Underrepresentation of Women in Political Leadership Around the World

Women around the world have faced many obstacles and inequalities throughout history. Women in the United States were given the right to vote in 1920, just 100 years ago. Although many countries have given women the right to vote, women remain underrepresented in political leadership. In 2019, an average of 24.3% of all national parliamentarians were female. A balanced participation between males and females in politics is important to have an effective democracy. Additionally, a greater female participation in politics increases overall quality of life by increasing representation of issues that pertain to 50% of our planet’s population. By raising awareness about gender inequalities, women will become empowered to take political leadership. Our project will look at the ratio of females to males in the upper house or first chamber of parliament around the world throughout the 21st century

Estimating the Number of Earth-Sized Habitable Planets in our Galaxy

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting sun-like stars, and while the number of these planets detected by Kepler is already known, the efficiency and accuracy of the telescope’s instruments are not extremely clear or precise. Using planetary transits accessed from Kepler lightcurve data, one can apply machine-learning methods for detecting transits and then run simulated transits through the model to find planets that failed to be spotted previously. Here, we utilize the Box Least Squares Method (BLS) alongside the Transit Least Squares Method (TLS) to search for transit-like features while taking into account features such as stellar limb darkening, orbital radii, transit depths, and planetary ingress and egress. Once the transits are detected, we can then calculate the efficiency of the telescope using the simulated transits, and this probability can be used in proportion to the number of Earth-sized habitable exoplanets in the Milky Way Galaxy