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The Colby Echo (November 5, 2020)
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
Q&A with Richard Blanco, poet and visiting artist
Get PDFFor the spring 2018 semester, Richard Blanco, inaugural poet at Barack Obama\u27s second inaugration, is the artist in residence at Colby\u27s Lunder Institute for American Art. He\u27s teaching a one-credit course to Colby Students who use works in the Colby museum to teach poetry to area children
Blacklisted but not Defeated: Jack Foner returned to academe after 30 years and made Colby a leader in African-American studies
Get PDFColby hired Jack Foner and in a single stroke, a then nearly all-white liberal arts college in Maine became home to one of the first African-American Studies programs in the country
Ending the Spanish Exception: Explaining the Rise of Vox
No full textThe “Spanish Exception” refers to Spain’s lack, until recently, of a populist right-wing party. Vox became the first party to the right of the conservative PP to win seats in a regional election in 2018 and in general elections in April and November of 2019. Vox is currently the third largest political party in the Spanish parliament, bringing an end to Spanish exceptionalism. This thesis addresses the rise of Vox through a conceptual framework of political opportunity structure. The framework allows for multiple explanations to account for Vox’s sudden breakthrough. I argue that opportunities present in 2018 and 2019 at institutional, party system, and voter behavior levels combined to create a favorable moment for a right-wing populist party to gain electoral success in a country once thought to be immune from such parties. Given the recentness of Vox’s electoral success, this thesis adds a new case to the vast body of literature that addresses right-wing populist successes. Furthermore, it expands on explanations for such successes developed over the previous forty years of right-wing scholarship
The Art of Sore Losing: The Effect of Outsider Candidates on the Democratic Nomination System
No full textAbstract: The 2016 election posed a series of interesting questions about outsider candidates: Who are they? Why do they run? How do they affect the party? What party mechanisms either foster or hinder outsiders? To answer these questions, I look at every election after 1968-- the year the McGovern-Fraser reforms flipped the Democratic nomination system on its head. I classify every competitive candidate in every post-1968 election as an outsider, an establishment-like, or an establishment candidate, evaluating their political experience and reliance on small-donors. I find that Iowa and New Hampshire serve a pivotal point for all candidates, encouraging a retail-politics campaign strategy. The two states are unrepresentative of the United States, and therefore their stronghold over the nomination system is undemocratic. Furthermore, I find that in the post-reform era, there are more outsider candidates, and they are increasingly competitive with establishment candidates. The research suggests that the longer an outsider remains competitive, the more likely they are to become a sore loser
Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated with Bitter Taste Perception and Influence on Food and Drink Preferences
No full textPolymorphisms in bitter-taste genes lead to bitter-taste receptor variants that modulate individual response to bitter ligands that are found in food and beverages, including beer. Several single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with the perception of bitter compounds, such as phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and caffeine. The goal of this project was to investigate the influence of four SNPs located within bitter-taste receptor genes on the food and drink preferences of 26 individuals. Genotyping at rs10772420G\u3eC, rs2597979G\u3eC, rs713598C\u3eG, and rs10246939T\u3eC was performed using real-time PCR. Food preferences and bitter-taste sensitivities were determined using food and drink surveys, taste papers, and beer tasting. Our findings demonstrate that bitter-taste perception of and individual preferences for certain foods and drinks, including beer, are interconnected, and may be well informed by assessing individual genotypes at SNPs of related bitter-taste genes. Our findings suggest that these four SNPs may interact to influence food, drink, and beer preferences
Identifying Metabolites as Markers of Fatigue in Athletes
No full textFatigue in athletes caused by inadequate rest and other stressors can be severely detrimental to their health, and yet there is no reliable way to measure and track fatigue. Many classical measures of fatigue like body mass and resting heart rate are not reliable ways to track the physical fatigue of an athlete because they can change with many factors. In addition, it is not known how academic stress on top of physical stress affects fatigue. Metabolomics is a relatively new area of study and tracking metabolites offers the possibility to produce biomarkers to assess fatigue. This study collected saliva samples from 10 football players to determine salivary levels of the metabolites cortisol, alanine and glutamine to track the fatigue of the subjects. Due to the small subject pool, much of the changes in classical fatigue measures and metabolite concentrations were determined to be statistically insignificant. Even so, alanine exhibited relatively small changes in concentration, while glutamine exhibited a drop over the course of the football season. Cortisol did not seem to show any consistent trends