2019

In this tutorial students have researched and written a history of Jews and Jewishness at Davidson College. The history explores the experiences of Jewish students, faculty, and staff at Davidson; a history of campus speakers, programming, and organizations pertaining to Judaism, Jewishness and/or anti-Semitism (this includes the history of Hillel, for example); the cultural and historical context of being Jewish at Davidson, which includes coverage of Jews in the American South, the relationship over time between the Presbyterian Church and Judaism specifically, as well as that between the Reformed tradition and Jews and Judaism more broadly; the history of Jewish people in higher education in the US; and also a history of American anti-Semitism, through several relevant case studies, including the recent experience of anti-Semitic hate speech and threats on Davidson’s campus. The history is housed on a website and includes oral histories (video and audio).

The Effect of Tax Rates on Interstate Migration Rates

May 7, 2019 By Media Consultant

Marshall Brady

Faculty Sponsor: Shyam Gouri Suresh

This paper draws data from all fifty states over a period of four years in an attempt to study the effect that government controlled economic variables, such as various taxes and the minimum wage, has on interstate migration rates in the United States. Several other variables that are not directly decided by state governments are included in the model to act as controls. It was predicted that those variables that increased one’s disposable income would increase migration and those that decreased one’s disposable income would decrease migration. Overall, the variables in question proved to match the theory at the ten percent significance level.

Calculating the Trajectory of an Object Orbiting a Black Hole

May 7, 2019 By Media Consultant

Evan Pritchard

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Michelle Kuchera

Black holes and the motion of objects of mass around them are important concepts to understand when talking about the universe. The azimuthal, or radial angle, radius, the initial angular speed, and the initial change in radius are values needed to calculate the trajectory of their path. Changing any of these values creates a vastly different trajectory. It was found that the most regular change between graphs changed when the dɸ/dt was changed by an interval of .01 from .01 to .07. The Fourth-Order Runge-Kutta method was used to compute the differential equations that explain the motion. The pylab package in the Spyder Python IDE was used to complete the computations graph the trajectory of an object.