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"Half Savage and Hardy, and Free": The Failure of Feminine Identity in Wuthering Heights
Get PDFOver the last half-century, much of the scholarly discourse concerning Wuthering Heights has considered Catherine Earnshaw’s struggle for belonging in the social order, using a transgressive mode of gender criticism to push against the constraints of traditional femininity found in both the space of Brontë’s world and within the norms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at large. Using Lacanian theoretical analysis, however, I argue that Brontë’s novel effects an uncanny interpretation of womanhood, placing Catherine between two impossible, failed identities. The first, beginning in childhood, is rooted in an Imaginary form of identification with Heathcliff, who acts as the image with whom she identifies. The second emerges through her participation in the Symbolic order as a socially recognized wife, mother, and upper-class lady. Unable to find satisfaction in the self-mediation necessitated by these Imaginary and Symbolic identities, she lacks any identity at all. Instead, it is only in death that Catherine attains true freedom from the agony of identification. By tracing this search for a fully realized sense of self throughout her life, I endeavor to illustrate how Lacan’s theory offers a framework for understanding Catherine’s inner conflict, revealing the fundamental futility of searching for oneself in an external object or system
Resilience-Based Tri-Level Optimization for Multi-Commodity Networks
Get PDFInterdependent critical infrastructure systems represent substantial financial investments and are vital to maintain a basic level of social and economic well-being, making them attractive targets for malevolent actors. Many of these systems carry multiple products, each with unique needs and importance to different stakeholders. Tri-level optimization models have been proposed to capture the scale of a system’s resilience, representing the optimal actions taken by a defender to harden the system, by an attacker to interdict the system, and then by the defender to assign work crews for restoration, all under a limited budget. However, most prior work focuses on networks with a single product. This work extends a tri-level protection-interdiction-restoration model from a single commodity to multiple commodities, solving the model with a Benders’ decomposition and set covering decomposition. We propose a method to limit unmet weighted demand across commodities, taking into account unique interdependencies between network components and commodity-specific capacity requirements. An optimal solution is found iteratively by alternately fixing protection and interdiction variables. This work is illustrated with a case study of interdependent Swedish power and railway systems. Results demonstrate the convergent behavior of the master and subproblems, the value of network hardening, and the non-uniform network recovery trajectory. The proposed model is easily adapted to different commodity types, attack and defense budgets, crew availability, and commodity weights
Multi-scale mechanical testing for engineering education in virtual reality environment
Get PDFThe year 2020 changed the state of the world with the introduction of the COVID pandemic. With various restrictions placed to protect the health and safety of humanity, life was greatly altered for everyone. As a student pursuing a higher education, the closure of schools and labs greatly restricted the practical experiences normally experienced in university due to the lockdown placed upon the populous. This lost experience inspired the ideation of educational labs conducted through virtual reality. With the utilization of virtual reality as a tool to educate students from a remote location, students could still experience the full practical labs that have been physically restricted to them.
The progression of this Thesis research included the initial previous project revolving around the creation of a virtual dog bone sample tension test as well as the continuation of the virtual reality (VR) lab possibilities through the creation of a user interface (UI) based scanning electron microscope (SEM) sample compression test. User testing of the SEM lab resulted in successful runs through the program and constructive feedback on how the program could be improved as well as possible potentials for the program to grow and potentially be utilized as a common educational tool for remote use
Criterial Variability in Eyewitness Identifications
Get PDFLineups typically induce superior performance compared to one-person identification procedures or showups. Understanding what makes the lineup a superior procedure is important to reduce identification errors, as these can lead to wrongful convictions. Differential filler siphoning, diagnostic feature detection, and criterial variability each attempt to explain lineup superiority. We test the hypothesis that the accuracy of an identification is impacted by group-level variability in criterion placement. Experiment 1 showed greater variability in criterion placement in the showup condition, although overall performance was not worse than the lineup condition. Experiment 2 used different photos of faces from study to test and introduced a constrained showup condition designed to lessen criterial variability by having participants respond only when they are highly confident. Experiment 3 introduced a simultaneous showup condition as another way to help participants set their criterion less variably by making diagnostic information more accessible. We replicate the finding that people set their criterion more variably in showups compared to lineups in Experiments 1 and 2, but this does not translate to a discriminability difference. Experiment 3 results are inconclusive, but this could be due to a small sample size. Therefore, more data are needed to attribute discriminability differences to criterial variability
Virgulae and Distinctiones: A History of Western Notational Systems from Grammar Handbook to Liturgical Leaf
No full textI present the history of the virgule or slash (/) as a measure of how students read and interpreted texts first by methods taught in grammar handbooks but then according to scribal-driven innovations to the page. The mark primarily operates in four ways: as an outsider to distinctiones, the dominant mode of punctuating from the first century CE to the ninth; as the term virgula, a “stem” or “twig” describing the shapes of accents or critical signs in grammatical treatises; as a runover or punctuation mark, both byproducts of Insular innovations in book production during the eighth and ninth centuries; and as an outsider yet again in Carolingian scriptoria, where scribes preferred a modified version of distinctiones or a new system of liturgical punctuation called positurae. The history of the virgule reveals how the responsibilities once considered as acts of interpretation left to the reader became expectations for the appearance of texts placed upon the scribe
Driving to Heaven and Other Stories
No full textDriving to Heaven and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction and creative nonfiction focused on the themes of family, religion, addiction, and exile. These works were written, compiled, and collated between Fall 2020 and Spring 2022
Analysis and Comparison of Cement Selection in Ultra-High-Performance Concrete
Get PDFUltra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) is a relatively new material that is growing in popularity and usage over recent years. The greatly increased strength and durability of UHPC compared to conventional ACI concrete makes it an attractive material for designing stronger and more efficient structural systems. However, the high costs of specialty materials needed to make UHPC have encouraged researchers to investigate methods for optimizing UHPC mixes with a balance of cost and performance in mind. Popular means of optimization include different curing conditions, particle packing methods, and the exploration of different amounts and types of materials. Materials that are commonly used and varied between different UHPC mix designs include steel fibers, silica fume, and portland cement.
The purpose of this research project was to investigate the effects of different types of cement and their properties, particularly chemical composition and heat of hydration, on the performance of a standardized UHPC mix. The methods of investigation included compressive strength testing of cube specimens at age intervals of 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 28 days, and 56 days, as well as calorimetry testing during the initial 3 days of hydration. Eleven different cements from six different manufacturers were investigated in this study. The collected data indicated that Type I/II portland cements performed the best overall. Investigating the individual chemical compositions showed few trends correlating individual values with higher compressive strength, though cements with higher C3S, C3S+4.75*C3A contents, and Blaine fineness had a slight tendency to have higher compressive strength at 56 days. Investigating the area formed under the measured calorimetry curves also yielded a positive trend between larger areas and higher compressive strengths, especially for 1 and 3 day strength