-water interface. These reducing conditions facilitate the reductive dissolution of ferric iron, and, since phosphorus is often present in freshwater lake sediments as solid FeOOH-PO4 complexes, results in release of soluble phosphorus into the water column. Our current study presents field and laboratory data from sediment fractionation extractions designed to quantify concentrations of iron, aluminum and phosphorus in lake bottom sediments from East Pond (Smithfield, ME), Great Pond (Belgrade, ME) and China Lake (China, ME). We focus on elucidating the chemical foundations of the fractionation method so as to streamline our extraction procedure and minimize the required sample size. We confirm that internal P flux is negligible during hypolimnetic anoxia if molar Al:Fe is \u3e 3. We ultimately hope to apply our extraction data to optimize aluminum dosing schemes designed to mitigate internal P flux in lakes above their phosphorus sorption threshold using the designated Al:Fe \u3e 3 as an operational target for aluminum additions
A Generalized Polar-coordinate Integration Formula, Oscillatory Integral Techniques, and Applications to Convolution Powers of Complex-valued Functions on
Get PDFIn this thesis, we consider a class of function on , called positive homogeneous functions, which interact well with certain continuous one-parameter groups of (generally anisotropic) dilations. Generalizing the Euclidean norm, positive homogeneous functions appear naturally in the study of convolution powers of complex-valued functions on . As the spherical measure is a Radon measure on the unit sphere which is invariant under the symmetry group of the Euclidean norm, to each positive homogeneous function , we construct a Radon measure on which is invariant under the symmetry group of . With this measure, we prove a generalization of the classical polar-coordinate integration formula and deduce a number of corollaries in this setting. We then turn to the study of convolution powers of complex functions on and certain oscillatory integrals which arise naturally in that context. Armed with our integration formula and the Van der Corput lemma, we establish sup-norm-type estimates for convolution powers; this result is new and partially extends results of (Randles, 2015) and (Randles, 2017). Much of this thesis is based on the article (Bui, 2021)
Protecting Privacy in COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing
Get PDFDigital contact tracing applications are a necessary and potentially dangerous tool used to combat the spread of COVID-19. Due to the potentially sensitive nature of personal information gathered by contact tracing applications, there is high potential for privacy issues to arise. This thesis explores the dangers of digital contact tracing or contact tracing via a mobile application. Focusing on the United States, this paper studies how contact tracing works and how a contact tracing application might collect different types of data. The paper then studies the effects of giving up location data and health data and what potential ramifications that may hold. Finally, the thesis concludes with the idea that there needs to be federal regulations on health and personal data beyond that of which is provided by HIPAA, noting that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation can be a good model for the United States
Convolutional Audio Source Separation Applied to Drum Signal Separation
Get PDFThis study examined the task of drum signal separation from full music mixes via both classical methods (Independent Component Analysis) and a combination of Time-Frequency Binary Masking and Convolutional Neural Networks. The results indicate that classical methods relying on predefined computations do not achieve any meaningful results, while convolutional neural networks can achieve imperfect but musically useful results. Furthermore, neural network performance can be improved by data augmentation via transposition – a technique that can only be applied in the context of drum signal separation
The Colby Echo (March 18, 2021)
Get PDFPublished by the students of Colby College since 1877, The Colby Echo is the weekly, editorially independent student-run newspaper of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Published monthly, 1877-1886; semi-monthly, 1886-1897; and weekly, during the academic year, 1898-present