Wind quintet (consisting of flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon) has been a favored ensemble of composers for centuries. Throughout the semester, these four students have been working on pieces for such an ensemble. During this session the presenters’ compositions will be performed live.

Historians make use of a plethora of material as they search for knowledge of the past, always adding new historiography to the existing literature. Only very recently have a few scholars, notably Joseph Witek, sought to examine comic books for what historians might glean from them about history. This study, the first of its kind in relation to comic books – at least as far as published scholarship – is comparable to Robert Darnton’s work, where he studied sixteenth- and seventeenth-century peasantry folktales to find evidence of their thoughts at the time, by looking at the mentalities they conveyed in their tales. Comic books, similar to folktales in their creative nature and fictional context, are no less useful for examining more recent mentalities. This paper examines two mentalities toward homosexuality in the United States through comic books published by Marvel Comics.

This paper presents research on various encryption schemes and their applications in securing data. Specifically, I discuss their vulnerabilities, implementations (both logically and mathematically), and briefly mention their durability against cryptanalysis attacks. I also present their mathematical properties, and theories that are assumed to hold within a security parameter. In particularly, I focus my attention on the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman) Encryption Algorithm and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) Algorithm in CBC mode (Cipher Block Chaining) against chosen-plaintext attacks [1] due to their popularity. I also introduce BB84 (Benett and Brassard 1984) and its relation to the one-time pad encryption scheme. Finally, by analyzing the pros and cons of all of the algorithms, I explain why the use of the one-time pad and BB84 key exchange are inherently superior to other approaches.

During World War 1, the media portrayed the recruitment of women war workers as a huge success. Women were employed by the thousands, faithfully fulfilling their patriotic duty in support of the men fighting in the war. My research will show the downside for women working in the munitions factories: the dangers they faced from accidental detonations, their contact with chemicals, and the dangers to themselves and their families, the harsh conditions they faced within the factories and their dismissal from these factory positions after the Great War.

World War 1 created labor shortages particularly in factories. Formerly women were not allowed to work in munitions factories, but to fill vacancies and to satisfy the need for additional work, the Women Work Council and Ministry of Munitions launched large recruitment drives. These actions seemed positive because an ever larger number of women were earning ever higher incomes which enable the women to achieve a higher standard of living. These accomplishments however, blinded contemporaries to the downside of war-time work in munitions factories.

The negative aspects of women working in the munitions factories are important because the population was unaware of the conditions these women faced on a daily basis. The Ministry of Munitions did not disclose the dangers the women faced working in the munitions factories. Instead the government used propaganda and the media to lure the women into these positions reinforcing the idea that it was the women’s patriotic duty. The women were seen as a means of producing as many armaments as possible.

In 1917, the British War Office launched a program to incorporate dogs into the military to serve as messengers, sentries, and guards. Dogs were pulled from the public sphere where their well-being was safeguarded under the Animal Protection Act of 1911 and placed directly under the control of the military. This paper examines the British Military’s war dog policies, their nutritional guidelines, general protocols, and the culture of care cultivated, in order to glean insight into the motivations responsible for improvements in the level of training, medical attention, and the care and treatment dogs received. This involved examining newspaper articles, memoirs of the founders of the war dogs program, and casualty reports posted by canine advocacy groups. It was found that the military’s impetus to treat dogs more humanely by improving the quality of care stemmed from the necessity for marital success rather than fulfilling a moral obligation.