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To Be Honest: Voices on Donald Trump\u27s Muslim Ban
No full textTo Be Honest is a play script and series of essays reflecting on the ways Muslims are perceived and spoken of in America. With funding from a Mellon Foundation grant, several professors conducted more than two hundred hours of qualitative interviews in Texas with people across religious and political spectrums. Their conversations confirm expected polarizations and reveal new, troubling perspectives.To Be Honest is a “documentary theater” script born from these interviews, which were used to help create monologues that give a face to the nuanced complexity of what is rarely said aloud. The monologues touch on non-Muslim millennials’ understandings of Islam, racism’s intersection with Islamophobia, the fatigue of “activist” Muslims, the impact of intervention in the Middle East on U.S. military veterans, feminist readings of the hijab, the Trump presidency, and more.Six essays contextualize the script’s underlying themes and provide material for further study. In these polarizing times, To Be Honest illuminates the striking reality that Americans have vastly different experiences with Islam, from evangelicals who work to convert Muslims with the aim of “helping them achieve peace” to Muslim youth who struggle to make sense of why society dissects their religion.Students, scholars, readers, and theatergoers will come away with insights that allow them to move beyond limited views of Islam by listening to and engaging with others. To Be Honest is an important script for staging and a valuable tool for dialogue across ideological perspectives.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1179/thumbnail.jp
Mortal Objects: Identity and Persistence Through Life and Death
No full textHow might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it to be human? Might we still exist after changing ourselves into something that is not human? What is the significance of human extinction? Steven Luper addresses these questions and more in this thought-provoking study. He defends an animalist account, which says that we are organisms, but claims that we are also material objects. His book goes to the heart of the most complex questions about what we are and what we might become. Using case studies from the life sciences as well as thought experiments, Luper develops a new way of thinking about the nature of life and death, and whether and how human extinction matters.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1181/thumbnail.jp
Self-Powered Microgravity Resistance Exercise with Soft Pneumatic Exoskeletons
Get PDFAs preparations continue towards sending humans on a 3-year mission to Mars, space programs must find solutions to combat muscular atrophy experienced by astronauts during extended time in microgravity. One method currently used to combat muscle deterioration is daily resistance training sessions using an apparatus like the ARED or CEVIS exercise devices, but these daily exercise sessions are not expected to be enough to protect the muscles during longer missions. To help combat muscular atrophy, we propose self-resistance outside of the daily exercise sessions implemented through soft pneumatic exoskeletons that could be integrated into astronauts’ suits, augmenting the formal exercise regimen to improve astronaut health during lengthy missions. To test the effects of self-resistance on muscle activity, we developed an elbow-elbow soft exoskeleton which we pressurized with air and connected to a closed fluid circuit so that as the user flexed their elbows, they were forced to work against themselves (self-resistance) via this column of air. In order to determine the effect of self-resistance, bicep muscle activity (obtained via surface electromyography) was recorded during horizontal motions with self-resistance and during both vertical and horizontal motions without self-resistance. Peak muscle activity and its variability both increased when self-resistance was applied, and correspondence between peak muscle activity and pressure indicates that the level of resistance could be tuned to achieve loads comparable to gravity. This soft pneumatic exoskeleton has the potential for easy integration into astronauts’ suits and could reduce muscle deterioration in microgravity by engaging the muscles more consistently via self-resistance during daily tasks rather than only during specific exercise sessions
All The Feels: Building a Chatbot to Assist Students Struggling with Depression
Get PDFInspired by the recent COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the mental health of millions of people, specifically college students, this thesis focuses on the development of a chatbot to assist those struggling with depression. The bot has three main tasks: identify the user’s mood and respond with the appropriate encouraging words, suggest activities that would improve the user’s mental health state, and provide resources in case of emergencies
Molecular Approaches for the Validation of the Baboon as a Nonhuman Primate Model for the Study of Zika Virus Infection
Get PDFNonhuman primates (NHP) are particularly important for modeling infections with viruses that do not naturally replicate in rodent cells. Zika virus (ZIKV) has been responsible for sporadic epidemics, but in 2015 a disseminated outbreak of ZIKV resulted in the World Health Organization declaring it a global health emergency. Since the advent of this last epidemic, several NHP species, including the baboon, have been utilized for modeling and understanding the complications of ZIKV infection in humans; several health issues related to the outcome of infection have not been resolved yet and require further investigation. This study was designed to validate, in baboons, the molecular signatures that have previously been identified in ZIKV-infected humans and macaque models. We performed a comprehensive molecular analysis of baboons during acute ZIKV infection, including flow cytometry, cytokine, immunological, and transcriptomic analyses. We show here that, similar to most human cases, ZIKV infection of male baboons tends to be subclinical, but is associated with a rapid and transient antiviral interferon-based response signature that induces a detectable humoral and cell-mediated immune response. This immunity against the virus protects animals from challenge with a divergent ZIKV strain, as evidenced by undetectable viremia but clear anamnestic responses. These results provide additional support for the use of baboons as an alternative animal model to macaques and validate omic techniques that could help identify the molecular basis of complications associated with ZIKV infections in humans
Dinitrogen Coordination to a High-Spin Diiron(I/II) Species
No full textDinitrogen coordination to iron centers underpins industrial and biological fixation in the Haber–Bosch process and by the FeM cofactors in the nitrogenase enzymes. The latter employ local high-spin metal centers; however, iron–dinitrogen coordination chemistry remains dominated by low-valent states, contrasting the enzyme systems. Here, we report a high-spin mixed-valent cis-(μ-1,2-dinitrogen)diiron(I/II) complex [(FeBr)2(μ-N2)Lbis]− (2), where [Lbis]− is a bis(β-diketiminate) cyclophane. Field-applied Mössbauer spectra, dc and ac magnetic susceptibility measurements, and computational methods support a delocalized S=7/2 Fe2N2 unit with D=−5.23 cm−1 and consequent slow magnetic relaxation
Adam Smith\u27s Digression on Silver: The Centrepiece of the \u3cem\u3eWealth of Nations\u3c/em\u3e
No full textI suggest that Adam Smith\u27s \u27Digression on Silver\u27 should be read as his most powerful argument against mercantilism in the Wealth of Nations. For mercantilists money is wealth, according to Smith, and an increase in the quantity of silver, and the associated reduction in its value, implies higher prices in terms of silver. On the basis of this connection, mercantilists advocate trade protections to increase prices and therefore, in their view, wealth. Smith argues that this account obscures two processes occurring at the same time: A change in institutions that allows wealth to grow and leads to real prices decreasing, and a simultaneous increase in the quantity of silver leading to an increase in nominal prices. Overall, according to Smith, the nominal increase would be larger than the real decrease in prices. Mercantilists focused on nominal prices, attributing a causal relation between the decrease in the value of silver and an increase in wealth. Smith shows that correlation is not causation in this case, merely the coincidence of two simultaneous and independent processes. The Digression on Silver leaves mercantilists with nothing: What seems to be, is not what is. Money may seem to be wealth, but it is not: The ability to consume is
Schopenhauer\u27s The World as Will and Representation: A Critical Guide
No full textSchopenhauer\u27s The World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system-building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics and science. Poorly received at its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of non-scholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously and to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume of new essays showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship on this monumental text, as well as its enduring relevance.https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/mono/1188/thumbnail.jp
Cross-Infections of Vegetal-Human Bodies in Science Fiction
Get PDFIt is particularly disturbing when seemingly inert plants escape the category of nourishing food and instead become transmitters of vegetal diseases infecting our human bodies or transforming us into plant-human hybrids or even plant-infused zombies. This article analyzes the ecological and alimentary implications of three sf texts in which plants infect human bodies or use them as a kind of walking soil from which to sprout: Paolo Bacigalupi\u27s novel The Windup Girl (2009), Olivia Vieweg\u27s German-language graphic novel, EndZeit [EndTime, 2018], and Nnedi Okorafor\u27s graphic novel LaGuardia (2019). Presenting plant-human relations as either utopian and kinship-based or as horrific cross-species disease vectors creating human-plant zombies, these texts reveal aspects of the ecological fact that human bodies are always monstrously chimerical. All living things are, in fact, composed of multispecies entanglements with other beings such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi, as well as the species they consume, as described by Anna Tsing et al. in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017). Bacigalupi, Vieweg, and Okorafor transform our ecological entanglements with and dependence on plants into both disturbing and celebratory sf visions of bodily invasion
Inferences Training Affects Memory, Rumination, and Mood
Get PDFMaking negative inferences for negative events, ruminating about them, and retrieving negative aspects of memories have all been associated with depression. However, the causal mechanisms that link negative inferences to negative mood and the interplay between inferences, rumination, and memory have not been explored. In the current study, we used a cognitive-bias modification (CBM) procedure to train causal inferences and assessed training effects on ruminative thinking, memory, and negative mood among people with varying levels of depression. Training had immediate effects on negative mood and rumination but not after recall of a negative autobiographical memory. Note that training affected memory: Participants falsely recalled inferences presented during the training in a training-congruent manner. Moreover, among participants with high levels of depression, training also affected causal inferences they made for an autobiographical memory retrieved after training. Our findings shed light on negative cognitive cycles that may contribute to depression