Senior theses integrate disciplines

Given a strenuous course load and a plethora of requirements, engineering students are not known to branch out of their fields. But in their theses, some seniors have bravely faced the challenge of combining engineering with other subjects, from neuroscience to English.

Hats for sale

By the time he's finished, Colin Ligon '04 will have more than just a manuscript — he will have an odd-looking but potentially lifesaving hat.

For his thesis, Ligon is developing a system that uses brain waves to determine when someone — say, a driver — is about to fall asleep and then uses this knowledge to wake him up again.

"I think it's a lot cooler... when you can say that this is what I made, instead of just looking at data," said Ligon, who is majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering and receiving certificates in engineering biology and robotics. "And there's lots of money in the market for this."

As part of his work, Ligon devised a simple driving simulation computer program in which subjects use a keyboard to follow a car moving randomly on the screen. While performing the task, the subjects are undergoing electroencephalography, a widely-used mechanism to study brain activation. Since the task is designed to be long and boring, most people eventually lose track of the car or even fall asleep, providing Ligon with the data he needs.

"I'm looking at subtle details in the neural network, so that eventually I can measure brain waves in real time and detect when someone is about to go to sleep," Ligon said. "A system like this will be needed anywhere that people have to be constantly alert on the job."

After analyzing all the data, Ligon plans to create a hat with two electrodes connected to a laptop that will beep loudly whenever it detects the brain activation of a person losing awareness of his environment.

Ligon said he is not the only researcher attempting to build such an awareness detector, but his methods are significantly less invasive.

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"There's a product already made that attaches to the person's neck, and when his head starts drooping, it shocks him strongly," he said. "I didn't even know that's legal! But I know Ford and GM are spending a lot of money looking into detectors."

Art imitating life

While not quite as lucrative, Katy Milkman '04 has an equally original thesis — using statistics to analyze short stories.

An operations research and financial engineering major with a certificate in American studies, Milkman read all 440 pieces of fiction published in New Yorker magazine in the 1990s, attempting to mathematically answer three questions — the relationship between authors and the characters they write about, how changes in the executive editor and fiction editor of the magazine affected the stories and how representative the characters in the fiction are to the demographics of the U.S., New York State and New Yorker magazine subscribers.

Milkman got the idea for the first question after taking English professor emeritus Elaine Showalter's class on the American short story.

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"We would always hear about the author's life and then analyze the stories in relation to it," she said. "So the assumption was that the author's biography was important. I wanted to test that."

Indeed, Milkman found that "fiction is incredibly autobiographical." In terms of age, race, gender and country of origin, the protagonists of the stories overwhelmingly shared demographic factors with the author.

Looking more closely at the data, Milkman made an even more interesting finding. She found that different categories of authors were more autobiographical than others. For example, men wrote about men about 85 percent of the time, but women wrote about women only 75 percent of the time, an "extremely significant" difference, she said.

"Why is this? Do women perceive that to get published they need to write about men, or does it have to do with a male-dominated society? There are a lot of possibilities," she said.

Similarly, Americans were more autobiographical than non-Americans, and whites and Asians more than blacks and Hispanics.

For the second research question, Milkman found that fiction editors had a much larger impact than executive editors, even when Tina Brown, a "pop star" of the publishing world, took the helm as executive editor.

"I expected sex, homosexuality, more women authors, just a more racy style," Milkman said. "But there wasn't that much."

But the most peculiar finding came with the final question. Milkman found that the distribution of settings in the New Yorker stories was "extremely correlated" to where magazine subscribers live, but not to U.S. population density as a whole.