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Alien Bric-a-Brac: OOO, New Materialism, and Useless Alien Objects in Science Fiction
Get PDFScience fiction has a long relationship with technology, but what is one to make of the various objects that appear in the genre that fall outside of this categorical distinction? In this text, I examine what is referred to as alien bric-a-brac, alien objects in science fiction that are small in scale and have no discernable purpose or practical application. It does so by drawing on the debates between object-oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism to account for the singular alienness of these objects alongside their relationalities. I analyze the alien bric-a-brac that appear in two primary texts: The Employees by Olga Ravn and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I argue that both texts explore an aesthetic relationality to alien objects that is contrasted with scientific knowledge through competing naming practices and posit that alien bric-a-brac disrupt our settled and anthropocentric relationalities to all objects.</p
Breaking Ground on Mental Health: Financial Insecurity and Job Demand in Construction
Get PDFMental health challenges in the construction industry are pervasive, driven by systemic and organizational factors that remain underexplored. This mixed-methods study investigates two critical stressors—financial insecurity and job demand—using complementary methods. Study 1 surveyed 499 construction workers across the U.S. and Canada to identify and rank workplace stressors, revealing financial insecurity and job demand as the most impactful across all demographics. Study 2 built on these findings, conducting nine focus groups with 68 field workers to uncover the root causes and potential solutions. Thematic analysis highlighted issues such as inflation, politics, job insecurity, and volatile project schedules as being primary drivers of these stressors. While broader reforms are essential at organizational and industry levels, this study identifies actionable opportunities for companies moving forward. Together, these findings are able to support multi-tiered strategies to enhance worker well-being, resilience, and productivity in the construction industry.</p
Continuum Point Cloud Particle Lattice Model (CP2L) for Dynamic Loading
Get PDFThis thesis introduces the Continuum Point Cloud Particle Lattice (CP2L) Method, a discrete alternative to traditional finite element methods for elastodynamic and subsequent fracture initiation and propagation in isotropic materials with 2D rectangular domains. CP2L distributes mass and area to a uniform lattice and node discretization to preserve continuum domain equivalency, then uses normal and shear lattice bonds governed by Hooke's law to replicate linear elasticity without artificial damping. By omitting rotational degrees of freedom and employing a meshfree point collocation technique for evaluating local strains, CP2L maintains rotational invariance and accurately captures transient wave propagation.
Numerical examples include verification of strain approximation and rigid body motion, and verification of D'Alembert wave propagation, which form a basis of an ongoing method development aimed at demonstrating a robust platform for dynamic loading and fracture simulation.</p
Cost Effective Absorption and Emission Sensing
Get PDFOptical sensing provides a non-intrusive, rapid, and precise method for measuring material properties, such temperature, concentration and pressure. Optical sensing techniques are often based on measurements of either light emission or absorption from the substance under analysis. Because the techniques are only based on photon-material interaction, absorption and emission sensing can help us understand extreme environments such as the combustion chamber of a supersonic scramjet engine, the atmospheres of a distant exoplanet or the dynamics of a forest fire that would otherwise be hard to access with intrusive sensors.
This thesis aims to further develop emission and absorption-based sensing to reduce the economic cost and improve the usability of optical sensors. This thesis focuses on two implementations of optical sensing, Wavelength Modulation Spectroscopy (WMS) and two color pyrometry imaging. WMS is a laser based, gas sensing technique and two-color pyrometry is a solid temperature imaging technique. The ability to measure both gas and solid phase systems improves our ability to understand systems where the interactions of gasses and solids are of interest.
With respect to the gas phase WMS sensor, a novel algorithm was developed which enables rapid and autonomous WMS data processing at a low computational cost. Lower computational cost enables rapid calculations using much lower cost processing hardware. Additionally, a GPU based absorption spectrum simulation library was developed which can simulate broadband absorption spectra with advanced spectral lineshapes at unprecedented speeds. Together, these improvements in processing algorithms were used to develop a low-cost, real-time WMS exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) rate sensor which was demonstrated on a 6-cylinder natural gas engine, resulting in a 954Hz measurement of EGR rate with a measurement latency of less than 1 millisecond and no human intervention. These advancements pave the way for real-time sensors for feedback control at a sensor cost profile that is amenable to production applications for on-road engine systems.
Laser absorption spectroscopy is well suited for measuring the thermodynamic conditions in a gas phase sample however it is not capable of measuring solid phase properties for non-transparent materials. For solid phase optical sensing, emission-based sensing is better suited since it does not require the sample to be optically transmissive. In this work, a thermal imaging system based on a consumer grade digital camera is constructed. Consumer grade cameras with high frame rates and high resolutions are available for a much lower cost than scientific grade cameras. The system uses two color pyrometry, where the temperature of a visibly glowing object is inferred based on the ratio of different wavelength regions of the emitted light. The high-speed, low cost two color thermal imaging system was deployed to measure the temperature time history of simulated burning wood embers in a controlled wind tunnel environment. The high speed ember measurements resolved high speed temperature oscillations which had not been observed in prior work. The measurements can be used to validate computational models of ember transport, a primary driver of wildfire spread. More broadly, the approach can enable non-expert users without specialized, expensive thermal cameras to perform in field measurement in wildfire and industrial applications.
By leveraging consumer-grade mass-produced modern optical sensor, GPU and FPGA platforms, we greatly reduce the cost and complexity of advanced absorption and emission sensors. These advancements create a pathway for optical sensors that have traditionally been relegated to the research laboratory to reach non-expert users and commercial implementation at scale.</p
Hitler’s Sparta: The Reception of Spartan Militarism and Authoritarianism by Nazi Germany
Get PDFThis thesis explores the reception of Sparta by Nazi Germany, specifically how and why the Nazis saw Sparta as a model for their military ethos and authoritarianism. The Spartan model was a return to what some Nazis, such as Richard Walther Darré, believed was their ancient Aryan past. Sparta served as propaganda for the Nazis in speeches even before they came to power in 1933. The speeches and books of the most prominent Nazis, such as Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, often invoke Sparta as an example of military power, bravery, and racial purity. Through its militarism and subjugation of helots, Sparta epitomized certain values that the Nazis admired and sought to sow in Germany. Just as in Sparta, Nazi policies often were meant to strengthen the population and make them more capable militarily. This emulation of Sparta’s militarism and authoritarianism influenced Nazi policies regarding the family, eugenics, and Slavs.</p
Dismantling the Teetering Tendencies of Global Citizenship Education with Decolonial Literacy Practices
Get PDFThis dissertation explores what comes about when an international school teacher explicitly includes global citizenship education (GCE) in their course design through a pedagogically decolonial lens. A decolonial pedagogy can encourage critical engagement with global topics to subvert a top-down, conceptual approach to GCE to mobilize decolonizing practices that center student perspectives and experiences as central to GCE instead. Across the findings, I explore how a collaborative practitioner inquiry between a researcher and high school English teacher explored how a decolonial literacy practice might make room for students to express their own navigation of institutional pedagogies and the tensions they experienced with it. Then, I consider the student experience to suggest that students questioned the very premise of global citizenship, pushing beyond institutional framings to consider how race, privilege, and belonging shaped one's ability to participate globally. Their critical inquiries shed light on the tensions between the institutional ideal of a neutral global citizen and their own national affiliations, tensions that reflected a resistance to the enduring effects of coloniality in international school that push students to privilege a multiculturality, often defined by whiteness, over national belonging more intimately related to their culture and heritage. As students focused on themselves and their personal relationships with the writing they read, their conversations, within a decolonial literacy framework, revealed that critical global citizenship was not a fixed, universal concept but rather a diverse and evolving practice of questioning, listening, and reflecting. The dialogic space, self-selection of texts, and community-designed assessments, cultivated in students feeling included in their learning and challenged some of their dominant, colonial perceptions of difference to make room for us to learn from their critical wonderings.</p
Effects of Ekman Pumping in Geophysical Fluids
Get PDFEkman pumping is a physical phenomenon that occurs at the boundaries of rotating fluids with certain boundary conditions. In large scale geo- and astrophysical settings, the Ekman layer is narrow and computationally expensive to resolve and often neglected. Through asymptotic matching, so-called "pumping" boundary conditions can be derived which encapsulate the effect of the Ekman boundary layer, removing the need to resolve it computationally. In this thesis, we explore effects of Ekman pumping in an unstably stratified system (Rayleigh-Bénard convection) as well as a stably stratified system.
In the setting of rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection, we extend the derivation of the Ekman pumping boundary conditions to a tilted geometry where gravity and the rotation axis are not aligned, which allows us to explore the effects of Ekman pumping at latitudes away from the poles. We show the efficacy of these pumping boundary conditions through linear stability analysis and find excellent agreement between the system with unapproximated Ekman boundary layers and the system employing the pumping boundary conditions. Additionally, we add the effect of Ekman layers back into reduced models by using the pumping boundary conditions and recover the correct stability results. Through this study, we discover that Ekman pumping has a destabilizing effect at large scales (low wavenumbers), which does not disappear in the rapidly-rotating limit. We characterize this destabilizing linear effect with analytical, asymptotic descriptions.
We also study a stably stratified quasigeostrophic system with an Ekman boundary layer. This study is focused on the vertical buoyancy flux, a quantity responsible for the transfer between kinetic (KE) and available potential energy (APE), as well as the slow-time evolution of the mean buoyancy. Through theory and numerical experiment, we show that Ekman pumping drives a conversion of energy from APE to KE at small scales, and from KE to APE at large scales. We also show that Ekman pumping results in a slight weakening of the stratification at the Ekman boundary, and an enhancement of the strengthening of the stratification that occurs away from the boundary without Ekman pumping.</p
North American Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming, 2000-2025 - November 2025
No full textThe Media and Climate Change Observatory Data monitors 131 sources (across newspapers, radio and TV) in 59 countries in seven different regions around the world. Data is assembled by accessing archives through the Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva databases via the University of Colorado libraries. More information may be found at: http://mecco.colorado.edu.</p
Australian Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming, 2000-2025 - November 2025
No full textThe Media and Climate Change Observatory Data monitors 131 sources (across newspapers, radio and TV) in 59 countries in seven different regions around the world. Data is assembled by accessing archives through the Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva databases via the University of Colorado libraries. More information may be found at: http://mecco.colorado.edu.</p
Finnish Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change or Global Warming, 2000-2025 - November 2025
No full textThe Media and Climate Change Observatory Data monitors 131 sources (across newspapers, radio and TV) in 59 countries in seven different regions around the world. Data is assembled by accessing archives through the Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva databases via the University of Colorado libraries. More information may be found at: http://mecco.colorado.edu.</p
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