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The Purple Sea Urchin (S. purpuratus) Utilizes AMPA-type Glutamate Receptors in the Righting Response
Get PDFWhile the developmental and reproductive systems of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, have been studied for many years, there is little known about the neurobiology of the adult sea urchin. There has been little research into the underlying neurotransmitter processes behind the sensory, behavior, and motor systems of this widely used model organism. To further our understanding of S. purpuratus neurotransmitters, righting and motility assays were used to indicate if AMPA-type glutamate receptors were present and affected urchin movement and behavior. Righting responses were conducted by inverting the urchin and recording the amount of time taken for the urchin to right itself. Motility assays were performed by isolating the urchin in a small tank and using Behavioral Observation Research Interactive Software (BORIS) to analyze the number of urchin tube foot movements. Righting and motility assays were recorded after drug immersion in varying concentrations of glutamate and decanoic acid, an AMPA receptor inhibitor, in DMSO. High concentrations of glutamate were used in an attempt to desensitize AMPA glutamate receptors and block transmission. However, glutamate had little to no effect on the righting response and motility. Decanoic acid was then used to investigate the role of AMPA receptors in righting and motility. Very low concentrations of decanoic acid significantly slowed the urchin righting response and motility data is continuing to be analyzed. These results indicate that glutamate oversaturation is not effective for blocking AMPA glutamate receptors in this paradigm and that AMPA glutamate receptors are present in the adult sea urchin neural system and are utilized in urchin behavior
Carbon for Cash
No full textZanmi Kafe’s work offsets carbon emissions by planting trees on Haitian farms, which improves economic stability for the farmers.
Problem: Zanmi Kafe needed a uniform process to pay farmers and to efficiently calculate carbon sequestration using a vast amount of raw data.
Solution: To solve this issue, Sewanee DataLab developed an interactive dashboard that displays and analyzes the data.
Impact: DataLab’s work has allowed Zanmi Kafe to quantify and analyze the carbon sequestration of their project. The dashboard created will continue to calculate data in future years and serve as a model for other small-scale carbon markets.Zanmi Kafe, a carbon offset program in Hait
Insufficiently Imagined Homelands: The Claims of Subalternity in Wendy Law-Y one's Irrawaddy Tango and Salman Rushdie's Shame
Get PDFThe Midrash of Law and Legend: Applying Jewish Interpretive Methods to Christian Preaching of the Hebrew Bible
No full textChristian preachers often find the scriptures Jews and Christians hold in common difficult to preach on Sunday morning for many reasons. Whether they fear crossing over into supersessionism, believe that their congregants will find the text to be culturally inaccessible, or misunderstand the Hebrew Scriptures, the outcome is the same. Preachers fail to balance their preaching between the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament. The result of this disproportionate preaching reinforces a myth of inaccessibility and the idea that the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament are somehow separate from one another. This thesis argues, therefore, that Christian preachers can help their listeners value the Hebrew Bible by incorporating Jewish interpretive methods such as Midrashic dialogue, imagination and PaRDeS into their sermon preparation. In so doing, the preacher can also provide their congregants with new methods for learning from and engaging with the Hebrew Bible.Prof. David Star
Christopher Sinclair
Get PDFHome after a year-long mission abroad, the novel’s eponymous hero is eager to continue his work with the Sons of Liberty, but a radical splinter group within the organization threatens to erase everything he and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to accomplish. Racing against spies, soldiers, and duplicitous allies, Christopher Sinclair will use his experience as a ranger and his expertise in espionage to stop these extremists before their incendiary plots destroy the very town they claim to be saving.
I spent a great deal of time researching the people, events, and places represented in this story. At times, my fascination with the subject led me to overload the text with tangents, unnecessary backstory, and microscopic detail. In The Art of History, Christopher Bram said, “There is pleasure in recovering old things from the junk shop of History, but an overload of details can clog a narrative.” The thesis process allowed me to identify and cut anything unrelated to Sinclair or the central conflict. For example, when Sinclair enters a room, I describe what Sinclair would see, not everything as a means of establishing my knowledge of the era. Setting is an integral part of the story, but I learned through trial and error that “place”—what Welty calls a “lesser angel”—should be secondary to character and conflict.
Every historical fiction writer should ask themselves, “Why tell this story, and why tell it today?” This is especially true of the stories ingrained in our public consciousness. The American Revolution, for instance, is brimming with story, but we, for the most part, have stopped exploring the vast history in favor of preserving the narrow myth. Christopher Sinclair takes place during the events leading up to and after the Boston Massacre. Despite being a piece of fiction, I hope to bring to life a complicated story that’s been reduced to Paul Revere’s famous engraving. Since its publication at the end of March 1770, Revere’s “The Bloody Massacre” has transformed from a blatant piece of propaganda to an integral piece of the glorious story we tell about our nation’s triumph over tyranny. I want to tell a familiar story differently, and by doing so, invite the reader to re-evaluate what they know about our supposed “history.” Hopefully, by re-examining the events that inspired the American Revolution, we can better understand the traditions and beliefs we hold so dear today
Measuring the Lifetime of Cosmic Ray Muons Using One NaI Scintillation Detector
Get PDFCosmic rays are energetic particles from outer space that penetrate and interact with the atmosphere, producing more particles. One of these particles that reaches the surface of the Earth is the muon. A muon is a “heavy” lepton (the same family as electrons) with a mean lifetime of 2.2 microseconds. Muons lose their energy continuously as they penetrate materials, like detectors, and some of them stop and decay inside the detector. I am measuring the mean lifetime using a sodium iodide (NaI) scintillation detector and nuclear instrumentation modules (NIMs)
The Give
No full textThis manuscript represents a progression from adolescence into adulthood with branching poetry narratives that focus on cultural and family dysphoria, the grief of loss, and coming to terms with sexuality and same-sex attraction. I began writing the poems of this manuscript four years ago in my advisor Nickole Brown’s poetry workshop during my first year at the Sewanee School of Letters. The actual manuscript project began in September 2020 at the start of thesis work. I produced many new poems during this time and began organizing and placing them in an order that I hope flows like a book. I don’t feel the manuscript is quite at the point of being a finished, publishable book, as there are some loose ends and empty spaces I would like to expand on in the future. I also have a difficult time ever feeling like a poem is completely finished, and I often spend years revising, especially as my writing style evolves and improves constantly.
Since that first term at Sewanee, my writing style changed entirely. I entered the program knowing that my biggest strength is my ability to write metaphors; however, this served as a double-edged sword because my biggest challenge in poetry writing is also the tendency to hide behind metaphors. Nickole was quick and gracious in pointing this out and helping me develop more honest ways of getting my intent and vulnerability onto the page and creating a balance between the metaphor and “saying it plain.” I had been so concerned with the appearance of my poems, making sure everything looked and sounded pretty, that I’d failed to open up with the emotional truth of them, thus keeping readers at an arm’s length. The poems in this collection are a labor of my attempt to stop hiding. They are sometimes dark, full of grief, and deal with uncomfortable subject matter. However, they are also honest, coming from a deeply emotional and personal core, and hopefully they speak to others going through similar experiences.
Another challenge I struggle with craft-wise is giving my works an effective title. There are several works in this manuscript that remained untitled for a long time. It is often difficult because creating a title generally takes lots of meditation and reading/re-reading the poem as I dig my way to the truth of the piece. I often feel like my poems must be neatly wrapped packages, and the title is the bow. Even now, I struggle to tell myself that poems don’t have to be clean stories with bookended beginnings and endings and that it is ok if a poem doesn’t answer all the questions or give everything away. I feel a challenge of mine is conveying a story; though I have gotten better at it, and many of the poems in this collection reflect my growth in narrative through poetry.
The biggest form of inspiration when writing poetry for me is simply reading the works of other poets. These works and poets include Richard Siken’s Crush, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Julia Koet’s Pine, and many others. There have also been specific works that challenged me, particularly Nick Flynn’s Some Ether, which is a book about suicide. We were assigned this collection my first semester at Sewanee, and to this day, it has been the most difficult collection of poetry for me to get through because of the emotional weight of its content. However, the deeply dark and personal concept of the book really resonates with me in my own writing style, as I write about the death of a close friend and my own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts; I find that writing from such dark and emotional places creates a difficult balancing act of trying not to hurt myself in the process of getting out my poems. I never finished reading Some Ether, as just getting through a few of the poems would throw me into deep, deep bouts of depression. I hope one day I am strong enough to finish reading the collection and incorporate more of Flynn’s technique into my own writing, but at the moment I must prioritize protecting myself from such a mental state, as I already push pretty hard at times trying to get out emotional honesty in my writings, and finding my limits has frequently been a difficult process.
I would also like to give a special acknowledgement to the poets Ross Gay and Claudia Emerson and their respective collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Late Wife. I read these books during the thesis writing process. Ross Gay’s I read for the third time, and Emerson’s for the first time, and each writer significantly influenced my work. Ross Gay’s ability to achieve emotional honesty and devastation in his poems while simultaneously carrying such joy, texture, and color is truly something I strive for every time I sit down to write. Claudia Emerson’s beautiful embodied language and imagery, particularly of nature and animals, also struck a deep chord of longing within me and an aspiration to achieve such levels of embodiment in my own writing.
My poems have always been colored by the rural Appalachian landscape where I grew up and still live, but I haven’t always known how to write about it in a way that evokes a sense of embodiment. To me, embodiment evokes a sense of deep immersion, of writing a scene or image using all five senses; it’s a slow observation that takes in every detail available, then reinvents that observation in a poem to give readers a sense of authenticity. Another big struggle in writing my poetry has been just that: an oftentimes subconscious revulsion of being embodied, of sitting in my own body and letting my senses speak to me. I was diagnosed years ago with major depressive disorder and often catch myself dissociating as a defense mechanism to hide from pain, whether it be physical or mental. In the process of writing this thesis, Nickole had me do daily embodiment exercises: 50-word writings on something embodied, whether it be the snow on the ground, a housecat’s playful behavior, or even the aches and pains of living with chronic illness. I found these exercises exhausting, small as they seem, but at the same time they invigorated my poetry, kept me grounded as I wrote, and reminded me to get out of the stars and back on my own two feet. This is definitely a practice I will not abandon, even beyond this program, as it pushes me to slow down and pay attention to my senses, which is something I think all people should practice more, whether they be writers or not.
I would also like to give my thanks to Tiana Clark, who led the poetry workshop for my last two years at the School of Letters. Her encouragement and positivity has meant the world to me; she taught me not to be afraid of traditional poetry forms nor be afraid to subvert those same traditions and forms. She taught me the importance of communing with significant literary influences on the page, most notably Emily Dickinson, whose life and works haunt me in the best way and who, to this day, continues to be a great muse and joy to study.
And finally, I would like to give my last heaping of gratitude to Nickole Brown, without whom I could not have achieved this collection. She has been an endless source of support and calling me out on my own nonsense, keeping me firmly on the wild and winding path, and helping carry me to the end of this four-year-long trek. This collection has been a deeply personal journey of self-discovery and self-improvement in the craft. It was often filled with tears and sleepless nights, feeling like a failure and feeling like I could soar. I am so excited to present these poems, these tempestuous poems that have changed and shifted as I have changed and shifted, all in an effort to achieve nothing more than a simple honesty
The Effects of COVID-19 on the Change in Real Estate Prices
Get PDFThe Coronavirus pandemic disrupted the global economy as governments enacted stay-at-home orders and businesses shut down to combat the spread of the disease. These actions led to an increased prevalence of remote work in the US. Allowing Americans the opportunity to relocate away from cities to areas they perceived as safer from the spread of COVID-19. This migration has the potential to impact housing markets throughout the US. Using monthly county-level data on COVID-19 cases and real estate prices, we study the impact of COVID-19 on changes in housing prices for rural and urban counties. We find that an increase in COVID-19 cases within a county had a negative impact on median housing prices, in that county.Katherine Theyso
“Keep Positive Things In Your Life, And You Know You’ll Be Alright”: Adolescents Recovering Positive Affect
Get PDFObjective: To examine how adolescents recovered positive emotional affect during or after challenging experiences.
Methods: 50 youth (ages 12 to 20) from rural communities in southern Appalachia participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews, where they discussed key moments of their lives. Grounded theory analysis was used to code the interview transcripts.
Results: Six areas of recovering positive affect were identified, including relational, cognitive, faith, nature, downtime/indirect, and behavioral approaches. Relational approaches were mentioned the most (27 interviews), followed by cognitive (26), religion/spirituality-based (20), behavioral (12), indirect (6), and nature (3).
Conclusions: Youth used a variety of strategies to not just minimize distress but also re-attain positive emotions. This is an understudied aspect of resilience.This project was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this project are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation
The Effects of Industrial Real Estate on Residential Real Estate Prices
Get PDFAmazon Inc. has been at the forefront of the consistent rise in the development of industrial warehouses and fulfillment centers. This trend has the potential to impact residential real estate values through increased job opportunities, housing demand, or even increased traffic in the area. Previous research has investigated the Amazon effect on housing prices within specific radiuses of fulfillment centers, but never at a larger scale. We study the impact of Amazon fulfilment centers on residential real estate prices at the county level using data from 31 counties with Amazon fulfillment centers and 115 surrounding counties. Using a difference-in-differences model, we find no change in housing prices from the presence of an Amazon fulfillment center. Instead, we find that larger Amazon fulfillment centers reduce the growth rate of housing prices in both the county where the center is located and the surrounding counties.Katherine Theyson
Aaron Elro