Air travel has become increasingly popular, becoming the preferred and most efficient method of travel throughout the years. With air travel projected to double within the next 20 years, more people than ever will be utilizing this form of travel. However, an increased demand requires an equivalent increase of security and safety. Many individuals have pondered this concept in an effort to better understand the corrective action in store following two deadly crashes that killed over 300 people. Are the airlines and aerospace manufacturers able to ensure a specific safety standard across all aircraft models and is this enough to reassure the public? Boeing, one of the industry’s leaders in aerospace manufacturing, found itself at the forefront of this movement for safety after the tragic system failures of its aircraft, the Boeing 737 MAX 8.
This report has been curated in an effort to highlight the injustices and oversights that have occurred throughout the course of the Boeing Crisis. These have formed during the early stages of designing, manufacturing, and integration process of the Boeing 737 MAX 8. The coverage and investigation that this crisis received was not cumulative of all factors that contributed to the failure of the aircraft to perform as designed while in flight. With many official reports from Boeing and the FAA being insufficient in both scope and detail of the crashes, this report will highlight the integral details that should play a larger role in the future manufacturing processes of aircrafts.

Attending a university is a stressful transition for many students leaving their respective support systems. Many universities attempt to mitigate this stress by offering numerous campus resources such as, tutoring services, counseling services, and health services. However, research has shown that many of these resources are under utilized by the general student population because of barriers that include student perception, awareness, and access. Being able to understand these barriers that lead to the under utilization of campus resources can assist with creating resources that are more visible, engaging, and attractive to student populations on many campuses. The question being asked is: how to create an engaging health resource that is attractive, visible, and accessible to students?

Based on research analyzed on the barriers between students and campus resources, the optimization of student outreach, and marketing strategies directed towards students, the creation of a student-led campus health resource followed. Analysis of this research showcased that the medium in which students resources were promoted, and the framework of the resource have an impact on students' awareness of the resource, attractiveness of the student resource, and student resource engagement. Based on these analyses and results, the creation of HealthU occurred to provide a visible, engaging, and attractive student resource to the Arizona State University student body.

With the rising growth of makerspaces in the United States, many are at the leading edge of innovation but are struggling to adequately keep track of and maintain the supplies required to make those innovations come to fruition. Due to most makerspaces being publically funded by local governments, universities, or designated grant money, approval for purchase and implementation of a proper inventory management system takes time. We have created an application called Introventoria that assists these businesses to manage their materials, tools, customers, etc.

As ASU students, we saw that our peers had opinions regarding sustainable issues, but did not feel like their voices were being heard by the university. We saw a space we could fill to promote engagement and let students know that they could participate in finding sustainable solutions to problems they faced around campus. This created our venture which works to promote engagement through sustainable solutions. We ran a successful competition with students and local professionals by focusing on sustainability topics students were interested in. Promoting engagement can often come across as disingenuous and thus serve the opposite effect of its function. By centering around the topic of tailored sustainability related competitions, we can direct goodwill to the organizations by harnessing the positive feelings individuals have toward sustainability topics.

We created a sufficient database that can be used by the SDA for extensive analysis as well as a starting foundation for further development. The design of the database revolved around the men’s basketball team and includes data for conferences, teams, players, and the historic schedule of teams past performances. This design can be used as a template for future sports that would like to be added to the database. The queries we ran that tested the functionality of the database show the utility and accessibility that is possible with the data currently in the database. The visuals included assist our examples by exhibiting how the results gathered by the queries can be transformed into figures that may be more visually appealing than the raw data. We came up with example questions that could be potential questions the SDA may have regarding current and past performance statistics. We expect that as a continuation of this project, the SDA will be able to utilize it to their advantage to analyze and improve the performance levels of other teams.

In recent years, feminist activists have taken their fascination with and concern over access to period products in developing countries and diverted their attention to period poverty that exists in the United States. Backed by globalist approaches and the deep history of Menstrual Activism in the US, the Menstrual Equity Movement aims to make policy changes at the state and federal levels to ensure that all menstruators have the products they need to manage menstruation. This exploratory study aims to understand the experiences and attitudes about period poverty at Arizona State University’s campus. Undergraduate menstruators were asked to reflect on general, and on campus experiences with access to period products. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were utilized in conducting this research. This study concludes that menstruators’ education would benefit from having access to free period products in all bathrooms.

Political polarization is at an all-time high in the United States and people are more polarized in their beliefs than ever. The issue of polarization is one of the most divisive conflicts in America today. The following honors thesis analyzes how political polarization affects voter emotions and behaviors. To study this, I expose participants to a high polarization news article and a low polarization news article and observe the results. Out of the test came two key findings. The first is that participants who identify as Independents were much more likely to feel inspiration in a high polarization context than in a low polarization context. The second is that in a high polarization condition, Democrat and Republican participants felt more connected to their own parties compared to the control condition.

In this paper, I describe the development of a unique approach to developing strategies for games in which success can only be measured by the final outcome of the game, preventing the use of heuristics. I created and evaluated evolutionary algorithms, applying them to develop strategies for tic-tac-toe. Strategies are comprised of neural networks with randomly initiated weights. A population of candidate strategies are created, each strategy competes individually against each other strategy, and evolutionary operators are applied to create subsequent generations of strategies. The set of strategies within a generation of the evolutionary algorithm forms a metagame that evolves as the algorithm progresses. Hypothesis testing shows that strategies produced by this approach significantly outperform a baseline of entirely random action, although they are still far from optimal gameplay.

As graduation season approaches each year, companies are seeking to hire the top talent from different universities all over the world. The battle to hire recent college graduates stems from the desire to hire young, hungry, and excited employees. However, with young age comes a lack of experience and exposure to the work force. The purpose of this thesis is to understand how recruiters from large corporations decide which candidates to hire, specifically candidates who are recent college graduates. Given that recent college graduates have little to no experience, it can be challenging for recruiters to determine their potential performance in each role. In comparison to seasoned professionals who have years of industry experience under their belts, it can be challenging for a recruiter effectively determine a young professional’s skills, work ethic, and industry knowledge.

I have identified and explained the different hiring methods that companies use when recruiting new talent to provide background information for my research. Furthermore, I have also interviewed several recruiters from large corporations in order to gain a further understanding of the university recruitment process, including what works and what doesn’t work. From the gathered research, I discovered key findings surrounding the topics of the interview process itself, how to properly assess a candidate, key components of the process and suggestions for enhancing the process. With this information, I have established recommendations for interviewing college graduates such as incorporating a pre-hire assessment into the process, implementing an on-site experience, condensing the process and clearly defining the interview protocol.