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Foreshocks of Revolution: The 1960 Valdivia Earthquake, An Environmental Road Toward Socialism
No full textThe 1960 Valdivia earthquakes set the stage for drastic change in the city of Valdivia, southern Chile, and eventual larger ramifications on the Nation. In 1969, the people of Chile accomplished the impossible, they elected the first Socialist President, Salvador Allende in a democratic election. From a macro perspective the election of Allende was indeed a revolution, but by examining the election through Valdivia’s natural environment, the election was part of evolutionary politics grounded in Chile’s natural environment. Focusing on the city of Valdivia and its progressive changes from its economic downturn in the 1950s to its massive earthquake in 1960, there is an advancement of changes that led to the election of Salvador Allende. When the 9.5 earthquake struck in 1960 it only heightened the need for change and the integration of the marginalized: working class, rural farmers, and indigenous people. The two previous presidents, Jorge Alessandri and Eduardo Frei took on the task of fixing these social issues, including housing, and attempting to incorporate southern Agriculture into the Nation’s Economic development as the nation leaders fought against inflation. For over a decade the issues did not change: housing, economic development, and integration of the marginalized. Their efforts of reconstruction and integration led to many of the rural population migrating to the city seeking both shelter and work. By focusing on Valdivia, the election of Salvador Allende could be better understood as an evolution rather than a revolution grounded in Valdivia’s natural environment and the 1960 earthquakes
Discourses of Division: An Ethnography of the Oklahoma Proud Boys
Get PDFAs a self-described group of "Western chauvinists," the Proud Boys have become lodged within the national consciousness because of their participation in historical and contemporary discourses concerned with fascism, militancy, and White supremacy. Members of Proud Boys chapters from across the nation have been continually vilified for espousing racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other repugnant ideologies. This study harnessed the methodological toolkit of ethnography to understand how members of the Oklahoma Proud Boys find meaning by joining this fraternal order. It takes as its point of departure an analysis of three competing strains of thought that make assertions about racial formations, specifically whiteness. The first, voiced by members of the Oklahoma Proud Boys ties whiteness a set of gendered and classed values, practices, experiences, and institutions while reducing it to a dichotomy of moral and immoral living. The second, voiced by popular pundits and best-selling authors that analyze the contemporary as a reflection of White supremacy and prescribe a set of tools for combatting this. Among this strain the basic assumptions about whiteness and how it can be challenged can be considered a reductive binary of racism and antiracism. Finally, a third body of literature is voiced by scholars who offer an alternative approach to the ways that racial formations operate as intersectional and contingent upon particular histories, power structures, and social relations
Election Fraud and Misinformation on Twitter: Author, Cluster, and Message Antecedents
Get PDFThis study determined the antecedents of diffusion scope (total audience), speed (number of adopters/time), and shape (broadcast vs. person-to-person transmission) for true vs. fake news about a falsely claimed stolen 2020 US Presidential election across clusters of users that responded to one another’s tweets (“user clusters”). We examined 31,128 tweets with links to fake vs. true news by 20,179 users to identify 1,069 user clusters via clustering analysis. We tested whether attributes of authors (experience, followers, following, total tweets), time (date), or tweets (link to fake [vs. true] news, retweets) affected diffusion scope, speed, or shape, across user clusters via multilevel diffusion analysis. These tweets showed no overall diffusion pattern; instead, specific explanatory variables determined their scope, speed, and shape. Compared to true news tweets, fake news tweets started earlier and showed greater broadcast influence (greater diffusion speed), scope, and person-to-person influence. Authors with more experience and smaller user clusters both showed greater speed but less scope and less person-to-person influence. Likewise, later tweets showed slightly more broadcast influence, less scope, and more person-to-person influence. By contrast, users with more followers showed less broadcast influence but greater scope and slightly more person-to-person influence. These results highlight the earlier instances of fake news and the greater diffusion speed of fake news in smaller user clusters and by users with fewer followers, so they suggest that monitors can detect fake news earlier by focusing on earlier tweets, smaller user clusters, and users with fewer followers.Ye
Feminist Food Rhetoric: Women's Rhetorical Strategies Across Instagram, Food Podcasts, and Community Cookbooks
Get PDFDemonstrating that food and cooking instructions are important everyday artifacts worthy of rhetorical criticism, Feminist Food Rhetoric advances rhetoric and writing studies scholarship on food by moving beyond the dominant focus on studying cookbooks. Analyzing multiple media used to teach cooking skills, I define cooking texts as any form of media (e.g., social media platforms, radio shows and podcasts, and cookbooks) used to circulate cooking knowledge. I argue that people use food to create collaborative community-oriented spaces that utilize the active creation and sharing of content alongside learning to rhetorically construct identities while uncovering and recovering voices and epistemologies often ignored or excluded. Drawing on feminist rhetoric, food studies, and media studies, I use rhetorical criticism, interviews, and qualitative coding to identify how women use cooking texts across time and locations. I apply these methods to a variety of cooking texts, studying how a hashtag on Instagram led women to find a community at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rhetorical strategies of a food radio host that works to recover foodways while teaching listeners how to cook, and the gendered and classed ideologies subverted, reinscribed, circulated, and memorialized in community cookbooks. Investigating elements of remediation and participatory culture, I find that cooking texts are a form of constitutive rhetoric that create a communal identity through opportunities for collaborative co-authorship, build community despite geographical distance, are used to respond to cultural upheaval and become a form of social activism that memorializes places, cultures, people, and events
Fat Justice: Mitigating Anti-Fat Bias Through Responsible Aesthetic Agency
Get PDFIn my dissertation I develop a series of guidelines for responsibly and respectfully navigating varying facets of aesthetic activity involving fat communities. I argue that fat people's engagement with the aesthetic can be used to foster community, resist anti-fat bias, and move towards fat justice. Moreover, I argue that considering representations and treatment of fat people in the production of art must be done carefully in order to avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes and anti-fat bias. My project aims to improve the visibility of fat people, ensuring that fat communities can determine how and when they are seen in ways that affirm their identities and experiences.
My project is broken down into four chapters, each of which tackles a different dimension of aesthetic engagement and activity. In the first, I develop a framework called "responsible aesthetic agency" for creators to use when depicting fat people in their work. I intend responsible aesthetic agency to be a way for creators to meet their bare minimum ethical obligations to fat people, and as such this framework is a precursor to (but importantly different from) Jeremy Fried's aesthetic allyship (which I take to entail a deeper, longer-lasting commitment to allyship not required for my account of responsible aesthetic agency). I use this framework to argue that artists must attend to the narrative webs in which a work exists when designing their new work's narrative, and that fat people must be active participants in this design and in the realization of said narratives.
My second chapter addresses how individuals can use aesthetic agency to advocate for themselves and their communities. I argue that beauty labor can be used to help dismantle anti-fat bias. Using Kathleen LeBesco's framework of agency and identity, coupled with Jeannine Gailey's assessment of the unique perception of fatness as simultaneously hypervisible and hyperinvisible, I argue that participants in the "Fuck Flattering!" movement shape their identities and advocate for fat communities by forcing society to acknowledge their visibility and worth.
In my third chapter, I consider representations of fatness in popular media, arguing that we can best achieve fat visibility through centering imperfect representations of fatness. I use Anne Eaton's "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression" as a starting point. In this paper, Eaton argues that distaste for fat bodies has an affective element of disgust that we must address to mitigate anti-fatness. Eaton argues that we must habitually engage with vivid and engaging representations that encourage us to see fat bodies as likable and attractive. I argue that while this approach has worthwhile aims, it risks leaving behind those fat bodies which we cannot bring ourselves to see as likeable or attractive (especially larger and disabled fat bodies, which deviate furthest from the type of bodies we collectively deem attractive). To better combat our distaste for fat bodies, I argue that we must show fat people as complexly as we show thin characters onscreen, highlighting the pluralities of ways to exist as a fat person.
Lastly, in my fourth chapter I discuss how to appropriately engage with marginalized communities as a member of a dominant group or identity. I examine the co-optation of the body positivity movement, outline the ethical harms that result from said co-optation, and discuss potential avenues for moving forward with the movement given its co-optation (including body neutrality, proper body pride, and radical self-love). I argue that in order to fully address the myriad levels of goals of the original body positivity movement (personal, community-oriented, and advocacy/activist goals), none of these three alternatives is sufficient, as each misses a crucial element of the original body positivity movement or asks participants to have too narrow of an attitude towards their own body. Given the shortcomings of these movements, I argue we should move forward from the body positivity movement’s co-optation by employing a modified framework of Aubrey Gordon’s concept of fat justice, one which also makes room to recognize the importance of fat people being able to experiment with beauty and see themselves as beautiful
Modeling and Designing a Vertical Isolation System Using a Laterally Loaded Arch as a Negative Stiffness Element
Get PDFStructures, artwork, and expensive equipment are often susceptible to significant damage from vertical dynamic motion such as that generated by earthquakes. Several systems exist which seek to mitigate damage caused from motion, but the study of vertical dynamic motion isolators lags behind that of horizontal motion isolators. This thesis explores the design of a vertical isolation system utilizing two laterally loaded arches, acting as beams, to generate negative stiffness. This negative stiffness is counteracted by a positive, linear stiffness from a parallel spring to create a quasi-zero stiffness. The quasi-zero stiffness shifts the natural frequency of the system to almost zero, causing frequency ratios experienced by the system to approach infinity. As a result, the system experiences low transmissibility from the base of the system to the point of interest, which in the case of this research is at the connection joining the beams to which the isolated mass is attached. Essentially, it allows for this connection to be effectively isolated from the effects of vertical accelerations at the base of the system.
Both an experimental prototype and two different theoretical models are examined in this thesis, which allows for a physical system to be compared to theories in order to determine the efficacy of the system and to help validate the theories. The experimental prototype is produced with a focus on using lightweight materials and allowing for a low profile. In order to achieve this goal, 3D printed parts are used. This allows for high levels of control when designing for different system variables such as the length of the beams, the stiffness of the beams, and the initial rise of the beams. Static testing is performed on the prototype to characterize properties of the beam and spring and to optimize the system. This is done simultaneously alongside the development of the two theoretical models, which aimed to aid in and simplify the design process, as beam properties could be roughly determined before being 3D printed. MATLAB is used in combination with OpenSees in order to test the different theoretical models before they are fabricated on the 3D printer. As static testing is performed, changes to the system are made in order to both improve system performance and calibrate it for future dynamic testing. Following the completion of the static testing and the implementation of small modifications into the system, dynamic testing is performed using a vertical shake table to evaluate the isolation performance of the system.
The motions the system is subjected to are a variety of harmonic excitations at different frequencies and amplitudes and white noise. The accelerations of the isolated mass are measured. This then allows for the isolation performance of the system to be determined by comparing the accelerations experienced by the mass to the accelerations at the base of the system. A comparison of the experimentally determined results and the theorized results is performed and will be used for the development of future research, including the development of systems similar to the one discussed in this research
Localization of tables and plots in documents using deep neural networks
Get PDFThere has been an immense increase in number of scientific publications being published every single day, it has been increasingly difficult to keep up with all the new results being published. In this research, we localized and detected all the plots and tables from documents using deep neural networks. We generated a custom document dataset and manually annotated it to train and evaluate object detection models and their customizability. We used two Single shot multi detector models with base model of MobileNet, RetinaNet and CenterNet model. We trained these models over 10000 epochs on the custom generated dataset. All three models were able to localize and detect the plots and tables with accurately predicted bounding boxes. The results were as follows with CenterNet having the highest mAP score of 92 and highest AR of 93.88 followed by RetinaNet with mAP score of 91.1 and AR of 93.76 lastly, MobileNet based SSD with mAP score of 89.04 and AR of 91.54