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Sexual selection for male advertisement call dominant frequency ratios in Xenopus petersii
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/c9103181-0040-40f5-88ba-45a1918bf329/thumb/128.jpgThe chirps, croaks, and other calls that can be heard throughout the animal kingdom are different versions of vocal communication. Many species use auditory signaling to communicate a variety of things. One of these things is important information relating to sexual reproduction. Through specialized auditory signals, an individual may be able to communicate their species, location, availability, and viability as a mate, and another individual can receive these signals and respond to them accordingly. In the genus Xenopus, individuals communicate by sound, and males of each species have distinct advertisement calls that are able to communicate to females that they are of their species and available to mate. While the communication in this case is being done by the males, the important deciding factor for whether reproduction will happen or not are the females. My thesis involved behavioral observation experiments of female Xenopus petersii response to a series of calls. There were four calls total for the female to respond to, natural advertisement calls of both X. laevis and X. petersii males as well as those same calls edited to have the dominant frequency ratio of the opposite species. There is a current gap in knowledge regarding the importance of certain auditory features of Xenopus male advertisement calls as well as just generally a lack of knowledge of female X. petersii behavior and preference. My thesis aimed to investigate female X. petersii preference for the calls of its own species versus those of a different species, as well as the significance of dominant frequency ratios for mating success
After the Light Is Gone
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/81d2c9e6-1736-4037-9929-3dfbed03f588/thumb/128.jpgA collection of poems
Revolution at the Ballot Box: Ranked choice voting in the US as a model of electoral change.
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/adcc9d0f-251c-4aa0-b43b-50c81f58cc4a/thumb/128.jpgIn 2016, Maine implemented ranked choice voting for all federal and state elections, and in 2020 Alaska followed suit. There is already a good body of literature on the effectiveness of ranked choice voting, with many studies showcasing the positive effects RCV has on the communities and governments that adopt it. However, no research has been written on why the campaigns for this system were effective, and what factors were present in Maine and Alaska that made them the first states to have these successful campaigns. In this paper, I will attempt to use Graham Allison's models of analysis to answer three questions: first, why were the RCV campaigns in Maine and Alaska successful, second, can Graham Allison's models be useful when scaled down for American politics, and third, is there a model based off these two examples that can be used to predict where else RCV may be successful
The Wake
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/bc0dd9d4-b132-4b85-b6df-aa87fe4f210d/thumb/128.jp
All That is Left of Me is You (supplementary files)
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/d88e0370-2bb5-4419-ada4-24c47df907ea/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis weaves together personal influence and knowledge sharing by exploring the impact my grandmother has made on my life and art practice. I discuss our shared interests such as knitting, cooking, and sharing stories while documenting her life story and the life she built for our family in her home. Through this lens, I abstract and amplify the ways in which we as individuals are impacted and influenced by craft, culture, and place-making as a way of creating collective memory. The final artwork, titled All That is Left of Me is You, explores how these types of exchanges shape who we are as individuals through the sharing and embracing of knowledge and personal practice.I use Janet Donohoe’s argument from her book Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship Between Memory and Place and Jada- Amina Harvey, Noa Hines, and Sebastien Pierre in their writing “Grandmother’s House: The Black Radical Tradition of Collecting” to frame my understanding of the impact of place and personhood on ourselves and those around us throughout our lives. Personal influence is used to establish the final medium of the finished work, a knitted fiber-arts installation, as well as the larger concept that the artwork conveys: the idea of interconnectedness and the creation of networks through exchange. I support the method of the finished artwork All That is Left of Me is You through the writing of David Rosand in his book Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation and his understanding of drawing as a way to recognize agency and identity through mark-making and surface design. My creative work All That is Left of Me is You utilizes the medium of knitting as an extension of this large concept, using form, color and display to further support the idea of interconnectedness.Knowledge is shared across relationships and through generations, shaping the ways in which we navigate the world with the skills and awareness that we grow over time through strengthening relationships. All That is Left of Me is You emphasizes the ways in which we are impacted by and impact those around us
Narratives of Roman History in Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/bdbe9860-af09-4183-991a-8201b7f032fe/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis will be using Salvian the Presbyter’s De Gubernatione Dei to understand the shifting social, political, and ideological currents moving through Western Europe in the fifth century CE within the context of past and future narratives of Western Roman Empire in the time of Late Antiquity. Chapter 1 will use secondary sources to both introduce the debate around the scholarship of Late Antiquity and explain the historical background and significance of the changing material and ideological conditions That produced De Gubernatione Dei. Chapter 2 will primarily be a textual analysis of De Gubernatione Dei itself, using Salvian’s writing to illustrate how he understands and navigates the changing material circumstance of the fifth century CE in both Christian and Roman terms simultaneously. The 3rd and final chapter will examine the significance of Salvian’s argument, the relevance it has for better understanding Roman history as a whole, and the value it has in providing nuance for our contemporary narratives of Late Antiquity. This thesis will argue that De Gubernatione Dei complicates the traditional “decline and fall” narrative that is present throughout modern discourses on Late Antiquity, and through the examination of it and other sources akin to it we can gain a more complete picture of the history of Rome
A Survey of Categorification: Towards Categorical Algebra and Higher Categories
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/5235e7ee-2a90-48c4-ac14-4c5ca3140fa4/thumb/128.jpgCategorification is one of the less well-defined terms in mathematics, but in general it typically refers to one of two different processes: horizontal or vertical categorification. Horizontal categorification is the translation of an appropriate algebraic theory into a similar categorical one. Vertical categorification, the more common use of the term, refers to the process of turning sets, or set defined theories, into categories, functions into functors, and so forth. This thesis will provide an overview of a number of key examples of both horizontal and vertical categorification. Along the way we will highlight some of the challenges in attempting to precisely define categorification. We will discuss how the concept of categorification can help us think about the purpose of category theory, as well as some of the basic ideas of categorical algebra. Finally, we will briefly discuss the concept of higher categories and how categorification can help us think about how to construct them
Medicine and Religion in Early China: On the Discourse of Wind
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/df64e331-a6a2-4bd8-8f7d-1ca4872eaf29/thumb/128.jpgWith the popularization of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the world market in the past couple of decades, physicians, scientists, and scholars alike have been debating what this thing is made of. Claims typically are framed within the disciplines of science of the West. Yet this thesis argues that, from a historical point of view, TCM needs to be understood differently. Many of the core concepts of what we nowadays construe as TCM need to be treated instead as the products of religious ritual practices dating to pre- and early imperial China. In order to do so, we will pivot the discussion on the topic of wind, and the argument is two-fold. First, we will examine early medical cases and theories that include vocabularies and concepts such as “wind” and “qi.” Then, we will expand on these cases and theories by tracing their origins to a wide fusion of ritual practices found in the contemporaneous non-medical literatures, which will include the Daoist cultivations of qi, ancestral worship, spirit visitations, cosmicizing of the human body and the political state, and also wind divination techniques that are rooted within Confucian music rituals. TCM as expounded by a group of literati physicians in early China stems from religious ritual practices; but the same as most of the so-called major religions of the world today, these religious sects, from which the ritual practices have grown out, impose also a strong imperial quality. And therefore, in the second argument, we will show that both wind and medicine have also in another direction provided the lens for us to review the understanding of what we call the imperial religions: the religions supporting and being supported by the empires. Approaching wind and medicine as the studies of changes and transformations of the destiny of humans, the political states, and the world at large, reveals also the core concepts of the religions of the empires. The diseases are many, but two factors matter most: disorder and delusion. The problem of disorder concerns measures taken in the processes of regulating the body, and by extension, the arrangement and unifying of both the political states and the cosmos, whereas the problem of delusion addresses the human sentiment and self-cultivations of virtues, the more internal aspects of personhood in which everything else is considered to be revolving around. In general, medicine in early China is a product of religious rituals established under the double scheme of both empire building and moral cultivation. And this, we will come to see through the eyes of wind
Linguistic Erasure Hertz; a post-binary discussion of F0 performance in read speech
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/3f4f60a2-2176-4779-bf7b-80e78383617c/thumb/128.jpgThis thesis investigates the relationship between fundamental frequency (F0) and the construction of gender outside of the man vs. woman binary. Qualitative analysis of sociolinguistic interviews around participant gender ideology informs my interpretation of quantitative acoustic data extracted from 33 samples of read speech. F0 mean and F0 range were extracted from a scripted passage in which participants perform three personae: valley girl, surfer bro, and high school detention supervisor. All participants self-identified as one of five gender categories: trans men, cis men, nonbinary people, cis women, or trans women. My research is primarily concerned with non-cis speakers’ construction of gender and personae via production of mean and range F0. I use theoretical frameworks including Performativity (Butler 1990), Indexicality (Ochs 1992), and Identity vs. Identification (Bucholtz and Hall 2004) to deconstruct the gender binary and discuss the usefulness as well as permeability of socially maintained gender categories
Simplicial Homology Computation Using Discrete Morse Theory
No full texthttps://rdc.reed.edu/v1/resources/e6933b5c-f848-447f-9c25-d9c14e704b7e/thumb/128.jpgThe theory of simplicial homology gives us powerful tools for analyzing the topology of a simplicial complex. This technique is used to analyze data in fields such as network analysis, scientific modeling, computer graphics, and neuroscience. However, for large datasets, applying these techniques requires high amounts of computing power. Ideas from Morse theory give us insight into how we can make these computations more efficient, but for computational applications, we must be able to apply these ideas in the discrete setting. Forman's discrete Morse theory is a combinatorial adaptation of Morse theory which enables us to apply the ideas of Morse theory to simplicial complexes. The aim of this thesis is to show how we can use discrete Morse theory to make homology computations more efficient by reducing the dimension of our original data in a way that preserves the information about homology, and to implement these methods algorithmically