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Did Socrates Corrupt the Youth?
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/0c716c22-e40c-41ef-9784-7a98fe2fc75e/thumb/128.jpgIn 399 BC, an Athenian jury indicted, tried and convicted Socrates of corrupting the youth. In this project I ask whether that conviction was indeed the case: did Socrates corrupt the youth? To answer that question, I examine, investigate and consider primary and secondary sources about Socrates and about his trial, and I conclude that Socrates corrupted the youth, but not in the way that was specified by the formal accusation against him. In the first chapter, I investigate Socrates’ pertinent behavior in Plato’s Protagoras, Meno and Lysis for clues. In the second chapter, I investigate Socrates’ formal defense against the indictment in Plato’s Apology, and draw from secondary sources about the trial by Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith, Thomas G. West, and C.D.C. Reeve. In the third chapter, I apply Xenophon’s Memorabilia and briefly Plato’s Crito to conclude that though Socrates did not corrupt the youth in the way that was specified by the indictment against him, he corrupted the youth by acting in ways that were thought to be harmful by the lights of Athenian moral standards
Power, School, and Race: Social Emotional Learning as a Legacy of Black Power
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/5744761b-5c85-41ac-9e14-a151f90eadcc/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis delves into the origins and rationale behind the establishment of the School Development Program (SDP), now known as Social-Emotional Learning or the Comer Program. Originating in New Haven, CT between 1968 and 1972, the SDP aimed to teach students, particularly those underperforming, essential social skills through community building. The program sought to enhance academic performance, reduce disciplinary incidents, and foster self- esteem through teacher training and community-building initiatives, emphasizing relationships among children, educators, administrators, social workers, parents, and the wider community. Central to the argument is the assertion that James P. Comer constructed the SDP on principles of community control to address issues of student self- esteem. The program, emerged as a response to both the Black Power movement and the community control movement, both reactions to the shortcomings of institutional efforts (such as Brown v. Board of Education) in achieving meaningful integration in American public schools. Throughout the thesis, connections are drawn between Comer's program and the community organization in New Haven during the 1960s, particularly the initiatives led by the Hill Parents Association. By elucidating the historical, social, and ideological underpinnings of the SDP, this thesis offers insights into the multifaceted origins and motivations shaping educational reform efforts in the late 20th century
Every American's Psycho: Masculine Self-making and Conduct Literature from Benjamin Franklin to American Psycho
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/9b96484f-e199-4523-b5d5-5877095da80d/thumb/128.jpg"My thesis analyzes the connection between manners and murder in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and its cultural precursors. Instead of reading Patrick Bateman as an individual psychopath descending into insanity, I read him as a fictional iteration of a long-established American type, the self-maker of conduct literature and the novel of formation. Tracing the tension between moral and financial self-making through three exemplary works– Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and A Talk to Young men, and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby–reframes Ellis’s chilling depiction of 1980’s Wall Streets as broader interrogation of American success stories over a century of corporate greed, in which violent extremes are not aberrations but advantages. Comparing the autobiographical fictions of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, two icons of American self-making, reveals the rising power of the business elite in the wake of the Civil War, and the values resulting from a newly corporate culture, during what Alan Trachtenberg terms “The Incorporation of America.” Whereas Franklin aligns virtue with economic success, Carnegie’s memoir treats the acquisition of capital–even through exploitation and violence–as a moral good. Carnegie’s vision of American progress contextualizes the cultural history of Wall Street, and the social transformations of the Gilded Age, and the fortunes amassed and inherited rather than earned. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby represents the conflict between Franklin’s self-making and Carnegie’s capitalist excess in the death of James Gatz, and in the different types of successful American men observed and described by the narrator, Nick Carraway. Both Gatsby and Tom Buchanan represent the excess of America’s economic elite in the Jazz Age, but the story of their wealth contrasts a dubious bootstrap narrative with the unearned privilege of a disgraceful heir; both expose the growing incompatibility between morality and success in America. Gatsby’s plot of self-making, like his idealistic romantic aspirations, cannot survive the corruption and carelessness of the privileged world he ultimately joins; sacrificing himself for Daisy, he is murdered by the husband of Tom’s mistress, protecting those with unearned privilege from the consequences of their carelessness. Gatsby’s death renders the self-made and virtuous American man a myth of a bygone era. If Great Gatsby represents the crisis of masculine self-making through unintentional vehicular manslaughter, American Psycho literalizes the killer instincts of capitalist greed through the serial murders of a violent psychopath. Success and masculinity are explicitly violent and extreme. Rather than reading American Psycho as a historically distinct portrayal of 1980s Wall Street, I examine the novel as an extension of American self-making against a myth of meritocracy, in order to be successful, one must have no self.
Structural Prediction of MHETase NlhH in PET-degrading Pseudomonas Bacteria
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/349c8a38-d648-4fc1-9b86-c591ff327c78/thumb/128.jpgThe widespread presence of plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as materials in contemporary consumer and industrial applications has had disastrous consequences for both natural environments and human health. Though a considerable effort has been made to increase recycling of PET, the vast majority is discarded as trash and persistently accumulates in landfills, cities, and waterways. Biodegradation of PET by microorganisms has been identified as a possible remedy for this crisis, with species such as the well-studied Ideonella sakaiensis capable of using PET as a sole carbon source. The species Pseudomonas sp. B10, also being capable of PET degradation as a sole carbon source, has been studied by the Mellies lab to better understand and engineer bacterial plastic degradation. The identification of PETase EstB in Pseudomonas sp. B10 prompted a search for an enzyme capable of degrading MHET, an intermediate product of PET degradation MHET. With putative data suggesting carboxylesterase NlhH to be a MHETase, I sought to structurally characterize NlhH with the intent of identifying active site residues that could eventually be engineered to improve enzyme efficiency. I used the computational protein folding program Alphafold to predict the structure of NlhH from the amino acid sequence. Using predicted structural homology to experimentally characterized enzymes, I structurally described NlhH by comparing it to the highly-similar Pseudomonas putida esterase rPPE. I report here the computationally predicted structure of NlhH in Pseudomonas sp. B10. This structural model includes predicted active site residues, substrate recognition residues, and a model of the enzyme bound to a MHET ligand. I determined that this enzyme is structurally dissimilar to the MHETase present in I. sakaiensis and other plastic degradation-associated enzymes in Pseudomonas sp. B10. This discovery makes NlhH an important target for future analysis and engineering intended to improve catalytic activity and degradation of MHET. Such improvements may provide the basis for engineering large-scale, sustainable, and clean methods of PET recycling
All They Do is Sit and Talk About Me: Representations of the Self in Queer Cinema
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3ce679bd-deac-4ee1-9090-eedf2484a663/thumb/128.jpgIn this thesis, I argue that we must include directorial self-reflection as an element of queer filmmaking what makes a film queer. I accomplish this through comparing how the directors represent themselves within Mala Educación (2004) directed by Pedro Almodóvar and Tongues Untied (1989) directed by Marlon Riggs. By comparing these two films, I provide a more comprehensive and less normative understanding of the queer film canon. In my first chapter, “Meet Me Halfway: Camp and Metafiction Through Mala Educación (2004)”, I argue that metafiction is the form of the queer camp aesthetic through a comparison of the definitions of metafiction and camp and an analysis of how Almodóvar utilizes the camp aesthetic to remind the audience of the fictionality of the film. Furthermore, I extend this argument to prove that camp is political, contrary to Susan Sontag’s declaration, as the metafiction of camp affirms queer identity by forcing the viewer to reflect upon how this fictionality parallels their understood reality. In my second chapter, “Every Time We Touch: A Haptic and Intersectional Study of Tongues Untied (1989)”, I analyze the way that Riggs forms a friendship with the viewer as he utilizes haptic visuality to allow the viewer to touch him. He similarly emphasizes an intersectional, nonessentialist understanding of Black queerness to appeal to a larger viewership. The goal of this chapter is twofold: to refute the claim that this film is pornographic which led to its censorship and to argue for the necessity to study intersectional art such as this film as it broadens our understanding of the queer canon
Naturalist Afterlives of the Frontier Myth
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/bc890db5-90be-4f33-a9e3-fb6cf8633e9f/thumb/128.jpgFrederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis asks what will happen to American character after the closing of the frontier, an environment that, in his account, has been essential to the conception of a national identity of American exceptionalism. In fearing the end of the heroic individualism that he attributes to the rugged landscape of the frontier myth, he builds not only on longstanding narratives of cultural decline in the face of modernity, but also on contemporaneous discourses of literary naturalism, which represents characters shaped by the forces of environmental extremes. Two naturalist writers, Jack London and Frank Norris, confront the frontier myth in ways that expose fundamental paradoxes in Turner’s thesis concerning the reconcilability of rugged individualism and materialist determinism. The works of London and Norris also demonstrate how the American frontier, and the cultural weight it carries, continued to exist into the twentieth century and beyond, despite the alleged finality of Turner’s declaration. The frontier perpetuated in the American psyche through the popularization of frontier fiction that romanticized its essence while using it to legitimize naturalist values, and through the transfer of Turnerian frontier values onto the newly emerging American industrial and commercial empire. The frontier may have been “closed,” but its myth never ended
Matroids and their cycle systems: the h-vector conjecture for a new class of matroids
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/7486d04c-1559-4de7-aa51-b81d99cd260c/thumb/128.jpgIn a 1977 paper by Richard Stanley, it was conjectured that the h-vector—the coefficients of the h-polynomial—of any matroid M is a pure O-sequence. Stanley’s "h-vector conjecture" became a reoccurring subject of research in matroid theory. Over the past 40 years, proofs of the conjecture have been developed for some classes of matroids, including cographic matroids. In this paper, we introduce cycle systems and coparking functions for arbitrary matroids and prove the h-vector conjecture for matroids with cycle systems, using recurrence of the Tutte polynomial. We also describe an algorithm for a bijection between matroid bases and coparking functions using a deletion-contraction diagram with respect to a cycle system, results previously known only for linear matroids
Berry Phase Estimation with Quantum Computation
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/32fb20ad-fe0d-4b86-85e6-17d1bd9b6ead/thumb/128.jpgThe purpose of this thesis is to use a quantum algorithm to measure the Berry phase. This was done with a particle evolving according to the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger Hamiltonian
Exploring Dog Cognition and their Bonds with Humans- A Systematic Review
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3ed3b46a-1b34-4413-9c88-7fc5947b7829/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis focuses on dog cognition and the complex human-dog relationship. The human and dog relationship is an interesting interspecies relationship as there is a long history of dog domestication, making the relationship between dogs and humans a neat one to explore. Anthropomorphism impacts humans' perception of dog behavior, emotion, and cognition. Furthermore, this thesis will investigate how dogs perceive humans' actions, behavior, and emotions. Research indicates that dogs and humans have a prosperous relationship of reciprocated understanding and care, and the human-dog relationship is one of them. The differences between human and dog emotions will be compared. This thesis will review current literature regarding the human-dog relationship and how it is impacted by interspecies communication of obstacles. With clear evidence that dogs are beneficial therapy and emotional support animals for humans, it is vital to understand the literature regarding dog cognition to aid the human-dog relationship further and understand dog behavior, emotion, and cognition
Timing Is Everything: Cell Cycle Pacing Across the Dorsal-Ventral Axis of the Developing Zebrafish Retina
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/44e19191-2eb7-4613-9e46-9fc288a90da0/thumb/128.jpgStem cells can self-renew and differentiate into multiple tissue types in response to their internal and local external environments. In developing vertebrate embryos, neurogenesis is the process by which neurons are created, as stem cells generate progenitors that exit the cell cycle and differentiate. Changes in cell cycle timing and exit can influence the number and type of neurons generated throughout development. Studying the nuances of the cell cycle allows for a better understanding of how developing vertebrates regulate and adjust cell cycle timing based on need without letting it run wild. One pathway known to regulate cell cycle timing uses retinoic acid (RA), which is spatially restricted to regions of the dorsal and ventral retinae at distinct stages of eye development. To explore how the RA pathway influences proliferation across the dorsal-ventral axis of the vertebrate retina, we examined cell cycle progression at various stages of zebrafish development and compared wildtype and mutant zebrafish that have expanded RA pathway activity and a microphthalmic retina. Cells were labeled with 5-ethynyl-2’-deoxyuridine (EdU) and phospho-histone H3 (PH3) at 54 hours post-fertilization (hpf) and quantified across the retina along the dorsoventral axis at 65 and 83 hpf. Results indicate that there are changes in the cell cycle speed when comparing retinas at 65 and 83 hpf between wt and gdf6a-/- retinas. Results also show changes in the spatial distribution of EdU between 60- and 83-hours post-fertilization in the wild type zebrafish that does not exist in their mutant counterparts. Additionally, the shift in the total number of PH3 cells is more extreme in the mutants, as it decreases more drastically. To further examine cell cycle timing and exit in the eyes of living zebrafish on-going construction of a newly modified Dual Fucci vector will label G1 and S/G2/M marker expression in retinal stem and progenitor cells