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Codifying racism : Chinese and Japanese immigration law in the United States from 1868 to 1965
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/80f7499d-a524-49a8-93a2-42a54b9842d3/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis examines the role of anti-Asian racism in United States immigration laws from 1868 to 1965. Over nearly 100 years, anti-Asian racism took on many forms and was justified in various ways according to the social and legal conventions of the time. Analyzing the laws that upheld this racism demonstrates how the legal structure negatively affected people of Chinese and Japanese descent. Through the analysis of immigration laws and relevant Supreme Court cases, this thesis also shows how anti-Asian racism was legally justified in the name of protecting American economic and political interests. Testimony from Chinese and Japanese immigrants and their children provides additional insight into how the laws were implemented and affected the communities they targeted. Dissecting the United States government’s justifications for this treatment exposes the true intentions of the laws. Additionally, as seen through the court cases and testimony, people of Chinese and Japanese descent in the United States fought discriminatory laws to remake the country into a place where they would be viewed as fully American
Producing Silence: Producing Silence: An Exploration of Silence Through Sound
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/ed4c7a7b-8e73-4a35-b8d7-a17261c979f4/thumb/128.jp
Autoregressive Representations for Nonstationary Time Series Classification and Clustering
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/d6e72819-7ac2-4860-bbff-0bae403fa319/thumb/128.jpgTime series analysis is a fundamental tool for understanding patterns and trends in sequential data across various domains, including finance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. This thesis explores the use of decomposition and classification techniques for analyzing time series data. Specifically, Seasonal-Trend decomposition using Locally Estimated Scatterplot Smoothing (Loess) (STL) is employed to separate a time series into its trend, seasonal, and remainder components, facilitating better feature extraction and data interpretation. The advantages and limitations of STL decomposition are examined, highlighting its flexibility and robustness to outliers. This thesis aims to evaluate the effectiveness of AR-based distance metrics for clustering and classifying time series, especially when preprocessing techniques like STL decomposition are used to handle nonstationarity. By bridging classical time series modeling with modern clustering tools, this work provides a practical framework for understanding temporal patterns in real and simulated data. Furthermore, classification methods are explored to categorize time series into meaningful groups. A feature-based classification approach is adopted, leveraging an infinite-order autoregressive (AR) representation of the remainder component obtained from STL decomposition. The extracted AR coefficients, along with trend and seasonality strength measures, serve as key inputs for classification models. Various distance metrics, including Euclidean Distance, Autoregressive Distance, and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), are evaluated for their effectiveness in distinguishing time series patterns. The thesis also investigates clustering techniques to identify natural groupings within time series data. The classification methods discussed include Nearest Medoid Classifier, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, which are applied to structured feature vectors derived from decomposed time series. By combining decomposition, feature extraction, and classification, this research presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing and interpreting time series data
The Board is Set, and the Pieces Are About to Move: Evangelical Apocalyptic Thinking, QAnon, and the Sense of an Ending
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/8c49d7bd-1a65-4dbd-b9fc-2819df80052b/thumb/128.jpgIntroduction From the late 1970s to the beginning of the 2010s, understandings of the Bible in mainstream political discourse, at least in the English-speaking West, seemed to have crystallized around a number of themes concerning economic liberalism and the support for military intervention abroad… However, from 2015 onward, there were rapid changes in politics and with the Bible following suit…Trumpism in America brought in abrasive readings of the Bible that were not typical of what had come before, at least not in the political mainstream (Crossley 2018)… But the COVID pandemic disturbed any potential certainties and brought with it to the political and media mainstreams discussions of apocalypticism and Revelation that were either unfamiliar or alien (this was, after all, the frightening language of the American Right). Now this language crosses the political spectrum, even if in updated horrified rejection. The past five years have shown that no-one ought to predict the political future with any confidence, but if predictions about climate change are anyway close to being right, then the age of COVID and the accompanying uses of the Bible may only be a mere dress rehearsal for the bigger apocalypse around the corner. James Crossley1 I begin this thesis with the above quote from New Testament scholar James Crossley, because it points at poignant fears Americans have been tackling concurrent to my writing of this thesis. With Trump’s 2024 reelection, massive political and religious shifts have come about in this country very quickly, and fear or uncertainty about our future is once again rife in the American consciousness. At its very core, this thesis is about fear and uncertainty, and the ways in which certain political actors have capitalized on and further propagated white Evangelical Christian fears about the apocalypse, reinvigorating the millenarian preoccupation of many Americans that was so prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. In his book The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory, which tracks the evolution of modern evangelicalism in a world of ever-increasing extremist violence, 1 Crossley, “The Apocalypse.”107. 2 Journalist Tim Alberta notes that congregations of many Protestant Christian faiths have been affected by the rise of the QAnon conspiracy movement and the Trump presidency.2 Alberta’s own father was an Evangelical Presbyterian (EPC) minister at the Cornerstone Church who appointed his successor Chris Winans precisely because of his liberal politics and progressive interpretation of Christian texts, an anomaly both for the EPC as a whole and in Alberta’s hometown of Brighton, Michigan, which he describes as “…deeply conservative, deceptively wealthy, and almost exclusively white.”3 Winans took over Cornerstone in early 2018, and immediately faced backlash from the congregants, who were irritated by Winans’ criticism of President Donald Trump, his desire to move the church in a more progressive direction, and his argument that “Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation,” and therefore should be actively working to prevent climate change, something Trump’s government had adamantly opposed.4 After the death of Alberta’s father, Winans became the senior authority of the Cornerstone Church, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, like many government officials across the United States, issued lockdown orders, which Winans chose to honor as he believed that “Whitmer wasn’t ordering Christians to do something sinful or immoral or unholy,” and “Scripture says to respect governing authorities,” much to the irritation of many of his congregants.5 Winans was confronted with the increasing integration of QAnon conspiracy ideology and Christian theology, with many of his congregants believing that “…the virus was a hoax cooked up by globalist elites,” but this integration didn’t come out of thin air.6 Rather, as Alberta describes, conservative Christians, especially conservative Evangelicals, had been warning their congregants for decades that the Democratic party had been launching a cultural, political, and spiritual war on Christians. Religious scholar Matthew Avery Sutton notes that between the first and second World Wars, conservative American Christians considered themselves “citizens of two 2 Alberta, The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory. 17-31. 3 Alberta, 18. 4 Alberta, 18. 5 Alberta, 18-19. 6 Alberta, 19. 3 worlds,” who “moved seamlessly from prophetic utterances to political critiques of New Deal programs and back again.”7 Sutton argues that premillennialism, or the Christian belief that we are living in the period before the imminent second coming of Christ, allowed the faithful to critique what they saw around them without forcing them to take any responsibility for it. They believed that God had turned the world over to Satan until the battle of Armageddon. Until then, they could claim the moral high ground without having to get their hands dirty in the hard and imperfect work of social and economic reform.8 The inter-war period was a time of great uncertainty in all aspects of American life—politics, culture, religion, and really, society itself. In many ways, the political instability and unfamiliar, frightening climate of the late 2010s-early 2020s reflects this period of history, even if the circumstances by which it has come about are different. Alberta argues that it is this very uncertainty that had many conservative Evangelicals during the COVID-19 pandemic believing that this same sort of premillennial “prophecy was being fulfilled—and spineless pastors like Chris Winans were letting it happen.”9 Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral bid acknowledged the importance of the Evangelical vote, a demographic that has historically been vital for any presidential candidate, and his 2020 campaign further appealed to this demographic.10 Trump’s campaign made promises to conservative Christians that acknowledged and utilized the fears they already had about the Democratic Party’s possible connection to demonic powers: Trump had campaigned in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he warned that his opponent in the 2020 election, former vice president Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president seized upon notions of America’s prophesied apocalypse, enlisting leading evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the 7 Sutton, American Apocalypse. 242. 8 Sutton, 242. 9 Alberta, The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory. 19. 10 Newport, “Religious Group Voting.” 4 secular leftists who viewed the forty-fifth president as the last obstacle standing between them and a conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.11 At the same time, the QAnon conspiracy theory, which first surfaced in late 2017, was gaining massive traction, which many scholars attribute in large part to their allegations that the COVID-19 pandemic had been planned by the top brass of the Democratic Party, who were themselves part of the global Satanic cabal, or the “deep state.”12 Fears around what for many Americans was an unprecedented event in American history (the last major American pandemic had been the Spanish Flu pandemic from 1918-1920) allowed a convenient entry point into the conspiracy theory which, when looked at with a bird’s eye view, includes so many absurd moving parts that diving in all at once is more or less unheard of.13 QAnon scholar Mike Rothschild notes the importance of remembering that conspiracy theories are attractive to individuals not because they are stupid, or mentally ill, or for any other derogatory label one might assign to believers; rather, Human brains need to recognize dangerous situations, and we are hardwired to seek patterns, to find order in chaos, and to exert control where none can be found. Conspiracy theories, at their most basic level, assert that we are in danger from hidden forces. This helps give difficult questions and random events satisfying answers… 14 Even more importantly, Rothschild emphasizes that “…people believe the conspiracy theories because they fit in with the biases they already have about how the world ‘really’ works.”15 Evangelical Christians had already believed for decades that there was a secret Democratic plot to destabilize or even criminalize their religion, and that the forces of Satan had invaded numerous aspects of American life; therefore, QAnon, which shared many of these same ideals, became massively attractive to American Evangelicals. In late 2020, the Cornerstone Church fired a popular pastor working under Winans who had 11 Alberta, The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory. 20-21. 12 Finkelstein et al., “A Contagion of Institutional Distrust.” 3-4. 13 Rothschild, The Storm Is Upon Us. 86-88; 94-97. 14 Rothschild, 86. 15 Rothschild, 90. 5 been “proselytizing for QAnon,” and although Winans had hoped that her expulsion would move the church in a better direction, he was faced instead with a harsh reality: When the church dismissed her, without announcing why, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people who Winans counted as confidants and personal friends.16 For many outside of Evangelical or QAnon circles, the connection between the two groups was not immediately obvious; that was, until January 6, 2021, when a group of pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the election of Joe Biden from being certified.17 This event, which deeply shocked many Americans, inspired a number of questions in me that have developed into this thesis. How did Evangelicals become one of the single most important voting demographics in the United States? How has American Evangelicalism influenced the politics of the United States throughout its relatively short history? How did QAnon become so popular? Who is Q, and does it even matter? What made QAnon so appealing to Evangelicals? How did we reach a point in American history where an attempted coup has, only four years removed from it, virtually been dismissed as a distant memory? In this thesis, I examine the ways in which the QAnon movement utilized technology to create online spaces where extant Evangelical and other Protestant Christian theological ideals were combined with political conspiracy theories, and how these spaces attracted white Evangelicals who felt disenfranchised and frightened by a world that they felt was becoming increasingly distant from their interpretations of biblical standards of living. In my first chapter, I will define what I mean when I say “Evangelical,” discuss the origins of the Evangelical church in the United States and illustrate the history of the Evangelical church’s role in American politics through the lens of Evangelicalism’s long-time de-facto leader Billy Graham. In my second chapter, I will define the QAnon movement, discuss and track the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and demonstrate 16 Alberta, The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory. 21. 17 Alberta, 21-23. 6 how the conspiracy reached so many people by illustrating what it is that makes conspiracy theories in general attractive to people. In my final chapter, I will discuss the convergence of the ideologies of each of these movements in order to demonstrate how they became intertwined, and use the events of January 6, 2021 as a case study to demonstrate the incredibly damaging results of this combination
Dammed If You Do, Dammed If You Don’t: The Clash of Coalitions Over the Lower Snake River Dams
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/4d9c96ea-f864-4b7e-a4c4-c2655993985a/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis analyzes the political discourse surrounding the potential removal or breaching of the four lower Snake River dams (LSRD), focusing on the conflict between declining salmon populations and the dams' economic benefits, including irrigation, barging, and hydropower. Drawing on a content analysis of 212 congressional testimonies from 1997 to 2024, I identify key actors across sectors—agriculture, business, conservation, energy, fishing, government, Indigenous peoples, and scientific researchers—and map their coalition alignments. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework, I examine patterns of political learning (learning within a coalition to develop more sophisticated advocacy strategies) and policy-oriented learning (learning across coalitions that leads actors to revise their understandings of problems and solutions). I track shifts in argumentative strategies and coalition membership to assess the extent of each learning type. These shifts highlight the roles of experts (scientists, technical consultants) and elites (elected officials, industry leaders) in shaping the discourse. Findings reveal that while scientific experts often maintain formal neutrality, elites consistently dominate discourse, shaping narratives and limiting opportunities for substantive learning and change. This research helps explain persistent policy stagnation in the LSRD debate and offers insights into the conditions necessary for future policy breakthroughs
Dynamic Volatility in Financial Markets: An Evaluation of the GARCH Model
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/743355bd-1644-48ec-ac0e-01734b79e463/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis evaluates how effectively the canonical model explains and predicts time--varying volatility in financial returns. After reviewing stationarity and linear fundamentals, we derive the conditional Gaussian log--likelihood for and implement a constrained maximum-likelihood estimator in \textsf{R}. A Monte-Carlo study of simulated series () shows the estimator is virtually unbiased: mean parameter estimates deviate from the truth by less than and the average volatility-tracking errors are small (MAE , MSE ). Applying the same workflow to daily S\&P\,500 returns (2005--2023) confirms heavy tails and pronounced volatility clustering. A fitted on an 80\,\% training window yields near-unit-root persistence () yet passes all residual diagnostics. Rolling one-step-ahead forecasts, refitted every 50 days, halve out-of-sample variance loss relative to a fixed-origin forecast and closely follow the COVID-19 volatility spike. While the basic model captures most second-moment dynamics, it leaves heavy-tail risk and leverage asymmetry unexplained, indicating scope for asymmetric or heavy-tailed extensions. Overall, the results reinforce as a powerful baseline and provide a reusable simulation–empirical framework for future volatility modelling
Branching Out: Phylogenetic Tree Construction and the Method of Invariants
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/512c52ef-9467-4a50-a9df-35f199ac67e9/thumb/128.jpgCreating phylogenetic trees to describe evolution is an ongoing project in biology. In 1987, two independent papers introduced a new technique used to construct phylogenetic trees called the method of phylogenetic invariants. Phylogenetic invariants are polynomials in the joint distributions arising from a Markov process on a tree. Since they were introduced, much work has been done to calculate phylogenetic invariants for certain classes of models. In this thesis, we introduce the algebraic-geometric concepts underlying the computations of these invariants. We also provide a biological understanding of evolution, how it is represented through trees, and the assumptions we make to simplify our model. Finally, we describe the model used to calculate phylogenetic invariants and unpack the work done by Bernd Sturmfels and Seth Sullivant to explicitly calculate toric ideals of phylogenetic invariants for group-based models
Strychnine: History and Synthesis
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/db7c8646-c10b-4aee-abe2-b7f6d329afee/thumb/128.jpgStrychnine is a chemical that was initially isolated from the strychnos family of plants by Pelltier and Caventou in 1818. Thirteen years later, Regnault confirmed it's elemental composition to be C21H22N2O2. It would not be until 1947 that the correlating chemical structure was proposed by Woodward; he would prove this structure correct in a 1954 total synthesis of the compound. Starting in the 1990s, strychnine became a popular synthetic target due to it's complex, seven ring structure. Herein is reported a proposed synthetic route towards strychnine. The first key step of this synthesis involves the Tsuji-Trost coupling of an indole malonate to an enantiopure, epoxidated piperidine. The experimental portion of this project is dedicated towards synthesizing these two fragments
Evaluating the Effectiveness of PSYPACT
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/e307a033-a2ac-4b11-85f8-ae4bde9b74bb/thumb/128.jpgNearly one in four Americans has a mental illness. The importance of treating mental illness has become very clear in recent years. One avenue for treating mental illness is the Psychology Interjurisdictional Compact (PSYPACT). PSYPACT is an interstate compact (i.e. an agreement between states) that widens the pool of available mental health care by allowing psychologists to practice telepsychology across state lines. Because PSYPACT increases the availability of telepsychology, I hypothesize that joining PSYPACT leads to an improvement in the mental health of a state’s population. To test this, I draw on the Mental Health Concerns (MHC) index developed by Bae, Jo, and Shim. The MHC index uses Google Trends data to construct a measure of people’s mental states. Using an event study model, I examine MHC index levels before and after joining PSYPACT. I find no discernible trend in my model, which is likely due to a number of factors. Even so, my thesis provides an example of how the MHC index may be applied in research, and demonstrates areas that further research can look into
Sustainable Extraction of Essential Oils in Undergraduate Lab Classes
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/f69d2cfb-06e3-485a-9ebf-1f25caedb21b/thumb/128.jpgThe essential oils industry has been rising over the past decade and continue to grow into a billion-dollar industry. Essential oils surround the world of modern medicine, aromatherapy, agriculture, and general consumerism. They are comprised of several chemical compounds within the terpene family and are a great organic education tool. The goal of this thesis is to adapt an already loved essential oils lab at Reed into an argument driven inquiry (ADI) structure, while also implementing student feedback to foster a fun chemistry lab environment. In creating this lab, I tested cinnamon, mint, and orange with three different extraction methods: steam distillation, carbon dioxide extraction, and ultrasonic assisted extraction