Showing 3471 - 3480 of 5713 Items
Unraveling Paradise: Colonialism and Disguise in German Language Literature
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Brigita Kant
Access: Open access
- For centuries, the Pacific Islands have been disguised by Europeans through the trope of “island paradise." Despite Europe’s role in bringing colonization and racial oppression to Oceania, the dominant narrative has been that Pacific Islanders lead simple lives, untouched from the complicated aspects of the “modern world.” This narrative has enabled White outsiders to fantasize about the Pacific Islands as a place for personal denial of Western social conventions, simultaneously allowing White European men to fetishize and possess Pacific Island culture and identity. My honors project will closely examine three fictional German language texts- Haimotochare (1819), Der Papalagi (1920), and Imperium (2012)- centered around the exploration German colonial involvement in Pacific Islands. My analysis of these texts will allow for the understanding of how the false narrative of “island paradise” came to be, how it has been embraced and weaponized, and what it means for both German and Pacific Islander post-colonial identity.
Outlier Detection in Energy Datasets
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Stephen Crawford
Access: Open access
- In the past decade, numerous datasets have been released with the explicit goal of furthering non-intrusive load monitoring research (NILM). NILM is an energy measurement strategy that seeks to disaggregate building-scale loads. Disaggregation attempts to turn the energy consumption of a building into its constituent appliances. NILM algorithms require representative real-world measurements which has led institutions to publish and share their own datasets. NILM algorithms are designed, trained, and tested using the data presented in a small number of these NILM datasets. Many of the datasets contain arbitrarily selected devices. Likewise, the datasets themselves report aggregate load information from building(s) which are similarly selected arbitrarily. This raises the question of the representativeness of the datasets themselves as well as the algorithms based on their reports. One way to judge the representativeness of NILM datasets is to look for the presence of outliers in these datasets. This paper presents a novel method of identifying outlier devices from NILM datasets. With this identification process, it becomes possible to mitigate and measure the impact of outliers. This represents an important consideration to the long-term deployment of NILM algorithms.
"Possessive gentleness": Insecure Attachments in American Literature
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Ella Pearl Crabtree
Access: Open access
- “‘Possessive Gentleness’: Insecure Attachments in American Literature” applies psychological attachment theory to works of American Literature. Each novel examined—Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856), and The Minister’s Wooing (1859) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Third Generation (1954) by Chester Himes, and The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison—describes the forces behind insecure attachment relationships between child characters and their caregivers. The first chapter of this project focuses on Stowe’s anti-slavery novels. It argues that the institution of slavery is in conflict with Christianity in these works, because it impedes disinterestedly benevolent mothering and disrupts secure attachments. The second chapter analyzes The Third Generation, and suggests that colorism in the black community is the cause of insecure attachments in Himes’ work. The third and final chapter examines The Bluest Eye, and presents sympathy, as embodied by the novel’s narrator, as a potential remedy for insecure parent-child attachments. Together, these texts elucidate how societal forces (e.g. colorism, poverty) intrude upon the family structure and destabilize parent-child attachments. Optimistically, however, they also suggest that improved parent-child attachments might function as a vehicle of broader social change.
Forests as Fuel? An Investigation of Biomass’ Role in a Just Energy Transition
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Brianna Cunliffe
Access: Open access
- Although wood pellet biomass corporations frame their recent rapid growth as a victory for “green energy”, troubling evidence of their adverse impacts on climate and environmental justice calls for rigorous investigation of these claims. Contextualizing biomass within the envirotechnical regimes that have created industrial ‘sacrifice zones’ in BIPOC low-income communities in the US South, this paper recharacterizes it as an innovation within oppressive regimes. It further critiques carbon accounting frameworks that designate biomass as renewable despite its greater emissions per capita than coal and carbon debts created by deforestation that could take centuries to rectify. Biomass pellet production plants, cited disproportionately in environmental justice communities, also emit serious and often under-reported amounts of pollutants including PM 2.5, VOCs, and HAPs, linked to higher rates of chronic illness and premature death in impacted communities. The current regulatory paradigm guarantees neither distributive nor procedural justice. Ethnographic research including participant-observation, interviews, and site visits revealed that community members felt that regulatory bodies serve corporations above vulnerable citizens, that their voices were not valued in public hearings or by elected officials, and that the pollution, dishonesty, and ecological harms plants bring far outweighs their meagre economic benefits. Communities enact robust resistance to biomass as both a global climate threat and a local injustice. This paper traces how coalitions connecting intersectional grassroots activist networks to larger advocacy organizations are achieving victories on the ground and in the court of public opinion, and the lessons this synergy holds for the endeavor of a truly just transition.
Characterization of the ELMO2 Protein that Mediates Cell Adhesion in Arabidopsis thaliana
Date: 2022-01-01
Creator: Devaki Rajiv
Access: Open access
- The binding of adjacent cells to one another, or cell adhesion, is critical for the growth and development of multicellular organisms. In plant cells, much evidence suggests that the amount and modification of pectin in the cell wall largely determines how well cell adhesion occurs. ELMO1 is a Golgi protein involved in pectin-mediated cellular adhesion, and mutations in ELMO1 lead to disrupted cell organization in Arabidopsis. ELMO1 is predicted to be a scaffold for pectin biosynthesis enzymes, and thus its absence leads to the adhesion-defective phenotype of elmo1-/- plants. There are four other ELMO homologues (ELMO2,3,4 and 5) which remain to be characterized as to their function and role in cell adhesion. This thesis focuses on the characterization of ELMO2, which has 79% amino acid similarity with ELMO1. A genetic analysis that evaluated elmo2 double mutants revealed that ELMO2 and ELMO1 have redundant functions. elmo1-/-/2-/- double mutants, but not elmo2-/- or elmo1-/- single mutants, have reduced tensile strengths. While elmo1-/- phenotypes are most pronounced in liquid media, they are partially rescued by growth on agar, suggesting a role of turgor in maintaining cell adhesion. Like ELMO1, ELMO2-GFP colocalizes with Golgi markers. The results suggest that like ELMO1, ELMO2 also functions as a scaffold for pectin biosynthesis enzymes in the Golgi.