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Guideless
No full textGuideless is a musical story that reflects on the loss of oneself in the scope of tragedy. How do you have faith in the goodness of a world that has hurt you and your loved ones so much? Though not a true narrative, Guideless lives in a world that is influenced by my memories and functions as a metaphor for core experiences from my life. Through the inclusion of found sounds and family videos, I connect the songs to moments in my life while also reflecting on the things for which I am grateful.
Functionally, Guideless lives in the liminal space between a narrative and an autobiographical story. Though it leans towards the narrative, it is complicated by the fact that the narrative itself cannot be separated from the experiences that led to me making it. The framing of a teen struggling with suicidal thoughts is directly tied to my own experiences with suicide, be it the loss of my friend in high school or my own contemplations searching for meaning. Additionally, many of the losses that she experiences are tied to my experiences of losing people or my fears of losing someone close to me. Within the second piece, “down to earth/memories,” I tasked myself with convincing our character that there was meaning within life, and the way I found I could do that was by exploring memories in which I find meaning through family videos and recordings I created. Thus, interspersed within the narrative is a connection between the main character’s life experiences and my own.
It’s my hope that this piece will encourage the listener to consider where it is that they find meaning within their own life. I hope that it will be there to meet them wherever they are at and encourage them to wonder, what would your soundscape of memories feel and/or look like? In fact, I would like to challenge the reader, after listening to this piece, to create a new version of “down to earth/memories” filled with your answer to that question, so we can discover greater meaning together
Wealth Taxes and its Unintended Consequences: Why Taxing the Wealthy is Not Efficient in Closing the Wealth Inequality Gap
No full textThe increase in wealth in the United States has overwhelmingly sided with the upper class. Wealth inequality has increasingly become an issue in the US which has led to talks about implementing a wealth tax. Wealth taxes have been implemented in other countries all around the world in efforts to close the gap in wealth inequality. Although taxing the wealthy and redistributing funds makes arbitrary sense, this form of taxation is not efficient in achieving this goal.
The implementation of a wealth tax comes with a plethora of issues including a decrease in taxable wealth, a redistribution of wealth amongst the wealthy, and inefficiencies in markets. When wealth taxes are implemented, we see a steep decline in the amount of taxable wealth available. This occurs because individuals targeted by wealth taxes will shift their allocations to escape high taxation rates. Drastic shifts in wealth distributions and investment attitudes may cause disruptions in markets which can severely impact a country’s long-term growth path.
Foreign examples can help show these disruptions and help policymakers and economists make more informed calculations. This paper talks about European examples of wealth tax implementation and concludes that even countries who are currently implementing a wealth tax are not able to escape the problems that arise with this type of taxation.
Wealth taxes end up harming economies more than benefitting them and should not be implemented in the United States. Through further research, we can find better avenues to target the increasing gap in wealth inequality in order to form well-versed policies
“A Woman Can’t Get Wet Like A Man Can”: Female City Letter Carriers and their (Non)Uniforms in the United States Prior to 1964
No full textAutocratic Radicalization: the Strategic Choices of Autocratic Executives and the Death of Democracy
No full textI build a novel game theory model to understand how the strategic choices of autocratic executives shape the outcome of democratic backsliding. The model predicts that moderate overreach strategies will not trigger opposition resistance allowing autocratic executives to safely erode democracy while radical strategies result in steadfast resistance that may oust the executive from power. I show that that the model successfully predicts the outcomes of backsliding in four cases: Poland, Turkey, Hungary, and Bolivia
Knowledgeable Partisans and Inflation Expectations
Get PDFUsing a nationally representative survey from the 2024 United States presidential election, we investigate the role knowledge plays in the difference between inflation expectations of Republicans and Democrats. Unconditionally, Republicans\u27 average inflation forecast was nearly 3\% higher than Democrats; they also reported higher inflation in the past year (3.5\%) and higher expectations in the long run (2.0\%). Conditioning on their beliefs about the future and their long-run forecasts reduces the pure partisan gap in inflation forecasts by two thirds. The gap between Democrats and Republicans is largest for partisans who are the most knowledgeable about politics. Greater numeracy appears to exacerbate the partisan gap, while greater economic knowledge mitigates it. The differential role of partisan and economic knowledge are consistent with a model where respondents\u27 survey responses balance objective forecasts with affective motives
SET and Functional Pottery
No full textThis body of work is about order, pattern, and belonging. The pieces, and their relations to one another, riff on the game SET, a math game designed by Marsha Falco about matching, categorizing, and understanding individuals via how they relate to their peers. My pieces bring these ideas to the warm, immediate space of functional ceramics—objects that will make their way into the home and the everyday—as a way to extract some of the rich metaphors I find present in abstract mathematics. Later on, I picture these pieces in their own homes, still living together in their matching sets of three
Lake Affects
No full textAs a resident of Utah, I am deeply concerned about the rapidly evaporating Great Salt Lake and what its demise means for future bird populations. My body of work features five species that are particularly impacted by the lake’s disappearance. The ceramic birds embody the desiccated earth they sit on, taking on the cracked nature of the salt flats. The intaglio prints are created from overlapping smaller groups of individuals to build up a dense flock. This monolith of birds is broken up by ghostly gaps that intersperse the group—representing the individuals already lost to the changing landscape. Together, the crumbling birds and fracturing flocks emphasize that what affects the individual affects the community
The Physics of Speech Production & the Vocal Tract
No full textThe human vocal tract is integral to the production of spoken language, and understanding its working principles has been essential to the field of speech synthesis. Sound is a travelling lon- gitudinal pressure wave„ and pulmonic sounds involve the conversion of some of the mechanical energy of the air flow during exhalation into a pressure wave that propagates up and out of the vocal tract with the air. The Source-Filter model takes the first site of constriction to the airflow to be the sound source, based on the linear path followed by the air through the lungs, trachea, larynx, throat, and oral and/or nasal cavities. Then, the remainder of the vocal tract downstream of it acts as a linear filter that amplifies specific frequencies within the pressure wave. This paper explores the Source-Filter model and its history with the goal of introducing an undergraduate physics audience to the field of Speech Acoustic
Sunflowers: The Visual Experience of Beauty in Nature vs. Two-Dimensional Art
No full textBoth nature and art are often associated with visual beauty. Since “beauty” is a common term, it is not immediately clear whether the experience of beauty is the same in both domains. Moreover, it is unclear whether one is referring to the object or their own experience when referring to something as “beautiful”. In this paper, we look at the dynamic between internal and external factors that affect our viewing something as beautiful. Objectivity and subjectivity, properties of the viewed object, pleasure, love, and complete absorption are all considered when defining beauty. This paper focuses primarily on the internal experience of the viewer, touching on how some external attributes influence the perceived beauty. The perception of two-dimensional (2D) versus three-dimensional (3D) objects are compared, looking specifically at how 3D objects depicted in 2D paintings are visually perceived in comparison to nature. Theories on aesthetic judgements and experiences in nature and art are then reviewed, highlighting the importance of factors like disinterestedness and expertise. A model for the aesthetic experience in nature, based on Leder et al. \u27s (2014) model for the aesthetic experience in modern art, is proposed. This model further illustrates the similarity between the cognitive aesthetic experience in nature and art. Finally, an extreme version of the aesthetic experience, where one becomes entirely lost in the experience, is discussed. The flow state and peak experiences are compared between nature and art. It is concluded that the perception, experience and aesthetic outcome of visual beauty in nature and art are cognitively similar, but not equivalent