Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

Testing biological hypotheses with embodied robots: adaptations, accidents, and by-products in the evolution of vertebrates

Publication Date
2014-November-12
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Abstract

Evolutionary robotics allows biologists to test hypotheses about extinct animals. In our case, we modeled some of the first vertebrates, jawless fishes, in order to study the evolution of the trait after which vertebrates are named: vertebrae. …

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Tuskegee and the Health of Black Infants

Publication Date
2021-January-01
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Authors
Department or Program
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Abstract

For nearly half a century, the American government funded the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." As the name suggests, this experiment abused black men from Alabama and required medical professionals to withhold care from the test...

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Ugly Food for Thought: Ripple Effects from a New Food Movement

Publication Date
2020-January-01
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Authors
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Abstract

In 2015, the Ugly Food Movement started by companies and campaigns to market and sell aesthetically suboptimal fruits and vegetables. The movement began in response to an increasingly visual culture in which many customers and retailers reject produce on the...

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What Do You Meme? An Exploration of Internet Communication Through Memes

Publication Date
2021-January-01
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Authors
Department or Program
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Abstract

The topic of memes and the ethnographies they create are discussed. Memes that have been created and adopted by alt-right communities, specifically incels, illustrate their ideologies while simultaneously validating their views and recruiting insecure, vulnerable populations. Memes from times past...

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