6617 research outputs found
Sort by
What It Means To Be a Monster: The British Raj, Race Science, and The Other in Fantasy and Folklore
Get PDFJ.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Fellowship of the Ring, the first entry in the culture-defining Lord of the Rings trilogy, from his cottage on Northmoor Road, nestled comfortably in the sleepy streets of North Oxford: the intellectual heart of the British Empire, during the last decade preceding the nation’s imperial decline. British rule over an entire quarter of the planet maintained itself not by force alone, but by the imposition of the ideology of white supremacy on commonwealth citizens, first implemented through Christian thought and later through the “scientific” study of race in the 19th and 20th centuries. While being a thoughtful opponent of the status quo in his time, this paper argues that Tolkien’s background both as a catholic and a scholar among the British elite undoubtedly introduced the illogics of race science into his work, specifically the Lord of the Rings saga which in turn became the groundwork for all fantasy literature and media in the West that came after. Focusing on Tolkien’s use of the term “race” to delineate separate species of independent origin and the formation of “orcs” as a society of dark-skinned, evil-natured, “mongol-types” positioned as inherently disposable and deserving of total annihilation presents troubling implications for the genres of storytelling which adopted Tolkien’s language without question. This legacy has produced two tropes that have pervaded decades after, first the association of the word “race” with immutable biological difference as well as alien otherness, and second the conclusion that the answer to evil is genocide. In response I present the history of race as a fictional narrative that begins in Europe and has persisted in maintaining the illusion of innate difference resulting in western-dominant racial hierarchy across the globe. Drawing on cultivation theory I argue that decades of storytelling which concludes with the annihilation of a racial or alien “other” has preserved the logic of imperial extermination and bolstered death drive junkies who beg and plead for a modern thermonuclear crusade against those they’ve decided are monsters worth slaying
Knocking Down NOx: Examining the Effects of Transportation Electrification on Urban Ozone Production in the South Coast Air Basin
Get PDFWith last year’s commitment to all in-state sales of new passenger cars and trucks being zero-emission by 2035 (California Executive Order N-79-20), California is leading the charge for transportation electrification in the United States. Despite being at the forefront of climate change management and mitigation, California has some of the worst air quality in the nation. While primarily motivated by a desire to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and reliance on fossil fuels, transportation electrification will also have a significant impact on local air quality. The goal of this study is to quantify and qualify this impact in the context of urban ozone production. From robust studies of the weekend ozone effect, we know that reductions in vehicle emissions on weekend days can actually increase urban ozone concentrations. By examining data from eight ground monitoring stations in California’s South Coast Air Basin (SoCAB) over a period of 40 years, we show that this region is a volatile organic compound (VOC)-limited system in which the weekend ozone effect is a clear trend. Additionally, these data reveal that despite a significant decline in average annual nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, mean ozone levels have changed very little. With this in mind, the question looking forward becomes: how will local atmospheric chemistry and air quality evolve as transportation electrification accelerates? To investigate this question, VOC-NOx ratios are modeled for varying rates of light and heavy-duty vehicle electrification in order to gauge how urban ozone production will be affected. While it is clear that vehicle electrification will ultimately improve air quality and help mitigate climate change, this study provides a unique perspective into the less understood transient impacts of electrification
Hunting for Fast Radio Bursts from Messier 82: Exploring the FRB--Magnetar Connection
Get PDFFast radio bursts (FRBs) are short-duration radio pulses of cosmological origin. Among the most common sources predicted to explain this phenomenon are bright pulses from a class of extremely highly magnetized neutron stars known as magnetars. In 2020, a Galactic magnetar produced an FRB-like burst, allowing researchers to constrain the Galactic magnetar burst rate. We assume that the magnetar burst rate scales with star formation rate and test an important prediction for similar bursts in nearby galaxies. Messier 82 (M82) has a star formation rate 40 times that of the Milky Way, implying that the magnetar burst rate would be quite high. We observed M82 with the 20 meter telescope at the Green Bank Observatory for 28.2 days. We found 291 candidate bursts, but none of those candidates had a signal-to-noise ratio greater than 10. An S/N of 10 is required for a candidate burst to be considered an FRB. Additionally, none of the repeating dispersion measures (DMs) we found had enough bursts to constitute a confidence level of 5 sigma. Using these constraints, we determined an upper bound for M82\u27s magnetar burst rate to be 0.035/day. Based on this result, we determined that star formation rate cannot scale with magnetar burst rate in the case of M82
Lie Algebras and the Poincare Group
Get PDFThis paper will discuss my research withProfessor Tonnis ter Veldhuis on the Poincare Groupand other similar algebraic approaches based on theMinkowski Metric. This paper will begin with anintroduction discussing group theory and expand on itsspecific applications in theoretical physics
Bloodshed, baptism, beer: racial capitalism and settler colonialism on the medieval Baltic
Get PDFScholarly and popular usage of the term “racial capitalism” has increased exponentially over the past decade, but the validity and implications of its use remain hotly contested. The late Cedric Robinson is the undisputed popularizer of this phrase and is referenced widely by both the slogan’s detractors and proponents. Despite this, little work has been done to engage with the core of his argument about racial capitalism: that capitalism is inalienably racial due to the racialism of the medieval European societies that spawned it. Debates over Robinson’s ideas have thus disregarded the substance of his deployment of the phrase and eliminated his historicist critique of the European social sciences. This paper attempts to correct this lacuna through a case study of racial extractivism in a colonial region of medieval Europe: the German Ordenstaat of Livonia. I draw on the methodologies of radical historical geographers within Black Studies to generate a synthetic analysis of regional historical literatures about premodern Catholic colonialism. I find that structural racism was central in funding and organizing the institutional antecedents of the capitalist world-system which emerged in the 16th century. Ultimately, I argue that Robinson’s historicist critique disrupts many ontological assumptions about the motivating forces, developmental trends, and leading protagonists of capitalism as a theoretical object
From Handmaids to Princesses: How Identity and Politics Impact Definitions of Biblical Rape
Get PDFThe politics of sex in the Bible are complex. They are impacted and limited by the time of the stories, as well as the political landscape and laws of the region. However, since many modern religions have emerged from the text of the Hebrew Bible, it is important for scholars to continue the work of critically examining the texts in the contemporary context. This paper offers a textual analysis of several biblical stories through a feminist and decolonial lens. Through the generation of a taxonomy by which these stories can be categorized, this paper posits that the biblical definitions of rape serve to protect the ancient patriarchal power structures, instead of the victims of sexual violence
Extended Hetero- and azaacene Chromophores Derived from a Non-linear Aromatic Diimide
No full textLinear aromatic diimides play an important role in building color- intense chromophores and semiconductors. In order to explore more in this area, our lab focuses on the angled isomer mellophanic diimide (MDI). Combining MDI with various reactants into heteroacenes can lead to molecules with higher electron affinities. Changing between different heteroatoms in the structure of heteroacenes provides different physical and chemical characteristics to the molecule. In this project, we focused mainly on the NOON and NNNN series of reactions, and other interesting derivatives. These hetero- and azaacenes were investigated through UV-vis and fluorescence spectroscopy, and density functional theory calculations. The MDI derivatives were found to exhibit high molar absorptivities (up to 214,638 M-1 cm-1 for oxNOON-Cl-EtHex), high quantum yield (up to 70.8% for oxNOON-H-Bn), narrowed bandgaps (down to 2.5 eV for both oxNOON-H-Ph and oxNOON-Cl-EtPh), and significantly lowered HOMO and LUMO levels
Crystal Graphs for the Symmetric Group
Get PDFThe object of our study is a bijective algorithm that turns a word in the k-dimensional positive integer lattice into a sequence of standard Young tableaux, where the subsequence of every other tableaux, beginning with the first entry in said sequence, is a sequence of standard Young tableaux on n boxes, and each successive tableau is gotten by deleting a box and reinserting it. The tableaux in these subsequences index bases of irreducible modules for the symmetric group of degree n, and this bijection gives a combinatorial model for the decomposition of the k-th tensor power of the symmetric group permutation module into irreducibles. The algorithm embeds the crystal graphs of these irreducible modules into k-dimensional Euclidean space at the point corresponding to its given word, and we explore connections between the algebra and the geometry of this embedding
Invalidation and Emotion Regulation: How does emotional invalidation relate to the efficacy and endorsement of emotion regulation strategies?
Get PDFPast research has reliably shown that emotional invalidation poses a threat to one\u27s capacity for successful emotion regulation, though the relationship between the two is complex. The pair of studies presently discussed sought to understand how perceptions of emotional invalidation relate to the success (Study 1) and endorsement (Study 2) of emotion regulation strategies. Study 1 did not provide support for the prediction that perceptions of invalidation would undermine the success of the particular emotion regulation strategy of affect labeling, generating a new hypothesis: invalidation may be more related to how we conceive of the process of regulating our emotions, rather than whether a specific strategy is successful. Study 2 tested this hypothesis and found that invalidation (defined generally) is associated with higher endorsement of suppressive emotion regulation strategies and lower endorsement of the strategies of problem-solving and social support. This study also examined whether the relationship between invalidation and emotion regulation differed as a function of the source of invalidation (family vs. friends). Invalidation from family members in particular was also associated with increased endorsement of rumination, a relationship that was not exhibited in the case of invalidation from friends. A continued understanding of the relationship between invalidation and emotion regulation is invaluable to the understanding of emotional well-being broadly defined
