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Surprising Song: Music in Tolkien's Legendarium
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/c921f862-6f27-48b3-9582-0c8253ff5bee/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis explores music in Tolkien's legendarium, focusing on the Silmarillion as well as smaller examples in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Though Tolkien's creation story features music as the primary creationary force in the universe, scholarship on the impact of song on the legendarium is somewhat lacking. As such, I will discuss music as the foremost divine force within the works concerning the sub-created world of Arda, and the impact it has on fate, free will, and morality
Not Just a PET Project: Large-scale PET Degradation by a Bacterial Consortium
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/a3f7e99f-0257-48c6-9082-02f38538bb1b/thumb/128.jpgThe current rate of plastic production severely outpaces its recycling, making plastic pollution one of the most pressing issues of this century. Enzymatic recycling has emerged in the last decade as a sustainable alternative for degrading polyethylene terephthalate (PET) into terephthalic acid (TPA) and ethylene glycol (EG), monomers from which virgin PET can be synthesized. This research investigates a two-step PET degradation process that first uses a food-waste derived biocatalyst to produce bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET), a compound subsequently degraded to mono(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (MHET), TPA and EG by a bacterial consortium. First seeking to optimize BHET biodegradation on the gram scale using pH measurements and HPLC analysis, this research aims to scale up this two-step process to the kilogram scale using a 110 L bioreactor to characterize biodegradation in cultures up to 15 L. Weekly consortium reinoculation combined with pH neutralization was shown to boost biodegradation, and supplemental yeast extract (YE) in 0.5% concentrations was found to be the optimal nutrient condition. Gram scale chemostat cultures achieved continuous BHET degradation and regular TPA recovery, and scaling up these cultures caused no reduction in biodegradation rate. While future research must investigate reducing MHET contamination in recovered TPA, these findings build a foundation for future continuous, large scale PET degradation by this consortium. This thesis reveals that bacterial PET recycling can be effectively scaled up, presenting a far more sustainable alternative to current recycling methods
Skin Deep: The Tattooed Body, Nationalism, and the Boundaries of Belonging in Postcolonial South Korea
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/c434fdd4-de4c-47be-93f0-532037da0b3f/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis explores the lived experiences of tattoo artists working in Seoul, where tattooing is illegal despite its global popularity and cultural significance. Drawing on eight interviews conducted during three weeks of original ethnographic research in South Korea, I explore how the implicit economy and legality shape social and political dynamics within the tattoo industry. I also argue that nationalism and post-colonialism continue to shape tattooed skin as rebellious, which is only further perpetuated by the illegality of the industry. I unravel the complexities of how artists navigate client relations under conditions of legal risk and utilize social media as both forms of simultaneous protection and surveillance. Through this, I frame the tattooed body as a dynamic representation of vulnerability, exposure, and resistance
Storytime! Congress and the Little AI That Could
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/32a7b042-7863-4200-833c-8bd0d26f72f7/thumb/128.jpgEmerging technology poses opportunities and challenges to everyday life. In trying to combat unknowns, policymakers, often tasked with protecting the livelihood of Americans, must ensure that the general public has access to helpful devices while working through fog of uncertainty surrounding emerging technology. Analyzing the case of artificial intelligence (AI) within the emerging technologies, recent policy developments suggest that it has attracted the attention of some of the nation’s top legislative body. Drawing on Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner’s Punctuated Equilibrium Theorem and Michael Jones, Elizabeth Shanahan, and Mark McBeth’s Narrative Policy Framework, the attention and framing of members of the U.S. Congress are analyzed to see if there is an overall trend in increasing attention through issue expansion and what individual lawmakers have to say about AI. This thesis attempts to reveal a deeper understanding of the reasons Congressional attention on emergent technology has changed in the past five Congresses. From 2013 to 2024, members of Congress have sent hundreds of newsletters to their constituents that mention AI, thus shifting their focus from other pressing issues and persuading their constituents to accept a certain framing of the AI issue
The Invisible: Violence from post-war France to the Algerian War
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3373604b-a3fd-4235-8654-19909ff47551/thumb/128.jpgLess than a decade after the end of WWII in 1945, when France was still recovering from its political turmoil, the post-colonial period in which the colonies worldwide started to rebel against their colonial country started another age of violence, especially the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. The eight-year conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) caused both severe casualties and profound aftermath: the Algerian political status was constantly in turmoil till an outbreak of civil war in 1992, and a generation of French were involved and traumatized by the war, keeping silent about it until the 2000s. Countless atrocities happened on both sides of the war, challenging people’s perspectives on violence. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Camus expressed and clashed with their different views of violence. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s last book for which Sartre composed the preface, the two admitted to different extents that violence was the only way for the Algerians to struggle against the French oppressors. though Fanon developed his diagnosis from a psychiatric perspective, and Sartre a leftist one. Meanwhile, Camus chose to stay silent till his death, and Aron supported the independence of Algeria from economic calculation. The thesis tried to explore violence as a concept with different interpretations and observe its development from post-war France to the Algerian War
Kingmaker: A Simulation Analysis of Strategic Voting
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/57471de9-32f0-48d4-bb88-c1924e20c57f/thumb/128.jpgThe Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem [1] establishes that any non-dictatorial voting rule with at least three alternatives is inherently vulnerable to strategic manipulation. This thesis examines the practical consequences of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem by ana- lyzing the susceptibility of various voting methods under a range of social conditions and models of voter behavior. To support this analysis, a modular and performant simulation framework—kingmaker—is developed for granular modeling of electoral conditions across diverse strategic environments and preference distributions. Using kingmaker, this thesis offers a systematic evaluation of the frequency, impact, and structure of strategic voting across multiple electoral systems. The results yield empirical insight into the robustness of these systems and identify the conditions under which theoretical manipulability becomes operationally significant
Road to Nowhere: The Impact of Wage Inequality on Interstate Labor Migration
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/9bdd17cd-cd5b-440a-a481-23d156c080b6/thumb/128.jpgWage inequality has been on the rise since the 1980s, and labor markets are still seeing the effects today. This probes the question of what is the impact that wage inequality is on labor migration within the United States. This thesis tackles this idea through the construction of a panel dataset using ACS, BLS, IPUMS, and Federal Reserve data that is used within an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression that captures both the net change per state and the overall flow per state. Alongside this, Granger causality is tested between the Gini Coefficients, which are the inequality measure, and the migration count. The results indicate how inequality impacts migration, in addition to which other factors included in this experiment carry the most explanatory power
A Naïve Realist Theory of Perception
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/0ecad082-5dfc-4f83-904a-5f6ef0942e0f/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis aims to defend an old but resurgent view of perceptual experience called naïve realism. The view holds that perceptual experience is just a relation between a perceiving subject and the mind-independent world without mental intermediaries. This contrasts with a Lockean approach in which some private mental items, which we can call sense data, stand between us and the real-world objects of perception and through which we indirectly see them. Naïve realism faces a classical challenge from cases of illusion and hallucination. I treat illusions as misleading perceptions. In illusory experiences, subjects are presented with real things and their properties, but those properties are relational and temporary and mistaken for more stable or intrinsic features. I treat hallucinations as not perceptual at all. Nevertheless, they are experiences, and they have phenomenal character. This stark distinction between perceptual and hallucinatory experiences is called disjunctivism. Naïve realism is not the only way of rejecting the Lockean view. Representationalism takes perceptual experience as a matter of entertaining propositional contents in a certain way, e.g., visually, and entertaining contents also do not require any mental intermediaries. Compatibilism is the idea that both theories ---relationalism and representationalism---are true. However, I will argue against representationalism, outlining the features of relationalism I take to be incompatible with representationalism. I take up Siegel’s version of compatibilism to make this point because of its minimal representationalist commitments. Finally, my thesis is an argument for trope theory. Treating perception as involving real relations between perceivers and objects while rejecting representationalism requires an ontology of appropriate objects. Nominalism and Platonism both fail to provide the appropriate relata for our perceptual experiences, especially illusory experiences, but trope theory succeeds
Immune Function, Exclusion, and Threat: Neural Correlates of Social Context Processing
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/4ba8ee46-cdce-4c97-8a3c-8057911c022f/thumb/128.jpgSocial exclusion increases medial frontal theta activity, a neural marker of social threat that has been associated with greater emotional distress following exclusion. Cyberball is a virtual ball-tossing game commonly used to simulate social exclusion. The task included a fair-play inclusion block and an exclusion block. Trials in which the participant received the ball were excluded from analysis, leaving two conditions: inclusion “not my turn” and exclusion. Twenty participants completed the Immune System Questionnaire (ISQ) and underwent EEG recording while completing the Cyberball task. Medial frontal theta power was collected across an early (200–400 ms) window linked to expectancy violation, and a late (400–800 ms) window linked to social threat processing. Theta power was higher during exclusion than inclusion across participants. A significant three-way interaction indicated that the relationship between condition and theta power across time windows varied by immune function. Follow-up analyses revealed that participants with reduced immune function exhibited significantly greater medial frontal theta during inclusion “not my turn” in the late time window. In the late window, participants with reduced immune function showed reduced neural differentiation between exclusion and inclusion. This pattern suggests heightened stress responses to ambiguous social cues and reduced ability to distinguish between safe and threatening social environments. It aligns with models linking immune dysfunction to social hypervigilance and impaired regulation of social stress
Quantifying Historic Drought Tolerance in the White fir (Abies concolor) x Grand fir (Abies grandis) Hybrid Complex
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/c1eedcc4-d4dc-4eed-8cf6-193d904e1797/thumb/128.jpgThe ranges of grand fir (Abies grandis) and California white fir (Abies concolor var. concolor) converge in the Klamath Mountains and western Cascade Mountains of Southwest Oregon and form a hybrid complex in this region. Knowledge of this hybrid complex is limited, due to the difficulty of identifying hybrids from grand fir and white fir in the field due to a wide range of phenotypic variation. Increasing severity of droughts in this region could put these species and their hybrids at risk of decline, and understanding how they have responded to drought in the past will aid conservation efforts and forest management practices in the future. To investigate historical drought tolerance, I employed a dendrochronological approach and calculated drought resistance, resilience and recovery metrics based on standardized ring width increments measured from white fir, grand fir and hybrid tree cores collected from 10 stands in the western Cascade Mountains near Medford, OR. 4 trees were selected per stand, with 2 cores per tree. Cores were mounted, sanded, scanned, and the scans were digitally processed to generate a record of annual growth. Four severe drought years were identified for the region and the growth data centered around those drought years from the tree cores were used to calculate individual tree metrics for each drought episode of drought resistance, resilience and recovery. These metrics were compared between species and between stands to test for historical patterns of differential drought response. I found evidence that white fir is less tolerant of drought than grand fir, and that drought tolerance values for hybrid firs tend to be intermediate to those of white fir and grand fir. These findings may be used to inform management practices for white fir, grand fir and hybrids within this complex