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Technology, Time, and Being: A Reading of Heidegger
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/a3d2055d-e07f-449f-927d-259909bb8c5d/thumb/128.jpgIn this thesis, I follow Heidegger’s essay, The Question Concerning Technology, to give an ontological account of modern technology. In doing so, I contextualize Heidegger’s view on technology within his view on Being in general, evidenced by his much longer work, Being and Time. I begin with a simple description of technology as a tool, and scrutinize this description, which eventually yields an understanding of technology as an existential feature of human life. To explain what this exactly looks like, I embed my description of technology within a Heideggerian ontology of the world at large. This leads me to an interpretation Heidegger’s critique of modern technology, in which the development of modern technology is intertwined with the historical development of the ways in which we understand our own existence
True Confessions: Reading Hearts in Three Novels of Graham Greene
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/2d8f64b8-4a67-491d-a8c9-550d797e6890/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis analyzes the use of confession within three of the most important Catholic novels written by Graham Greene: Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951). I argue that Greene routinely interrogated the mode of confession because he was interested in transparency of communication, especially through the ideal of Augustinian confession. Because communication and confession are so mediated in Greene’s modern world, however, achieving interpersonal confession is near impossible. His characters turn to various other mediums of communication but find them lacking. I conclude that while other modernist writers often problematize communication, but Greene’s use of Catholic confession as a contrasting impossible ideal distinguishes him from his contemporaries, allowing him to infuse a religious core into modernism while simultaneously placing it firmly out of reach
Enfolding Liveliness: Invoking Bacteriophage Therapy for More-Than-Human Kinships
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/6575cb19-f3eb-43b0-9653-88d45c66095a/thumb/128.jpgThis interdisciplinary thesis uses art and microbiology to investigate how bacteriophage (phage) therapy can inspire radical kinships between humans and microorganisms. Phages are viruses that only kill bacterial cells, and phage therapy is the practice of treating human infections of bacteria by applying phages. Phage therapy presents scalability challenges to the pharmaceutical industry and draws into question the way we define our body boundaries in opposition to microbial invasion. The troubling of these biopolitical and constructivist norms offers a tender place to grow a culture of microbial kinships. My experiment used transposon insertion sequencing to try and identify the receptor molecule on the surface of E. coli that the novel PDX phage binds to, although due to limited time, this goal was not achieved. The characterization of such phage-host interactions is crucial for understanding how bacteria gain resistance to phages, one of the primary challenges of implementing phage therapy. The specificity of phages to their host bacteria means they can’t be applied ubiquitously like antibiotics; the practice requires deep attentiveness to phages, which can grow into kinship. I created a garment which aimed to embody that kinship by incorporating phage plaque iconography into an exaggerated, cyborg body outline. My use of lichen—tight associations of fungus and cyanobacteria or algae—to dye the fabric functioned as a readymade symbiosis transcending representation. The lab work and the art were both methods of experimentation in relating to the lively phage so that through creative collaborations with microorganisms, we might persist through precarious times
Divine Beings and Soft Power: How Falun Gong Uses Performance to Gain Political Influence
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/df79eef9-e70d-4845-885e-87a0ed052009/thumb/128.jpgFalun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) is a new religious movement that originated in China. Since the 1990s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has run a suppression campaign against the group and has been accused of imprisoning and persecuting its members. In this thesis, I examine a performance known as Shen Yun, which is produced by Falun Gong and tours throughout the world and mainly in the United States. I argue that the primary purpose of Shen Yun performances in the U.S. is to influence public opinion of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and encourage the U.S. public to support more “Tough on China” policies. I will also argue that the show does not achieve this objective due to a variety of biases present among audience members in U.S
It's Not Just In Her Head: Sex Bias and Autoimmune Disease
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/d2cc3e40-d9e8-4f37-a8ce-429729d62a14/thumb/128.jpgPrevious literature has suggested a sex bias in the prevalence of autoimmune disease. Females are considerably more likely to suffer from almost every AD than males, suggesting that predisposing factors differs depending on sex. Biological and environmental factors compose two possible predisposing elements to autoimmune disease and thus targetable for an investigation into the causes of autoimmune sex bias. In this thesis, I review biological differences between sexes as well as environmental factors that may lead to increased rates of autoimmune disease in females
To Burn or Not to Burn: The Effect of Low Severity Fire on Native Port-Orford Cedar Soil Microbiomes with Consideration for Phytophthora lateralis Infection
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/340c6046-55bb-4af6-8460-3a46a5243968/thumb/128.jpgPort-Orford cedar (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana), a rare conifer tree, is currently threatened by the prevalence of Phytophthora lateralis, a waterborne pathogen that causes severe dieback in its native range. Management options are limited due to the aggressive nature of the pathogen. Phytophthora lateralis however, has a low heat tolerance leading to possible management options that employ prescribed fire. Historically, Port-Orford cedar stands were exposed to a low severity, high frequency fire regime that has been suppressed in recent years due to wildfire mitigation activities. Fire has many effects on forest soils, including altering the diversity of soil microbiota, which may affect pathogen establishment success. This leads to an overarching question of how low severity fire impacts the microbiome and pathogen success of Phytophthora lateralis in the native range of Port-Orford cedar. This study aims to determine if and how: 1) the presence of Phytophthora lateralis impacts the diversity of the soil microbiome in a congruent pattern with previous studies that act as background to this study, 2) fire impacts the diversity of the soil microbiome of Port-Orford cedars, and 3) interactions between fire and Phytophthora lateralis affect the potential pathogen success rate of Phytophthora lateralis. Soil was sampled from 6 stands of Port-Orford cedars (3 infected, 3 non-infected). The soil was then burned by igniting leaf litter collected at the sites using a propane torch to simulate a low severity fire. Soil DNA samples were taken from the pre-burned samples, the immediate post-burned samples, and again two months following the fire (i.e. “Recovered samples”). The DNA was then amplified using 16S and ITS2 primers and sequenced. Sequenced DNA samples were then analyzed for alpha and beta community diversity, and relative taxonomic abundance. The results showed that variation in both alpha and beta diversity were more dependent on the site the samples were collected from than the infection status of the stand or the fire treatment. This study suggests that fire and pathogenic presence only have minor effects on soil microbiome composition and that differences in site conditions are more important to determining microbiome diversity. Future work should look to improve samples sizes and focus on the interaction of fire and Phytophthora lateralis establishment success as results for this test were inconclusive. Future studies are needed to more directly assess management options of Phytophthora-infested field sites
Exploring Memory Tiering Policies for Composable Memory Systems
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/050e626f-1365-46cd-a8f4-467314e7fe4c/thumb/128.jpgComputer applications are increasingly running into a well known problem dubbed the memory wall. Specifically in the fields of hyperscale and high performance computing, machines do not possess enough memory capacity and bandwidth local to the processor to satisfy the volume of memory traffic from resource-intensive applications. To address this issue, novel memory hardware and interconnects have been developed which allow operators to compose computer systems with multiple memory tiers. However, software defined memory management for composable memory systems remains an open problem. Current software implementations for tiered memory focuses on migration policies for capacity constrained use cases while ignoring the effects of initial allocation decisions and bandwidth utilization. This thesis proposes a bandwidth-aware approach to modeling the effectiveness of different memory tiering policies on a two-tier memory system, and gathers empirical results to motivate simple interleaving policies for initial memory allocation
Not So Crystal Clear: Towards a Structural Analysis of the Manganese Exporter MneP
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/ff655c00-27a9-4da2-8dc7-57489ce6a2db/thumb/128.jpg"The dynamic nature of bacterial interactions with their environment is essential to the microbe’s ability to survive in a variety of conditions. One such way that bacteria can rapidly alter interactions with their extracellular environment is through the use of transmembrane transport systems that facilitate the movement of nutrients across the cell membrane (Chandrangsu et al., 2017). MneP and MneS are two such transmembrane proteins, natively expressed in Bacillus subtilis, responsible for the movement of manganese (Mn(II)) and iron (Fe(II)) from the bacterium’s cytoplasmic interior to the extracellular space (Huang et al., 2017). These proteins, belonging to the cation diffusion facilitator (CDF) family, are most commonly known as Mn(II) exporters. It has been determined that both MneP and MneS are crucial to the maintenance of biological Mn(II) concentrations and homeostasis for the proper function of many biological processes. Specifically, Mn(II) exporters like MneP and MneS prevent fatal Mn(II) intoxication in instances of high intracellular Mn(II) levels that are often a result of host immune response to bacterial infection (Steingard et al. 2023). Consequently, the two transmembrane proteins play an important role in bacterial survival, allowing for a robust bacterial response to fluctuations of extracellular metal concentrations. As members of the CDF protein family have been implicated in a variety of human diseases and the ability of pathogenic bacteria to export metal has been found to impact their virulence, the two Mn(II) exporters MneP and MneS represent a promising area of study owing to the implications of their study on human health. This thesis aims to obtain atomic resolution structures of the primary Mn(II) exporter MneP while also optimizing the protocol of MneP purification. Protein yields obtained using optimized methods of the MneP purification protocol were increased by ~75%. Preliminary structural characterization experiments were carried out and, while Cryo-EM did not appear to be a promising technique for structural characterization, MneP crystals could be grown. X-Ray crystallography, therefore, represents a possible method of structurally characterizing the Mn(II) exporter MneP.
Parameter-Pack Iteration in Swift
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/1020d7f0-84b2-4186-b276-3313505509e5/thumb/128.jpg"Variadic generics, or more specifically, parameter packs, is a very powerful feature present in some of the most commonly used programming languages, such as C++ and Swift. This thesis will focus on the Swift Programming language, its implementation of variadic generics, and my contribution, which builds on top of this concept. Swift positions itself as a programming language approachable for beginners, and parameter packs have been considered a really advanced feature since its adoption. However, as some of the qualities that attract people to Swift are its simplicity of writing and use, the variadic generics feature should not be an exception. Because of this, I have co-authored the SE-0408 ""Pack Iteration"" proposal to Swift, which enables a familiar ""for""-""in"" statement to accept a pack expansion expression, therefore enabling iteration over the elements of its respective value pack. I have also fully implemented this new feature. Before SE-0408, users were able to ""emulate"" such iteration by putting code involving statements into a function or closure (a self-contained block of functionality) and then using ""do""/""catch"" statements for short-circuiting. Under SE-0408, programmers are able to express the same logic using familiar, straightforward, and clean syntax. The feature exhibits a unique quality of Swift's parameter packs that allows dynamic iteration: the elements of the value pack are evaluated on demand. The proposal allows for a number of applications within Swift's standard library, such as a more effortless implementation of existing tuple operators. Under SE-0408, Swift became the first widely used programming language with such a feature. The feature will be available for everyone starting Swift 6.0.
"Man, in Changing Nature, Changes Himself": An Environmental History of the Gulag
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/1aad4bad-2196-416f-b607-1d4fba8c97e0/thumb/128.jpgMillions were arrested, imprisoned, and killed in the Stalinist Soviet Union, many within the prison camps of the Gulag. Scholarly attention has long been fixated on Stalinism and the Gulag, and the field of Russian and Soviet environmental history has grown significantly in the past years. However, study of the Gulag has not yet begun to interrogate the relationship between nature and prisoners in the camps. How did nature and geography impact the experience of incarceration in the Gulag? This thesis examines the writings of Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov to investigate the relationship between prisoners and nature. Placing Shalamov within his historical and ideological context, this thesis seeks to understand how the Soviet Union sought to reconstruct the human-nature relationship through the Gulag. Chapter one describes the Soviet Union’s approach to the relationship between humans and nature, arguing that the Gulag served as a crucible for restructuring nature’s role in human society. Chapter two flips this narrative on its head; it was nature, rather than the Soviet state, that changed Soviet power and prisoners. In chapter two, I examine Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories to demonstrate that the Soviet state never truly overcame the forces of nature and still had to submit to nature’s will in the harsh conditions of Kolyma. I also identify two main roles that nature plays for Kolyma prisoners: that of a punishing, cruel force, and that of a subversive, nurturing force that refused to submit to Soviet power. These competing sides of nature are surprising and interesting considering the bleak conditions in the Kolyma camps and the difficulty of life in the Gulag. Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories reveals a deep connection between incarceration, geography, and the environment that is insightful for understanding how the three interact. Studying the Gulag provides interesting insight into the current geography of penal institutions in Russia, especially relevant in the context of the death of Alexei Navalny and issues of crime and punishment in Russia